Tig Wallace: Write What You Want

There came a point years ago when I had a choice to make. I knew I wanted to write, to take steps towards being published, but I wasn’t sure what to write. You know, that small detail. I had three different projects I’d started: one literary novel, another contemporary novel for adults, and a YA fantasy. I chose the middle option. I made the wrong choice.

Writers often hear the advice to write the book you want to write. I was more excited by the YA novel idea, which felt distinctive, but I felt like I should write that other book first. It’s probably too simplistic to say I chose wrong – the book I wrote was personal to me and to that time in my life – but I thought it would be hitting a trend. When we sent that book out on submission it got a nice reception, but no offers. I was late to the trend. But also, the book needed a plot and, well, let’s just agree it had some problems.

I worked as a children’s/YA fiction editor at that time, which had a bearing on my decision to veer away from YA in my writing. It felt too close somehow. Though there would have been no actual conflict, I worried what people would think – that maybe there would be a question mark of some variety in the minds of my colleagues and even my authors. But more practically, I couldn’t see a way of managing my energy well-enough to edit YA at work and then write it at home.

When eventually I did return to my YA manuscript, it just felt right. I enjoyed getting back into that world. I had fun with the characters. It felt like it played to my strengths. In starting to write, I felt my inspirations zinging around my head clearly and had a vision for what I wanted to do. I’ve always loved YA fantasy – these are the books that made me want to be an editor and a writer since I was a teenager, books with magic systems and prophecies and big imagination, from Ursula Le Guin to Garth Nix to Philip Pullman (together, the subject of my undergraduate dissertation!). I’ve also always loved a blockbuster, from the action and set pieces of authors like Matthew Reilly and Anthony Horowitz’s Alex Rider series, to epic disaster movies. I was excited to bring all these inspirations together in my writing.

The inspirations may have been clear, but that didn’t mean the early writing was good. I initially wrote pretty freely, without much of a plan, other than a sense of how it ended. I then began a process I wouldn’t recommend to any author, of revising early chapters while continuing to write new ones, planning only a few stages ahead. I got towards the end and realised not a lot hung together, or rather, nothing made a whole lot of sense. It was…not a great moment.

But I still felt there was a spark of something, I still believed in the concept, and I wrote it again. And again. And edited again and again, until it started to work. Eventually, it was good enough that people were interested, but still there was plenty of work to be done.

I do believe you should write what you want, but in writing this article I’ve realised something new. Maybe that other book wasn’t the wrong choice. Maybe it was the book I needed to write at that time. Who knows, maybe I’ll even return to it someday. The process of writing it, the rejection, the determination to try again – it made me better. I took the long and winding road with Storm Bringer, and I’m very proud that we got here.

Storm Bringer by Tig Wallace is out in paperback now, published by Chicken House