The Next Story
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.