#62 Note From Underground, Two
Today, I thought I would continue the non-fiction theme from last time, as I haven’t had brain capacity to think about any other fiction than the novel I’ve been working on. Hope you enjoy today’s newsletter.
Before we dive in, as always, there’s a musical accompaniment for each piece. Today, I share with you Matt Maltese’s As The World Caves In. I saw Matt Maltese live at Electric Brixton last Thursday, and it was pure gold. Can you believe he released this song when he was 19? He’s now 25 and about to release his fourth album. Putting the rest of us to shame.
If you’re gasping for a taste of some short fiction, chew on the steak of the archive.
#62 Notes From Underground, Two
Last time out I mentioned my trip to Porto and the painstaking editing process that I’ve been through. While I spent most of the last newsletter talking about some of the nuances I’ve tried to capture in the book, and the politics, this week I’d like to talk a bit more about writing and editing as an act.
I started this book about 18 months ago, developing the idea over the summer of 2022. Despite my best efforts to be organised and a planner, I always find that I both start and end with a clear picture of what I want the story to be, but both those two pictures are never the same. The end product is something very different than what I set out when I started. At the beginning, I wanted to write a novel set in and around Westminster, but really focusing on the character journeys of six characters, following the theory of the six basic story arcs. For those who don’t know, this is the theory that all stories can be summarised by six basic arcs (or patterns). These are:
The ‘rags to riches’ story (imagine a line graph with time on the x axis and ‘circumstances’ on the y axis, this would manifest as a linear rise from 0 to 100)
‘Tragedy’ or ‘Riches to Rags’ (this would the exact reverse of the above on a graph)
The ‘Man In A Hole’ story (on our graph, this would be a fall followed by a rise)
‘Icarus’ (A rise followed by a fall)
‘Cinderella’ (a rise, then a fall, and then a rise again)
‘Oedipus’ (A fall, a rise, and then finally, another fall)
The theory suggests that all stories follow these six arcs, or some combinations thereof. It’s pretty hard to argue with. When I was developing this story, I was obsessed with the idea of having six characters in one story, each following one of these arcs. And the setting for this, and the challenge at its core, would be about the culture of politics in Britain (though those themes are similar elsewhere).
Over time, however, what has happened has been that my ideas for what the novel should aim to do have really narrowed so that I’m now far more focused on one main character arc, and the others all sort of hang off this one. These other characters now play more of a supporting role in driving the main character on her journey, while still playing an important role in painting a picture of the difficulties in modern politics. I’ve reflected a lot on whether this is the right thing, or whether I should have stuck to my original plan and that would have ended with a more powerful, better-structured product. However, in the end, I’ve convinced myself this isn’t the case. In the end, everything that goes into the work has to be driving towards making a clear case, a clear statement about why the story matters. And at the end of the day, while the stuff about the six arcs is interesting, it ultimately has no connection to the ‘why’ question of the whole story. As in ‘why should I care as a reader?’ ‘Why should I dedicate 7-10 hours of my life reading this thing?’
In the end, what matters isn’t the structure or the theory, but the story - what happens to the people, what journey they go on, and therefore, if it’s good, what journey you go on with them.
If you read at all about the process of writing you’ll know one of the most common conclusions people come to is all the hard work happens in the editing and although I’ve written a handful of other novels before, I think this is the first time I’ve really realised that. In the past, I’ve found it very hard to let go of the ideas I had at the start of the novel, even if, somewhere at the back of my brain, I knew that I was clinging to those ideas at the cost of actually writing something good. This time around, I’ve been fairly ruthless with the editing, fully grasping the act of ‘re-writing’, of starting some bits over, of scrapping things, and really just saying: what needs to happen for this book to be better? I even went through the painstaking tedium of changing the tense of the whole thing, after I’d finished writing.
For all the musing about it, and reflecting on the process, I hope the outcome warrants the work that’s gone in!
Thanks for reading. I’d be interested to hear if others battle with these challenges and how they’ve tackled them. Next time, I promise we’ll return to some short fiction.
