© 2006-2010 John C. Beresford

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Breaking News!

Novel submissions have started! Full bulletin below.

The Author's Story

The earliest memory I have of entertaining the notion I could one day be "a writer" was winning second prize in a writing competition sponsored by the National Westminster Bank.  This must have been around 1969/70 and the prize was £10.  Serious money for a thirteen-year-old back then.  I spent it on books, naturally enough!  The theme of the competition was "Ambition" and my story (whose original idea was adapted from an American comic I'd read the year before: Astounding Stories or Amazing Tales or some such, but whose narrative and text were wholly mine) told of how a sleeping guardian awoke to realise his ambition of defending the Earth against invasion from outer space.  The guardian's identity, only revealed in the last sentence, turned out to be the Sphinx.

The next thirty years, give or take a year, passed in a blur of career, marriages, house buying, DIY, babies and all the other serial events that are not writing (see other pages for details).  In 1999 two things happened that rekindled my interest in this long-suppressed ambition: while tidying up I unearthed some original fiction I'd written at school, along with a five-year diary that included several entries on writing; and I met a real-life writer - Colleen Patrick.

CP (as I later found out she preferred to be called, but too late to stop me from always calling her Colleen in my head) and I first met up in an Internet chat room totally unconnected with writing (we're both Coronation Street fans, and this was a fans' room).  A few months later I had the opportunity to visit Seattle on business and we agreed to meet up.  Ever the sensible one (!) CP arranged to meet me in a very public place and had worked out an itinerary that combined showing me some of the more interesting, off-the-tourist-track parts of Seattle while at the same time staying in relatively crowded, visible places.  All you Internet buddies take note: nine years later and we're the best of friends, but back then either of us could have been "anybody" so this was entirely the right way to go about things.

Anyway, we took a ferry trip to Bainbridge Island for a cup of iced tea.  We talked about all sorts of stuff - mutual friends on the channel and IRL; jobs past and present; childhood - the usual things people who don't know each other very well talk about when they want to get to know each other.  Finally on the ferry back I admitted I'd had a lifelong dream of becoming a writer.  My memory of the moment CP shared her first and most profound piece of wisdom with me is still crystal clear.

"If you want to be a writer, all you have to do is ... write."

Sounds so simple doesn't it?  And it is.  I don't think I'm giving away any trade secrets if I tell you that CP advised me to start small.  Five minutes a day.  To make that commitment to myself absolutely.  Five minutes a day, every day.  No matter what.  The idea being, of course, that you eventually get "into it" so much that five minutes is not enough.  Not nearly enough.  Your writing time expands, you hone your descriptive skills, you write.  You are a writer.

It took me a while to get started.  Being me, I had to approach it sideways rather than head-on.  I bought books.  I read around the subject.  I studied form, the structure of a novel, how to write a synopsis, how to develop an idea, storyboarding.  The whole lot.  Finally, frustrated with the lack of progress, I sat down and started fleshing out an idea for a thriller that I had been nurturing in the back of my mind.

It wasn't what I'd expected to write.  As a youth I'd read almost exclusively science fiction and horror.  In my twenties I moved on to science fantasy.  This wasn't a complete departure for me - it still had science fiction at its core - but it was more thriller than pure SF.  It took me about a year to finish the synopsis, the character lists, and to have the plot broken down into sections and chapters.  At long last I started writing the first draft of the narrative.  It was June 2001.

I could say I had about a year at it, but that wouldn't be strictly true because even then, the distractions were crowding in.  Amongst other things, my divorce was getting to its vinegar strokes; in August 2001, 15 months after leaving home (15 months!) I saw my daughters again for the first time and started the long halting process of rebuilding our relationships; in February 2002 I signed the contract to buy a new house, and in June 2002 we moved in, so for all of that year it was never "write, write, write."  After we'd moved in things were even more hectic - curtains, furniture collection, garden - the potential excuses were limitless and I used them all.  The book was stalled around 20,000 words and my attention was elsewhere.  I hadn't lost the plot: it was still in my writing folder, but it wasn't going anywhere; literally or figuratively.

It was Train of Reckoning that was to eventually lead me back to my novel.  CP observed during one of our hand-overs of the script that writing with a partner, the way we organised it, was really productive because she could get on with her other writing projects while I was writing my next section of ToR.  "Hey!" I thought, "no fair!"  Well, I didn't really think that, cos it's a Yankee expression, but you get the idea.  In the gaps between my sections of ToR, I went back to my novel with a renewed sense of purpose.  Progress was abetted by the long train journeys I had started taking regularly in connection with 'work'.

ToR was completed in May 2005 and I kept up the momentum for another four months before drifting back into the Sargasso Sea of writing lethargy.  When I woke up one morning to find it was Christmas already and three more months had slipped by with no progress, I resolved to pick up again in the New Year.  This time the resolve lasted until February when other projects (including this site!) started creeping in again and stealing time.  In an effort to embarrass myself into making inroads into the remaining six chapters I set up a word-and-date counter at the top of this page and invited visitors to berate me if it hadn't moved for more than a month!

Meanwhile a strange thing started happening at work.  After having a brief conversation about all things writing over morning coffee one day, I found people I'd worked with for years coming up to me and saying "I hear you're a writer, I'd like to do it too...where do I start" and asking me for coaching!  There's a lot of it about.  People writing in their spare time, I mean.  'Course I told them as much as I could, but I couldn't help feeling like a bit of a fraud.  I know people say you're a writer if you write, but I've always tended to the belief that you can only call yourself a writer after you've been published.  Or maybe after you've actually finished something.  Now there's an incentive to get on with this novel!

Read the prologue of Love On A Wire.  (this is a working title only)

First Draft Complete

If my assertion above is correct, and that you need to have finished something before calling yourself a writer, then as of 7am on Wednesday 16 August 2006 I am a writer!  After six years of hard slog, doldrums, dry periods, highs, lows, disillusionment, frustration, encouragement, new purpose and hours of research, my first draft is finally complete.

Since I took William Forrester's advice (from Finding Forrester) and wrote the first draft "from my heart" I now have a lot of work to do to engage my head: redrafting many times to draw out the essence of the story and pare away the unnecessary parts, the parts that don't take the story forward, and to make sure the characters and the plot are consistent.  But hey!  No matter how long it takes, I have a novel.  I did it.

17 March 2007 - Second Draft Complete

A little over six months on, second draft is now complete and that includes filling in all the plot gaps and bits of research that I'd skipped over the first time round, with the result that the word count has risen to be even closer to my 100,000 word target.  Reading the final six chapters after an absence of six months has given me a lot more confidence in the story (and my rendition of it), so I now feel that one more run through - a final polish if you like - and I'll be ready to start sending it to some publishers.  Feeling very excited about it now.

7 March 2008 - Third Draft Complete

Almost a year after I finished the first rewrite (aka second draft) and I'm amazed how much time has gone by with no progess, AGAIN. Lots of progress on the house and the fake work, but that's hardly the point.  On the bright side though, that 12 months' hiatus has given me a fresh perspective and actually I'm even more excited about the work than I was before.  I'd abandoned this third draft at chapter 7 and having polished those remaining 13 chapters over the last two weeks I'm convinced that with one more read through from start to finish I really will be good to go.

17 April 2008 - Fourth Draft Complete

Wow.  I don't know what happened, but this time round it's only taken barely more than a month to rattle through the entire thing.  One of the reasons is that I crafted a Word macro to highlight poor style - use of passive voice; compound sentences; contractions; etc - and this made it much easier to revise.  Now I'm happy that the work is good enough for others to read, I'm sending it to a few trusted friends for comment and critique.  After that I'll process, adopt or discard their comments, make any changes necessary and then it'll be time to hunt down one of those elusive publishers.

1 September 2008 - Agency Submissions

With almost all the comments in from my beloved beta-readers and the manuscript polished to a dull but satisfying gleam, it's time to send it out into the big wide world.  I've already spent two weeks researching agents and a further week ranking them against my personal criteria, plus a weekend condensing my original "synopsis" (which was really a string of scene sheets) into one that's fit to share, so I've run out of reasons to procrastinate.  The progress box at top left will record my progress through my list of agents, and there'll be another bulletin down here as soon as there's anything significant to report.