John Dickinson

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.

My daughter is studying narrative poetry as part of the A Level English Literature course. This is good news. The bad news (for her) is that they’ve picked some poems that her father likes. Of course father knows that he should leave alone and let teacher and daughter get on with it, but somehow he can’t. So there he goes, striding up and down the kitchen spouting bits of Tennyson while daughter cringes and covers her face with her hands. This sort of thing does happen in our house.

Included on the syllabus are two poems from Auden’s 1930s work The Orators. I have to say my jaw dropped when I saw them on the list. They’re teaching that to A Level students these days? I’d heard they were dumbing down these exams, but maybe that was a myth. There’s nothing dumb about Auden. And The Orators is …

Well, it’s hard to say quite what it is, really.

It’s part prose, part poetry. But some of the prose is still poetry when you look at it closely. Other parts are in the form of a journal, which breaks into verse now and again and also includes diagrams. The central theme (according to Auden himself) is the failure of a heroic figure. Auden also said, at various times, that he was very dissatisfied with the work, that he couldn’t recognise himself as the writer and that it was far too obscure. Critics and scholars have had a lot of fun unearthing the different influences in it. And there seem to be many: the rise of Fascism, the malaise of England, Freud, D.H. Lawrence, Auden’s own circle of friends and the Anglo-Saxon Book of Exeter. Each critic or scholar puts their own spin on the significance of what they find. But they can all agree on one thing. It is obscure.

It’s a scrapbook of individual pieces, each beautifully written, but the flow of story from one to the next barely exists. The opening is a speech given to a school prize day. ‘What do you think about England,’ the speaker asks, ‘this country of ours where nobody is well?’ By the end of the address, and with only the slightest change in the speaker’s voice, the schoolboys are a lynch mob and men are being murdered.

It moves through passages so cryptic that they are like dreams, offering glimpses of the hero but no explanations. There is a letter written in the privacy of a quiet room, not to another person but to a secret wound. There is the journal of the hero himself, known only as ‘the airman’, who is struggling against a hidden enemy and his own shameful weakness. He turns to suicide as a cure for both. After that there’s a sequence of six odes, some of which seem to recall Auden’s own experiences as a schoolmaster. The last of these opens with a prayer:

‘Not Father, further do prolong
Our necessary defeat;
Spare us the numbing zero hour,
The desert-long retreat…’

And the Epilogue – a famous little poem – speaks of people departing into danger, their fate only a little less certain that that of the fearful ones they leave behind.

In politics and philosophy, The Orators is past its sell-by date. England’s defeat was not necessary and it did not happen. The things Auden loathed in Fascism did not prevail. And every generation can interpret Freud and Lawrence according to their need. What, then, is there to love in a piece that is so much less than the sum of its parts? Because I do love it, in a bewildered sort of way. It does things to me that I want to put into books. But the feelings it evokes are elusive. The spirit is too hard for me to capture.

The very obscurity of it is fascinating. It’s like a bit of Nostradamus. You sense there is a meaning, but it’s just beyond your grasp. Or you can see exactly what the lines are saying – they have a fevered clarity – but still they leave you puzzled. ‘Far too many monks in Sinclair Street.’ Why is that a bad thing? Because it clearly is bad. Are the monks the enemy in disguise, or is the writer slipping into madness? Both could be true.

The words are rhythmic, the images dream-like. ‘The face lit up by the booking-clerk’s window.’ That’s all you get of that scene – one, fleeting impression. Who did he see, on some railway platform at night - friend, enemy or stranger? What did it mean? You aren’t told, and maybe the writer himself does not know. Lines jump out at you in paranoid whispers. ‘Candidates must write on three sides of the paper.’ Long after you have put the book down they remain, a succession of mental pictures, a powerful voice speaking of sickness and doom.

‘Summon. And there passed such cursing his father, and the curse was given him.’

Indeed. It was my father who introduced me to Auden, as it happens. I do not curse him for that. (Though there’s a daughter who may think differently of hers.)

I originally wrote this piece for Norman Geras’s normblog, and I reproduce it here with his agreement.

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.

The cave of wonders! Torchlight glitters on piles of gems. It glows on jars of incense, on carpets, cloth, leather and canvas sacks that have split with the weight of coin and cascaded gold and silver across the floor. There’s pile upon pile of it, more than can possibly be counted, receding into the shadows. The light trembles. Where did all these things come from? The men that laid them here are fierce and cruel. Hanging on hooks among the silks, like a carcass at a market, are the dismembered quarters of an unlucky traveller who has been hacked to pieces for daring to enter the cave. The last of his blood still drips to black pools upon the floor. His killers must be close by. What’s that noise? Is it sand, trickling in a crevice - or is it the whisper of steel?

Surprisingly, Ali Baba may not one of the original stories in The Arabian Nights. Like Sinbad and Aladdin it may have been collected separately by Galland, the eighteenth century French traveller who popularised the Nights in Europe. But it’s one of my Arabian Nights – the Nights that have been with me since childhood. It was in the big, colourful, yellow-jacketed hardback book that my parents gave us. I can still remember the pictures, flat and stylised like Persian miniatures, and the way the robber chief throws up his arm before the cave as he cries “Open Sesame!”

So many stories! Ali Baba and his slave-girl Morgiana, and thirty-nine thieves dead in their jars of oil. Aladdin and his lamp. The Sultan Haroun al Raschid and his vizier Jafaar. The hunchback and the bone he choked upon. The brothers Aboukir and Abousir, and the city where the dyers can only colour things blue. Turbans and curling beards and gongs and incense. Cunning and beauty and terrible cruelty. This was fantasy, an other world far removed from Western living-rooms, long before Tennyson wrote his Idylls or Tolkein woke our Northern myth from its slumber.

And Scheherazade herself. The young woman who, night after night, tells the stories to her husband the Caliph, knowing that if she ever loses his interest she will be killed like all his other wives before her. In the sweltering darkness she whispers to him, and he listens with his head propped on silken pillows as she ends one tale and begins another, only to fall silent just as her royal murderer is begging for more. Young as she is, she has mastered the art of the cliffhanger.

(I never asked myself, when I had that yellow book in my hands, what else she might have known about amusing men in bed. Nor did I wonder if the Caliph’s problem with women stemmed from some very private little problem of his own, and the reason the stories worked for him was because nothing else was going to. Sad creature that I am, I can think these things now.)

A thousand stories! I’m a storyteller myself, and used to being asked about my ideas. But where did she get all hers from? Did she walked at dawn through the peacock gardens, her brain dull from fear and lack of sleep, plotting the twists and turns that would keep her alive for one night more? That story about the sailor went well. It must be worth a sequel or two. All right, but what’s he going to do on all these voyages? (Bird flies by with mouse dead in its claws) That’s it! Birds! Big birds, big enough to feed on elephants! That’ll make him sit up. That will get me one more dawn like this. One more…

Stories inside stories inside stories. Scheherazade tells of Jafaar the vizier, who, found wanting by his master Haroun, obtains a pardon for himself by entertaining his Caliph with the Tale of Nur al-Din Ali. (No harm, you can hear Scheherazade thinking, in planting the idea of mercy in her own Caliph’s head). The Fisherman tells the Djinn the story of the sage Duban. Sinbad the Porter hears the story of the seven voyagers from his namesake the Sailor. Layer upon layer of them, one inside another inside another, and the myriad of voices that tell them seem to come from all around, echoing inside the cave.

A thousand and one stories? Some collections have as many – ancient tales that go back into the folklore of different Middle Eastern cultures, including some about historical figures who lived long after Sheherazade and her Caliph are supposed to have existed. But most tellings have only a selection. Ours probably included no more than twenty. Some I recall very clearly. Other stories have elements I remember or half-remember, like tricking the djinn back into the bottle, or the book whose pages are poisoned, or the Caliph who enters a house in disguise, is entertained, and nearly loses his life. I must have read those stories and then forgotten them. Or maybe I never did, and I only think I recognise them because others like Umberto Eco and James Elroy Flecker have served them up to me since, set like gems in stories of their own making. Running my eye down the list of a thousand titles, I’m surprised to see how few I can recognise. The Nights were part of my childhood, and yet what I have is only a fraction of what is there. They are the piles upon piles of untouched treasures that I left behind me when I escaped with my little bag of jewels all those years ago.

This post first appeared as my contribution to Kath Langrish’s ‘Fairytale Reflections’ series on her blog Seven Miles of Steel Thistles.

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.

‘In the beginning was the Word,’ says the Gospel of John. ‘And the Word was with God, and the Word was God.’ It’s a passage we hear quite a lot at this time of year, on TV or radio, or if we happen to have crammed ourselves into a real church for one of the Christmas services. The first lines are beautifully written, mystic, rhythmic, mesmerizingly repetitive, culminating with the phrase ‘The light shines in the darkness, but the darkness has not…’

And then you might hear ‘…overcome it.’

Or you might hear ‘…understood it.’

Indeed, you might hear any number of things, depending on which version of the Bible is on the lectern at the time. But mostly, these days, it seems to be ‘overcome.’ Pity.

I am not a scholar. I have no doubt that ‘overcome’ is closest to the original Greek. Yet every time I hear it I… well, I sigh a little. I feel as if I’ve been watching a swift attacking move in football: the passes between the players, the long cross, perfectly judged, the diving header – and the ball goes just wide. Disappointment. Wasted opportunity.

I’m not a creative writing teacher either. I never took a course, let alone gave one. I haven’t won a prize for writing since I left school. So the following thoughts on word choice are personal and definitely unlicensed by anyone of any authority. But I still think they’re right.

Almost always, the word to choose is the one that doesn’t call attention to itself. That’s particularly true of prose story-telling. You just don’t want the reader stopping to think about individual words, even if it’s to admire them (and mostly it won’t be). By all means pick a long word rather than a short one if it gives you a better rhythm. Rhythm is important, and so is sentence structure, and sometimes you can use them to convey effects to the reader. In general, however, keep it simple. Keep it plain.

But there will be times when it really does enhance the telling if a line or a word stands out. I’m not going to try to write rules for when such times should be. I’ll only say that they come a lot less often than the writer might think. And I’ll pick that line about light and darkness from John as an example of when it does. Why? It’s a moment of climax, the end of that first pulse of the Gospel message. There is the Word, and light, and there is the darkness, and… What, John, what? Tell us! Tell us!

To say that the darkness ‘has not overcome it’ is to reduce the relationship between light and dark to a simple arm-wrestling match. It adds very little. The writer could have stopped the sentence after ‘The light shines in the darkness’ without losing any meaning. But the word ‘understood’ is unexpected. Suddenly the story is transformed. We’re hearing about failure, but also potential. We feel sadness when we know there should have been hope. How should the darkness understand the light? And why doesn’t it? There are so many possibilities.

‘Understood’ is a plain word – plainer even than ‘overcome’ in the sense that we use it more often in everyday language. It has exactly the same rhythmic value. And yet, because of the meanings folded within it, it is much the more powerful here. Now the reader should stop to think. And that’s all right. At this point, we want them to.

Use wisely, writers. Use very rarely. But let’s use it. There is power in the word.

So your partner has become an author. Congratulations. This may not have been your choice but congratulations anyway. With a little attention an author can be a rewarding companion as well as a curiosity and a conversation piece. But there are just a few things you need to know.

1) If you do not already have a paying job, you may need to get one. Do not imagine the future will be fame, fat royalties and film contracts. That sort of thing only happens to other people.

2) If your author greets you with a big smile and the news that they have written x000 words, it is unkind to remind them what they said the other day about how little reward is related to effort in this profession. Coo adoringly and tell them how clever they are. (If on the other hand your author does not offer to tell you what they have achieved, do not press them. Very probably they have no idea.)

3) Authors spend a lot of time in their own heads and may pay little or no attention to the outside world. This can be frustrating for those who share their lives. Learn to recognise the signs. Muttering, pacing about and seemingly random activity such as unstacking dirty plates from a dishwasher that has not yet run probably means that something creative is happening in there and it’s best not to disturb. Just restack dishwasher when they have moved to loading the cat into the tumble-dryer. On the other hand, if they are drifting around the house with a vacant expression this may mean that their thoughts have got lost somewhere inside their skulls and they need help to get out. Try saying things like ‘Shall we watch the news now?’ or ‘Would you like a hand with supper?’ In extreme cases, shake, slap or announce casually that you have put the computer on e-Bay. That ought to do it.

4) Authors, particularly male ones, may neglect their grooming. It is best to keep an eye on this because once things slip they can slip a long way. Deal with it while the products you need are still in the realm of the pharmacy. If you have to resort to the garden centre it is probably too late. But also be realistic. Your author is never going to be a fashion accessory.

5) At some point your author will produce their latest typescript. This is a delicate moment. You are now about to discover who it is they have spent their last few months with. If you find, for example, that your author has involved themselves with romantic interest of a particularly dashing or beautiful variety, it is best to read nothing into this. Really it is. Similarly, if you encounter hot love-scenes that bear no resemblance to anything - so far as you can remember - that your author has ever experienced, just assume that they have lifted these lines verbatim from the work of some other author. Almost certainly, that is what they will have done. (And that other author will have done same. And ditto, and ditto.)

6) Criticism. This can be a difficult one. Authors’ egos are fragile things and must be carefully nurtured. Bear in mind, however, that the publishing world is full of meaningless hyperbole and that your author will be at least dimly aware of this. Phrases such as ‘I like it’ will be taken to mean no more than ‘I have managed to read the first three pages without gagging’ etc. Say what it is you like about the book, and you had better mean it. Do not be shy of pointing out weaknesses either – your author will be grateful for this. At least, they should be. Above all, leave them wanting to go on writing. If this is not possible then it is probably kindest to have them put down.

7) Final thought. Do not breed from your author. One in the family is quite enough.

I was sharing a corner of the RHCB Christmas Party with the writer John Dougherty, sheltering from exploding glasses and from the crowds of other writers whose books I ought to have read but hadn’t. We’d got as far as agreeing that today’s young readers preferred stories that were much more pacey and quickfire than the ones we had enjoyed in our childhoods. Therefore, I said, I ought not to worry if the stuff that I’m writing seemed to me rather hurried. It was what today’s child wanted, wasn’t it?

John wouldn’t go so far. It might be what they wanted, but that didn’t mean we should always be writing it. He recalled studies on the effects of shortening attention spans on children’s intellectual development. There was a trend here to be resisted. It was good for children to read stories that demanded concentration.

Well, yes, I said. But won’t they need to hop quickly from subject to subject? Many working environments are fast, multi-tasking places. Think of your average office. I swear that the hours I had spent shooting down space invaders were just as much help to me when I was an office worker as any amount of time I had put into carefully-researched essays on medieval history.

Ah, said John. But… And he talked about further studies which showed that the butterfly mind does less well in a multi-tasking environment than the mind that is a focused beam. John is a former teacher who thinks deeply about the relationship between teaching and writing. And there’s a time when even I give up arguing with people who know more than I do. Especially when I’m in a room with a hundred other people and am having to shout to make myself heard.

Writers are entertainers, not teachers. Even more than teachers, they part from their audience at their peril. But the best stories should be about more than entertainment. They affect the way we think. They give us models to follow and ways of understanding the world. A story-teller who is not, at some level, saying to the audience I want you to think about this is an empty vessel. If the story teller is good, maybe they will listen. But is the thought a good one? The usual test is ‘do enough of us (adults) agree with it?’ Yet no one can really be sure. Whole generations can be wrong. Or at least, they can fail to see how the world is changing.

We were lying on our backs in a bit of the Sinai desert, watching for shooting stars in the night sky. The teenagers wanted to know about The Silence of the Lambs. I told the story as best I could: ‘Well there’s this policewoman played by Jodie Foster and she has to catch a serial killer and she needs this crazy guy Hannibal Lecter to help her…’ and so on. And I finished by discussing the title: how it refers to a story the Foster character tells about being a child on a farm watching the slaughtering of the lambs. How the lamb is a symbol of a victim (an edible victim) and the silence of the lamb is the silence of death. ‘Does that make sense?’ I asked. ‘Yeah,’ said one teenager tolerantly. ‘But I think you went a bit deep at the end there.’ At which point one of the other teenagers saw her first shooting star ever and much excitement ensued.

Images are delicate mechanisms. If you take them apart to find out what’s in them they tend not to work so well for you when you put them back together again. They are at their most powerful when you sense vaguely what they are on about but don’t stop to think it over too closely. In fact, most readers and viewers probably don’t want to think them over at all. So it’s called Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. And there’s no tiger and no dragon, but who cares? Just tell me the story.

Fair enough. But titles tell you something about the story. Maybe they tell you what’s coming before you get to it. (Snakes on a Plane. The Time Traveller’s Wife.) Maybe they point out the thing on which the reader needs to concentrate. Or maybe they’re an image, and the meaning of the image only becomes clear after the story has finished. Either way, if you change the words in the title you are likely to change, subtly, the way the audience perceives the story. And that’s why I think it’s worth thinking about titles.