My first novel was written over the course of one calendar year and serialised online in 12 parts, as I produced them. When it concluded I was struck by the enthusiasm of some readers for a sequel, or even a series, based on the same characters and places. When the book was published this summer, similar comments came up at various launches and literary events.
I was both flattered by and sympathetic to the reasoning. I too had got very interested in my main characters and had enjoyed writing about the setting of Dumfries and Galloway, in south west Scotland, where Iive. Since I had the people and also the rural context, why not keep going?
The answer was simple. I’d learned that people, place and plot are seen nowadays as the three foundations of contemporary novel writing. Yet, try as I might, I couldn’t get the bones of a realistic sequel storyline, still less an overt mystery, to drive the writing forward.
At the same time I was drawn to one character in the debut novel to whom I had not only become attached, but whom I found increasingly intriguing. Perhaps all the more so because she had died some months before the story began. I wanted to imagine her long before COVID took her life. To hear her voice, not through a flashback to someone deceased, but as a person very much full of life. Someone embracing the world and wanting to make it a better place.
I began thinking about how to explore this idea through a ‘prequel’, and began to ponder what some of my debut characters were up to a few decades before the first novel began. By chance, I hit on a mystery theme, relating to my Nithsdale locus, and involving the legacies of World War Two. I worked out some chronologies. For the various elements to fit together, the main action of the prequel would need to be set in 1997.
I began researching the events of that year and also the wartime dimensions that interested me. I started to fill out my main characters, digging back in their lives and making sense of how they had come to be who they were in 2023, the setting of the first story. Over this summer I amassed a huge dossier of material, created a full set of chapter summaries, two (alternative) blurbs, and a working title too.
So why, come the start of autumn, was I not feeling compelled to begin writing? Why was I prevaricating about plot lines, historical details, and the ‘mood’ I wished to convey in the story? It wasn’t writer’s block (I hadn’t even started). In part it was a slightly obsessive notion that I should write the story as I had done before, in the months (if not the actual year this time) in which it was located.
I weighed up these elements, trying to rationalise them, but was unconvinced by my own reasoning. Then as several other writing commitments came to fruition, I realised I was missing something. I spent quite a bit of time reading, pottering in the garden, and following the news. But my days lacked a strong purpose, a desire each morning and sometimes in the evenings, to give unfettered time to an ongoing task.
I’m referring here to the pleasures and pains of an extended piece of writing. Like the athlete laid up by injury, I was missing the adrenalin rush. Not one born of any extreme physical activity, but in my case something that comes from the process of creating a story from my own imagination.
So there I was one morning a couple of weeks ago. I’d done my emails, ordered some new tyres for my car, hoovered the house and planned the week’s menus. It was time to change gear. I opened my laptop, created a new Word document and gave it a title: Chapter One.
By the end of the day I had a humble total of around 250 words. But they were carefully crafted, open to revision, and pointing the way to where I wanted to be. The work had begun and I smiled in the knowledge that a new long distance writing journey lay ahead!
Quotidian 