Everybody lies

I have never actually read one of Elizabeth George’s novels, because as I mentioned before, I am not much of a crime story fan. But this book is subtitled “One Novelist’s Approach to Fiction and the Writing Life”, and there are two things I just can not resist: books about books and books about writing. And even though I am not a fan of her books myself, I gather that she is a very successful writer who sells millions of books, so I figured she might have actually something worthwhile to say about the writing process.

After reading the book I am still not a fan of her writing (I know that because she uses excerpts from her books extensively as examples), but I have the feeling I might get along with her personally. She certainly has a very sensible attitude towards writing and has a few interesting, if not actually new to me, things to say concerning the craft.

It was very interesting to compare her approach to writing a novel to, for instance, Stephen King’s. While King seems to be a very intuitive writer, who always says that the story basically writes itself and he is just there to take it down, Mrs. George seems to be quite the opposite, taking planning and plotting to extremes and needing a very detailed outline and kind of flowchart for the whole thing before she even begins the actual writing.

I am neither the one nor the other extreme, but there are certainly things to be learned from both methods.

Elizabeth George’s process in a nutshell, as given by her in the final chapter, consists of roughly 13 steps:

1. the idea, the expanded idea, the primary event
2. people the world of the expanded idea and the primary event, list characters generically, list characters specifically
3. research
4. create characters
5. create settings
6. step outline till there’s nothing more to say
7. plot outline
8. write the rough draft
9. the fast reading
10. the editorial letter
11. the second draft
12. the cold reader
13. the third draft, if necessary

She goes into much detail about each step in the different chapters. I especially liked the way she really takes her time to get to know her characters intimately before she begins the writing. Also, what she had to say about dialogue and how to turn an idea into an actual plot.

All in all it was a very nice book, which I am glad to have read, but probably won’t pick up again. While I agree with her on many points, I think her writing style is so different from mine that I won’t feel compelled to return to this book again and again as I do with other books.