Back-to-front writing?

If your novel needs research, you do that first, right?  I mean, it’s obvious, isn’t it?

Well, that’s what I thought – so I started the research for my new novel by looking at everything that might be useful.  I bought a lot of books and I made a list so that I could cross each one off as I finished it.  Then I started the reading. 

After a day or two, I realised that it was going to take me a very, very long time to read everything on that list.  I like to write quickly (a good/bad habit picked up from working first as a journalist and then in television) and the research process seemed to be making everything very slow and ponderous.  I was making notes but the actual proper writing bit seemed to get further away rather than closer with every passing day.

One day, I just sat and stared at the list and realised that there was a good chance that the whole idea for the novel – and certainly my enthusiasm for it – might just curl up and die if I delayed starting it until I really had read everything that could be useful in its construction.

So I did what I thought was a radical thing.  Maybe everyone does this but, to me, in the moment, it did feel faintly rebellious, as though I was somehow cheating.  I decided that I’d start the novel (because the writing bit is what I enjoy the most) and I’d let the emerging narrative and characters dictate what I needed to research, rather than the other way around.  Hence the idea of back-to-front writing.   Bonkers?  Maybe, just a bit.  But sometimes your characters and action take on a life of their own and do actually decide where things are heading.  This is what happened now and where I realised that I’d need to ink in a bit more detail, I’d put [RESEARCH NEEDED] in the middle of whatever section it was, so that I could focus on something specific.  For example, without giving too much away, the new novel is set a couple of hundred years ago (hence the need for research in the first place and a natural terror on my part about getting things wrong) and I realised that I needed to know about gambling in that particular period.  I only realised this because I’d started writing the novel and it just became something that one of the characters pretty much decided for himself that he needed to do.  This meant that instead of having to read the whole of the long and weighty tome that I’d bought on life in Georgian England, I could just dive straight into the chapter on gambling.  Job done.  Hooray!

Now that I write this down, it seems blindingly obvious (you probably agree) but maybe the difference is that subconsciously, however deeply it was buried, I knew broadly and sketchily what I wanted to write.  If you were starting with a topic and neither plot nor characters, even at the most rudimentary level, you might have to do it the ‘right-way-round’ and research that topic first in order to discover your narrative.

It's like I always say – with writing, there’s no right way or wrong way, only your way.  And if it works, go with it, even if it is back-to-front. 

Happy writing – in whatever order you do it!