Diary of a Novel
The following diary entries were jotted over the course of the writing of The Rules of Cool. Hopefully these notes will give you insight into the writer’s process and a sense of where the thousands of ideas that go into a novel spring from.
September 2007, late afternoon
Today’s work has been an insane soup of free-flow surfing and narrative and research, overlapping with music and video. It’s all a big brain explosion. I kind of like it. Habbo and flickr and last.fm and a PBS TV show on Coolhunting and this electric stew of influences all coming at me, exploding out of the screen and driving me on into the real world.
So, here’s what I’ve taken from today’s research ... A feel, a bunch of ideas for the digital side of Mac Slater, Coolhunter. But, also, by letting these ideas flow I’ve also got the drive for the main story and the character objectives.
I’ve decided that these guys have to fly.
4 October 2007
I’m sitting in my car by the beach googling grease traps. I think there might be a scene with an exploding grease trap in the book. I kicked off the day working on my other book that I’m writing with another author, Tempany Deckert, who lives in L.A. She writes a chapter then I write a chapter. It goes like that.
Then, at about ten o’clock, I drove down to the beach and spent some time at a place called the Arts Factory. It’s a really cool backpacker lodge that has a long history of alternative lifestyling. Mac’s bus that he lives in is based on the old bus there and I wanted to spend some time absorbing the characters. I noticed, on the side of the double-decker bus, was this quote: ‘Cool is what other people think. Free is what you feel.’ I might use that in the book.
So, anyway, I set up the laptop in the Arts Factory cafe and tapped away for a couple of hours. It made me feel like I was travelling. Then I went on to a cafe and wrote for an hour or two before walking along the beach. Some of the chapters in the book are set at Main Beach so it’s great to be surrounded by the world of your book. It was a perfect day, tons of people holidaying and hanging out. I have a very, very good job, I’ve decided.
I’ve written about 1500 words today. I aim for 2000 but about 1500 usually come out.
Life is sweet. I’m a little sunburnt. I’m liking the book but always nervous that the writing isn’t as exciting or engaging as it could be. But that’ll all happen in the re-writing. That’s what they say – ‘Writing is re-writing’.
8 October 2007
Sitting at my desk. I’ve written maybe 1500 words today. I have ninety minutes left.
Here’s how I write. I write on the move. I listen to rock music – U2’s Vertigo, Silverchair’s Straight Lines, The Verve’s Bitter Sweet Symphony, Matchbox Twenty and I’d like to get some Green Day. I listen to this stuff because it feels like the rhythm of my story. I want it to have an immediacy and drive. Words tend to tumble out when I have a song that drives me forward.
Cups of green tea in my Buzz Lightyear mug. Kit Kats, bagels, fruit toast sometimes. A Ganesh figure on my desk (a Hindu god, the mover of obstacles). I have images on the wall that feel like my story, too. I do web searches for images based on what I’m writing. I print the best of them and hang them on my wall for inspiration – hippie kids, inventors, lightning bolts, flying bikes. A lot of the ideas in the books spring from images stuck all around my writing space.
I watch movies, too – Talladega Nights, Swimming With Sharks, American Dreamz. They feed me.
I have a favourite writing book – a Moleskine diary, the kind of notepad that Picasso and Ernest Hemingway (amazing writer, check out A Moveable Feast, set in Paris) used to use for their notes. Not that I compare myself to them but that kind of heritage makes you feel inspired when you write.
I’m trying to do three sessions a day – 8 till 10, 11 till 12:30 and 2 till 4 with a half-hour lunch break. In the breaks I might throw a ball for my dog, get other things done, drive to the beach or a cafe, sleep, research on the web, talk with builders and painters about the work being done on 
my house, work on where I see the world of the book spilling into other mediums, like interactive. I play golf every week at the moment. I like to play other sports when I get time. They take me away from the writing and they stimulate other ideas.
Books That Move. That’s what I want to write. Books that Inspire and Move. You don’t want to put them down but it’s not all just gratuitous action.
That’s all for today. Best get back to Chapter Twenty.
12 October 2007
The toughest thing about writing is fending off all the distractions and getting down to it. There are always a million things more pressing unless you’re right on a delivery deadline but that’s too late to create something great. I’ve been trying to get to my Mac Slater draft since 8 this morning and it’s now 3 in the afternoon and I have an hour to write. I’ve been writing a press release for a film organisation and responding to emails and writing an entry on another book that I’m writing with a co-writer.
Anyway if you’re out there and saying to people ‘I have so many ideas’ but you never make the time to write, then the ideas are worthless. Getting down to it and making time to write each day, whether it be fifteen minutes or eight hours, is the key. Then the story starts flowing through you and everything you do outside of writing feeds the process. Showing up at the keyboard and writing until inspiration comes is much more important than waiting for random sparks of inspiration before you commit a word to paper or the screen.
Daily writing practice. Blurking it out. anything that comes, until the right words start to flow. You can always cut and edit later. But, as they say in the movie industry, ‘if it ain’t on the page, it ain’t on the stage’.
30 October 2007
Just finished reading the first draft of Mac Slater 1. Pretty amazing having this 37500-word story that I’ve written. So much about it that I like but I see a lot that needs to be done!
6 November 2007
I’m working on the second draft of Mac Slater 1. I’ve graphed the first draft. The spikes on the graph are when Mac is close to his goals of getting his bike in the air, winning the trial and making his dad proud, and the valleys on the graph are when he is a long way from his goal.
Drawing the story visually in this way helps to clarify the shape of the story in my head. I don’t plot the points on the graph in a mathematical, analytical way. I just tear off a long sheet from a roll of paper and just graph the shape of the story in a very gut, visceral way, letting the story flow out of me. I then go through and identify the main turning points of the story and the parts that aren’t working well. I think about those points and write lots of notes all around the graphical image of the story.
It’s not at all pretty and only I could understand what I’m writing but the story starts to re-shape itself and I find out things about the characters and the shape of their journeys –where each character starts and ends their journey. It’s important to me that each character has to grow. Not just the lead character.
At this stage you’re also trying to iron out the less believable elements of the story and fill in any gaps in your research. On this book I had to learn about coolhunting, paragliding, flyking (paragliding on a trike), lightning farms and also spend a lot of time hanging out in the area that I live as the town of Kings Bay is based on this region.
Somehow, even without meaning it, the book starts to explore the stuff going on in your own life. You’ll find that this occurs in your own stories, if you start writing. In some way, everything in the book relates to your life. Even though I don’t paraglide regularly (microlighting and hang-gliding are the closest I’ve been but I’m planning a para-gliding adventure) and I’m not a coolhunter and my dad isn’t a lightning farmer, somehow the events and the themes tend to be based on stuff that I think about a lot. It all comes back to the author, somehow. I like that. Story is very mysterious and the only way to learn about it is to tell a lot of stories. You might think that you suck but slowly you start to find your own rhythm and the words start to flow and you find better ways to construct stories.
If someone ever tells you that you have to be ‘born’ with a gift for telling stories, don’t listen to them. Most people who can write or tell a story don’t know they can or believe they can until they’ve already ‘made it’ and, even then, many still doubt their talents. You can never tell if you’re meant to be a writer. It’s just something you do and learn about and keep doing and turning stuff out and slowly you find your groove, and that’s how storytellers are made. Read a lot, write a lot. Listen and watch. Do it all again.
Better run. Got to write up some research questions on my final stunt in the book. I’m trying to make it spectacular but believable. Edge-of-the-seat but actually possible in real life.
Monday 12 November, 8:16am
I’m sitting down to write for another week. To re-write. While you’re writing a first draft you always trick yourself that this is the hard bit and, once the skeleton of the story is there, that it will be easy. But then when you’re re-writing you trick yourself that you wish you were writing the first draft because it all seemed so easy then.
On a longer book like this (longer than I have written before) you have that time to re-think things and to second-guess and challenge yourself. This is both good and bad. Hopefully it results in a better book but it also makes you wonder whether what you have written makes sense and whether it’s as good as you need it to be.
But I’ll push onward in the dark and, I hope, by this time next week, I’ll have finished this re-write and have something that might just need a couple of big back-cracks and then it will be readable by other humans. I just read a quote from a famous writer, John Steinbeck (The Grapes of Wrath) who said something like: writers try to explain things which can’t be explained. And if the writer is smart enough to realise that it can’t be done, then they’re not a writer at all.
Does that make sense? It’s the writer’s job to struggle in the dark and occasionally stumble across things. Somehow this gives me juice and hope for the week ahead.
Here goes ...
22 November 2007
I’m determined to do something new with this series, to innovate and push the boundaries of storytelling, to expand the experience of the book. It’s all I think about now. This story and how I can find new ways to tell the story and to make it live in other realms than just on printed paper.
I’ve been reading about Amazon’s new Kindle, allowing books to be read digitally on a screen that’s made to feel like a book. But it allows you to do so much more than a book. I want to be at the forefront of people offering new reading experiences. I want to meld video and reading and user interaction like it’s never been done before. I want the book to be just the beginning of the adventure.
I feel there’s so much that can be done and I’m excited about the future of books.
Anyway, better get back to the story.
23 November 2007
I had an amazing chat to a filmmaker friend yesterday, someone totally going their own way and not conforming to what’s expected. A true innovator. There are only a handful of those people out there who think deeply about what they really want and why they do what they do. And then they actually do it. Most of us seem to just accept what’s advertised to us or go with the flow and never really think about why.
Mac is a kid who asks why and who comes from a background of people who live consciously. Some of the other characters in the book, not so much.
Why does Mac want to get a bike in the air? He’s not saving the world but it means something to him. It means escape from the every day. It gives him a fresh view of the world. It challenges him to push beyond his own fears and to focus his energies. It is his way of expressing himself. And, whether it’s cool or not, whether it fits with anyone else, that’s what he has to do. He has to create and innovate, to build things with his own hands and to fly.
Flying is a great metaphor for the freedom you have when you’re living the life you need to live, when you’re not worried about what anyone else thinks and you’re totally comfortable in your own skin. That doesn’t mean you don’t make an effort or that you don’t care deeply about other people. You just don’t make all your choices to make other people comfortable with what you’re doing. You do what you need to do.
Someone told me the other day that the way to find your deepest passion is to ask yourself these four questions:
1. What would you do if you knew you were going to die in five years’ time?
2. What would you do if you had $10 million?
3. What would you do if you knew you were fully supported?
4. What would you do if you knew you couldn’t fail?
The suggestion is that it’s fear that usually holds us back and why aren’t you going and doing all of these things right now even without the big bucks? What would you do?
14 December 2007
Mac Slater 1 (currently looking like being titled The Rules of Cool) has been read by Zoe, my publisher at Random House. And she liked it. Well, she told me she liked it. Maybe she was just being nice. See, these are the things that go through a writer’s head. You always have this sneaking suspicion that what you’re writing is no good so you kind of have to gauge it on other people’s opinions.
Anyway, it’s off to the editor. The editor reads the whole book and makes suggestions on things that could be tightened, made clearer, expanded, cut out and so on. Lots of stuff that, in my experience, makes the story much stronger. So the ed could make thousands of notes or just a few. I kind of hope she makes thousands, in some sick way. Reading an editor’s notes is always hard because it’s like a gigantic list of all the things you did wrong. But, if you can take criticism, realise it’ll only make the story stronger, and dive into re-writing, you’re often really happy at the other end.
13 May 2008
There you have it. The book is now done and off to the printers. The editing process was relatively pain-free. No major adjustments to the shape of the book but lots of tightening of character motivations and expanding of characters and humour injected. This editing process is where you really learn a lot from someone who reads and analyses stories day in, day out, for their entire lives.
I’m now re-writing the second book in the Mac Slater, Coolhunter series. It’s set in New York, my favourite city, a place I think about a lot. Again, it’s been an adventure and a struggle and I’m sure that I’ll share the diary entries once the book is released in 2009.
Hope this has been interesting and / or inspiring. Now it’s time to get out there and write your own stories.