John Dickinson

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.

I went to my editor and asked ‘What shall I write next?’

It was, as he said to me kindly over a plateful of garlic prawns in Oxford, a bit of a silly question. It’s certainly a question to which wise editors might not offer a straight answer. He didn’t say why, but I can guess. There are two reasons.

1) No editor wants to give the impression that they are commissioning a work that they are not, in fact, commissioning.

2) An author is more likely to write his best by writing what he wants to write, rather than writing to order. That’s not to say his best will sell, but if you’ve got enough good authors writing their best then you’ve a fair chance that one or more of them will have a lucky strike. My editor has three best sellers on his list this year.

I know all that. I also know it’s a sign of weakness in an author even to ask the question. But authors are nervy creatures and we’re allowed to get the jitters. And I also know that out beyond the world of the editor there’s a legion of sales executives and booksellers who would answer ‘write a vampire novel’ without a second thought. Sales of vampire novels are propping up three whole publishing empires at the moment, my agent says. Yup. Vampires. Right.

As it happens, somewhere around the coffee stage, the suggestion that I might write a horror novel did creep into the conversation. And it wasn’t me that made it. And I could. Actually, I could see two quite different horror novels that I could write. They wouldn’t be the blood and guts type, no. Vampires, no. Not this time anyway. But people disappearing, things you half–see but don’t quite… Yes, I could go there.

After, that is, I’ve done some other things. Because I also spent a certain amount of time during this talk convincing myself (if not my editor) that the two ideas I already have in my head might be rather good ideas after all. And I mustn’t forget that I’ve sort-of promised myself that if I find a publisher for Keys of Cleary then there’s definitely going to be sequels. So that’s five or six books I now have tentatively on the project list. (There must have been something in those prawns. )

And the really difficult question is – which of them should I write first?

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.

Dad’s got an OBE! Let’s take a little time out to celebrate.

When I spoke to him after the announcement he said he thought it had been given primarily for his time as Chairman of the Society of Authors. I’m sure that’s right. There has to be an element of public service for an award like this. But it also looks like one more recognition of his writing and poetry. And I may be just a little bit biased here, but I think he deserves it.

There is something a bit special about this wordsmith. His brain goes everywhere. I used to be shocked how little research he did before sending his heroes to 6th century Byzantium or war-torn contemporary Africa. He didn’t read up about these places, he imagined them. And people who’ve lived in Africa say how vividly he’s brought the place back to them. He’s imagined himself into the skull of a dying old woman and a child of a prehuman species 200,000 years ago. He’s also worked out and published a theory that to be able to fly and breathe fire dragons must have been lighter than air – flying gas-bags, in fact. I remember him telling me about the day he tried this theory of dragon evolution on David Attenborough. (Apparently Mr Attenborough was not convinced.)

He writes for adults, teenagers and young children. His books are mysteries, fantasies, science fiction, ghost stories, pet stories, historical and contemporary political. He doesn’t do cookbooks and he doesn’t do chick-lit but there’s not much else he hasn’t had a go at. He doesn’t pander to fantasies about power or sex. His lead characters are thoughtful, often meek. I can recall a rare one or two who have special talents or powers, but those powers are not used to slaughter enemies or shake the world. If you meet a larger-than-life figure in his pages it’s usually a baddie, or someone who is marked for destruction. And he writes well. His books are strong on setting and character. I won’t list the prizes he’s won – it gets rather boring after a bit – but he’s deserved those too.

He’s written poetry all his working life. When he was a journalist he did humorous pieces for Punch. But he kept writing the stuff after he became an author, even though there was no prospect of getting it published. He writes short, compact pieces with tightly-woven rhymes and images of love, time and the passing of generations. He also wrote a series of intense poems about my mother’s illness and death. There’s now a volume of his poetry available through his website.

Peter Dickinson, OBE. Hurrah!

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.

I registered for the Google Rights settlement this morning. It was not a difficult decision.

The story so far is that Google has for some years been scanning and digitising large numbers of books without asking for permission from the copyright holders. A number of authors and publishers got together and sued and a deal has been reached. This has been a Big Event in the world of Intellectual Property Rights. Anyone else could be forgiven for not having noticed. In fact, I hadn’t noticed either. Until the letter from my agent dropped on the mat telling me to accept it or try suing Google myself.

Swallow hard. The settlement offers a writer like me the chance to get my rights over my books acknowledged and – maybe – collect small amounts of money if such ever arise. On the other hand even guys like Google are supposed to ask your permission before they drive their tanks over your lawn. They didn’t in the first place, and they’re still not asking now. The settlement says that writers will be assumed to have said yes unless they actively say no. So I’ve woken up to find caterpillar tracks all over the grass. Never mind that I was asleep when they did it. I want to grab my pitchfork and go after them.

Don’t do it, says the agent. Don’t do it, says a good friend who also happens to be a hot-shot IPR lawyer. A pitchfork against a tank battalion is about right: you’re a lone and not terribly well-known author and they’re, well, Google. You need huge resources to take them on. Anyway, they probably haven’t got as far as digitising your books yet, so don’t look so offended. Sign up, and dream that one day you’ll be in a position to regret that you did so.

Sign up I have. And since I can post-rationalise as well as anyone else, here’s a thought to go with it. It’s another way of getting the books out there. Sure, I’m in this business for money, but I’m also in it for the readership. Given a choice between a readership but no money and neither money nor readership I’ll take the readership every time. Google would say the same. When those books are out of print and have disappeared from the shelves, they’ll still be only a click or two away. That’s got to be a good thing. Capitalism does more good than harm in the end. It’s the way we persuade ourselves to make things happen.

As half term loomed, the work-daemon called me to his office in the upper reaches of my mind.

Half term is no excuse for laziness, he said. I agreed it wasn’t.

You can shut the door, he said. You can leave the world its own devices. I want to see you writing. I said I would.

Productivity is the key, he said. Rhythm. Discipline. Discipline, I said. Yes.

Last half term was a travesty, he snarled. And I nodded meekly. I would do better.

And?

Well Monday was Bank Holiday. Much-loved friends were staying. No work got done.

Tuesday I was taxi for daughter and friend who were shopping for their joint birthday party. Also I was shopping to replenish stores after much-loved friends had departed. There’s no reason why a trip to the supermarket, plus associated unpacking and putting away, should wipe out an entire working morning, but it did.

Can’t remember what happened to Tuesday afternoon. Must have been something important.

Wednesday I did get some words down. That was after being taxi for daughter and other friend who were going to joint birthday party. (Was saved from further depradations by friend’s parents, who valiantly took the job of trucking whole gaggle of friends into Bristol and back entirely on themselves. Both are office workers. It’s not only the work-from-home types who see their productivity suffer at half term.) Any way, writing got done. Ta-daah! It might have been a struggle finding that rhythm for so short a time after having done nothing for days, but I had thought what I wanted to say and for two pages I said it.

It was Wednesday evening that son came and asked me for gift-wrap. Gift-wrap? ‘For Mum’s birthday present,’ he said.

Now, I hadn’t forgotten Thursday was Pippa’s birthday. I am not that sort of husband. I am the sort of husband who knows very well when his wife’s birthday is and then forgets he has to do anything about it. Not only was there no gift-wrap in the house, there was no present from loving self either. Fortunately the taxi-run to pick up daughter was due. Pippa thought she was doing it but I claimed it, swung by B&Q in the last half-hour before it closed and secured nice new gardening gloves. On return with daughter found that daughter had not got her mother a present either. So Daughter got gardening gloves to give to Mother and Wife got an IOU from Loving Husband for a new mobile phone. At which she laughed. Pippa is wonderful and I don’t deserve her.

Thursday. Pippa’s birthday. No work got done.

So it’s Friday. Work-daemon is pacing his office, furiously chewing on his cigar (I don’t know why I let him smoke on the premises). Daughter is off. House is quiet. Son’s haircut is not due until the afternoon. Lawn is getting long, but its haircut can also wait till the afternoon. (Mem. Must do something about that mobile – but maybe the afternoon will have room for that too.) The week is lost but not all is lost. Some work of noble note may yet be done. The screen is open.

And I’ve remembered.

The in-laws are coming tomorrow.

…And while we are building worlds, let’s also talk about women.

As I’ve said elsewhere (That Woman), you have a choice when telling stories that are set in traditional societies. Either you cast your heroine in a traditional role and let her exert such influence as she can within those confines, or you make her an exception to the traditional stereotypes – a Joan of Arc if you like – in which case you must be prepared for much of your story to be about why she’s an exception.

With fantasy, however, there’s a third option. You write about a society that allows women to have power, maybe even swing swords, so that they can take on heroic leading roles naturally. Easy? Let’s think about it.

As writer, you could just say ‘It’s my world, and I make the rules. Women can be knights and swing swords like men. It’s part of the scenery. So there.’ But how come? Do our knights and warriors and other quasi-medieval types all have 21st century western ideas about sex equality? Without any wrenching social changes? I put my hand on this scenery and I know it’s made of cardboard.

So let’s give women a source for their power. In the novel I’m working on at the moment, I’ve borrowed a concept that has come up here and there in history – that is, that the right to own land descends through the woman. I’ve taken it a step further. It is actually the woman owns the land. (OK, so now who’s boss?) There still has to be a reason why the people believe that is right, but the traditional associations of earth, water and Earth-mother are there if I need to make the case.

But when you are world building, you have to think things through. What other effects would this custom have? There must be some, otherwise it still feels unreal. The sister inherits the land, the brother has to leave to find a wife who has land. What effects has that on cohesion, mobility and protection of the ancestral territory? Do the men work the land under the woman’s direction? Or do they just hunt and fight? My fighters have Kings, who are married to Queens. What is the balance of power between Queen and King? Who actually gives the law – or do they have different areas of competence? A single bit of invention can have very far-reaching implications.

Now, we don’t want long explanations. We don’t want Tolkien-style appendices. What we want is that the reader should be able to sense, without diverting from the story, that all the obvious questions have answers. Better still, the answers should be there for them, perhaps planted in conversations or asides, before they’ve started to ask the questions. Look, you say to them, the scenery in this world is real. Now carry on reading.

That’s the trick of world building.

Carrying on from the idea of fantasy world building, let’s have a look at names.

The name of any fictional character is likely to tell you something about them. They also tell you something about the world the character is in. This can be true for any genre but it is particularly true for fantasy. If you are serious about your fantasy - and some of us are - then the names you see on the page matter. A name that looks as if it’s just been made up ain’t good enough. (I can think of one or two in The Cup of the World that I regret!) It should look like it comes from somewhere, in the way that our own names do.

Tolkien took this to an extreme. He invented whole languages and scripts for his peoples, and their names derive from these like plants growing out of rich soil. His world is deep (in this respect), and his lesser imitators have benefitted endlessly from his work simply by imitating him. But for those of us poor mortals who would like to make ‘real’ worlds without spending a lifetime on just the one book - well, we need to cobble things together a bit more quickly than that.

So here are a few questions I think about when making up fantasy names:

What is the culture of these people? What is the nearest comparator in human history?

Also, what is their history? How did they get to where they are? Are they pure blooded, or mongrel? (The Cup of the World people are definitely mongrel, but to be honest that’s a bit of post-facto rationalisation.)

What is their language like? What sounds predominate? Is there a common ending to male and female words, like -us and -a in Latin?

Are there different kinds of names for different social classes?

And what blurrings have occurred, with time and use? A system that is too rigid and logical won’t feel realistic either. It ought to feel that it has grown into place, over time.

Looking at this list, it quickly becomes clear that names shouldn’t just be invented in isolation. The world - the society, culture, language and history - ought to be imagined as a whole. The more thoroughly that is done, the more naturally the patterns of name-use should emerge.

Before we get carried away, there is one further, major consideration: how much otherness is the reader going to stand? Extraordinary names are hard for the reader. I have certainly been guilty of giving my characters names that are difficult to pronounce - and also that are easy to confuse with those of other characters a page or two later. For The Lightstep there were so many long and difficult names that my publisher had to persuade me to put in a cast list, so that the reader could remind themselves who this man ‘Bergesrode’ was whenever he turned up and why he was different from that bloke ‘Balke-Horneswerden’. Two long names beginning with B, occurring again and again. Whoops. And that book isn’t even a fantasy. It’s a historical novel. Which makes the point that however fantastic the worlds we conceive, our real human history can be more fantastic still.