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.

A good blurb is like an elephant.

1) It’s rare.
2) You know it when you see it.
3) You need to be God to get it right.

How do you create, in a few short words, something that will make the reader pick this one novel from a thousand others? My editors and I have been batting the blurb for WE back and forth for weeks now. I’ve lost count of the number of versions we’ve gone through. Even our cover artist has had a go. It was quite a good one, I thought, but it did not find favour. Since then the wise man has retreated to a distance and let us get on with it.

We know what messages we are trying to get in. We have converged on a way of doing it. We agree that the first line should be a quote from the book. We have even agreed on a punchline. We just can’t get the rest of it right. Words that resonate to me seem to do nothing for others. They in turn write stuff that seems good to them, and when I see it I tear my hair and cry ‘How can this be?’ A few nights ago I had a revelation. I woke from a dream with my heart pounding, leapt to my computer and fired off the magic words at four-thirty in the morning. ‘There,’ I thought. ‘That’s how creation happens!’

My words fell into a well of silence. Round we went again. ‘Do you like this one?’ ‘ Well, not really . . .’ The most recent offering from my editor was prefaced ‘Hopefully final!’ I read it and reached for my sideburns.

But this time I am conceding something. This time I am working on someone else’s draft, rather than expecting someone else to work on mine.

This time, we may get somewhere.

So I’ve excised the heroine and one supporting character. I have replaced them both with a new heroine who combines both roles and personalities. I’ve put in all the other edits and copy-edits (on which more another time maybe). The book is due to go to Production at the end of the month. The editors will need it for a week at least before then. Next week is filling with engagements and the summer holidays loom. I’ve got about one more working day left.

I’ve had one last look and, as I thought, there’s still some stitching to be done.

Editing at this stage of the game is a bit like being a doctor who has to operate on the victims at the scene of his own drink-driving accident. In that:

1) You are not in the best state to be doing this;
2) There is no one else who can do it;
3) Everything you’re looking at is your own fault anyway.

I say ‘not in the best state.’ Even in your first draft it’s hard, as you struggle away at the paragraphs and sentences , to keep in mind what the whole thing will seem like to the reader. I’ve rewritten this manuscript six times now and I can barely imagine how it will read to a fresh pair of eyes. Over the various drafts I’ve cut scenes out, replaced them with other scenes, emphasised themes and de-emphasised them again. I’m getting the author’s equivalent of double vision. I was building up an idea in chapter nine today when I realised that the explanation on which the idea depended had been deleted from chapter three about two drafts back.

Like a concussed and semi-inebriated doctor at the roadside, I’m beginning to wonder which reality I’m in. And there’s delicate work that has to be finished before the Production van, blue lights flashing and sirens wailing, comes haring up to carry the victim away.

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.

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.