Heavenly Guest Spot
Thanks for all your messages - after surviving being rejected in front of 3 million people I think I can cope with anything now, (kept thinking of those award ceremonies where the camera pans in on the nominees and their rictus grins as the winner is announced :) The People's Author was great fun and I'll blog about it at a later date - today, I'm delighted to welcome long-time blogging friend Cally Taylor to WKDN as part of her blog tour. Orion has just published her first novel 'Heaven Can Wait' - it has been wonderful following Cally's success story from the early days of landing a great agent to publication, and today she tells us how she wrote her novel. Congratulations Cally - I hope the book is a huge success, and the first of many.
I came up with the idea for “Heaven Can Wait” by thinking - what if a woman died the night before her wedding and refused to go to heaven?
I wrote that question in a notebook and jotted other ideas around it:
- What if she returned to earth as a ghost?
- What does she want?
- Why is she dead?
- Obstacles?
- What if she isn’t allowed to return to earth as a ghost?
- What has she got to lose?
- What does she learn?
I wasn’t able to answer all the questions immediately. I need to put my notebook away and go and do something else (going and doing something else is a great way of freeing up your subconscious I’ve found). I’d return to my notebook whenever an idea hit me and write it down. Slowly but surely the novel started to form in my head and I knew the beginning (the first 8 scenes anyway) and the ending, but I didn’t know what happened in the middle. Was that a problem?
Unlike a lot of other writers I’ve never been a plotter. I started my writing career by writing short stories and I never, ever plotted them. I’d get an idea or a character’s voice in my head and I’d just start writing, not stopping until I reached the end. Could I do that with a novel?
I decided I could - or at least I’d have a shot at it. For me one of the most wonderful things about writing is the element of surprise – when a character does or says something you don’t expect, when a twist suddenly pops into your head, when a new character walks into a scene and disrupts it – and I knew I wouldn’t be able to sustain interest in a novel if I knew what was going to happen for all 100,000 words of it. I needed to surprise myself.
I didn’t want my novel to meander all over the place however. What I needed was some kind of loose structure, but what? I searched the internet for articles and books on writing a novel and when a friend of mine suggested I follow the structure of the Hero’s Journey something clicked into place. At first I found it hard to translate the very fantasy-based hero’s journey to my own, very contemporary novel so I adapted it, picking out certain elements like the ‘call to adventure’, the ‘road of trials’ and the ‘refusal of return’.
I went back to my notebook and sketched out a very rough hero’s journey for my heroine and brainstormed what might happen during the different stops on the journey. Not all of them made it through to the final draft but some did. I started writing then, speeding through the first few scenes then pausing momentarily to think when I wasn’t sure what happened next, then writing again (letting the character lead the story).
On a very basic level the Hero’s journey is about giving your character a goal and then throwing lots of obstacles at them until they finally reach that goal. If you’re writing adult fiction the characters in your subplots need to have goals, and obstacles too.
In “Heaven Can Wait” Lucy’s goal is to be reunited with her fiancé. Her flatmates in ‘the house of wannabe ghosts’ have goals too - Brian’s is to haunt Paddington station and Claire’s is to get revenge on the band that mistreated her before she died. My task was to throw as many obstacles in their path as possible. Obstacles are important for a few reasons:
1) They up the tension and conflict in the novel (and conflict and tension is what keeps a reader reading)
2) They reveal a lot about your characters’ personalities. A good character is active not passive. They won’t lie down and give up when they face an obstacle, they’ll plough straight through (or around) it and battle on to achieve their goal. I recently read that it isn’t so much sympathy that engages a reader with a character, but admiration for the strength they through the course of a novel – and showing them overcoming their obstacles is a very good way of doing that.
In the Hero’s Journey, and a lot of women’s fiction, most characters achieve their goals (aka a ‘happily ever after’ ending) but it’s not always the case. Sometimes the characters gain more than that – they gain a new understanding of the world, a sense or peace and acceptance, or they grow as a person.
When I was writing “Heaven Can Wait” I tried hard to make sure that each of the characters had their own ‘character arc’, i.e. how they changed and grew as people over the course of the novel. This was particularly important for Lucy, the main character. It’s not something you can necessarily plan but if you give your character a whole bunch of flaws at the start of your novel and let them lead your story the chances are they’ll go off on a learning experience all on their own.
So there you go. That’s pretty much how I wrote my novel. Some of it was conscious (i.e. roughly planning the Hero’s Journey) and some of it was subconscious (letting my main character decide how she got from A to B). I’m not suggesting that it’s the recommended way to write a novel (and part of me wishes I was a plotter so I didn’t have those “Urgh, what happens now?” moments) but it worked for me.
Cally
Author of “Heaven Can Wait”, a supernatural romantic-comedy.
