What writing a novel taught me about accomplishing big goals

Exciting news. After taking redundancy in July I am about a week away from completing the first draft of my second novel.

My first attempt a decade ago remains unpublished but this one went better, why? Several reasons, that are relevant for anyone embarking on a significant creative endeavour or transformation.

Here's what I did that was the same:

• Start with a seed—in this instance a spooky short story I wrote for Halloween about three years ago—then imagined what might lead up to this and what might follow
• Tell the story only you can tell right now, notice what resonates
• Chase down ideas in Scrivener and Scapple until you have the bones then fill and iterate, embrace creative flow states alternating between distinct styles i.e. Plancing—a mixture of pantsing, just going for it without a plan, like Margaret Atwood, usually stimulated by long walks and plotting working out what happens then writing it like John Grisham

Here's what I did that was different

And it made a huge difference.

• Have a coherent purpose
• Be authentic—create as your #YOUnique #SELF
• Relinquish control, embrace fate and uncertainty, and become your story
• Develop your own way of working: create powerful processes and maps

I will explore these below.

Have a coherent purpose

The first novel I wrote had a purpose. It was an ecological satire around the need for change wrapped around an adventure story about a mouse.

This one has a similar purpose. What is different this time is it is coherent: plot characters, settings, milieu and twists all reinforce and resonate. I have also crafted the purpose into a call for action, making it timely and urgent.

I was also helped in this by being reminded of having given the same advice to another as my younger self (thanks Stu). And by my late friend J.Brian Hennessy: I committed to #AskYourSELF

Work authentically as your #YOUnique self

My first novel was a children's story and the hardest thing was straight-jacketing myself so I did not go "Full On Christopher". This was a significant mental toil and made everything much harder as I was having to suppress many things that resonate right now like:

• Satire, vulgarity and swearing
• Crazy ideas and shocking creative imagery
• Strong emotions including anger and despair, violence and psychological peril

In other words, I did not adopt my natural cadence, I did not Pedal Up. Perhaps this is why Martin Amis controversially said he would never write for children:

Now I LOVE children's' stories. And would not consider them in any way inferior—far from it—it's just the story I want—no, need, to tell right now is from the perspective of an adult. That's just where the voice in my head is right now.

In other words, as J.Brian Hennessy would say if he were still here, I stuck my hands in dirt, I climbed the fucking tree. In other words I embraced my #YOUnique.

Working in this way was therefore more natural—it just flowed. Now whether anyone reads or enjoys it isn't the point. I am more interested in what feels right.

By the same token I took the decision to self-publish, since I realised that I value 100% creative control since I work fast, intuitively and have skills in art, design, website building, music etc. I resonate with the words of the late great multi-instrumentalist Rahssan Roland Kirk:

who once said he would not play an electronic instrument as that would mean:

"...these people [from the electric company] could pull the plug out of me at any time and I wouldn't be able to express myself."

So yes in a way I was selfish, though I tried to avoid being too self-indulgent, and it paid dividends.

"Fats Waller wasn't really misbehaving; he was just misunderstood sometime."—Rahssan Roland Kirk

Relinquish control and become your story

The next good decision I made was to enter the story as a subservient partner and so was taken on a magical voyage of discovery where I:

• Embraced ambiguity (quantum factors) and change (some ideas died some survived, others morphed—like natural selection). This allowed the characters, plots and twists to fool me and dance around in my head as if I was the reader/viewer rather than the author
• Was essentially a man haunted, possessed even. A medium and a messenger perhaps but not the story-teller
• Spent literally hours laughing, crying and having #Aha moments (better than therapy) -essentially living the story along with my characters

So essentially this was a form of divine grace. I did not create the story, rather I created the story conditions and acted as a faithful servant to what was emergent. The quantum universe, the Creator and my subconscious all took care of the rest. It seems I was in good company:

“Writing a book is an adventure. To begin with it is a toy and an amusement. Then it becomes a mistress, then it becomes a master, then it becomes a tyrant. The last phase is that just as you are about to be reconciled to your servitude, you kill the monster and fling him to the public.”― Winston Churchill

Another J.Brianism. I #LetGo.

Create powerful processes and maps to assist

My first novel was completed in dribs and drabs over about five years with a couple more years of on and off editing while having a full time job and young family. Let's just say I made mistakes since writing has the habit of becoming an obsession.

Process

This time round the process was as follows:

• Start with a short story
• Spend a frustrating 6 weeks trying unsuccessfully to turn this into a novel
• An #Aha moment during a walk into town where my creative mind woke up
• An intense three week period where the story fell into place and I got about 20K words of manuscript written
• Breakthrough 1: mapped my fledgeling plot as a series of concentric circles around the hero's journey
• Breakthrough 2: let go of preconceived ideas and let my plot morph and change to my shock and delight. Goosebumps.
• Breakthrough 3: cast actors and created a soundtrack. I imagined I was an actor being each character in turn. Method acting: one of my characters uses a gun, I bought a plastic one. One of my characters was evocative of Elizabeth Siddal, I found a painting of her I liked and hung it on my wall
• Breakthrough 4: determined self-expression was my goal so self-publishing made more sense
• A less intense but productive three week period where I fixed plot holes and continuity errors and wrote filler scenes, deleted or rounded out stuff that was not working incl. characters, scenes, plot points.
• Breakthrough 4: made it interactive with a QR codes, images and a website

Models

Here are the four stages of my plot map showing the order in which they were conceived and mapped to the others:

Note: the diamonds in the rings aligning coincides actually to the finale that is another #Aha moment so I go round the loop (AKA J.Brian's #PathOfAha) one and a half times.

My mood board had pictures of characters, props, locations and themes.

My soundtrack was a curated set of music that I listened to while writing to get the power and meaning of each chapter and its unfolding in the next.

And finally my character map explored the relationships between the characters and the forces that acted between them: emotional and influential.

Conclusion

By listening to what resonates I free my mind to new levels of creative accomplishment and productivity. I create my own tools and methods and routines and rituals, often adapting things I learn to my specific needs.

So what about the story, is it any good? Will anyone else read/like it? Could I make a career of this? Will it be made into a film or will it disappear unread into the bowels of Internet Archive obscurity? Let's take these one by one:

• Is it any good? For me it has been amazing, transformational, it has changed my life. I feel renewed. So by this measure yes.
• Will any else read/like it, could I make a career out of this, will it be made into a film? It is edgy I hope, growing the edge. Van Gogh, one of my heroes, only sold one painting in his lifetime and his brother Theo was an art dealer. So who knows? I guess I will just have to embrace whatever happens either way, since it won't be me that decides. This will free up valuable time and energy to write the next one.

The profound message for me in all of this is that the universe and indeed our hearts already know the answer to our problems, it may be buried and needs time and the right conditions to emerge. This requires receptivity, humility and curiosity. So #AskYourSELF, #Let go, #Aha, #DoIt, #BeIt, #Flow. Embrace the journey rather than the destination and answer the call to adventure; and become the hero of your own story.

So yes, I did it my way:

Postscript

Book sample:

If you fancy sampling what I wrote, draft one of the first three chapters is here with more to follow. Any and all feedback positive and negative valued.

Note: adult themes incl. swearing, graphic sex, violence and psychological jeopardy though in practice these make up less than 5% of the work.

A little post on uniqueness from Sarah: