‘What I’m hearing is, I have to write another.’
Tom Benjamin, author of A Quiet Death In Italy tells how writing is really rewriting.
Almost every published novel is an iceberg – beneath its shining surface lies the dark, brooding bulk of earlier drafts. Certainly A Quiet Death In Italy is no different. Behind the 80,000-plus published manuscript sits not only a lengthy re-drafting process, but an entire other novel in which English detective Daniel Leicester first walked the porticoes of Bologna.
I thought I had been boxing clever – after years of working in isolation and having manuscripts rejected, for the first time I had decided to seek professional advice and submitted the raw draft of that earlier novel to a literary consultancy. The consultant was qualified, constructive and, once I had made their suggested changes, highly complimentary. Not quite complimentary enough to recommend it to any of their contacts, but still… I submitted it with high hopes, confident that I had constructed a novel that ticked all the boxes.
It got nowhere.
It is times like this you think about giving up. Of course you do, but if you are born to write, you carry on. I submitted the novel to another consultancy, which assigned me a graduate of the UEA MA in creative writing who forensically deconstructed the novel, at the end of which I said:
‘What I’m hearing is, I have to write another.’
‘Well… I’m afraid… yes, probably.’
With Alex’s help, I did. I managed to ‘scrape’ around 5,000 words from the original, but the other seventy-five were all new. I say ‘seventy-five’ but in reality this was more like one hundred after all the cuts and re-writes.
I tend to draft as I go along, so it is difficult to say how many drafts I actually do. Let’s say ‘at least three’ (I picture Amanda, the editorial manager at Constable, falling off her seat in surprise). Anyway, I then sent it to half-a-dozen agents who rejected it. In the next ‘tranche’ one agent who had requested a full asked me to call her then chewed me out for presenting an Italy that apparently didn’t match her holidays quaffing Chianti in Tuscany, then I heard from Bill Goodall, who loved it and immediately offered me a contract. Clearly, his perception of Italy had more in common with the ‘Zen’ novels of Michael Dibdin than Under The Tuscan Sun.
It took a few months, and quite a few rejections, before I was offered a three-book contract with Constable, an imprint of Little, Brown. Naturally, I had to make some further editorial changes, but the book was published this May pretty much as I had submitted it to Bill and has received some great reviews. The Times said: ‘The locale is brought to life… and the plot keeps you guessing – even when you think you know what’s coming.’ While according to the Herald Scotland, it is ‘a slow-burning, tense and brooding thriller which boasts the atmosphere and attention to detail that could only spring from a genuine love of the location.’
I wrote the follow-up, The Hunting Season, within a year, and it was accepted without further changes. That’s a joke, by the way – in fact, my first effort was pulled apart and in the teleconference I said to my publisher:
‘What I’m hearing is, I have to write another.’
‘Well…’
Tom began his career as a reporter in north London before becoming a spokesman for Scotland Yard where he was a frequent visitor, for strictly professional reasons, to its famed Black Museum. He went on to work in international aid and public health before moving to Bologna with his Italian wife. His debut A Quiet Death In Italy was published at the end of May and has received praise from the Times for its evocation of place, characterisation and a plot ‘that keeps you guessing – even when you think you know what’s coming next’. He managed to get the Daily Mail and Morning Star to agree his was a ‘promising debut’, while the Herald Scotland described it as ‘a slow-burning, tense and brooding thriller which boasts the atmosphere and attention to detail that could only spring from a genuine love of the location’.
About A QUIET DEATH IN ITALY:
Bologna: city of secrets, suspicion . . . and murder When the body of a radical protestor is found floating in one of Bologna’s underground canals, it seems that most of the city is ready to blame the usual suspects: the police. But when private investigator Daniel Leicester, son-in-law to the former chief of police, receives a call from the dead man’s lover, he follows a trail that begins in the 1970s and leads all the way to the rotten heart of the present-day political establishment. Beneath the beauty of the city, Bologna has a dark underside, and English detective Daniel must unravel a web of secrets, deceit and corruption – before he is caught in it himself. A dark and atmospheric crime thriller set in the beautiful Italian city of Bologna, perfect for fans of Donna Leon, Michael Dibdin and Philip Gwynne Jones.
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The secret to writing a successful novel? Get ready for redrafts.