Writing at the beach

Well, the sun lived up to its part of the bargain so I lived up to mine. I said I’d write at the seaside if the weather was good, so earlier today Katia and I stepped out towards our micro camper van with our micro computers and our micro dog, and we headed off to do some work at the beach. After a journey of almost a mile (we’re pretty intrepid travellers) I parked on the shingle and sat on a little seat in the back of the van. The camper van has an overhead air conditioning unit that limits my headroom in this seat so I had to bend my neck and my back at weird angles. Also, the table was too small to handle two computers at the same time so Katia, sitting opposite me and with headroom to spare, worked on her lap. Pooch was happy to curl up on a cushion and dream about chasing chickens.

Outside, hardy people wrapped themselves up against the biting March wind and crunched their way along the stony beach. Noisy kids skateboarded in the adjacent park. Ferries chugged sedately through the chilly, green Solent. But inside the van we were cosy and warm, and were both feeling inspired to write. Katia was writing a film review, and I was rewriting a scene which, if it were a movie, would occur at the start of Act Two of the film.

The Matt Baker character has come through a situation from which there is no going back. That was the ‘turning point’, and he is now firmly set on his mission. In case you’re interested, the first act of a film usually takes half an hour of screen time, which is typically 7,000 words of script. The number of words taken up by my novel to reach the same turning point is about 40,000. That’s how far I am with this draft.

‘Act Two’ begins with Matt Baker’s chance encounter with some archaeology students having escaped from being in a bit of pickle (to use a phrase that he wouldn’t understand). One of the students mistakes Matt for Andy McNab, which really winds him up. In the original text I edited today Matt tries to persuade the students to help him rescue Ruby and get her out of Guatemala. I felt that this didn’t work because it seemed unlikely that he would ask strangers to do something so dangerous. It would be more convincing if the students’ enthusiasm for the idea of a rescue made them beg him to take them with him, despite his misgivings.

The best bit about this scene is that the students have a 1970s Volkswagen camper van (‘kombi’) which they have kitted out with secret compartments for smuggling Mayan relics. I’ve owned three of these Volkswagens in the past (minus the smuggling compartments), each van a historic relic in its own right. I know all the quirks and problems of trying to keep such a vehicle running. My first kombi broke down in the Dordogne: turning the ignition key failed to make any connection to the starter motor. As luck would have it, a kindly Welsh car thief happened to be taking a well-earned break on the same campsite. He helpfully by-passed the ignition lock with a nifty bit of hot-wiring. The van then started by means of touching two bare wires together behind the steering wheel (not the easiest thing to explain to a policeman when crossing international borders). Anyway, I thought this would be the perfect thing to put into the novel, so I made sure the student’s kombi suffered from the same problem, and this provides some useful plot devices later on.

Happily my current camper van, which is about half the size of a kombi, started up first time and brought us safely home. But I can’t help thinking it would be nice to have one of those old 1970s brick-shaped busses again. They make wonderful mobile offices for writers.

From taxi to tuk-tuk

I'm keen to make everything in the novel as believable as possible. I want details to be based on reality, and today I thought about the small issue of what kind of car do taxi drivers use in rural Guatemala. I've been in one myself, but it was ten years ago and I was too fascinated by the Mayan pyramids to notice what kind of car I was travelling in from Flores to Tikal. So I looked it up on the web today and discovered that Flores is now full of delightful-looking tuk-tuks: hybrid vehicles in a more traditional sense of the word, being made from the front half of a motorbike welded to a rolling bench at the rear. Inserting this detail added a little colour to the chapter by making Matt Baker’s journey to the edge of the jungle all the more uncomfortable.

With all the little edits I've been doing this week the word count has crept up to 167,000. Then there's a new scene I need to weave in near the beginning to develop a subplot about Ratty's attempt to sell a priceless carved Mayan stele before realising its true significance and trying, too late, to back out of the dodgy deal. That will add another thousand words or so. Adding to the word count is not my goal, by any means, but I have to admit that it's more satisfying when the document grows than when it shrinks. I sometimes look back at the 50,000 words I cut from the story a few years ago and wonder if I made the right decision. Why can't a novel be like a DVD of a movie, with deleted scenes and bonus features at the end? I'm sure some people would be interested to read the sequences that ended up on whatever is the writer's equivalent of a cutting room floor. A waste paper basket, I suppose.

Matt Baker has a scene in today's chapter where he meets a dying man who has read his book. Matt is a kind of Andy McNab character, a war hero turned writer, and people in the remotest parts of the world all seem to have their opinions on his work, good or bad. Those opinions crop up at the most inconvenient times for him in the story, and it's fun to have someone tell him with their final, rasping breath that his book sucks.

I’m nearly a week into my edits and I’ve worked on about 10% of the book. I need to speed up, because this redraft is meant to be a relatively straightforward matter of re-familiarising myself with the text and the story, cleaning up the book a little here and there as I go. When I’ve got the whole book freshly ‘uploaded’ into the RAM of my brain I can then tackle the more interesting and challenging aspects of the redrafting process, such as exploring each character’s true motives, deciding how much of those motives to reveal to the reader and when, finishing the subplots and ensuring they interweave seamlessly. Plus a million other things that are needed to make this book as good as I know I can make it. It’s Sunday tomorrow – no days off for me. I’ll try to finish a couple of chapters before Monday.