History 
An earlier version of this article appeared in January 2001 on the Jade Pagoda online discussion group. I happened to mention on that discussion group that I wrote Kursaal in two weeks. Rather than saying “yeah, and it shows”, people said, “How is that possible?”
The truth is a little more prosaic. Writing the text took two weeks. But from my first contact with the BBC to the books publication was 18 months. I’m not sure whether two weeks is necessarily good or bad. I’m sure it would be possible to spend seventeen years writing a perfectly dreadful novel. So this article discusses how my first novel came to be published.
I realise that this
trainspotterish detail may seem rather self-possessed of me (for which read
“vain” J). But I enjoy all kinds of writing, even the couple of thousand words
in explanations or articles like this one. In addition, I was invited (a while
back) to discuss my writing methods with a UK writing group, some of whose
members have written for other franchises like Mills & Boon; so I have some
of this information in my files and can regurgitate it here for people who
might find it interesting—or maybe even useful in their own approach to writing
a first novel. It worked OK for me, so... er... take it or leave it!
Writing Kursaal
10.
The long and
the short of it
12.
Proof stage
Contact has been made
June 1996
Getting a break in publishing can be a matter
of luck. Or maybe that’s just spotting an opportunity and making the most of
it. Several of my friends had already written Doctor Who novels for
Virgin Publishing, and they were therefore in the group of writers who the BBC
first approached when BBC Worldwide took over the novels from Virgin. When I
learned this, I got the names of the two commissioning editors at BBC Worldwide
(Rona Selby and Nuala Buffini) and e-mailed them on 4 June to say I would like
to pitch them an idea.
I followed this up with a phone call with Nuala
to discuss what they were looking for. At the time, they were planning to
capitalize on the TV Movie, which had been broadcast only the previous month.
They were considering more “traditional” and perhaps even “historical” novels.
And, of course, they were interested to know whether I could write, rather than
just talk about writing. As I remember, all Nuala’s notes to me were written on
Doctor Who movie postcards.
Nuala also sent me the BBC’s Doctor Who:
Guidelines for Prospective Authors document. This was shorter, less
pedantic, and more direct than the “how to write” guidelines sent out by Virgin
for their New Adventures series. These Guidelines said, among other things:
- Books would be 75,000-80,000 words
- No unsolicited manuscripts would be considered until after 9
September
- Synopses should be no longer than 4,00 words and a sample chapter
of the same length
I wanna sell
you a story
August 1996
Over several evenings, I wrote a proposal for a novel called “Kursaal”, dated 19 August. This was 3,800 words
long—within the word-limit specified by the Guidelines, though it is
rather longer than I’d recommend now for BBC submissions—bear in mind there
were fewer proposals for the BBC to consider in the early days of the BBC
novels, as the first commissions were based on requests to specific authors.
You’ll also see that the new companion, Sam Jones, does not appear in the
proposal at all. Nuala hadn’t mentioned Sam, and I had therefore pitched an
idea for a story that (like the TV Movie) had a one-off companion.
I definitely wanted to write for the Eighth
Doctor, rather than for a “past” Doctor, but I helpfully explained in the
synopsis how it could be adapted for a variety of Doctor-plus-one-companion
combinations. Nuala confirmed that she received this on… 9 September!
Very
interesting, but…
September/October 1996
In late September, Nuala wrote back to say she
was interested in the proposal, but had three things to consider before making
a decision. The first was that she wasn’t sure that the 15-year break in the
middle worked, and would I consider revising it so that the events happened in
the same time zone but different places on the planet. The second was that she
wanted to get the opinion of her as-yet-unnamed editorial guy, to whom she was
handing over the commissioning. The third was that she’d like to see an example
of my writing. So I sent her a copy of “Moving On”, my short story in Decalog 3, as my “sample chapter” (what a swizz, eh?) and
told her I’d just received a contract from Virgin Publishing to do something
else for them.
Although I knew Nuala was handing over the
day-to-day running of the Who stuff to someone else, I still wrote back to her
in the first week of October (the day I received her letter). And I made some
suggestions about how I could address her concerns about the outline with
appropriate revisions.
Keeping up with
Sam Jones
February 1997
I heard from the new guy, a chap called Stephen
Cole, that the BBC was still interested in “Kursaal”. (Incidentally, he had
already selected a book called Alien Bodies at this stage, which was the
first of the Eighth Doctor novels that he commissioned.) He wasn’t so concerned
about the 15-year gap (it’s a time travel series, right?), but he did
have this new companion called Samantha Jones, devised by Terrance Dicks. I
would need to incorporate Sam and, unlike Amy in my proposal, she could not be
killed off.
As it happened, I think I knew a bit about Sam
Jones because there was some discussion on the rec.arts.drwho internet
newsgroup where, among others, Vampire Science authors Jon Blum and Kate
Orman were discussing how good (or otherwise) the character was.
Revising the
outline
March/April 1997
Steve Cole sent me the character outline, and I
worked on a couple of revised drafts of the proposal. I decided I could
introduce a new companion (regardless of who she was) and still feature Amy in
some way.
11 March: I
submitted draft 3, incorporating Sam Jones.
18 March:
Steve e-mailed me, saying he thought Sam fitted in well, but there were a few
other things to discuss. For example, there are two very similar shuttle
chases, and Sam’s motivation in escaping with Amy was not clear enough. Looking
back at it now, I can see how much stuff Steve must have been working on at the
time with two lines of books plus other tie-in merchandise (his e-mail to me
was at 11:29 p.m.).
19 March:
Phone call with Steve to discuss and agree the fixes. This is the point at
which I decided that Sam would take on responsibility for Amy’s death, and make
clearer the tension between her loyalty to the eco-terrorists and her loyalty
to the Doctor. Steve decided to commission the book (must have been my polished
telephone manner).
21 March:
Steve writes to me and commissions “Kursaal”, now with an upper word limit of
85,000 words, and manuscript delivery date of 31 August.
4 April: I
submitted a revised outline containing the amendments.
13 April: I fleshed out the outline into a 13,000-word scene-by-scene breakdown, and then looked
for good points at which to put chapter breaks. For each scene I provided the
location, whose point of view (POV), and what time of day. This was to help me
be consistent, and to see whether the story could be conveyed credibly and
comprehensibly. It’s one thing to say “an ecological pressure group has run a
Greenpeace-style direct action campaign against Gray Corp, and successfully
disrupted work all over the planet so that the project is running well behind”,
but how do you demonstrate that plausibly in action and characterisation? I
also find it distracting when point of view changes in a scene. In the outline,
I scribbled ideas for bits of business, snatches of dialogue, character and
location notes, etc.
At this point, of course, work and family
commitments got took priority, so I didn’t write anything else for the rest of
the month. Besides, where was that contract, eh? J So at the end of the month, I went on vacation.
A holiday from
the Doctor
May 1997
Mind you, I discovered that by being on holiday
at Center Parcs in Windsor (near to Longleat House and its Doctor Who
Exhibition, by complete coincidence) I would miss the chance to attend the BBC
Books launch party. I persuaded my wife that I could have a half-day-holiday
from my holiday, and traveled to London for one evening. How could I miss this
opportunity, they’d sent me a free ticket!
There is, of course, no such thing as a free
launch. The BBC had put it on in West London, and I went along and met some of
the other authors. This included one (I forget who, it may have been Jim
Mortimore) who asked me if I’d written “that K-9 story in Decalog 3”and
when I said “yes” he said “You really must write a novel” (I said I’d do my
best).
I’d already bumped into David Howe at the tube
station on my way in, and he asked me if I agreed with his thoughts about the
cover. I said I hadn’t seen it yet, and hadn’t even started writing the book! I
think that the launch party was also the first time that Justin Richards heard
that Option Lock had been commissioned. Attendees got some snazzy
t-shirts, a postcard book, and copies of the first four books—two Past Doctor
Adventures and the first two Eighth Doctor Adventures. This meant that,
counting Lance Parkin’s splendid Virgin
finale The Dying Days, I had three Eighth Doctor novels to read when and
if I had time.
The launch party also handed out copies of the
TV Movie postcard book, which was helpful when it came to reference material
for what Paul McGann’s Doctor looked like.
Cover version
May/June 1997
Following the launch party, I wrote to the Beeb
asking to see the cover for Kursaal, so that I could incorporate (or at
least not contradict) the illustration. I had originally conceived the Jax
wolves like the dog-headed mobsters in the Bruce Willis action film The
Fifth Element, but with longer snout, coarse hair, and no
clothes—altogether more “wolf-like”, albeit with opposable thumbs. I hadn’t
seen the film at that stage, so it was a happy coincidence that there were
photos in the Radio Times that I thought would be useful reference.
However, when I saw the “Kursaal” cover, it
featured a traditional wolf-like head. (It also features Earth’s moon, of
course, but I chose to conveniently ignore this fact.) I decided to abandon my
plans for the appearance of the Jax wolves, and go for more “traditional”
werewolf transformations. This posed a small problem: the Jax needed to have
manipulation skills, since they were obviously capable of building a palace.
From this I extrapolated to having them be humanoid at some stage in their
evolution, and from this to the theory about dominant species, and then on to
what I felt was the much better narrative twist of making the Jax a virus
(after doing a lot of research into various types and behaviours of
retroviruses).
The lazy answer, I suppose, would have been to
leave the story as it was and ignore the cover, or say it was just “symbolic”.
As it is, I think the revisions it prompted made the novel better. I’ve tried
not to think too much about quite what I’d have done if cover designers Black
Sheep had featured Lon Chaney Jr. instead.
Throughout the month, I also discussed my contract with BBC Business Affairs via mail, fax and e-mail. There were some changes I wanted made, based on what I’d seen as standard elements in the Virgin contracts that I had previously signed for Decalog 3 and Decalog 4. Ordinarily, one wouldn’t expect to quibble too much about a first novel… but I had some prior examples, and the other writers (with whom I was now corresponding via e-mail) were good for comparing notes with. I also discussed some Sam characterization with the other authors, including (for example) how she would react to finding death and the dead around her. And I exchanged e-mail with Paul Leonard, while I considered how (if at all) to use a continuity reference to the Tractites and to Time Trees from Genocide.
It
would not be until early the following month, June 2nd, that the
first two books in the new BBC Doctor Who range were officially
published: The Eight Doctors by Terrance Dicks and The Devil Goblins
from Neptune by Keith Topping and Martin Day.
The story so
far
June 1997
OK, so this is the point I’d reached
before the “two week” writing that I mentioned at the top of this article. You’ll
gather, therefore, that a lot of planning and thinking had already gone into
the novel by this stage. I have a full-time job, so a lot of the prep work was
done over evenings and at weekends when I had neither work nor family
commitments. To do the prose writing, however, I decided to dedicate a whole
working week to writing as much as I could. So I booked a week’s vacation,
during which my wife and children went to visit the grandparents and left me at
home.
Other people will have different personal
circumstances or preferences for writing (to a soundtrack, for example—I rarely
write with music playing, but that’s more because I don’t want to wake the
children up in the evening).
Unlike my later novels, I wrote Kursaal
in story order, and so I’d reached the end of scene 30 (end of Chapter 8) by
the end of this first writing period. (You can see Chapter 3
online.)
The method that worked for me was to create Chapter files in Lotus WordPro (my editor of choice) into which I’d copied-and-pasted the appropriate part of the scene breakdown (see above). Then I typed over and around that text as I drafted the chapter.
Sometimes, as I wrote, I’d go off at a tangent,
and have to throw stuff away (or come back from the tangent and throw away what
I’d written!) At other times, I’d have to devise new stuff in order for the
narrative to make sense. For example, it’s one thing to write in an outline
“Sam isn’t impressed”, but you need to see her actions, learn her feelings, or
hear her dialogue to get this. So she says things like ‘What is this, the
off-season?’ Later I can go back and add stuff like ‘I hope you booked a return
flight” which will (I hope) echo what happens in the second half of the book
when they come back to Kursaal after a 15-year gap—a different kind of
return ticket.
In six days I wrote the first 40,000 words, and
then the family came back home. We decided that this had been quite a
productive way of working, and so I booked another week off work a month later
when (a) work and family commitments allowed and (b) I could allow contingency
time for under-running, rewrites, etc.
Incidentally, I formally signed the contract to write the novel on 23 June, at which point I received the first half of my advance on royalties.
Authorial intentions
July 1997
I wrote the rest of the novel in that subsequent
seven-day holiday in July. After that, I would spend a variety of evenings and
weekend time revising the draft before submitting it in August.
I also exchanged a lot of e-mail with the other Who authors. Jon Blum had set up a mailing list and a “secret” web site, where we exchanged discussions about the regular characters, the plots of our novels, etc. Through these e-mails I made it clear, I hoped, that I wasn’t as unhappy as a few of the others were with Terrance Dicks’ character sketch for Sam Jones. I thought she was interesting because of her flaws—for example, how she behaved rather young for her age, and her instinctive rather than rational opinions, etc.
The documents that came out of this over the next year on the web site (but which were not all available at this point) were:
·
The BBC Books Guidelines with our thoughts about them
·
General thoughts about the Eighth Doctor, including: what Jon Blum
remembered Philip Segal telling him at the Visions convention; McGann’s
thoughts from the Bidding Adieu video; McGannerisms (“performance” notes
from observing the actor in various film and TV roles); his “darker” side.
·
Sam Jones: original outline and suggested revisions; backstory and
development (reams of stuff here, with no consensus); her crush on the Doctor
and how it would develop and resolve; what-would-she-do-if? scenarios; self
discipline vs. puritanism.
·
The TARDIS layout (less interesting to me, I wasn’t going to have any
Tardis scenes).
·
Continuity (high-level stuff).
·
Useful stuff that fans were saying on newsgroups (and whether we agreed
or disagreed or cared).
The active members of this discussion group were: Jon Blum, Kate Orman, me, Justin Richards, Steve Cole, Paul Cornell, Lance Parkin, Mike Collier, Paul Leonard and John Peel. We got stuff out to writers who didn’t have e-mail access (such as Mark Morris and Lawrence Miles), but only Mark responded. To give you some idea how far ahead the series was being commissioned, the writers were now discussing how Sam’s character might evolve in what was to become Jon Blum and Kate Orman’s book for the following year, Seeing I.
The long and
the short of it
August 1997
Work and home life became more important at
this stage, so for the next few weeks I did read-throughs of the draft. I also
passed it on to my read-through team (friends and novelists Justin Richards and
Craig Hinton; work colleague and fantasy writer John Barfield; wife and writer
Anne Summerfield). In the second half of August, I produced a revised second
draft using my notes and their comments (where I agreed with them).
On a couple of occasions, I think spoke with
Steve Cole’s editorial assistant Lesley Levine (no relation to Virgin
Publishing’s Rebecca), who I would talk to on the phone when Steve was either
too busy to talk or was making some feeble excuse to hide from me.
He did send all the writers an e-mail
containing a photo of “Sam” so that writers could have a consistent image of
her. This was rather less helpful to me, as I’d based her on what I’d gleaned
from earlier books plus a photo I’d clipped out of Radio Times and stuck
on the pin board above my computer (next to the Paul McGann postcards, a copy
of an encyclopedia line-art of a cathedral, and a photo of a wolf).
Other things I’d hunted out as research at this
point included: information about World Heritage Sites; structure and function
of enzymes; viruses, retroviruses, viral factors in neoplasms; the physiology
of somatic death (cheerful bed-time reading); canids (dogs, wolves, foxes);
landmarks and characteristics of the moon. I had also written my own
“cribsheet” for the Doctor and Sam’s characters, so that I could be consistent
while I wrote and rewrote their scenes.
I was aware that my submission draft was 89,000
words long—four thousand more than contracted. I asked Steve beforehand whether
he wanted me to cut it before submitting, or whether he’d be happy to see the
long version with my suggestions about where to cut it. He agreed to see the
long version for the structural (desk) edit.
I also proposed chopping a number of sections, particularly a couple of
thousand words of Chapter 1 alone—which was fun but was holding up the plot. I
negotiated a couple of extra days for the manuscript submission deadline,
printed the whole thing out twice on my incredibly slow HP inkjet printer, and
posted draft 3 to the BBC. It was 88,000 words.
Some time around this point, I also signed a
number of “Ex Libris BBC Books”
stickers, which were supposed to go into freebie copies or competition
prize copies of the printed book. I wonder if anyone ever received one of
these?
Bad language,
no buts
September 1997
All my correspondence with editor Steve Cole
was cordial and well mannered, with never a bad word between us. Unfortunately,
this was not true for some of my characters.
On 10 September, Steve e-mailed me his editorial
comments. One thing that the early BBC Books were cautious about was swearing,
and several of my characters swore—not dreadfully, but noticeably. I could
understand this caution as the BBC tried to establish the line at a time when
there was still a possibility of a second film or a TV series: it would not do
to have Daily Mail headlines using the Doctor Who
franchise as a stick with which to beat the Corporation because of a “shit”
quoted out of context. Oddly, some things sneaked through: Sam says “Gordon
Christ!” for example (a line quoted from the daughter of a work colleague),
which sets up the Doctor’s line at the cliffhanger conclusion to the same
chapter. But all the “shits” came out, as it were. I decided to make a virtue
of this by having Cockaigne, deliberately an irritating character, be more
irritating because of his penchant for the word “poo”. Steve and I also had a
somewhat surreal exchange of e-mail about Kadijk’s imperious steak order to a
hapless waiter: “Whack off its horns, wipe its arse, and stick it on a plate.”
Apparently, “arse” was not allowed. Steve suggested “bottom”. I said that this
spoiled the euphony of the line, and to his credit Steve did not retort “you
phony”, but agreed on “butt” instead.
Other things changed at this stage included:
Sam’s unexpected familiarity with specific brands of cigarettes; a Basil
Brush gag from 1975; clarification about Kadijk’s “I-card”; toning down
Sam’s wardrobe; plus some toning down of the horror sequence where Bandros is found
slaughtered. Best of all, the novel was now to start on a strong image (“pulled
teeth”), with Amy Saraband entering the underground cathedral just as the
reader enters the book. We decided that, contrary to one of my asides, Sam
would not know who Captain Beaky was, but might just recall Hissing Sid.
(All-important stuff, you see.)
At this rewrite stage, I experimented with
adding a short first-person, present-tense description of the palace attack
from the Jax point of view—a prologue to bookend the novel with the epilogue,
and featuring a bit of gore up-front. I also outlined a rewrite of all the
subsequent archaeologist reactions in reported speech (Amy explaining to
Cockaigne when she reaches the HALF HQ), or as a flashback (Amy dreaming about
the attack in the HALF HQ, just before Kadijk’s team attack her and her HALF
colleagues). However, reported speech is less dynamic and exciting than direct
action, and a flashback would hold up the plot. As for the Jax POV, this would
have been unique in the book, would have meant cutting something else to fit it
in, and was too similar to a narrative device being used in Paul Leonard’s Genocide
(which I hadn’t read at that stage).
Finally, I considered a variety of ways of
shifting around scene or chapter order so that I could have the Doctor and Sam
in the opening chapter of the book, rather than after nearly 8,500 words
(almost 10% of the way into the book). But I liked the opening sentence (Amy
entering the palace just as the reader is entering the book), and it gave me a
chance to have the Doctor and Sam enter a place where we (but not they) already
knew there was horror and danger.
I discussed the revisions with Steve via
e-mail, and delivered it in good time for the agreed submission deadline
(whereupon I received the second half of my advance). This was, effectively,
draft 4 of Kursaal. I sent it as a Rich Text Format (RTF) file exported
from WordPro, and also in a printout with all the changed lines highlighted (a
handy feature of Lotus WordPro) to make the editor’s job easier. I think I
delivered this by hand (what a creep) to Steve, who I met with some other Doctor
Who people in London one evening for a meal.
We discussed the revised draft, again via e-mail,
around 22 September, and agreed a few minor changes. Steve was amused to see
that the Captain Beaky reference was now Gordon the Gopher, and that one of my
characters was now… er… a giant gopher.
I asked if I could have a Contents page (which
I hadn’t seen in previous BBC books) and this was OK-ed. I knew I wanted to use
quotations for chapter titles, which would mean more to readers after
they’d read the chapter than beforehand—I intended to make each title either a
puzzle or to give it more than one meaning in the context of the chapter. I confirmed with Steve the plan to have the
“Epilogue” appear on the very last left-hand page, after the Acknowledgements
page, and with no entry in the Contents list—a “post credits” sequence, as it
were.
One thing I requested at this stage, but which
was vetoed, was line art. More details of that where I describe the Jax symbol elsewhere.
Steve had written the back cover blurb, and sent it to me earlier in the month for my review and suggestions.
Unfortunately, one correction we requested slipped through the net before the
covers were printed (well ahead of the rest of the book): the word “remains”
awkwardly appears twice in the second paragraph.
Proof stage
October 1997
I received the copy-editor’s notes (from a
company called MFE Editorial Services) on 3 October. This helpfully pointed out
a variety of pedantic inconsistencies which would irritate readers—confusion
between “jumpsuit” and “tunic”, use of
nested quotation marks, consistent capitalization, confusingly similar minor
character names, etc. My favourite two were (a) appropriate use of en-hyphens and
ellipses to punctuate a radio message that is breaking up and (b) a typo where
I said “pulse rate 70 below normal” instead of “70% below normal”. For the
later, the copy editor had slightly missed the point, even if he’d spotted
there was something amiss:
If heart rate measured in beats
per minute, then 70 below normal could even be a minus figure. The normal pulse
rate of an adult at rest ranges from 50 to 85 beats per minute, although the
mean rate is about 70 to 72 for men.
He also spotted possible continuity problems,
such as the Doctor’s short canine tooth. (Were we happy to commit to such a
thing at this stage, he asked? Yes, it was a continuity item from an earlier
book where the Doctor lost it and, not being human, is able to grow it back—an
addition suggested by Steve.)
The galley proofs came back later in October.
But I remember that I had only a few days to read them and make changes.
(Editorial changes, rather than simple typos, were discouraged.)
The Final
Chapter
November 1997 – January 1998
And so the book went off to the printers. I
updated the other authors on what was now in the book, for continuity purposes
(including, I think, a potted history of Sam for some of the later authors). I
also amused myself by writing a press release for the local papers, in the hope
of creating some publicity for the books in local shops. More amusingly, the
local papers printed it practically verbatim. I used to be a journalist, so I
know how grateful they are in a slack news week for anything they can use with
the minimum of effort.
My author copies arrived in December. I
resisted the temptation to give signed copies as cheapo Christmas presents. Reviews started to appear in the specialist press.
In January, Kursaal was published by BBC
Worldwide. It was 19 months since I had first approached the BBC about writing
the book.
Last revised: 10 February 2001