April's First Friday Thread: A Sneak Peek at My Very New Novel-in-Progress
This novel is so new it barely has a working title, but I thought you might like to take a look behind the scenes at how I start to draft a brand new book.
For April’s First Friday Thread for all of my wonderful paid subscribers I thought why not dive right into a brand new book I’ve only just started working on (for publication in 2024 or 2025) so you can see how things change and take shape over the writing and redrafting process.
Getting the Wow Factor Into My Writing
I usually sign two-book contracts with my publishers. And my current contract ends with The Disappearance of Astrid Bricard, coming October 2023 to Australia and early 2024 for North America. So now I have to send my publishers about six chapters of my next book and hope they like them enough to give me a new contract! Which means these have to be the most well-written chapters I can possibly write – I need to wow them into wanting this book.
But in February’s Bijoux List, I mentioned that I was suffering from a bit of burn-out at the end of last year.
It’s hard to wow anyone when you’re feeling burnt out. So I needed to do something to recharge my creativity, to make sure I wasn’t getting stuck in a rut – something to stretch myself as a writer. I went back to the basics – writing exercises.
From Writing Exercise to Scenes
I’ve said before that I love George Saunders’ Story Club Substack. And he occasionally posts up these weird little exercises that you look at and think – no way am I going to get anything useful out of that. But that’s the whole point – and the fun – of writing exercises.
There is absolutely nothing at stake. You expect them not to work out. You’re not invested in them the same way you are in a manuscript. So they’re actually very liberating. You can write the craziest possible sentence and there are no consequences. Nobody is going to strike out that bizarre sentence with a red pen and say, I don’t understand this.
So, I chose the craziest of all the exercises Saunders has on his Substack.