The Blank Page

Well, all The Other Writer’s stuff is done – the deadlines met (just) , the mss mailed or emailed depending on the publishers’ preferences and my life is my own again. And hopefully Foul Deeds and Suspicious Deaths in Grimsby and Plain Clothes and Sleuths and Heroes Villains and Victims of Leeds (second in the series after H V & V in Lincoln) are all with their respective editors and heading towards the bookshops some time later this year.

And I can concentrate on my own book instead.

So I’m back on a deadline and I’m back at the beginning of a new book. Some people love this stage, with all the wide open spaces of a new idea ahead of them and all that potential for character development and conflict creation.
My feelings at the start of a book tend to vary depending on what stage of ‘hatching’ I’m at.

Each book is different. Sometimes I know exactly how a book is going to begin, but then perhaps the middle stage is cloudy, unsure. Other times I know something that is going to happen a third of the way through but not quite how my characters are going to get there. I once wrote a book – Saturday’s Bride - knowing exactly the way that it had to end and working towards that so that I almost had to write the book backwards! With The Italian’s Forced Bride, I knew a major event that happens two thirds of the way through – and that meant that certain obvious things had to take place before I could write it. With the next release – Sicilian Husband, Blackmailed Bride – well that’s a book I was talking about in March last year. I knew the opening. I could see my hero, Guido Corsentino, walking into a village church and . . . well, no you’ll have to read the book to find out.

So where am I with this book? Well, right now I’m feeling lucky. The tiny seed that I planted and left to develop while I was rushing around helping The Other Writer has grown into a nice sturdy little seedling. For once there isn’t just a beginning or an ending – but an beginning, a past story – an conflict and a middle twist. This is rare, believe me! And I have no intention of looking gift horses in the mouth. I’ve been scribbling notes to myself and noting down lines of dialogue even when I can’t actually get to my desk. Now all I have to do is to collect them up and hope I don’t miss any. I don’t want to let any of those fragile, newborn ideas get away.
At this stage, the prospect of all those words ahead of me, coming between me and The End can be daunting., and the worst thing of all is the prospect of that totally blank page – page one. So that’s the reason why I have this funny little superstition when I finish a book. As soon as it’s done, and I’ve emailed the ms to my editor, that’s when I open a new file. I label it W I P or something equally bland and I set up the first page – I add a heading with my name, the page numbers. And I put down CHAPTER ONE. Then I write a couple of lines – something that I think sounds like a good beginning and hopefully has potential. It might be the start of something; it might not ever go anywhere. But the important thing is that I never, ever have nothing new to work on. I’ve always started a new book – even if I might come back later and erase the beginning, replace it with a new one.

This time I had the line ‘The hands of the clock didn’t seem to have moved in all the time she had been sitting here . . .’ It might stay, it might not. But I know what I was planning when I wrote it – and where I was going. 21 words down . . .54,979 to go