Tales of structure and plotting: St Mary’s Twickenham Creative Writing MA reading list, 2nd semester

The second semester workshops for Creative Writing: The First Novel took into matters of structure and plotting.

When you’ve found a voice and launched your characters into a story, one aspect which makes a novel publishable is how it tells the story. Dr Jonathan Gibbs was our guide for the Spring 2020 semester.

A novel isn’t just a rambling series of events, it has a beginning, middle and end. Depending on who’s telling you, it has a hook and an inciting event, acts, complications, reversals, obstacles, themes, subplots, mirroring and motifs.

You might have to weave plots from different characters so that they elegantly entwine into a climactic finish, and reveal key information at just the right points to satisfy your reader. Your novel may feature linked stories which occur in different time periods or locations, but must reach their conclusion, and key moments en route, in synchronicity.

Some of this can be taught, and some of it can be learned by example. In the end, I’ll have to get it wrong before I get it right, but that’s what first, second and all the other drafts are for.

1. Our Endless Numbered Days, by Claire Fuller. A young woman recalls her father taking her on a hiking holiday that slowly becomes a seven-year ordeal of wilderness survival and mental trauma. She returns to her mother alone, with a terrible secret that unfolds through moments in the present and flashbacks where it’s often hard to decide if she’s telling the truth to anyone, including herself.

Verdict: Our Endless Numbered Days is a dark story, but Fuller’s heroine is likeable, as are many of the supporting characters — until the moment they’re not. She vividly depicts a teenager’s difficulty reconnecting to everyday life after growing out of her childhood in the wild, there’s a vivid sense of place and moments of genuine joy and terror. The twist isn’t too hard to guess, but it’s no less disturbing if you glimpse it a few pages before the reveal.

Usefulness: An unreliable narrator, a strong voice, complex structure, family dynamics, a mystery that has to be slowly unravelled, and myriad issues, themes, motifs — there’s a lot to learn from this novel. Claire Fuller was also an engaging, funny and helpful guest speaker, full of insights into her writing process and experience of publishing.

2. Tigerman, by Nick Harkaway. By far the most enjoyable and accessible of this semester’s novels, Tigerman is both a thriller and a deconstruction of superhero myths. A battle-weary soldier, posted to a tropical island on the cusp of a man-made apocalypse, attempts to save a comics-obsessed teenage boy and find out who’s terrorising the islanders.

Verdict: I was hooked from the start of the slow-burn opening as Harkaway established his troubled paradise in a believable contemporary SF context that’s not so much near-future as just-around-the-corner. The island is vivid, the action visceral and the characters pop from the page, but when Tigerman shifts into thriller gear, it’s a relentless page-turner, by which time I was so thoroughly invested that the denouement is heart-breaking.

Usefulness: I’d love to write a novel that so effortlessly takes the action-thriller structure, and many of its tropes, and uses them to crack open the cliches without losing any of their impact. Nick Harkaway also turned out to be a fantastically entertaining and illuminating guest speaker, and the joy of writing is, I think, apparent on every page of Tigerman.

3. Happiness, by Aminatta Forna. The lives of a widowed African psychiatrist and a divorced American ecologist literally collide on Waterloo Bridge, as they attempt to find a missing child and a dignified ending for his terminally-ill ex-lover, while they both try to resolve their past pain so they can find love in the present. Oh, and there’s a fox and some parakeets. They’re important, too.

Verdict: I’d never choose to read a literary novel like Happiness, but I’m very glad I did. I was absorbed by Forna’s world and characters, intrigued by her weaving of stories, and her depiction of the widower’s journey from grief to new love was honest, unsentimental and connected directly to my own experience.

Usefulness: Happiness is heavy on theme, with intertwining plots for the protagonists and several of the supporting characters, that move backwards and forwards across 30 years between London, the USA, Africa and the Middle East. I thought it had a lot to teach about melding complex, emotional stories into a coherent narrative, so I chose Happiness as the subject end-of-semester presentation on plot and structure, and received an unexpectedly high grade.

4. The Essex Serpent, by Sarah Perry. The widow of a wealthy but controlling Victorian-era MP rediscovers her self-esteem as she dips in and out of life in an Essex village, which is being terrorised by the idea of a monstrous creature lurking in the Thames estuary. She becomes romantically involved with the village’s vicar and there are numerous subplots involving the villagers and the widow’s friends from London, all told month-by-month through the course of a single year.

Verdict: I finished The Essex Serpent because I had to (see below) and that’s true of most people in our group (though it had a couple of fans). I found the experience exactly as enjoyable as I imagine it would be to get stuck in a boggy estuary and wonder when the tide was going to put me out of my misery. Perry’s narrative flits infuriatingly from one character to the next, with little reason, and features ponderous masses of summary narration.

Usefulness: If you’ve ever read How Not To Write A Novel, you’ll wonder how The Essex Serpent was ever picked up by an agent, let alone a publisher. On a positive note: if this can win awards and land on book club reading lists, then who’s to say that my terrible novel won’t be a bestseller?

5. Apple Tree Yard, by Louise Doughty. I didn’t finish Apple Tree Yard. It wasn’t that the subject matter didn’t interest me (a bored middle-aged woman decides to have an affair; shit goes very wrong, then very wrong), because it’s a course text and you don’t have to like them as long as you can learn something. But it was obvious that this novel was also going to make me very unhappy, so I read the synopsis and gave myself a pass.

Verdict: I liked the courtroom-based prologue, and it felt like the mundane worlds of Whitehall and a loveless marriage were believable, though hardly enthralling. I disliked the protagonist very early on, and the other characters seemed to be equally charmless. But what do I know — it was turned into the kind of harrowing, joyless crime thriller that ITV viewers can’t get enough of.

Usefulness: Structurally, it seemed like a linear thriller narrative, wrapped inside a courtroom drama, which is interesting. No-one chose to base their end-of-semester presentation on Apple Tree Yard. What does that tell you?