(Again, not the decade...)
I tend to write by what’s sometimes called the flashlight – or headlight – method. With The Hollows, for instance, all I really had was the opening scene of Ellie Cheetham finding Tony Harper’s body in the snow, having apparently frozen to death in sight of his own home, too afraid of someone or something to go near it.
I didn’t know, at the beginning, what Tony Harper had been so afraid of, not even, for sure, whether it was something human or supernatural. What I did know was that Ellie would have to do certain things. She was the main authority (not counting her ineffectual sergeant) in a snowed-in village. So she’d have to inspect the scene, find somewhere to put the body, find out if she could what the dead man’s last movements had been, and notify the family.
When you’re driving along a road at night, all you can see is what’s in your headlights. It doesn’t show all the road, much less the whole journey, but it does show you what’s immediately ahead. By the time you’ve covered that distance, you can see a further stretch. If things get really knotty and you’re stuck, then, yes, you might have to work out some or all of the remaining route before proceeding, but that doesn’t happen too often.
As the other characters came in and I worked out what they wanted, the rest of the story shaped up. Once I’d decided on the nature of the beast (as it were,) an idea of the story’s overall shape began to develop. Then it was just a matter of switching between points of view – whichever character’s activities mattered most at that time – and generally having fun.
And so The Hollows was written.
Stories, at their simplest, have a beginning, a middle and an end. And the middle is usually the most awkward part. That’s one of the reasons I spent so long stuck in the 60,000s when it came to the word-count of my current novel. As I’ve said elsewhere, it’s been quite a slow-burning story in many ways, and there were times when it felt as though that long middle
section would go on forever.
But nothing does – good or bad – and finally I passed the 70,000 word mark.
More importantly, I finally saw how the final section of the novel might pan out. As the middle section moved towards its end, building to a point that would send events rolling towards the big climax and (hopefully) some sort of resolution, it gathered momentum. And so the 70s went by very quickly.
And a couple of days ago, I broke the 80,000 word mark and began Part Three of the current novel.
As regular readers will now, I try to edit the completed chapters as I go, so the word count will ebb and flow a bit, meaning you can be over the 80k work one day and then back under it the next. But as of today there are around 85,000 words in the bag, so fingers crossed even with two chapters to tighten and trim, the book should stay comfortably in the 80s.
Give or take, and assuming all goes reasonably smoothly from here on in (which it won’t because it never does – there are always potholes, pitfalls and forks in the road) I’m hoping to finish this book by or around the end of September. Hopefully leaving the better part of three months to get another novel well underway.
But of course, if you want to make God laugh, tell Her your plans.
So we shall see what we shall see…
See you next time,
Daniel :)
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