The Dark One
Auror
I've written about this a few times as part of an incidental response to the posts of others, but I've had a request to explain it again so it seemed like a good idea to start a thread called the AHA! moment - the moment (if it's ever happened for you) when you realised you had an absolute killer idea for a story. One that couldn't fail.
For me it was really the culmination of a lot of things - mainly the dramatic improvement in my writing and storytelling ability which had occurred between writing my first two books. They had both generated a fair bit of interest from publishers and agents, but no-one had been quite convinced to take them on. The second story, in particular, went agonisingly close a couple of times. A commissioning editor at a mid-sized publishing house loved it and tried to get it up but (as he admitted) I wasn't already famous so they didn't want to take a risk on me. (He even admitted the company had started approaching celebrities to ask them to write something...anything...just to cash in on their names. Leaving less and less room for the undiscovered. But he encouraged me to continue and to make sure I sent him my next thing.
As you can imagine, I was pretty depressed after that. It seemed like there was no way out of the slush pile for the non-famous. The best way for me to attract the interest of publishers was to become a serial killer...or axe murder the prime minister!
I even gave up on writing for a little while, but when I restarted it wasn't a novel. I decided to have a go at writing a screenplay - much quicker to write, so less need to pour so many thousands of hours into an ultimately fruitless exercise. (As you can see, cynical, but still cursed with THE URGE to write.
I rattled off three screenplays and a stage play over the next two or three years and it taught me a lot. I knew that I already had strong original ideas and could tell an original story. Screenplay writing added the discipline of scene crafting, very strong dialogue (there is no wasted dialogue in my work these days) and a sense of the mechanics of storytelling that had never really occurred to me previously. One of my screenplays was even optioned by a producer, but has not yet been made despite numerous meetings with a keen (and quite famous in Australia) director. I gather there's nothing more common than an unmade optioned film.
What I realised by now was that I was actually quite skilled at writing/storytelling - I just needed to tell the right story. The story that was so strong it couldn't be ignored. And here was the AHA! moment: it finally occurred to me...what if I write a story actually targeted at a particular audience?
Believe it or not, that had never happened before. My writing had always happened in a fairly idiosyncratic and personal vacuum, which I really loved, but not enough other people did - even though some professionals could sense its quality. My stories were just too obscure and demanded too much of the reader. My simpler and more commercial approach, learned writing screenplays, was now turned to writing a novel.
I knew also that I already had the story too. For some years, I'd been idly jotting down bits and pieces for a comic tale about a 39 year old park level goalkeeper in Australia who decides to chase an impossible dream in England. He winds up having all sorts of amazing adventures with vicious hooligans, international terrorists and winds up playing for a non-league side in London who are a legitimate business front for the Irish mafia. The team go on a bit of a run in the FA Cup and all the various threads come together in a pretty amazing climax.
I'd never really taken the ideas that seriously, because I was a serious writer, but I suddenly realised that this was a seriously good idea and the football public would probably really like it.
The story was so strong it wrote itself, and when I sent it to the fellow who had championed my cause in the past he told me he was just doing non-fiction at that time, but I should send it to X at Y publishing house. So I sent an exploratory email to X and was gobsmacked when 20 minutes later the phone rang. It was X and he was really interested in seeing my ms. That was a Monday morning, and by Friday afternoon he had read it and told me he definitely wanted to publish it.
It took another 18 months and numerous editing phases but in April 2010 I was doing a reading at a launch for the first time and in a rosy-blurred daze of joy. While signing numerous copies that night, someone asked me: was it hard to get published? And I thought, no, it was bloody easy. If you have the right product, it's easy to get published. If you don't, it's impossible.
Of course, getting the right product is hard...unless you're an axe-wielding celebrity.
Does anyone else have an AHA! moment worth sharing?
For me it was really the culmination of a lot of things - mainly the dramatic improvement in my writing and storytelling ability which had occurred between writing my first two books. They had both generated a fair bit of interest from publishers and agents, but no-one had been quite convinced to take them on. The second story, in particular, went agonisingly close a couple of times. A commissioning editor at a mid-sized publishing house loved it and tried to get it up but (as he admitted) I wasn't already famous so they didn't want to take a risk on me. (He even admitted the company had started approaching celebrities to ask them to write something...anything...just to cash in on their names. Leaving less and less room for the undiscovered. But he encouraged me to continue and to make sure I sent him my next thing.
As you can imagine, I was pretty depressed after that. It seemed like there was no way out of the slush pile for the non-famous. The best way for me to attract the interest of publishers was to become a serial killer...or axe murder the prime minister!
I even gave up on writing for a little while, but when I restarted it wasn't a novel. I decided to have a go at writing a screenplay - much quicker to write, so less need to pour so many thousands of hours into an ultimately fruitless exercise. (As you can see, cynical, but still cursed with THE URGE to write.
I rattled off three screenplays and a stage play over the next two or three years and it taught me a lot. I knew that I already had strong original ideas and could tell an original story. Screenplay writing added the discipline of scene crafting, very strong dialogue (there is no wasted dialogue in my work these days) and a sense of the mechanics of storytelling that had never really occurred to me previously. One of my screenplays was even optioned by a producer, but has not yet been made despite numerous meetings with a keen (and quite famous in Australia) director. I gather there's nothing more common than an unmade optioned film.
What I realised by now was that I was actually quite skilled at writing/storytelling - I just needed to tell the right story. The story that was so strong it couldn't be ignored. And here was the AHA! moment: it finally occurred to me...what if I write a story actually targeted at a particular audience?
Believe it or not, that had never happened before. My writing had always happened in a fairly idiosyncratic and personal vacuum, which I really loved, but not enough other people did - even though some professionals could sense its quality. My stories were just too obscure and demanded too much of the reader. My simpler and more commercial approach, learned writing screenplays, was now turned to writing a novel.
I knew also that I already had the story too. For some years, I'd been idly jotting down bits and pieces for a comic tale about a 39 year old park level goalkeeper in Australia who decides to chase an impossible dream in England. He winds up having all sorts of amazing adventures with vicious hooligans, international terrorists and winds up playing for a non-league side in London who are a legitimate business front for the Irish mafia. The team go on a bit of a run in the FA Cup and all the various threads come together in a pretty amazing climax.
I'd never really taken the ideas that seriously, because I was a serious writer, but I suddenly realised that this was a seriously good idea and the football public would probably really like it.
The story was so strong it wrote itself, and when I sent it to the fellow who had championed my cause in the past he told me he was just doing non-fiction at that time, but I should send it to X at Y publishing house. So I sent an exploratory email to X and was gobsmacked when 20 minutes later the phone rang. It was X and he was really interested in seeing my ms. That was a Monday morning, and by Friday afternoon he had read it and told me he definitely wanted to publish it.
It took another 18 months and numerous editing phases but in April 2010 I was doing a reading at a launch for the first time and in a rosy-blurred daze of joy. While signing numerous copies that night, someone asked me: was it hard to get published? And I thought, no, it was bloody easy. If you have the right product, it's easy to get published. If you don't, it's impossible.
Of course, getting the right product is hard...unless you're an axe-wielding celebrity.
Does anyone else have an AHA! moment worth sharing?
Maester
Minstrel
