John Dickinson

Pick up a book that you wrote yourself, oh, about five years ago or more. Look at the cover (no problem, you’re used to that.) Look at the book sideways. There’s tens of thousands of words in there. You wrote them all.

Now…

Do you dare read it?

It’s horrible. It’s like wading out into an icy lake with the chill creeping up your body. You go slowly – so very slowly - and every line is agony. Who wrote this stuff? Could it really be you? You did this. How on Earth did you think you could get away with it? The lines are… (1) The dialogue is … (2) What you’re looking at seems to be the work of a tyro. Or possibly a madman. Ugh.

Actors, I am told, hate watching themselves on screen. The way they get through it is to look at everybody in the scene except themselves. The author, unfortunately, has no one else to watch. There’s no escaping what you’ve done. You must either put it back on the shelf, or plunge in.

But if you can plunge in (back to that icy lake again) you find after a bit that it’s not so bad. You stop noticing those mannerisms of yours that to begin with were so off-putting, and that most other readers were never bothered by and may not even have noticed in the first place. You might start enjoying the scenery. This isn’t half bad, after all, you may think. Not half bad at all. Some of it, anyway. You could almost forgive yourself.

And it wouldn’t be that surprising if, after a bit, you did surprise yourself. Some of it will be bloody brilliant.

(1) insert appropriate descriptor here. If these days you favour short, stark sentences, insert ‘gross’ or ‘florid’. If vice versa, insert ‘infantile’ etc.
(2) as for (1) but ‘fake’ probably covers all possibilities.

You can kill people in droves and it’s expected. But you won’t get away with underage sex or racial discrimination unless you write it strictly from the victim’s point of view. It’s easy to sell a story about a little person who takes on a big organisation. It’s a lot harder to do one in which the organisation turns out to be right and the little person wrong. Pictures from the famine camps should show us starving children, but not the ones who have already died. We don’t want it. We, the consumers, censor both what the story is and how it may be told.

Why shouldn’t we? Some thoughts can be truly dangerous if written down. Even where they aren’t, a bit of censorship can still be a good thing. It challenges our storytellers to use their wits, rather than just telling things the obvious but lazy way. And we do actually expect storytellers (in all their forms) to push a bit beyond what’s normal and accepted. It is their job to take our imaginations to places where it is not safe for our bodies to be. They let us think ourselves into dramatic situations without the risk of getting into them for real. We may even allow a writer who shocks us to be newsworthy, that is, to become a story themselves.

But storytellers have only a very little power. They have to appeal to things that are already in our minds. They can’t make us go where we don’t want to go. Whether they are peddling fact or fiction, they must massage our emotions in pleasing ways. We are ready to weep, so long as we can feel uplifted by the weeping. We want to imagine ourselves coming into power, gaining riches, lying in the arms of another human who is beautiful. We like the little-person-against-the-big-machine story because it lets us see ourselves triumphing against the world that keeps us down. And we love stories about people we all know and whom we can gossip about – celebrities whose success we can somehow share by reading about it, and whose failures and foibles we can spit upon as we pass them humiliated in the gutter. ‘You thought you were better than us, didn’t you?’

So I’m with those who say: you can blame the press, but don’t forget who was buying the newspapers. I’ll go further. Why is political debate so nauseatingly sterile? Because we like ‘pompous ass makes fool of self’ stories much more than we do ‘life is terribly complicated and if you want something to change you’ve got to accept the consequences’. So a politician in front of a microphone simply cannot afford to take risks. And if you ever get depressed about the number of books in which young heroine falls in love with beautiful monster who wants to suck her blood – well, you’ve just got to accept that some stories are stronger than others. They’re the ones that tell us what we want to hear.

So back in April I tossed that map of the new novel to the winds, shouted ‘Yee-hah’ and charged off into writing it anyway. So how did that work? Well…

The first thing that happened, once I was round the corner and out of sight from the cheering crowds, was that I sat down and tried to draw myself a bit more map. Sure, I said to the fiery champing stallion of my creativity, we’re going to go on a charge. But this time, let’s just think exactly where you’ll be putting those feet of yours so that you can carry me flying to the finish in one glorious gallop. We don’t want to end up in the swamp again, do we?

Besides, you don’t look so much like a fiery champing stallion at the moment. You look more like a stray from the Donkey Sanctuary who’s only too glad of a bit of creative procrastination. So let me plan. Your time will come.

The Planning Department said Not Fair. They’d done their stuff already and didn’t see why there had to be more. Strike action threatened.

Fiery steed said of course he could charge, if I really wanted. It was just that right now didn’t particularly feel like it.

The Anti-Procrastination Police went to look for their whip.

Negotiations broke down, the Planning reps walked out and the APP found their whip in Lost Property. Self and Stallion looked at each other: ‘Swamp?’ ‘Swamp.’

And here we are.

The going is slow and sticky. A pitifully small number of words get written each day. Some days there’s a little leap onwards from the last bit I wrote. This is the writer’s equivalent of jumping over a ditch: I know what I want to happen in the gap, but I’ve no idea how to do it. Not yet. I’ll be back to sort it out later. In the meantime, gotta keep going. ‘Keep going’ is what matters. And as for that fiery steed – he’s not much use in the swamp. It’s not him carrying me, in here. It’s more the other way around.

Keep going. We’ve been here before.

We know that at some point these mists will lift. The way will clear and we will be running – yes, galloping - over the broad uplands towards the finish. We will write ‘The End.’ We will cheer and award ourselves homecoming treats. And then we go back along the muddy trail we have left, cutting the corners, hammering in the signs, building the bridges, the street lighting, the metalled highway along which readers will speed in joyous career, never guessing with how much labour and loss this route was first laid.

(Enough metaphor for one week. But all my writing happens like this, and every writer will know what I mean.)

Lauren asked how long it takes to write a book.  She had heard two years.

It takes as long as you take to write it, Lauren.   Which depends on several things.

-    How long the book is.  My shortest to date is 40,000 words.  My longest is 150,000.  That’s a difference of three or four times the length to start with.  And some writers go on for hundreds of thousands of words.

-    How much care you want to take over writing it.  No sneering here: there are a lot of bad reasons for taking a long time over writing.  And it IS possible to write a 100,000 words in six weeks.  But it usually shows if you do.  Some writers take ten years, carefully and painstakingly going over the text, waiting patiently for the ideas to emerge from their little dark burrows.  They take all that care over their work. I’d say that shows too.

-    When you think you’ve finished.  Which is quite hard to say.  Granted, a book that’s published and out there is almost certainly finished, but even that’s not always sure.  If it isn’t published – if it went out and got rejected and its ghost still haunts your disk drive – why, who’s to say that you might not start over again?

These unhelpful thoughts aside, I’d say that since I gave up my career I’ve produced, on average, about one book a year in a form that I thought was ‘finished’.  That’s slower than many authors, and certainly not as fast as some people say you need to produce if you want to be successful as a writer of light fiction.   On the other hand it seems to be plenty fast enough for my editor, thank you, who has been good enough to publish five of them and may yet be persuaded to do one or two more.  And it’s a lot faster than I managed while I was a civil servant (three books in seventeen years, writing in fits and starts as it pleased me.)

Could I be faster?  Yes I could.  Would it be any better for me if I were?  I doubt it.  Certainly I don’t think my writing would be better.  That counts with me.

So. You’re an angel. And you’re in boot camp. You’re in boot camp because you’ve volunteered to go down to Earth and fight the good fight there, and as we all know before you go to the front line you have to do boot camp. What is angel boot camp like?

For a start, what is it called? Camp Chrism? Camp Succour? Camp Fire? (surely not!) What’s it made of? If the path to Hell is paved with Good Intentions, what material do angels use to roof their Nissan huts? I have a suspicion they too may use Good Intentions. It seems to be a downward looking sort of material. And then they form squads and jog up and down singing things like:

WE’RE the finest angel CREW
WE’VE got bells and smells for YOU

The camp is run by angel NCOs. Camps everywhere are run by NCOs, although they may sometimes masquerade as scoutmasters or holiday leaders. This must be true even in Heaven. They’re loud-voiced, hardbitten types. I’d say they should be cynical and corrupt, but of course angels can’t be either. Maybe they’re just reticent, which is as close to being cynical as an angel can get. And they bear the marks of the Good Fight. What would those marks be like? Can an angel have a wooden leg? An overwhelming dislike of certain brands of body spray? Or are the scars simply moral ones, which manifest themselves in a tendency to twitch nervously when they hear phrases like ‘On the other hand…’ and ‘Look at it from my point of view…’

As for the training: there would be lectures, certainly, about the perils that await on Earth; there would be weapons drill on harps, trumpets and fiery swords. I have a feeling that there should also be role play, which the recruits would be hopeless at because being angels they are of course all possessed of the single and unalterable Truth and the idea that they could be anything other than they are is very very difficult for them.

Ideas please. To be offered in the knowledge that I may shamelessly pirate anything that makes me laugh.

Every two years my old school holds a careers fair. They write to those of their alumni who are known to have careers and invite us to come and tell the boys about what we do. If you arrive early enough, they add, there’s a free lunch.

We come. Those of us who have done this before know that it is fun to do. (We also know that the lunch is quite good.) The lawyers and engineers turn out in truck loads. I am astonished to discover how many different types of engineer it is possible to be. There are doctors, psychiatrists, the armed forces, financial services, gap year excursion organisers, a music agent, a couple of guys from TV companies and a man who is now a most eminent astronomer but whom I know - because I was an accomplice - to have mis-spent much of his school days in Napoleonic wargaming. There is also one author.

(Knowing my school as I do I should have expected a strong team of investment bankers, but for some reason there aren’t any this year. There aren’t any accountants either, which is astonishing. I assume that the bankers are still hiding and that the accountants know where the food is even better.)

The rest of us take up our positions at our little desks around the central atrium and the boys are released into us in batches through a long afternoon. Some of them make a bee-line for a specific career. Most drift uncertainly past the tables. They glance down at the books I’ve scattered on mine to prove that an author is what I really am, and then they drift on again. The trick is to nail one with your eye and start talking. Once you get the first, the crowd forms around you just as if you were a street artist. And you can keep going for as long as you have any voice left.

They’re interested. (Who after all, wants to be a banker? Dad’s a banker and he’s still hiding in the cellar.) And they do quite a lot of writing at this school: mostly short stories, for which there are organised competitions. Some are working on playscripts or even poetry. ‘I’d like to be a writer,’ one says, ‘but my careers adviser says it’s a hobby, not a career.’

Deep breath. This is what I’m here for.

It can be a career, I say. But there are some things you need to know.

And I talk about the money (or lack of it), the security (or lack of it), and maybe also a bit about the odds against any one piece being accepted for publication. I talk about having a regular job, and how far that can be combined with writing, and the differences it made to me when I left the civil service to follow a writing career. ‘Anyone here want to get rich?’ I cry, several times during the afternoon. ‘Then go somewhere else!’ Go and talk to the lawyers and the engineers. The best I can say for myself is that I have a deal on my next book. As an author, I am alive for a little bit longer.

I’m not here to turn anyone off writing. Creative writing is a holy thing, to authors and schools alike. If you enjoy it, if you feel you do it well, then you must go on doing it. But if you want to be an author, take a good look at the Ancient Mariner here. That’s why they’ve given me lunch.

There are two ways of planning a story.  We can either:

a) get an exciting idea, jump on its back, shout ‘Yee-hah’ and gallop off blindly in whatever direction it takes us, or

b) sit down with a blank piece of paper, write out the ideas as they come and then laboriously poke, prod and plan them into some kind of order until we have a shapely and meticulously plotted structure and all we have to do is to write the thing out in prose so perfect that we never have to go back and correct anything.

I know authors who do (a) and are proud of it.  I have heard of authors who say they can do (b).  I’m a sort of b/a, myself.  I think most writers must be.

The fact is, random galloping is a great way to start a novel, but it can mean that we end up thrown into in a swamp or a hedge somewhere half way round the course and that the way home from there will be a bit of a struggle.  Also, if we only ever begin our stories when such fits of enthusiasm seize us, the number of stories that actually get begun may not be very many.

So we start by trying to do b.  We write down the ideas that we’ve had.  We decide on a beginning.  We decide on an ending.  We get a string of stuff to go in between (we’re not quite sure how) and, as we work, we become increasingly aware that we have a lot of gaps.

This, of course is where the true B comes into their own.  They fill the gaps in, carefully and meticulously, until  every entrance and exit has been sketched and every indrawn breath has been timed to the letter.  Only then will they begin to write.   I, on the other hand, stare stupidly at my semi-blank page until my brain aches and I start feeling that whatever I sketch in now won’t really work when the time comes to write it down.  Let’s face it.  What I have here isn’t really a plan.  It’s more like a set of possible stepping stones across the swamp.  When I get to that bit I will know what to do next.  But the gap between one stone and the next is still looking very swampy.

So, keep planning, or start anyway?   I know by now that I write best and fastest when I have a clear idea of what’s coming and how it is all going to fit together.   But some ideas only come once I’ve started writing.  Some problems only resolve themselves when I’m right up against them.  And sometimes they resolve themselves because of stuff that I’ve written in spontaneously, earlier in the narrative.  The risk of trying to plan everything is that we stifle our own creativity.  We end up leaving enthusiasm in the stable.  So…

So, all right then.  Yee-hah.

I guess all authors are different about this.  For me it’s a no, but just sometimes a yes.

When I’m composing stuff on the screen, silence is best.  The mind has to focus on the job.  It already has too many excuses to wander (the coffee in the kitchen, the postman at the door, the sunlight on the stream at the bottom of the garden…).  Let’s not give it a snare drum as well.

That’s true for about 90% of my writing days.  But now and again I do need a mood enhancer.  When I’m reading something over, or just entering changes that I’ve already pencilled into the margin of a printed typescript, I want help settling into the story.  Come on, I’m being a reader.  I’ve picked this book up, I’ve paid money for it, I want what’s on these pages.  The distraction I’m most afraid of now is the urge to fiddle with my sentences.  If I start doing that, I will lose the flow as the reader experiences it.  I will be so busy correcting the small faults that I may miss the large ones altogether.  In this frame of mind, music becomes an ally.  Play me a mood, maestro.

I avoid heavy rhythms and vocals.  They demand too much attention.  I also avoid the sort of music I love so much that I have to stop to listen to it.  The Lord is My Shepherd from Rutter’s Requiem is wonderful, but not in my study.   At my funeral, maybe.  Film music on the other hand works well, perhaps because it was always meant to be a background for a story.   So this morning, as I’m skimming over a bittersweet little fantasy I’m writing, bittersweet fantasy music is what I’ll play.  It’ll be Howard Shore’s score from The Lord of the Rings, or Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, or maybe the themes from Gladiator (minus the battles).   The music to feed the mood.  The mood is important.  If I find myself weeping as I work, so much the better.  It’ll make me feel more confident about the book when I come back to edit it.

Assuming I weep for the right reasons, of course.

‘Books are like autumn leaves’ my father says.  ‘They lie on the ground, and maybe they are beautiful.  But they are soon hidden under the layers that come after them.’

There’s a melancholy thought.  Books should last – especially the ones we have written ourselves.  We spend so much effort on them, we feel they should be forever.  They should be like Mansfield Park and Treasure Island, entertaining for generations.  But the excitement of launch is quickly lost.   The reviewers (if we got any reviews) turn to other books. The chatter is about other things.  Have you read this?  Not yet.  Have you read that?  No, I’m sorry - I will try. But This and That will soon be covered in their turn.   From time to time someone may tell you how much they’ve enjoyed what you’ve written.  Others will remember a scene and frown, thinking  – where did I read that?  All the while the leaves are falling.

If you take a leaf home and spray it with liquid gold, it will last forever.  Is it still a leaf?  We do need a few books like Mansfield Park and Treasure Island.  These are things we can all share and talk about and watch the re-makes when they come round.  But we also want new stories, all the time, more and more and more of them, and mostly we want them to be new versions of the same old themes, only told in new voices and with new twists.  Their transience is necessary.  If all books lasted forever there would be no room for renewal.

I could never make a leaf.  They are complex, delicate things.  But they’re being made all the same.  It’s the tail end of February now.  There’s a fuzz on the alders that wasn’t there a week ago.

Better get writing.

My reader’s report has arrived - pounce upon it at once! Skim through it at speed, landing on about one word in every six in my eagerness to know if my story is any good. Did she like it? Did she? She did - she says.

Well, maybe she would say that. We all know how authors react if anyone tells them their latest typescript is a pile of sh*t. Tears get wept. Knives get sharpened. Horses’ heads get found on pillows. Which is a bit strange because it won’t usually have been the horse that did the crit.

So slow down, read on, and let’s start underlining things we might have to do something about. This will be the last set of changes before the novel goes off to my agent. We don’t want to miss anything.

She liked this bit. Good. She liked that bit. Minor point here – easily dealt with. She thought this idea was good (so maybe she really did like the thing). She thought that scene was too long. OK, we’ll have to look at it again. She thought the next bit was good…

Ah.

Aha.

She doesn’t like the ending. It’s too complicated, she says. And in particular she doesn’t like it that the heroine falls in love with him. He’s not worthy of her. Problem.

Come to think of it, one of my other readers has said pretty much the same thing. And since he is a he and this one is a she, and the two of them are separated by thirty-odd years in age, they pretty well cover the likely readership between them. This is not a comment I can ignore. I seem to have just two options.

(a) my ending would be a good one but I haven’t told it properly, and

(b) my ending , however I tell it, is a pile of sh*t and will be as acceptable to my readers as a horse’s head on a pillow.

Endings are not the easiest bits of a novel to change. They’re what you’ve been driving towards all along. There may be a twist when you get there, but there should also be a sense of inevitability because of all the things that have happened up to that point. Of course I could write a story in which the deserving heroine gets the dashing and romantic hero simply because he is dashing and romantic and she is deserving. But that’s not what I’ve been driving towards. And anyway I don’t want to. Flee to other writers, ye millions. No candy on sale here.

Let us, therefore, work on (a) and see what the agent says. One thing she is sure to say is that if I wish millions to flee my writing then she would like to flee as well please. So if we’re going to work on (a) we’ll have to come up with something good.

I have a routine for moments like this. Step one – retain novel in head, quit computer. Step two, still retaining novel in head, do something else eg: have hot bath. Hot baths are excellent for the purpose. They should be tax-deductible. Step three…

Ah. Idea. You see?

I know what I’m going to do. It won’t take much. In fact it’s going to take very little.

That’s because, like all the best ideas, it was really there all along.