We’re just about into that incredibly exciting stage where things start getting printed on paper – meaning that I’ve recently received the most important pdf file of my entire existence so far, and have spent the past week going over it with a fine-toothed comb. It feels weirdly unceremonious to see my proof sitting open in a Chrome tab along with email and about 50 other tabs worth of research for my next book, as if it were just another JSTOR article that I stopped skimming last week and forgot about.
Fortunately, it is gorgeous, as you can see from the image above. I’m thoroughly impressed with my publisher’s choice in fonts, all of which are wonderfully evocative of Elizabethan-era typefaces. And then there’s the uncanny resemblance between the header font and the tattoo on my right forearm:
Yup, that’s me, in my bathroom, because let’s face it, it’s the only room in the house with good lighting. You can probably tell from my face that I’d just spent two hours getting stabbed with tiny needles.
I got myself the tattoo last year to celebrate signing my deal with Atlantic. A more superstitious person than myself might take the resemblance as some kind of omen. Lente currite noctis equi (“run slowly, horses of the night”) is a phrase that originally appeared in Ovid’s Amores, a series of quite randy love poems which my protagonist, Christopher Marlowe, translated into English as a student at Cambridge. It also, and perhaps more famously, appears in Marlowe’s own play Doctor Faustus, used by the titular character as a magical incantation in effort to halt time in its tracks. Notably, the incantation does not work – Faustus can’t escape his deadline with the Devil, who promptly shows up and drags him screaming into hell.
So, uh, not sure whether that’s a good omen or a bad one, but it is at least a lovely coincidence.
From here, the next stage is to print ARCs (advanced reader copies), which will hopefully lead to some nice endorsements from people far more interesting and successful in life than myself. After that, we’ll begin work on the final text for publication in May, at which point my book will truly have grown up and moved out of the house for good. For now, it’s thrilling to see it all dressed up in a spiffy new suit, looking very much like a “real” book, albeit in digital form.
Things are definitely heating up, so hopefully I’ll have more news to share soon!
If nothing else, I am learning a lot about my worst habits as a writer, and I suppose this knowledge ought to come in handy down the road. The first editorial phase was instructive on a global scale, subjecting characters, plot and overall themes to forensic examination. I came away from it feeling like I’d just gotten a free MFA in creative writing. The copy editing stage, however, will humble you up in a heartbeat.
What impresses me the most about this part of the process is the indefatigable patience of copy editors, who can turn over a page of prose the way a seasoned detective turns over a crime scene. Invariably, if something is out of place, they will find it. At the moment, I’m so highly attuned to the incorrect usage of hyphens that I agonized for a good several minutes over whether or not to hyphenate “highly attuned.” As you can see, I gave up.
Sighs, for that matter, are starting to give me eye-twitches. I can’t let out an audible breath without wondering whether I should just go back and delete it altogether; no exhales for me, only inhales from now on (passes out).
Well, as my extremely generous copy editor has reminded me, all writers have their tics. Even the great Cormac McCarthy, as this Electric Literature article reminds us, had a “smiling” compulsion (though naturally he sometimes managed to make gold out of it).
I suppose the copy editing stage is a little like seeing a doctor – embarrassing but necessary for your health. And in my case, I feel confident that my work is in good hands. Now to try as hard as I can to retain all of the insights I’ve received for the next big thing.
Although I still have no idea how to use hyphens. Did I promise to learn? Yes. Will I?…
I’ve just handed-in my first batch of revisions to my wonderful editor at Atlantic Books, and I suddenly find myself with nothing at all to do, book-related, for the next few weeks. This is the process, as I’ve found it: lots of short bursts of grinding work that’ll keep you either manic or paralyzed with anxiety, until, suddenly, it’s all over. Now, to wait.
The road to publication begins with so much fanfare, so much excitement, that the subsequent long periods of seeming inertia can easily drive you batty. You feel as if you’ve lost momentum, or you’ve been forgotten about, or (worse) you have forgotten to do something, and the silence closing in is all your fault. But as I sit here writing this, there’s a whole machinery at work on my book, behind the scenes: editing, cover-design, publicity, rights-management, and more. For me, it’s all peaks and valleys, but for the publisher, it’s a slow, steady ascent towards Launch Day, when the real rollercoaster begins.
After all the excitement of signing my contract at the end of last year, life became relatively quiet. So quiet, in fact, that I found myself with time enough to start working on the next book, if for no other reason than simply to keep busy. Now that we are just past one year out from publication (in spring 2024), things are finally picking up again. I’ve had two weeks to work on changes to the manuscript, which might possibly have been the most stressful two weeks of my writing life. I kept having visions of that day every writer should look forward to: opening a great big box full of fresh, gorgeously bound copies of my debut novel, only to look inside one and immediately find a sentence I loathe staring back at me, set in stone.
Fortunately, my last opportunity to fine-tune has not yet come and gone – and the last round of edits will have the watchful eye of a copyeditor involved, so the responsibility of catching all those overwrought metaphors and wonky adverbs will not fall to me alone. Lightborne remains, however, my baby, something about which my editor was very clear: the goal is to end up with a book that makes us both happy. Having both seen and heard horror-stories about inflexible editors, I know am very lucky to have one who actually trusts me. (Now, whether or not she should…)
So, for the next few weeks, I will be trying to forget about Lightborne for a little while so that my editor can do her job in peace. But once this pause ends, I’ll likely be facing down the most intense weeks of work I’ve ever spent on this book. (And I’ve spent, um, A LOT of weeks on it.) Soon, hopefully, there will be a cover to look forward to, followed by more edits, final edits, printing and distributing ARCs, convincing nice people to say nice things we can put on the cover, convincing nice people to say nice things on TikTok… And in the midst of all that there will be little ol’ me, who barely knows how to tweet and uses Instagram mainly to share pictures of my dogs, doing the WB Frog dance and looking forward to my next nap. Maybe I should just enjoy the silence.
Featured image: A sample of Lightborne’s protagonist, Christopher Marlowe’s handwriting (Wikimedia Commons)
Yesterday I made my podcast debut on Michelle Hoover’s brilliant, informative, possibly life-changing “7AM Novelist” series – a 50-day writing challenge designed to give new and experienced writers the tools they’ll need to write a solid first draft. Michelle was my instructor at Grub Street Boston, through the Novel Incubator and the Novel Generator, so I can’t recommend her podcast highly enough to anyone who dreams of writing a book.
I was on along with Louise Berliner, author of Texas Guinan: Queen of the Nightclubs, to talk about how to handle setting and time period in your early pages. As often happens when you only have half an hour to talk about a topic, I signed-off positively bursting with still more to say, so I’m doing what I suppose any one of us would do in that situation: blogging about it.
From Michael Drayton’s Poly-Olbion (detail), Folger Shakespeare Library
Our conversation started from Louise’s wonderful idea of setting as a “container,” which characters bump up against throughout the story – a site of conflict, struggle, and most importantly of all, drama. Often, writers will make the mistake of thinking of their setting as more or less static, a blank set onto which their characters are air-dropped. But whether you’re writing historical, sci-fi/ fantasy, gothic horror, or contemporary literary fiction, the “setting” in a novel should be dynamic, a hybrid of both time and place that moves and is moved by the characters.
We’ve all heard of or read books that treat setting like a character, but what exactly does that mean? How is it achieved? All novels begin with what some writers refer to as the “Unstable Ground” situation – a nomenclature which, by no accident, suggests setting. In the opening pages, we find ourselves amongst certain people on a particular day, one where something big will be set in motion. Whatever happens, it doesn’t just happen in any time or place, but on this day and no other, in this very spot and no other.
Take Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, for example, which takes place on one particular day. “Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself,” is one of the most iconic opening lines in all of literature. Over the next few pages, we learn that Mrs. Dalloway is part of a culture that is desperately trying to return to a setting that no longer exists, i.e., pre-WWI Britain. As she moves through what could easily be a perfectly ordinary day – buying flowers, sewing a dress, taking a nap, throwing a party – her story becomes entangled with the ghosts of war. Her search for the comforts of the ordinary is constantly interrupted by reminders of all that she and her country have lost, in the form of supporting characters like the shell-shocked veteran Septimus Smith, whose visions of the battlefield create a sense of constant instability in the landscape of London.
Mrs. Dalloway and Septimus Smith represent the opposing forces that come together to create dynamic settings: status quo versus change. Or, the “unstoppable force” meeting an “immoveable object,” if you prefer. Each character is embattled within themselves just as they are against the world: wanting to move on by going backwards, which is, of course, impossible. Spoiler alert: it costs Septimus his life.
Woolf’s setting for Mrs. Dalloway was her own present day. For historical fiction, setting takes on an even larger presence, firstly because it is always unfamiliar to the reader. Every author will interpret history differently, choosing to emphasize certain details over others, offering different answers to historical mysteries, or characterizing historical figures differently. Each year, about a dozen novels based on the life of Anne Boleyn come out, and yet no two feature exactly the same take on their protagonist.
Historical fiction is where the “setting as container” notion really comes into play. This is partly because, as modern writers, we are ourselves frequently in conflict with the era that we are trying to bring to life. Hilary Mantel likened this task to “chasing ghosts” – although in her words, the ghosts often chase us back. It is through these conflicts between the author and the past that we often find our way to the characters’ conflicts with their own time. In my case, Lightborne is about queer men living in an era fraught with dangers for anyone stepping outside the status quo, and so their conflict with the setting is quite literal. Many books of historical fiction feature protagonists who don’t exactly “fit” into the world around them, and thus offer ever-fertile ground for stories about outsiders.
Historical fiction and sci-fi/ fantasy books also often come with a map somewhere in the opening pages. This is partly because the settings are so unfamiliar to average readers, but it’s also a consequence of just how important the settings are to these stories. The landscape of Middle Earth or the streets of medieval London shape who the characters are and who they are becoming, while also being shaped by the characters throughout the course of the novel. The maps represent both time and place.
There is no escape from the hours and the days. Neither from tomorrow, nor from yesterday. There is no escape from yesterday because yesterday has deformed us, or been deformed by us.
Samuel Beckett, Proust and Three Dialogues with George Duthuit
I think this is a good quote to keep in mind when working on setting. Every novel begins with Unstable Ground – the time and place when the story is propelled into being by circumstances that exist even before page one. After that, the ground continues to shift – time and place “deform” the characters as they pass through it, and are “deformed” by their passage. As the ground shifts, details will emerge, pathways will be uncovered, exits will be blocked. The setting is alive – and has a big role to play.
Of course there’s still plenty more to say about setting. WAY more than I can fit here. Another post, perhaps?
But if you actually bother to go through all the myriad files within files squirreled away in the recesses of my laptop, it amounts to something more like four or five books. Four or five books, some weighing-in at over 400 pages, just to whittle it all down to ONE.
This is not as unusual as you might imagine. Depending on what kind of writer you are, what kind of book you’re writing, and what kind of support is available to you, the sum total of words you generate towards completing a novel might be thousands or hundreds of thousands more than the finished product. Sometimes you fall down rabbit-holes, and sometimes…
Sometimes you have to go a long distance out of the way in order to come back a short distance correctly.
Edward Albee
Werner Holmberg, Landscape from Leppälahti in Kuru, Unfinished, Wikimedia Commons
Throughout the process of writing Lightborne, I wrote a hefty historical fiction novel centered on William Shakespeare; tossed it out, then wrote something quite ambitious, a novel which alternated between the 16th, 17th, and 21st centuries; trashed that, then wrote another novel, alternating between just two time-periods this time – and oh yes let’s not forget the TWO MORE hist-fic novels I wrote after that, by which time Shakespeare had long since disappeared from the book (except in a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it cameo), and Christopher Marlowe was the main character. This isn’t even counting the numerous revisions that each of those earlier novels went through before being unceremoniously scrapped and scavenged for parts.
So what was it that finally got me to “done?”
Depends on how you define “done.” The thing about writing a book is that the goalposts are always moving. Even as I write this, I know my book will likely go through still more changes before it (fingers crossed) ends up on a shelf at Waterstones or Barnes & Noble, as even a publication deal is rarely the end of revising. Another quote springs to mind:
A painting is never finished. It simply stops in interesting places.
Paul Gardner
Helene Schjerfbeck, Unfinished and Defaced Self-Portrait, Wikimedia Commons
Painting and literature may seem like very different mediums, but all art shares some DNA in the process of its creation. Anyone trying to make art goes through a trial of false starts, erasures, making, and remaking. In all art there is is a discovery process, where at times you think you know where you are going only to find yourself going in circles, or occasionally, ending up in interesting places you’d no idea were there.
I often use maps as a metaphor for the writing process, because in my experience there are many roads through a novel, with many possible endings. As in real life, the most interesting places are almost never found at the end of a single, straight path, with no diversions, bushwhacking, or backtracking involved. The way through the landscape sometimes requires going all the way back to zero, and then setting out again.
I never would have gotten this far if it hadn’t been for good beta-readers, workshop partners, and instructors showing me that there was more beyond the horizon I had previously set for myself. Draft after draft, I kept arriving at interesting places only to discover even more interesting places a little further down the road. The “finished” novel, as it stands, doesn’t cover even half the territory I mapped out over all those related but different books, all those out-of-the-way journeys I had to take in order to come back to the right place by the right route. But, like a painting, my book eventually found a view to put in its frame – not the whole view, but an interesting one.
My favorite novels always feel like this: landscape paintings with more going on over the horizon, or in the distant city, or the harbor, or even in the sky. The reader will never see it all, never know it all, but the fact of it being there, just outside the frame, makes all the difference.
Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, Wikipedia
It took me nearly twenty years and at least twice as many drafts to write my first novel Lightborne, which, at the time of writing this, is finally out on submission. Point-of-fact, it isn’t really my first novel, but my twelfth or thirteenth, if you count all of the now-embarrassingly adolescent “novels” I churned out from years 14 to 23 while my peers were out doing fun things, such as, I dunno, hanging-out in malls. What I mean to say is, my journey to this point in my writing career, such as it is, brought me down a long and winding road, possibly longer and windier than average. But there’s an end in sight for me at last. Or possibly a beginning.
In those early years, I shuddered at the thought of anyone else reading my work, as much as I yearned to be a “real writer.” But the road didn’t lead me much of anywhere until I finally got myself some travelling companions. Whatever I’ve learned about novel-writing comes not from solitary hours bent over a desk, but from other people: reading other writers, and sharing my work with other writers. In many cases, these writers were people like me, who had started out writing for themselves long before it ever occurred to them to write for anyone else. Workshops, writing classes, even just having a “writer-buddy” who will support you through the tough times, and keep you on track – all of these things can make the difference between having a book in a drawer and a book that’s ready to submit.
What made the biggest difference, for me anyway, were beta-readers. Beta-readers are fellow writers who will read and critique your full manuscript in exchange for you returning the favor, and they are among my favorite people on Earth. Without the sharp feedback of other writers, I’d still be wandering around the vast wastes of aimless rewriting (Draft 46, Draft 46.2, Draft 46.3, Draft 46.3.1… You get the idea.) Before I submitted my novel to the Irish Writers Centre Novel Fair, through which I met my agent, it was a handful of beta-readers who whipped my book into shape: people who were readers of my genre (literary-historical fiction), who knew something about writing themselves, and whose opinions I trusted.
I have been a beta-reader as many times as I’ve worked with one. That too has been an education: in writing craft, of course, but also in humility, which we writers need to have in scads. When offering criticism or feedback on someone else’s novel (their BABY, for God’s sake!) it was essential for me to learn to silence that little voice that says “I could do this better.” No, I can’t. That story belongs to the author, not to me. Feedback should never be proscriptive, because it’s always based in a subjective interpretation of what the author is trying to get across. Every reader’s interpretation will be a little different. The author’s goal is to create a world that feels open to the inhabitation of outsiders – a time, place, or person that anyone can exist in comfortably for a while.
It took me ages to figure out that the problem with my novel was that it was not welcoming to outsiders. The characters I knew and loved seemed like complete strangers when other people described them to me; the plot-points that I thought ran smoothly were, to others, complicated or obscure. This was devastating to hear at first, but gradually, a new and marvelous excitement kicked in. Now, I could go back into my little world armed with the knowledge necessary to bring readers along with me. This was my opportunity to get to know my characters and my story deeper, to experiment and explore. In time, a new roadmap took shape – rough at first, as are all maps into uncharted territory. But I could see multiple paths ahead.
My experiences with beta-readers absolutely made me a better writer. And it made my book not just a better book, but my book, my vision: a world with open doors, one which nearly anybody can step into, and live.
HESSE PHILLIPS 