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.