There’s no getting away from it. Writing a novel or a short story is a strange thing to do.
You spend long periods of time inside your head, but that’s not claustrophobic, because inside your head there are entire worlds, complete living and breathing people, conflicts and dramas that nobody else will ever feel as fully as the writer does. If we’re good, we’ll manage to capture some of that in words that will allow other people to share those worlds and characters and dramas—at least to some extent—but it’s never the same.
Unless you’ve written stories, it’s hard to convey that. The closest I can get is when you compare watching a film to reading the book it was based on. The film has its own aspects that you can’t capture in a written story, but generally, losing yourself in a story brings more depth and detail, more power of emotions. The difference between reading a novel and writing one is comparable: a similar stepping up in intensity and verisimilitude. Writing a book is so much more real than reading one.
But there’s another category that fits into this spectrum somewhere: the books we will never write.
One of the most commonly asked questions of a writer is “Where do you get your ideas?” And if there’s one real trade secret in the writing world it is that coming up with ideas isn’t the hard part. Writers have ideas spilling out of their ears. We have notebooks crammed with them; or nowadays, lots of us have files on our computers and phones and other devices that are just as crammed as those old notebooks were. Most of our ideas never get developed into stories, because we simply don’t have the time.
Out of that pool of ideas, there are the initial sparks of the ones we go on to write, and there are the ones we will never write; but also, there are the ones that will very nearly get written. We can spend, weeks, months, even years in odd moments here and there, coming back to a particular idea and adding notes, expanding that idea until we have bloated files full of the things we need to know, or find out, if we ever get to turn that idea into a fully fledged story.
Sometimes that’s just an early stage in eventually sitting down and writing the story itself, but often it stalls. The idea doesn’t quite come to life. Or we realise that it’s too similar to an existing story. Or another idea jumps the queue and demands to be written. Or we get sidetracked by working with a publisher on something else we’ve already written that needs editing and polishing for publication. There can be any number of reasons why an idea a writer has put a lot of work into might miss that moment of peak excitement when it simply has to be written, and slides off into the long twilight of wouldn’t it have been nice to write that one?
Those books don’t cease to exist, though. They vie for space in my head, alongside all the stories I’ve actually written: like memories of holidays and old friends, these stories and nearly-stories are about people I know intimately, set in places I know inside out; they’re part of who I am. (A writer never stops being a writer, because even if you’re no longer putting words down on paper the act of having been a writer has created the mental structures of who that person is.)
Those books, the stalled, incomplete worlds and characters that have possessed my thoughts for long periods of time, might not be as fully formed as something I’ve gone on to spend months and years actually writing, but they’re there. They’re part of who I am. In my head as I write this—the thing that prompted this little essay—is a mystery trilogy set during the Blitz. I’ve written a short story that, with a lot of hacking about, would serve as the opening of a novel. In my head, I know where that novel goes, I know the characters that leap to life from that initial short story, and the ones who we will later learn to distrust and even despise. I know where a follow-up novel will go, albeit in less fleshed-out detail, and, most importantly, I know how this second book will bring to the fore elements of back story touched on in the first book. And I know how all these threads come together in a third novel, that will bring that back story out front-of-stage, and big issues will be confronted and, to varying degrees, resolved.
All of this is in my head and in some files on my computer, and along with a million other things I’ve been working on it for three or four years.
It won’t get written though. In doing all this work to explore and build up the stories and characters, I’ve realised that too many elements of it have been done before by others. Maybe one day I’ll work out how to twist it away from those other stories, but there are so many other ideas to explore, I know that’s becoming increasingly unlikely.
In all likelihood, that trilogy will never get written.
But it exists. In my head, in those files of notes. In the three or four years that I’ve kept coming back to it. I know the characters, I know the settings, more vivid than many people and places I’ve actually known. It’s more real to me than a film, more real to me than a story I might have read, but less real than if I’d actually written it. But it’s there, and my life has been much richer for knowing it, and experiencing it.
So yes, there’s no getting away from it. Writing a story or a novel is a strange process. But not writing one can be just as weird.
Trace Evidence 