My Novels: Coming Apart at the Dreams

Title: Coming Apart at the Dreams

(I was rather pleased with this. I’ve always been quite pleased with my titles, on the whole – often the best part of my books! Obviously a play on the phrase “coming apart at the seams”, and referring to the fact that the two main characters split up because of their differing hopes and dreams and ambitions).

Word count: 78,694

Written: March to August 2000

Story: Michael and Catherine, a young couple in their early twenties, arrive in his home village, having recently become engaged. He’s English and she’s Australian, and he’s brought her home to meet the family. However, when an ex-boyfriend of hers and her brother turn up from Australia, she begins to doubt whether Michael is really the man she wants to spend the rest of her life with. It all ends up fairly miserably for poor old Michael.

Opening: “It’s still raining.”

Michael couldn’t suppress a thin smile. He looked at Catherine, an expression of restrained amusement crossing his face as he did so.

“You were expecting something else?” he asked sarcastically. “After all, this is England. You knew what you were letting yourself in for.” Catherine returned his gaze with one of those long, withering looks that only women can give, and he turned away chuckling.

“Yes, but does it have to rain so much?” she asked, looking up and down the length of the station in mock desperation. She then looked at her watch. “And the trains don’t run on time.”

Background: At the age of sixteen, I had one of those ridiculous, intense, angst-ridden crushes on a girl who was in my year at school. Absurd and pointless, but it felt important and dramatic at the time, as these things tend to do.

One day in March 2000, said young lady showed me a short story she had written for her English homework, to get some feedback about it. (Friends and acquaintances have often been kind enough down the years to regard my drive to write as somehow qualifying me to give advice and criticism on their own writing). It was very good, and I liked it, and said to her how I ought to show her some of my work in return.

I was sitting in the school library the following day, flicking through The Guardian’s education supplement, when I came across a piece about a writing competition for a 3000-word short story on the theme of “The Perfect Journey”. This seemed like too good an opportunity to miss, and I wrote a story called Home, about a young couple on a train journey, both for the competition and to show her.

I never heard anything back from the competition, of course, but the object of my unrequited affections went into raptures about it, saying how good it was and how much she’d enjoyed it, and how I had to carry it on. Well, of course, what else could I do? The following month I started turning it into a novel under the title Coming Apart at the Dreams, with the original short story as the opening chapter, carrying on the story of the young couple.

I spent much of the summer working on it, and when we returned to school to start sixth form in September, presented it to her as a gift. Goodness only knows what she made of that, but when she eventually read it she was gracious enough to claim that she’d enjoyed it. She was always very kind to me, although of course I only took that as encouragement to continue my ill-advised declarations of adoration.

Looking back: Ye Gads, it’s dreadful. I don’t hold it in any of the affection I have for Fatescape, although that might be because it’s tied up with all the teenage angst I had going on at the time. I do feel rather embarrassed when I look back at the way I behaved with my crush on the girl in my year, and my feelings about Coming Apart at the Dreams are all part of that embarrassment.

It doesn’t help that it’s an incredibly self-indulgent book. It’s basically a 78,000-word love letter, when all’s said and done. Filled with less-than-subtle allusions to the situation between her and I, and ham-fisted attempts to show what a perceptive and interesting and sensitive and intelligent sort of a guy I am. The central character, Michael, is of course a version of me that “thinly-veiled” would be far too generous a description of, and the story doesn’t really go anywhere or do anything remotely interesting.

If I’m looking for something to say in its credit, then I suppose it was at least my first attempt to write something grounded in the real world, and be a bit more mature. (If you can call writing a novel to try and impress your teenage crush in any way mature). It’s also set in barely-disguised versions of the places I lived and knew at the time, the first time I was writing about my own background and upbringing. I felt embarrassed about this as I thought it betrayed a lack of imagination, but later on I’d come to embrace it, on the basis of thinking “why shouldn’t these places have novels written about them?”, and that eventually led to a more recent effort of which I am more proud, The Wicket in the Rec.

What’s also interesting is, looking back at my diaries of the time, I wrote that I didn’t feel anywhere near the same sense of achievement in writing Dreams as I had with Fatescape. I didn’t remember that, but I suppose it’s true – nothing else since has felt like as great an achievement. As if once the first one is done, nothing else matters until I write one good enough to be published. Which I haven’t yet, and Dreams certainly wasn’t.

Submissions: I did submit it to some agents and publishers, but never had anything other than form letters back from any of them. Which is not surprising, really!

Once More Unto the Yearbook

I don’t really have a very good explanation for why I buy a new copy of the Writers’ & Artists’ Yearbook every single year. (Or indeed why, as you can see from above, I’ve hung onto my last few years’ worth of copies).

It’s not as if the listings change a great deal from year-to-year – the vast majority of the publishers and agents therein still have the same contact details and submission guidelines as they have done for donkey’s years. And it’s not even as if buying it has ever done me all that much good. Over the years I have bombarded dozens, possibly hundreds, of agents and publishers listed in editions of this book with synopses and sample chapters of my novels. Carefully going through, circling the likeliest candidates who publish similar books or the right genre, and crossing them off as the rejection letters come in.

There’s been the occasional positive contact with the odd agent via the book, but of course nothing that’s ever led to publication, only kind words and encouragement. (Which are still no mean things to get from agents, admittedly).

In fact, the only copy of the Yearbook which has directly led to me getting something published remains the very first one I ever had, the 2001 edition, which was given to me as a 17^th birthday present by my friend Lauren a frightening eleven years ago now. (I ended up getting paid to write some features on TV history for The Stage newspaper after getting their contact details from that book).

But as I say, I still waste my money buying the new edition every year. Perhaps because it gives me the psychological feeling of getting closer to achieving something. Makes me feel a tiny bit like a ‘proper’ writer... Mind you, it can also be a bit depressing – all those people publishing all that material, and still no room for me? I must be really crap...

Oh, and one of the articles in the new edition is all about why it’s okay to self-publish, complete with a list of very famous writers who resorted to it at one time or another. Hmmmmm... Get thee behind me, Satan!

My Novels: Fatescape

Title: Fatescape

(No, me neither. I think I was going for something along the lines of it showing the great sprawling, metaphorical landscape of the fates of the various characters. Either that or I just thought it sounded good).

Word count: 83,245

(I can remember being terribly pleased that it clocked in at over eighty thousand words, as I’d read somewhere that this was the standard length for a novel; so I felt as if I had written an actual, proper novel, the right length and everything!)

Written: October 1998 to September 1999

Story: In the far-flung future, a bunch of Baddies, the Urkan Empire, go to war with a bunch of Goodies, the Galactic Republic, for... er... reasons which aren’t entirely clear. After much of the Republic’s space is invaded in a lightning attack and their military forces are in disarray, it falls to Commodore Haile Tripps and the crew of the heavy cruiser Redemption to save the Republic from certain destruction.

Opening: “The Menrax system was usually a quiet, tranquil area of space. Its two uninhabited planets spiralled distantly around their sun in a lumbering, lazy orbit. It was far from the established space lanes and borderlines of the Galaxy. It was not particularly close to anybody’s territory, and the two planets had hardly any natural resources that were worth anything, at least, none that couldn’t be obtained much more easily and cheaply somewhere else. In fact, most people, even highly experienced spacefarers, hardly even knew that the place existed, and those that did would hardly have any intention of going there.

But today was different...”

Background: Fatescape actually began life around Christmas 1995, when I was in Canada and had just been given my first PC. It had a word processing programme on it, WordPerfect for DOS, and of course I excitedly wanted to use this to do some writing, and ended up bashing out something that later resembled the prologue to Fatescape, and already had that title straight away.

I think that got forgotten about for a little while after we got back to England in the New Year, but later on in 1996 I had progressed up the word processing food chain to Microsoft Word 6.0, courtesy of a friend of the family, and this inspired me to take up Fatescape again. Over the summer holidays of 1996 I finished a 20,000-word version of the story, which felt epically long to me as a twelve-year-old and which I had enormous fun writing!

I’m not sure why, but a couple of years later I decided to go back to Fatescape and attempt to do it “properly”. A fourteen-year-old’s grasp of characterisation, plotting and descriptive prose are not typically great, but they are sufficiently better than a twelve-year-old’s to enable me to end up, over the course of the following year, writing something that at least resembled a “proper” novel in structure, shape and – yes! – length.

I don’t think I worked on it solidly, but in fits and starts with typical teenager’s procrastination, and I finished it in early September 1999, now aged fifteen. I remember printing it out on the old dot matrix printer I had (complete with that paper with the tear-off strips of holes down the side), which you had to be very careful to keep adjusting and only printing off  a few pages at a time as the paper size wasn’t in sync with the page size on the computer... Anyway, I was very proud to take it into school in a big plastic folder full of paper at the start of the new term, and excitedly showing it off to my friends and teachers – “Look, I’ve written a novel!”

Looking back: Well, it’s crap, obviously, but on the other hand... It does have a rather charming innocence to it. There is nothing at all pretentious or pseudo-intellectual about Fatescape – it is space opera pure and simple, unashamed storytelling and entertainment. For the writer, anyway – not sure about the reader!

I remember reading Dave Owen’s Doctor Who Magazine review of Lords of the Storm by David A. McIntee, where Owen made the point that great big science-fiction space battles are, in novels, “heaven to create for the author, but hell for the reader,” and I think he’s probably right. I was having a whale of a time writing Fatescape, and probably to this day it remains the novel I enjoyed writing the most.

As it was the first novel I ever completed, I think I’ll always have an affection for it, and I remember the storyline and characters far more clearly than I do some of my later ones! I even still pick it over from time to time – there’s a 4000 word document sitting on my computer that’s an entire biography of one minor character from Fatescape, written purely for my own amusement... last year!

Submissions: I think I did actually send off submissions for Fatescape to a few publishers as a rather hopelessly naive teenager, although of course it never got anywhere. Who knows, though? Maybe I’ll go back to it again someday, and “do it properly...”

Counting words

There’s a bit in Regeneration by Pat Barker – which I haven’t read since I was sixteen, so please forgive me not quoting it verbatim – where Owen approaches Sassoon for advice about how exactly to go about writing. And Sassoon basically tells him that you simply have to get down and do it – make yourself write. Force yourself to do something every day.

Owen replies, a little ruefully but with some knowing irony, that this doesn’t exactly go along with the idea of the poetic muse. Sassoon replies that you have to forget about any such ideas as that, and get on with it.

Despite it being twelve years since I read the book, this part has always stuck in my memory – more than anything else in the novel, pretty much – because it came as such a relief. I think for a long time, as a teenager especially, I was under the impression that all other writers found writing incredibly easy, enjoyed every moment of it and were blessed with constantly living and breathing artistic creativity.

So it was a bit of a revelation to find – as I have found more and more since, from seeing and hearing interviews with other writers – that not only is it quite difficult, most of them actually don’t enjoy doing it. Hence Dorothy Parker’s superb quote, which always sums it up so well for me:

“I hate writing. I love having written.”

There are so many other things you could be doing instead of writing. So many distractions, so many excuses to put it off. My friend and fellow scribbler Tim recently drew my attention to a quote from Zadie Smith, where she gave some writing advice, part of which was that you should always do it on a computer that doesn’t have access to the internet.

Because the demon of procrastination will get to you again...

I often feel guilty for not writing. And I always feel pleased with myself if I have managed a day where I have written a few thousand words. They may not be very good words; or at least, while all perfectly good and acceptable individually, not especially pleasing when assembled in the particular order I have chosen for them. But at least they’re there. At least I’ve done something.

As another famous old saying goes, “To write well, first you must write...”

You can always change and edit and improve later on. Or at least try to.

Probably also when I was about sixteen, Tim gave me a book about writing by John Braine, of Room at the Top fame. This contained two particular nuggets of wisdom which have also stuck with me. The first because it gave me hope – Braine claims that very few people, if any, are capable of writing a decent novel before the age of thirty. (The aforementioned Zadie Smith disproves this notion of course, but anyway...)

The second thing in this book which struck me was Braine’s assertion that “a writer is someone who counts words,” because that very much rang true for me. If I have a day where I have written two or three or four thousand words, then that feels like a good day. A productive day. A day where I haven’t wasted my time and the oxygen I’m using up.

But it needn’t be that daunting. You can write a novel very easily, if you do it a little at a time. If you wrote only 200 words a day, you’d have a novel of 70,000 words or so in a year. 200 words is, frankly, a piece of cake. I’d got to over 200 here in this blog entry by the time we reached Dorothy Parker.

I am a word counter. I fully admit that. It might not make me particularly creative or artistic. It might make it sound like I’m reducing writing down to the level of mathematics. But at least I get something done. I may not have the talent, but at least I make the effort – if I do end up becoming a professional novelist, at least part of it will be down to the fact that I kept going when other, more talented, writers simply couldn’t be bothered.

There’s a standard old joke along the lines of “You’re writing a novel? Nor am I....” So many people claim to be or want to be writers, but they never get anything done. Or they pick and paw at a single project for decades, never finishing it or submitting it or showing it to anyone, or doing anything at all with it.

“Oh I’d love to write a novel...” or “Of course, I’d really love to be a novelist...” But they never do anything. They concentrate on other things, allow the rest of life to distract them, and they never write a word.

If you want to do it that much, sit down and do it. Just write something. It may be terrible, but you can improve.

And it starts by counting words, day after day, until you get there.

I’ve just written nearly 900 in a quarter of an hour on this blog entry. If I did that every morning, in three months I’d have a novel. What’s your excuse...?

What I wouldn't give...

I don’t wish to use this blog to bore you with the details of what I get up to in my life outside writing. But suffice it to say that I had a bloody awful week at work. It was a very important week for us, with everyone going above and beyond the call of duty and putting in incredible amounts of effort... Except for me.

I managed, through a spectacular display of incompetence that can only be blamed on me and me alone, to royally screw up what ought to have been an important moment for us. If you think I am being overly hard on myself, trust me – I’m not exaggerating.

So that’s made me fairly miserable over the past couple of days. But it also got me back to playing with a little thought that often comes to mind if I’m feeling down. Now, don’t get me wrong – I don’t believe in gods or angels or geniis or fate and destiny or anything of that nature. But it is diverting, every now and again, to just play that game of thinking: “Yes, but you’d accept this if it were the price to pay for you having a novel published, wouldn’t you?”

As if I were in some grand universal bartering system, and could accept the low point of my incompetence at work in return for it guaranteeing publication one day. It crossed my mind the other week as well, after England were knocked out of Euro 2012, on penalties, as always. “Yes, but you’d take that in exchange for having a novel published, wouldn’t you...?”

Of course I would. I wonder how much I would give, though... For instance, I am lucky enough to be in the position of having an interesting job that I enjoy. Would I give that up for twenty years of misery pushing paper or stacking shelves, in return for knowing that if I worked hard at my writing I’d get a novel out eventually?

Hmmmmmmmm. Not so sure... But in the end I suppose I would say yes. I’d take the swap. Surrender my good, creative, interesting job for a lifetime of drudgery, for the sake of the novel.

Actually, that’s a pretty miserable thought in itself, isn’t it?

Fortunately, we live in the real world, where such choices and exchanges do not have to be made. Nothing happens for a reason. Nobody has a destiny. And – sadly – I can’t barter or swap my way into publication.

On the subject of which, I got home this evening to find another rejection e-mail from an agent for my current novel, The Wicket in the Rec. Not as nice as the last one I had – nothing personal this time, just a form reply.

Bugger.

I am Steve Claridge

Not literally, obviously. That would be a little unexpected for you.

But I once, in conversation with a colleague, came up with what I thought was a rather nice little analogy for my writing abilities. Never one to waste something on mere conversation when it can be written down and recorded, I thought I'd share it with you here.

I will never be a great writer, creating beautiful and moving passages of prose, perfectly matched with intricately constructed plots and characters who spring off the page as if they were alive. If writers were footballers, I could never hope to have anything remotely approaching the silky skills of the finest - I am not a Maradona or a Pele.

No. I'm Steve Claridge.

A hoofer, a clogger, a journeyman. Usually competent, but by no stretch of the imagination inspired.

However, if I'm lucky, if all the elements come together and I am blessed with being in the right place at the right time, I may - just may - one day shin one in from thirty yards...

New month, new name

This blog is not even a week old, and I've already changed the title.

I've done it because my friend Tim (whose film-making misadventures you can follow here) pointed out to me that "Failing Novelist" sounded both self-pitying and as if I were fishing for reassurance that it's not so.

After some thought I decided he was right. I wanted "Not (Yet) a Novelist", but that was taken, so "Not a Novelist (Yet)" it shall be.

It's staying that way this time. Promise!