The big news this
Christmas is that I finally finished the book I told myself I wasn't
good enough to write. It's coming out in February with massed
fanfares and another top notch blog tour care of Rachels
Random Resources (doing the hard work so I don't have to). It is
called Gap Years and writing it has been like pulling my own
fingernails out with my teeth.
I tried to start
writing this dual first person narrative after I finished Weekend
Rockstars four years ago
before quickly
discovering
it was much harder to pull together than I had first envisaged and
abandoning it to write a funny story about a grandmother on a
murderous rampage. Which
was much easier and has done quite nicely thanks. About halfway
through writing The
Craft Room, however, I
realised I could write the two halves separately and glue them
together later. A decision I would learn to regret, but here we are,
two years later at the end of the journey and on the eve of
publication.
Here's the (still
open to change) blurb:-
19
year old Sean hasn't seen his father since he was twelve. His mother
has never really told him why. An argument with her leads to him
moving to the other side of the country to live with him.
The
one thing they have in common is the friendship of a girl called
Rhiannon.
Over
the course of one summer Sean experiences sexual awakenings from all
angles, discovers the fleeting nature of friendship and learns to
cope with rejection.
Meanwhile
his father, Martin, struggles to reconnect with Sean while trying
delicately to turn down the increasingly inappropriate advances of a
girl he sees as a surrogate daughter and keep a struggling marriage
alive.
Gap
Years is an exploration of what it means to be a man in the 21st
Century, trying to reject the social conditioning of the past and
embrace a tolerant vision of the future from two very different
perspectives – neatly hidden inside a funny story about bicycles,
guitars and unrequited love.
If
any of my beta readers are reading this and think I need to change
it, do get hold of me, there is still time.
The
reason it has taken so much longer to write than intended was because
of the damn characters not doing what they were told. During a radio
interview (with the lovely Chee
off of Phonic FM) for the launch of The
Craft Room what feels like a
hundred years ago, I explained how Rhiannon, the female lead of the
novel, had made me rewrite
her completely as she turned
out to be more manipulative than I originally thought.
She then revealed herself to be even
more complex than that, requiring
at least four complete rewrites,
and I began to despair of ever finishing the book.
Once
I had got
to grips with her, I realised I needed
to cut a 30000 word subplot and replace it with something more
interlocking in order to tie it all together. And even after all that
there was still something wrong
that I couldn't put my finger
on. Off it went to my aunt,
who is the best editor I know, in hopes of a reply of heaped praise,
as I wanted it done, over with, out in the world. She pointed out
that my ending had become a massive Deus Ex Machina
after all the changes I had wrought since first committing
it to .odt file.
That
was the thing, finally a
finger had been put on it, so
off I went to
rewrite the ending, again.
It
is now the
book I wanted it to be when I first imagined it on a cold morning
when I was supposed to be working on my first novel – Weekend
Rockstars. Well, it isn't,
it's completely different, like they always are, but it works. The
characters are doing what they should, and what they want to and it
feels right now. I'll leave it up to the readers to decide if it was
worth all the pain.
There
is, however, one scene that has been a sticking point among everybody
that has helped me along the way. There's no point trying to be coy
about it, there is a very graphic sex scene between two men in there.
Half my readers told me it was a good thing, and to leave it in,
while half of them said exactly the opposite, that it was
cringeworthy and awful and needed to go. I've heavily edited it to be
less smutty and slightly more tasteful and it is no worse than the
heterosexual sex scenes that occur later and upset nobody. I felt
that representation was more important than offending any
heteronormative sensibilities though, so it stayed, for better or
worse.
Because
representation is important.
Diverse
in species, but not really in character, when you get down to it
There is a lot of
noise about representation these days. As a writer it is at the
forefront of the zeitgeist, and there are very angry people on both
sides. Go, join in on Twitter if you don't believe me. As a white,
cis-gendered male, 40-something writer it is more important than ever
to keep abreast of it.
At Christmas time, I
am very well represented in the popular culture of the season. I am
always well-represented in pop-culture, I can identify with Kay
Harker from the Box of Delights, Bob Cratchett and Moley – even
Arnie as he Jingles All The Way to buy Anakin Skywalker a cheap Iron
Man knockoff. I may not be from their time, their country, or even
their species, but they are written from a familiar perspective. I
feel at home with them in their awkward, very familiar feeling
worlds. I would, at this point, like to reel off a list of well-loved
BAME, female-centred, gay and trans characters that I don't identify
with, but thanks to the way our world is set up, I've never been
forced to watch/read/listen to them and thus can't bring them to
mind.
And that's the
point. Had I not been able to identify with the characters in my
childhood fiction, I would probably never have been inspired to
create my own worlds, would not have felt so happy. I was an awkward,
weird kid who felt happier in the company of fictional friends than
real ones. What if I had not been able to see myself in them? What if
they had all been from a completely unfamiliar world? The kids from
Narnia and the Magic Faraway Tree may have been from a different
time, but they felt like they could have existed in 1980s Guildford.
Like the other children I met at Sunday School, in a world that was
soon to disappear in a blur of technology and atheism.
And so, when
creating new worlds and new civilisations, every type of people need
to be visible. Gene Rodenberry knew that when he made Star Trek;
Uhuru, Sulu and Chekov were ground-breaking. I don't think we're
going backwards just yet, quite the opposite, but it's very easy to
think the work has been done and get lazy.
Being from the
background I am, I am un-uniquely unqualified to write the stories of
BAME and LGBTQI communities, but that doesn't mean I can't ensure
that my background characters reflect them and it doesn't mean that I
can fail to deal with them entirely in my story lines. In Gap
Years, the two main characters
are dealing with changing attitudes in an ever more progressive world
from two very different points of view. Sean, as a 19 year old, has
no problems accepting all kinds of diverse and differing types of
people, while his 50-something year old father, Martin, has to work
harder to check his inbuilt prejudice.
I
can write from the perspective of straight white men in Devon,
easily, I am a straight white man in Devon. Ironically
I recently read a book set in Devon that felt a lot like it had been
written by someone who had never even visited, some major
geographical mistakes were made, along with the kind of
misunderstandings
about rural public
transport that can
only be assumed by a city-dweller. I
would feel uncomfortable writing from the perspective of a
trans-woman struggling in Uganda though.
Not because I find the subject matter uncomfortable, but because it
is not my experience. I can empathise, I can try to understand, but I
can't really write that story. It doesn't mean that my straight,
white Devon men can't encounter a Ugandan trans-woman in their
travels (spoiler: they don't) and my background cast is as diverse as
the story (and my as yet
undiscovered built in privelige and prejudice)
allows.
It
certainly doesn't mean that I can't write a couple of gay scenes and
trans characters. But it does mean that I need to run it past my
friends and relatives with real world experience to make sure it
reflects the realities of their life – which I very much did. The
most important thing to do as a writer (and we all know this) is to
do the research, make sure it will ring true, not only does it make
you a better writer, but it also makes you a more sympathetic human
being, and that can only be a good thing.
