John Dickinson

A fortnight ago we left our hero the author in the middle of a metaphorical car-chase. This week we find him struggling in a huge web. And it’s one of his own devising.

What we’re trying to do is to combine two characters into one. And this is in a novel that should be complete and in the last stages of editing before it goes to production. So we want to change as little as possible while we do it. It’s a bit like saying to an architect, as you watch the roof being put on his new cathedral –‘You know, I don’t think you should have those twin towers at the east end. Couldn’t it be a great big dome instead?’ And as his face falls, you add ‘…without redesigning the whole thing, of course.’ And you mean this to be reassuring.

Underlying every story there is – or should be – a web of supports and balances, a bit like the arches and buttresses of a cathedral. Each scene should be supported by the scenes preceding and following it, not simply in what is said and done but in mood, pace, variety, so that everything is given the right emphasis and the reader is carried through the story. Ideally this structure should go in naturally at the first writing , without too much labour or conscious thought on the part of the writer. (It’s always best when things happen naturally). After that, any time you go back and rewrite a scene or replace it with another, you have to look not only at the new scene but how it fits, consciously and subconsciously, with the others around it.

Now in this case we are not replacing any scenes. I can find ways of getting everything that needs to be said and done said and done with the new diminished cast of characters. If it’s no longer possible for the two-into-one character to take part in a scene with the hero (because she simply wouldn’t behave in the way that the scene calls for) I can bring on a supporting character to do that bit instead. Easy. Change a few words and turns of phrase, and the scene still works fine. What’s worrying me is what all this is doing to the subconscious structure of the novel. Every time I pull on a thread, other threads in the web get pulled too. I may be pulling things out of shape without knowing it. For example, this same supporting character appeared and did a scene with my same hero two scenes back. Now, even though everything she says is consistent, the set-up feels repetitive. Flabby. We’re losing momentum, here.

Or are we? Is it just that I’m losing confidence? I’m right in the thick of it at the moment, with web-thread wrapped round my arms and over my face. What I’m afraid of is that when I finally pull myself free and look back at what I’ve done I’ll find my once-trim structure all ripped and baggy. And at this stage in the process, that will not be good. Why don’t spiders get caught in their own webs? Because they know which threads not to touch. Why don’t architects redesign cathedrals? Because they brain the person who suggests it. But authors, it seems, are a different species. They are bent on self destruction.

Dad’s got an OBE! Let’s take a little time out to celebrate.

When I spoke to him after the announcement he said he thought it had been given primarily for his time as Chairman of the Society of Authors. I’m sure that’s right. There has to be an element of public service for an award like this. But it also looks like one more recognition of his writing and poetry. And I may be just a little bit biased here, but I think he deserves it.

There is something a bit special about this wordsmith. His brain goes everywhere. I used to be shocked how little research he did before sending his heroes to 6th century Byzantium or war-torn contemporary Africa. He didn’t read up about these places, he imagined them. And people who’ve lived in Africa say how vividly he’s brought the place back to them. He’s imagined himself into the skull of a dying old woman and a child of a prehuman species 200,000 years ago. He’s also worked out and published a theory that to be able to fly and breathe fire dragons must have been lighter than air – flying gas-bags, in fact. I remember him telling me about the day he tried this theory of dragon evolution on David Attenborough. (Apparently Mr Attenborough was not convinced.)

He writes for adults, teenagers and young children. His books are mysteries, fantasies, science fiction, ghost stories, pet stories, historical and contemporary political. He doesn’t do cookbooks and he doesn’t do chick-lit but there’s not much else he hasn’t had a go at. He doesn’t pander to fantasies about power or sex. His lead characters are thoughtful, often meek. I can recall a rare one or two who have special talents or powers, but those powers are not used to slaughter enemies or shake the world. If you meet a larger-than-life figure in his pages it’s usually a baddie, or someone who is marked for destruction. And he writes well. His books are strong on setting and character. I won’t list the prizes he’s won – it gets rather boring after a bit – but he’s deserved those too.

He’s written poetry all his working life. When he was a journalist he did humorous pieces for Punch. But he kept writing the stuff after he became an author, even though there was no prospect of getting it published. He writes short, compact pieces with tightly-woven rhymes and images of love, time and the passing of generations. He also wrote a series of intense poems about my mother’s illness and death. There’s now a volume of his poetry available through his website.

Peter Dickinson, OBE. Hurrah!

In the classic tough-guy movie, there’s always that moment when the hero’s car gets ambushed, a bus blocks his route, the roofs sprout machine-gunners and bullets fill the air. The hero faultlessly executes a handbrake turn, the tyres screech and he accelerates away in the opposite direction pursued by bad guys and an orchestra. The ensuing mayhem carries on for far longer than any real ambush ever would, leaving a trail of destruction across the city. And the film-producer’s budget will have taken some knocks too.

I suppose every walk of life has its equivalent. In the quiet world of the author it’s when you get the copy edited manuscript back and the copy editor has left flecks of vomit in the margin.

The copy editor doesn’t like my heroine. She really doesn’t like my heroine. And that’s a problem. Because things like this should all have been dealt with by now. Copy editing is supposed to be about whether you really want to use the same word three times on one page, or whether the hero should have turned left out of the door at this point because the last time he went this way he turned right. It’s the last check through before you go to printing. But when your copy-editor is herself an experienced editor – and moreover she’s a She and what she’s complaining about is your principal female character – that’s when you’re looking at bullet-holes in your windscreen.

And people have been murmuring to me for a while that maybe the heroine is a weak point in the story, and each time I go away and I think I’ve fixed her, and each time it turns out I haven’t. I think the problem has been that she’s supposed to chuck herself at the hero without really knowing how. So her scenes are a bit cringe-making, which is tough for anyone who wants to identify with her.

The deadline for production is only weeks away. I am already half-way through another novel. I have three options.

1) Ignore problem. All books have flaws. It’s only one reader’s reaction after all.
Er…

2) Snip away at problem. Remove the phrases that cause most offence. Heroine is just less emotional. (Actually, she would have less character all round.)

3) Emergency manoeuvre. Rewrite character completely. In three weeks.

I spent an uncomfortable half-morning not working. I did the shopping. I don’t remember where light dawned – it might have been in the car park at Waitrose. The answer isn’t to rewrite one character. It’s to rewrite two. Combine them. The second character in question is also one that some readers have been murmuring about, because he has interesting features but doesn’t get to play much of a role. Actually, if I do that, then I need to rewrite the hero a bit as well, because the heroine is now going be rather icy and self-sufficient, and the hero will have to be a bit more touchy-feely just for balance. All in all I’m looking at changes running through about a third of the novel. It is late, late, late to be doing this.

Telephone discussions. Copy-editor is supportive. Desk editor is content. (Really, it’s nice that they have so much faith, but I sometimes worry about how lightly these guys hold the reins!) I grip the wheel read: mouse. I grab the handbrake keyboard. Screech! And on the rare occasions that anyone makes films about authors the next three weeks pass in a series of short clips of author typing feverishly (yes), pacing to and fro (yes), clock showing three am (not on your life) while dramatic music thumps away in the background. (No. I can’t do serious work with music playing. It gives me brain overload.) Which is of course why there are so many more films about tough guys than there are about authors. It’s just so much more fun when you can see the action.

Even if the action would never happen like that.

I registered for the Google Rights settlement this morning. It was not a difficult decision.

The story so far is that Google has for some years been scanning and digitising large numbers of books without asking for permission from the copyright holders. A number of authors and publishers got together and sued and a deal has been reached. This has been a Big Event in the world of Intellectual Property Rights. Anyone else could be forgiven for not having noticed. In fact, I hadn’t noticed either. Until the letter from my agent dropped on the mat telling me to accept it or try suing Google myself.

Swallow hard. The settlement offers a writer like me the chance to get my rights over my books acknowledged and – maybe – collect small amounts of money if such ever arise. On the other hand even guys like Google are supposed to ask your permission before they drive their tanks over your lawn. They didn’t in the first place, and they’re still not asking now. The settlement says that writers will be assumed to have said yes unless they actively say no. So I’ve woken up to find caterpillar tracks all over the grass. Never mind that I was asleep when they did it. I want to grab my pitchfork and go after them.

Don’t do it, says the agent. Don’t do it, says a good friend who also happens to be a hot-shot IPR lawyer. A pitchfork against a tank battalion is about right: you’re a lone and not terribly well-known author and they’re, well, Google. You need huge resources to take them on. Anyway, they probably haven’t got as far as digitising your books yet, so don’t look so offended. Sign up, and dream that one day you’ll be in a position to regret that you did so.

Sign up I have. And since I can post-rationalise as well as anyone else, here’s a thought to go with it. It’s another way of getting the books out there. Sure, I’m in this business for money, but I’m also in it for the readership. Given a choice between a readership but no money and neither money nor readership I’ll take the readership every time. Google would say the same. When those books are out of print and have disappeared from the shelves, they’ll still be only a click or two away. That’s got to be a good thing. Capitalism does more good than harm in the end. It’s the way we persuade ourselves to make things happen.

As half term loomed, the work-daemon called me to his office in the upper reaches of my mind.

Half term is no excuse for laziness, he said. I agreed it wasn’t.

You can shut the door, he said. You can leave the world its own devices. I want to see you writing. I said I would.

Productivity is the key, he said. Rhythm. Discipline. Discipline, I said. Yes.

Last half term was a travesty, he snarled. And I nodded meekly. I would do better.

And?

Well Monday was Bank Holiday. Much-loved friends were staying. No work got done.

Tuesday I was taxi for daughter and friend who were shopping for their joint birthday party. Also I was shopping to replenish stores after much-loved friends had departed. There’s no reason why a trip to the supermarket, plus associated unpacking and putting away, should wipe out an entire working morning, but it did.

Can’t remember what happened to Tuesday afternoon. Must have been something important.

Wednesday I did get some words down. That was after being taxi for daughter and other friend who were going to joint birthday party. (Was saved from further depradations by friend’s parents, who valiantly took the job of trucking whole gaggle of friends into Bristol and back entirely on themselves. Both are office workers. It’s not only the work-from-home types who see their productivity suffer at half term.) Any way, writing got done. Ta-daah! It might have been a struggle finding that rhythm for so short a time after having done nothing for days, but I had thought what I wanted to say and for two pages I said it.

It was Wednesday evening that son came and asked me for gift-wrap. Gift-wrap? ‘For Mum’s birthday present,’ he said.

Now, I hadn’t forgotten Thursday was Pippa’s birthday. I am not that sort of husband. I am the sort of husband who knows very well when his wife’s birthday is and then forgets he has to do anything about it. Not only was there no gift-wrap in the house, there was no present from loving self either. Fortunately the taxi-run to pick up daughter was due. Pippa thought she was doing it but I claimed it, swung by B&Q in the last half-hour before it closed and secured nice new gardening gloves. On return with daughter found that daughter had not got her mother a present either. So Daughter got gardening gloves to give to Mother and Wife got an IOU from Loving Husband for a new mobile phone. At which she laughed. Pippa is wonderful and I don’t deserve her.

Thursday. Pippa’s birthday. No work got done.

So it’s Friday. Work-daemon is pacing his office, furiously chewing on his cigar (I don’t know why I let him smoke on the premises). Daughter is off. House is quiet. Son’s haircut is not due until the afternoon. Lawn is getting long, but its haircut can also wait till the afternoon. (Mem. Must do something about that mobile – but maybe the afternoon will have room for that too.) The week is lost but not all is lost. Some work of noble note may yet be done. The screen is open.

And I’ve remembered.

The in-laws are coming tomorrow.

…And while we are building worlds, let’s also talk about women.

As I’ve said elsewhere (That Woman), you have a choice when telling stories that are set in traditional societies. Either you cast your heroine in a traditional role and let her exert such influence as she can within those confines, or you make her an exception to the traditional stereotypes – a Joan of Arc if you like – in which case you must be prepared for much of your story to be about why she’s an exception.

With fantasy, however, there’s a third option. You write about a society that allows women to have power, maybe even swing swords, so that they can take on heroic leading roles naturally. Easy? Let’s think about it.

As writer, you could just say ‘It’s my world, and I make the rules. Women can be knights and swing swords like men. It’s part of the scenery. So there.’ But how come? Do our knights and warriors and other quasi-medieval types all have 21st century western ideas about sex equality? Without any wrenching social changes? I put my hand on this scenery and I know it’s made of cardboard.

So let’s give women a source for their power. In the novel I’m working on at the moment, I’ve borrowed a concept that has come up here and there in history – that is, that the right to own land descends through the woman. I’ve taken it a step further. It is actually the woman owns the land. (OK, so now who’s boss?) There still has to be a reason why the people believe that is right, but the traditional associations of earth, water and Earth-mother are there if I need to make the case.

But when you are world building, you have to think things through. What other effects would this custom have? There must be some, otherwise it still feels unreal. The sister inherits the land, the brother has to leave to find a wife who has land. What effects has that on cohesion, mobility and protection of the ancestral territory? Do the men work the land under the woman’s direction? Or do they just hunt and fight? My fighters have Kings, who are married to Queens. What is the balance of power between Queen and King? Who actually gives the law – or do they have different areas of competence? A single bit of invention can have very far-reaching implications.

Now, we don’t want long explanations. We don’t want Tolkien-style appendices. What we want is that the reader should be able to sense, without diverting from the story, that all the obvious questions have answers. Better still, the answers should be there for them, perhaps planted in conversations or asides, before they’ve started to ask the questions. Look, you say to them, the scenery in this world is real. Now carry on reading.

That’s the trick of world building.

Carrying on from the idea of fantasy world building, let’s have a look at names.

The name of any fictional character is likely to tell you something about them. They also tell you something about the world the character is in. This can be true for any genre but it is particularly true for fantasy. If you are serious about your fantasy - and some of us are - then the names you see on the page matter. A name that looks as if it’s just been made up ain’t good enough. (I can think of one or two in The Cup of the World that I regret!) It should look like it comes from somewhere, in the way that our own names do.

Tolkien took this to an extreme. He invented whole languages and scripts for his peoples, and their names derive from these like plants growing out of rich soil. His world is deep (in this respect), and his lesser imitators have benefitted endlessly from his work simply by imitating him. But for those of us poor mortals who would like to make ‘real’ worlds without spending a lifetime on just the one book - well, we need to cobble things together a bit more quickly than that.

So here are a few questions I think about when making up fantasy names:

What is the culture of these people? What is the nearest comparator in human history?

Also, what is their history? How did they get to where they are? Are they pure blooded, or mongrel? (The Cup of the World people are definitely mongrel, but to be honest that’s a bit of post-facto rationalisation.)

What is their language like? What sounds predominate? Is there a common ending to male and female words, like -us and -a in Latin?

Are there different kinds of names for different social classes?

And what blurrings have occurred, with time and use? A system that is too rigid and logical won’t feel realistic either. It ought to feel that it has grown into place, over time.

Looking at this list, it quickly becomes clear that names shouldn’t just be invented in isolation. The world - the society, culture, language and history - ought to be imagined as a whole. The more thoroughly that is done, the more naturally the patterns of name-use should emerge.

Before we get carried away, there is one further, major consideration: how much otherness is the reader going to stand? Extraordinary names are hard for the reader. I have certainly been guilty of giving my characters names that are difficult to pronounce - and also that are easy to confuse with those of other characters a page or two later. For The Lightstep there were so many long and difficult names that my publisher had to persuade me to put in a cast list, so that the reader could remind themselves who this man ‘Bergesrode’ was whenever he turned up and why he was different from that bloke ‘Balke-Horneswerden’. Two long names beginning with B, occurring again and again. Whoops. And that book isn’t even a fantasy. It’s a historical novel. Which makes the point that however fantastic the worlds we conceive, our real human history can be more fantastic still.

I played truant from work this morning. I went and met a bishop, and talked to him about storytelling. The bishop nodded sagely and sipped his coffee. And I posted a fellow author, also with thoughts on storytelling, and that was the morning gone. The author hasn’t got back to me yet. Maybe he’s still sucking his teeth over the interminable rant I’ve sent him. It’s on the subject of world building.

World building. This is where you’re creating an alternative world for your reader and you have to let them feel that they know how it works. It might be a historical setting. It might be a fantasy world - or indeed a whole series of parallel worlds, like Pullman’s Dark Materials trilogy and others. It might even be something set here and now, but in a place stuffed with bizarre and improbable characters. Think of James Herriot’s Yorkshire Dales or of Cold Comfort Farm. Anyway, world-building is very much on my mind at the moment, which is why my poor colleague got a dump from me on the subject.

I’m in the opening chapters of my new novel and am describing a fantasy world. It’s a different place and a different time. There are different customs, landscapes, laws, and systems of government. Oh, and there’s magic - of a sort. When it comes to making your reader comfortable with the world of the story, anything that smacks of magic is really problematic. It’s the power to do things that couldn’t normally be done. To break the natural laws. And if they can do something magical on p 52, John, why can’t they do something like it on p137 and so rescue the princess and defeat the baddies before we’ve even reached Chapter 7? What, exactly, is possible in this world, and what isn’t? This has to be got right. The reader must be able to feel, as they journey through the fantasy land, that if they took a detour and looked at those mountains closely they wouldn’t find that they were just a painted backdrop. But at the same time I’m trying to develop a story. I could write passages on the geology of my mountains, but just how long is the reader going to wait around while I explain all these things?

The secret of world-building is to have thought it through yourself, who these people are, what their history is, how their society works and so forth. Then you pick from that only what the reader needs to know, and you build it in to the narrative before the reader realises they need it. Do it quickly and firmly, like a cartoonist drawing a human face in just four lines of his pen. You don’t need to describe the whole world and everything in it - heavens, no! Not even Tolkein, who invented languages and scripts and wrote out thousands of years of history for his Middle Earth, could do that. A lot of it should emerge from the way your characters talk to each other and the assumptions they are seen to share (I took a look at this in The Craft of Conversation.) Does it sound easy? It isn’t. But world-building is part of the fun, for both reader and writer. So have fun while you do it.

Solaris is a fascinating novel. A friend asked me if I had read it, after he had had a look at the typescript of my forthcoming science fiction novel WE. (More on WE in due course). I said I hadn’t. He kept asking me, and I kept saying I hadn’t. In the end he sent it to me.

It’s just as well I didn’t pick it up until WE was out of the door. If I had I might have despaired.

It’s fascinating in several ways. On the surface it’s a book about scientists confronted by a phenomenon that is simply impossible to understand. At the end of the story they still don’t understand it. This is a direct and fundamental challenge to those of us who believe that we can, in time, get the measure of the universe we’re in. And since the author, Stanislaw Lem, does not suggest there is anything like a god to cling to either, he leaves us in a pretty dark and cold place.

It’s also interesting because although it is classic science fiction, Lem isn’t interested in much of the science. Travel across inter-stellar space just happens. He doesn’t explain how. His planetary station moves on some kind of anti-gravity system, but he doesn’t describe it. That’s not why he’s chosen an SF setting. What he wants to do is isolate a small group of people and have them witness things that are completely out of human experience. The most important of these experiences - meetings with people whom the characters know are dead - could easily have been set in a gothic novel or psychological thriller. But in gothic or psychological novels we don’t expect to end up finding out all the reasons for things. In SF we do.

Then there’s the story-telling. The book is brilliant in building up the nightmarish atmosphere inside the station. The station itself is seedy and disordered. Many of the most disturbing things are only glimpsed by the reader, but amplified to us by the reactions of the characters. (Can a straw hat be terrifying? Yes it can. Read this, you lovers of explicitly gorey horror stories, and see how it can be done!) The situation builds and builds into an atmoshere of sustained chronic madness. And then… it goes away again. Nothing the hero does affects it. He is left contemplating loss, and futility. And so are we.

Does it work? I’d say not quite. What happens is that the hero wakes up and finds that matters have simply been resolved while he was asleep. In theory this might enhance the sense of futility, but I don’t think it does. I was left wanting more struggle and tragedy before the ending. It seems to be a classic example of a book where the author was more interested in getting into a situation than he was in getting out of it again. But it’s still a classic.

They’ve even made films of it - although I believe they’ve messed around with the ending.

Keys has gone back to my agent, 17,000 words longer than the first draft with - I believe - no loss of momentum. Right now I think it’s a great book - the best I’ve ever written. Which is how I ought to be feeling. If I ever suspect that my latest book isn’t the best I’ve written then something is probably wrong. And since it’s going to be a while before I’m called to copy-edit WE (the publication date has now slipped to January) I now have that delicious and rather fearful moment of trying to decide what I’m going to write next.

I think I know the answer.

About six, maybe seven years, ago I experimented with dictation. This was when I was still working in an office and it was hard to get time to write. So I acquired some voice-recognition software and a headset and dictated a novel while riding to and from work through the streets of Brussels. As an experiment it was only partly successful. For one thing the cycling meant my breath came so hard that the voice-recognition software could not, in fact, recognise my voice. For another I lost confidence in the story.

It was a fantasy, like my other work at that time, quite inventive, but I feared that it was too short and that I would never get away with the ending. However, I never quite forgot it. And a month or so ago I had an Insight. A jolt. I saw a way of telling those final scenes that seemed to work, with the right amount of juice and not too much risk. So I got down on my hands and knees, rummaged around in the back of the cupboard and found the floppy on which the fruits of those bike journeys are stored. (Yes, I said floppy. That’s how old it is. Listen. My first novel was typed, OK? I’ve even got bits of it that were handwritten. I’ve been doing this for a while, you know. Comments about tablets of stone will be Moderated.) And…

Well, some of it is better than I remembered. You couldn’t tell that it had been put together in broken sentences while swerving to avoid traffic on a Brussels autoroute. But it’s striking to see how much my tastes - and techniques - have moved on since that time. The thing I really notice is how much effort it took me to get my hero from scene to scene. Whole paragraphs are devoted to crossing a stream in the darkness, for example, while the action waits on the other side twiddling its thumbs until I to catch up. All that’s going to have to go. In fact, probably the only way to do this is for ALL of it to go, so that I can re-write the whole book from scratch. The story’s a good one. It always was a good one. But this writer is older now. The telling is going to be different.