How to train your zombie novel

Ok, time to come clean...

For years now, I have built a career upon being one of those bad-ass writers who will not write spec work.  Writer's block is not a thing.  You pay me in advance and in a currency of my choice.  You can crit my work -  go on, make my day, for I am not like other writers.  You cannot make me cry.  I am detached, analytical, my brain is a series of wheels and cogs. Sharp to the touch. I will analyse your ideas, harvest the things I can use from your critique, discard those I consider to be merely opinion as opposed to analysis.  I can do all these things because I have no emotional attachment to my work.  It is a collection of letters and phrases, each deliberate in its deployment for the singular purpose of meeting a remit, producing a product that behaves as it is supposed to.  I am a master of my craft and you will pay for my expertise.

And then I accidentally wrote a novel.

I say accidentally... it really was.  After the collapse of a particularly difficult film venture, the loss of 9 months of income, 12 months of endeavour and a lifetime of pride, it just seemed like the thing to do.  Nobody asked for it, nobody was expecting it, waiting to read it.  It was my secret and it became the receptacle for a sonic wave of anger, frustration, disappointment, but also hope, pride, political awakening and connection to a city, and in turn, for four of its imaginary denizens, their components plucked from people I have loved, feared, loathed and stood in awe of.

I did every single thing I teach my students not to.  I wrote without a plan.  I prioritised the work to the detriment of paid employment, regular meals and personal hygiene. (There is a dark corner of my couch that has seen some things)  My fiancé is still deeply mystified as to why I would seek that moment to expend that much energy when so much was at stake.  I couldn't stop.  I wrote without much understanding of the world of prose.  I was an interloper, charging across vast unknown plains of words and encountering precious little resistance.  2 thousand words per day, 3 thousand, 5...  It became something that consumed me, a punch bag inside my own head that I could unload upon.  And fuck it felt good...

Once I let the secret slip, good friends whispered wise words of caution as the word count approached 70, 80, 90 thousand.  The thing started to take shape.  Started to become something unexpected.  It had completely broken out of what weakened remit I had chained it with and was rampaging loose under its own momentum, savaging the things I was supposed to be doing, ripping out the throat of anything that threatened its reign of terror.

And then, one day it was done.

I couldn't look at it for almost a week, or much of anything else for that matter.  I left it to skulk, pad around, perhaps in the hope that it might of its own volition find a way out into the world that did not involve me at all.  But no.  It waited... with something almost resembling obedience.  It now had expectations of me that I would have to try to meet.

It felt like taking a rabid dog to the vet.  I coaxed it out from under the couch, ran my fingers through its grammar one last time in the hope of calming it before forcing it into the pet carrier of a 50 page sample and a synopsis that upon reflection was infinitely less revealing of its origins and purpose than this article.  Needless to say, it howled all the way there, scratching at its split infinitives which were becoming raw and infected.  It didn't matter.  It would soon be out of my hands and into those of the dreaded agent, whom I was hoping would be able to diagnose clean bill of health, and perhaps proscribe a sedative for us both.

For 12 days, I sat in the digital waiting room.  At first, it felt strange not to have it around.  It felt odd to watch occasional home improvement shows of an evening.  This is, it seems behaviour utterly incompatible with the life of a professional novelist, especially one bent on writing a whole novel in three months.  Even so, with it out of the house, I began to humanise again, began to eat and bathe regularly, began to work on writing jobs that pay actual money.  I had almost returned to pre-novel levels of paranoia and neurosis when the word came in.

My novel... my poor, angry, rabid, vibrant lurcher of a novel whilst otherwise reasonably healthy, if somewhat over written, had been diagnosed with a terminal case of literary fiction.  The saddest part was, it didn't seem any the wiser about its diagnosis.  If anything, it seemed pleased to see me, as if its poor undeveloped novel brain couldn't comprehend how ill it actually was.  At least it didn't appear to be in any pain.  Like all concerned owners without any real expertise in the area, I took to the internet in an attempt to better understand the diagnosis.

For the reference of anyone else who suffers a similar diagnosis, it is important to note the following.

1.  If one types 'literary fiction' into google, its search engine helpfully adds 'is dead' as item one in the auto-complete search bar.

2.  Most of the articles you then find date back to around 2010.  My poor savage beast was as Will Self puts it, a 'Stillborn novel', written by a misguided person intent on some sort of zombie necromancy.

3.  On the plus side, there is a new wave of articles entitled 'Literary fiction is dead articles are dead.' which would seem to indicate that so dead is literary fiction that even articles bemoaning its death are now also extinct.

The news was difficult to take.  For a while, I didn't want to give up.  I looked up radical new treatments of zombie literary fiction having some success in America.  New experimental interventions that might prolong the life of my novel.  For most, the research was still in its early stages and the techniques were not as yet approved for use by the Times Literary Supplement.  My heart sank.  The agent himself had only suggested two highly drastic possible treatments, both requiring intensive surgery and long periods of medication that might change the mood of my novel, alter its behaviour...  The first was to re-envisage it as a thriller, involving the removal of characters and an increase in plot driven narrative.  The second was more drastic.  It involved the forced neutering and reconstitution of my novel as a 'Young Adult' book...

I carefully mulled over all of these options.  Both were invasive and painful treatments, the second requiring an unrequited sexual tension that I thought would be hard for my novel to bare.  My first reaction was that in order to spare my novel any further pain, and though it would be very sad it might be kinder and easier on everyone concerned to self publish it down.  But it seemed wrong to do that to such a young book that was as yet unaware of its symptoms.  Instead, I decided that it could perhaps be retrained, to somehow make the leap from angry diatribe to something more universal.  (When you try to put 'commercial literary fiction' into google, nothing comes up.)  My novel did not seem to care.

So, with the rolled up newspaper of literary theory, the chew toy of genre identity, and a firm leash attached to its authorial voice, I am going to attempt to make it something more obedient, whilst at the same time, preserving something of the wild eyed savagery of its soul.  This will be a challenge, to be sure, but then if necromancy was easy, everybody would be doing it.

Or perhaps not...