Have you ever been put off a favourite author because you read just one mediocre book of theirs? I’m ashamed to admit that I have. I’m not talking here about when you pick up an early work from a writer you have come to admire and find that it is not as good as her later works – I quite enjoy doing that, because I can see how much that writer has grown since she started. No, I am talking here about when you have read her first ten (in a series or otherwise) and the eleventh just doesn’t match up so you abandon her from then on. 

It’s a sobering thought to realise that there are certain authors I'll never read again. Or at least, not until one of theirs is the only audio-book left in the library and I'm desperate and about to embark on a long car journey. There is a terrifying Sword of Damocles that hangs over the heads of actors, which says that you’re only as good as your last performance, and the same is true of authors. Somehow it doesn’t seem to matter that you enjoyed their stuff till this latest endeavour; your overriding memory will be of their
most recent work and if it’s a weak one, you don’t want more of the same. 
 
What causes this sudden change in an author who seemed to have a winning formula and then lost it between books five and six?

I can’t quite put my finger on it, but if a book doesn’t have the same "grab-factor" that its predecessors had, even if it’s been highly recommended by a friend, then I just can’t get into it. If we as writers could work out what that certain something is, then we could clone it. If we as readers could work it out, then our bookshelves wouldn’t be so full of almost new books that have had only their first three chapters read.

I’ve narrowed the problem down to one common denominator: characters. To put it simply, I can’t read a book whose characters I don’t like. And I can’t work out which character I’m supposed to like if the author keeps head-hopping from one to the other and not giving us much to like in any of them. If she can’t decide which one she wants to follow, then how can she expect her readers to know? 

In my last blog I discussed the magic triangle of Characters, Plot and Setting. An important factor to bear in mind when deciding on those characters is Point Of View, or POV. Which one of your novel’s characters is the most important one, and how can you make this clear to your readers? As a reader, I hate it when writers muddy the waters. If I can't work out by chapter three who the main character is, or if I have worked it out but still don't like any of them much, then the whole book becomes a waste of time, sits on my shelf gathering dust and eventually gets dumped at the SPCA’s used bookshop so it can irritate someone else.

Joseph Campbell tells us in The Hero with A Thousand Faces that all memorable stories have at their heart a hero on a journey. Christopher Vogler re-iterates this in The Writer’s Journey so where does this leave a writer who tries to tell several stories at once, if she wants to avoid a muddied point of view?

That's one of the biggest fears I have with writing multiple POVs, because it needs to be very clear to the reader who he or she is supposed to be rooting for. The Dickensian omniscient treatment of the 19th-century doesn't point the lazy 21st-century reader in the right direction.

I usually avoid reading books that have multiple POVs, and yet I love Kate Morton’s
writing. If there is an exception to every rule, then Kate Morton disproves mine. Why? Because even though she writes in several different time frames at once, she has a definite central character in each time frame and it's pretty clear who you are supposed to be following. She also makes sure that there is something that we like about that character. The woman is a genius! 

Screenwriter Blake Snyder wrote a book called Save the Cat! The Last Book On Screenwriting You’ll Ever Need and the reasoning behind his rather quirky title is this: Early in your story, put in a scene where the main character does something that endears him to the audience and makes that audience root for him. For example, a scene in which he might save someone’s cat. If we can see some act of selfless goodness in a character who may otherwise be riddled with flaws, we will want to see more of that, and that makes us root for him and follow him to the end. 
 
If this character is also the one who has the most to lose or gain, then he has potentially the steepest learning curve and thus the most turbulent journey as well. If we feel that there may be redemption ahead for him, then we’re keen to join him on that journey. But if the writer kills him off at 80% of the way through the novel and ends it with a secondary character suddenly growing into his shoes, we can’t help but feel a little cheated. We all enjoy a nail-biting twist, but if there’s no “save the cat” scene for us to remember about that secondary character, then the author has failed us a second time and we don’t want to read another disappointment from them. 
 
So how does this relate to my writing and why am I being so critical?

Well, some months back I had a few problems with my current WIP. I had muddied the waters and allowed too much concentration on a character who wasn’t the main one. Yes, I liked him (I fall in love with all my main male characters while I’m writing them), but the main female was pale and wishy-washy (as they sometimes are before I’ve fleshed them out properly), plus I hadn’t made it clear enough by the fourth draft that she was the main character. 
 
So I gave this character a major re-vamp by rewriting her into the first person. This made me think about the plot from inside her brain instead of from inside my own. Then I worked out which of the male character’s chapters could be told better from her POV, and rewrote them thus, with her inner emotional reaction to them. Viola! She’s grown a personality and a lot more guts to go with it. And the male who counter-balances her has lost none of his strength along the way.

It all works out much better now. At least I think so. One of these days the book will be ready for you to read, and then you can tell me what you think.

Last weekend I finished the sixth draft of my current novel and increased a whole dress size at the same time, without even leaving my laptop. How did I do this, you may ask? I ate my way through my novel. No, not like those horrid termites that ate their way through a shelf of my books back in February (Will she never stop going on
about that? – Ed), but by eating with gusto the entire way through the writing process.

The way I look at it, we have to be as healthy as we can and this depends on food, doesn’t it? What you put into your body fuels it. Ergo, what you feed your body while writing your novel fuels your novel as surely as it does your body.

With many writers there is a danger that, while they are so busy writing, they will forget to eat. Not in my case. In fact, sometimes I am so busy eating that I omit to write. I have, however, developed a rather canny knack of typing with my right hand while my left paw keeps up the conveyance of crisps into dip, and from thence into mouth. Crisps and dip can be a notoriously messy snack, but if you can manage to do it with one hand, then the other is free to write. All day. And all the way through the dip. And the next packet of crisps.

Of course, there are motor problems here with the finger co-ordination. My right index finger, for example, tends to get a little muddled and I often end up with the odd “t”in place of a “y” unless I concentrate very hard. And then comes the time to write a “y” and I end up with a “t” but these are small problems and can easily be edited out in the next draft, possibly while sucking some juice through a straw, because that doesn’t require
hands.

Some writers might eat the kind of food that their characters eat, or the national dishes of the country they are writing about, but I don’t really discriminate. I’m happy to eat whatever’s in my cupboard, or in my biscuit tin. What I like about crisps and dip, though, is that the crisp crumbs tend to land in the dip and not on the keyboard, which is a bonus because you don’t have to stop to turn the laptop upside down; you can just collect the fallen crumbs from the inside of the dip tub with the next crisp and nothing is
wasted on the keyboard.

(Pizza is particularly messy, and I prefer to leave this until I am watching TV. This is usually followed by microwave popcorn with Jelly Tots. Did I mention that I like Jelly Tots in my popcorn? You really should try it – it works especially well in a darkened movie house, and it’s much better for you than all that salt, which I hate on my popcorn, particularly that hideous, artificially-flavoured powder that they leave on the counter for you to poison your popcorn with. Yuk! Seriously, the best part about eating it in the dark is that your fingers can’t distinguish between the rough curved surface of the popcorn and the rough sugared surface of the Jelly Tot, so every mouthful is a surprise. Fun, huh? Trust me on this!)

Anyway, back to the novel. This weekend I managed to consume five pots of English breakfast tea, three and a half litres of iced tea, two packets of biscuits (mostly dipped in tea for the same reason as crisps and dip – see above), one and a half maxi-size bags of crisps, a tub of dip, a pizza while watching TV between editing sessions, two medium tubs of yoghurt, and a six-pack of hot cross buns. I know these last are supposed to be seasonal, but my garage shop stocks them year-round. They’re good writing food but sticky rules apply. Sticky rules? Always have a damp kitchen cloth on a saucer close at hand – it beats running to the kitchen every time you need a mop-up. Yoghurt is good writing food, but you need the big tubs, not those poxy little ones that fall over as they get emptier because the spoon suddenly becomes too heavy.

Strangely, cheese and chocolate – two of my favourite leisure foods – are not favourites when it comes to writing. This is because they usually have fiddly wrappings that need two hands to undo them, and that really takes you right out of the novel – usually at a time you can ill afford the interruption, and even I am not such a pig as to consume the waxy rind or the silver paper of these respective products. I still have old metal fillings in my mouth...

Soup, pasta dishes and those nifty little cocktail sticks with chunks of tasty things on them are okay, but the preparation time is the big downfall here. Fine if someone else has prepared them, but food that comes in a packet, ready to eat (or to microwave) takes the first prize in my house every time.

So what is my novel about, you ask? Can’t remember exactly, but the characters do eat several pizzas and drink a lot of Australian wine. Watch this space!

A few months have passed since I wrote about the problems I was having with the fourth draft of my novel. Midway through that draft I realised that a major rethink was needed. My main female character had become the secondary character, while the actual secondary character was staging a coup and taking over the book. While I appreciated his input, I couldn’t let him overshadow her. 

I really liked him though, and didn’t want to water him down or dilute his impact, so my female character just needed to be better. She had to up her game and compete with him. Literally. I needed to put some spark into the dialogue and create more friction between them. She had to be the irritant – without being irritating –and bring to the story something even bigger, which he couldn’t provide on his own. So she became a woman with a bit of a history.

Stephen King warns us in his book On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft that: “The most important things to remember about backstory are that (a) everyone has a history and (b) most of it isn’t very interesting. Stick to the parts that are, and don’t get carried away with the rest.” 

Any woman with a history has secrets, and the best way I could find for my heroine to hold onto her secrets was to let the reader into her head. I worked out the significant events of her past, buried them into her subconscious, rewrote her into first person instead of third, and let those secrets fester for a while. And out of that cauldron came a whole new Bad Guy in my fifth draft!

I don’t want to sound smug, but I do love it when the writing goes well. And sometimes, for that writing to go well, we have to let our characters find their own way. My initial suggestions and plans for my heroine hadn’t turned out well, so instead I let her carve her own path and carve it she did. I gave her an inch and she ran those miles. In doing so, she created more intricate threads and convolutions for the plot. In short, the novel has taken on a new depth and come alive again.

Stephen King builds his books on situations rather than outlines. He likes to put a character (or group of characters) into some kind of situation and watch them work their way out of it. In other words, he creates a sort of “what if?” scenario. It’s rather like mixing two chemicals and waiting to see what happens. The result can go one of several ways – utter dormancy; a symbiotic mix; or fireworks. In novels, it’s the fireworks that we want. Right now, I am watching the fireworks grow in my sixth draft, and making sense of it all.

I don’t expect this novel to be ready by Christmas, but if I was the kind of writer who did, I’d be selling my readers short. Call me old-fashioned but I can’t get into that modern habit of churning out a book every few months (or weeks, as some do). If the book is to be worth reading, then it must be worth waiting for the writer to do it properly, to the best of his or her ability. 

My favourite writers – Kate Morton, Mike Mills and Anne Fortier – don’t turn out books like fast-moving sausage machines, and it shows. Their books are well worth the wait when they are released. Even as I read them, I marvel at the time and effort that must have been spent on building and crafting that intricate plot which I know they created for the sheer enjoyment of me, the reader, and many others like me. Yes, they are books that I read quickly – usually because I can’t put them down once I start – but I relish every moment of them. 

And while I’m waiting for each one’s next release, I have plenty of other favourite authors to read, and probably some unknowns that I haven’t yet discovered. That’s what’s so wonderful about the world of books – there is enough space for all of us in it.

So please excuse me while I leave you and try to follow their examples. I have a novel that needs some more work.

I’ve been renovating my oldest bookcase. It’s not made of special wood, but it was made by a special person – my father. He made it for me when I started university back in 1979, and I have squeezed it into no less than nineteen cottages, flats and basement apartments since then. Despite the acquisition of an additional eight bookcases over the years, my father’s bookcase has remained my favourite, even more precious to me after his death.

In February this year, termites came up through the floor and ate through the bottom plank of it on their way to devouring 24 of my biggest books. The books can be replaced, but the bookcase was one of a kind, never to be repeated. So in the months since then, I have been busy with a project between bouts of writing. There’s nothing quite as satisfying as the restoration of something precious to you, and the repetition of manual tasks frees up the brain to think while the hands are busy.

It struck me during one of these sessions that repairing a bookcase is like fixing a half-written novel. Parts of the original casing (or first draft of the novel) are still fine and serve their purpose, but big changes need to be made to other parts. Termite tunnels in the bottom don’t make for a solid foundation, so what no longer works needs to be unscrewed, cut away and abandoned in the same way that ideas we once thought marvellous for the novel don’t always work when the characters start to think for themselves. 
 
In place of the ruined wood, a new plank (story thread or idea) has to be sourced, bought, cut to size, sanded down, painted with primer, and left to dry. All new story threads need time to mature and develop before they can be woven into the existing plotlines of the novel. 
 
In order to accommodate the new part, the old bookcase has to be sanded down, have all its joints checked for more insect holes, and rusty screws need to be replaced. Old holes once taped up and glossily painted over (plot holes that I may once have tried to hide) must now be undone and repaired. That original plywood backing that I thought I needed can be jettisoned and the shelves can be left open to allow the books to breathe, in the same way that leaving out a non-essential element of the book allows the characters to stand in sharper relief, on their own, and don’t need me to labour a point.

When both parts of the bookcase are ready, holes have to be measured and drilled in the new plank, in exactly the right place to ensure a proper fit. There is only one chance to get this right so, on my story outline, I highlight all the new pieces and work out exactly where each new bit has to slot in, before I adapt the existing text forever and write the new pieces into it. Very carefully, the new plank is inserted as seamlessly as possible into the original piece.

Huge sigh of relief, but the work doesn’t stop there. In fact it’s only just beginning. Once holes and joins are sealed up, the completed piece needs to be re-painted. It’s very tempting to rush ahead with both the painting and the writing before the holes are sealed up, but time and care taken now will be time saved later. 

The bookcase needs an undercoat before the colour, even a second undercoating two days after the first if the old colour or ugly pink primer is still showing through. Two thin coats are always better than one thick one, in the same way that two careful edits of anything you have written will yield better results than one heavy-handed one. 

After each coat has had sufficient time to dry, a light sanding is needed to pare down the rough bits (edit out the glitches) that crept unseen into the previous coating of paint. Test the sanded surface by running your hand over it to feel for uneven textures, in the same way as you need to read your novel aloud to hear what works and what sounds awkward. 
 
Paint manufacturers warn that each coat must be allowed time to dry, especially in adverse weather conditions. Read their instructions properly, and stick to what they say. They have written them to help you, because they know their product better than you do. In the same way, you need to read as many books on writing as you can find, before attempting to join the ranks of published writers already out there. 

Like coats of paint, you cannot write one draft straight after the other – it needs time to cure, to settle down and solidify. You also need time to forget how brilliant you thought you were when you wrote it; time for your brain to forget what you were trying to say, and instead be able to see with fresh eyes what you actually did write. And then you need to re-write it. At any point, feel free to call in other writers, painters or carpenters to give
your work the once-over and point out where you need to fix things.

Be sure that the undercoat is ready before the first coat of colour goes on. I once made the mistake of painting a door before the undercoat had dried properly. The entire thing blistered and had to be re-sanded back down to the undercoat, and the whole process done all over again, this time with a second day in between each coating. It takes monumental patience to watch paint dry; it can’t be rushed, and it’s no good stabbing at messy bits with a paintbrush in the hope of covering them up. It doesn’t work. Be honest and don’t angrily flog recalcitrant bits of plot until they’re dead or no longer recognisable, just because you’re keen to finish writing the novel.

The first coat of colour needs to be followed two days later by a second, but don’t forget another light sanding in between, or that second coat will never be as smooth as you’d like it to be. There is always time for another light sanding, just as there is always time for more detailed editing. Once you're satisfied with the colour, your bookcase will be finished, but wait until you're absolutely sure that the final coat has solidified properly before you pile on the weight of the books. 

Your novel needs to be as perfect as you're capable of getting it before you attempt to send it to prospective agents or publishers, and if you're self-publishing it, then it needs to be even more perfect, so give it yet another edit before you cast your darlings to the wolves.

Good luck with all those books, and watch out for the termites!