I'd rather be writing

If there's one thing I really struggle with as a writer is how to begin working on my next writing project when the current one is in the publish/promote stage.

I recently read an article about Dick Francis, the highly successful English jockey and author who managed to write a mystery every year for more than 40 years. That alone is worth a major wow.

The new novel (left) with its elder siblings

Francis described his writing process in the article. If I remember correctly, he said he generally wrote each novel during the first six months of the year, then sent the manuscript to his publisher and, while the publisher was doing its work, he would begin to plan the next novel. In the fall, he would be out promoting the just published novel while researching and preparing to write the next one. Then the new year would come and he'd start writing again.

I find that amazing. I can multi-task in just about every other aspect of my life but I don't seem to be able to get myself working on the next novel while the last book is still in process.

For example, right now the Abigail Christmas novel is with the printer. We've just received the proof copy and approved it so now, while the printer actually produces the one-thousand copies we've ordered, I have to start into the promotions cycle: writing press releases, planning pre-launch and launch events, contacting sales outlets, and things like that.

That's all fun and interesting but it isn't the creative work that I so much enjoy. In simple words, "I'd rather be writing". So why can't I get myself to sit down and write?

All of that being said, I have been able to use up a couple of lunch hours at work to start, in a very minor way, a new novel. This one has nothing to do with the Abigail project but is completely new: a literary novel, if you will.

The problem is, every time I want to sit down and work on the novel, I remind myself of all the things I have to do to promote the current one. If only I had Dick Francis' publisher! (and his skill, creativity, audience...)

Rankin myself among the big names

In 2007, Orion Books published a 20th anniversary edition of Ian Rankin’s original Rebus novel, Knots & Crosses. I tell you this because I just picked up a copy at the local library book sale.

What attracted me to the book was the fact that, inside both the front and back covers, Orion included facsimiles of what appeared to be Rankin’s original notes and drafts for this life-changing novel.

As a wannabe writer myself, I am always interested in reading about how the most successful of my colleagues (yeah, right, I can include the likes of Ian Rankin, Dick Francis or Joanne Rowling as “colleagues”… that’s rich) got their start.

Rankin kindly includes a brief introduction in this edition in which he explains how this novel came into being. It’s an interesting bit of reading, as much for the information it provides about his inspiration and process as for the insights it gives into how he, 20 years later, looks back on his first Rebus novel with at least a small degree of embarrassment.

“I was a young man in love with language,” he writes of his 1987 self, “striving for a voice and sometimes overreaching.”

I read that and found myself nodding. Yeah, I know that feeling. I can’t look back at some of my earliest literary efforts without feeling a bit of a blush come over me. Did I really write that? Was I really that caught up in Joyce/Dickens/Woolf/Eliot that I would try to write just like them?

But I was also struck by Rankin’s description of the process by which Knots & Crosses came to be. “[L]ooking back,” he says in 2007, “what amazes me is that the idea of the book came so quickly and fluently, and that even those first few hand-written pages of text show few changes from the version that would see eventual publication.”

It’s at that point that the differences between Rankin and me as writers shine with such startling clarity: I struggle to find plots and have to work hard to establish layers of depth for my characters; exceptionally vivid characters flow naturally from him and evocative, effective lots seem to develop fluently for him.

Does that mean I can’t ever be successful? Of course not. Does it mean I will envy Ian Rankin and his natural brilliance? Maybe just a little bit.

Learning from Francis...

On an extended break from writing, I am attempting to catch up on reading things that inspire me, that help me as a writer.

So I've started to read the entire collection of Dick Francis all over again. I own the first 40 or so of Francis' horse-racing-based thrillers in used paperback format and find I re-read them, in order, once every four or five years.

I call them "environmentally friendly" books: they leave absolutely no residue in my brain. I can read them, then go back to them three or four years later and remember very little about any one of them.

That's not because they are awful books. It's because they are so cleanly, effortlessly written and offer such intensely paced plots that I rend to race right through them, just like one of Francis' jockeys on a championship hurdler races through a steeplechase course.

Francis' novels are all well-written, carefully plotted mysteries with sympathetic characters. I find I learn a lot about writing from his books and a lot about the many different careers/interests his characters enjoy.

I'm trying to slow myself down this time around, to be sensitive to why his books work so well. It's a useful exercise, attempting to learn from one of the best, most successful authors of our time.