words, words, words

there's more and more of them

Hello again, sequel readers. As promised last time, I finished a difficult chapter 9. It took 4 weeks altogether, but it did turn into a long one, at 3500 words. That’s as long as the longest chapters of my previous novel, Parallel Lines.

It has focussed my mind on chapter length, because it’s starting to feel a bit out of control. With PL, I had in mind an ideal chapter length of 2000 words. I deliberately made the first half-dozen chapters shorter, because I like short chapters at the start of a novel; I think it gives the reader a good sense of making progress through the book. After that I just wrote the episode I had in mind for each chapter, and got pretty good at making episodes about the right length to be described in 2000-2500 words.

This time, even the early chapters are running long. I can’t see any way around it: the choices I’ve made to have a two-thread plot, each with their own cast of characters, just takes more describing. The six-sentence synopsis I posted last time became a four-scene chapter (the first and last sentence are just aspects of the first and last scene). In PL, most chapters only had one or two scenes.

I’m reminded of the analogy of sculpting using clay compared to sculpting in marble (I can’t remember where I picked up this idea, but it’s not an original thought of mine). Writing PL was like making a sculpture out of clay: I shaped each part (chapter) in turn, and stuck it onto what was already there, always adding. Writing the sequel, so far, is more like making a sculpture out of marble: I’m chipping away, sometimes here and sometimes there, to reveal the shape I want. I suppose the crucial difference is that PL was character-driven, and I built up the relationships between the characters as time went forwards. The sequel is much more plot-driven, and in each chapter there can be several plots to advance. I’m more dependent on plotting in advance to figure out what happens, and having done that, I can write chapters and scenes out of order if I have an idea for one particular part. I wrote chapter 9 by doing first and last scene, then scene 2, then finally 3, the one about the history of the City Stadium which needed careful thought to condense something which I could have taken 3500 words just to recount if I’d gone into more detail.

(If it sounds like I’m only just learning how to write – of course I am. Sequel Country is all about what I’ve learnt.)

Below is the section of scene 9.3 where we learn about that history. It’s rough, first draft material, and I could definitely improve on it, but if I take that route, that might be interesting to compare later. However, I can also see I might need to cut it, since it doesn’t really advance either plot or character arcs; it is only about developing the theme of the psychogeography of the Ouseburn valley. Kit and Ashley are sitting in the park on a sunny day.

Ashley had sat up to look at Mr. Thompson, who looked him straight back in the eye.

‘Er, this is my mate Ashley. He’s new to these parts.’

Ashley shot to his feet, and offered his hand to shake, which Mr. Thompson did. Evidently Ashley had the manners that Kit had been brought up with, but entirely abandoned in the pubs of east Newcastle. He did stand up too, a little ashamed not to treat Mr. Thompson with the respect Ashley had.

‘Stephen Thompson,’ he said as they shook hands. ‘Lived hereabouts all me life. Born in West Walker.’

‘Great,’ Ashley said, almost as if he meant it. ‘We were wondering how this place got the name of City Stadium. Do you know if it was planned to build more than just a running track?’

‘Dead reet. Eighty thousand seater stadium got talked about, way back in the fifties. Never happened.’

Kit, doing mental arithmetic, raised his eyebrows. Wasn’t that, like, twice as big as St. James Park even today?

‘So they filled in this whole valley for something that never got built?’ Ashley asked.

‘Nay!’ Mr. Thomson gave a low, growling chuckle. ‘It go filled in by rubbish. This whole area we’re standing on is a rubbish tip.’

‘A landfill site?’ Ashley said, as he and Kit both looked down at the grass, picturing the thousands of tons of waste below their feet. ‘So close to the city centre?’

‘Aye, it’s where all the rubbish from the city went for fifty years,’ Mr. Thomson told them. ‘Back then it was just called the Tip. When I were a lad, it was still a valley. Stank to high heaven. You couldn’t see the culvert in the bottom any more, but it was deep. Poor kids used to go scranning all over the Tip to see if they could find anything that still had any value. Made them stink too. It was the bairns with no shoes. Even in the thirties there was still bairns who only had clogs.’

Kit felt sad, imagining kids so poor they never had a pair of shoes. His father would have got instantly angry at the thought, and ended up giving a shouty sermon about charity, but Kit had no fire, only the heavy rain of depression.

‘See them houses?’ Mr. Thompson pointed to the row of gable ends of terraces that ended alongside the park. ‘They were far above the bottom of the Tip. There was a steep slope down below the road. And the pong, on a hot day you could smell it over in Heaton.’

’So they put the river into a culvert just so they could use the valley as a landfill site?’ Kit said.

‘Aye. In Edwardian times, that was. It took fifty years to fill the whole place up to this level. And in the war, the culvert was used as an air raid shelter. Even then there was, I dunno, maybe a thirty foot deep layer of crap on top of the culvert roof, which is all concrete besides.’

‘Much nicer now, eh?’ Ashley said, as the all looked around the mowed grass of the park.

‘Aye. And the kids that come here after school now, they all have shoes, and some of them have proper football boots with studs in as well! Now that’s progress. Anyway, I’m off up Shields Road to get something for tea. Be seeing you.’

‘Nice to meet you!’ Ashley said politely. Kit didn’t quite know what to say, and just gave a half-hearted wave of goodbye.

A bit forced, perhaps, especially reading this out of context; “on the nose”, my writing group would say. But it’s a first pass at how local history can be condensed and woven into a story, while also revealing a little of the characters involved, important given that we are still early in the novel. The mention of clogs isn’t specific to Newcastle, but my mother, who was a child in the 30s, remembers kids who had to wear clogs and I wanted to include that too, as the kind of detail that writers of historical fiction often overlook.

I ‘ve already worked on the plot for chapter 10, so let’s see if that goes a bit more according to plan. Subscribe to find out next time!