Writing & Notes

Following on slightly from my last post, one thing I've found interesting about writing fiction is the balance between using things you already know and researching the things you don't.

There's an obvious advantage in starting with something familiar.

With Certified in Sounding Official, quite a lot of the background came from recognising the language, behaviours and occasional absurdities of working in and around technology, cybersecurity and large organisations.

That doesn't mean the events are real, of course, but knowing how those environments work gives you somewhere believable to start.

I've found much the same thing while working on what comes next.

Places are a good example.

If you know an area well, you remember things that probably wouldn't appear in a tourist guide or a quick internet search.

Which roads become difficult when traffic builds up. Where one type of housing suddenly gives way to another. What a particular underpass or estate feels like. The shortcuts, service roads and bits of infrastructure most people pass without really noticing.

They are usually fairly ordinary details.

In fiction, though, ordinary details can be useful. They give you something solid to build around.

But familiarity only gets you so far.

Once a story starts developing, there are inevitably things you don't know.

That is where the research begins.

It is quite different from the sort of research I'm used to through work, where there is normally a fairly specific reason for doing it: understanding a technical issue, working through a standard or policy, checking how something is supposed to operate, or finding an answer to a particular problem.

Research for fiction is a bit less predictable.

You might start by trying to work out whether one small detail is plausible and end up reading about a piece of technology, a building, a process or something else you knew very little about beforehand.

Routes get checked.

Buildings get looked at properly.

Technical assumptions get challenged.

Sometimes something you confidently thought would work turns out not to, or the convenient route you had somebody taking makes absolutely no sense.

There is also the danger of disappearing rather too far into something that will eventually occupy about two sentences in the finished book.

But even that can be useful.

Understanding more than you eventually put on the page means the detail can sit in the background rather than requiring a paragraph explaining it.

And occasionally the research turns up something much more interesting than the thing you originally went looking for.

I quite enjoy that part of it.

You start with something you understand, follow it into something you don't, and gradually build enough around it that the fictional part has something solid to stand on.

I suppose "write what you know" doesn't necessarily mean only writing about things you already understand.

Sometimes it just means knowing where to start.

---

One of the things I've found particularly encouraging since publishing Certified in Sounding Official has been discovering just how many people in my professional network have a creative side that I knew little or nothing about.

There are other authors, artists, people involved in narration and audio, and quite a few people developing creative projects alongside their main careers.

I've enjoyed discovering that, probably because I'm now doing much the same thing myself.

I still work full time in cybersecurity, so writing tends to happen around everything else.

Evenings. Weekends. Occasionally a note made when something occurs to me at a particularly inconvenient moment.

There isn't really a separate writing life where everything else stops for a while.

It fits into the gaps.

What has changed is that I now have one published novel and other projects at different stages behind it.

Finishing the first book also changed my perspective on the process.

Before publication, most of what happens to a novel is largely invisible.

There is the initial idea, which is usually much less complete than it feels at the time.

Then there are the things that work immediately, the things that definitely don't, characters who become more important than expected, scenes that disappear completely and details that send you down research routes you hadn't anticipated.

Eventually, after rather more revision than you imagined when you started, there is something resembling a finished book.

And then everyone sees the finished version.

I realised that, apart from mentioning a book when it is completed or available, I had shared very little about everything that happens between those two points.

How ideas develop.

What changes along the way.

What turns out not to work.

The research.

And what I'm learning from trying to fit writing around a fairly normal working life.

So I thought I'd occasionally share a little more of that here.

Nothing too relentless.

Those with absolutely no interest in how novels get put together can consider this fair warning.

It isn't intended to become a constant stream of book promotion. There will still inevitably be some of that when there is something worth mentioning.

But I'm increasingly interested in the process itself: where ideas come from, the things I'm working on and some of the subjects that keep finding their way into the fiction.

It has also been a useful reminder that the professional version of somebody is rarely the complete one.

Apparently quite a few of us go home and do something entirely different.

An earlier version of this piece was originally shared on LinkedIn.

There are people who quietly solve problems.

And then there's Crispin Lockwood-Fetch.

One of the ideas behind Certified in Sounding Official came from something I suspect most people who have worked in large organisations will recognise: confidence and competence are not necessarily the same thing.

Sometimes the people who understand a problem best are the least interested in performing that understanding for everybody else.

They investigate. They ask awkward questions. They work through the detail. Then, quite often, they quietly fix whatever has gone wrong.

Other people are rather better at the presentation layer.

They have the language. The acronyms. The diagrams. The reassuring ability to turn something complicated into a slide containing three arrows, a maturity model and the word strategic.

Technology and cybersecurity provide particularly fertile ground for this because much of the subject is difficult for people outside it to assess.

If someone speaks confidently enough about resilience, transformation, threat landscapes, governance or risk appetite, how do you know whether they understand what they are talking about?

Usually, eventually, something has to work.

That gap between sounding convincing and actually being useful became part of the starting point for Crispin.

He isn't intended to represent a particular person, and Certified in Sounding Official certainly isn't a disguised account of somewhere I have worked. Most of the events would probably result in considerably more paperwork if they were.

But the behaviours are deliberately recognisable.

Anyone who has spent time around technology, cybersecurity, consultancy or large corporate environments will probably have encountered some version of the meeting where everybody appears to agree despite nobody being quite certain what has been agreed.

Or the presentation that becomes more polished as the underlying problem becomes less clear.

Or the person who can explain, at considerable length, why somebody else is going to fix something.

That familiarity gave me something useful when writing the book.

The situations could become increasingly ridiculous, but they needed to remain just plausible enough that a reader might occasionally wonder whether something similar had actually happened somewhere.

Usually while remembering a meeting they would rather forget.

And that is probably where Crispin works best.

Not because he is completely unbelievable.

Because, occasionally, he isn't unbelievable enough.

An earlier version of this piece was originally shared on LinkedIn.