Week 20

So…Gooseberry launches next week. It’s the culmination of six months of extremely hard work, and yet I’ve given (re-)birth to another character and another novel. So what have I learned along the way?

I’ve learned that I do have other voices in me. When I started this project, I wasn’t sure that I did. I’d only written two novels before this, and both had the same protagonist. I’m really proud of Gooseberry’s voice and the way that I’ve fleshed out his character. He’s an opportunistic, bright fourteen-year-old with a truly sunny disposition and a predilection for helping others.

I’ve learned that I can write quicker than I thought I could. Nothing focuses your mind and prevents you from fussing over tracts of text like a looming deadline. At some points I was writing a thousand words a day—unheard of prior to this. My personal best was 1,700 words. Other days I struggled to make even two hundred words, usually when my subconscious was trying to tell me that I’d “missed a trick” in terms of plot development.

I’ve learned that I really do need to sort out the back story and a general plot outline before I write a single word. Not doing that came back to bite me with a vengeance!

So…would I ever write a novel in this manner again? Yes, but it is a rather risky way to write. Despite my best intentions, I found that two of the chapters were almost unreadable when I came to re-edit Gooseberry for its publication as a completed novel. So, while serialization might suit a project that it already risky in some fashion (writing in a different genre, for example, or in the third person rather than the first that I normally favor), I don’t think I’d subject any of my existing protagonists to it again. It really could have gone horribly wrong. I’m glad for Gooseberry’s sake that it didn’t.

Till next week,
Michael

Michael Gallagher’s Gooseberry launches on Friday November 21st, 2014. Pre-order it today at Amazon and Smashwords.

Michael Gallagher is the author of The Bridge of Dead Things and The Scarab Heart, as well as the popular non-fiction title Why the Victorians Saw Ghosts.

Photograph: Street Floods in Lambeth by John Thomson, used courtesy of the London School of Economics’ Digital Library under a CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 licence.