I never took creative writing classes. I learned a bit from school, a bit at my father’s knee, quite a bit at the civil service - and the rest I’ve found out for myself. I do not have a pat answer to every writing problem. Back in November I was asked at a writer’s group how I do conversations between my characters. I had my mouth open to reply when I suddenly thought: ‘hang on - what do I do?’
Conversations can be difficult. Anything in writing can be difficult, if you don’t feel sure about what you’re doing. It’s best if it comes instinctively. If it doesn’t, well, that’s when you have to get to work. Conversations must look natural, but in fact they are not. If you read a transcript of a real conversation you will find it full of ‘um’ and ‘er’, repetitions, incomplete sentences, and it will go round in circles, off in tangents and not end anywhere. A few writers might make a point of doing it like that. 99% of readers will not be up for reading it. So the conversations we write must be artifice.
Let’s start with the most important stuff - what has the reader got to take away? What must they learn, and feel? Write the points down: Belinda was there when she should have been here. Alice is unhappy with that. The house has got a huge mortgage. Boris is gambling again. Work out the order in which they would flow most logically. That’s your route through the conversation. And Keep It As Short As Possible. If later, you find that the conversation still doesn’t satisfy, it’s probably because you didn’t do this first part as well as you should. Go back to it, and start again. Do you really need the reference to the mortgage here? Cut it. Now, how does it all fit together?
Done that? All right. So now we write it, making it feel as if it’s actual talk, rather than contrived prose. This is where the characters have to wake up and live - use the words they would use, react the way they would react. There’s often a dilemma here. Unless the story is set in a time and place with which the reader is absolutely familiar, the characters should have a shared knowledge of their world that the reader doesn’t have. Try listening to two aerospace engineers talking. It’s like trying to follow a conversation in a different language. If the reader does not sense that shared knowledge, the characters won’t feel real. But the same shared knowledge excludes the reader, because the characters can’t plausibly start explaining everything to each other from square one. Unless - and here’s a device that writers often use - one of the main characters is a stranger, an outsider or a child, who has to learn about the world they are in and can do so at the reader’s pace. Otherwise it’s a choice between (a) putting the characters on ‘pause’ while the narrator takes the reader off for a paragraph of explanation, or (b) getting the characters to say just enough for the reader to work it out from context. ‘Where’s Louie?’ ‘He found a blib in an alley.’ ‘Oh.’ Means nothing. But add ‘The funeral was yesterday.’ and we know that ‘blib’ is something fatal - a hit-man or a knife or a soft-nosed bullet, maybe. Add instead ‘Those socks of his will never be white again.’ and we can guess that a ‘blib’ is a muddy puddle and Louie is Belinda’s three year old who is now in disgrace upstairs. And we know that this is a world with its own slang, and we can go on believing it. I prefer (b), almost always. Usually I try not to have a separate narrator’s voice at all.
Ums, ers and interjections are least important and can come last, like putting cinnamon on the cake. A very thin layer of them, sprinkled on the top once the real thought is done.
I make it sound easy, don’t I? I write all this because I’m currently struggling with some conversations between my hero and his colleagues in my science fiction novel WE. It’s at least the third draft I’ve done on these, and in one case I think the fifth. Time to violate last week’s Resolution 1.
First of January 2009. Resolutions for the coming year. (Here goes…)
1. Less Vice, More Virtue. This is good as a catch-all. Better still, come halfway through the year I can forget which way round it was I said it. In this context Virtue means starting when it’s time to start and writing until it’s time to stop. Stopping is then optional, but carrying on doesn’t mean that I get off starting at the due time next day. Vice on the other hand, means delaying for that extra cup of coffee in the morning, sloping off for biscuits and more coffee in the middle of a session, and allowing other sorts of spurious Virtue to intervene (eg breaking off to sweep the kitchen floor - even if it’s for the first time in a week.)
2. I Shall Not Fear
(a) Readers. They are all different. Some of them love my stuff. Some of them, well, don’t. That’s how it is.
(b) Reviewers (if any).
(c) Other writers. I shall Read More (Note. Quantative target suppressed).
Really the main thing I need to fear is the runaway creative instinct. I may be thinking what I’m doing is brilliant when everyone else thinks it’s just bizarre. O Lord , make me fearless, yes, but deliver me from Self Destruction.
3. I Shall Produce. This should not be too hard. I have two works in process already. Both should be finished before the summer. There’s another in the loft that’s waiting to come down and get started. I can keep up the output, all right. It’s getting the contracts that’s the key. And there’s not much that can meaningfully be put into a New Year’s Resolution about that. “4. I shall be Successful”? Nope. Doesn’t work.
Which only goes to show that the whole New Year’s Resolution Industry is a massive case of collective displacment activity. Just like poor Bridget Jones writing how much weight she was going to lose, when what she really wanted was a man and let the weight thing go hang. If we fast forward twelve months and the end-year review reads: “Vice: Failed. Virtue: Failed on that too. Fear: Woke screaming at nights. Books published 1.” Well, that won’t have been a bad year at all.
And by that standard, neither was 2008. Thank you very much
If you want this life you have to get used to the waiting.
Waiting, mainly, for others to read what you’ve written. The industry is saturated with manuscripts. I tell Ginger, my agent, that I should be able to let her have a first look at my next book in January. She says brightly that I am the fifth of her clients to promise her a manuscript that month. (Forewarned is forearmed. I’ll get it off early just to make sure I’m at the top of the pile.) Ginger reads quickly - you learn to do that in publishing - but even so I shall be lucky to get a response before January is out. I spoke with a manuscript reader at a publisher’s party a couple of weeks ago. Her desk is tottering with manuscripts and she reckons on a three month turnaround time. I did that job once, years back. Sounds as if nothing much has changed.
Waiting for something to come of it. They’ve read it, they’ve told you they like it, and then…? At the same party that I met the manuscript reader I also talked with a scout who has been kind to me in the past. In his sympathetic ear I sobbed that I had been waiting ten months for an offer from my editor on my next novel. There there, he said (not without a tinge of hysterical laughter). With this editor - whom we both admire - ten months from submission to offer was not unusual. If it went over a year, maybe I should worry…
Waiting for publication. It’s quite incredible how long the publication lead times can be. We were doing copy-editing and covers on The Lightstep in January 2007. The hardback emerged in March 2008, the paperback is not due until January 2009. Of course, if they’ve got a reason to rush something out - a new prize-winner or a celebrity bio that’s just right for Christmas - they can do it. But in the obscurities of aspiring literary fiction that doesn’t happen.
And after publication it’s waiting for reviews, recognition, anything really. ‘I’ll let you know when I have any news’ says the nice publicity agent whom we last met in “Author and Publicity“, in a tone that tells me it’s not a case of when but if, and a pretty tenuous if at that. Winter deepens. The news is dire. Recession sweeps the land like a chilly wind. The freelance editor who is working up the offer I’m waiting for has just had her days cut by half, so why am I feeling sorry for myself? Put another log on the fire. And wait. And while I’m waiting, what am I going to do?
Write another book, of course.
I have a companion on my journey through medieval Wales. His name is Gerald.
Gerald is a churchman. He is tall, gaunt, pious, learned and very full of himself. He was born in the middle of the twelfth century and pursued a career in church politics, in which he was ultimately unsuccessful. But he left detailed descriptions of the people and customs of the Wales of his time. He is therefore essential reading for anyone trying to write a novel set there and then. He is a good guide, full of stories and useful little nuggets of information. He describes country dances and local superstitions. He tells me that in his day there were beavers on the river Teifi. I may suppose Wales to have been the land of the longbow, but the bow that Gerald describes is short, and it isn’t made of yew either. These are all good things to pack in around the story that I have written, to make it firm and strong and to help it belong to the time in which I have set it. I feel quite friendly towards Gerald.
I cannot believe that he would feel the same towards me - or my characters. One thing that’s clear from his writings is that he was quick to condemn. The human frailties that I want to celebrate - lust, drunkeness, fear and greed - are all failings that he despises. Piety and obedience are his virtues, but he will not find them in my pages. His ghost stands behind my chair rolling its eyes and clicking its tongue as my words creep on to the page. This morning I will try my hand at some Latin. He will take one look over my shoulder and then wander off in disgust. For sure he was a writer himself, and a penniless one. “Nowadays no one ever pays for books,” he wrote “and I do not seek or expect any other reward. Among men in high places there seems to be a conspiracy against authors.” He knew all about an author’s self-pity. But that did not stop him damning his fellow writers with his pen. That’s another thing authors do.
Yet I have this right over him - that I have read what he has written. It’s what he begged for eight hundred years ago. I am neither the first nor the last to do this, but I too have granted his wish. Therefore I may grab him by the hem of his robe and demand that he guide me. He is no Virgil and I am no Dante. But it is the fate of the greater that he must lead the less.
If it’s December it must be Wales. This is the Plan.
November Part I was about the launch of The Fatal Child - preparing and giving various talks in various places. November Part II was devoted to reviewing my Science Fiction novel WE, including a final round of research into bits of astrophysics that I felt I hadn’t fully understood. And to conversations with editors, which threw up some issues with the story that I still need to sort. But that all needs a bit of a mull, so I shall not start on it until January - a month or so before the final manuscript is due.
That leaves December free for a return to medieval Wales, to redraft the novel The Keys of Carey. If I can get this done, then Keys can be out with its first readers for a month or two while I finalise WE. The sooner it’s out, the sooner it’s back and the sooner I will have it in shape for submission. So this month is real. I need it.
But of course December is never free. Never set a deadline in December. As a working month it suffers from serious drawbacks. A trip to London for a publisher’s party, with side meetings, takes out two days (even allowing for no hangover). A trip to parents-in-law, another to Kent, children at home… And (Oh God!) Christmas cards, Christmas shopping… Look, I’m trying to do a complete redraft here. The scene where He meets Her for the first time is going to take a week to sort out by itself. By January I’ve got to be on the moons of Neptune. There’s only so long I can hang around in medieval Welsh mud putting rosewater in My Lady’s bath! And yet the approach of the Feast is inexorable. It’s a power that cannot be controlled. It demands submission, and when the time comes I will have to submit. Who would have thought that the arrival of one small baby could wreak such havoc to a chap’s schedule? I can almost hear Herod saying the same thing. (And what was he working on when they knocked at his door announcing those three strange visitors? His autobiography, I expect…)
And now I come to Atti, the Fatal Child herself. ‘She’s the real heroine’ our artist said after reading the novel. Maybe he’s right. She is central, she is brave. She has moments of humanity and compassion even when things are at their very worst for her. Much of what goes wrong around her is actually the fault of others, who love her too much and whose love she is unable to return because of her inner nightmare. It is this nightmare, this terror, that is her defining flaw.
How do you invent a character, particularly one who is so complex and important to the story? I know where I first saw her, in the image that came to me of a young woman standing quite still in a garden while a massacre went on not far away. And I knew what I wanted from her. She was to bring the series of three books full circle. She would share many things with Phaedra, the heroine of The Cup of the World (a dark beauty, a scarred and lonely childhood, a husband who courts her in her dreams). Yet now it would not be the man who would lead us down the path towards darkness, but the woman. Where Phaedra had fought her nightmares and won, Atti must fight them and lose. She would be the earthly embodiment of Beyah, the goddess who weeps forever. She was to play the role of Guenevere.
All that was the easy bit. I did not so much plan it as find it rising to the surface of my brain when I was working out the story. As always, the hard part is filling in the stuff that doesn’t come naturally. In this case it was harder still because one of the important things about Atti is that she doesn’t want you to get to know her. She turns away, doesn’t look at you, doesn’t let you see what she’s thinking. She has a coldness that is defensive. As the various redrafts went by I put in first one new chapter, then a second, at the start of Part Two, learning more about her through the eyes of the peasant girl Melissa. The final redraft, when I’d got just about everything else sorted to my satisfaction, was devoted pretty well entirely to Atti, to wake her up and round her off, and also to give her an exit that would balance her first entry, stepping out across a muddy, torchlit yard with single spots of rain hissing like arrows from the sky.
The Fatal Child is told through the eyes of two characters: Thomas Padry, a high-ranking servant of the King, and Melissa, an orphaned peasant girl.
The choice of viewpoint is a fundamental decision for the author. Is the reader to be in the head of one character, or more than one, or standing back from all of them? If one character, should it be the ‘I’ voice, or the third person? How far should the reader identify and sympathise with this character - totally, mostly or not much? (”Not Much” is very risky!) More viewpoints give the writer more freedom. We can plausibly witness a range of scenes without having to find reasons why one person is there to see them all. But of course there is more work to be done in building characters who are satisfactory companions for the reader. The answers to these questions will colour the whole story.
In this case I did not have to think very hard. The Fatal Child is a story of two camps - the King’s and the Queen’s. I needed a witness in each camp. I also had - it often seems to happen this way - two characters who had taken minor parts in the previous novel (The Widow and the King) and about whom I wanted to know more. Better still, they were very different. The contrast between them became part of the telling.
Thomas Padry is a former teacher, a man who has a big brain and knows it. But his soul is not quite built to match. He means well, thinks of himself as someone who does good, but is blind to his own faults and commits a grave error. Over the course of the novel he finds that all the products of his brain will come to nothing. His good works will be overtaken, his advice is ignored, his peacemaking is futile. This should be a moment of destruction for him but it is not. He is redeemed by the way he has come to love his king, and by his willingness to suffer in service.
Melissa too loves the King - this is the one thing she has in common with Padry. But she sees him from a wholly different perspective. Her journey in the novel is to understand the difference between a love that idolises and one that is realistic, and to choose the second rather than the first. She is simple and practical. The intrigues of the court are way over her head. Where Padry is a doer, Melissa represents the down-trodden and the done-to. But her moral compass is better than his. When the powers speak, at the end of the novel, it is through Melissa that they find their voice.
I was preparing a talk for a local writers’ group this week. Struggling to find words of my own, I resorted to those of other writers. Some of them are worth a further outing. For those of us who are feeling undervalued, the problem was diagnosed as long ago as the 18th century - we’re in oversupply.
“That unprosperous race [men of letters]… …their numbers are everywhere so great as commonly to reduce the price of their labour to a very paltry recompense” Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations.
There you have it. Anyone volunteering to resign? I thought not. Mind you, from the way we write about ourselves you’d think we were dying to get out of this life.
“Writing is not a profession but a vocation of unhappiness” (Georges Simenon)
and
“Writing is easy: all you do is sit staring at a blank sheet of paper until drops of blood form on your forehead.” (Gene Wilder).
To Wilder, and all others paralysed by writer’s block, you might respond “Don’t get it right. Just get it written.” (James Thurber). To Simenon, we might try “Writers are unequalled not so much in their suffering as in their ability to complain of it.” (I made this one up - I think. If I didn’t, then it’s a case of unintentional plagiarism, which is a hazard of the profession.)
Writers seem to agree than insanity is an issue, but dispute whether writing is a cause or a cure.
“Many suffer from the incurable disease of writing, and it becomes chronic in their sick minds” (Juvenal)
and
“Writing is a socially acceptable form of schizophrenia” (E L Doctorow).
But on the other hand Graham Greene says: “Writing is a form of therapy; sometimes I wonder how all those who do not write, compose or paint can manage the madness, the melancholia, the panic fear which is inherent in a human condition”. While Byron, more succinctly, said: “If I don’t write to empty my mind, I go mad”. Which may explain a thing or two about his life. Half the time he was mad and the rest of it his mind was empty.
My thanks to the Thinkexist site for supplying many of these. I will close with my favourite, from the American journalist Bill Stout. I commend it to all writers everywhere.
“Whether or not you write well, write bravely.”
The Fatal Child launches in UK today. I should be used to this moment, but I’m not. It’s scary.
I’m talking to at least five audiences over the next few days, starting with the pupils of the High School for Girls and the Kings School in Gloucester. My talk there is on Ideas, and it’s the first time I’ve done it (Somehow I always have to write a new talk for each occasion). But what’s really scary is that this time I’ve chosen to support the talk with visual aids, so I’m using a laptop and projector. Projectors are like sulky stallions. They know when they’re in the hands of a tyro, and they can’t wait to throw you. And for an encore they pick a fight with the laptop.
The other immediately scary thing is that walkers in Eastgate, Gloucester, have been hailed for the past few days by big posters in the Waterstones bookshop window, announcing my appearance there on Saturday. What if I get there on the day and find them queuing around the block? Or if I get there and no one comes in at all? (Far more likely - if they’re queuing around the block it’ll be a case of mistaken identity. There’ll be some rock star with my name that only I have never heard of, and they’ll all think it is him. Or the posters have got muddled up and everyone thinks it’s Barak Obama doing the signing.)
And then there’s the book itself. The Fatal Child. My child, so to speak.
It’s not so much what’s in the book. I know that’s good, and different. It will please a majority of people who read it (one nice review already). What nags at me, worries me, is the bit between the moment it hits the shelves and the moment that readers start turning its pages. Why should they pick this one out of so many? In a world of thousands of thousands of books, very few make it in meaningful numbers. What can I do about it? Very little. I can talk, to those who will listen. I can carry on talking about the book even when I think people probably aren’t listening. But mostly I can only watch. The child has gone out into the world now. She must make her way on her own.
I worked at NATO for a while. There was a lot of sitting in big meetings hearing diplomats take turns to speak. The best speakers often began with the phrase “Thank you, Mr Chairman. I have just three points…”
You’ve got something to say - a joke, a speech, a story, it doesn’t matter. How do you keep people listening to you? Try putting it into a structure of three. “There was an Irishman, and Englishman and a Scotsman…” How many is that? Three. How many people passed the wounded man on the road to Jericho? Three, the third being the Good Samaritan. The oldest fiction in the English language is Beowulf. It’s a story in three parts, of a man who fights three monsters, and the third causes his death. (Did anyone see the film? Not a bad effort, I thought). Our minds like things that come in threes. The first time we just see what happens. The second time we recognise it. The third time we are ready for the twist or the punch - whatever it is that’s coming. Three has a power. For the storyteller, it’s like a force of gravity. It bends things into a new path.
I was not planning a third book in The Cup of the World series. I could almost hear the yawns. Another fantasy trilogy? Who was going to take that seriously these days? The Widow and the King had a good, solid ending, and I thought of leaving it there. I also thought at one stage of breaking The Fatal Child into two, to make four books, just so there wouldn’t be three. But the power of three is very strong. Right from the start I had given myself - yes - three monsters. They were Phaedra’s husband Ulfin, his mentor the prince Paigan and the goddess Beyah. (This in itself is a good illustration of how the power of three works: I actually had at least ten monsters, the other seven being the brothers of prince Paigan. But what the mind sees is the pattern of three.) By the end of The Widow I had dealt with the husband and the prince. I had not yet dealt with the goddess.
She had begun as a moment of spontaneous invention during the first draft of The Cup. A world figure, weeping for a dead child. (Lots of resonances there - our guilt towards our parents, a sense of original sin, our fears about the way we are treating the Earth…) At that stage I just wanted her for the mood music, pointing implicitly to the danger that Phaedra and her own child faced. Then I decided that those divine tears must be the source of the magic. This conveniently joined up a couple of loose creative threads. But from that moment the goddess became one of Three - the three from whom the bitter magic of that world came. You don’t see her often - just twice, fleetingly, in the whole series. Yet the idea of her is immensely powerful. She underlies everything that happens. It was because of her that the third book was written.
Today my first copy of The Fatal Child has come through the post from my publishers. I have put it on the shelf beside The Cup of the World and The Widow and the King. There they are together, unashamedly three.
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