Monique Roffey on Process

Orange Prize shortlisted Monique Roffey came to talk at Nottingham University yesterday, as part of the National Academy of Writing afternoon. As with all NAW patrons delivering talks, she was asked to focus on process. Her talk was fascinating, and I found myself nodding avidly in agreement with such a lot of what she said about the long distance process of writing a novel. She also used some very visceral images to illustrate her points, which was rather nice. You can imagine that this part of her nature is something that feeds into her talent as a writer.

I've taught workshops called 'Getting Started on your Novel' at the University for a number of years now. These tend to run in two parts, with an inspiration session first of all, to get everyone writing, and then some guidance on how to plan and shape from there. I know what works for me and I describe this in detail, but I try to make reference to what I've heard from the other writers I know. One thing I've learnt, chatting to writers of all shapes and mindsets, is that there isn't a 'one size fits all' answer about how to write a novel. Monique's talk reflected this too. At the same time as giving us a real sense about how she worked as a writer, she outlined alternative ways of working. As a writer also now working on her sixth full length novel, so much of what Monique was saying chimed with me.

Roffey started by outlining her own experience. She has written five books and published three, with a gap of seven years between her first published book and her second, not that unusual, I'd guess, for a literary writer in the current climate. She talked about two books in between that had been hell to write and which she said really didn't work. Given her exacting nature and skills as a writer, I suspect they were probably a whole lot better than the abandoned manuscripts sitting in the average writer's bottom drawer. She stressed how important it was that she had written these books. Even though they hadn't seen the light of day, the fact she'd been writing, and kept herself 'fit and limber' as a writer was important. A novelist friend and I sometimes refer to this state as being 'in the zone'. It's true, I think, that a good simile for writing skills is fitness, or fluency in a foreign language. The key, even when things are not going your way, is to 'keep on keeping on', as a certain writer once said in a story.

Monique went on to say that she had a lucky meeting with a specific writer who had a lot of influence over her process. This writer was Andrew Miller. She met him first at an Arvon Foundation course, at a time when she had started to write but didn't have anything resembling a novel. She asked him - how do I write a novel? He had a simple answer - write 2000 words a hundred times. This reminded me of Stephen King's response to this question and his comparison to eating an elephant (one bite at a time) or building the Great Wall of China (one brick at a time). It perhaps sounds a little glib, out of context, but this works. The trick is one word after another... (as long as you realise I don't mean this)

Later, by sheer coincidence, Monique decided to do the MA at Lancaster University. Andrew had been there previously, doing his PhD, which was focused on his first novel, the very lovely Ingenious Pain. His dissertation was in the library, where Monique found and read it. From this, she learned more about Andrew's process. This first novel had taken him ten years to complete, and the essay outlined why this was the case, and what he'd changed. One of the first quotes she read from the dissertation resonated very strongly for me. 'We learn from each other.' I'm sure that almost everyone who's ever done a Creative Writing MA or BA will agree with me that this particular nugget of truth is what one gains the most from these courses.

Monique then outlined three potential methods of writing a novel in possibly the clearest and most illuminating way I've seen it done. I'm sure there are probably more methods but, for the moment, I'll stick to the ones she talked about, as these are the main ways I've seen people working. There was 'puddling', which involved writing scenes, saving them, building fragments till you had a novel's worth, and then assembling them in the right order. Then there was what she called the 'man method', mostly, I think for its macho sense of struggle. This was the one that I think too many aspiring writers try. It's rather iterative.

1. Write first chapter
2. Edit first chapter
3. Edit first chapter
4. Edit first chapter
......
n. Edit first chapter
Repeat for second chapter
Repeat for third chapter
etc

As you can imagine, this is a rather tortured way to go about things. It has a romantic feel to it, though, as if one ought to struggle this way for one's art. However, it doesn't necessarily produce the best novels. As Monique said a few times, and I would stress 'Perfectionism is anti-creative.'

Monique then went on to describe what worked for her, which she called the 'drafting' method. I think this is how a lot of writers work. It's certainly similar to what I do myself, although most of my process happens on my laptop, which I take everywhere, rather than in notebooks or index cards or folders. Scrivener allows me to do the same things electronically that Monique described, although I'll admit, I did feel envious when she described her corkboard, index cards and ring binders. (I am a not so secret stationery freak.)

What follows here is the Roffey method, in so much as I interpreted what Monique said and paraphrased. (All mistakes are this author's etc etc.)  Or perhaps I should call it the Roffey-Miller method. Or even the Roffey-Miller-Mantel process, as Monique also explained that she'd been very influenced by Mantel's essay Growing a Tale in this book. All I can say is that if it's good enough for these three, it's good enough for the rest of us. That said, I defer, always, to the need of an individual to find her own way through.

This is the method. Don't look away or stop listening...

Roffey keeps a notebook with removable pages, or carries index cards around. When thoughts come to her that are important to the novel, she writes them down. She pins these to a cork board. She might then write a scene or two. These get pinned behind the cards where they belong. Similarly, she may pin cuttings, research, pictures and other relevant snippets behind the cards. Over time, the idea grows through the stationery. Some chapters get completely written, some characters very clearly sketched out, others less so. When it's at a certain stage, Roffey takes these cards, scenes, clippings and so on, and creates a ring binder. At this point, she will make a 'stick bridge plan', which highlights the important scenes and cards, and she will make all of her decisions about narrators, point of view, tense and so on. These are things that can be changed later if necessary. (We'll come to that.)

Finally, when the momentum has built for the project, she sits down to write it. This momentum is important. As Monique puts it 'most first drafts get abandoned' and she puts this down to two possible causes; a lack of energy for the project, or too much perfectionism early on. My experience, working with writers for years now, is that she's on the money with this assessment.

She writes chronologically then, as opposed to 'puddling', and writes a thousand words a day for about three months. I have talked about this magic number before. It seems to be quite a common one that works for most people. Her take on this first draft stage was not to rattle through it but to make it the best you can at the time without going back to edit. She did say that she might have a little tidy of the prose, in the afternoon, but avoided the 'man method' of editing herself into an early grave. So don't rattle through it but, on the other hand, don't worry if it's 'rubbishy', a word she takes directly, again, from Miller's dissertation. After this, the devil is in the drafting. This is the bit when you're allowed to get iterative, and picky, and perfectionist. In fact, I'd positively encourage it. As Monique put it: once it exists as a first draft, it's much less likely to be abandoned.

You might realise, somewhere along the way, that one of your big decisions was wrong. This narrator needs to be unreliable and therefore first person, for example. Or there might be too many voices. Or the present tense you've chosen might be just too tiring for the reader. Key here is to keep on keeping on. Switch, there and then, but don't go back and rewrite. NEVER rewrite until you've reached the end of the draft, NO MATTER WHAT.

I could write about Monique's talk all day, as she made so many valuable points, but this is supposed to be a  blog post and not a book length treatise. So I'll focus on three more of her gems of wisdom.

1. The notion of trying to embark on a big writing project, like a novel, without preparation, is as ridiculous as  planning a trip across the Sahara and not working out how much water you'll need, what camping gear, etc, then acquiring it.

2. Good ideas tend to come in two forms. The ones that rattle around and stay with you, growing and changing over months or years, or the 'rake in the grass' moment. This one is where it's like you stood on the end of a rake and its handle hit you in the face and knocked you for six. (See what I mean about the visceral images?)

3. Determination is irrelevant when trying to solve a creative problem. You need to trust yourself, and relax, and wait for the answer to come to you. If it doesn't, then you need to ask yourself - was that the right question?

Sometimes, when writers speak about their lives and work, you get the sense that it's all too hard and I've even heard them say they don't know why they bother, usually to comic, self effacing effect. I got none of this from Roffey's talk. She was an evident professional talking about a process she had refined and considered. I was most impressed. I hope that my approximation of what she talked about is of use to those who might come by this blog.

Today is six sentence Sunday, according to the interwebs. What this appears to mean is that writers are posting six sentences from their books to give people a taster. So here goes... From my debut, The Killing Jar, and slightly edited to make the most of the six sentence format... (ie I cheated a bit so the extract would feel more complete.)

"The council estates at Broxtowe and Aspley are laid out in ever decreasing circles. I am an authority on this cause I have floated above them, listening to them sing and vibrate.

I don’t know the technical details of what ecstasy does to your brain, cept the papers say it leaves holes when it’s done. What it does to me is this: I talk all posh, use long words I’ve picked up from books. And everything makes sense, life and death and fate and collective unconscious and all that shit. The whisper-thin layer between body and soul goes permeable for an instant; I slip through it, easy as water."

You can read a longer extract here. Or buy the book here, Kindle edition here and other ebook formats here. 

White space

I haven't abandoned this blog or anything but for a while I will be blogging here more often. Please do join me there. Pull up a chair and I'll make you a cuppa....

Mouthy Poets

I'm not sure if I mentioned on this blog that I started working at Nottingham University at the beginning of this academic year. It's certainly a job that's been keeping me busy but I've really been loving it. The more I get to know my students, the more of their work I read, the more amazed I am with what they are capable of.

Mouthy Poets being a case in point. Run by the hard working and talented performance poet cum student cum teacher cum just about everything else, Deborah Stevenson, this is a project to help young people find their voices. And it certainly has. Their first public performance last night was Say Sum Thin at the Nottingham Playhouse and featured Inua Ellams. I have to admit that it isn't very often I'd be up for a scheduled three hours of listening to poetry. But Deborah had brought some of the Mouthy Poets to perform for us at our end of year show so I knew just how good they were. The night went by in a flash and I enjoyed every minute of the performances.

The show ran outside poetry into music, rap, dance, news report mock ups, an open mic session, art exhibition, craft shop and performers from a competition battling it out in the final. Every performance was vibrant and full of life in a way that is rare for a literary-based event. My only disappointment was that there weren't more people from the established Nottingham literary scene to see these young people perform. The room was full but they deserved an even bigger and wider audience.

And it astounds me to think that this was all dreamt up, organised, run and beaten into shape by Deborah, a twenty year old undergraduate. She is twenty one next month. Who knows what she'll do then. I don't but I have a prediction. More great things.

Creativity versus Language

I read a very interesting article in the New Scientist recently about creativity. It's a fascinating subject, and one of the things I'm asked most about at author events. 'Where do you get the ideas from?' There's no easy answer. The article I read didn't really answer that question but it did raise some other rather pertinent ones, especially for a novelist.

In essence, the findings of a study found that the nerve centres in the brain responsible for creativity appeared to compete with those for language processing. Brain damaged patients whose language centres were affected by their accidents or illnesses were shown to have become more creative and original. To quote the researcher:


"Shamay-Tsoory says that while creativity is likely generated in the right side of the brain it may be suppressed by language processing on the left."


In other words, there's an inverse relation between how well your brain processes language and how original you are likely to be. The implications of that for a novelist is a little bit frightening. As a writer, you want to both be able to process language well and to be original and creative. 


I began to think about whether this was borne out in the books market as we see it today. Thinking about commercial versus literary fiction, does this research fit with what we see? The more I thought about, the more I decided there was some kind of inverse relationship. Take Dan Brown. Whilst he did borrow some ideas and facts from The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail in writing The DaVinci Code it was, in fact, a very original novel. As are most of his others, if you analyse them closely, even though he often gets many of his facts wrong or stretches them to the point of incredulity. Still, someone stealing antimatter from CERN is something I find truly original, even if it's entirely infeasible. Opinions about books and the standard of writing of many authors varies hugely, with people having quite diverse opinions on many. Not so Dan Brown. It is a truth universally accepted by readers everywhere that his writing sucks on many levels. 


Take a successful literary author, though. John Banville is possibly a good example, previous Man Booker winner for his book The Sea. The kind of book that people buy and never read. Why? Is the writing good? Crafted to within an inch of its life. The story? 


"Led back to Ballyless by a dream, Max Morden is both escaping from a recent loss and confronting a distant trauma in the coastal town where he spent a holiday in his youth. The Grace family appeared that long-ago summer as if from another world. Drawn to the Grace twins, Chloe and Myles, Max soon found himself entangled in their lives which were as seductive as they were unsettling. What ensued haunts him for the rest of his years and shapes everything that is to follow."


So a bit of past secrets, memories of youth, escaping recent loss, confronting trauma. Original? Well, it's all sounding a bit Ian McEwan meets Kazuo Ishiguro to me right now. Interesting? I can't say I'm desperate to read about these unsettling twins. And, speaking of unsettling twins, are these a common theme in fiction at all? Hmmm... let me see. Her Fearful Symmetry, The God of Small Things, The Shining, The Thirteenth Tale, Atonement, The Secret History, Alice in Wonderland, Cutting for Stone,... I could keep going for a day and a half if I had more energy.


In short, I think there's something in it. I've found myself recently getting very bored of literary fiction and, at the same time becoming more and more interested in the stories I read in more commercial books. The books I've loved the most over the years have been the ones that have bridged the middle ground. Joanne Harris's Chocolat is a good example, where I find the language lovely and enchanting and the story equally satisfying.


What does it mean for me as a novelist? Well, I always try to find the story first and worry about the language after, so perhaps that's not a bad way to work after all. If nothing else, I think this is a good argument in favour of the commercial novel being of equal merit to the literary one. The snobbery that divides the two and looks down on one of these forms seems a shame to me; it always has. Surely we want originality in our lives as much as we want beautiful language? I know I do.

The August when I accidentally saved a bunch of people

Nine years ago today, I woke up in a Chicago hotel room, turned on the TV and saw a plane sticking out of a building I'd worked in, right there on the screen in front of me. 

I don't want to give anyone the wrong impression. I don't consider myself a World Trade Center survivor or someone who was especially close to the disaster, but it did touch the edges of my life and scare me half to death. I had been there, in that building, working, on several occasions over the summer months in 2001. When I woke up on that September morning, it wasn't 'some skyscraper in America' I was looking at. It was a place I knew. The first plane had hit just a few floors above where I'd stood and admired the view and told a colleague 'I want your office' and that very space was being engulfed by fire as I watched, and tried to work out which tower it was that had been hit, pretty sure I already knew. I remember moving around the room quite randomly, panicking, trying to decide what I needed to do. I needed to get in touch with home, that was for sure. My family knew I'd been working in the World Trade Center that summer. I'd mentioned it specifically when talking to my sister about her fear of lifts. Even though I was in Chicago at the time, they also knew I travelled round a lot and that I didn't always keep them totally updated as to exactly where I was. I guess that, for all anyone knew, Chicago could have been next on the list. There certainly are a lot of tall buildings there if you were that way inclined. So I needed to get in touch with my family, and I needed to get in touch with the office and I needed to get there, actually, to physically be at my office (even though I had recently left my job) and be with the people in America I was closest to, my friends Tim and Rebekah. 

My first challenge was contacting home. This was before the days when you could use your mobile phone anywhere in the world. In fact, back in 2001 you could pretty much use your phone anywhere in the world except America. Mine had worked when I'd gone to Africa for a fortnight but, aside from a ten minute interlude in New York where I caught the edge of a GPS signal, it was a useless piece of plastic everywhere in the states. I'd never got round to getting one of the brick-like American 'cell' phones that made me laugh. I was staying in a hotel room as I'd recently left my job and the apartment they'd supplied with it and the phone there was good only for local calls. When I tried to ring my mum, it wasn't having any of it. A payphone then. Hmm.. Well, anyone who's ever tried to use a payphone to ring internationally in America knows how that works out. It doesn't. There are no dollar coins and you just can't put enough quarters in. I walked around Lincoln Park and tried one after another, getting nowhere. 

I did manage to ring Rebekah. The news wasn't good. Most of our colleagues were accounted for but there were two people nobody could reach. I remember telling her that they'd be found. I could almost hear her biting her lip down the phone line as she said 'I'm not sure they will.' Something inside me was insistent about it, though. I don't know looking back if it was some kind of foresight or just sheer bloody mindedness. Perhaps it was wishful thinking because both people were colleagues I'd liked and respected. I was adamant, though, despite their office being on 86th floor. They will be found. 

I decided to make my way to our Evanston office where my friends were, and where I might be able to get inside and make a phonecall. For a moment I wondered if travelling anywhere was the right thing to do. The news anchors were very clear that everyone should stay in their homes. But I would be travelling away from the centre of Chicago so surely that made sense? It was before the London tube bombings so that the idea of something happening on a train or the El did not even cross my mind. I needed to contact home and find my friends. Of course, the office was in a tower block so that, when I got there, no one was allowed in anyway. 

I had to get in touch with home. Would anyone think to check their email? It was worth a shot. I managed to find an internet cafe and send a message and prayed that someone would get it. The cafe had a huge TV and you can guess what the live pictures were that were coming through. It was there that I saw the towers fall, one after another. It felt like the world was ending. 

Finally, I found my friends Tim and Rebekah and we were able to spend some time together and talk about what was going on. Someone had got hold of some weed and we smoked it in a public park. It seemed a valid reaction at the time. There had been a miracle. The two 'missing' colleagues had been located. Despite their 86th floor location, no one we knew had died. It sounds silly looking back but, at the time, it felt almost as if I had willed it to be true. I know I had believed it when I told Rebekah they'd be okay. Under the circumstances, I don't know where that belief had come from. It was an amazing story. Bill Trinkle was on his way to a client site that morning, where he arrived to cheering and applause. He was an early starter and someone everyone was sure would be in the building. Judy, the receptionist, was in the lobby on her way up to work as the plane hit and was able to get out quickly. The New York office manager had fortunately decided to take his holiday that week. There was no management around and morale at the company was pretty low at the time so that no one else had quite made it in to work yet that day. There'd been some really horrible political stuff going on and lots of redundancies. It hadn't been pleasant at the time but now, we were all glad of it. 

And I'd had a part to play in all this too. My friend Tim pointed out that I'd probably (entirely unwittingly) saved a whole bunch of my colleagues. It all revolved around that political stuff. There'd been a new president of the company brought in by one of the shareholders. This was a German guy who'd had quite a high profile in the industry in one way and another. It had been this guy who had brought me over from London to help him sort out the business and make some difficult decisions. But things hadn't gone well. Shareholder support had turned against him and his position was in jeopardy. We had a conversation one warm evening in August. He was on his way back from a long meeting at the office, I was on my way back from the bar I'd been drinking at with my friends and we collided in an alleyway near our apartment block. He told me they were planning to move him aside; that they'd offered him a job managing the New York office. He was trying to decide whether to take it or not. I knew straight away what I thought about this. I told him he should resign. It was about pride, in the end, I said. He nodded his head and went away to think about it. The next day, he did resign. He told my friend Tim that the conversation he'd had with me had been a big factor in his decision - that he'd been seriously considering accepting the job but that as soon as he heard me say this, he knew I was right. 

If my boss had taken the job in New York, everything would have been different. He had a European banking mentality. That meant early starts and long hours. He would have almost certainly have been in his office that morning. And it's a bit like Bagpuss. If the manager is awake, all the others make sure they get there and sing like the mice on the mice organ. I suspect that most of my New York colleagues would have been there too. I'm not claiming any credit for saving their lives. It was a lucky accident. It did make me think, though. How every action, every tiny thing we do has the potential to have a huge effect on the people we know and ones we don’t as well. I just said what I thought. I can't envisage ever saying anything different in that situation. But if I had, the world would be totally different now to what it was like then. I might even have ended up in New York that day myself. 

I often wonder about those crazy times in the autumn of 2001. I wonder how much we knew, somewhere, deep inside us about what was about to happen. It’s one of the times in my life that makes me consider the boundaries between past and future, and how solid they really are. I'd been keeping a journal, not something I generally do, and my entries from the few days before are strange. They talk about restlessness and strange atmospheres, the feeling of bad things on their way. They talk about changing my life. I'd had a good friend Kevin from England visit me the week before. He left the day before the attacks. He spent the entire time in Chicago telling me how scary the skyscrapers were and refusing to go up any of them. I remember laughing and telling him he should see the view from the World Trade Center. And I think of another story too, a writer I know whose first novel came out the year before mine did with the same publisher. His was about terrorist attacks in London. Its date of release? The 7th July 2005. 

My memories of the World Trade Center itself are so tied up in what happened to it next that it’s impossible to separate the two. There was a tight security system that meant you needed to show your passport and have your photo taken before you were allowed in as a visitor, a system that never could have foreseen or done a thing about the attack that finally happened. I can still picture the lobby and the coffee shops downstairs, the doors and windows and desks and chairs and papers that I wrote on and left there, all up on the 86th floor. 

Most of all I remember the people I got the lifts with. The people who worked above the 70th floor and who got the express ‘elevator’ first, before having to find the right lift to take them onward depending where exactly they worked. The people who probably died that day. I especially remember the first time I visited the building, when I stood around looking confused about where to go next as I got out on the 70th floor and a really kind man noticed and helped me out. I always wonder what happened to him. I hope he survived but, in my heart, just as sure as I was that Bill and Judy would be found, I'm certain that he wasn't so lucky. And he was kind to me. Needlessly kind, with no agenda, except that he could see that someone was lost. It's too sad to think about. 

I used to think that what happened that day changed my life but, when I look back now, I wonder if it did. I was already changing my life. I was writing loads and had been looking into MA courses with serious intent. It perhaps propelled me faster in that direction but whether it truly changed anything I did is another matter. I know I went back to London and thought about getting another job in banking, but never quite got round to it. I went back to teaching instead, and then to Nottingham, to do an MA in Writing but also to my family. And I wonder about that decision because I remember the feeling I got that day nine years ago, a sense of everyone going home. Everything closed in and everyone reached out for the people they loved, getting there anyway they could, car, bus, train, feet. It wasn't as easy as that for me with airspace closed but it's interesting that, in the end, I found my way home too. I think that probably is significant but it's so hard to tell. 

It's taken me nine years to write about this. Looking back now, it's hard to separate the way it felt then from the hazy glow of nostalgia that settles over it now. I've seen Bill Trinkle since and some of the other people from the New York office. They seemed happy. Super relaxed. I suspect that it did change their lives. But it's hard to remember how it really was that day, those few weeks before. Every interaction seems filled with meaning, every decision as important as Hell. I knew Bill and Judy would be all right. My sister just had a feeling about checking her email because I might try to get in touch that way. I'd been so certain that my boss shouldn't go to New York that the moment I told him so felt almost supernatural. But is that how it was? 

I don’t know. All I know is how sad it still makes me when I think of all those people in my lift. 

New courses

I am running two courses in the next couple of months for those who are interested in improving their writing.

The first is part of the Nottingham Writers' Studio series of workshops and focuses on planning and developing your novel  - where you go once you've got an idea, in other words. It runs all day on 25th September at the Nottingham Contemporary. For further details, or to book a place contact Robin Vaughan-Williams on admin@nottinghamwritersstudio.co.uk 

The second is for writers much further down the line, those with well developed or finished novels looking to find an agent or publisher. The idea is to help writers make that jump from writing well to getting their writing noticed. Ahead of the course, each participant is asked to send their proposal document comprising three chapters, a synopsis and covering letter. The course will focus on these proposals, looking at the work that each individual needs to do to get the attention of an agent, and so has an element of manuscript reading built in. It will look at the actual projects, what changes might improve them or make them more marketable but it will also examine the wording of the proposal, and synopsis, to help the writer sell his or her novel more effectively. If I feel that individual projects would be of interest to agents I know then I may make recommendations for the writers concerned. This course will take place on 14th and 15th of October at Antenna in Nottingham. For further details, or to book, see http://gettingyourworkoutthere.blogspot.com/ or contact me direct.