Did I Really Make That?

I’ve just finished what I call a Pre-Draft of my next book. It’s something I started doing a few years ago that I find really helpful. I used to do an outline before starting on the First Draft of a novel but the outlines grew and grew until they started to be somewhere between 30 and 40 percent of the length of the finished novel. They had their own contents pages, detailed setting, pages and pages of finished dialogue. They were mini novels really, working models of the real thing which allowed me to explore the plot and characters in very considerable detail before actually beginning work on the real thing.

But it takes a lot of will power to make myself go through this elaborate preparatory stage because all I really want to do is launch into the novel proper. So why don’t I? Because if I take the trouble to write it out in miniature first, I find I end up with a much better piece of work. And that’s what matters.

All the same I am so immensely relieved when I get out of the Pre-Draft stage that I feel like throwing a colossal party. Then I remember the last time I threw a colossal party, how at the end, when I finally succeeding in getting everybody out of the house at some dreadful hour in the morning, put all the bottles and cans in black plastic sacks and wearily climbed the stairs to my bedroom I discovered that somebody had been sick on my bed.

So perhaps I’ll just go out with my wife to a very nice restaurant instead.

First though, I am going to have to do something about the terrible mess that is my desk. It looks like I’ve just been burgled. This happens whenever I’m working on an extended piece of writing . Letters pile up unopened, books gather around the computer like they’ve started growing there. Soon I begin losing things underneath the debris, like my glasses for example, or the telephone. Everything goes to hell in a handcart.

But right now who cares? Because my model works and I’m so pleased with it. Look at the wheels going round, look at the pistons going up and down, look at the lights going on and off. Did I really make that?

What I Did That Summer

Some people remember past events by smells. Proust and his biscuits, for example. I have to confess, I usually eat my biscuits too quickly to notice the smell. No, for me, it’s generally words.

Writers are obsessed with words, of course, but with me the obsession goes so deep as to verge on the autistic. That’s why this blog is called Dreaming In Text because sometimes I do – dream in text I mean. In those dreams I am simply presented with a huge white screen on which the text of a story appears, word by word as I read it. I don’t know if anyone else does this but if you’re out there, I’d love to hear about it.

One of those moments when words wrapped themselves indelibly round my life was when I first heard Virgil’s most famous line, forsan et haec olim meminisse iuvabit, which most people translate as something like, ‘and perhaps it will help one day to remember these things’.

Aeneas, who has been shipwrecked on the way home from Troy, is talking to his men and he’s saying something along the lines of, ‘Cheer up guys, one day you’ll look back on all this and laugh,’ but at the same time Virgil, the poet, is talking to his audience, which stretches all the way from his time to mine, and telling us that one day we will be glad that this story has been recorded.

Virgil’s words were written in a book for me when I was seventeen by a girl in whose company I’d just spent my summer holiday studying Homer. I’d never had the chance to learn Ancient Greek at school but I loved Latin and my Latin teacher managed to get me a bursary to attend a crash course in Greek focusing on Homer’s Iliad. Everyone was there for the same reason.

I knew about the Aeneid, of course, knew that it was the great Roman epic just as Homer’s Iliad, that we were giving up our Summer to study, was the great Greek epic. But so far the only Virgil I'd read was Book 4 of the Georgics, a strange poem which seemed to be all about bee-keeping but was obviously about much more. ‘Forget the Georgics,' she urged me. 'Read the Aeneid. It'll blow your mind.’ (We all spoke like that in those days, I'm afraid. She was right, though.)

That afternoon we were going our separate ways. I can’t even remember how many days the summer school lasted but it had been an intense time. There had been love affairs going off like fireworks all around; some students had been picked up by the police wandering around the town at daybreak wrapped in blankets, wide-eyed as old testament prophets; one student had melodramatically taken too many sleeping tablets, fortunately not enough to cause any damage. Now we were all saying goodbye.

Memory plays the strangest tricks with time. Some summers seem no more than a regular procession of light and shade, while others burn as brightly as phosphorus. And afterwards, when all the names and places are no more than ash only the words are left behind.

If This Is What It Takes To Win The Carnegie...

A woman is tied to a metal frame with her arms high above her head. There is blood on her face because she is being tortured. The frame is lowered into the water and kept there until she is close to drowning. When the frame is raised clear of the water she coughs so hard she throws up all down her chest. Behind a one way mirror two men and two teenage boys watch.

This is a scene from The Ask And The Answer by Patrick Ness, the second book in his trilogy Chaos Walking. The first book won the 2008 Guardian Children’s Book Prize and was nominated for the Carnegie medal.

It’s not the only difficult scene in the book by any means. For example, there’s another scene in which the narrator is placed in charge of putting metal number tags on concentration camp inmates. These tags are bolted onto the leg so tightly that they cause an infection but the metal plates are coated with a medicine which fights the infection so what happens is that the infected skin starts to heal around the band, growing into it, replacing that bit of skin with the metal. The tags cannot be removed without causing the infected wound to reopen. At one point one of the guards, for no reason other than his own amusement, decides to clamp one of the tags around the neck of an inmate, causing him to collapse as his throat is constricted to the point where he cannot breathe.

The concentration camp victims are not human because it’s a science fiction novel. They’re called Spackle. But they behave exactly like humans. They live in family groups, they talk to each other. Except that they don’t talk to each other any more because the food they are given contains a chemical which prevents them from doing so. It’s described in the book as like ‘cutting their tongues out.’

Have you heard enough yet?

There’s been a lot of outrage among children’s authors about the idea that publishers have come up with of putting age-guidance on children’s books even though we all know that many books are bought for children by well-meaning adults who haven’t the time or the inclination to read them first. They just look at what it says on the cover and if the book has won a prestigious prize, well that probably seems as good a recommendation as any.

I’m going to get a lot of flack for saying this but I think some of the authors who have made a fuss about the idea of age-guidance want to forget that they are actually writing children’s books. They want to be taken seriously as literary figures and they suspect that having an age rating on their books will militate against that.

Of course that’s just speculation on my part. What I really wanted to say was that The Ask And The Answer is a powerful but harrowing book about the way that politicians impose themselves upon our society and how individuals respond to them but I won’t be recommending it to my daughter even though she really enjoys YA fiction because I think she would find it too disturbing. She’s thirty one, by the way.

Writer's Hesitation

I don’t believe in Writer’s Block. At least not for myself. I’ve seldom experienced anything stronger than Writer’s Hesitation which usually lasts no more than a few days. If writing doesn’t want to come to you, you have to make it come. There are all sorts of ways to do that. Here’s mine.

First you have to set up a mental process that has the potential to produce whatever it is you want, be it a theme, a story, a segment of plot, a new character. I call that process churning.

Churning involves deliberately trying to imagine what you might write, even if you haven’t a clue. You make the effort and keep making it for a sustained period. Maybe a day or so. Maybe a week. This can be very frustrating but you have to make yourself do it. Then you stop thinking about it on the surface but allow the thinking to continue at a very deep level. Every now and again you bring that process back to surface consciousness to see if anything has changed. You don’t give up even if you don’t seem to be making any progress. It‘s a matter of will power.

At the same time as you’re churning, you have to feed the process. I find it helps to read several different kinds of book at the same time – books that are like your normal kind of writing and books that aren’t, good books, bad books, books from completely different disciplines. I also try to watch movies and listen to music. Personally, I find contemporary minimalist composers particularly useful for stirring up currents in the mind.

The next step is sketching. You sit down and start writing, even when you haven’t a clue what you should be writing about. It’s important not to think of it as something that will necessarily lead anywhere or something that you might keep. I often start by writing about episodes I remember from my childhood since my childhood seems so different from the way the world is now that just remembering it is like visiting another planet. Sometimes I also use my dreams as starting points.

While all this is going on you can get involved in other things, but whatever you’re doing whether it’s painting the kitchen, going to the supermarket or cooking a meal, you still think of yourself as working on your writing. This process I think of as keeping a candle burning on the altar of your writing. You can go away and leave that altar unattended but the candle is always burning.

So you’re churning, your feeding the process, you’re sketching and you’re keeping the candle burning. What’s left? Recognition. You have to be ready to recognise inspiration when it comes. Sometimes it’s not that easy to spot. It may look nothing like you expected but there’s always something about it that makes you look twice, that makes you smile inwardly or catch your breath.

When that happens, you know you’ve got the beginning of what you were looking for. Now it’s essential to make the idea feel welcome. Pay it attention. Listen to what it has to say. See where it leads, how it can be developed, what its friends are like.

Sometimes one idea is not enough by itself. You have to wait for another one to come along. It might seem completely different to the first but if you pick it up and turn it around you suddenly see that they fit together perfectly, they’re part of the same jigsaw and now you begin to imagine what the other parts might look like. You’re on your way to creating a whole new picture.

And that moment when the big picture starts to form in your head is so beautiful that it’s worth all the effort.

What's That Smell?

‘Plot-driven’ is a damning phrase to use about a book. Plot is looked down on like an uncouth acquaintance who walks into a restaurant when you’re having a meal with someone you want to impress. It’s no good looking in the other direction, because here comes embarrassing old Plot, marching up to your table, talking too loudly, completely failing to understand that you’re in literary company now, you’re focusing on the telling details of human relationships, you’re busily crafting exquisite sentences. Plot wouldn’t know an exquisitely crafted sentence if the head waiter brought it to his table on a silver platter.

But the truth is that Plot is the one who keeps the restaurant in business. Plot pays the bills. Plot comes up trumps. And you and I both need Plot because there is nothing worse than a manuscript without a plot. I’ve read a few in my time, as it happens. And written some.

All too often a writer gets a good idea for a book and they’re off writing like a dog after a rabbit. They don’t wait to think the whole thing through because they’re so keen to explore the story; to discover the characters; to let the structure develop; to see how the characters interact with the structure; to have fun with the language; to tell their friends that they’re working on something; to hint that they think this one might be good; to add, given any encouragement, that it might even be the one.

Of course they don’t know how it’s going to end yet but they have a kind of inkling and they’re really enjoying the writing; and that, after all, is what it’s all about. Isn’t it?

Then at last, after months of toil, they get to the end and, reading through the whole thing again, they do have to admit that the plot might be a bit thin in places. But, hey, it’s only a first draft, after all.

You know what? It’s much easier to improve the language, the characterisation, the setting (almost anything actually, other than the plot) in the second draft. Those are all things that can be relatively easily tweaked but try sorting out a manuscript when you’ve committed yourself to a plot full of holes.

There’s only one real way to do it and that’s to start all over again. And that is soooooo painful, especially after you’ve told all your friends that this might be the one; soooooo hard to even contemplate after all those months of work, that it’s easier to ignore those nagging doubts and just work on the manuscript you’ve got, polishing the language, honing the characterisation, adding depth and lustre to the setting until it’s really a very good piece of writing indeed.

Except for one thing - the plot stinks like a dead donkey.

A Secret Place

Do you remember the first time you kissed someone and really meant it? If you want to write for young people I think you need to remember such things. I was sixteen with long curly hair like Marc Bolan when it happened. I had ‘snogged’ girls before of course, but only as a points-scoring exercise. This was a different thing altogether.

I saw Diana for the first time at the house of a friend of a friend. There were about seven or eight people in the room that night, listening to music, drinking cheap wine; some were passing joints around. I didn’t care about any of that. I couldn’t stop looking at the girl in the corner of the room with the almond eyes. I thought she was incredibly beautiful. That was the word that filled my head. Not pretty, or sexy, or attractive. Beautiful

Weeks later, when we were ‘going out’ together, I told her what I thought that night. To my surprise she punched my arm, really hard. ‘Don’t say stuff like that!’ she told me angrily. It was no good me insisting that I meant every word. She wasn’t prepared to listen. She wanted only honesty, she told me firmly. But all that was in the future.

I left my friend-of-a-friend’s house that first night with my head full of her, though we’d hardly spoken. How I envied other people’s social lives that seemed so full of exciting opportunities, unlike my own narrow little world. I felt quite certain I would never see her again.

But only a week later on a Sunday evening at the Round House in Chalk Farm where I regularly went to see rock groups, I walked right into her. To my surprise she seemed just as pleased to see me as I was to see her.

We spent the whole evening together. I have no idea what we talked about. I expect I babbled, but she agreed to meet me in the same place the following week. I don’t know how many evenings I spent at the Roundhouse with her before I plucked up the courage to kiss her. Three, perhaps. Four. How could I have been so slow? Because I didn’t want to spoil things; I was terrified I might drive her away.

It was right at the end of the evening. I remember that I was wearing a heavy blue ex-RAF greatcoat. Much too big for me but very trendy at the time. We were standing near the exit and she was about to go home. I put my hand up to her cheek and gently tilted her head towards me. She smiled, slid her arms inside the coat and wrapped them around me. Then I closed my eyes and put my whole soul into that kiss.

That relationship lasted until I went to university two years later but it seemed to me that it had been going downhill for at least twelve months. She so often seemed dissatisfied with me, critical of the things I said.

In the end, I took the coward’s way out and wrote her a letter. But she wasn’t prepared to be dismissed like that. She insisted on meeting me face to face. It was the honest thing to do.

So we met up for one last time. She mustered all her dignity. I felt ashamed of myself. ‘I was looking in my diary,’ she told me. ‘I read the entry for the first time you kissed me. I wrote that I loved you.’

I was speechless. All I could think of was, why had she never said that before? It was no good telling me now when it was too late. I had always been obliged to guess at what she thought of me. And I had tended to assume the worst. Gradually, the relationship had degraded into a series of misunderstandings and now it was too late to put it back together again. But I didn’t say any of this because I was too young to understand it myself. I just stood there like a fool.

It would never have worked between me and Diana. Even if we’d met later on in life, I’m sure she would have found me just as annoying and I would have always been left guessing at what went through her head. But I will always remember the night the whole world melted away as she slid her arms beneath my coat and kissed me back. That night I discovered a secret place, one that I had never known existed but where I had always wanted to be. I walked back to the tube station with my blood singing in my veins.

The Conversion Of The Jews

One of the things I like about narratives of childhood is that there are so many moments when the world view of a child is suddenly exploded and he or she is obliged to understand that the world is larger and more complex than previously imagined. One such moment occurred for me when I went to secondary school for the first time.

I was, as I’ve mentioned before, brought up within an Irish Catholic community living in Walthamstow, in East London. Practically all my parents’ friends were Irish immigrants. Our neighbours, on the other hand, were long established Londoners whose cockney accents were strikingly different from my parents’ accents and whose world, despite their proximity, seemed utterly removed from mine.

Twice a year the men, women and children from the Catholic church paraded through the streets in religious procession singing hymns and carrying banners. Though I was a very devout young boy, I hated taking part in these processions. The local people would hang out of their windows watching in bewildered fascination, and I felt mortified by their gaze.

The Christian calendar provided many of the milestones for my early life, one of which was the feast of Good Friday marking the death of Christ. The service for this day included a prayer for the conversion of the Jews, part of which is reproduced below.

‘Let us pray also for the Jews that the Lord our God may take the veil from their hearts and that they also may acknowledge our Lord Jesus Christ. Let us pray: Almighty and everlasting God, you do not refuse your mercy even to the Jews.’

I noticed this prayer because it was only said on Good Friday but it didn’t mean a lot to me. Though Walthamstow today is a completely multicultural community, at that time it was very monocultural. There were hardly any black or Asian people living near us and I had certainly never encountered any Jews. If I thought of them at all it was as extras in the story of Jesus which I heard each Sunday in the Gospels and almost every day at school from the nuns.

When I was twelve years old the time came to go to secondary school. My parents sent me to a Catholic school run by Jesuit priests. It was a few miles away in Stamford Hill, and required a train journey. I remember that on my first day as I walked to school with my brother I saw a group of men dressed in what seemed the most extraordinary manner. They wore black hats and long black coats; the younger ones had curled side whiskers; the older ones had long black beards. I stopped and stared.

‘Don’t stare!’ my brother told me.

But I couldn’t help myself. ‘Who are those people?’ I asked.

‘They’re Jews,’ he said. ‘Now come on, for heaven’s sake or we’ll be late for school.’

So these were the Jews, I thought to myself. Obviously, I was later to learn that they were only a particular group of Jewish people, but at the time all I could think was that these were the people for whose conversion I was praying each Good Friday.

For the first time in my life I began to doubt my religion. Until now I had had no difficulty believing in the virgin birth, in the miracle of the loaves and fishes, in Christ walking on water, or rising from the dead and breaking out of his tomb.

But that the individuals I could see on the other side of the road – people who were prepared to make a procession of themselves every single day - would simply give up their religion and become Catholics was beyond my ability to believe.

It just wasn’t realistic.

The Good Old Days

The primary school I attended was run by nuns. Real nuns, clad from top to toe in black with just their faces showing. They scared the life out of me.

I particularly remember the nun who taught me in my last year at that school. Her name was Sister Catherine. She was a tall woman. Though, to tell the truth, I never thought of any of them as women. My mother was a woman. My aunt was a woman. The person who served behind the counter in the shop across the road from our house was a woman. But the creatures who presided over the seven terrible hours of each weekday that I spent at school were just nuns.

Sister Catherine didn’t like boys. Girls were fine, girls behaved themselves. Some of her favourite girls were even allowed to do little jobs in the classroom, such as cleaning the blackboard or taking her place at the teacher’s desk when she had to leave the classroom on an errand, and writing down the names of anyone who talked.

But boys could not behave themselves even if they tried. It was not in their nature. Boys disgusted Sister Catherine.

One of my favourite lessons was art. I wasn’t particularly good at it but I enjoyed the relative freedom it involved. I remember one day painting a picture of a house on top of a green hill. There was a tree beside the house and smoke coming out of the chimney. I was pleased with that picture. At the end of the art lesson Sister Catherine collected our paintings and pinned them to the wall at the back of the classroom.

As the weary day wore on, I happened to glance back to look at my painting and I remember feeling pleased with it and deciding that it was one of the best I’d ever done.

Suddenly Sister Catherine’s voice cut through my thoughts like a guillotine dropping smoothly down on someone’s neck. ‘Brian Keaney!’ she said. She was standing right beside me, looking down on me and speaking in a level voice but through gritted teeth. How had she got there so quickly without me noticing? ‘I don’t know how many times I’ve seen you looking at that picture of yours today,’ she continued. ‘You must be the vainest child I have ever come across.’

There was no sound from the rest of the class, not even a hint of a giggle. No one wanted to be the next to incur their teacher’s anger. Instead they gazed in horrified fascination as the vainest child Sister Catherine had ever seen shrivelled before their eyes like the desiccated remains of an insect shut away in an empty room in a long abandoned house.