The End Of My Suit

“I bet you’d like to see one of your books turned into a film.” People are always saying that to me. Well of course I would. And the money would be nice, too. I just hope it wouldn’t be anything like my experience in the world of theatre. That was a long time ago when I was a young man with a great deal of enthusiasm and a very small bank balance.

Despite the constraints on spending imposed by my bank-manager, when I received my first commission to write a play, I splashed out on a rather nifty designer suit in which I thought I looked very cool indeed. It seemed to me to be exactly the kind of suit a playwright ought to wear.

Yes, those were heady days. Working with actors is great fun and seeing your dialogue come to life in performance is thrilling. But directors, well that’s a different matter.

Some of my colleagues never stop complaining about their editors. I tell them they don’t know how lucky they are. Editors are, on the whole, entirely reasonable people. Certainly, you can get annoyed with them on occasions when they take the liberty of rewriting a sentence you’ve written. But nine times out of ten it’s because that sentence was a dead donkey in the first place. So you have a choice: accept the editor’s version or write a better one.

Directors are an entirely different kettle of fish. They don’t just want to rewrite your sentences. They want you to bow down and worship them. Okay, so not all of them. Some will just be satisfied with an incessant stream of flattery.

The last director I worked with was a woman called (let’s say) Carmen. Now Carmen was a very difficult person to please. Once when I refused to change a line she threw a cup of hot coffee and an omelette bap (that’s a kind of bread roll for those of you not familiar with the UK catering industry) straight at me. And she scored a direct hit. I was wearing my suit at the time. It never recovered. And neither did our working relationship.

I remember going to see the first night of that particular play and just before the interval there was a fairly lengthy scene that I didn’t remember writing. It seemed entirely disconnected from the rest of the play and was, in my opinion, incredibly wooden. I sat there asking myself, could I have scripted this lame bit of theatre without even realising it.

As soon as the interval arrived I bolted outside, found the director and buttonholed her. I didn’t remember writing that scene, I protested. ‘That’s right, you didn’t,’ she told me with the silkiest of smiles, ‘my husband did.’

That was the end of my love affair with the theatre and also the end of my suit.

Starbursts

The third book in the Promises Of Dr Sigmundus trilogy came out in the UK on the 4th September. I have to confess, I didn’t really take much notice of the actual publication date because it was two days before my daughter’s wedding. Don’t get me wrong – I take my writing very seriously – but my daughter’s wedding was always going to come first.

Reading to my two daughters at bedtime was one of the things that motivated me to become a children’s author in the first place – that and working as an English teacher in secondary schools. I found that I enjoyed those books so much more than many of the novels written for adults. One of the reasons for my preference, is that writers for young people never forsake the story. It’s just not possible in our profession. Writers for adults, especially the more self-consciously literary ones, sometimes forget that they also have an obligation to entertain. Children’s writers can’t do that because our audience would melt away faster than snow in Oxford Street.

Despite the fact that the publication of The Mendini Canticle happened while I was taking my eye off the ball, it has been a big deal for me. It was the culmination of a project I first dreamed up over four years ago. The ideas for my novel Jacob’s Ladder and for the Dr Sigmundus trilogy all hit me at the same time and I could see all the way to the end of the four stories but, afterwards much of the detail was shadowy. Here and there episodes stood out but it was like trying to recover a dream.

What followed was several years of hard work recapturing that original vision, getting the ideas down on paper and incorporating all the changes that naturally got built in along the way. Now I’m finally there, it’s like finishing your time at university and stepping slightly nervously out into the world, knowing that you're a changed person

So what’s next for me? Well, I’m working on a series of Victorian ghost stories that I’ve already mentioned in this blog. The first one, The Haunting Of Nathaniel Wolfe, has been published in the UK and I’m finishing off the second draft of the second book right now. And recently I had another one of those nights when some kind of inexplicable starburst took place in my head and I saw the stories of a number of books playing out in my mind, almost like watching a video. So I’m going to be busy in the weeks and months to come. Fortunately, that’s just how I like it.

The Hidden City

A question I am always being asked is, 'Where do you get your inspiration?' It's one of the questions writers dislike answering because the truth is that we don't really know. Obviously, the simplest answer is that everything that ever happens to you affects the writing you produce but that's not what the questioner means. What are the really significant experiences, the ones that act as catalysts or starting points for a particular book? That's what they're asking.

If I take my trilogy, The Promises Of Dr Sigmundus, as an example, I could say that there were a number of critical experiences for me. Some took place during my childhood like having a hallucinatory experience when I had tonsilitis (I've blogged about this previously. See The Machinery Of The Universe, Jan 2008.), reading book one of Dante's great poem The Divine Comedy when I was about thirteen years old and, more recently, during a trip to Orvieto in Italy, visiting the network of caves carved out of the rock on which the modern city stands

But those experiences aren't the reason I wrote the books. They were just the seeds that grew into certain aspects of the content. I wrote those books for one reason only – because I had to. The books just started to appear in my head one day and from then on, it was like looking out my window, watching the fog gradually thinning to reveal a wonderful city whose existence I had always suspected but which I had never dared to dream that I could visit.

Once I knew for certain that the city really was there, I simply had to explore its winding streets, visit its magnificent temples, peer down its sinister alleyways and sit drinking coffe in its magnificent squares while I watched the people going about their business, talking, laughing, arguing about prices, or falling in love.

I don't know if that's what it's like for other writers but that's what it's like for me.