Category Archives: Uncategorized

I was having a conversation about Detective Fiction with a friend of mine recently.

He brought up the fact, apparently well known in detective fiction circles, that the mobile phone is killing detective plots. Writers are tying themselves in knots trying to invent situations in which their characters are unable to make phone calls: they lose their phone, they’re out of charge, there’s no signal, whatever.

Now, I should state again for the record that I don’t read much detective fiction. I’ve nothing against it, it’s just not my thing. But I can’t help thinking that the writers he’s talking about are missing the point. They’re making the same mistake that bad SF writers do: they’ve had an idea and they’re going to hammer the story around it to make it work. They’ve worked out a plot, and they’re going to follow that plot to the end, even if it means getting their characters to act in some pretty strange ways.

I’m often asked about how much I plot a story, and I usually say the same thing. I plot about half way, I have an idea about the ending but that’s it. I always end up following my characters somewhere else. This is one of those things that you can’t be taught, it only comes with practice.

Good writing involves finding an original set of characters and putting them in an interesting situation. Find those things and the story will write itself. A real character will have their mobile phone with them, they will remember to have charged it. Instead of asking how they will lose their phone, a good writer will instead ask what happens next after the character has made that call a lesser writer would have been trying to avoid. That will resuly in a far more interesting story…

You can tell great writing by the way that it just is. There’s something very unforced about it, something very natural, a sense that what you’re reading could be no other way than the way it is. Characters act naturally, any surprises in the story come from their circumstances, not from their reaction to events. Plots unfold in a manner which appears logical (at least on reflection), nothing seems contrived.

Great writing leaves the reader thinking "I could have done that. All I needed was the basic premise and I would have written that. I mean, what else could have happened?"

And that’s the point. It all seems so real, so natural. That’s the mark of a great writer. Someone who has worked hard to make it all look so effortless.

The answer? Fifteen days, twenty hours and fifty five minutes.

I know that because I finished Dream Paris yesterday and I’ve been clocking the time I spent working on the novel.

The time includes the writing of the first draft of the novel and three redrafts: first redraft, the second following feedback from my wife and a third following feedback from other readers. The novel is now with my editor awaiting his feedback and will probably undergo at least two further redrafts.

I’ve not counted time spent planning the novel or the notes I made prior to embarking on the writing. As some of the ideas, scenes and dialog that appear in the novel have been collected over several years, it was difficult to measure this.

Some statistics you might find interesting:

I started on the 18th February, 2014 at 9:58am
I finished on the 20th February, 2015 at 3:00pm exactly

If I’d been writing an 8 hour day the novel would have taken around 48 days to complete.

The book is almost exactly 100 000 words as it stands, given that it took just short of 381 hours to write that gives an average word rate of a rather pitiful 262 words an hour. Given that the first draft took around half the total time to complete, that makes the word rate a more respectable 524 words an hour. As I normally average around 850 words an hour, the missing words are partially accounted for by the fact that I cut around 60 000 words from the novel due to mistakes, changing my mind or no good reason.

If you’re interested how I collected this data, well, have I mentioned Emacs? I recorded the time taken using org-mode. You can find out more by reading this post on My Emacs Writing Setup.

I just received my PLR statement for this year. If you’re wondering what the PLR is, then read this, taken from the PLR website:

Public Lending Right (PLR) is the right for authors to receive payment for the loans of their books by public libraries.

I’m a huge fan of the PLR and not only for the obvious reason that they send me money each year, but also for the fact they are so good at their job.

I first found out about them a few years ago when one of their operatives phoned me up to say she’d noticed I hadn’t registered with them and was due some money if I did so. Since then they have operated with quiet efficiency, paying my money directly into my bank each February without fail. They’ve also got an excellent website – nothing fancy, it just works.

If you’re a published writer and you’ve not signed up yet, you could be losing money. Where does it come from? Well, again, as it says on the website:

Under the PLR system in the UK, payment is made from government funds to authors, illustrators and other contributors whose books are borrowed from public libraries. Payments are made annually on the basis of loans data collected from a sample of public libraries in the UK. The Irish Public Lending Remuneration (PLR) system covers all libraries in the Republic of Ireland and operates in a similar way.

To qualify for payment, applicants must apply to register their books.

It takes less than ten minutes. There’s absolutely no reason not to sign up.

There’s a nice end note to all this, too. Many top selling authors waive their PLR payments, allowing them to go back into the pot to help out other writers.

PLR, they really do bring a ray of sunshine into these dark January days.