A blog about writing a novel

This is the start of a blog that I’m hoping will be done and dusted in five or six months. It is a blog about writing a novel, in which I will entrust you with my thoughts, my hopes and my doubts regarding the book-under-construction. I will present these thoughts to you as clearly and plainly as I can in the belief that this will be of interest to you, and of help to me.

I will describe what the novel is, and how its conception came about in a moment. I want to begin by committing myself to a species of honesty and candour that I know will be difficult to sustain.

This is not, repeat, NOT an exercise in self-advertisement. It’s not something a publicist has suggested to me, or a publishing house recommended in the hope of drumming up readers for the novel-to-come. It is a genuine attempt—and I really don’t yet know whether it will work—to get under the skin of the process of building a novel from the ground up, allowing you (assuming you’re interested) glimpses into the choices I make as I go along. If I don’t tell the truth about the difficulties I face and the problems I’m trying to solve, there isn’t really much point in doing this at all. So: the truth, warts and all.

WHO AM I AND WHAT’S WITH THIS NOVEL?

So who am I? I’m married. I have two children who are both well on their way to establishing themselves in the fields of film and computing, respectively. I have two step-children, aged 12 and 14 each entering in upon their tumultuous teen years. I am, and have been for the span of my professional life, a writer—first as a newspaper journalist and sub-editor, then as a documentary film writer, and finally as a writer of television or film comedies and dramas. My daily bread is the product of my work predominantly of the writing of soaps, of which South Africa has an embarrassment of examples. The soap for which I write—and generate stories—is called Rhythm City. It is set in the world of the music industry. Our chief characters are either record producers of one kind or another, or actual or aspiring performers.

Josie and I run this website. It started off as a site devoted to lovers of romantic fiction. We’d hoped originally to provide readers with a broad range of interesting material to read on line, and to entice them thereby either to buy some of the fiction we have on offer, or to sign up with us for one or other (or one and another) on-line writing course. (There’ll all here. Check out the strapline.) Our ideas have evolved over time, and we have come to believe that there is a distinct and interested market for a website that is more wholly devoted to writing skills.  So we’re going to be allowing the free (and paid-for) romantic (and erotic) fiction to play a less demanding role, and for the writing skills element of the site to take centre stage.

This blog fits into that new conception of the site. Read it for itself. All responses, positive or negative, are welcome. Perhaps you’ll be led from the contemplation of the blog into a desire to write a novel of your own. In which case… Well, I’ll leave the sales talk to those pages of this site devoted to our courses. 

Let me talk about the novel that will be taking shape on this site over the next months.

The idea for it came to me while I was preparing with my fellow facilitator for one of our 12-evening Writers’ Circle Courses. These take place once a week in Johannesburg, and we have, over the years,  attracted a wide variety of wannabe writers interested in producing either novels or works of creative non-fiction. Now, Josie (my partner in this venture) has published four excellent novels, the last of which hit the shelves just a couple of months ago.

It is a really superb book (of course I’m biased, but I speak truth here!), and it will be followed, I have no doubt, by many others. But I, who teach others the skills they need to write novels, have not published one of my own (let shame be upon my head!) I have written one, called Partial Eclipse of the Sun but have not yet had it published. To be even more honest with you, I haven’t really tried to have it published! (I have, however, written hundreds of episodes of soap—for three different series—dozens of television dramas and a handful of screenplays.)

It really would improve my credibility, however, if I could point, modestly of course, to a novel or two of mine on my shelves.

Hence,  this novel. Which at the time of writing doesn’t yet have a title, although I suppose an appropriate working title could well be Soap Star. Or Soap Suds,