I have an octalogy of novels to write, only one of which is actually finished. I have a list of “stories with beginnings” that stretches to five pages. It’s obvious I’m not going to take on another major project.
Except that, of course, I did.
That Was a Start
It wasn’t planned. I do a fortnightly writing exercise with one of my online writing groups, where we write for an hour on a prompt someone’s proposed and then post the results. Over the years, many of my best stories have started that way.
A few years back, we had the topic that “that your character has a sudden, urgent need to escape from their friends/family/allies without being stopped or seen”. My first reaction to this was that it seemed very Hitchcockian, so I decided to write a Hitchcockian story — but fantasy. My character woke to find a strange woman lying murdered in his home and a gap in his memories from the previous evening.
That was a start.
I didn’t plunge straight into the story. I had no plot, really, but over the months that followed I managed to twist various of the prompts in the exercises so that I wrote about half a dozen excerpts. Most followed straight on, but one or two belonged to a later stage of the story I still only vaguely knew.
Eventually, I decided to knuckle down and write it properly. Looking back at when I started posting it on Fantasy-Writers.org, in sections as I wrote it, I see I stated confidently that it “should be a shortish novella”. I think I was expecting somewhere between 15,000 and 20,000 words.
Well, no. By the time I’d finished the first draft, by which time it was called Shadows in the City, it had grown to over 30,000. And, even then, I knew it was too short.
The Setting — Contemporary But Not
For decades, I’d been writing secondary-world fantasy in the usual kind of setting. Worlds (or one world in particular) where people rode horses and fought with swords, and the most complex technology was a watermill.
And yes, I still write those stories and love them. But, some while ago, it began to occur to me that our world was once like that and developed into the world we live in. So why shouldn’t my secondary world develop, too?
Now, of course, a bizarre world might turn out very different from ours. A world with multiple intelligent species enough like each other to interact. A world where magic is integral in people’s lives. A world that’s shaped like a banana.
My world, on the other hand, is very like our own, except for all the details. There is magic, there are supernatural races, but most people live their entire lives without encountering any of this.
This means that its “modern” phase has many of the same kind of things ours has. It’s a world of trains, planes and computers — and my Hitchcockian “ordinary guy in an extraordinary situation” turned out to be an accountant.
The precise setting, though, is one I could have more fun with. The city of Errish, through a series of unique circumstances, has developed as a largely vertical city. Above ground, it’s a city of skyscrapers that are routinely over a hundred floors. Below ground, there are twelve levels of the Undercity — mostly (though not entirely) the less-salubrious districts, lit by great lamps and ventilated by vast fans.
Needless to say, its most important transport system is made up of lifts.
Errish isn’t just a place where my story was to take place, though. It grew to be woven right through the fabric of the tale. Just like the old film with the credit “co-starring the city of Paris”, I like to think of this story as co-starring the city of Errish.
Where’s the Magic
But, of course, this wasn’t to be just a story about a city. Fantasy needs some kind of magic or supernatural beings, and mine gradually introduced themselves to me.
The adversaries were more obvious, because of course they were responsible for the body in the flat. Well, that goes without saying. They’re a race of sinister demons, come from no-one knows where. After going through various unsuitable names (I tried Lurkers for a while) I settled on calling them the Shadows. They’re normally cloaked and hooded, but once or twice in the story there’s a disturbing peep beneath the hood. They’re also invisible to non-magical beings — although some young children can sense them.
The allies evolved more gradually. They first appeared through a strange teenage girl in a bar, although at that point I had no idea who she was. They eventually proved to be magical beings called the Shailth, who figure in the fairy stories of this world. They’re perhaps best defined as a cross between faeries and X-Men.
The magic comes from both Shailth and Shadows — and also, as the story progresses, from more unexpected sources.
The Second Draft
I let the first draft lie for a while before coming back to it, and I worked on various other stories. Eventually, though, I began to plan my second draft. I should explain that, although I’m mainly a “pantser” when I write, that doesn’t mean I don’t do outlines, character studies and careful planning. It’s just that, unlike many writers, I do them in between the first and second drafts.
Although it varies a bit for each story, I tend to follow a similar process, at least for substantial pieces:
- For each section (whether a chapter or a convenient “chunk”), I go through all the feedback I’ve received, making brief notes of the main recommendations from each critiquer.
- I make a similar list of the issues I find when reading it through.
- Referring to all the lists, I work my way through the section, noting down the various things that need to change as I come to them. This can be anything from a character’s voice not seeming right to a whole scene needing to be added. Or removed, although that’s a good deal rarer.
- Then I rewrite, referring constantly to the changes I’ve listed.
In this case, what I’d been getting in the feedback from FWO was that it was all too sketchy. Not enough happening to allow proper development of characters and themes. It was going to have to be a lot longer.
So I set about redrafting and expanding it. This time, I explored the story properly, introducing new secondary characters, new scenes, even whole new episodes. I explored the rather bizarre central relationship in more depth. And I explored the city of Errish a lot more.
I was expecting, now, that the story was going to end up as a very long novella, perhaps around 40,000 words. In fact, when I finally completed the second draft, it fell just short of 50,000. This was a novel, now, although a brief one.
The Third Draft
The feedback I was getting for the second draft — mainly from different people — was identifying far fewer issues. There were some things that needed to change, though. So I repeated the planning process and launched into the third draft.
There was less to alter here, but there was still some substantial rewriting, including one entirely new scene. Also, the meeting between the two main characters had been flagged up as rather weak and not reflecting the personalities.
After some thought (probably while walking in the woods, which is where many of my best ideas come to me) I developed an entirely new way for the scene to go. This meant not only completely rewriting that scene, but also making major alterations to several scenes that followed, in order to be consistent.
So the rewriting process varied a lot, this time. Some was entirely new content, some was heavily rewritten, and some just tweaked. For instance, I made a more conscious effort, this time, to weave the main character’s personality and interests into the language — not only in his dialogue, but also in the first-person narrative.
Since the story was now officially a novel, I also divided it properly into chapters. And, for the first time since the 1980s, I actually gave them titles. I mean, coming up with the overall title can be hard enough — why put myself through finding twenty or thirty more titles? Somehow, though, it seemed appropriate for this story.
And, about a week ago, I wrote the final words for the third draft of Shadows in the City. The official count is now 55,852 words.
The Final Stage
There isn’t going to be a fourth draft, but that doesn’t mean I’m finished with the novel. The final stage will be a polish, designed to:
- Strengthen the language, wherever needed.
- Increase sensory language — one of my weaknesses.
- Make sure characters’ voices are consistent throughout.
- Weave in one particular theme I’ve realised needs to be stronger.
- A few last-minute adjustments here and there.
And then Shadows in the City will be ready to meet the world. All I’ll need is a publisher just waiting to snap up a pseudo-contemporary secondary-world Hitchcockian action-mystery fantasy.
They’ll be clamouring, right?
The Fantasy Worlds of Nyki Blatchley 