Everyone says second novels are a nightmare to write. I'd personally agree with this wholeheartedly. My own second novel, Cold Town (Orion Books, £5.99) cost me 15 months of my life, which it proceeded to turn into a convincing approximation of hell - during this time, I repeatedly lost the will to live, and came extremely close to following one of my central characters off London Bridge. But when people moan about second novels, I always think they're not quite giving impressionable non-authors the full story. Okay, second novels can be really, spectacularly, memorably soul-destroying (to this day, I can't remember certain Cold Town rewrites without wincing). But first novels are a sod to write as well. And to be perfectly honest, third novels aren't a lot better. The sad thing is, you begin a third novel with such elation. At least, I did. Drafting out the initial synopsis, I felt uncannily like Tim Robbins in The Shawshank Redemption, when he's jumping around in the moonlight after escaping from jail. At any given moment, I couldn't quite believe that the nightmare was over, and I wasn't going to get an editorial voice on the phone saying crisply, "Sarah? How are you? Yes, I'm fine too. Look, I'm afraid we've all had another think about Cold Town, and…" So being in a position to begin a third novel at last felt, quite simply, too wonderful for words. The idea that I was finally free to work with state-of-the-art new characters, rather than just tinkering around with rusty, knackered old ones that seemed to get slower and creakier and more annoying with every passing month. It felt like upgrading from a car boot sale radio to a top-of-the-range Bang and Olufsen sound system - all the irritations I'd taken for granted would soon be at an end, this time I was working on something that I genuinely loved.
Well. That was the idea. To cut a long story short, let's just say that history repeated itself. At first I tried to kid myself I was being overly self-critical. However -- as the weeks turned to months - this reassuring inner voice became rather unconvincing. Approximately halfway through, I realised that my characters really didn't bear any similarity to persons living or dead, and were inhabiting the dumbest plot in the world. I also realised I was writing the sort of book where, if someone asked me "why does he do that on page 80?" my only possible answer would be "because if he doesn't then the ending won't make sense. Doh." So there I was, my plot had turned against me and my characters had all turned into cardboard cut-outs when my back was turned. Not having a clue what had gone wrong with the writing process this time round (apart from a rather unhelpful and generic 'it's pants') I thought it might be time to hand over to the experts. At this point, I bundled it off to my agent with the kind of apologetic, desperate little note kind people probably find tied to abandoned babies in hospital loos. The resultant editorial meeting was an essentially helpful process, and, in the course of it, several key problems were highlighted. Most notably, my heroine was completely unlikeable, her supposed-to-be-irresistible love interest was a shallow, loathsome tosser and my ending was ridiculous. Also, a lot of key motivations weren't anywhere near clear enough. All fun and games. However, having these concerns pointed out by an external source made them seem like addressable difficulties, rather than advanced dry rot running through the entire book. That afternoon, I left my agent's office with several pages of handwritten notes and a new sense of optimism.
Over the following months, I changed virtually everything, to the point where my agent would be receiving four or five rewrites for the price of one. I kept hitting the three-quarters-of-the-way-through mark and noticing something crucial I'd left out. And going back to the beginning to thread it in again. The plot began to darken, complicate and thicken, and I was delighted to feel my characters start walking around and talking on their own. Before, I'd felt like the world's oldest and most arthritic Punch and Judy man with moth-eaten puppets and an extremely sore throat. This version, I realised, was a big improvement. But the nightmare wasn't over yet. After sending the new manuscript off, I was promptly called into another editorial meeting. My heroine's love interest was, apparently, still a borderline tosser as opposed to the lovely supportive golden-hearted fellow he needed to be. I argued a passionate case for the defence, e.g. having never personally dated any lovely supportive golden-hearted fellows, I'm far from sure they actually exist, and whenever I try to write about one, it comes across with all the innate conviction of a New Yorker guest edited by Osama Bin Laden. Unfortunately, my agent wasn't buying this at all, and I ended up agreeing I'd try my best to de-toss and gold-plate the guy. Also - owing to sundry issues in my heroine's past - we agreed that she would almost certainly have sexual hang-ups in her current life. Only we came a long way from explicitly agreeing what these might be. This part of the meeting ran rather like an exchange between two extremely repressed middle-aged men who happened to be VD doctor and patient respectively -- it was comprehensively agreed that I'd make my heroine, mm, well, you know, and I volunteered a brave suggestion that I'd try and show her being a bit more, like, yeah. Consequently, I left the office deeply uncertain whether I was supposed to portray the woman as a nympho, a bondage fiend or a habitual sheep shagger, but eventually settled on giving her an, oh, sort of, you know. (It's awfully embarrassing. You have to read it for yourself really.)
In conclusion, you'll hopefully be pleased to hear that this rewrite was the last - having narrowly missed its chance to appear in Orion's autumn/winter catalogue 2001, it's out now. It's priced £9.99 if you're a normal person or £16.99 if you want to buy a hardback. It's called Remember Me. It's very good. Honest. While writing my third was nowhere near as bad as writing my second, this is a bit like saying that chopping your finger off by accident is nowhere near as bad as getting mauled to death by a sabre toothed tiger. Nonetheless, I remain undeterred - and, at time of going to press, am working on a fourth novel.
Some people never learn.
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