What I Wish I’d Known is a regular series where we ask some of our favourite people in the book industry to reflect on their careers. In this instalment, authors share some of the unexpected and useful things they’ve learned along the way about writing novels.
Top row, left to right: Bruce Pascoe, Hossein Asgari, Yumna Kassab, Amanda Lohrey and Scott McCulloch. Bottom row, left to right: Michael Brissenden, Francesca de Tores, Avi Duckor-Jones and Melissa Goode.
Hossein Asgari – Only Sound Remains
Firstly, I wish I’d known that writing a novel is like a relationship, but one that you would eventually have to give up on: you pour your heart into it, you get disillusioned, you give up. This way, you can adjust your expectations about what you can achieve within the world of your story and accept your own and your characters’ limitations.
Secondly, with a slight risk of being reductive, I wish I’d known that character is the most important element of a story and every other element is secondary to it. A well-built, intriguing character would always have a story worthy of telling. Develop the character, and the story will follow.
Michael Brissenden – Smoke
There are so many things I wish I’d known about this writing game before I started, but, like everything, you learn along the way and hopefully, you get better at it the longer you do it. Sounds trite, but writing a novel is a lot of work. You actually have to sit down and write. One. Word. After. Another. Until you get to the end. And then you’ve only really just begun.
A first draft is just that. Edit, edit and more editing. Show don’t tell—a lifetime in journalism, I now realise, has left me with a tendency to try to overexplain. I need to constantly bash that out of my writing and give readers room to fill in the gaps. On the other hand, I think in the early days I took the writing advice of Elmore Leonard (one of my favourites) far too literally. Often writers put in too much of what he calls ‘hooptedoodle’: unnecessary description of characters and places. I have found sometimes it’s a good idea not to mistake a little bit of poetry for hooptedoodle. And finally, it’s important to accept that wherever you end up there will always be a wide range of opinions about your work.
Avi Duckor-Jones – Max
Writers are, first and foremost, readers. We all have books we love and stacks of books we wish we had written ourselves. What I wish I knew about writing novels is that there is often a frustrating divergence between the books we admire and our own work. A writer’s voice is the greatest tool we have, so it doesn’t work to try and emulate a style you admire when that simply isn’t you. I wish I knew that leaning into my authentic, honest voice would be the thing that would get me closest to creating the work I wanted to make in the first place.
Melissa Goode – Ordinary Human Love
For so long, we writers are taught ‘show don’t tell’ and this holds true but only takes you so far. For the reader to understand your characters, to feel invested and to engage in their plight, you must tell the reader what your character is thinking. Not all the time. But at various (and many) points in the novel. In this way, the reader can understand the character’s motivations and triggers, so even if they don’t particularly like your character (and who sets out to write a likeable character?) the reader will go on the journey until the glorious end. I learned this in the editing process of my first novel, Ordinary Human Love, and I’m applying this learning to the two novels I have been writing.
I had thought that action and dialogue delivered much of the character’s interiority, but it turns out I was wrong. So do tell. Even if you know exactly what your character is thinking, it doesn’t mean the reader does. And it shouldn’t be a painstaking, tension-killing explanation (which is what I think terrifies most writers)—just a line or two, a moment, and you’ve captured it.
Yumna Kassab – Politica
Most publishers are terrified of any novel that plays with form or style or language. The typical novel wanted by a typical publisher is evenly chaptered, has around 300–400 pages, introduces a character-driven story, has a typical complication that is then typically resolved. End of story.
Anything other than the above is quickly rejected because the typical publisher is unsure how anything but the typical novel is to be sold. There are exceptions to the typical publisher. Find them and stay close to them because they are gold.
Amanda Lohrey – The Conversion
I don’t wish I’d known anything in advance. When I started writing I’d read a lot of fiction and already had a sense that every novel is different—unless you’re following a formula in a genre like crime. You have to figure out each new work for yourself, which is why writers who have written one good book can also produce bad or mediocre books. Just because you manage to write one good one doesn’t mean you’ll be able to write another using different material and/or a different form. To quote myself from another publication, much of the time writers are working blind. They’re like cat burglars trying to crack a safe, twisting the dial first this way and then that and waiting to hear the click. Then when they’ve busted the safe, they can’t remember the combination they happened upon.
In a very real sense, each new work is a first novel, given that each book presents a different set of challenges. What you learn as you go on is to persevere, which is the best advice I could have given myself and that I now give beginning writers should they ask. Early drafts may be poor, but if you keep at it, they will improve—they always do. You have to be dogged and hold your nerve. If you begin a work, you’re embarking on it for a reason. Keep going to find out what that reason is, and never compare yourself to any other writer. You can discuss plot, character, pacing and so on, but all of this is academic because each new project will dictate its own terms.
If you get really stuck then don’t be afraid to abandon a project and work on something else, at least for a while. I can’t think of a book I’ve published that I haven’t at some point sincerely abandoned. Being prepared to eventually let go can free up your thoughts. This is one of the paradoxes inherent in the writing process. I’ve been giving up writing for the past forty years, but each time I am drawn back to it. Being a writer is not about talent, it’s about being driven to explore meaning by putting words on a page in a way that resolves into an aesthetically satisfying form. You may not be successful, you may not ever get published, but if you can’t give it up, then you’re a writer.
Scott McCulloch – Basin
…more languages, and more about language / how to better archive, store and organise papers and scraps / how to ride on sand better so that an old motorbike doesn’t flip and land on your chest and break three ribs and smell of petrol in an off-season seaside writing cabin for a month / how to take apart and solder electronics to fix dictaphones or pieces of basic interview and field recording equipment, rather than return to a city to find an electrician on the street or in a bazaar and lose a day and a night of writing / how to work a little faster, especially when detailing a subject that is disintegrating before us / how to know the moment the inner clockwork of the narrative is set, and then the writing has to become a habitual undertaking, to not waste words or time, so that when you’re in the throes and mystery of creation, the material produced is strange even to yourself…
Bruce Pascoe – Imperial Harvest
I wish I’d known how hard it is to burn a body. I burnt my first two novels in my incinerator at Glenroy in an age when you were still allowed to burn things in your backyard which were not the body parts of animals. The corpuses burned imperfectly, and for weeks afterwards charred remnants of overwritten prose would appear in front of me as I was planting lettuces or explaining toilet habits to the dog. Hickory, the English shorthaired pointer, was beautiful, but the fine sculpting of his head didn’t leave sufficient room for memory or regret and in regard to those novels I envied Hickory for his ability to remain unaffected by mistakes.
Francesca de Tores – Saltblood
I wish I’d known not to wear my favourite clothes for my author photo. You can never again wear them to any book festival, launch or event without looking like a weirdo who only owns one outfit.
More seriously: I’d always been dismissive about deliberately planning novels using archetypal plot structures. To my (slightly snooty) mind, that approach seemed too formulaic, too close to paint-by-numbers. Then an academic who was teaching one of my novels showed me that it divides perfectly into a three-act structure, each section demarcated by a crossing over water. It was a humbling lesson in how these narrative structures are hardwired into us. I still don’t plan my novels along these lines, but I’m more open to thinking about how and why these ancient story forms satisfy something in us, to the extent that they can even manifest unconsciously. Predictably, the contrarian in me now wants to subvert this—to play with and interrogate these forms. In Saltblood, my first historical novel, it was fascinating to see how even Mary Read’s extraordinary life slips neatly into the three-act structure (sailor; soldier; pirate), but I’m most captivated by the points where Mary’s story, unruly, refuses to conform.
