For most of my writing life, I’ve had a tiny audience – often consisting of only one person.

First at school then at university, my work was only read by a teacher or tutor. During those years, I also wrote countless pieces that were only ever read by myself.

The size of your audience influences the work you produce. When I was writing my academic essays, I would think to myself: “What does the one person who will read this think of my work? What does he normally like to read? What impresses her?”

Years later, I’m still writing, but now I’m increasingly tempted to try and find ways of increasing my audience. In the publishing world, the focus is often (understandably) on the size of your audience. This is mainly because the size of your readership often has a direct relationship with commercial success: the more people buy your work, the more money you make.

When I started blogging in 2006, I took advantage of the many online tools for measuring your readership. Like many bloggers, I became obsessed with my visitor statistics, thinking that to be a successful blogger I needed to get lots of readers. I wanted to use this blog as a way of promoting my storytelling, so I was keen for as many people as possible to download my story, ‘A Cadence‘.

But during this process, something unexpected happened. Four people, all good friends of mine, responded to my work in an extremely creative way by getting together and illustrating my story. Years after I wrote it, I was suddenly very excited by my story again. More than that, the illustrations inspired me to start work again on the other three stories in my collection – and on new projects. When I wrote ‘A Christmas Argument‘, I was thinking more of my illustrator friends than of any potential wider audience. On 1 December 2008, I invited my friends round, Gemma cooked us a delicious lunch, I read out the story and then we illustrated it. I really enjoyed the day, and I think the others did too.

This has given me a new understanding of my audience. One approach to writing is to aim, constantly, for more readers. The goal is for your writing to spread as far as possible, reaching people you’ll most likely never meet or even hear from. The alternative is developing a relationship with your audience, nurturing what you have instead of constantly trying to reach more people. As Seth Godin puts it, “The internet lets you take really good care of 100 people instead of harassing 2,000.”

So really, the point of this post is to say: thank you for reading. I’m saying this to you, the people who are already here. Thank you taking an interest, and I promise that there’s another story coming very soon. Would you like to help me illustrate it?

Philip Pullman tells a nice story about how he invented dæmons for use in His Dark Materials:

“… it just emerged as I was trying to begin the story. I suddenly realised that Lyra had a dæmon, and it all grew out of that.”
(‘The Man Behind the Magic: An Interview with Philip Pullman‘)

I like Pullman’s implication that he isn’t really the author of this story – that the details were something for him to realise rather than invent.

But this is also a story of beginning again. Pullman tried to begin the story without dæmons and it didn’t work, so he began again – this time, with the dæmon present: “Lyra and her dæmon moved through the darkening Hall.” It’s a compelling opening, and many would argue that dæmons are the most successful element of Pullman’s work. It seems important that dæmons were born when Pullman started again.

I tried a more self-conscious version of beginning again when rewriting ‘A Fantasy’, the followup to ‘A Cadence‘.

The original story started with a knight, Sir Drake, who fell in love with a princess. In my head, the story was all about this knight and whether or not his fantasies came true.

When I’d finished the drafts of all the stories in this collection, I realised that ‘A Fantasy’ was by far the weakest. It needed a lot of work. At first I thought this would be a case of a few tweaks, but after hiding from the story for about a year, I eventually decided that the whole thing needed to be rewritten.

Remembering Pullman’s story of regenesis, I tried to talk myself into a similar mindset. I asked myself what other elements were in the story that I was not seeing. Who else was there? In the end I “realised” that what I’d missed was the emphasis. In the first version of the story, the princess was objectified – she was something for Sir Drake to dream about obtaining. I wondered how the story would change if I made the princess an equal protagonist. What if it wasn’t just about Sir Drake’s fantasies, but about hers as well? What if the rich and healthy princess was just as scared of her very ordinary destiny?

Instantly, the story started to shift, and I can now see how ‘A Fantasy’ fits into the collection. In ‘A Cadence‘, the princes go on adventures while the ordinary people work on the land and think about what’s going on. The rich and famous people are clearly the protagonists, and the ordinary people are mere extras. What ‘A Fantasy’ now enables me to do is begin the transition from stories about extraordinary people (with mermaids and dragons) to tales about very ordinary people.

When we talk about storytelling, we put a lot of emphasis on beginnings. I agree that beginning is a great challenge and a real achievement. But perhaps even harder – and even more important – is the process of beginning again.

My wife and I share a conflict of opinion about Doctor Who.

She doesn’t like it, because in every episode the monsters nearly kill the humans but they get away in the end.

I like it, because in spite of that it tells me a believable story about a lonely man.

Which of us is right? Perhaps both (they’re just opinions, after all). But reading The Writer’s Tale recently, I was interested to see the show’s current head writer, Russell T Davies, describe precisely this conflict.

He explains how, as a new episode begins to take shape, two stories converge and start to fight for space. One of the stories is about the monsters, while the other is about the people:

“I’m glad to have started, though worried by what’s to come. I had a fair bit of Cybermen-in-Victoriana worked out, but this two Doctors story, the real story, is so strong that it’s sort of knocking out everything else.”

I’ve stuck with the show because, in spite of the hackneyed formula of the key characters nearly dying in every episode, the overarching examination of human nature continues to engage me. Davies’ comment above, about 2008’s Christmas Special, plays out this conflict between formulaic monster plots and emotionally engaging human storylines.

I’m intrigued by his notion that the second storyline, about the relationship between two people, is “the real story” – as though the other story, about the Cybermen (the monsters) is just a means to an end.

When I was putting together the page about my story, ‘A Cadence‘, I toyed with various ways of describing the tale.

One obvious way would be to describe its elements – it’s a story about two princes and a mermaid. This conveys something of what the story contains.

Another way is to outline its themes – in this version, it’s a “not-so-fairy tale about stupidity, beauty, grief and revenge.”

Which is better? Perhaps neither. But I might verbalise this as Davies does his own stories. I might say: “It seems to be about fabulous creatures like mermaids, but really it’s about human qualities like stupidity and vanity.”

But in the end, I realise that the storyteller’s tools are part of the story he’s telling. I can’t deny that Doctor Who is, on some level, about formulaic monster chases. You can’t pluck out the essence of a story without in some way destroying that story. The story is the whole thing – the monsters and the emotions.

You say “goodbye,” and I say “hello”. We oppose each other, and therefore – just like a famous equation – we are equal. We stare into each other’s eyes, we reflect each other, each containing the other’s difference.

You say “goodbye,” and I say “hello”: we complete each other’s sentences, figuratively and literally. We are the same verb, and only we know the adverb. Our hostility is a difficult poem, beautiful despite evading most readers. I understand – I know what it means – and I only wish I could reveal that meaning to you, who, whenever I say “hello”, have just said, “goodbye.”

That the Internet offers potentially every individual with a computer the opportunity to self-publish is at once something wonderful and terrible.  As a grammar pedant, it pains me to see people develop online authority as writers despite not knowing the difference between “it’s” and “its”.  In traditional publishing, points of style, grammar, spelling and the like would fall under the jurisdiction of an editor or proofreader.  With online publishing, there is potentially no filter between the author and the ‘submit’ button – with just one click, a piece is live for the world to see, mis-placed apostrophes and all.  (And pedantry aside, I would add that it’s not just apostrophes.  There really is some dreadful, barely comprehensible writing out there on the blogosphere.)  On the other hand, I am also conscious that the Internet is giving me, as a reader, the chance to discover writers I would almost certainly never encounter offline.  Blogging, in particular, gives writers a direct link with their readers: no longer is the communication mediated by a third party, who might impose his or her assumptions and prejudices on the transaction.  At the same time, social bookmarking services and story submission websites such as Digg and Newsvine enable users to customise the reading process so that stories are generated and prioritised according to their preferences rather than, again, the assumptions of an editor.  In a nutshell, then, that’s the beauty and the curse of blogging.

I have never aspired to be a blogger.  I grew up surrounded by books, and I have always loved the physicality of them.  I can never decide which excites me more – the musty smell of old second-hand books or the pristine smell of new ones.  Whereas online writing is permanent – available anywhere, always backed up in case of disaster – books can be lost and therefore can be treasured.  Books age, over time acquiring the marks of ownership.  I used to hate it when my books got scuffed, but now I like it if a book gets a few blemishes that show it’s been somewhere with me.

And it is books that I aspire to write.  I want my work to be available in physical, paper form, so that it can be treasured and lost and discovered and shared in the real, physical world.  I rarely read stories on a computer screen – I prefer to take them on the bus with me, or read them in bed, or sit in my papasan chair and dose off with a book in my hands.  And, as a writer, I want to contribute to that physical process for other people.  The end result, for me, is to get a book in print.

So it occurred to me that I could use this blog, in part, as an opportunity to document my progress.  Although print is my goal, one of the virtues of online publishing is the fact that you can update your content on a constant basis – many bloggers post every single day.  So, on this site, I can not only show finished products where appropriate, but also convey the process of making those products.

The printed matter I currently aspire to create is a book called Stories.  I’ll briefly explain the origins of the project.  Over three years ago a friend of mine asked me to write a fable so she could illustrate it.  I appreciated the challenge, and started thinking about what a fable actually was.  I know this is perhaps stretching the original meaning of the word, but for the purposes of this project I was thinking of a fable as being, simply, a story with a moral.  I’d never written such a piece before, and my postmodern training had taught me to be sceptical of interpretations that try to pin a text down by giving it a moral or a meaning.  So the story that I eventually came up with, ‘A Cadence’, is actually one that explores the idea of a story with a moral, suggesting interpretations but never fixing on one rigidly in the manner of Aesop.  It is also a story about stories.  I wanted to use this tale to portray a world in which storytelling is one of the building blocks of humanity (as I believe it is in ours).  But the piece is also, I believe, a good story in its own right – I think that it is the kind of story I would like to read, although this is always hard to say as we are too familiar with our own words to be able to judge them.

I really enjoyed writing ‘A Cadence’, and before I had finished it my mind was already creating more stories in a similar style.  The first had been about a mermaid.  I then imagined a tale about a dragon.  Realising that all of these stories were based on very familiar tropes from folk tales, I also began to think of my favourite existing stories, and how I might re-tell them.  I gradually built up the idea of a collection of stories, apparently unconnected except for the fact that they all had the same garrulous and fussy narrator.  Without meaning to, in ‘A Cadence’ I had created a narrator who would not leave things alone, who worried about how best to describe things and who constantly interfered, unable simply to tell the story.  Thinking perhaps a little of Lemony Snicket, and a touch also of Flaubert’s Parrot, I liked the idea that as the stories progressed, we would begin to know a bit more about this narrator, perhaps that the stories would become more about him and less about the other characters.  That, very crudely, is the idea behind Stories.

Over the last few years, while doing other things (and not writing much), I have continued to think about these stories.  First I worked out what stories I wanted to tell, then I started writing them.  As with ‘A Cadence’, I did not start at the beginning, but instead contributed various disconnected paragraphs with the intention of filling in the gaps.  Those disconnected paragraphs have sat on my computer for months while I endured a job that stifled and bored me, daydreaming about the stories I was going to write but rarely actually getting anything done.

Then, last month, I went away for a week with Gemma to Northumberland.  It was here that I had finished my first draft of ‘A Cadence’, and I had a vague intention of doing some more work on my stories.  Gem was revising for an exam, and she suggested that, at the end of each day, to reward her for doing her revision, I could read to her what I had written that day.  So, on the first day, I completed the first half of ‘A Fantasy’ and read it out.  Like Scheherezade, I was then compelled to finish the tale, and the trend continued.  By the end of the week, I had completed a first draft of three out of the four remaining stories: ‘A Fantasy’, ‘A Substitute’ and ‘A Tragedy’.  I am extremely lucky to have Gemma as my editor.  She is honest and passionate about my writing, just as much when she likes it as when she doesn’t.  After hearing her feedback, I came to the conclusion that these first drafts provided the good basis for a collection, but had some serious flaws that needed to be resolved.  In particular, the garrulous narrator and postmodern trickery are perhaps too intrusive.  For these stories to work, they need to be essentially very well told stories.  As Gemma put it, a storyteller should strive to be interesting rather than to be clever.

And that is my progress so far.  Back at home, I am working once again predominantly in my head rather than on paper, but I think I know what needs to be done to those three stories to make them work.  For the first time, a finished product seems like a plausible idea.  I am really excited about finishing the stories, and about finding an audience for them.  I will keep you updated on my progress.