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In an attempt to become more accountable for my writing, I figured I’d post an update once a month. So here it is!

Untitled Sci-Fi Thriller (Completed)

I’ve sent this to 46 agents, all of them UK-based. So far I’ve had 13 replies. That’s 13 rejections. Here’s a sample of some of them:

“I’m afraid I didn’t feel strongly enough about the sample material to want to take things further”

“We just aren’t wholeheartedly connecting with your work, despite its many charms”

“Im afraid to say, however, that it won’t be a project we’ll be pursuing.”

“While we enjoyed it, unfortunately we have to pass on this occasion”

That’s fine. Expected, really. From my understanding the publishing industry is super difficult to break into these days. Either that or my book is shit (got there before you).

I’ve given myself the deadline of the middle of May, which is when my most recent query to an agent hits the 12-week mark. If I haven’t heard anything by then, I’ll be jumping on the self-publishing train again.

Untitled Third Book (Writing)

I’m really enjoying writing this one. It’s coming to me a lot easier than my Sci-Fi, that’s for sure. I’m up to Chapter 4 now, having written around 12,000 words in total. It’s not going to be a long book. In fact, I’m slightly worried I might not hit 60k, but I have a feeling it’ll probably end up between 60-70k. So, let’s say I’m about 20% of my way through.

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It’s been a while since my last post, but would you believe I’ve been scribbling stories the whole time? That’s not quite true. I have children now, so my time to write can fit on the head of a pin. But I have been writing… and I’ve got a new novel! 

What’s it about, Stew? I hear my fans ask. Well, you two, I’m going to keep that under wraps for now. What I will say is it’s a Sci-Fi Technothriller. It also took me 6 ½ years to write and easily the most difficult thing I’ve tackled to date. 

Does that mean it’s good, Stew? That’s for you to decide, eventually (if you want). I’m well aware that more time + effort does not always equal more quality, but there are many factors to why this one took me so long. I’ll go into it one day.  

That’s writing, though. It’s a journey. And while it was turbulent, and on occasion very nearly broke me, I really do believe I’ve written a good novel, if you’re into that sort of thing (think AI, androids, and mind transfers—but very much grounded in reality).  

So, what’s happening with it, Stew? All these questions! Well, I edited it, polished it, and got it into decent shape. So far, five whole human beings have read it and feedback has been very positive. But the real test is still to come.

Right now, I’m in the debilitating process of querying agents, subjecting myself to the inevitable onslaught of rejections. I’ve set up a status page for the book here if you’re curious of its progress.

If I fail to land an agent, I’ll do what I did with my first novel and self-publish. 

Want sneak peeks and creative insights? Sign up for my mailing list below. (No spam, just the occasional update.)

Oh, and one more thing—I’ve started writing a third novel. This one will not take so long; I’m already ploughing through the early chapters and really enjoying it. Aiming for a first draft in 6 months.

I’ll also be posting updates to “the socials”. You can find me at the following

X: @stewmcdonald

Instagram: @mrstewartmcdonald

Facebook: @stewartmcdonaldwriter

Speak soon. 

Lots of love. 

Me.

This post is part of a series of articles about writing my novel, A Single Source of Truth.

Buy it here on digital or paperback.

Naively, I thought that once I had my cover designed, and my manuscript all polished to perfection… that’d be everything I needed to get the book uploaded to Amazon and start selling like hotcakes. Unfortunately, as I’d soon find out, there were many other things I had to do. Finicky things that I probably should have paid someone more skilled to do. Instead, as always, I gave it a crack myself.

Kindle Direct Publishing

When you sign up for Kindle Direct Publishing at https://kdp.amazon.com you’re given a virtual bookshelf where you create digital versions of your books. Creating a new item in their system is a doddle, and it’s all wizard-driven with forms that ask for pertinent information. The one thing I didn’t realise was that an eBook and a paperback book were treated as two separate entities in their system. You have to create them both individually, and then once they’re published, as long as they have the same title and cover, Amazon’s clever system will automatically link them together.

The two formats are, obviously, delivered to customers quite differently. The eBook is essentially a digital file that sits on Amazon’s servers. When people buy it, it’s sent automatically to the person’s chosen device(s), such as a Kindle or a phone. The paperback is a physical copy of the book that is printed on demand (ie. when someone buys a copy). Paperbacks are more expensive for the consumer due to manufacturing and shipping costs, but it’s no skin off an author’s nose to sell a paperback version as well as an eBook. It’ll widen their reach for sure, although, due to the costs being so high, they’re unlikely to make more “profit” from the eBook than the paperback.

The eBook

Creating an eBook version of a manuscript file (formatted in Microsoft Word) is a lot easier than sorting out a paperback, which I’ll go onto down below. Firstly, while there are quite a few software packages and services available for creating eBooks, Amazon has its own application for doing this. It’s called Kindle Create and was pretty basic when I first used it, but it has since added a lot of new features. Simply put, the app will import the manuscript as a Word document and try to automatically format it. This process probably won’t work perfectly straight out of the gate, but it provides a clean interface to organise your contents page, your chapter headers and any ‘frontmatter’, such as copyright, foreword, introduction etc. Once the book is set up exactly as you want, you click the ‘Publish’ button within the app and it creates a local ‘.kpf’ file.

This isn’t a readable file, nor is it strictly the eBook file that people load onto their kindles. The .kpf file needs to be uploaded to your bookshelf and it will then be processed by Amazon’s servers. Only the file that is distributed to people’s kindles, phones etc is the readable version of the file (usually an .epub or .mobi). How to get a local copy of your own eBook is quite frustrating, because you can’t just export an epub or mobi file from Kindle Create, nor can you download it for free from your own bookshelf. There are ways, however, such as using a free application called Calibre.

The Paperback

The paperback was a whole different beast to the eBook. Firstly, the manuscript that’s uploaded to Amazon requires typesetting – how the text appears in the physical book. The margin measurements have to be very specific and depend on how many pages there are in the book. Amazon has fairly comprehensive instructions for doing this, but I won’t lie, I found it a total pain in the arse.

Setting the margins creates the ‘gutter’, or the centre of the book where the pages fold. This is done by alternating the margin on every other page, so that the pages on the left have shifted left, and the ones on the right have shifted right, creating a wide space for the gutter in the middle, the size of which is determined by the thickness of the novel. There was also bleed areas and safe zones to contend with because if the text goes too close to the edge of the page, it’s likely to be cut off by the printer.

It was all very mathematical in the end and unlike the eBook, it was difficult to actually see whether the printed book was going to look okay to the consumer without ordering one. Amazon have their own previewer, that lets you view the book as a virtual copy, but I found it wasn’t as accurate as the physical copy. Amazon actually lets you purchase your own ‘Proof Copies’ for a discounted price, but they still set me back around £7.50 a pop. The main issue I found with this was the book could take up to 10 days to arrive, which meant I’d have to wait to find out if my typesetting worked or if I was completely off the mark. It was a very slow process of trial and error. I think I ended up buying around 6 proof copies in the end.

The Font of Knowledge

This was something else I hadn’t thought about. Font! Who thinks about that? Well, it’s important. At first, I had purchased a few proof copies that used Arial, because I figured that was a pretty standard, universal font. Something seemed off about it though in its physical form. It’s only when I looked at other fiction books that I realised they all went with a serif font…. curly, ye olde English style fonts… instead of clean and clear style fonts. It seemed that san-serif (like this font) was reserved for non-fiction, instructional style books. That meant another couple of proof copies were ordered.

More Cover Design

The thing I struggled with most, though, was the cover. All the typesetting, messing about with margins and changing the font, changed the length of the book, which made it thicker or thinner, which had an effect on the spine of the novel… and that was part of the cover. That wasn’t the trickiest part. No matter what I tried, the front cover seemed to shift to the right when it was printed out.

Now, a lot of other people would have ignored that, but I’m a pretty neurotic person… I couldn’t rest until I’d sorted it out. In the end, I actually created two versions of the cover, one for the eBook, and one for the paperback that was shifted ever so slightly to the left, so that when it printed out it was centred. I posted a couple of queries about this to Amazon’s KDP message boards, but their response was that I’d probably done something wrong in the measurements. Maybe I had, who knows. Suffice to say it was a pain to fix, but it’s done now. Here is the final cover design, taking into account the spine.

Once everything was done, the book was ready to publish. The only thing I needed to do was set the price.

Pricing a Book

Pricing books is another game that takes time and experience to play. Luckily (or unluckily), I didn’t have any reader expectations or preexisting audience, so I went straight down the middle. EBooks from new authors generally sell for around £2.99. Books that sell between approximately £1.99 and 9.99 allow the author to keep 70% of royalties. Go outside of those prices and the royalty percentage drops to 35%. Of course, the plan starting out isn’t to make money, because unless you get a retweet from JK Rowling or Stephen King, you’re not going to make any. The plan is to get people knowing about you as an author, and hopefully, they’ll buy and like your book, spread the word, and be interested in buying your next book. So, just getting people to buy it regardless of price is important.

As for the paperback, this was tricky due to the high manufacturing costs. Being a print-on-demand service, the minimum price I could set the paperback was £8.10, which seemed like a strange number, so I set it to £9.99. I didn’t think the paperback would sell as many as the eBook, but it’s always good to have it as alternative option (many people still love to read a physical book).

Royalties are skewed with paperbacks because of the printing costs. Selling A Single Source of Truth for £9.99 would only mean £1 profit, and yet selling an eBook for £2.99 meant I got about £1.68 profit. Strange, hey? As I said though, it’s not about money at this stage, it’s about exposure, and the focus was primarily on the eBook.

Scheduling the Book

Through Amazon’s KDP dashboard, I ensured both my final Kindle and Paperback manuscripts were uploaded along with the covers. I tagged the book with two relevant categories (the limit is two), which determines where the book comes under when people browse Amazon (ie. crime thriller etc), and I put in 7 keywords that are used for when people search (you only get 7). The book was to be ready to buy on the 29th June 2019, but because of delays in Amazon’s review stage, the paperback wasn’t available until a day or two after launch day. So, if you want both to be ready on the same day, make sure everything is sorted and uploaded at least a few days prior!

Tune in next week when I’ll be discussing the do’s and don’ts of launching a book. Mistakes were made, certainly.

If you have any comments or questions, please post them in the box below.

This series of articles is about writing my novel, A Single Source of Truth.

Buy it here on Kindle or paperback.

Writing a book is hard. Getting people to read it?… Impossible!

Okay, not quite… and it shouldn’t be impossible, not in this day and age. With the internet, artists not only have the available knowledge and tools to create whatever they want, whenever they want – but they’re within clicking distance of the eyes, ears and minds of billions of people from around the globe. It’s wonderful, but with such a vast stage, competition for consumer attention is fierce. That’s why there’s still very much a benefit in traditional routes.

The Traditional Route

It makes perfect sense. Organisations such as theatres, record labels, cinemas, distributors, publishers… they’ve all built a reputation for promoting, showing or selling only certain works that have passed their litmus quality test and are the “right fit” for them. Due to their time in the game – often decades – these organisations have gathered many a loyal following who are eager to part with their money, time and attention for whatever recommendations they offer. It’s social proofing at its most potent, and the exclusivity of the stage is what makes it so appealing.

The difficulty with the traditional route from an artist’s point of view is convincing the gatekeepers. These people are the decision-makers, and they hold the keys to the most prestigious stages in the world. Unless they can be convinced that they’d be insane to let your work slip through their fingers, you haven’t got a chance in hell.

As an author, the gatekeepers are publishers (and to some extent, agents). Getting a book traditionally published not only means the scrubby, typo-laden manuscript will be tidied up, polished to perfection and given a professionally designed cover, but with it comes a boatload of marketing – advertising, interviews, reviews, launch parties, and book signings. The book will be thrust under a large spotlight, and who knows, maybe it’ll even win some prestigious award!

It helps to get published, but it’s not the recipe for success (in the promotional sense). You still need to write a bloody good book, and at the end of the day, art is completely subjective. If a publisher says no, it shouldn’t be taken personally.

Querying Publishers

My intention with A Single Source of Truth was probably to always self-publish it, because never in a million years would I think any publisher would want it. And yet, once I had a draft I was happy with (after a couple of rewrites thanks to the paid editorial assessment), I figured it couldn’t hurt to at least try. And so, putting my actual writing of new things aside in favour of “getting myself out there”, I rolled up my sleeves and started researching prospective publishers.

The first thing most people tell you is to get the Writers & Artists Yearbook; a massive tome that is released each year with thousands of contacts inside. Well, I’m not one for patience, and so instead I just Googled. With my novel being set in the UK, I decided to target only UK based publishers and agents. It was also important to query those who work within the same genre; no point sending my techno crime thriller to a children’s book publisher.

After probably a few weeks of scraping the web for any sort of web link or email address I could find, I ended up with a spreadsheet of 42 publishers and 45 literary agents. The big players like Random House, Bloomsbury etc were a write-off already, because they rarely take unsolicited queries – the query has to come from an agent, and as I didn’t have an agent, I crossed them off the list! (their loss, pah!).

Many of the publishers and agents had websites that provided clear instructions on how to submit new work, and they all pretty much followed the same rules:

1. Submit a query letter
2. Include a full synopsis of the book
3. Include the first 3 chapters or first 5000 words, whichever is shorter

The Dreaded Synopsis

I can think of only one thing harder for a writer than writing a story, and that’s writing the synopsis for it! How can one squeeze a 108,000-word novel into two pages, let alone one? Well, it has to be done, unfortunately. And if anything, it’s another good chance to look at your story from a holistic point of view. I won’t bore you with a how-to on writing a synopsis for a novel, there are plenty of resources out there for that; suffice to say it’s like writing most things… tedious work. I first got my synopsis down to about 5 pages, then whittled it down to 2. And finally, after much wailing and gnashing of teeth… a single page.

If you’re interested, here is the one-pager. *Spoiler Warning* A synopsis tells the whole story, twists and all. If you haven’t read the book yet, go here… it’s free!

DETECTIVE SERGEANT JOHN BECKFORD investigates computer crime for a High Tech Crime Unit in the Metropolitan Police. When old flame DI ALISON FARBER turns up one day with a computer under her arm, Beckford gets embroiled in a new case: A Ukrainian computer science student who’s blown his head off with a 12-gauge shotgun. 

Beckford’s analysis of the computer reveals a webcam recording of the student’s suicide but suspects it to be fabricated. Further investigation leads him to believe a hacking group is behind the murder and cover-up, a theory that’s confirmed when Beckford is attacked at home one night by masked assailants. 

Beckford manages to escape and goes into hiding, but things go from bad to worse as he’s digitally framed as the leader of a child pornography ring and the prime suspect of the murder of a Chief Inspector. Now a wanted fugitive, Beckford uncovers information that exposes a network of corrupt Metropolitan Police officers. And after another attempt on his life, Beckford is rescued by a mysterious helper who turns out to be none other than the “murdered” Ukrainian student. 

The Ukrainian explains how the same digital wizardry that faked his own death is being used by the hacking group who are after him. Known as The Studio, they have the technical ability to penetrate almost any computer system undetected, enabling them to manipulate data to forge what people perceive to be true. 

Beckford is captured and interrogated at an unknown black site by masked members of the Studio who must leave no stone unturned to maintain the secrecy of their existence. Beckford is shocked to learn The Studio is a legitimate – albeit covert – unit of the Metropolitan Police, specialising in digitally strengthening cases against known criminals. A modern form of noble cause corruption. If it wasn’t for their handy work, the killer of Beckford’s sister wouldn’t be behind bars. They have Beckford over a barrel, but he escapes.

A year later, Beckford is living under an assumed identity in the Orkney Islands, where he spends every spare moment re-treading his sister’s murder investigation, knowing that only when he can find strong evidence to convict his sister’s killer under a true justice system, will he be able to expose to the nation the truth behind the wrongdoings of the Metropolitan Police.

The Query Letter

The good thing about getting a synopsis written is it gave me material for my query letter. The query letter is really the one shot at getting a publisher or agent’s attention. The chapter samples and synopsis will be attachments to the email (unless you post it, but that’s becoming rare these days), but if you don’t reel them in straight away – hook, line and sinker – they’re not going to open anything.

The query letter needs to be succinct enough that they don’t get bored, but encapsulate the feeling of the story without giving too much away. I used the one-page synopsis as a template but tweaked it to hold a few details back. Here’s the query letter:

Dear _____,

I’m currently seeking representation for my mystery crime-thriller novel, A SINGLE SOURCE OF TRUTH.

Once a prolific homicide detective, DS John Beckford now investigates computer crime as part of a High Tech Crime Unit in the Metropolitan Police, having transferred out of CID after the high-profile murder of his sister sent him spiralling into a depression.

When blast from the past, DI Alison Farber, arrives at his office one day with a computer in her arms, Beckford becomes embroiled in a new case: a Ukrainian computer science student who’d put two barrels of a shotgun to his head. And filmed it. 

Beckford’s analysis of the computer throws up questions, and when he probes into the night the student killed himself, further inconsistencies cause him to suspect the suicide was fabricated, and that in fact the Ukrainian had been murdered. His suspicions are confirmed one night when he’s attacked at home by masked assailants, and after managing to escape, Beckford learns a warrant has been put out for his arrest regarding the indecent images found on his computer. What indecent images? Things go from bad to worse when a close colleague is murdered and Beckford is the prime suspect. 

As his crimes are forged into reality, Beckford discovers he's being fitted up as the leader of a child pornography ring. Now a fugitive in the city, he not only has to evade the police but also an unknown group of hackers hell-bent on destroying his life. With help from both sides of the law, Beckford traces his digital enemies to an underground syndicate known as The Studio, where information is created, altered, or erased to manipulate what people perceive to be true. 

Will Beckford manage to uncover the conspiracy behind The Studio and clear his name? Or will he end up being ‘removed’, just like anyone else who gets in their way?

By day, I’m a web developer and business analyst, but I’ve been writing fiction for over fifteen years, during which I’ve penned a number of screenplays, stage plays, and short films, some of which have been produced. A SINGLE SOURCE OF TRUTH is my first novel and complete at 108,000 words. The manuscript is available, in part or full, upon request.

Thank you for your time and consideration. 

Best regards,
Stewart McDonald

I submitted that query letter with the synopsis and requested sample chapters to 64 publishers and agents in total. I got 24 responses, the first one being on the 6th February 2018, and the last one 6 months later on the 29th August (also Judgement Day, come to think of it!). Of those 24 responses, 23 of them were flat out rejections. Only ONE person requested to read the full novel. Which they did, getting back to me a month later to reject it.

Rejections are Standard

I was prepared for rejections, and so should anyone trying to make it in a creative industry. Most of the rejections I received were from agents who basically said they only maintained a small client list and couldn’t take on any more writers now. Whether this is a template rejection, no one knows (apart from agents), but they didn’t owe me anything. My query was a lotto ticket and nothing more. Here are some of the responses I got:

Unfortunately we will not be moving forward with your submission, as it doesn't quite fitwith the future direction of our list.

After consideration I'm afraid I won't be offering representation

Unfortunately our agents ultimately decided that your work would not be best served here 

It’s an interesting story and I like the way you write, unfortunately it’s not for us this time around feel it is something we could place successfully in the current publishing climate

Unfortunately in this instance I didn't feel passionately enough about the story to be convinced it would sell in today's competitive market.

while I thought there was much to be admired here, sadly I didn't quite feel the connection to your work that I think would be needed for me to represent this

We enjoyed your writing, but after extensive consideration, we do not feel that we are the right agency to represent your proposed material.

Unfortunately it isn’t the kind of thing we represent at this agency so we would be the wrong agency for you.

I’m afraid I don’t think it’s quite right for my list

we're going to pass I’m afraid I didn’t respond warmly enough to the story to be able to fully engage with it

We are sorry that we cannot invite you to submit your work or offer to represent you the writing was missing an 'unputdownable' quality that we look for 

Try Try Again

I was already in the throes of self-publishing before all the rejections were through. Maybe that was my pessimism and impatience running away with things, but I’m glad I started when I did. Undoubtedly, I’ll try and get future novels published the traditional way, because why not? It’s worth a shot, and if someone out there bites, life as a writer will become just that little bit easier.

Stay tuned next week where I’ll be discussing my journey into self-publishing.

If you have any comments or questions, please post them in the box below.

This post is part of a series of articles about writing my novel, A Single Source of Truth.

Buy it here on digital or paperback.

Self-doubt is a very prominent thing these days, and it seems to come hand in hand with any creative endeavour. It’s the sensation that what you’re creating is shit, that you’re not good enough, and that you will never be good enough. Many artists who are deemed highly accomplished in their fields can struggle with it, which just goes to show that it’s not indicative of quality or success. It’s a personal battle, one that must be fought and won by you and you only.

Because A Single Source of Truth took me such a long time to write, I went through many, many phases of self-doubt. I’d experienced similar feelings before when writing screenplays, but nothing as intense, although I think that was because, with screenplays, I was in familiar territory. Movies were my thing, and I felt like I knew how to speak their language and had the confidence to piece together a 3-act script. A Single Source of Truth, however, was my very first novel. And novels were totally not my thing.

Imposter Syndrome

A well known psychological issue many successful people encounter is imposter syndrome, where despite their high level of achievement, they believe they’re not as good as everyone thinks they are, and it’s only a matter of time before someone finds them out. I wasn’t (and I’m still not) accomplished enough to experience true imposter syndrome, but I certainly felt like an imposter writing my book. It took me ages to figure out why.

Authors love books. They love to read. They’ve been reading since they were a kid, and fondly remember days as a child reading under the covers with a flashlight. This is a generalisation, and whether this is true or not isn’t important; it’s my generalisation and what I believed. I was, to some extent, the complete antithesis of my stereotypical novelist. I didn’t love books. And if I’m truly honest, I still don’t. I do read, every day if I can, but I’m a slow reader and I never grew up with my nose buried in books.

In my defence, I’ve had access to a home computer since I was 4 years old. When kids my age were reading books, I was playing Repton on the BBC Micro. Computer games and movies were my sources of entertainment, and it was only when I got into adulthood that I realised maybe I’d missed out on something. I do get enjoyment from fiction books, but it doesn’t come easily, not for someone who grew up with entertainment spoonfed to them from loud and colourful screens.

So who on the hell was I, attempting to write a novel? I was a screenwriter and filmmaker, familiar with screenplays and movie structure from studying my favourite films. Written prose was for the well-read who got higher than a D in A-Level English Literature (I got a C in Language, though, woo). It was a losing battle every time I sat at that computer because no matter how much work I put in, I still considered myself not good enough.

Striking a Balance

Turns out, self-doubt can be a healthy trait. There are writers out there who will bash something out in no time with a huge smile on their face thinking it’s the greatest work since Dickens. When other people read it and disagree, it’s them who’s wrong, not the writer. Delusion is rife in the creative space. I’ve been there. I remember finishing my first ever screenplay thinking I was going to sell it for a million dollars. When I read it now, a little bit of sick enters my mouth. It’s bad.

Striking a balance is key. If I thought my writing was shit, maybe it was, and that’s a good thing. It meant I had enough self-awareness to identify flaws and what needs to improve…

In relation to this, I recommend watching this great video by Ira Glass that discusses the gap between our work and our tastes.

… but maybe the writing wasn’t so bad after all. Maybe I was being too hard on myself. I think the main issue wasn’t my writing, it was me. After being knee-deep in a piece of work for such a long time, I couldn’t see the woods for the trees, and I was consumed with almost every cognitive bias out there, subconsciously arguing and reasoning with myself over whether what I was writing was worth people’s time or not. And I kept telling the same story to myself: “I’m a screenwriter, not a novelist.”

Here are some excerpts from my morning journals back when I was rewriting the book.

The novel is feeling a bit like a hindrance, because even though I’m still writing it, and it’s going well, I feel the book won’t be read by anyone but my friends and family. It’s been a good learning tool, and taught me discipline (for getting up and getting writing done) and hopefully improved my writing (at least 200k over 3 years). I’ve come this far, and that might be the problem, but I HAVE to at least finish it. I owe it at least that. 

My book is boring me a bit. I’m going through the phase again where I think I’m not a good writer, I shouldn’t even be attempting to write the book I’m writing, ‘it’s just not me’ blah blah. 

Been reading my novel and making notes, and I’m probably over half way through now and I think some of it just is a bit crap. It’s not CRAP, but... the prose can be confusing sometimes, and I think a lot of it is bordering on cliche.

Still cracking on with my novel, but each day I just think it’s not good and not for me. I think it might have an affect on my day too. Like, I felt happier and more ‘fun’ to be around when I was writing plays than I do writing this novel. And I remember the years it took me to write the first draft and how bad I felt through a lot of that. Why would I do that to myself? 

As you can see, I wasn’t having a very good time with it. I certainly went through a few bouts of depression while I was writing it, and only in retrospect can I see that it was mainly down to the internal battle I had going on between who I was, and what I “should” be doing. That battle rages on to this day, although it has calmed down somewhat now that I have a clearer understanding of myself.

Strengths and Mediums

Everyone has strengths and weaknesses. As a writer, I would hope one of my strengths is writing, and that means I can tackle any medium I want, be it a book, screenplay, play, blog post or poem, because writers write, right? This is like thinking all hip-hop artists can compose classical music. On a macro level, writing just looks like one thing, but go in closer and the range of required skills and techniques is spread far and wide across a diverse spectrum.

Up until A Single Source of Truth, I’d only ever written screenplays and plays; mediums that are light on detail and used as blueprints for physical performances. A novel is the performance. It’s everything encapsulated. And since receiving that email from an agent back in 2014, I have only ever considered the medium of A Single Source of Truth to be a novel (or maybe a 6-part TV drama, Netflix, if you’re reading this? *wink*).

And I now know, by going through the sheer exhaustion of writing it – and lately my new book – that my strength doesn’t lie in writing prose. I struggle with words, all the time. It takes me forever to string a sentence together. I repeat the same connective lines or character descriptions over and over. I don’t feel I have big enough vocabulary, or can think quick enough to be bashing out a book every 6 months like some authors can. I’m not a prolific reader. I find it extremely tough. It is not my strength.

Does that mean I should shirk from the challenge?

Theodore Roosevelt once said: “Nothing in the world is worth having or worth doing unless it means effort, pain, difficulty.” Sounds pretty depressing, but then again, an opportunistic person would see “difficult” as challenging. And to be challenged provides personal growth.

The main driving force I cling to when writing out of my comfort zone is that, first and foremost, I consider myself to be someone who likes to tell stories (AKA a “storyteller”, but more on that below). Writing is just the process of translating the story from your head into the minds and hearts of others, and some stories may lean towards certain mediums over others as their best form of translation.

It may be that writing films and plays come easier to me and that I’m more naturally suited to them, but my aim is to tell stories in their best possible way. As long as I understand the contract I’m signing before I carry out any work – that novels will always be harder for me than anything else – I can mitigate those low moments of desperation by remembering it’s all part and parcel of the process, and to tell myself to keep calm and carry on.

My next novel has been tough, just like I knew it would be, but I’m sticking with it because it’s a story I want to tell in its most appropriate medium. I’m looking forward to starting another play though, that’s for sure. I see it as necessary peaks and troughs. For all the advantages and disadvantages each medium has over the other, I always learn from it, and the teachings undoubtedly cross over. And that’s the balance I want to strike.

Labelling Yourself

One final thought on labelling yourself. You’ll notice that throughout this post I called myself a screenwriter, a novelist or a storyteller etc. I try not to do that any more because using labels only fuelled my self-doubt. By labelling myself one thing (ie. a screenwriter), it excluded me from being not only a novelist but being ANYTHING ELSE IN THE ENTIRE WORLD.

I’m not a novelist, a screenwriter or a playwright. I’m a human being who has written a novel and has written some plays. And I’m lucky enough to live in a time and place where I can try whatever artistic endeavours I want, without restriction. And why not?

If you have any comments or questions, please post them in the box below.

This post is part of a series of articles about writing my novel, A Single Source of Truth.

Buy it here on digital or paperback.

Writing is hard. Many people who write themselves know this, and yet you’ll often hear stories of how someone bashed a book or a script out in 13 minutes. There are some exceptions that prove the rule, but how often can those people do it on a consistent basis? Not many. In fact, if I were a betting man, I’d say none. Once in a while, you can get lucky and find your flow state and before you know it you’ve had a pretty good streak; words fell onto the page at the speed of thought. Everything clicked. If you find yourself getting into flow states regularly, I envy you.

For me, writing anything (including this blog post) is always very difficult and almost completely debilitating, were it not for the little moments of light that shine through once in a while, teasing you to carry on. If I can use a golf analogy here, it’s like playing a lousy round for 17 holes, but then on the 18th you hit a wonder shot 150 yards and it lands 2ft from the pin. All that crap you had to put up with for 4 hours, hacking away at the rough and bunkers? It was worth it to see that ball soar into the sky and drop like a cotton ball exactly where you wanted it. It makes you want more.

That’s what gets me through writing, those flashes of something good. The things that work, that you intended. And then it’s just a process of trying to do it again and again.

Routine is Key

When I started writing A Single Source of Truth as a novel, I already had the screenplay that I could use as my outline. You’d think that meant I had a headstart, wouldn’t you? Unfortunately, what I was to discover was that, for me, compared to plays or film scripts, writing a book is an even longer, slower, more laborious process. For example, If I can throw in another analogy (this time construction), I see writing a play like building a room with four walls. Writing a screenplay is like building a house. And writing a novel is like building an entire city. That’s not to undermine any medium, saying that one is easier than the other, it’s just my personal perspective on it. A novel is a long game, but that’s where routine helped.

Prior to the book, I wrote whenever I felt like it. Sometimes I’d dip in on the weekend, or for a few hours one idle weekday evening. Other times, I’d be swept up in a frenzy of inspiration and would forgo friends, family and fun to knuckle down and get whatever I had in my head on the page. This seemed to work well for the most part when I was writing scripts that had no deadline, and plays that had no stage. But because writing a book can take such a long time, the concept of writing occasionally just wouldn’t cut it.

For writing A Single Source of Truth, I decided to take it seriously and treat it like a job. I already had a real job, but that didn’t mean I couldn’t put in an extra hour each day in my own time. So I got up at 5 am each morning, giving me enough time to write before work. And if I treated it like a job, I’d do it 5 days a week, just like a job – giving myself the weekend off.

The good thing about routine is that it’s a process, and as long as you stick to the process, you will make progress. You also won’t feel guilty about periods of inactivity, because there won’t be any! The bad thing about routine is that it doesn’t account for quality, but that’s okay. I realised over time that the finished product is an average of all the days I put in, not just a reflection of one or two. I had good days when I’d write 1000 words of decent stuff and other days when I would barely break 100 words of crap; maybe because my brain wasn’t in gear, or I got obsessed reviewing and editing the prior day’s section. Or maybe I wasn’t well, and that’s fine… I’d be unwell and not write.

If anything, I found that on the days that words weren’t coming to me, I’d think instead. And thinking is just writing without a keyboard or pen!

Measuring Progress

I like to track my progress towards goals because it enhances the chances of achieving them. The studies behind this are comprehensive, and over the years I’ve used all sorts of spreadsheets and apps to track stuff. Out of all the benefits, I find the positive reinforcement of tracking to benefit me the most. Being able to look back at all my days of writing and cumulatively see how I much I wrote actually makes me feel, dare I say it, proud of myself.

Tracking the progress of writing is easy. You can find hundreds of word trackers online, but all you need really is a spreadsheet with three columns, A, B, and C – Date, Total Words and Daily Words. Each day, after my writing session, I would load up the spreadsheet and on a new row enter the Date and how many Total Words my novel was. Using a simple formula in the third column, Daily Words, I would subtract yesterday’s Total Words from today’s and it would give me Daily Words I wrote on that day.

Below is a chart from a spreadsheet I used in 2014, tracking my daily word count for A Single Source of Truth from 30/10/2014 to 17/03/2015. In that 5 month period, I wrote 64042 words; about half the original length of the first draft.

Importance of Focus

There’s a great quote by Josh Billings: “Be a postage stamp. Stick to one thing until you get there”. I know it by heart now, but I had to learn it the hard way. You see, despite my routine ways of getting up early and dedicating an hour or two to my craft, I didn’t write this novel from start to finish in one big chunk. Nope. My attention span was much too erratic for that because after a few months bashing away at A Single Source of Truth, I’d typically set it aside and go off to do something else like put on a play or make a short film.

While variety is the spice of life, doing as Josh Billings said and sticking to something until it’s complete is very important. It’s now my preferred course of action. In fact, jumping from project to project is probably the main reason why I took so long getting A Single Source of Truth into a state I was happy for others to read. There are other reasons, but I’ll cover them in next week’s article. Suffice to say, the first draft was the hardest and longest stretch of the lot.

The Many Drafts

It took me from when I started in May 2012 until 25th February 2014 to write a complete first draft of A Single Source of Truth. Back then, it was still titled DATABASE, the original screenplay title.

In my opinion, getting to the finish line of any first draft, regardless of the quality, is one of the most important milestones. Because like I said in a previous post, it gives you something to work on; a big lump of clay that can start to be shaped and finessed. As I typically write plot-driven stories, I focus most of my first drafts on story structure. It has to have a cohesive beginning, middle and end, and all the dots connect, or I won’t continue with it. Everything after that – characters, world-building, attention to detail – can be worked on in future drafts.

Somewhere in 2015, I came up with the new title, A Single Source of Truth, which was introduced in my 3rd draft. By the time the novel was completed in May of 2019 – with rewrites, development notes and copy/proof edits – it was up to the 9th draft. That’s a lot of drafts! But it’s also the result of me doing things the messy way.

I’m currently writing my next novel and am keeping the whole process a lot more streamlined. Iterative rewrites will be a given, but hopefully, I can get my drafts in under 9.

Stay tuned next week when I’ll be discussing the nagging doubts that almost kept the book from ever seeing the light of day.

If you have any comments or questions, please post them in the box below.

This post is part of a series of articles about writing my novel, A Single Source of Truth.

Buy it here on digital or paperback.

“Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe” – Abraham Lincoln

I’m a sucker for quotes. The one above is a great analogy for outlining and researching a book. It’s all in the preparation. Now, people approach writing stories differently – some like to outline, and some don’t (also known as ‘discovery writers’). I’m firmly in the outline camp, but that’s just how I prefer it. Apparently, Stephen King doesn’t even know how his books end when he starts writing… he just works his way towards it. Amazing. I envy anyone who can do that. Another author in this camp is George R.R. Martin, who even mentioned it in his pitch letter to his agent in the early days of fleshing out A Game of Thrones:

“As you know, I don’t outline my novels. I find that if I know exactly where a book is going, I lose all interest in writing it.” – George R.R. Martin

Yep, I completely understand that Georgey, because the main issue I find when writing a story that’s been outlined to death, is that it removes a lot of the creativity. It becomes painting by numbers. Yes, there are flourishes you can add, small alterations you can make, introduce a character or two, even make an occasional deviation if you wish, but if you’re an outliner like me, your house of cards better stack up or the whole thing will collapse.

The Three-Act Structure

I educated myself on the three-act structure by watching millions of films (if not billions). We all know how a good story must go: there’s a beginning, a middle and an end. That’s it. But novels are different. They’re a much freer form of artistic expression, and if a writer wanted to, they could write a 400-page novel that’s just one long sentence with absolutely no beginning, no middle, no end, and not even any grammar! I mean, good luck to them getting that published, but that’s not the point. A novel is words on a page and, unlike film or TV, it doesn’t require millions of pounds and a massive cast and crew to make, nor does it need to make a ton of money in order to cover the production costs. That means we can write whatever the hell we want!

However, to take part in the entertainment industry and get readers responding well to my story, I had to follow some basics, and that meant using a recipe that’s worked for thousands of years – the three-act structure. Now, some people may be turned off from this, thinking their story will end up as a duplication of every other story out there, but the structure is the framework, just like how a house is built. The content is the story, and that’s all up to the writer’s original interior design (injecting their personality, voice and ideas).

Here is the three act structure broken up into the 5 main beats that I like to use:

• Act 1
• Act 2 – First Half
• Middle
• Act 2 – Second Half
• Act 3

The reason Act 2 is split into two parts is that this is typically where most of the action of a story takes place, and so Act 2 is longer than Act 1 or Act 3. It’s also perfectly split down the middle by…. the middle of the story! And it’s at this mid-point where something drastic will happen where there is no turning back for the protagonist.

*SPOILERS*      THE NOVEL IS FREE TO READ HERE, WHAT ARE YOU WAITING FOR?      *SPOILERS*

Looking at my novel now, you can see the structure as follows:

• Act 1 – John Beckford, a forensic investigator, delves into the suicide of a student and suspects data has been tampered to cover a murder.
• Act 2 – First Half – Dangerous people come after Beckford and he escapes, becoming a fugitive on the streets.
• Middle – Beckford is saved from drowning and is under arrest for the murder of a close friend (no turning back from this!)
• Act 2 – Second Half – Beckford gets closer to the enemy in an attempt to clear his name and unearth the truth.
• Act 3 – Beckford discovers the truth behind the Studio. He saves the life of his ex-girlfriend, then flees into hiding.

I’m not going to let this post become a tutorial in structure, there are much better resources out there, I’m just laying down the facts of how I came to outline my novel. Suffice to say, if you want to know more about the three-act structure… don’t read novel writing books, but screenwriting ones. Here’s a list of books I’ve read over the years and recommend:

• Save the Cat by Blake Snyder
• Screenwriting for Dummies
• Which Lie Did I Tell? by William Goldman
• The Writer’s Journey by Christopher Vogler
• How to Write High Structure High Concept Movies by Rob Tobin
• The 101 Habits of Highly Successful Screenwriters by Karl Iglesias
• Story by Robert Mckee
• Making a Good Script Great by Linda Seger
• How NOT to Write a Screenplay by Denny Martin Flinn
• Your Screenplay Sucks! by William M Akers

Now, because I’m an outliner, the most important aspect I need to know when starting out is basically the complete opposite of Stephen King’s (pfft! what does he know?). I need to know my ending. As long as I know how my story ends, I’ve got a destination… something to aim for. And in knowing that, the structure generally takes care of its self.

From the previous article on the origin of the idea, it was clear that I batted ideas around in my head for months, writing them all down and trying to shuffle them like a jigsaw puzzle. Then finally, in September 2010, I had the beginning of a structure which bears some resemblance to the finished article. This only goes up to about the middle of Act 2, but it gives you an idea.

1. A desperate video by a young guy. He shoots himself off camera. 
2. Police are viewing the video. Who is this guy? He's a self-confessed computer hacker.
3. The body can't be identified by anything but DNA and dental records. 
4. Someone spots a change in the video, which records consistently until either the computer runs out of space or his body is discovered. The light changes, ever so slightly. This suggests a cut in the video as the sun in the sky outside had shifted, possibly for a few minutes. 
5. Guy's friend, or possibly a cybercrime cop becomes obsessed with the case. Why did he kill himself? He begins to suspect that the video is fake. 
6. He goes to see the body in the morgue, after an autopsy. He demands to see it, but the head is a bloody mess, blown apart by a shotgun blast. 
7. He wants to see the DNA or dental record match on computer. A forensic technician shows him the match. Guy asks about the database behind the records, is the data accurate? true? Could a hacker get into it? 
8. He wonders if the data has been tampered with. Manipulated. He goes down a relationship trail, like a database. Anything that could be evidence. (CCTV footage of the guy on the day he committed suicide. )
9. Guy wonders that the man who died wasn't the man we believe. He's a cover up, with his entire digital history manipulated to make him appear like someone else. The real guy is on the run. His partner doesn't believe him, the job is too vast. He's covered up his tracks too well. How could he get into the DNA database? Really? No possible. "IT IS!"
10. Guy chases who he thinks is the real man. 
11. The trail goes cold, ala Zodiac. 
12. Guy finds a new lead, follows, finds the real killer, who looks like himself. A disgruntled twin? Or really a master hacker? Who was the murdered man?
13. Guy chases someone who ends up dead. He was a CG artist who worked in film, doing computer graphics and digital compositing. He possibly had a hand in re-creating the CCTV footage. 

Using a numbered list like that may seem a bit formal, but to be honest I find lists incredibly helpful, especially when outlining. Some people like to put small white cards on a corkboard, with each card being a scene or a chapter. I’ve done that, but I find the numbered list on a computer much quicker and easier to edit. And there’s always a lot of editing.

The structure above was part of the early outline of my 2-hour movie screenplay, which had the working title DATABASE (original, right?). In fact, it was a title that would stick, and over the course of the following year, I fleshed out the full story following a pretty much tried and tested outlining process:

1. Lather
2. Rinse
3. Repeat

There’s no magic formula for building a story. It takes time and it takes effort, like anything really. The more time and effort I put in, the better it got. There were no shortcuts. Think of a story like chiselling a marble statue. The early days are just going to be whacking off huge chunks, getting the general shape. Bit by bit you’ll whittle a more specific form, and then move onto the details, using smaller tools for the finer work, all the way up to the final polish. Writing is exactly the same.

When I felt I had enough of an outline (a numbered list that went from about 1-40), I wrote a scriptment – a sort of half-script/half-novel document that let me really flesh out the details without feeling like it was permanent. That probably took a few weeks, but once I was happy, I finally tackled the screenplay and completed the first draft in June of 2011.

Now, I know I approached writing this novel in an unconventional way by writing a screenplay first. That’s probably one of the main things I did wrong in this process, however… adapting a story from one medium to another is a very illuminating experience. It gave me a fresh perspective on the story, and many of the faults that were invisible in one medium lit up like a Christmas tree in the other. If I showed you the screenplay of DATABASE today (please, don’t make me), you’d see a lot of elements in it that remained in the novel. Detective John Beckford is still the protagonist. He still has an ex, Alison Farber. Nikolai is in it. The story is about 50-70% the same. Even the quote in the front of the novel was there on the front page of the script:

“Data is a precious thing and will last longer than the systems themselves.” – Tim Berners-Lee

The main difference between the film and the novel is the final third. In the script, the villain was one person, with a couple of bad guys helping him out. It was much smaller in scale and it ended with Beckford facing off with the villain, as a lot of thriller movies do. I also think Beckford and Farber reunite, but I’m not going to check (please, don’t make me). The entire concept of the Studio didn’t come until the novel, and that decision evolved over time and had repercussions that rippled right through the story, meaning I had to rewrite a lot. I also re-outlined a lot, because no matter how much preparation I put into a story, I’ll get side-swiped by an idea I couldn’t have thought of unless I traversed half a novel to get there.

Now, I’m skirting around a pretty big question here. If I wrote the story as a screenplay because I was a screenwriter who wanted to make movies… why would I go on to write it as a novel? My simple answer is as follows:

Because no one wanted the fucking script!

That’s right. I sent it out to as many movie producers and agents as I could find, but no one was biting. In retrospect, the script was closer in style to an episode of British TV than a full-length movie. Something in the vein of Line of Duty (yes, it was as good as that *cough*). I did target UK based producers/agents but got nothing back. Apart from this reply, on the 21st of February 2012:

Dear Stewart, 

Unfortunately we are not taking on any script of screenplay writers at present due to the fact that we are a literary agency dealing in commercial fiction. However, if you do ever decide to novelise your concept feel free to resubmit it to us, we would be interested in reading it. 

Novelise?… What, me? Write a novel? You are out of your fffff–

The idea of writing DATABASE as a novel had never crossed my mind. Not once. And though I had tackled a few short stories, and attempted to write a novel in my early twenties (I didn’t get past chapter 3), my experience in writing prose was severely limited. The email planted a seed though. And after a few more weeks of rejections, I seriously started to consider it. Maybe DATABASE would be better told as a novel? And writing one couldn’t be that hard, right? It’s just words after all…

Stay tuned for next week’s article, where I’ll be discussing the heavy research involved in developing the novel.

If you have any comments or questions, please post them in the box below.