TRICKS OF A FANTASY WRITER: PRE-FILMING and OVERLAPPING WAVES
The great curse of my life is that I had writer’s block for twenty-five years. I still have drawers in a cupboard stuffed with manuscripts of novels I began but could never finish! The great joy of my life is that I finally beat the block – now every completed novel (and I have seventeen published) seems like a gift and a blessing!
What made the difference? For one thing, I gave myself an absolutely regular writing routine. I started writing straight after breakfast every day of the year, except Xmas and birthdays, and I write through until late lunch at 1.30. It sounds boring, and I don’t need to stick to it so rigorously now, but it saved me from having to fight myself every morning – saved me from making excuses and balking because I wasn’t feeling particularly inspired. Now I just know I’m going to write, so I do it no matter how I feel. And because a novel is such a big, overhanging thing, it’s still there at the back of my mind from the previous day – and soon enough it all comes back to me, along with the writing momentum and the inspiration. I don’t hang around waiting for inspiration to give me a push – I start writing and wait for inspiration to come join me!
The other crucial part of the routine is the 1.30 stopping time. Even if I’m on a roll, I put down my iPad (I like using the slider keyboard on my iPad) and call a halt. Sounds terrible, right? But it works! Because the next morning, I still have something to complete, I want to get back into the writing as soon as possible. The way I see it, the momentum’s in the world and the story, not me … and it’ll wait around until it gets the chance to take over and push me forward again. I think the worst thing you can do for writer’s block is to write yourself into exhaustion, until you’ve set down all of the story you’d pictured ahead – so then you have nothing to complete the next day, and you have to struggle to start from scratch all over again.
But there’s something else I do in the afternoons, after I’ve finished writing. I call it ‘pre-filming’, and I don’t guarantee it’ll work for anyone else. I have a very visual imagination that can go a long way without having to fix a scene down in words. I spend an hour or two every afternoon thinking ahead to the next episode I’ll move into tomorrow, seeing it unfold like a film.
With Ferren and the Angel, for example, the episode where the Humen Hypers with their transport machine come to take away the fallen, damaged angel, Miriael, for dissection and analysis. I’m experiencing it with Zonda, daughter of Neath, the head of the tribe, and I look out across the wide grassy plain and see a line of black figures approaching. They’re going to drive their transport machine right across the tribe’s vegetable patches and ruin their crops – she pleads with her father, ‘They have to be stopped’. And drags him out to appeal to the Hyper leader.
Then I see the Hyper leader close-up: a metal collar around his neck, an iron spike mounted on his head, and red wounds dripping across the black rubber of his costume. And Neath is pleading with him, ‘Please, fellow-ally’, and Zonda weighs in, ‘You can’t do this!’ Then the leader’s mouthslit parts, showing spittle inside, and he snarls, ‘We can do anything!’ But at that moment a great golden flourish of trumpets rings out overhead, and a dozen angels descend from the sky in their bright globes or auras.
The Hyper leader orders a retreat; the transport machine reverses direction, but it's too late. Three angels descend and let off dazzling flashes of light. Everything goes black and white – and when the color returns, the Hyper leader, Neath and Zonda have been knocked flat to the ground. Neath’s legs and the leader’s legs are tangled in a heap – when he sits up, the leader’s in a vicious mood, and disentangles himself from Neath by breaking the old man’s legs, snapping them like twigs. Then he picks himself up and runs after his retreating men and transport machine.
His men are rubbing their eyes, crying ‘I’m blinded’, but he picks them up and throws them like sacks of potatoes onto the flat top of the transport machine. But now all twelve angels descend and loose off their flashes simultaneously – a single explosion of light. Hypers cry out from the heart of the dazzle – when it clears, the transport machine is wrecked, the grass is bleached white all around, and the Hypers are in their death throes.
Further back, Zonda weeps over the broken body of her father …
So – like a movie. I live through it, I picture it, but I don’t write it down or make notes. Instead, I go to bed and sleep on it overnight. That’s the real trick, that’s the secret of ‘pre-filming’! Because the sleeping mind works on it, lays it down, solidifies it – so that when I get back to writing the next morning, it’s as if it really happened! All I have to do is record what really happened!
People say my books read like movies – maybe that’s why. For me, at least, ‘pre-filming’ unlocked the side of my mind I needed for writing fantasy fiction. Another thing I learned was the trick of telling a story with ‘overlapping waves’. And this one definitely works for every writer.
The trouble with novels is that they’re long and can sag in the middle! When writing beginnings, it’s usually a matter of fitting it all in – you had some strong opening scenes from your very first idea of the story, and they surge forward like a torrent. Usually, you have a rough idea of the ending too, but it’s a long way ahead. What happens in between? Here’s where the torrent loses its surge; you have to spread the story more widely, and it’s so very, very easy to lose momentum. I have dozens of beginnings that meandered into nothing still piled up in my cupboard to prove it!
The ideal is to have many small build-ups before the big overall build-up, so that readers – and the writer – are always anticipating, hoping, dreading and looking ahead to some event or revelation in the foreseeable future. And here’s the thing – while you have many smaller climactic events or revelations through the middle of the novel, you should never have dead water after a climax. While one wave crashes, you always have another starting to build up.
After that scene where the angels descend and destroy the Hypers and their transport machine, for example – well, it looks as though the damaged angel, Miriael, can now be rescued and taken back up to Heaven. End of momentum! But no! When the angels visit Miriael, chained up to a wall in the tribe’s settlement, it turns out that, although they could free her, she can’t return to Heaven. She’s eaten mortal food, so she’s not spiritual enough. In fact, they despise her …
Meanwhile, in the novel’s other middle strand, Ferren was approaching the Human Camp before the mini-climax with the Hypers, angels, and transport machine. He was determined to break into the Camp and find out what happened to his sister, who was taken away for military service. Now it’s the turn of Ferren’s narrative as he breaks in, gets spotted and chased, and finally manages to escape by hiding inside a great, tarpaulin-covered machine with wheels.
Back to Miriael and a new dynamic. She’ll try to re-spiritualize by not eating mortal food, but she wants to know the full history of this world she’s in. How did the war between Heaven and Earth begin? Why are the great archangels in charge rather than the ‘Supreme Trinity’? And why do the Humen rule on Earth, while the original human beings live like Ferren’s tribe, isolated and backward and beaten down? These questions have been hanging over the novel for a long while, and finally they’ll be answered by two Cherubim scholars who’ll be coming down to Miriael.
And Ferren? He resumes his search for his sister, follows a cage of tribespeople being carried along to a great pit, watches as the tribespeople are packed into baths with cotton wool wadding in their mouths and wires clipped onto their bodies – it’s a shocking revelation, more than I can begin to describe here. But finally Ferren understands what ‘military service’ really means.
But no dead water! Because now we swap to another kind of revelation as the two scholars tell Miriael the history of the war, which began a thousand years ago when scientists on Earth discovered how to bring the brain of someone who’d died back to consciousness, and learned about the reality of life-after-death in Heaven with the angels. Leading to psychonauts, to the expulsion of souls from Heaven, to the Great Collapse and the Burning Continents …
Then Ferren, back in his hiding-place in the wheeled machine, wakes to find that the engine beside him has started up and the wheels underneath him are rolling forward!
Enough! But you see how it works – always building up to the next mini-climax, but always having another build-up already started by the time the first mini-climax concludes. And if it works for the reader, it works for the writer too. You never want to stop writing; you’re always leaning forward into another fresh development!
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I've had 19 spec fic novels published; I've won awards in France and Australia, and Ferren and the Angel has won two awards in the US (Reader Views Silver Award for Teen Fiction, Moonbeam Silver Award for YA: Fantasy/SciFi). So I reckon I've broken my writer's block! But it's been a struggle. It still feels as though I had to learn everything the hard way!
