With six novels under my belt, I thought I had a reasonable feel for what the process of writing one looks like. Spend months taking notes and outlining. Write first draft. Conclude that first draft is terrible and needs to be completely rewritten. Write second draft. Rinse and repeat. Imagine my surprise, then, when The Reckoning, the fifth book in the Anna Scavolini series and my seventh overall, emerged more or less fully formed from the word go and underwent by far the lightest round of edits I’ve ever experienced.
What changed?
In part, I suspect it stemmed from the idiosyncratic approach I adopted, writing the initial draft in screenplay form – effectively a hybrid of my usual exhaustive outlining phase and a more conventional first draft. In just six weeks, I went from having the bare bones of the story to a draft which, while obviously not ready for publication, included every scene and line of dialogue which would, with only minor alterations, end up in the finished novel. None of the numerous “how to write a novel” books out there are crazy enough to recommend this method, but it proved a revelatory experience for me, and one I fully intend to repeat for everything I write going forward.
More importantly, though, it’s because it’s a story I felt genuinely compelled to tell, the broad beats of which were clear in my mind from the very beginning. I’ve long had a morbid fascination with the so-called “manosphere” and the various snake oil salesmen who’ve amassed sizeable online followings telling disaffected young men, starved for healthier role models, that all the problems they face are because modern society systematically discriminates against them, and that the world would be a much happier place if the reforms of the last half-century were rolled back and women once more reduced to the status of chattels and property.
I’m not going to name these individuals, for the simple reason that they don’t deserve the oxygen. But suffice it to say that, when it came to creating Professor Robert Leopold – Anna’s colleague and nemesis, idolised by “The Reckoning”, the shadowy group of militant men’s rights activists enacting their own twisted brand of vigilante “justice” on Glasgow’s female student populace – I didn’t lack for inspiration. Loathsome even compared to the various foes Anna has faced in the past, I won’t have done my job properly unless Leopold and his acolytes succeed in truly making your skin crawl.
My favourite crime novels invariably have something to say about the world we inhabit, and while The Reckoning is first and foremost intended as a gripping page-turner, I hope it also succeeds in shining a light on the real-life equivalents of The Reckoning and Leopold: the angry trolls who ply their trade online and the public-facing “thought leaders” who hide their retrograde views behind a veneer of faux respectability.
It’s long past time for them to face a reckoning of their very own.
The Reckoning by M.R. Mackenzie is published by Mad House
The Reckoning by M.R. Mackenzie – (amazon.co.uk)
