::mslexia author method::

The Evans Method
From Interview no. 31

• When you start with an idea in your head you don’t have a sense of structure especially with a first novel. You just have an idea, but how do you tell the story?

• You start asking yourself these questions, like what comes first and next? It feels like the structure is getting in the way and interfering with the purity of the story.

•It takes a first draft to get over those boundaries – how are you planning it, how are you going to do it, how are you building images? – and the second draft is where the novel finally appears.

• Stay true to the picture in your head, it has an innocence and perfection that you want to put on a page, but it feels impossible to get down. Stick with it; make it possible.

• Focus on little scenes and images. write it scene by scene. Don’t think of it as a whole book, just build it up. Each scene is a building block, an additional piece of the puzzle.

• Think of the most important moment or scene, the heart or the nugget or the real starting point for the story – it won’t necessarily be linear. Start with the truth, basically, and work outwards from that most telling, compelling moment.

• Come up with a first draft; decide to do the whole thing again and be ready to completely change the structure.

• Things happen when you are writing a book and you don’t always know why they work, they just make sense, they fit. Surrender to your characters, to your story.

• Follow your nose. Even if you don’t know all the parts of the book, even if you don’t know it chapter by chapter, when you know the beginning and the end that makes it a lot easier.

• Break into the day physically with yoga or a swim; break into the day mentally by reading some poetry as a warm up, then start writing. Write through the day into the afternoon. Finish by reading a bit of fiction for a cool down. Then go out with friends or family; relax, interact socially with the outside world, refreshing yourself for your solitary work the next day.

• It’s like a game of football or volleyball – everything has to meet up with everything else, it all has to be connected like meet-the-dots, and you have to keep the ball in the air. Basically keeping the ball in the air is the story being alive and working.

Things happen when you are writing a book and you don’t always know why they work, they just make sense, they fit. Surrender to your characters, to your story.