Not happy with getting a non-fiction publishing deal, I felt the need to revisit the first novel, Dirty Sparkle, over the bank holiday weekend.
When I first started writing I had never heard of ‘show not tell’ or the concept of indenting paragraphs. Dirty Sparkle was and is still a story about the leftover Hacienda generation of Manchester, the people whose lives have moved on but part of their hearts still live in the past.
The first draft was almost a continuous paragraph, a stream of consciousness that had spilled almost unexpectedly onto the page. I sent off the first three chapters to an agent who requested the full manuscript. Unfortunately this came at a time when I was just finishing a qualification and I had family problems, so wasn’t as prompt as I should have been and the opportunity escaped. But someone reminded me that if it’s good then there will always be another chance.
About a year ago I decided to submit Dirty Sparkle again. Once again I got some attention from agents but no one offered to represent me. I also previewed some of the chapters on YouWriteOn and Authonomy, where it received mostly good reviews. In fact it got into the top 20 novels. One kind reader informed me that my writing was the ‘standout piece on the site’ which made me realise that, in fact, someone did ‘get it’ ater all. However, one reader wrote that there was no sparkle, that the main characters were troubled and it wasn’t uplifting. This resonated with me as another reader had reviewed my later novel, Life: Immaterial, saying that they were emotionally detached from the main character. The question I asked myself was: didn’t people realise that the title was ironic?
It was with dread and fear that I realised I had not made my main characters sympathetic (or, more to the point, commercial). I was and am faced with a choice to either leave them as they are, immersed in their own troubled lives until the story resolves this for them, or to ‘nice them up’. I chose the former. My characters are not meant to be instantly likable. They are people (mostly women) who, apart from the normal aspects of female life, have an extra burden such as alcoholism or working in the sex industry. Of course they are ‘nice people’ but unfortunately for them, when we first encounter them, they are tied up in a problematic situation. They are emotionally detached from themselves, and this is the whole point of their existence and the stories they generate, so there is little hope that, at this stage, the reader will be emotionally attached to them! In all of my novels there is a progression from the initial problem to a resolution, but I have to say that they don’t ‘all live happily ever after’.
Maybe it’s because I’m a psychologist, or maybe just because I recognise that the starting point for a good yearn is a crisis? Perhaps I like introverts with a drink problem or sullen dominatrix? Or that I can’t suspend my reality enough to write about ‘happy happy joy joy’ people all finding the end of the rainbow. I just couldn’t turn Charlotte or Juliet or Jinny into women who are only superficially troubled – it’s all or nothing for them. They do end up a little bit happier but not in the way you would expect.
So, this weekend when I revisited Dirty Sparkle, I tidied up the dialogue and the POV and killed a few darlings. What I didn’t do was make Charlotte and Louise skip through the meadows laughing or Sean live. In Finding Isaak and Life: Immaterial I may ease up on the violence and perhaps cut out the blind piano tuner and the baby kidnap. But I just think that rather than boring, my characters are more subtle examples of identity in action. Which was the original point of my writing the novels, so it seems I have succeeded!
Whether or not anyone in the publishing industry will buy them or not unless I inject a huge dose of artificial sunlight, I don’t know – I guess that’s another post for another day!