Writing into the Dark. (Can you really write a novel with no idea of the story?)

You may want to fetch a dustpan; and perhaps a long-handled brush. We’re going to be breaking some sacred rules here, and it could get messy.

Let’s begin with the most fundamental law of creative writing. You must plan out your story. “I do not begin a novel until I know exactly how it will end,” wrote Vladimir Nabokov, and you don’t get much more influential advice than that. Ken Follett, the author of around 40 novels, famously devotes a huge amount of time to planning. In a Guardian interview in 2014 he admitted, “I do not begin a novel until I know exactly how it will end,” and he told The Paris Review, “I make a very detailed outline, sometimes fifty pages, sometimes more. I don’t start writing until I know exactly what happens.”

For some of us, that attention to planning seems oddly excessive. But Follett is by no means alone. Jeffrey Deaver, whose website informs us he has sold 50 million books worldwide, told The Guardian, “My outlines run to 150–200 pages. I don’t start writing until every twist is in place.”

If you’re an aspiring writer, these pronouncements from the great and the good must seem faintly terrifying. They certainly do to me. What might a 200-page novel outline look like?  I really don’t know. I met a writer once who championed the virtues of yellow post-it notes and a big empty wall to plan out a story, like a police incident board. I don’t have a big empty wall except for the one in my kitchen and I can’t imagine being allowed to cover it in yellow sticky paper. But students of creative writing are, I understand, generally encouraged to plan like this. Develop a synopsis, they are taught. Structure your story into three acts, plot out your character arcs, make sure your protagonist starts with a character flaw, encounters adversity in Act One, experiences an epiphany at the end of Act Two, and emerges improved and more lovable in Act Three.

But does anyone want to read that story? Really?

I write into the dark. I used to avoid admitting this in case it made me appear untutored, but you know what, I’ve had seven novels published now, so I no longer care. Let’s explore this writing technique. Join me if you will for a creative-writing tutorial on exploratory writing. We will be joined by no less a writer than Laurence Stern of Tristram Shandy fame who declared, ‘I write the first sentence, and I trust to Almighty God for the rest.’  And there, in a nutshell, is the full methodology. Sit down with a blank sheet of paper and a clear mind, with no grand ideas, no plot twists, no characters, and bash out a sentence. Then see if Almighty God, or Calliope (the muse who inspired Homer), or your deep unconscious mind perhaps, can follow this first sentence with a second. And then a third. And then you’re off.

Or maybe you’re not. Because here is the downside of this approach; it doesn’t always work. But you will know, within a page or so, whether your story has legs. Don’t be disappointed if it doesn’t. I probably start five or six stories for every one that gathers enough momentum to make it as far as a first chapter and usually, by around ten thousand words, you will find you are either on a roll or it’s a dud – like a firework that didn’t light. Be ruthless and consign the duds to the bin. Give them no more thought. Find another first sentence, and you’re off again.

Secretly, I suspect, every writer works this way. I just don’t think they want to admit it. Even Jeffrey Deaver must start his 200-page outlines with a spark, and I bet his final novels look very much like those outlines but with more words. I’m not suggesting that you shouldn’t have a core idea. In reality you probably need that at least. You do also need to know if this is a detective story, or a romance, or a tale of Plantagenet treachery. Maybe you have a brilliant conceit – twins commit a murder but witnesses and DNA can’t decide which one is guilty. OK. Keep the idea in mind. But don’t let yourself be ruled by it because a better story might just emerge as the writing develops. And here’s the thing. Trust your characters. Once you know who your characters are, you can rely on them to come up with just the right dialogue and ideas. They always will.

I heard Lee Child interviewed once on the radio and he came right out and said it. He starts every Jack Reacher novel with no idea of what the story will be or how it will end. ‘If I don’t get surprised writing it,’ he said, ‘how can I expect the reader to be surprised?’ (That quote is from my memory by the way so please don’t repeat it as gospel.)

‘But what if you can’t think of an ending?’ people will ask. Fair question. But then they don’t know what it is like to write a novel. This story will be in your head for almost every waking moment for the next year or more. You’ll constantly be thinking about what might happen next, where it might go, how it might end. Just like a chess player who has a hundred possible routes in mind to reach checkmate, you’ll think of a dozen endings and your characters will help you pick the right one. And just as Lee Child discovered, some things will surprise you. A character you love might die when you never expected it. Horrible things might happen. Go with it. You are writing into the dark. This is how it works.

There is one other downside. You’ll have to re-write a lot. I don’t suppose Jeffrey Deaver has this difficulty. But you might suddenly reach a point where you realise how much better it would be if your main character had grown up in Paris rather than London. Not a problem. You are the creator of this universe. You go back, you rewrite, and hey-presto your detective is French. It would be better if the murder weapon had been a claw hammer and not a gun. Back you go. You will get a lot of these. But don’t worry. They’re all good.

Sometime in my early fifties, on an idle day, I opened a blank word document and I wrote, ‘My name is Maximilian Zygmer Quentin Kavadis John Cabwhill Teller. My name includes every letter of the English alphabet except for the letter F. My father it seems, had an aversion to F.’
And that was it. I don’t know where this line came from. I had no idea I was writing a novel. I had to change the character’s name to Pinder because I discovered he didn’t have a P, and sometime later I mistyped his name as Maximilian Ponder and I preferred this, and eventually this random first line went on to help earn me a shortlisting for the Costa First Novel Award and set me up with a career change as a novelist. Trust your instincts. That was the lesson I learned.

Early in 2017 I found myself watching a TV documentary about a young woman who was studying chimpanzees in Gabon. She was standing beneath a tree and looking upwards. I found myself wondering, what if she was a gymnast? She could climb the trees. An hour later I had written a first line. ‘Angel was asleep when Gaffa fell from his tree. Milo would tell her sometime later, that a branch snapped. Angel could believe this. She didn’t know how much Gaffa weighed, but she knew he was huge.’

Thank goodness I didn’t try to plan this novel out. I let it brew, and it evolved beautifully over seven or eight years of writing. It became The Angel of St Piran and I’m ridiculously proud of it. So, unless you are the planning type, don’t listen to the siren voices that tell you to plot your novel out in precious detail, and don’t go buying packs of post-it notes and messing up your kitchen. All you need is a laptop and a quiet room.

And a first sentence.

CREATING ANIMAL CHARACTERS

 This is an article I wrote for 'Writing Magazine' exploring how I created the chimpanzee characters for my novel, ‘The Angel of St Piran.’

 

‘Never work with children or animals,’ That was WC Field’s advice. They will upstage you. They will forget their lines. They will misbehave on set. But this advice was aimed at actors. It can’t apply to writers. Can it?

Let’s dispose of children first. We all know they are notoriously tough. Unless you live with a ten-year old, it can be fiendishly difficult to write convincing dialogue for  children this age. "You know what a stroke to me such a suspicion would be," says little ten-year-old Miles, torturously, in Henry James’ ‘The Turn of the Screw.’ Well maybe Miles was unnaturally precocious. 

Animals, of course, are easier. We don’t have to create dialogue for them. Or do we?

Well of course we do. Talking animals are an absolute staple of literature, and not just for children. Don’t ask me to list examples. Oh, all right then. Animal Farm, Wind in the Willows, Watership Down, The Jungle Book, Black Beauty… and that Norwegian book they made into ‘The Sheep Detectives.’  And how about, ‘Pidge,’ a 2024 debut novel by Kathryn Lomer which won all sorts of critical acclaim despite the fact that it features a talking magpie. And I bet you can name dozens more. In fact I’ve just thought of, ‘The Labrador Pact,’ by Matt Haig which I haven’t read yet, but I really want to because, as I understand it, the tale is told by a family labrador (ok not strictly a talking labrador, but one who is capable nonetheless of telling a story) who has to obey the rules set out for the breed in the Labrador Pact, which sounds so delicious I’m almost ordering it already. But then I do have a soft spot for labradors.

The rules for talking animals in literature are fairly binary. Either it’s a children’s book (in which case the animals really talk). Or it’s an allegory (in which case the animals are representations of people, or they are metaphorical vehicles to enable the telling of a human story, or they exist in some kind of metaphysical dream). Take your pick.  

But what if animals really could talk? In my novel, ‘The Angel of St Piran,’ Angel Restorick is a primatologist who lives in an African forest, with a study group of wild chimpanzees. After some months in the forest, Angel convinces herself that the apes can talk. Sort of. They are not forming sentences. They don’t use adjectives or nouns or grammar. But Angel believes they can communicate intent and describe situations with a complex combination of noises, facial expressions, gestures, and movements, and she believes she can understand them, and even talk back. This communication is the essential heart of the story. For Angel’s forest is invaded by four super-rich trophy hunters who have come to bag themselves a chimpanzee. Only by mobilising the chimps can Angel keep the animals safe from the hunters – and who knows – maybe settle some scores.

So how did I create the chimpanzee characters to populate this novel? Reader – I cheated. For several years in the 1980s and 90s my wife Sue was a council member of Chester Zoo. Chester is home to Europe’s biggest group of chimpanzees (currently around 22 individuals). One day a week, while Sue was busy in the zoo doing whatever she needed to do, I would park myself by the chimps and watch them. I grew to know them all – their personalities, their liaisons, their predilections. And they were utterly fascinating. So fascinating in fact that I’ve borrowed them for the novel. Boris was the most famous of Chester’s chimps. He was famous before he even came to Chester. He had been discovered as an infant in a New York pet shop by the writer Hester Mundis, who raised him in her Brooklyn apartment, and he became the subject of a book with the wonderful title, ‘No, he’s not a monkey, he’s a Chimp and he’s my Son.’ Boris was the alpha male all the time I was watching chimps at the zoo. He was charismatic, intelligent, and sociable. But his role was coveted by at least three other males. Wilson was a wiry, contemplative creature, quite strategic in his relationship with Boris. He worked hard to earn the alpha’s trust and to act as the second in command. Contrast him with Nicky and Bolden, two large and boisterous chimps with very little cunning or imagination but with plenty of strength and quick tempers. Bolden was broody and temperamental. Nicky was over-excitable and full of energy. These two had just one strategy to win the top job. They would fight for it. These personalities were a gift to me while writing ‘The Angel of St Piran.’ There were strong characters too among the female chimps. Meg was in her mid-thirties, one of the oldest chimps in the world at that time. She was the matriarch of the group, and it was usually she, not Boris who kept the youngsters under control. A younger female, Heidi, was loved by all the young chimps. And by all the adults too. In my story Meg and Heidi merge to become Hootha, and Boris becomes Gaffa, and this helped me to picture them while I was writing.

Animals are people, really. That’s probably the only lesson you need to know about creating animal characters. Keep them faithful to the behaviour of their species, and after that, have fun with them. There is no reason why they shouldn’t be capricious, cantankerous, conspiratorial, resourceful, or caring. Or all of these things. Or none. Just make them real and we will believe in them. Well, I surely will.