Who is the first agent you approach?  The best one, of course, whoever you think that may be.  In my mind, it’s the Curtis Brown agency.  So when the time came for me to start trotting my new novel around town, I headed to their website first.  They have an online form which, frankly, makes life a lot easier, both for the author and, no doubt, the agency as well.  I filled in all the required boxes, clicked send……and was told that I had already submitted that novel.
WHAT??
But I hadn’t!  It was the first time I’d submitted the novel to anyone.  Had someone stolen my title?  Yet I’d made sure I’d never mentioned it on any online platform, paranoically keeping it a secret for as long as possible.  Mystified, I sent an email to someone called “info” at Curtis Brown, then moved on and approached another agent instead, one I actually like rather just think are the best.
You should know, at this point, that while I do indeed have a landline, the sound is permanently switched off.  In fact, the only reason I have a landline is that I can’t get a good TV/broadband package without one.  And also, if you don’t want to put your mobile number on a website, you can just put your landline number instead.  When the phone does ring, a little red light flashes, something I absolutely never see.  In fact, I didn’t even know it did flash until I spotted it and thought, hmmm, I bet that’s just a nuisance call, but what-ho, I’m in the mood to be bothered, so I answered it.
Can you imagine my amazement when I discovered it was someone from Curtis Brown?  And can you imagine my sheer utter embarrassment when I discovered that I HAD submitted that novel before?  I don’t even remember doing it!  The phone call was lovely but I felt MORTIFIED.  It took a lot of hard thinking afterwards to remember that over two years ago, I decided I couldn’t stand working on the novel a moment longer, that it was finished, and that I really needed the help of an editor.  So I must have cobbled together a synopsis and the first three chapters and a cover letter and sent it off to them.
BUT WHERE ARE THEY?
I can’t anywhere on my computer find the cover letter and the synopsis I must have written.  Did I do this at work one bored afternoon?
Anyway, whatever happened, I had done something mad and stupid and now I couldn’t submit the VERY THOROUGHLY edited novel that was, hopefully, a much better prospect.  Unless I changed the title.  The title I had settled on originally was “Season of the Falling Sun”.  However, throughout the novel, I NEVER use the word “the” in front of “falling sun.”  So the title was actually incorrect anyway!  It seemed to me fate, or someone else, was trying to tell me to change the title.  So I did.  And it works.  And that’s what I used to submit my novel to Curtis Brown, which the online form accepted.
But after all this, do you think they are going to take any notice of it?  I’ve got everything going against me: 

• I’ve submitted it before
• I forgot I’d submitted it before
• It’s 160K words long
• I’m not anybody
• Competition is fierce

I’m thinking me and Curtis Brown weren’t meant to be.
 
But out of this fiasco, I got one thing right:  the title.  Hoorah.

It’s taken me eight years to get to the end of my Big Novel but it’s done!  At last!  Bring on the champagne!
 
I really finished it over a week ago, wrapping up the last of the Killer Edit, and producing a synopsis and cover letter while it was still fresh in my mind.  But yesterday I did the final bit of formatting.  When I write (directly onto the screen), I don’t use indents as I find them hugely off-putting, and I write in block paragraphs i.e. with a line space between each paragraph.  I’ve always written like this as it keeps things neat and tidy inside my head and on the page, but obviously the final product can’t look like this.  You certainly can’t self-publish a manuscript looking like that and no agent or publisher is going to look at something so unformatted.  So my final act was to add the indents, then go through the entire novel getting rid of those line spaces between each paragraph.  And also getting rid of the indents at the beginning of each chapter AND the chapter number (indenting afterwards throws off the centring). 
 
I know lots of people write with tabs.  This makes me shudder from head to tail!  The horror!  But there you are, we all have our different foibles.  No doubt anyone watching me write in block paragraphs is filled with the same horror!  I just don’t get why anyone would want to use tabs – if you’re self-publishing, you absolutely can’t use that manuscript and have to get rid of every single tab!  Anyway, this is utterly beside the point.  Once I’d done my formatting, I was done.  I felt it was finished.  The moment of great finality had come.  My novel had reached the end.
 
I first came up with the idea about eight years ago but didn’t start working on notes until a year or more later.  I only know I wrote the first words on the first page in February 2015 because I blogged it on my website.  The first draft was the battle from hell and took over two years.  When I say “first draft,” I really mean countless drafts.  The restarts, the rewrites, the rethinks, the restructuring.  The replotting.  The gigantic plot holes I had to fill and refill.  The rock hard shapeless stone I had to hammer and hammer and chisel and hammer some more to try and find the angel within.  It was a nightmare.
 
When that “first” draft was done, I abandoned it.  I changed my writing style and began a series of lightweight novels that weren’t allowed to go over 80K words.  I wrote short stories.  Novellas.  Flash fic.  Anything SHORT!  Well, shorter than 180K words, which is what it ended up as – it really was gigantic!  The novel also underwent several title changes.  The heroine had her name changed at least seven times.  Even her hair colour changed.  Huge chunks of world-building never made it into the novel, or if they did, were cut out again.  A huge amount of research was never used.  I can’t tell you how BIG this novel was, how MUCH work I put into it.  And what did I end up with?  A great big rock-solid heavy chunky faux-fantasy style disaster.  I ended up HATING the thing.
 
At the start of 2019 (before the pandemic really took hold), I did a massive edit, called the Red Edit.  I tore out 20K words.  I hacked and hacked and hacked.  And then I forgot I did all this and went off to have a writer’s crisis while the world locked down.  It was only when I needed a huge challenge to get me out of my deep funk that I faced the Killer Edit.  In this, what would have to be the final edit, I began to strip the novel back.  I simplified it as much as I could.  I thought I’d be able to rewrite the novel in a whole new style but honestly, I think that might have killed me right off.  I just had to the best damn editing job I’ve ever done.  I even did things like search over-used words such as THAT, AS IF, JUST and many others as it gave me another chance to rewrite badly structured sentences.  I got rid of every single instance of SO THAT, a phrase I used about a million times.  I mean, my God, truly, the writing in this novel was AWFUL.  I know what I was trying to do, though:  I know the mood I was trying to create.  But it just made a great big lumpy muddy mess instead of a dreamy gothic concoction.  My romantic ideals didn’t work.  I also, by the way, got rid of every single semi-colon.  Now, I know how to use semi-colons and I hadn’t used them incorrectly, but it was part of the simplification process.  Simple punctuation.  Simpler language.  Shorter sentences. 
 
There are chunks of this novel that still don’t work.  Yet there are parts that I am very proud of, that work for me, that are beautiful.  But the fucker still comes in at 160K words.  No agent in their right mind is going to look at it.  I have, over the years, both loved and hated this novel.  I’ve called it That Novel.  That Difficult Novel.  My magnum opus.  My prize winner. 
 
Now I’m just going to call it my finished novel.
 
Cheers.

My new year’s resolution for 2021 is to be a writer. 
 
Now hang on a sec – aren’t I already a writer?  Am I not self-published?  Have I not been writing for years and years and years?  Am I not known for being a writer?  Novels, novellas, short stories, microfiction, some poetry (a long time ago), even a few screenplays??  Blogs, diaries, articles??  Editor, proofreader, manuscript construction??
 
Well, yes.  But here’s the thing:  my beingness as a writer was eaten away during the events of 2020.  Anxiety levels as a result of the pandemic eroded my imagination until it felt as if I couldn’t write anything except the dingiest, greyest, grimmest stuff with no space or scope or life in it at all.  My creativity, it seemed, was in its own period of lockdown.  Another factor that affected my creativity badly was working from home.  Don’t get me wrong – I actually liked working from home!  I found the admin work, which I hardly got time for when in the library, quite relaxing in its own boring, repetitive sort of way.  But in order not to be glued to my computer for eight hours a day, I arranged my work hours differently, which ended up eating into my writing schedule.  Also, I found myself checking work emails every single day, not just when I was strictly “at work.”  Add to this a whole world of other problems I had to deal with:  my eyes, my daughter’s uni problems, the stupendously awful heatwave that hit central London in August, returning to a customer-facing job while others were still working from home, then the shock of redeployment…..
At the end of this, it felt as if the writer part of me had all but expired.  It was rising to the enormous challenge of editing a difficult novel that got me back on track.  Some time over Christmas to relax a bit helped me to work out how to reconstruct my life around working from home.  And how to Be A Writer again. 
This is what I’ve come up with so far:

1.  Made a list of how to separate my WFH job from my writing (I’ll write about this list in another blog).
2. Changed my desk area completely so that it is now completely writer friendly (I’ll take a picture of it as soon as the sun hits this part of the room).
3. Using a different diary to reshape my thinking.

 
The third point has turned out to be quite important.  I’ve been using Moleskin diaries for years, usually the small one with a week-per-view.  Then I got a big one, also a week-per-view, but with more space, which I liked.  This year I went for something different:  it’s a big one again but with a full page-per-day.  NO WFH stuff is allowed on these pages.  All library work has been relegated to pages near the front of the dairy which show a month-per-page, the days divided up into little blocks.  That’s it.  That’s all the WFH job gets!  The new big pages are my life, my writing, notes, ideas, microfiction, single lines of writing……absolutely anything that is part of my creative life.
Compartmentalising my life, creating a beautiful workspace, and encouraging myself to write down ideas will, I hope, help me on the road to recovery.  I want to BE a writer.  I don’t want to just “have written.”  There is a whole beingness involved in creativity. 
That’s what I’m aiming for.

Today I begin the brand new edit of a gigantic novel I have edited several times.  I’ve written about this novel here many, many times.  In another blog, I might even go and have a look at all those old posts to see what I’ve written!
 
But today I want to pat myself on the back – not because I’m starting a major piece of work, but because I’ve done more this year than I’d thought.  I’d quite forgotten that at the start of the year, I did a HUGE edit of this novel.  I chopped and chopped and pared down and whittled and rewrote bits and rethought Part 3 and gave it more life and really, really worked my arse off.  I even made notes for what was to be the last edit – not a proofreading-type edit, but an actual rewrite-type edit, in which I sit down and rewrite the whole novel (with the most recent draft open next to me) so that the words feel fresh and new on the page as they come out my fingers, so to speak.  I even made notes.  I made pages of notes.  I told myself what to do. 
 
I even gave it a name:  The Killer Edit.
 
And then I did what I needed to do:  I walked away from the novel so that when I came back to this killer edit, I’d feel fresh and raring to go.  Which, amazingly, is just how I feel!  This is a HUGE project.  I’ve been working on this novel, on and off, for bloody years.  After the year I’ve had with writing failures, I feel ready for this enormous challenge.  I want to be consumed by its problems and find ways of fixing it up!
 
What gets me is when I last worked on this novel:  it was March.  Yep.  March this year.  Just as Covid19 began to raise its head.  Just as this new word was added to our vocabulary.  I last modified the notes for my Killer Edit on the 6th of March.  It doesn’t seem that long ago.  But it also feels like a whole lifetime.

I finished a short story!  That doesn’t sound particularly amazing but considering the year I’ve had with writing, just to say I’ve FINISHED something feels like quite an achievement.
 
I never expected to write this particular short story.  The idea was quite unbelievably grim, describing the abuse of a preadolescent, all the way into her twenties.  This is not my usual style, nor was it something I was comfortable with.  The story’s saving grace was the beauty of the setting:  a wild, windy coastline, with an eerie quicksand beach.  There was a hint of magic – the heroine (or should I say victim?) was accused frequently of inverting her witchery (hence the abuse).  But otherwise the predominant colour of the story was grey.
 
I thought I might have come up with this idea very early this year, but I’ve just checked the creation date of the Word document in which I wrote up the notes I’d made, and I can’t believe it was last year in September.  When I finished the notes, I had a pretty good idea that I would never write it.  It was too grim.  No one would want to read it.  The fact that it had a fantastically happy ending wasn’t good enough – no one would ever get that far.  And, quite frankly, I didn’t want to write it either!  It was just too miserable!
 
But with my writing going so badly this year, suddenly I was in the mood to write something relentlessly grim.  Once the year had settled into its new routine – daughter back at uni, me back work, new lockdown on the horizon – I began The Winds of Witching.  I handwrote it as this gives me the greatest pleasure.  When you handwrite, you think you are creating the most wonderful piece of writing.  You are convinced that it’s going brilliantly, that jewels are dripping out the nib of your Bic.  Handwriting is great for your confidence!  I also noticed how calm I felt after a writing session.  Every rape scene took monumental confront but when I was done, I felt almost peaceful.  Anxiety slipped away.  I felt like myself again.
 
I remember mentioning this to my hairdresser who, in her great wisdom, said that the process of writing this grim tale was one of catharsis, given the difficult year we’ve just had.  Okay, she didn’t use those exact words but that’s what she meant!
 
When I came to type up the story, however, I realised how BAD it was.  Badly written, badly conceived, badly plotted.  But I gritted my teeth and did that thing that 95% of writing is about:  I edited.  I rewrote, changed stuff, put stuff in, took it out again, and by the time I got to the final draft, I stripped it down as much as I could.  When I was done, I was satisfied.  The satisfaction was enough that I could walk away from it and feel that it was, for the moment, finished. 
 
I suspect no one will ever read it.  So what was the point?  When I get the blues (and I’m calling them the blues when it should really be called black-hole-blackness), the one word that leaps into my mind a lot is “pointless.”  Everything feels pointless.  My life, my writing, the world, the whole universe (I tend to be dramatic in my thinking when I’m down).  I was determined that this short story WOULD have some point, even if it wasn’t to be read. 
 
It was, basically, an exercise in self-discipline.  Because if I’m going to get myself to the other end of this pandemic in one piece, I have to get back on the writing train.  I can’t just hang around the rail tracks.  With this project, I pushed myself hard.  I edited that damn piece of rubbish writing until it work, finally achieving something, only a very small thing, but better than nothing.  Confronting a difficult piece of work seems to be the way to go.
 
My next project is to edit – yet again! – that monstrous novel that I have, in hilarious moments, called my Prizewinning Novel.  I’m determined to attack the thing until it too works, until the words leap off the page so freshly the ink could still be wet. 
 
I may have to gird my loins for this.  

​My writing isn’t going well.  If I had to blame anything, then I’m going to have to say it was the pandemic.  I did try.  I started an Exodus Sequence story quite early in lockdown but it was a mess and didn’t work.  I handwrote a short story but it was so poor I couldn’t find the will to fix it up.  I spent a long time working on the Exodus Sequence story, its title changed to Enlightened, realising that I’d tried to write two stories together that didn’t work.  Successfully separated, I wrote a fresh new draft, feeling quite confident at first.  It soon became apparent that it was a poor effort and, once again, I haven’t got the will to edit it. 
Where do I go from here?  How do I get back into writing again?  The depression of the summer is beginning to ease but the anxiety hasn’t.  I’m back at work, wearing a mask all day, while some colleagues only wear a mask under their chin.  I don’t feel safe.  I don’t trust anyone.  The world has gone to hell in a handbasket and I don’t want to go out.
If I’m indoors all the time, you’d think this would be prime conditions for writing.  People who don’t write and have no idea how the creative process works keep saying that to me:  “oh, you have SO much time to write now!”  What does TIME have to do with it??
I tried to concentrate on some marketing instead.  Not only has this failed utterly but I wasted £200 on a book promotion website that I realised too late is a con.  I have really been burned.  After all these years, you’d think I’d have some sense.  I thought I had checked them out really closely.  I thought I’d done my homework and my research.  But really, I was just desperate.
 
So here I sit.  It’s September and I have NOTHING to show for 2020 except a new caffeine addiction, a total loss of faith in myself, and a future that involves playing dodge-the-disease every day.  How do I come back from this?
 
I’d like to say I have the answer but I don’t!  My solution to everything is to just write.  Anything.  Garbage.  It doesn’t matter.  Just get some words on a page.  I have LOADS of editing to do but haven’t worked my way up to that.  So writing it is.  But what do I write if I don’t believe in my ability to write anymore?!  Teeny tiny writing.  Small and crisp.  Just an idea.  No need to develop it. 
 
Microfiction.
 
After amazing myself by actually managing to write a few of these, I then googled it to see HOW to write it.  Well.  Bugger that.  I can’t do rules.  I’m already chained.  I don’t need writing rules to chain myself further.  If that means my microfiction is a failure, then, well, heh, so what’s new.  But I like it.  And I like doing it.  My imagination is being exercised.  And in the long run, getting my imagination operating again is more important than having time to write.
 
LOWTIDE is my first ever attempt at writing something huge in a tiny space.

I approached an agent in the US recently, the first time I’ve ever done this.  Perhaps, I thought wildly, my contemporary/portal fantasy novel will have greater appeal to the American public.  As I’m not very good at pretending to be English and feel like a fraud setting my novel in a “quirky village in England” (you can’t believe the research I had to do to get a feel for non-clichéd village life), I thought perhaps my “quirkiness” would be entertaining rather than, well, researched.
The rejection arrived less than a week later. 
I have approached a total twelve literary agents this year.  In the previous two years, I approached 21 (just for this novel, you understand).  Of the 33 total, only 18 bothered to reply, all with bog-standard rejections, their emails almost identical (do they learn how to write these at Literary Agent School?)  I’ve run out of agents in the UK who don’t sneer at fantasy.  Sadly, my novel (or proposed series of novels) isn’t really Big Fantasy, which makes it even harder.  It’s set in the modern world.  The magical realm is separate and reached by what is traditionally called a portal (like Narnia).  There’s a bit of magic in our world but not much.  It’s very character-driven and heavy on relationship building.  There are a large number of strong female characters.
Is this all so unappealing?
It’s been over two and a half years since I approached the first agent.  I’ve already written the second in the series, though haven’t edited it yet.  I had hoped to write the third this year but it has begun to dawn on me that I probably won’t get to it.  A year that I had greatly looked forward to, filled with exciting projects, has been crushed by so many outside factors that I can barely get up in the morning.  I hardly need mention the pandemic.  Then there’s the realisation that I no longer feel able to work in my Real World job.  And on top of that, I’ve just been told I may have to have an eye operation for a possible torn retina.
I mean, fuck.  How do I respond to this?  I don’t know how to keep going.  The two efforts I’ve made this year at actual writing have produced absolute rubbish.  The immense amount of editing I have to do (which I usually enjoy) has been left to gather dust because I haven’t got the energy, crushed as I am by the events of 2020, not just globally but in my life.  I may have felt a smidgen of hope recently, when I got into gear and approached the US agent and did a whole bunch of other “writing career” stuff but the eye operation threat has destroyed it all.  There I was, trying to remain positive, trying to stay busy and productive, making an effort, DOING something, when I got steamrollered.  And it was a big steamroller. 
 
I recently tweeted:
I'm not sure I can do this writing thing anymore. I've been trying to find an agent for over thirty years now. I've been trying to get people to read my books for a decade. Nothing I do works. I am a droplet lost in a tidal wave.
 
I didn’t expect much of a response, the word “droplet” being the clue.  But someone replied with this:
I think your years of experience show a resilience and strength that the rest of us aspire to! I was feeling this way for the last couple of weeks... And reading your post makes me feel like such a lightweight. You are truly badass!
 
Me?  A badass?  According to Google, this means:
A tough, uncompromising, or intimidating person.
 
I was quite touched to be viewed this way!
 
While “perseverance” may be my middle name, the other side of the coin is, I’m afraid to say, total despair.  And as for the answer to the question I posed in the title of this blog, I don’t have one.  People may admire me for persisting and persevering on a difficult path, but for me, that path just looks like the ashes of my life, with all hope lost, a road that goes forever on and on in a talentless void.  And I only keep on walking because I haven’t spotted a turn-off.

If you can’t find an ending to your WIP, there is only ever one reason for it:  something hasn’t worked earlier on.
 
I’ve reached the end of novels, novellas and short stories in a variety of different ways:

1. I knew the ending first and have been leading up to it confidently from the beginning
2. I had a vague idea of what should happen but had to work on it once I got there
3. I knew what was supposed to happen but couldn’t figure out how to get there
4. I had no idea where the story was going
5. I had no idea how to end once I ran out of story

 
Every story is different.  No one way of writing is better than another.  For all my novels, I plan my endings to avoid waffling on endlessly.  I want to lead the reader confidently towards an ending that will either surprise them, please them, or leave them thoughtful (better still – wanting to read more if it’s a series).  This is something that works for me.  I like to know where I’m going.  I want to know what’s going to happen to my characters.  This way I can work on nuances and hints and ironies while I write.  Sometimes the ending can go flat when I get there, having held it in my head for so long, but a bit of rewriting, rethinking and reworking soon rekindles the original fire.
 
My short story writing is more experimental so I’m ready to expect the unexpected.  There can also be something quite delightful about not knowing the ending to a story.  It’s like embarking on an adventure and discovering things as you go along.  Not knowing your ending doesn’t mean you’re going to get stuck.  In a wild creative urge (and your muse on top form), a brilliant ending can occur to you just when you need it. 
 
While I’m definitely NOT going to advocate that you MUST know your ending before you start, there are going to be times when you just can’t find an ending – even if you planned one!  It’s awful if a planned ending doesn’t work but it’s worse if you just can’t think of a way to end a piece.  I don’t suffer from writer’s block but I come close to it when I hit a total blank at what I realise must be the end of the story.  How do you even know if you’ve reached the end of the story?  Has the plot run out?  Are all the characters dead?!  Or are you just sick of it? 
 
Whatever the problem, my Big Writing Tip should work.  Before I get to it, let me take you through some writing experiences I’ve had:
 
Knowing the ending
All my novels were carefully constructed.  I didn’t necessarily know them scene-by-scene and interesting things often occurred along the way, with some characters proving more alive than others, but I knew where I was going.  My Fleet Quintet novels were immensely complex with a plot that spanned hundreds of years (actually millions!) and some wild leaps in time.  I carried the plot of five novels around in my head for years and it was a great relief when I finally finished the fourth one.  The fifth novel in the Quintet is yet to be written but I have all the notes:  I know exactly what it is going to happen because I know exactly where all the plot holes are that need to be filled, the dangling threads that need to be tied up, the mysteries yet to be solved.  This is all planned!
 
Finding the ending years later
This has happened to me several times.  My short story, The Evolving, which I wrote in my early twenties, was rewritten decades later with an altered ending that actually made sense.  Another short story, Walked (which had a different title), was written in the late nineties but the ending was deeply unsatisfactory.  I knew the MC had to get to the desert in a plane, but what did she find there?  Over ten years later, the story became part of The Exodus Sequence and the ending resolved perfectly.  It was as if the story had to wait for the right ending to coming along!  Another Exodus Sequence story, Crashed, had a very weak ending that I couldn’t resolve.  By applying my Big Writing Tip, I finally found the perfect ending years later.  But I had to really work for it!
 
Not knowing the ending
My short story, Diamonds on the Moon, is a relatively unstructured piece which I didn’t plan at all.  I started with a dragon waking up on the moon, trapped in a crater, wondering what his purpose in life was.  I had NO idea where this was going.  I certainly hadn’t planned for Neil Armstrong to turn up in it!  I really just wanted to write about beauty and joy and friendship and I think I succeeded with that.  The final sentences of the story capture a theme that is prevalent throughout my writing (which means the ending worked for me, though I can’t be sure it works for anyone else!)  I planned nothing, yet the story is definitely finished and finished on a high note too, despite the sadness.
 
No ending at all
A recently completed Exodus Sequence story (which will appear in a collection of short stories as well as the second Exodus volume) (eventually) began very strongly indeed.  With characters that leapt off the page and felt very alive, it was great fun to write.  But once they reached their goal, knocking on the front door of a forest cabin they were trying to find and conversing with the inhabitant within – what then?  I had no idea!  Where was the story going?  What were they trying to do?  Why was this person in a cabin important?  I couldn’t answer any of these questions and was clueless as to how I was going to end the story.  I continued on boldly until finally I ran out of steam.  I’d rather hoped something would occur to me before I reached the ending, but it didn’t.  So I abandoned it for a while, then applied my Tip, and ended up with something more brilliant than I could ever have hoped for.  It moved the whole Exodus Sequence forward, rather than reaching the dead end of plot stagnation which is where I’d left it.
 
Having an ending come to me out of the blue
This is utterly brilliant when it happens.  It’s what you dream of as a writer.  It’s creation at it’s most excellent.  It also hardly ever happens.  I wrote Experienced pretty much “off the cuff” as it were.  There was no planning.  I launched into it wildly, then had to stop and restart the whole thing because I needed to change it into first-person-weird.  If you read it, you’ll know what I mean by “weird” because it’s a very dense story and takes a while for the confusing claustrophobic drug comedown to wear off and the plot to emerge.  The reader is basically walking in the MCs exactly footsteps – there’s no space from him.  You’re so far inside his head that you couldn’t escape if you wanted to.  For me, the revelation came during the fight at the end.  I knew what the MC had to do during the fight.  I just didn’t expect him to end up on real-world Io (that weeny volcanic moon that spins around Jupiter), nor did I expect that very last scene.  It absolutely tears me apart!
 
BIG WRITING TIP
 
If you can’t find an ending to your WIP, there is only ever one reason for it:  something hasn’t worked earlier on.
 
Oh, wait, didn’t I already say this at the beginning of this article?  Well, yes.  Because my Big Writing Tip isn’t more complicated than that.  It’s not some big secret thing.  It has nothing to do with inspiration, creative ability or your muse.  I’m quite sure there are a zillion other articles out there with advice.  Perhaps I’m saying exactly the same thing.  Perhaps I’ve come up with something genius.  But honestly, this is just what I’ve done and it’s worked for me.  Hopefully it’ll work for you.
 
If you’re stuck and in despair, the first thing you need to do is walk away from it for a bit.  It doesn’t matter how long.  If you can’t stand the story anymore, then make it quite a long bit.  You may just need a cup of tea or you may need to abandon it for years.  But if you don’t want to do the latter, try this:

1. Read the story from the beginning and make notes.  It doesn’t matter where or how:  I like using plain text documents.  But I’ve also been known to handwrite notes in vast volumes.
2. Ask painful questions while you read:  Does the plot make sense?  Do you know your characters well?  Do they remain “in-character” as it were?  Do you know what they want?  Do you even LIKE the story and where it’s going?  Is there an earlier scene that suggests a way out for the character and an ending to the story?
3. If you’ve had ideas while writing of earlier events that need changing, then change them now.  Sometimes if you spot a plot flaw, you’re not going to be able to think clearly until that flaw is cleared up. 
4. During this particular edit (it may be the first time the story is edited), you will almost certainly find things that don’t work.  Plot flaws, character errors, missing elements, maybe even a lack of structure.  You may find your tense is wrong or it should be in a different voice (first person rather than third).  You may even find the style is all wrong for the story and that it needs to be hard ass noir rather than wishy-washy fantasy (that would be quite an extreme change, but you get the idea!)
5. By now you’ve done a huge edit on your story, you’ve rewritten it, you’ve changed it, you found a new character or deleted one, your MC has expanded a bit and you know them inside out, you know their goals and dreams and past mistakes, you KNOW your story.  Has an ending miraculously suggested itself to you yet?  If it hasn’t, then there is still something missing from the story – and it’s not the ending that’s missing, it’s something earlier!  Find it and add it and connect it to the end.  There’s your story.

 
I’m currently working on a new short story for the Exodus Sequence about an MC from a previous short story, Woken.  His name also crops up in various other stories, so I thought I knew him quite well.  In this new story, he’s found dead on a beach in ancient Greece by a hermit – except that he isn’t dead and he has a huge story to tell.  The purpose of this story is to tell the truth about Atlantis (at least, the truth according to my Exodus Sequence universe!).  I launched in with no plot, no particular idea of which characters were going to do what.  I had some scenes in my head that I wanted to have play out.  And I knew that at the end, the hermit leaves his tiny Greek island and goes off to find some big name, like, I don’t know, how about Plato, to tell his story to, which is how Plato found the idea for his Atlantis.  That ending is all well and good, but what about the ending of the story that the MC relates?  That is the ending that is eluding me completely.
 
I already know there are some huge problems with the structure of the story.  It doesn’t have one!  It lurches about with info dumps and static conversations between characters.  I hate it!  Worse still, I don’t have all my facts straight.  The Exodus Sequence is a huge story with many characters, spanning millions of years.  Most of the stories are concentrated in the present or future.  Shattered takes place at the time of the Neanderthals and Woken in Arthurian times.  But this one, while set in the hermit’s time of ancient Greece at the time of Plato, also has a huge chunk set long, long, long ago, when there weren’t supposed to be any people on this planet at all.  It’s the heart of my Atlantis story, the soul of the Exodus Sequence.  The “thing” that happens here affects everyone forever more.
 
No pressure in getting it right, then!
 
What I’ve been doing is rereading ALL the stories in the Exodus Sequence and making historical notes.  I started this a few years ago and forgot about it.  Basically, I’m working on canon.  If the story has been published, which most of them are, then I can’t change the history.  And there is a lot of it!  It’s going to be very useful indeed to have all the “history” in one place with casual references to past events recorded in a linear fashion (to make my life easier.)
 
This is excessive when it comes to doing homework in order to find an ending to a story that has stalled, but it shows you how far I’ll go to get it right.  Hopefully, your story is just a one-off and just requires some serious editing.  By working on the Exodus universe history, or canon, I’ve already got a thousand ideas of how to fix up the story.  Better still, I’ve found the ending!  I realised my MC can’t possibly know who traps him.  THAT was the plot flaw.  It also means that in a future story, I can have a big revelation when he finds out who it is.  No writing is ever wasted!

I hadn’t planned to write anything this spring. I had been working on my short story compilation when the lockdown began and, doggedly, I’ve continued to put it together:  editing, doing a little rewriting, formatting, etc.  Quite a lot of it is done and I fear that it will be finished too soon – before the end of the lockdown, before summer, before I have a cover ready for it (whichever comes first).  I really hadn’t intended publishing this book before September, so there’s no particular rush.
My next big job (I’ve got this whole year pretty well mapped out) is to once again edit my Prizewinner and begin preparations for submissions to agents.  In the meantime, I’m still approaching agents for my fantasy series (though I seem to have stalled a bit during the lockdown).  And then – the big prize at the end of the year, or autumn, or just...later on – I will sit down and write the third Honeysuckle novel.  But between here and then...that’s a lot of time not doing any writing.  I started the year struggling with my writing and felt it was a good idea to take a break, doing something really constructive, such as working on the short story collection.
It’s just that I couldn’t possibly have known how I was going to feel in this lockdown.  I want to write.  I need to write. 
But what, exactly?
I have PLENTY to be getting on with.  I’ve got five series on the go.  Yes, really.  How did that happen?  I think it’s because I’m one of those people who love starting new things, who have endless ideas, whose imagination flies in every direction.  The five series are:
 
The Exodus Sequence:  White Shadows, Last Exit, Golden Queen, Merlin – a gloriously huge tale spanning millions of years, crossing several genres and experimenting with style.  (Finished 12. Unsure of end total)(short stories/novellas)
 
The Fleet Quintet:  Mindwalkers, the Fleet, the First, Gomenzi – an alien invasion of a most peculiar kind.  (Finished 4 out of 5)(novels)
 
Honeysuckle Rage:  Lightweight fantasy set in modern England with only one door left to a magical realm, about to be invaded.  (Finished 2 out of 7)(novels)
 
Tales of Everlast:  Short stories set in the magical realm first introduced in the Honeysuckle Rage novels.  (Finished 3 out of however many I feel like writing)(short stories)
 
Jacaranda Jane:  Autobiographical short stories.  (Finished 1 out of however many I feel like writing)(short stories)
 
I also write the occasional short story that fits into no series at all.  And of course, there are any number of novels in my head all clamouring to be written too.
I should really do another Jane story but they are hard to confront, seeing as how they are about me, albeit in the third person.  I’d rather do something more escapist, at the moment.  Having just finished an Everlast story, I might do an Exodus one instead.  But there are so many to chose from!  I want to write more about Zipp (the heroine of SPOOKED) but the next part of her tale is quite complex and I actually can’t get my head around it out right now.  Also, I need a different kind of challenge.  Which may involve reading Plato.  Urgh, really?  Must I?  Can’t I just cheat and read the Wiki page instead?! 
As an entry in The Exodus Sequence (volume two), it stands slightly outside of the general plot line – not that the reader so far would be aware that there is a plot line, but trust me, there is one!  Volume Two will be much more explanatory, compared to Volume One which, for the most part, concentrated on introducing readers to the characters and the aliens.
 
Let’s see how far I get with Plato…

I’ve just spent the last hour trying to think of names for the two main characters in a new short story.  What a waste of time!  I wanted to make notes for the story;  instead I got stuck on what I was going to call the prince and princess. 
 
Why is it so difficult?  There was a time when names used to just jump into my head.  I never worried about whether a name was cool or not.  It was just a name.  A name that seemed almost preformed was Gomenzi, anti-hero of my novel “Transference.”  I was sure I had heard it somewhere before because it felt familiar.  It doesn’t, however, seem to exist.  It doesn’t come up at all if you Google it – aside from my novel “V. Gomenzi”.  These days I Google all names to make sure there isn’t some famous person with that name, although this is only true of names with surnames;  my characters often only have one name, particularly if they are gracing the pages of a sci-fi story.
 
Other names that have leapt into my head are: 
Angelica Zippoli
Alenka Koie
Claire Halward, with parents Nick and Karin
Dett (who had a number of variations such as Detter, Detteth, Detteria and Besredetth)
Sistia Scarpora
Yani
Domitian (okay, I stole that – but who would think to use it now!)
Ziann Rama
 
The list goes on! 
 
Recently, in the last year or so, my pool of imaginary names seems to have run dry.  The heroine in my short story “The Crystal Vision” had so many name changes that sitting here, right now, I can’t actually remember her name.  This is NOT a good sign.  All characters are a part of me, after all;  it’s like not being able to remember part of your own name.  I’ve just checked:  her name is Lightness.  Urgh.  No wonder I couldn’t remember it.  It isn’t really a proper name at all (her mirror-twin is called Darkling, which is even more ridiculous).
 
I’m currently doing an enormous edit on an enormous novel I “finished” three years ago.  The main character in this has not only had her hair colour change but also her name – at least seven times.  I really, really wanted to call her Igraine.  And this is where my problems start:  the names I love are invariably mythical or made-up and used in famous novels.  Igraine was King Arthur’s mum.  The name has pretty much never been used for anything else (unless you’re a trendy parent, the kind to saddle your kid with names like Merlin or Frodo or Galadriel).  I worked on it for an age and eventually came up with my own made-up name, Ilgria.  When the novel was done (at least, I thought it was done), I realised I didn’t like the name at all.  My daughter agreed, saying she thought it made the character sound old.  Being highly enamoured with Tolkien names, I pinched a word from Elvish and called her Elanen.  My daughter promptly mispronounced it.  I promptly discarded it.
 
The search went on.  After several more attempts, I came up with Alegria, which is basically just Allegra dressed up a bit.  When I started my Big Red Edit (which has currently turned into a bit of a rewrite), I realised it was horrible and had to wrack my brains all over again.  Finally, I hit on Elanor.  It sounds a bit like all the names I’ve been wanting to call her, so is ideal.  And it’s pretty!  But it’s also a very famous name from, yes, Tolkien, being both a flower and Sam Gamgee’s eldest daughter (she even has her own Wiki page).  I eventually settled on a variant of the spelling and my heroine is now called Ellinor.
 
But you know what?  I don’t like it. 
 
While that name-search hangs over my head, my new short story, which I dreamed up all of two weeks ago, has run aground on the same deserted beach.  It doesn’t help that she’s a princess and he’s a prince.  The ONLY name that seems to go with prince is Charming.  Yes.  Really.  Prince Charming.  I don’t know whether to laugh or cry.