Brave New Worlds – A Mentor’s View

This blog on the work of a creative mentor is written by BCre8ive Mentor David Manderson

One Strange World

So, we’ve got our setting. Let’s say, hmm…a leather-tanning factory in nineteenth century rural France. Our characters: the women who live and work in it all their lives and the animals who are bred for slaughter in its out-houses. Our idea: that animals and people can shake off exploitation together. We’ve even got the theme.

Anything else? Oh yes, chunks of the story are told by the factory. The building itself, with all its filthy nooks and blood-spattered grannies, is the narrator.

So why doesn’t it work?

This isn’t a plan but the outline of a story already written by a young writer who won a prize with her first novel and now needs a second.* It’s essential that she gets that second book out there and that it’s better than her first.

But it isn’t. Not yet.

She’s worked and worked on it and it’s just not come right. She’s revised it again and again until her brain spins. She’s changed the viewpoint, she’s changed the tense. She’s tried everything she knows and some things she doesn’t. And still it refuses to come alive.

Where I Come In

I work giving advice to new writers or writers who are some way into their careers, giving them feedback on their material and trying to help them move forward. In the other half of the week I’m a novelist. I write screenplays, short stories and articles too, but novels are what I do.

What’s sometimes apparent is that a writer is using the wrong medium or misusing the genre. A young author trying to compress a feature into a five minute screenplay, or an established novelist using every trick he knows to make that thriller really exciting (he’s only ever written literary fiction before), are two examples.

What I also come across are creative people whose move from one world to another has proved successful. Several screenwriters who didn’t quite make it to the big screen are now widely published crime novelists here in Scotland. And then there’s the TV scriptwriter who scored a hit with his adaptation of the Katie Morag series and is now writing books for children alongside his soap opera episodes.

And with the new medium comes new challenges, different conventions and different methods, but also, most importantly, fresh opportunities.

From Print to Visual

The leather-production plant story, for example, became a living, breathing thing when it was taken, not by a traditional publisher but by a graphic novel company. The rave rejections turned into eager acceptances. In fact the designers and artists couldn’t wait to get their hands on it.

What had been an idea that struggled to live in one world was transformed into one that grew without effort in another. There were important aesthetic decisions, which chimed with the novelist’s wishes and encouraged her to go in this direction, one of which was not to show the gore.

The story no longer needed the exposition, description and scene-setting the writer had pushed into it because the audience could see for themselves the sullen brutalization of the workers and the fear and grief of the animals as they were led to their deaths.

Collaborative Energy

Not only that, the writer had to learn to do something she’d never done before, which was to work with other people.

And contrary to reports of novelists being difficult to work with, she loved it. She could see how the artists could take her idea to places she couldn’t, she could help her story grow into new shapes and contours which she couldn’t have done alone.

It took quite a bit of courage to agree that huge blocks of her original had to go, including the talking factory. But she did. And when the proofs of the graphic novel showed how the original’s flaws had become strengths in this brave new world, she was delighted.

She’s back to writing a different novel now, one more like her first, and it’s working fine.

The launch of her graphic novel, where the artist and the storyteller will share the credit, is scheduled for a major book festival next year. There’ve been talks of a TV spin-off. And film, animated or real, is where she and the publishers plan to take it next.

She’s writing other things now too, and some are working. Others aren’t, no matter what she does to them. Some things never change. But at least she knows to move them around a bit. Another new world could be just round the corner.

*This story is itself a fiction. It doesn’t exist, but the journey of the writer did.. I do work with creative people turning their stories into to new forms, but their ideas are, of course, copyright-protected, and I keep them confidential.

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