in verse

I’m going to share something that happened to me writing-wise where I decided to completely change the style of writing for a new novel that I’ve written. For a long time I’ve wanted to write a verse novel, after reading great ones by Sarah Crossan, Louisa Reid and Gráinne O'Brien to name a few. I also have always felt like my writing was close to a kind of poetry and it is hard to say that without sounding very pretentious but that’s how I feel. I try to write in a semi-stream of consciousness way and I had a feeling that I could write something in verse that made an impact on the reader.

So I wrote a novel in verse, I really liked the characters and the theme and how it ended and everything but what I found was that I kept coming back to it to add more things here and there. As I did this, I noticed that the word count was creeping up and up and I felt like I had to make a decision, keep it as a verse novel (I really liked it that way), or convert it to a prose novel.

In the end I decided to simply make a copy of it and convert it to a prose novel. I have just finished the prose novel a day before writing this blog post. It took me a long time, a lot longer than I thought, but I really loved it, re-writing it and turning it into a prose novel. I found that the covnersion process really helpful to get my voice across in a way that I really wanted it for my protagonist, which is a kind of combination of Pony Boy and Holden Caulfield I guess. It also made me aware how much respect I have for authors who write in verse because it is extremely difficult and I don’t think I have the skill set to do it yet, as much as I wanted that story to become one. I feel like I struggle to put things down in a concise, effective way that a verse novel reqiures and maybe I rattle on too much but I found that I wasn’t getting across the voice I wanted in that format for that particular character.

I am not advising anyone to write in verse, but what I am saying is that it was a very fun challenge for me to write in verse in the first place and an even bigger challenge to convert it to a prose novel. I think I’m happier with it as a prose novel and I don’t think I’ll try this process again, even though it was kind of by accident. I hope to be able to write a verse novel I’m happy with in the future as I really enjoy reading them and as a librarian I know how effective they can be to hook students who claim they can’t find anything to read.

Again, the challenge was really fun and I really hope that these characters see the light of day at some point in the futre.

real life

I wrote the first line of my debut novel, A MILLION TINY MISSILES ALL AT ONCE, when I was nineteen years old. At that time I was really struggling and I won’t go into all of that. The point of this post is to talk about the idea of inserting real life issues into your writing. I have no idea how other people write, really, but I assume there’s always some element of real life in everyone’s work.

When I started writing my novel, I didn’t know what to write about other than the actual events that happened to me as a kid. I condensed them for timeline purposes, but as I racked up over one hundred rejections for the manuscript, I began to think that no one was really interested and maybe the story wasn’t engaging. However, when the novel finally did get published with the amazing Chicken House Books folks, I also had a realisation that people are going to be reading real things that happened to me and my family. This was a little daunting but also quite a relief in a strange way.

I don’t mind that people are aware of the odd and funny and I guess strange things that happened, but it can create interesting experiences. I was at an event where a person had read the proof of my novel and they approached me and wanted to know if the things that happened in the novel were true. I said that they were, and they replied that it made them very angry that a kid would have to go through that kind of stuff.

This was all done in a very positive way but I felt the need to defend my upbringing in a strange way because in a lot of ways I had a great childhood but I feel thta due to our circumstances we were a magnet for weird things. Throw in the fact that we lived in a small town with a lot of characters, many of them out of their minds on drugs and alcohol, and you have the possibility of some very strange and funny and tragic instances, which is what the book is about in some ways.

I think the point of this post is to highlight the fact that you do not necessarily have to write down all the personal stuff that happened to you in your life, it just seemed to fit the story I was trying to tell in that moment. I had to ask myself if the things that happened to me were actually interesting, and it turns out they were, to some people at least. I also had to be prepared for the fact that other people would read and be critical of what was essentially my life. No, it’s not a memoir, it’s a fictionalised version of things, but I guess it could be close to a memoir in some ways. 

I had to be ready that it was going to be edited and even before that I was very hesitant to let anyone read it because it was so personal. I think if you are going to write about your life in a fictionalised way you still need to be open to let others read it before you send it off to agents etc because if it does get picked up, a lot more people are going to be reading it. I think that’s it, try not to be defensive about it, even though I was very defensive for a long time and I can say that it really hindered me. Hopefully that’s helpful! Take it easy. - Lucas

my blog

get off your phone (A message to Myself)

Welcome to my blog. All I’m going to do on here is write about things that I hope might be helpful to other writers. Each post will be short. I’ve been writing a long time but I’m new to being published so it’s probably better if I discuss the different ways I approach things rather than discuss the publishing business as a whole.

As of wirting this I have finished my second novel which I hope to find a home with a publisher soon. This is a book that I loved writing. I say this because although I also loved writing my first book, A Million Tiny Missiles All At Once, it was much harder to write because it was very personal. In my second book, I just decided to write about kids that get into trouble and went from there. In this post I’m going to discuss how I went about writing it and why I loved it so much.

I am not saying that all of these techniques will work for everyone, for some reasion it worked for me.

1: I got a lined journal and I wrote the synopsis over and over and over again. This might sound like I was in The Shining or something but although I did not do this for my first novel, I decided to do it because for some reason I needed to know what steps I was going to take to write this story.

For example, I wrote Boys meet behind the Kwik Way (which was a store I used to meet my friends at when I was a kid) and under that I wrote They discuss how to spend the last few days of their summer. I then put Chapter Two under that and wrote another few lines as to what these kids got up to.

My terrible handwriting as I try to work out a scene in the novel.

Again, this might not work for everyone, but it worked for me and it helped me form a synopsis that I wrote and rewrote until I was happy with it. Did the synopsis change over time/ Definitely, but having this plan helped me a great deal.

2: I went for walks without my phone. I just left my phone at home and took my dog out and walked around the neighbourhood and thought about things. This might sound pretentious or something but again, it seemed to work for me. I found a book on the sidewalk one night in the pouring rain and this book gave me a huge idea. Not the plot of the book (I didn’t read it, it was ruined) but the cover. It’s hard to explain but having this weird little accident of finding this book in the rain gave me an idea for a character’s side story that eventually became a huge part of the novel and I’m pretty sure that if I was on my phone I wouldn’t have spotted the book at all.

3: I read a lot poetry. I know that sounds lofty and pretentious but I read a ton of poetry and I find it helps me think of ideas. I just feel it opens the brain up to writing in less hacky and cliche ways. I find it hard to explain. I read Bukowski, Rumi, WB Yeats, WH Auden just to name a few. I try to read dark poems, Out, Out by Robert Frost with the line the buzzsaw snarled and rattled in the yard is genius in my opinion and a huge inspiration. So at night before bed, I’d leave my phone in another room and read these poems and just jot down ideas in a little notebook and things just kind of came along after a while.

I hope these are useful, you might be already doing them, other people may have articulated it better than me. I’m someone who tries to write in short spurts, when and where I can. This is why I try to have a notebook handy. If I overhear something cool or interesting, I jot it down. I think the overall message is get off your phone, it’s destroying your brain. This is me talking to myself, really. Take it easy.