Writing Nightflower: Part One
I thought I would share some tips and advice for writers in this blog. But then I thought, my book isn’t even out yet, who am I to offer advice? Well, nobody really. So instead I thought I would maybe write a few entries on how I wrote my book, Nightflower, which is due for release in a few weeks. And if I manage to put some advice in there along the way, well then I guess you’ll just have to forgive me.
I can’t quite recall where the original idea for Nightflower came from, if indeed it came from anywhere. The core idea was very simple – witches and revenge. That was it. Why witches? No idea. I do recall that the idea sparked in my mind like a little lightbulb. I remember having this feeling that I’d just had a really good idea. There are quite a few things I can point to as sources of inspiration, but I will probably talk about those in another blog. I wanted to begin with the actual physical writing of the book, and how that started.
Like many would-be self published authors, I have a full time day job and a family, meaning I don’t exactly have a lot of free time for writing. When I first started what would eventually become Nightflower, I would write for an hour here or an hour there, spreading that time unevenly over the course of a week. Unsurprisingly, this was slow going, and the pages weren’t exactly flying out of my brain and onto the computer. But gradually something was beginning to take shape, and I had a vague notion that I quite liked it.
This went on for just over three months, and in that time I produced a total of around 20,000 words. That’s about two hundred words per day – not great. But the thing was, I had kept going, and there was material there to work with. I could see it growing, albeit very slowly, into something.
I don’t know exactly what triggered the change, but it was around that time that something in me just clicked. I decided to knuckle down and really try to do this thing. I think I knew that if I carried on at that slow pace I would probably never finish the book, that it would just die due to lack of momentum. I knew I didn’t want that to happen, I felt I had a story to tell – so I made time. I decided I would write every day for at least an hour. My aim was for about six hundred words per day, which I roughly equate to two pages.
During the week I wrote every evening, after my kids had gone to bed and after I had spent a little time just relaxing. Typically this would be around 10pm, and I would finish some time between 11 and midnight. I also wrote at weekends, mainly in the morning, but this would vary as other life events dictated. So the book was primarily a nocturnal creation, which fits its gothic setting rather nicely.
Now, I can’t pretend that every night I leapt from the sofa with a smile on my face, eager to fire up the laptop and smash out another two pages. In fact, there were a lot of times, particularly as the process wore on, where I really had to make myself get up and do it. Don’t misunderstand me, I wanted to tell the story, by that point it had become a thing I needed to get out. But the prospect of staring at a computer screen at 10pm after a full day of staring at a computer screen for my day job was not one I relished.
To help me, I created a writing diary. This was basically just a spreadsheet with a long column of dates and the number of words I had written that day. Now, perhaps because I am a software engineer, over time this simple spreadsheet morphed into a rather more complex beast, featuring all manner of calculations to tell me how many words I had done each month, how many pages per week, average words per day and on and on. But the basic core of it never changed, and I firmly believe it helped me to stay on track. The simple act of finishing each writing session by opening up the diary and adding a new line with the number of words I had managed that day kept me moving forward.
And this moving forward is crucial. There is a tendency when writing to continually review your past work. To tweak, improve and adjust as you go. This temptation should be ignored as much as possible, because if you’re not careful it can quickly become an endless loop. This happened to me on a previous aborted attempt at a novel. In each session I would find myself constantly going back over the same few chapters again and again, worrying them until they were just right. Of course, just right never arrived. Over time my momentum faded, I lost interest and the whole thing sagged to a dismal halt. The truth is, you aren’t qualified to know what better looks like for your story at that early stage, you’re still in the thick of it. The knowledge and perspective you need to improve it will only come later.
So, with Nightflower I began each session by simply reviewing the previous paragraph, or at most a single page. I made a few tweaks if I felt it necessary, picked up the thread and carried on. Again, momentum helps here. By writing every day like this you don’t ever really lose track of where you are. The story begins to live in your mind at all times, bubbling away in the background even when you’re not really thinking about it.
It can feel a little odd at times, just ploughing ahead without ever looking back. Every now and then that temptation winds its way into your brain. What if it’s all terrible? What if none of it even makes sense? You should probably just check, right? No – stop it. Leave it alone. That’s what the second draft is for. Just keep going and trust yourself. Allow the story to come out naturally by keeping it alive.
So that’s what I did. I kept going, rarely looking back, until I made it all the way to the end. I had a rough idea of where I was going, but I let the story take me there and tried not to force it. I’ll probably talk about that in another blog post. I still have my writing diary, and I plan to use it again for the next book.
I hope this has been of some interest, so please let me know!
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