WRITING FOR THE BLACK LIBRARY

By Bill King

A lot of people have written in and asked how do I write a novel for the Black Library. What is the actual process? For the curious among you, it goes something like this. Usually it starts with an email or, should I happen to be in the same room as one of the editors, a conversation. In any case the gist of it all will be: have you any idea what your next book is going to be then? If I have some idea I spit it out, and I usually do have some idea because I try to think ahead at least as far as the next book. If I am in the same room a conversation ensues, if not, emails go back and forth discussing ideas, plots, characters, bits of business etc. Next up it’s time for the synopsis. This is quite important since its acceptance means the book is quite likely to come out and it's also the first milestone for being paid. i.e. I get the first installment of my advance on its acceptance. I find the easiest way to write a synopsis is to use the outliner in Microsoft Word. I start off with a general description of the book detailing the overall story, characters, locations etc. Once the basic stream of consciousness outline is done, I go back, polish it, expand it and divide it into sections using the outliner. In the good old days, the outline used to contain pretty extensive details of any special locations and artefacts I was going to use, potted biographies of major new characters, quick character sketches of the minor ones and a detailed chapter by chapter breakdown of the plot. These days I usually skip the chapter by chapter for reasons that will become obvious later. I content myself with a broad overview of what is going to happen and even this is usually proved wrong in the end. Somewhere out there are writers who can present a synopsis and stick to it. Unfortunately, I am not one of them. I forget which military theorist said “No plan ever survives contact with the enemy” but I am grateful to him for justifying my attitude to outlines. For me an outline is an itinerary for a journey. It shows how you plan to get from A to B. It’s a bit like choosing a route before going travelling.  But in writing, just as in travel, things go wrong as well as right. Trains get cancelled, roads get closed, and the weather causes problems. On the plus side you meet interesting people, discover things not covered in your guidebook or find a place more to your taste than it was to that of the guidebook author and decide to stay longer. It’s the same with writing a novel. Scenes that looked great in the outline fall flat in practise. Some characters simply don’t click. It takes longer to execute some things than you thought it would, while others go by in a flash. At the same time some characters take on a life of their own. Some scenes catch fire and lead to others you never anticipated. These are the proverbial pebbles that start avalanches. Small changes lead cumulatively to wild mutation. The diversion on the road takes you through places you never expected and, as in travel, these are often the most fun parts of the whole process. Always, as you go along, you see links and connections as you make the trip, things that you never foresee even when you are writing the most detailed outline. It’s the difference between visiting a place and reading about it in a guidebook. Sometimes things you write later in the book will change stuff you’ve done earlier. You find you need to introduce a character earlier or foreshadow events that you have just detailed.  I find it pointless to go back and rewrite immediately because who knows- things might change again before I am through. Instead I make notes of the things that must be dealt with in a notebook and I flag them in the text using Word’s comment facility. After all I have said about deviation from outlines, I don’t want anybody to get me wrong. In broad brushstrokes the book always resembles the outline. If the outline says Gotrek and Felix go to these places, meet these people and fight these monsters then they do. It might not be exactly as it was in the outline, but it’s fairly close. To stretch the travel analogy still further, I don’t tell Games Workshop I am planning a trip to France and then go to China. I do actually go to France and I travel in the regions I said I would. The mechanics of the actual writing are as follows. I aim for two thousand words a day. When I was younger I could do a lot more but 2k is a pace I can comfortably sustain for the long haul. (It’s also what Steven King and Ian Fleming aimed for so I am in good professional company.) Of course there are the usual interruptions, illness and household disasters so I don’t always manage 10k words a week. I usually budget 4 months to a book start to finish once the outline is approved which leaves time for edits, rewrites and some slack. Games Workshop officially asks for 90-100k words in a book. Mine have varied between 86 and 112k so there is obviously room for some variation. Somewhere during the writing process comes the midway milestone. This is where the first half of the book gets sent in and you collect another chunk of advance. For any authors (who can stick to an outline) the book’s editing process can begin here. Anyway, eventually the book is finished. It’s time to go back over it, read the printouts, mark them up, read the notes I made in the original writing and then rewrite. Now is the time to draw all the connections together, sharpen things up, take out all the extraneous material that has crept in, and polish. This process usually takes one to two weeks. Then the manuscript is emailed in for comment. Suggested changes are made if I agree with them, and argued about if I don’t.  Then the book goes into editing and the writing process is done. Hope this gives you a bit of insight into what the process is like and good luck with your own writing. Bill Please note that the Black Library only commission novels from established authors and prefer their writers to have a proven record with a few short stories published in Inferno or Warhammer Monthly beforehand  - the Black Library have a very good set of guidelines for such submissions which can be found here.     [ Top ]     [ Essays ]