John Dickinson

Better get started.

So, put aside the final re-write of WE, which I was all fired up for. Position proofs of THE FATAL CHILD on kitchen table. Arrange inbox and outbox. Designate area where I will put those pages I have marked with corrections. Music. Coffee. Pen. Deep breath. Begin.

Thus far, my feelings are probably pretty close to those of anyone called on to perform this most tedious of all tasks in publishing. But I am also having to cope with my own reactions as author of the thing that is before me - my creation, about to be born into the world. I may be seized with despair at the imperfections which are now, when it’s too late, suddenly obvious to my eye. I may become convinced that nobody in their right minds will read past the second paragraph. Or I may perform a feat of astounding self-hypnosis and become spellbound by the elegance and poignancy of my own prose. I may be totally persuaded by each fresh page, and ready to weep buckets at the ending. It’s sure to be one reaction or the other. And neither, of course, is any real guide to what the reader will think when they come to it fresh for the first time. And neither improves the quality of my proofreading.

The proofreader is a machine. The proofreader must put aside all thought for plot or phrasing or even consistency. The proofreader is as mindless as a computer programme, testing each word and punctuation mark in turn. And of course all the easy errors have already been picked up by spellcheckers and the like. What the proofreader is hunting for is that most elusive of preys, the error that is disguised as something correct, the word that should be “they” but has become “the” or “then”, or something like that. They’re out there, furtive, shy, camouflaged in that jungle of a hundred thousand other words. Now find them.

More coffee.

I start from the back. Last page first. No, that’s a lie. First I check the contents page - chapters, titles, page numbering. This is all stuff that hasn’t been put in before. There’s always one or two you can flush out here. But this time there isn’t. Hah. Someone’s done their stuff properly this time - uncaring of the feelings of the proofreader, who isn’t supposed to have any feelings but still feels it would be nice to start by finding something where he expects it to be. All right. So now we turn to the back and begin, last page first. I do it this way round to stop myself getting distracted by my own narrative. It doesn’t work, of course. Already my eyes are misting over at the drama and emotion of the ending. Also starting to worry about references to the passage of time, which really I should have sorted out at the copy-editing stage. Concentrate, curse you. Remember what you are here for.

More coffee.

My eye is a funnel. It is a fine sprocket reeling the words past one after another like links on a bicycle chain. I am like Polyphemus, sitting at the mouth of his cave and feeling each of his sheep in turn as they go out to pasture. (Not a good image actually, since Polyphemus had just had his eye poked out by Odysseus and the cunning old Ithacan was slipping his men out strapped to the underside of the sheep.) The number of sheets on which I have found anything to mark is worryingly small, and most of my marks aren’t really proof errors at all but other stuff that I just can’t let go and must beg my editors to let me tweak even at this very last of all last moments.

More coffee. Now, concentrate. I am the proofreader extraordinary. Nothing is going to sip past me.

That was back during the Cold War, when MOD had a fearsome reputation. The facades of the Main Building in Whitehall were fascistic and blank. But on the inside it was benign. I stayed, with various secondments, for seventeen years. Oh, there were moments that made me weep, literally. There were even some when I prayed. If you care enough about what you’re doing that’s bound to happen sooner or later. I also got frustrated with the endless game-playing over budgets, the slowness of promotion, and the general lack of faith in the administrative competence of anyone sitting more than a few metres from your own seat. But I saw no bullying, no scapegoating, no poisonous office politics, and the rewards were more than reasonable. There were reasons why I left, but it wasn’t because my employer had done anything bad to me.

I recently compared notes with my former tutor. He was about to leave the spires of Oxford to help manage a charitable trust in Indonesia. I had quit MOD, that large and protective organisation, to go it alone as a writer. We were both sure, intellectually, of the reasons for what we were doing. But the subconscious was not convinced. It shrieked with discomfort. We both experienced this through dreams. His was that he had taken a sledgehammer and smashed the chimney out of the centre of his house. The house still stood, it still looked the same, and yet he knew in his heart that it was now fundamentally unsound. Mine was a more bureaucratic dream (naturally). I was going to a large international meeting. I had my papers, my tie, everything I needed - even my trousers. I knew what I was going to say. I went down to the big meeting room. I opened the doors - and there was nobody there. The organisation had vanished.

And to what effect? To what effect do I sit here in a quiet house, tapping at keys, talking to myself and chasing the odd rogue cat out of the door? I did some numbers the other day. Thirty thousand people have read The Cup of the World. Now, that’s not a living (I smile wryly when I remember our civil servants’ gripe about how little we were paid). It’s not the sort of figure that impresses booksellers or publishers or literary journalists. Not yet. But it’s something far more than I could have achieved at MOD. There were just too many people helping me, there.

What’s scared me off it up to now has been the fear that the reader will suspect me of fulfilling personal fantasies through my hero’s story. And as I am indeed a fantasist, and quite capable of daydreaming myself into a hero, it has always seemed better to steer well clear of the temptation. Besides, third-person narratives have their advantages. You can shift viewpoint if you want to. Both The Lightstep and The Widow and the King have two main characters. The narrative swaps between them, one scene from her viewpoint followed by another from his. The characters have different perceptions, different feelings, different information at their disposal. If you move viewpoint at the right time you get a stronger story. That’s very much harder to do if you are writing in the first person. Yes, you can get your ‘I’ character to stop and tell you an episode from another person’s point of view. I’ve seen it done. But you are still stuck with that voice. If you’re ‘I’ character is a cigar-chomping action man, he still has to speak like a cigar-chomping action man while he tells you how the sensitive young heroine is coping with whatever misfortune she’s fallen into. There are some things he’s just not going to say - or even feel.

Well, I’ve been lured into the ‘I’ voice this time. It’s because I can hear the narrator voice in my head. It’s very clear. It’s a coarse voice, sometimes humorous, sometimes bitter, frequently drunken. The man (yes, it’s a man, I’ll give that much away) has his own store of wisdom to live by.  He repeats it to himself. Sometimes it’s like a litany. He will do good things for bad reasons and bad things for good ones, and will see at the end what he has done. Gilbert the Fleming is his name. I want the reader to identify with him, very closely. That’s why the ‘I’ voice is right.

Fair enough. But already (beginning chapter 3, first draft) there are pitfalls. The main one I have noticed so far is the challenge of keeping the voice consistent. The man has his ways of saying things. There are words and phrases he wouldn’t use. But I will, if my attention wanders. And this is where confidence can waver. Is it better at this stage to charge ahead but with the feeling that what I’m laying down in this first draft may be deeply flawed, or should I go back over and over to hunt for unlikely polysyllabic participles? And when I say things like ‘ I can hear his voice in my head’ - yes that’s true, for some of what he says. The rest I just have to make work.

And there’s only one way to do that -  I have to get to know this guy.

Between them, however, lie great areas of darkness. I know roughly what needs to happen but not in what order, nor how I am going to tell the story. And typically for me, I have more areas of darkness at the beginning of the story and more lights at the end. Beginning is always the hardest. This is the moment when the confidence falters and I think - ‘have I really got a novel here at all?’

We took a few days holiday in Wales. No, I didn’t do any research (except to climb a hill in the Preselis which doesn’t count). But I took a walk or two, and thought. And most of what I thought was about the atmosphere of the novel, running over the bits that seemed strongest, thinking of a few ideas that might come in here and there. It was a kind of self-hypnosis. I made myself think it could be done. And when we got home I spent the first morning plotting out the chapters in a grid - what the reader would want to know, what would happen, what else I wanted to get into that scene. Of course this sort of note taking is only gets you part of the way. Scenes will change as you write them - particularly the ones you haven’t been seeing clearly to begin with. I may also decide to bin some, if I think they haven’t worked, and replace them with others. Nevertheless I have a plan. I have mapped how I think the path runs between the lamposts. No doubt I will find myself stumbling in the darkness. But now, slowly and with arms outstretched, I can begin.

They were all working, and all women. (They had given a copy to a male colleague and invited him along but he hadn’t made it. No surprise there. I have yet to find a book group with any men below retirement age among its members.) They were also very nice, both generally and about the book. Some had found it a struggle but that’s fine. It’s never going to be everyone’s cup of tea. What I’m finding is that most of those who stick with it do feel rewarded at the end. And some really love it.

I think the atmosphere helped. When you’re surrounded by chatter and the smell of coffee and the Waterstones bookshelves, there’s less danger of the event turning into an author’s monologue. Also I had brought along a map of the Holy Roman Empire as an icebreaker, which sounds deadly but is actually quite fun when you start looking at all those tiny different-coloured splodges, musing on the course of History, and ordering that next medium (read: merely enormous) cappucino which is of course essential to the proceedings. Some of the group’s criticisms were familiar to me. Others I had not heard before. I shall listen carefully at future groups to see if the same things come up. Not that there’s anything I can do about The Lightstep now. But it’s not going to be the last literary historical novel I write.

And what did they get? Well, meeting with an author, hearing about researching and constructing a novel, getting the inside story on the book they’ve been reading - that’s what it says on the tin. But also (and other book groups have said the same) having the author actually there does mean that you discuss the book much more thoroughly and intensely than you otherwise might. Hearing about someone’s holiday, and someone else’s weekend with the brownies - that all has to wait for another time. And why shouldn’t there be another time, anyway? After all, the coffee shop’s always there.

(1) Dostoevksy’s Brothers Karamazov. Untouched for six months. There was a dowdy, greying Russian woman in the middle of Central Asia who assured a roomful of international delegates that wars could be stopped by reading Dostoevsky. I wish I could convey to you the depth of politely stunned silence that fell on that assembly of representatives from NATO, Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan, Georgia etc when she said this. The silence endured when it was time for questions. The Turkish chairman assured her that this was because everyone had understood her perfectly.

I was there, and I hadn’t understood. I cornered her afterwards to demand the secret of lasting peace. Conflicts, she said - interpreted through a long-suffering Polish colleague of mine - arise from human evil. The best understanding of human evil is to be found in the pages of Dostoevsky. Therefore the best way of stopping wars is by a world-wide programme of education based upon his writings. QED. I said but this and but that and by the way you are not seriously telling me that we bombed Kosovo because Bill Clinton was caught with Monika Lewinsky, are you? (She did say that). But I promised that yes, I would read him. Years later, I am still trying to keep that promise. No, I am. One day I will finish at least one Dostoevsky. Maybe even this one. But just for the moment my ship has ground to a halt on the soft sandbanks of Father Zossima. As for the secret of lasting peace, I haven’t found it yet. Unless it’s to lock the warlords away with copies of The Brothers Karamazov and tell them that they can’t start another war until they’ve finished it.

So much for my diplomatic career. What else is in the pile? Ah yes, (2) The Book Thief. I picked this up at my daughter’s behest, and last turned a page about three weeks ago. This isn’t Markus Zusak’s fault. It’s mine. I am definitely definitely intimidated. I know that horrible things are going to happen and I don’t want to be around when they do. I wish I could write horrible things the way that Zusak does. Meanwhile my thirteen year old daughter, who has read it and wants to talk to someone about it, keeps nagging me to get on with it.

And (3) Kate Teltscher’s The High Road to China, the story of the first British diplomatic expedition into Tibet. It’s the only work of non-fiction in the pile. Is that why I find it easier? Because however good it is, it doesn’t intimidate me because it’s non-fiction? Maybe. Still my progress is painfully slow as I follow the young Scotish hero deeper and deeper into that extraordinary landscape. I have to admire his guts, and his persistence, as he negotiates his way past the physical and diplomatic obstacles in his path. He seems to take it all in his stride - mountains, the rope-bridges, the reek of butter lamps and the taste of oriental diplomatic tea. A fine example. I should be inspired. Indeed I am inspired. I shall gird myself to renew my literary travels as he does his physical ones. I just have this terrible fear that the Panchen Lama is about to turn round and invite him to read Dostoevsky.

I said um, yes, maybe, when I get an idea for it and so on. Then I went off and pursued higher reaches of literature, which is what I do.

And then an idea came.

You know the cartoon convention where a character, at a moment of moral decision, is approached in their thoughts by a little angel and a little devil who urge different courses of action? Well, this story is about a girl who has the same thing happen to her. The twist is that we see the story largely through the eyes of the little devil, and its with him that we sympathise. How do you persuade someone who is top of the class, nice, dutiful, helpful to everyone etc to fall off their pedestal? Like The Screwtape Letters, but for laughs. I certainly laughed as I wrote it. So did those I showed it to. I called it Muddle and Win.

Now I don’t need anyone to tell me that we are getting into dodgy territory here. There’s possession and occult on the one hand, and all sorts of subliminal but real child protection issues on the other. Plus writing about the devil is a bit like walking under ladders or opening doors marked “13″. I’m superstitious enough to have to make a conscious decision that I don’t believe in him (well, this time anyway). And there are sane and intelligent people who do. But of course, it’s the very dodginess of the territory that makes it exciting, to writer and reader. So I sent the story to David, warning him - tongue in cheek - that it might earn the DFC its first fatwa.

In the weeks of waiting (it’s always weeks, and sometimes it runs to months) I did what I always do, which is to prepare myself for a No. “No, too dodgy”. Or possibly “No, too moral - this is a comic, Dickinson.” I wasn’t very worried. If I had had to bet I would have bet on a Yes. Anyway, I had only invested a couple of weeks in it. Normally I work for most of a year on a manuscript before sending it in.

The one thing I didn’t expect was that he would ask me to draw the thing.

What? Draw it? Me? I’m a writer, not an artist! Why me?

Maybe I’ll go off and pursue the higher reaches of literature for a bit more. But I know why he’s suggested it. And it’s not because he thinks my drawing might be any better than your average six-year-old’s. Cartoon story-telling is a different medium to the written page. It has to be visually interesting. That’s the point of the comic, after all. So will there be enough going on in the pictures? Actually, I think there will be. I can see pretty well every image in my mind’s eye. It’s just the actual drawing that’s going to be a challenge.

Oh, and the story’s OK too. Trust me.