The Long Game

A little bit of context for this Substack

I’ll get back to talking about King Arthur in a sec, but I thought I should stop and give people a little more of a sense of where this Substack is coming from first. The gist of it is that I’ve just spent a long time writing a novel called The Bright Sword and am now finally coming up for air.

It was a very long haul. The other day I was wondering morbidly exactly how long it had taken me to write The Bright Sword, so I checked, and my first emails about it are from 2015. Welp, I said to my daughter, at least it didn’t take me 10 years! Then she pointed that in fact it did take me ten years. 2015-2025 would’ve been eleven years. 2015-2024 is ten. You have to count the 2015.

How could it take me an entire decade to write a novel? Tesla announced and brought to market a terrible Cybertruck in the time it took me to write this novel! Perhaps this listicle will shed some light on the question.

10 REASONS IT TOOK ME 10 YEARS TO WRITE THE BRIGHT SWORD

1. For the first two years I had a full-time job. I only quit at the end of 2016. So that slowed me down a bit.

2. The Bright Sword contains a lot of things that were personally hard for me to write about. For example a lot of the Arthur story is about fathers and sons—Uther and Arthur, Arthur and Mordred, Lancelot and Galahad. That’s a bit of a raw topic for me. But then again that’s pretty much the crux of novel-writing, isn’t it? Writing about exactly the stuff you’re ill-equipped to write about.

3. The material was also chonky and difficult. When you take on King Arthur, he comes to you stiff and flat and cold. He’s both massively written-over and at the same time strangely underexplored. It’s like you’re getting fricken Austin Powers out of cold storage—he requires a lot of cleaning up and fleshing out. He also arrives dragging the Great Chain of the Arthurian Tradition, which is something like 1,400 years long, much of which demands to be reckoned with. Or at least read. Or at least pretended to be read.

4. Like everybody else, I went through some stuff in those ten years. My kids were growing up. Plus COVID.

5. There was a lot of research. I am not a historical novelist by temperament, and Arthur is more fantasy than history, but at the end of the day a lot of details still had to be got right, or at any rate sound like I’d gotten them right. I read a lot about medieval fabrics and forest law. I had to learn what a gongfermor is.

6. While I was writing The Bright Sword, I was also writing some other stuff, including assorted journalism, two screenplays (one got made, the other didn’t), a TV pilot (sold but never made) and two children’s novels (which did get published). The more time you take on a book, the thinner you’re stretching the advance (really the first quarter of the advance, which is all you get when you sign the contract), and the more other stuff you have to write to keep the lights on, which in turn makes the book take even longer … it’s a vicious circle.

7. The Bright Sword exists in a few more dimensions than the Magicians books. The Physical Kids never worried much about History, for example, but Arthur has a place in history, however fanciful, sandwiched in between the Romans and the Saxons, and all that entails. Likewise there are relationships in The Bright Sword that I never really tried in The Magicians, not in any depths. Parents and children, for example, and husbands and wives—I wanted Arthur’s and Guinevere’s marriage to be a proper marriage. I had to grow some new muscles as a writer.

8. The Bright Sword is long. It’s not crazy-long; it’s not Ulysses, or Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. But it’s by a good whack the longest thing I’ve ever written—the final draft is something like 195,000 words, which works out to a 688-page book. By comparison the Magicians books were each about 145,000 words. It’s roughly four Great Gatsby’s, or five The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobes. My little grey cells had to work extra-hard.

9. I don’t know?

10. Most of all I lost my way. I always do, I’ve never written a novel without losing my way at some point, and The Bright Sword was no different, except that this time it was maybe a bit moreso. I lost my inspiration, found it and lost it again, a hundred times. I made stupid continuity errors. I undermined myself and attacked people who tried to encourage me. I misunderstood my characters. I got interested in the wrong things and wrote hundreds of pages about them which I then had to delete. I forgot how to write. I lost faith. I despaired.

There were times when I never thought we’d get here at all. But here we are.

I will conclude with a video of me signing pages for a limited edition:

If you like you can watch it again on TikTok, where it is currently the least-viewed video on the entire platform.