There are many things I like about the crafting of a new novel, though I admit there are always times when it’s more a long slog than a joy.

For me, it invariably starts with that first kernel of an idea that can come from almost anywhere. For the steampunk novel which I’m just doing the final editing on, it came down to the fabulous goggles with their multiple lenses and extra widgets, which provoked a question that took root at the back of my mind:

What would you use those for, why would everyone be wearing them, and yet be wearing slightly different versions.

When I started to come up with answers to those questions, I started to come up with an entire back story, which subsequently created the history of a world and the setting of the novel.

That for me is possibly the greatest joy of writing, finding a seed of an idea which can be cultivated and grown into a small seedling of an outline, and in time the full grown plant of a story. In truth I suspect most novelists come up with a great many more seed ideas or even seedlings than they will ever have the time to grow into finished novels, and perhaps that’s the first hurdle which a would-be novelist has to get over, the temptation to just keep coming up with ideas rather than sticking with one through the many, many, much harder and slower and more difficult stages.

Nothing particularly contentious so far. Creativity though, isn’t limited to the plotting and planning stage. The writing proper takes much longer and is much harder, but it still requires a lot of ideas and invention. As the story progresses and you’ve described the world, the characters and the locations to your reader, the amount of freedom you have to invent something new gradually decreases, and it becomes very easy to write yourself into a place you can’t get out of without either going back and re-writing something, or using your creativity like a crowbar to smash your readers expectations, and force something new into the story, and approach that’s often described as the use of an ‘ass-pull’.

And this reveals the real double-edged nature of creativity. Coming up with something new and elegant that fits into and compliments your story is a fantastic achievement and a great feeling, but working on something and waiting for inspiration to strike can be equally disheartening.

For example, I’ve been struggling with a couple of points like this while writing my third novel. The high level plot was there and I was happy with it, the characters were well established in my first novel and felt like old friends, the elements of intrigue and threat and problem solving that I like to incorporate had all been fitted in snugly, and I even had some interesting and exciting locations in mind for different stages in the story. So the skeleton was firmly in place and it was surely time to start the actual writing?

Yes its true there were still a couple of bits I needed to figure out in the second half of the story where I needed something to prevent the protagonists from having too easy a time of it, and where I needed to add in an problem they’d need to solve, but I was happy to flesh those details out as I went.

I wasn’t concerned as I made my way through the first five or six thousand words, re-establishing the scene and doing a bit of preliminary set up, so I still had plenty of space to manoeuvre without any risk of having to rework anything later on. I worked through a few options as I wrote the next five or six thousand words, and came up with a couple of ‘maybe’ options that weren’t great, but might be something I could develop if no other ideas came to me, but nothing really chimed. I still had quite a bit of space to work in, but I was getting a bit concerned now because I knew at ten to twelve thousand words into a ninety thousand word story the walls were alread closing in around me.

I was half way through the next couple of chapters when inspiration finally struck, not while I was sat at the keyboard slaving away, oh no. At eleven minutes past five o’clock in the morning I woke with the solution I’d been wanting. There it was, exactly what I was looking for, an elegant solution that fitted perfectly with the rest of the plot, would add pace and tension precisely where I needed it, would complicate the plans of my protagonists just nicely and in the process would be a slap-in-the-face to the bad guys leading into the third novel in which they were already planned to be increasingly ill-tempered and unpleasant.

But eleven minutes past five o’clock in the morning is not a time I like to experience very often, especially when I’m often writing until just gone midnight, and need to get up for work at seven thirty. So the price for my inspiration on this occasion was of course feeling absolutely dog tired by the time I finished work for the day, and really not feeling like sitting down at a computer again in the evening to do any more writing.

But is it worth it? Will I enjoy writing the intervening scenes all the more, knowing what I’m now building up to. Absolutely I love it.