A work night tonight. My task now is to cut my previous draft into pieces and reassemble, filling in the blanks that emerge as I go.

The blanks can get pretty big.

The piece I’m working on right now concerns itself with a tabloid television story and one of those famous combative interviews. It’s not an easy thing to pull off in a believable way. You may scoff, but I’ve actually turned to clips of Corey Delaney (thankyou Crikey!) to get a feel for how an interview can really head South (although I can’t employ that schoolmarmish interviewer technique).

It’s the kind of thing that seems like a good idea when you throw it down in notes, but bloody hard to get the final language perfectly nuanced. Words like nuanced, for example, are complete anathema, as would be anathema.

I’m not huge on throwing newly minted text up here, the urge to immediately rip it back from the blog is too great, but I’ll think about throwing this part up, at least to get an idea of the anatomy of a scene like this: switching between a narrative of two people watching TV and the stuff that is actually airing.

I don’t like to make things easy for myself, obviously.

This novel has a lot of music running through it, virtually all of which is fictional, which means I have to write a lot of song lyrics. This is a song by the fictional Martin Orville Elliott - a thinly disguised amalgam of two of my favourite musicians. I’m hoping “spot the influence” will one of the joys of reading the novel.

See? My capacity for unreliability knows no bounds. It’s probably a good time to note that this novel will contain a narrator as unreliable I am at blogging. In some ways I don’t want to reveal too much now, it’s still early days, but try if you will to imagine the kind of medical condition that would render a narrator completely unreliable, even to himself.

I am fan of the the unreliable narrator. Most people familiar with my work will know I owe a huge debt to American author Kurt Vonnegut, I flog from his body of work frequently. It’s not a popular novel of his, but I’m still heavily influenced by Slapstick, or Lonesome No More. Wilbur Swain, the narrator of that story is very old, very strange, and dying. He is the President of United States. He also has a habit of saying “Hi ho,” all the time. He even promises at one point to cross out all the “hi ho”s id he manages to finish the book (a clue to how the book turns out as it happens). I’d like to think I could write something as good as Slapstick.

My character, for now known only as F, is not the President of the United States. In fact he’s not anyone of significance. That’s kind of his thing, being insignificant. In some ways, this novel is about families, about what happens when a family pursues a goal for one member to the exclusion of all else. F is the hapless sibling left behind while his entire world focuses on his sister, but he doesn’t mind that. He’s focused on her too. How could he not. His sister has been the family’s project all his life.

It’s starting to sound like a pitch. I’ll stop there. More details will follow when I get around to posting them.

I attempted to reply to a comment about using blog entries as a part of the text of the novel, but it got out of hand, so I figured it should be a blog entry on its own. I should insert a disclaimer here: I have no idea what I’m talking about. Enjoy!

Thanks, Raven. The possibilities are juicy, I agree. It’s the practicalities that concern me. Appreciate your comments about it though, generally reflects what I’ve been thinking about it. I’m thinking about making a complete break between the blog as presented in the text of the novel and the blog as discovered by the character in the story’s world.

Does that make sense?

It may even be an interesting aspect to the story - the character discovers something but doesn’t tell you, the reader, about it. You get to read the same text as the character at the rate I set.

Okay now I’m really confused. How is it that I can confuse myself?

I am certain this whole thing may be frustrating, so it has to be handled delicately, if there’s one thing I’ve learned about writing: no matter how cool you think an idea is, if it annoys readers, it’s dead in the water.

One second, Sherry sits on the plastic chair looking a bit bored, kicking at the doughnut bag crumpled into a ball at her feet. The next she’s stomping around the room demanding that Lionel Brownstitch face her. Cameras swarm from nowhere and Flymo wonders briefly if the producers maintain crews on standby for any kind of ruckus.

‘Get ’im out here!’

Two big blokes with production crew t-shirts surround her. ‘Miss, perhaps you should lower your voice.’

‘Why? The cameras are running. I wanna see Brownstitch out here.’

Lenses peer in at Sherry and the security guards. They record Sherry’s anger from three angles. Each two-man camera crew consists of a boofy operator and a skinny sound bloke with headphones and a boom microphone, the furry kind. They busy themselves with shooting Sherry without getting each other in the picture. It’s a well-practiced dance from what Flymo can see. Choreography for the real world.

‘I’m sorry, Miss, Mr Brownstitch is very busy today.’

‘So is everyone else in this room!’

She gets murmurs of approval and a few claps at this. Around five hundred hopefuls turned spectators surround them, mobile phones either attached to their ears or held out to shoot their own footage of the event. Even the girl in the teapot costume was filming.

‘Why do you want to see Mr Brownstitch anyway?’

She rounds on the security guard. ‘Why?’ She lifts her legs and kicks the bloke’s shin in time to her argument, ‘Because my daughter went into that room two and a half hours ago and she ain’t come back out. What’s he done with her?’

‘Miss, I’m sure –’

‘And you can stop calling me “Miss”! My name is Sherry Star Smith. My daughter is Amber Star Jones. Write it down!’

Was up late last night making lists. Lists are an extremely important part of preparation. At least they will be this time. I’ve often attempted lists, chapter summaries, timelines, all sorts of crap, only to find that when I sit down to actually write something, I forget all about them and do the whole wild tangent thing anyway.

This time is different though. Why? Because I won’t stop with the list. From the list, I’ll make chapter summaries and from the summaries I’ll make more detailed summaries before then starting to turn summary into proper narrative.

The idea is already yeilding dividends. I’ve discovered that I don’t know squat about one of my main characters. She’s a young singer with a stage mum, but I don’t know what’s driving her and why she allows herself to be manipulated. This will probably prove to be important and I’m pretty sure the chapters that feature her will dip into the past more than deal with the present. Maybe that’s her thing - she carries a lot of baggage.

Let me ponder that a while.

So, if this blog is really about the process of writing a novel, I should fill you in on what the story is so far.

This is not a brand new story I’m writing here. The idea has been bouncing around my head for a good couple of years and I have a draft in progress at about 10,000 words strong.

Only problem is, I think it’s on the wrong track.

When you’re facing a novel at over 50,000 words, it is incredibly difficult to keep the simple point of your story straight in your head. You get lost in endless mirror maze of tangents and ideas that seem really cool at the time, but end up an albatros: the “darlings” that William Faulkner urges writers to kill.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not throwing out all the work I’ve already put in. More than likely I’ll dip back into the good stuff I’ve already done as I need to, but I do want to make a fresh start free of the problems inherent in the existing text.

What’s wrong with it? I think that stuff will become apparent as I go. I’m happy with my characters, they seem pretty well formed and three-dimensional, at least the primary four or five do. The main problem I had was that my characters seemed to be making an awfully big deal over very little. The events and their consequences seemed a bit…flimsy.

That may sound like a big deal, but it’s not really. Story problems are easy to fix - just place your characters in more interesting situations. Characters that suck is a much more difficulty problem and one that affeects just about every existing word on the page. This is what happened with my last novel and I’ll be damned if I’m going make the same mistake twice.

Famous last words if I ever heard them.