Marc Nobbs: Blog

I saw an interesting Reddit post the other day. The author claimed to have been writing for twenty-five years, but despite “Sending stories out. revising novels. taking writing classes,” it never really “clicked” for them.

Twenty-five years is a long time, and it’s in the same ballpark I’ve been writing for. In one of the replies, the author mentioned that they had been writing “since they left college,” which would make them a similar age to me as well.

The author then briefly mentioned some mental health issues and feelings of failure due to their perceived lack of success.

My response to this post follows, which I thought you’d enjoy reading.

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The first thing I’d ask is, what is your goal? What do you want to achieve? How do you define success or failure? Because that’s what matters here. Are you trying to get a novel published through a traditional publisher? Do you want to get to a position where you give up the day job and make a living from writing? Or do you just want people to read your work and tell you they enjoyed it?

Decide what you want, and then you can work out how to get there or if you can get there.

You say you’ve been sending stories out for 25 years. To who? What kind? What length? Have you only been sending novels to agents/publishing houses? If so, have you thought about self-publishing? The landscape now is completely different than when you left college; if you wanted to publish a novel yourself, it’s easy to do so. Getting it noticed by readers and making sales is hard, but it would be through a traditional publisher, too.

Or have you been sending short stories to contests or magazines? Well, there are plenty of websites for any short story genre where you can post your stories, and people will read them, rate them and tell you what they think.

Or do you write because you feel compelled to write? Because you have a story to tell, and it doesn’t really matter if anyone else reads it or enjoys it? And the reason you feel like it’s not working is because you don’t like what you write and feel the story you want to tell hasn’t turned out how you want it?

Define success or failure in terms of what it means to you. Only then can you know if it’s time to quit.

But say you do quit, then what? How would that make you feel? What would the benefit be? I’m going to go ahead and assume that you haven’t been sitting at a desk writing without “success” for 25 years and not doing anything else. I assume you have a day job. In which case, is writing a hobby you could replace with something else? Or is it a passion that keeps you going day to day that would create a huge void in your life if you stopped?

To put this in context, I’ve been writing for about the same length of time as you. I turned 50 this year. I have published (through Amazon KDP and other channels) 7 “full-length” novels (60k words up to 120k), a handful of novellas and a whole bunch of short stories. I’m currently working on the 4th novel of a series which I originally intended as a trilogy, but now looks like it will be five books instead. Am I a huge success? No, not in sales or financial terms. Can I give up working and live off the earnings from my writing? Hell, no. Am I satisfied with where I am? Well, I’d like more, but generally, yes. Because, ultimately, I write for me. I write because it’s an escape from the daily grind. I write because I have a story to tell. And when someone buys my book or gives it a good rating or drops me a message to say, “Hey, enjoyed this. Hurry up with the next one”, it feels good. It feels like a success.

Judge success or failure on your terms and your terms alone. Only then will you know if you, personally, have what it takes.

I was away with the family a couple of weeks ago. My wife is a teacher, and my daughter is still at school, so that was the October half-term week, and we took the opportunity to see our son, who is now living four hours away at university.

He doesn’t get a half-term break, so we didn’t see him as much as we’d have liked, but he’s in one of the most beautiful parts of the country, and we were able to walk along the stunning South Wales coastline. Just spectacular. I’d argue it’s one of Britain’s best-kept secrets, and not enough people outside of South Wales know how beautiful it is.

Anyway, I was able to publish three WIP chapters of A Healing Love to Ream because I queued them up beforehand, and another two went up last week, so that’s a positive.

Another positive is that I could do a fair bit of work on the manuscript in the evenings while we were away, and I managed to complete chapter 23 and push the word count up to over 100,000, making it my third-longest manuscript thus far. I suspect it will soon surpass A Wounded Heart into second place, but I don’t know if it will overtake A Tortured Soul or not to become the longest. That would take another twenty thousand words, which at the current average chapter length is about four or five chapters. That’s certainly a possibility.

There are days when I sit down to write a blog post and I know exactly what I want to write about and, indeed, exactly what I want to write. Then there are days when I sit staring at a blank screen with a blank mind and have no clue how to even start.

Today is one of those second types of days. There’s nothing I need to write about. A few things I’d like to write about. But nothing that really leaps out at me. So sometimes you just have to start writing and see which path your ever-elusive muse leads you down.

For example, there’s a post on the StoriesOnline forums that’s been hanging around for about a month, which crept back to the top of the feed this week when some people replied to it about “Coming of Age” stories. The Paul Robertson Saga is very much a “Coming of Age” tale, so maybe a response to that post in a bit more detail than the forum allows might be something to tackle. Right now, as I start to write, I have nothing planned. No particular insight I feel the need to impart. So I’m just going to write and see where this post takes me.

The OP in the thread says…

However, I almost always give up on the longer stories around here because they get too over the top with the conscience of the teens actions. It gets too polite and thoughtful, it eliminates the whole trial and error thing of being a teenager.

I could go on regarding many stories like this, they have great ideas but they feel so out of touch of how real teenagers act, EVEN the most polite ones.

So, I guess what I want to discuss here is, “Does this apply to Paul?” Is he too polite? Does he seem out of touch with “real” teenagers?

Reading through the thread, the overarching theme seems to be that middle-aged authors find it difficult to write teenage characters because they’ve forgotten what it was like to be a teenager. It’s not just the language they use when speaking that people see as unrealistic; it’s the attitudes and even the skills they have.

“No teenager speaks like this; he sounds like he’s in his forties” is a valid criticism. But if you wrote the dialogue in the way that teenagers actually speak, it would be rightly criticised as bad dialogue because the reader would struggle to understand it. You can get away with the odd “Erm…” or “Well, it, like, so…” but fill all your characters’ mouths with it for a whole book, and it would very quickly become annoying and unreadable.

I have a character who first appeared in “Eternally & Evermore” whose “teenage speak” I exaggerated to make her stand out from the adults in the story. She’s making a reappearance in “A Healing Love” and still speaks noticeably differently from Paul and his peers despite the age difference being about five years or so. It’s a deliberate choice to make her stand out, and she’s a lot of fun to write. But she’s also exhausting to write and to read back. There’s simply no way you could fill a whole book with people speaking like that.

The same applies to slang. Actually, slang is worse because it changes so quickly. Writing a book in 2024 that’s set in 2014? Any idea what words the kids were using ten years ago to describe something they like? Or dislike?

No, me neither. And trust me on this, the internet is not all that helpful in this regard either.

The same goes for skills. How many teenagers are fabulous cooks? Not many. Some will be, and if you’ve got a character who is a good (not great) cook and, crucially, can explain why they are in the story’s context, that one thing. But if all your teenage cast are whipping up culinary delights all the time, that’s unrealistic.

The same goes for sex. How many teenage boys are good at sex? Hell, how many teenage boys don’t come in their kegs when a pretty girl even looks at them the wrong way? (Or the right way.)

But if you are writing an erotic Coming of Age story, then having your main character be a bumbling, sexually incompetent nerd, the like of which we saw in the wonderful The Inbetweeners, wouldn’t make for a great story. It was hilarious to see Will attempting to have sex with Charlotte, but it wasn’t the least bit “sexy”.

Yes, teenagers are dumb and incompetent and make one mistake after the other. But unless you’re writing a comedy, no one wants to read about a character like that. One respondent in the thread on SOL even comments that he gets more comments from readers asking how his character can be so dumb after he’s done something dumb that a teenager might do, than he does after his teenager pulls off some middle-age wonder skill that he really shouldn’t be capable of.

Teenagers are a breed unto themselves, and writing teenagers is to walk a fine line between realism that’s either unreadable or just not enjoyable to read and making your character talk and behave in a way that is beyond their years.

Which brings me back to Paul.

The first thing to remember here is that Paul is narrating this story from his memories in future. 2048, to be exact. And the story he’s telling you starts in 2010. That’s 38 years earlier. Yes, the narration seems to be in “the present”, but the truth is Paul isn’t a reliable narrator. He’s not exactly unreliable in the strict literary sense, but he’s certainly offering you his version of events, and doing so from the distant future. Doesn’t it stand to reason that the middle-aged narrator is going to be economical with his interpretation of what happened, what was said and how it was said?

That said, Paul does narrate some of the dumb things he does. He questions his choices, but, remember, he’s doing so of the position of an old man describing his younger self. He knows, for example, that getting in his car angry and drunk and driving away was a dumb thing to do, and he doesn’t shy away from that. But he also doesn’t think he flashes his cash around when it’s clear from what some of his friends say, that he does.

The big one here though is Paul’s skills in the bedroom. In A Tortured Soul, he depicts himself as something of a sex god. But is he? Could he be? After all, at this point, he’s only nineteen at the start of the book and twenty by the end. Could he really be that good at sex?

Well, you need to remember that by this point he’s had a lot of experience. He travelled around America sleeping with women in every town he visited. Or, at least, he tells us he did. The only actual evidence is his dairy, since Paul chooses to skip over the whole trip in his narration. So I think it is believable that Paul’s sex skills are going to be a cut above his university peers—which ultimately is all that matters when it comes to his campus reputation.

As I said, I think writing teenage characters is a delicate balance. You want them to be believable as teenagers, but you also need them to be interesting and not act the way typical teenagers act because, frankly, it would be annoying and not that interesting. And with Paul, I’d like to think that I’ve pulled it off.
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This post was originally published on my Ream Stories page on 25/10 and on my website the next day.

It’s a glorious feeling when you can see the finish line of the book you’re writing.

I’d imagine it’s the same feeling you get if you’re running the London Marathon when you pass underneath Blackfriar’s Bridge onto the Victoria Embankment—you know you’re only about a mile from the finish. After twenty-three gruelling miles, your legs hurt, and you’re low on energy. But now you’re running along the north bank of the Thames. You know all you need to do is turn right at Westminister Bridge, run up Birdcage Walk alongside St. James Park, turn right again at Buckingham Palace, and you’re done. You get your last wind—that extra boost of energy you need to complete the course.

Okay, so knowing how your book is going to end and what events you need to write on the way there probably isn’t the same as running the Marathon.

But it’s close.

Okay, it’s not even close.

But it’s where I am now.

I have a calendar on which I track the events within the Westmouthshire universe. It’s an Excel spreadsheet rather than an online calendar or something, but it works for me. I’ve got a tab for the overall timeline, which shows the months & years, and then colour-coded blocks which show when each novel, novella and short story takes place.

You can see an example of this on my Website.

After that, I have a tab for each year from 2007 to 2014, a typical “grid” layout for a yearly planner – months across the page, days down the page. Within each tab, I have colour-coded blocks that detail the specific events in each novel, novella, and short story. It makes it quite colourful when events from different books happen on the same day, which happened a couple of times in 2013 & 2014.

There is an example of this on my Website too.

I started doing this when I was writing The Truths We Live because I really needed to plan out the exact timeline of that story, including when Bobby filmed scenes and when those scenes got released. And me being me, I then had to fill in all the other details for every other event in the universe.

I actually find it really helps planning out stories, including things like working out when a school/university term starts and ends or when bank holidays are that I need to write around.

In one case, it even helped me to determine if there was a full moon one night for a scene in a story. And so it’s proved again. I’ve now pencilled in on the calendar the major events that will bring A Healing Love to a close. So I now have a rough framework for the rest of the book. In a sense, I’ve just passed beneath Blackfriar’s Bridge onto Victoria Embankment. Only, I’m strolling casually rather than pushing myself for a personal best time. Nevertheless, I know I’m only about a mile from the end.

I've made an announcement regarding early access to the 4th Paul Robertson book on my author website. You can find the link to the post on my Facebook page, which you can get to from my SOL author page.