John Dickinson

The book was written and the title chosen before my attention was drawn to Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We, published in English in 1924. I have only my ignorance to blame, for Zamyatin’s work is an important early dystopian novel, inspiring Orwell’s 1984 and influencing many others.

I did look for another title (Cold Eden seemed a possibility, although this again was not original.) But nothing else captured with such short, stark simplicity the theme I wanted to write about - the place of the individual in the larger group. So We it remains. I, too, owe a debt to the great Russian. And I don’t feel bad about that. Not with Orwell’s footprints before me on the road.

Orwell and Zamyatin wrote in the context of the early and mid-twentieth century, which saw the rise of powerful totalitarian states founded on the argument that “we” – the people as a whole – were far more important than “I” – meaning you, the individual. That “We” fed itself upon show trials, purges, mass murder, and war. Against it, the “I” had no appeal. It was terrifying. “If you want a picture of the future,” Orwell wrote in 1984, “imagine a boot stamping on a human face – for ever.”

In the twenty-first century, those clouds have parted. The worst dictators are dead. Their armies are defeated or have rusted away. But the “we” is of course always with us. It has to be. We (ahem) would never achieve anything if we were only a collection of random “I”s. So where does the balance between “we” and “I” now lie, in our comfortable, liberal, if slightly bankrupt societies? And what seeds have we sown that could transform it?

Look at the screen on which this is written. Consider what lies behind it. All those connections, all that information.

Think about how you use it.

…And fast forward fifty years…

WE comes out in January. It’s my first science fiction novel, set not very far into the future – say the second half of this century, so that all the technology is still recognisable and plausible and hasn’t transformed into substitute magic. Inter-stellar travel is not possible. The action takes place on a tiny moon on the edge of the solar system, where gravity is one-tenth that of Earth and the average surface temperature is about forty degrees above absolute zero.

Just think about that for a moment.

The sky above the moon is dominated by a giant planet, as big as two fists held together at arm’s length. On Earth, you can cover the moon with the tip of a finger. The forces on that planet are massive – winds of hundreds of thousands of miles an hour, an ocean deep enough to drown the Earth and hot enough, at its lower levels, to poach it. But you can’t reach it and it can’t reach you. it’s just up there, looking down on you. The sun is so distant it appears to be the size of a bright star.

(All this is for real, by the way. The planet is based on Neptune and the moon on Triton, though I don’t use those names in the book.)

It takes years to get here. The costs are enormous. In the low gravity the human body sheds most of its weight-bearing muscle and the bones become brittle. Once here – do you ever think you’re going back? So why come here in the first place?

That’s what the novel is about.

About a month ago (see “Stepping Back”) I finished the first draft of one novel and, to clear my mind a bit before revisiting it, I began another. Something completely different. Something funny, in fact.

I’ve always been a bit shy of writing humour. I think my first three books had about one joke between them. I’ve tried a bit more with Keys of Cleary (see “Comedy”). And what I’ve found is that if I set out to be funny- planning the scenes in advance, so he drops his trousers and she pours a bucket of custard over his head and they fall down the stairs – what I get is stuff that ought to be funny but isn’t. The really funny bits just come. From somewhere. Don’t ask me where. I don’t know until they hit me. I may think of a key line the day before I type it. Or it may just happen as I type. It’s like juggling blindfold.

But it is coming. Strangely. There’s something every couple of pages. It might be a play on words. It might be a character acting very much in character (slightly bizarre characters are a very rich source of comedy. And an easy one. You just keep them doing what they do.) It might be a dollop of good coarse lavatory humour, just delivered in a way that the reader doesn’t quite see coming, but when it comes – splat – it’s perfect.

And it’s fun. It’s fun to write stuff that makes you smile. It’s so much fun that I want to go on doing it. I want to write this novel to the finish. And never mind the poor, noble fantasy that I’ve put aside, now shouting at me from the document folder saying ‘hey – haven’t you stepped back for long enough already? What about me?’ There’s a trade-off between creativity and discipline. Right at the moment I just want to ditch the discipline and run off and have a wild fling with creativity.

One thing that nags at me as I write though is – am I trying too hard? Is all this comedy getting in the way of the story? What if, instead of making the reader laugh, I’m going to bamboozle them with so much madcap stuff that in the end they sigh and put the book down? How do I tell?

There’s only one way. Sooner or later I’m going to have to step back.

Time’s Chariot is a science fiction novel with a strong element of detective fiction. A future society has developed time-travelling technology. The technology is under the monopoly of a College, charged with making sure that the lessons of the past can be observed and used without history being disturbed. But rogue elements are up to something sneaky. Their tentacles penetrate high into the organisation and far back into the past. And our misfit hero – an officer of the College - is bent on defeating them.

Ben Jeapes is another of David Fickling’s authors, and David expects his writers to have a certain something (though we say it who shouldn’t). He looks for what he calls ‘narrative’, which I think means he expects us to tell a story capably in the good old way without too many gimmicks or wanderings. Now, I have to confess that I struggled with Time’s Chariot to begin with, partly because there’s a large cast of characters with strange names and it took me a while to sort out who was who. But then the story woke up, the game got afoot and I’m now reading with real pleasure.

The challenge with a time-travelling novel is how you deal with the paradox – the moment when someone goes back and changes the past in a way that affects a part of the story that’s already been told. It’s tough to do, because story-telling is by nature linear with a beginning, a middle and an end in that order, and a successful story must follow that pattern even if it doesn’t appear to. The easy way is not to have any paradoxes, or to invent reasons why they don’t happen. That seems to me to be a cop-out. In Jeapes’s story, paradoxes clearly can happen. So far they’ve happened off stage. You learn about them in asides from the main characters. We haven’t yet experienced one up close. But I’m reading on in hope. I have a theory that the bad guy whose death was faked at the beginning really will die in that incident, and has been dead for five thousand years before the main story began. Let’s see…

PS. Yes, there was a paradox. But it wasn’t what I expected!

So you’re writing a book, and you’re wondering if it might be published and earn you a lot of money. Fair enough. It’s a perfectly reasonable question. Let’s do some numbers.

Some years ago I did a stint as a manuscript reader for a publisher in London. In my time there I looked at 200 manuscripts. I passed twenty on to my bosses for a second opinion. Of those I thought six might be publishable. In the end they published one. They hadn’t been expecting me to find any.

So that’s one out of two hundred submitted. When I compared notes with my editor on this he thought that the ratio - at least in the UK - was nearer one in five hundred. I can’t adjust for the effect of one book being submitted a number of different publishers in succession (as Harry Potter was, and Watership Down and no doubt many other novels that went on to be very successful.) But let’s say the chances of acceptance are around one percent or below.

Depressing? Yes. But new authors do get published – even now. And lotteries do get won. So let’s say the book’s accepted. What are the chances of success (ie: big sales, household name, publisher clamouring for sequels and old life totally rotted up by celebrity)?

They’re better. But they’re still not great. A University of Bournemouth survey of professional authors in the UK found that 50% of earnings go to just 10% of us. So that’s say one in ten of us making the big time. The rest of us get by on sums that fluctuate from year to year but on average amount to about two-thirds of the UK average wage. That’s a useful second salary for a household (especially if you manage to do it part time) but not the path to riches.

The point is that there are far more of us wanting to write than the public want to read. Most readers enjoy reading more if they can talk about the book afterwards to someone else who has read it. And a reader is most likely to pick up a book by an author they haven’t read if someone else tells them it’s good. Today’s readers may well be far more diverse in their tastes than in the past. They will have more ways of chattering about more books. But the social need is, as it always has been, for small numbers of books that large numbers of people can talk about. Not the other way around.

And yes, quality is part of the social need, but only part of it. Beautifully written, intellectually challenging books only attract a minority. Anything that offers a good gossip or a nice, heart-warming dream will stake a far bigger claim on the reading public’s purse. Wail if you like, but that’s the truth.

I don’t think there’s any point blaming the industry for any of this. If publishers and booksellers get swept away by the advent of the e-book I think we’ll find that all these effects will persist, and will probably become even more marked. More of that another time, maybe.

The End.

I’ve written those words again. I’ve unwound the thread of my story all the way to its finish. Now I have to look it over to see what more needs doing, and what needs doing differently.

It’s a difficult mental adjustment. I’ve been living with this thing for weeks, working away at the level of paragraphs and sentences. Now I have to try to put myself into the mind of a reader who is coming to it for the first time. It’s like the moment when a painter makes the last tiny stroke on his canvas with his finest brush, and then steps back to look.

In fact, if he’s sensible, he doesn’t just step back. He walks out of the room, makes a cup of coffee, digs the potato patch or something and only then does he walk back in and look at it. That’s because he wants to see it as a whole, without focusing immediately on that bit there that he’s always known isn’t quite right.

The writer has the additional problem that it’s impossible to read the whole book in one glance. He has to work his way through it from the beginning. And it’s very, very easy to start getting distracted and to think that this sentence here would be so much better if only we took out the comma, or something. But we have to ignore that sort of thing at this stage. We’re trying – however futile it might be – to get an overview.

One tip that might be useful is to print the whole book out and to read it like that. Words are much harder to fiddle with once they’re on paper. And while I try not to use the print button more than I have to (because I do want there to be a planet for my children to enjoy) there are times when you just have to let the trees go hang.

Another tip is to let time elapse. This is one case where tomorrow really will be better than today, and next week will be better still. And while I’m about it, and if I really want to clear my mind of this stuff I’ve been doing, perhaps I should begin writing something else. Maybe that’s the answer – a chapter or two of something completely different.

So what will it be? Ah, yesss….

Lily from Vancouver wants to write a book. She asked me how to do it. And here’s more or less what I said.

To start with you need an idea of what the book’s going to be about. This is the spark that gets you going. (I’ve talked about this before “The Golf Club and the Sponge”, so I won’t repeat myself. In any case, Lily’s already got her idea. Let’s go on.

The next thing you need, I’d say, is an outline of the basic story. There’s got to be a sequence of events that finishes with a satisfactory ending. This isn’t difficult, but you’ve got to have it. For example, ‘boy meets girl and after a lot of trouble they fall in love,’ is one. ‘Child that everyone laughs at finds special powers and saves the world’ is another. There’s actually a very small number of basic storylines and we use them again and again.

Next, you need to think about how you are going to keep your reader wanting to read on until they get to your ending. This is difficult, and I guess many of the successful writers just do it instinctively. You need an idea of what your reader is like - probably they’re someone quite like you - and what’s going to grab them. You might want a lot of suspense, or funny scenes. You might want a lot of fascinating characters. There will almost certainly need to be a central character whom the reader likes, finds interesting, and wants to come through. (Excellent books with unsympathetic central characters do get written, but it takes a special sort of writer to do them well and a special sort of reader to soldier through them and still enjoy the experience).

Now we need to start writing. This is also hard. The first few pages can often seem unsatisfactory. Don’t worry too much about it. You can come back and re-write them later. Just get going.

And above all, you need to keep writing. This is also hard. Try to write something every day, even if it’s only a few sentences. If you can’t write something every day, have a time or times in the week when you do write. Don’t let yourself put it off. Once you stop, you can stay stopped for weeks or months. It’s very hard to start again. Don’t let yourself lose confidence. Confidence is key to the writer. Have faith.

I’m now two-thirds of the way through this story I first did about seven years ago. At first I thought I was going to have to re-write the lot (see “The Next Story”). Then I found I was importing whole chunks of text from the old version, because I couldn’t see that it was worth doing that bit of imagination all over again. What’s emerging now is a blend of old and new. So here’s the interesting question - what am I doing differently, after seven years of professional writing? How have I improved – and what have I lost?

The thing that hasn’t changed is what I want to happen. The story is about a young bronze-age warrior who has six sisters. And then this happens to them and then that and that and so on all the way to the ending as I imagined it all that time ago. Also the basics of the setting are the same – an isolated little world, a landscape of hills and forests, firelight and shadows and the presence of the sea. It’s a fantasy, but the fantastical elements are not obvious to the eye. In fact it’s very similar to the setting of The Cup of the World and its sequels, except that the culture of the people is more primitive.

What’s changed very much is the way I tell the story. I’ve introduced a narrator. This was someone who is very important at the end, but her presence needs to be felt throughout – and now it is. I let the reader discover important facts much earlier in the telling, rather than springing them right at the end. That’s because I have greater self-confidence. I don’t need to hide stuff as much as I do.

I’ve made the language less pompous. The main characters don’t say ‘is not’, they say ‘isn’t’, just as we would. I use fewer adjectives and fancy phrases. I want to make it easier to read what I’ve written.

I’m less shy about the romance. Seven years ago I wrote all that bit through they eyes of a third party, very much from the outside. Now it’s one of the most interesting questions – why does she go with him? So there are new scenes, seen from her point of view, that tell you why. I’m paying altogether more attention to the women. They are supposed to be spirits in their world. So what’s it like, being a spirit?

Some of this I think I would have done anyway if I had started re-writing immediately, seven years ago. The emphasis of a book often shifts as you re-work it. Stuff that is under-stated at first does get brought out – sometimes at the expense of things that you had originally thought were more important. But I think my idea of who my readers will be has changed. They’re less patient. They want more things explained. They want more love and less agonising. They want to turn the pages, find out what happens - things like that.

And so do I.

It’s been raining for three days. The wind blew heavily last night. This morning the children drove off for the first day of the autumn term. The author (who is very fond of his offspring) danced a little jig in the drive and came back into a house that was empty for the first time in six weeks.

Except for the cats, one of whom had been sick on the carpet.

Leave the cat-sick for the moment. Clear breakfast. Brush teeth, shave, make bed, hugging all the time the thought of four quiet morning hours, solid and serene, and nothing but the gentle chatter of the keyboard. After a summer of visits and visitors, excursions and distractions, at last a chance to do some real work!

Eight twenty-five. The bed’s made (as much as it ever is). It’s time to warm up the computer. Press switch, open blinds, let daylight in. Daylight reminds me that there is cat-sick still uncleaned on the carpet. Clean cat-sick. What next? Oh, the washing’s still sitting in the basket, damp and threatening to go mouldy. Can’t leave it like that. Start hanging up washing. Shirt, yes, Jeans, yes, sock, sock, odd sock – yes I know time’s beginning to creep by – sock, tee-shirt, sock, another odd sock – and the computer’s still humming patiently in the corner of the study. But what’s the point of starting something if I’m going to leave it unfinished? Sock, sock, sock. And the cats are beginning to look at me. It’s the sort of look that says, ‘We knew it’. I knew it too.

I knew this would happen, all through the long summer when I was telling myself that if only I could have a clear morning I could get such things done. It’s just ten minutes into the autumn term and already I’m shy of the keyboard. Regimented regime? Hah! And now I must admit that there were clear mornings in the summer – my family arranged them for me – but I found it convenient to use them for things other than writing. All creators are in some sense driven, I suppose. If we were not we would not be creators. It’s just that I seem to be driven by my ability to procrastinate.

And I’m sure I’m not alone. Ask any ten authors what it is they fear most and nine of them will probably say ‘Loss of inspiration’ or something like that. (The tenth will tell you that it’s the call from the agent or publisher who says ‘Look, this latest typescript of yours. I’m sorry, but…’ and yes, that’s true too.) There is something a bit frightening about a blank white screen. Looking at it, you feel a sense of enormous potential. And that potential includes the possibility of failure. A little mental battle has to be fought and won, each day, with that first touch of the keys. I’m catching up on six weeks of mental battle right now.

OK. The washing’s hung. And the blog’s done too. The novel – the real thing – is still waiting. It’s just a screen away. So, then…

Cup of tea?

I’ve been asked: ‘Do you write to a regimented regime?’

Yes, I write to a regime. The thing about writing is that it’s so flexible that if you DON’T make a time when you absolutely must write, it gets pushed to one side by everything else. I currently do 3 hours five mornings a week. That may not sound much but if you I’m actually drafting something up for the first time I find three hours of solid creative thought quite enough. Do I stick to my regime? Sort of. Mostly. See “The Discipline Thing” and “Holidays Are Allowed”.

However, all authors are different. I know some who work (in theory) all day and well into the night. I know some who work only when the fit takes them. When I had a full time job I would write in whatever snatches of time I could find in the evenings - fifteen minutes here and an hour there. That’s how The Cup of the World was written. It took about six years. Then when I was in Brussels working long hours as a diplomat, the only time I had to write was on the way to and from the office. I cycled to work, so the only way of writing was to dictate while I rode. (Not good for the concentration, I fear, but my automatic pilot kept me alive somehow.) I was using voice-recognition software but of course I was breathing rather heavily into the mike as I rode so the software was never really able to recognise my voice. I’m not recommending this method, but it shows you the lengths some authors will go to.