Writing and the power of not knowing what you’re doing, by Ben Shepherd, Author of Blood Drunk

I’ll be three months short of my fiftieth birthday when my first book, BLOOD DRUNK, comes out. Not old, not quite, but I should maybe be picking out my first set of carpet slippers and settling into a moderately dignified middle age, reading books about the Roman Empire like a middle-aged man is supposed to. Not going on podcasts to talk about vampirism, binge drinking and football violence in mid-1990s South London.

What, you might be tempted to think, has gone wrong?

Well, I’m not ashamed to admit that I like reading books about vampires, magic and fighting, particularly if there are jokes as well, but they’re not what I was intending to write about when I left the civil service in 2011. I was going to make a living as a consultant until my novel hit the shelves. Something literary and elegant. A grown-up thriller, perhaps. Magisterial, people would say.

I didn’t get very far. Three years later and all I had to show for my efforts were the lifeless three-chapter stumps of ambitious projects that I had neither the skill nor confidence to truly take on. I had a mortgage to pay, consultancy work to do and I was increasingly aware that it was going to be necessary at some point to actually finish something if I wanted to make a go of this writing thing. I embarked on writing what turned into BLOOD DRUNK in 2014 in a state of something close to desperation.

So I decided to write something I could make up out of whole cloth. Set it in South London in the 1990s, as that’s where and when I grew up – no research required - and add magic and vampires, as no-one owns the canon and you get to invent your own. Make the central character bullish and violent and frequently drunk, someone who can drive a plot forward by making a series of ill-advised life choices. Don’t try to make it about anything, just a fun story that keeps the pages turning and delivers some crunchy action sequences. The kind of thing I’d be pleased to stumble on in a bookshop. That’s got to be easy.

And it worked. I smashed through a first draft in something like three months, all the key ideas and characters flooding out. I don’t, for instance, have any recollection at all of coming up with the magic system in the book; it just appeared, fully formed, and involves lots of dead rats - you’ll have to read it to find out.

I had, as they say, got out of my own way.

But. The more observant among you will note that it took another twelve years for the book to see the light of day. It turns out that ideas and the bones of a story aren’t enough. I read the draft back and immediately saw the problems. It was lumpy, full of holes and didn’t really have an ending. The characters were crude. It needed a lot of work, slowly chipping away when I had a free hour or day, rewriting and restructuring and thinking and despairing. I abandoned it several times, only to be drawn back after months or years by nagging guilt and a sort of doomed persistence. Each time I’d read it with fresh eyes and think that some of it, maybe, wasn’t entirely terrible. Then I’d work at it until I hit another roadblock and the cycle would begin again.

But as the book edged closer to its final form I realised that I had written about something after all, even if I hadn’t intended to. BLOOD DRUNK is about the struggle of young manhood, about family and belonging and flawed father-figures. It’s about class too, and the way Britain’s social hierarchy is written into our cities, particularly London. And it’s about the terrible – and universal – tyranny of having, finally, to pick a side; that giving up and going to the pub is just as much of a choice as manning the barricades.

I’d never have got there at all if I hadn’t allowed myself the freedom to just write, back in 2014. And that freedom came from a naïve belief that it was possible to write a book about nothing at all and that it would be easy; things you can only think if you don’t have the first clue what you’re doing.

It was anything but easy. But it was, in the end, worth it.

Don’t worry, the action and jokes and vampires didn’t go away. It is, I hope, a page-turner, and still something I’d be delighted to pick up in a book shop. Fingers crossed you might be too.