My journey on Blood River: what I learned from writing my first novel

About a month ago I finished my first novel (it’s taken me a long time to read a book etc). It’s been a mere 18 months since I began writing Blood River as my Nanowrimo challenge for 2017.

It’s the story of a six volunteers and five staff, working on a conservation project in the jungles of Borneo, for whom things go very awry. It’s loosely based on a delightful trip to Borneo, where no-one tried to kill anyone else. Not even a little bit.

The first draft (at least, the first draft of the very absolutely definitively final plan from April 2019) is currently resting before I read the complete work for the first time in August. If I’m not entirely appalled by it, I’ll recruit a handful of beta readers to give me their opinions, and try to schedule a second draft by the end of the year (although YMMV because I start an MA in Creative Writing in September).

Blood River was my second Nanowrimo and it’s my first full-length novel, so hopefully I’ve learned a few things about writing fiction. Here’s my top five:

1 You don’t have to write a lot, to write a lot. That first 50,000 Nanowrimo is daunting enough, but a 100,000-word novel feels like an epic task, and I’ve spent my working life writing a couple of thousand words a day. But maths is on your side — 2,000 words a day will become 100,000 words in 10 weeks, and you still get to have weekends to recharge.

Naturally, I had off-days when I wrote very little or I hated what I’d done, but I also had purple days when I smashed out 5,000 words until hunger or thirst forced me to take a break. Sometimes you have big reversals. My Nano challenge for 2018 was to complete Blood River — I wrote more than 25,000 words and in January this year I junked almost all of it.

2 Planning pays off. Part of this comes down to planning — at least for me. Some people are ‘pantsers’ like Stephen King, who prefer to stick their characters in a difficult situation and let it take its course. King is damning about plotters, but he’s been writing since he was a child and I think he has an instinctive understanding of plot and structure that most beginning writers haven’t developed.

I don’t plot each scene in detail — I have an outline of the whole story so that I know where I want to get to, and how to get there, with a couple of lines to describe each scene, but I agree with King that too much detail kills spontaneity. The details of each scene only emerge as I write it — the pace, the characters’ behaviour, the descriptions and the speech. I know what I want them to do, or to have done to them, but I frequently don’t know how it happens until I’m writing it.

3 No plan survives fresh writing. Of course, once I started letting those characters do their own things, and choreographing the events that befell them, the outcome of the scene sometimes changed. Some of the days when I didn’t write that much were spent evaluating where the story had gone: did it need a minor course correction, a scene added here and deleted there; or did the outline need a more significant change?

This can seem like a chore, but it allows me the joy of spontaneous creativity, which is why I write. An outline isn’t alive in the same way as the words that arrive the page as I write a scene, often rising from my unconscious mind to surprise me as much as they would if I was reading someone else’s work.

4 Understanding your characters makes them easier to write. You’ll avoid major story re-alignments if you understand your characters and their relationships as well as possible before you start your first chapter.

There are plenty of writers’ hacks that can help with this (try Jeff Vandermeer’s fantastic Wonderbook): biographies that detail their driving passions, hopes and fears; mind maps of character relationships; short descriptions of how they will behave in stock situations; styles of speech; ticks and mannerisms. Important characters should have detailed biographies, and if you spend time on this at the start, you’ll have an invaluable reference later on.

Real people and other fictional characters are also a great source of inspiration. It sounds like cheating, but they’re in your head already so it will happen whether or not you want to do it. You might as well make it a conscious choice.

5 Your story might take time to emerge. Blood River began as a whimsical idea for a 50,000-word Nanowrimo challenge, cooked up when I realised how many everyday things could be lethal in the jungle. It wasn’t until I finished that first short draft that I began to conceive of a larger story and introduced a supernatural element.

When I began, I didn’t know which of my nine narrators was the protagonist or why the antagonist did such terrible things. When I’d finished the first 55,000 words I was better-placed to make those choices and chose my main characters. I even kept a couple of red herrings that will hopefully stop readers guessing where the story will go.

I’m not sure I’d take the same route to finding my central characters — it’s taken a long time — but I’m not sure I would have to do it again. Hopefully I now understand some of the fundamentals much better than I did before.