Writers Need Good Luck Sometimes.

There you are, busily editing the first draft of your amazing, soon-to-be best seller WIP, hoping to move on toward that goal of publication when, from some inexplicable, unrecognised source, two new and unrelated ideas pop into your head. The question then is whether to give these intruders room to expand or simply to ignore them and hope they’ll go back to wherever they were conceived.

In my case, neither could be ignored. In fact, it very quickly became clear they’d both enhance the story significantly.

One was relatively simple to deal with once a serendipitous notification came my way. I had a character studying art history, about which I have only superficial knowledge picked up when I worked as a graphics technician in a local art school. That was when I was in my late teens to about 21 years old, and as I’m now several hundred years older… One of my protagonists is based on that character. But it was a girl he was interested in who was studying the history of art. It occurred that some conversations were inevitable, given their developing relationship. My knowledge base, however, was inadequate to the task, and a couple of online searches quickly informed me the topic was far too complex to study that way.

Along came the serendipity. There’s a local online community here called ‘Nextdoor’. I received a response to one of my posts there, which needed an answer. In the process, I discovered a section that provides a space for users to make gifts of items they no longer need. There, at the top of the short list, was an offer of some art books. I glanced at the titles. A veritable cornucopia of the very information I needed. But the offer was aimed at students studying the subject, so I felt I should at least give them first chance. When no one came forward, I contacted the lady concerned, explained my need, and she was happy to let me have them! After a little organisation, we managed to arrange the transition from her to me. It turned out her daughter lives in my village and the lady was visiting and dropped them off.

The photo above shows the pile of encyclopaedic volumes on offer. Thirteen of them! All prolifically illustrated. Wonderful! I brought them in and carried them up to my study. The lady concerned was delighted when I offered to mention her in the acknowledgements of the book, together with a copy of the novel once published. I now have a lot of reading to do, of course. But I can be selective in that. And that particular idea can now be thoroughly addressed.

The second thought that intruded into my mind as I was editing resulted from my concern that the two main protagonists are both male. One is able and willing to give a first-person account of the events in his life that appear in the novel, so that’s quite straightforward. The other is more visual than literary, so I had to create a narrator for him. The natural choice, at first, seemed to be an older man who was perhaps a mentor for the protagonist. I completed the full first draft in this mode.

If you’re a writer of fiction, however, you’ll understand how sometimes doubt creeps into your mind about some aspect of your story. It worms its way into your imagination and refuses to leave you alone, usually because there’s an element of the story that’s just not working the way it was initially envisaged. In my case, I realised this was simply related to the gender of the narrator.

This particular character works almost exclusively with women. It suddenly became blindingly obvious that the narrator of his story would work so much better if she were a woman, preferably one he worked with. So, I’m now in the process of seeing the story of this protagonist through the eyes of the woman concerned.

She began life in the novel as a relatively minor player, but she’s also a little opinionated and unwilling to allow me to merely put words into her mouth, insisting instead on occasionally having her say on matters, expressing her feelings, attitudes and opinions. Such is the nature of created characters when writing as a pantster.

Whilst this is making the re-write more arduous, it’s also working so much better than the original. The contrast in the two parallel stories is already much improved by the change, even though I’m still working on the first few chapters. It’ll be a while before the book’s ready to send to a publisher, but I feel much more confident the MS will be more likely to be accepted now, maybe even welcomed!

Watch this space!