The Celestial Boatkeeper

I learned last week that an old friend had commited suicide. It was a shock but not exactly a surprise. In my parents’ time people would have said that she ‘suffered from her nerves’. Nowadays we would say that she had a mental illness. Either way, she was an enormously likeable person who just didn’t seem to be able to cope with the difficulties presented by her own personality.

My dismay is nothing compared to what her family and close friends are having to endure. Nevertheless, the news left me feeling stunned for a day or two. After that, I was filled with a sense of urgency. The realisation came home to me: we have so little time and so much of mine has already gone.

A very good friend of mine, who died about fifteen years ago of liver cancer, told me that when he was given the news that his condition was terminal, he found himself remembering how, as a boy, he would sometimes pay a few pence to hire out a boat on a pond in his local park. Each boat was allowed twenty minutes. When his allotted time was up, the boatkeeper would appear at the side of the pond and yell out his number.

‘It was always too soon,’ he said. ‘You were just beginning to enjoy yourself. But you knew there was nothing you could do about it. The pond wasn’t very deep. If necessary the boatkeeper could wade out into the middle and pull your boat back to shore himself.’ Amazingly , my friend told me all this with a grin.

I have to get on with my work before the boatkeeper calls out my number. It doesn’t matter that I’m not James Joyce or Charles Dickens, that I’m only writing children’s books. This is my mark upon the page of the world. I have to complete it.

Hope

I had lunch with my editor yesterday to discuss the First Draft of my new novel. This is a new editor. When isn’t it? Children’s publishing in the UK seems to be exclusively staffed by young women in their late twenties and early thirties, which means that they are inevitably leaving to have babies at regular intervals. I heard of one writer who had five editors during the course of one book. You hardly ever see any editors over forty. What do they do with them I wonder? Perhaps they all get remaindered

My new editor, Catherine, has possibly the trendiest haircut of any editor I have encountered. (I would hazard a guess that it’s an asymmetric bob but being fifty-five and never a real surfer of the zeitgeist I could be wrong.) Every time I have encountered her so far she looks as if she had it cut that very morning. However, this is all by the by. The point is that she was tremendously enthusiastic about my new book.

‘We believe it could be very commercial,’ she said.
'Well that's nice,' I replied.

One has to be restrained, doesn’t one? It wouldn’t do to start blowing a whistle or letting off fire-crackers because the thing to remember about publishing is this: it is fuelled by hope. Everybody in publishing lives and breathes the stuff. So there’s absolutely no point in getting excited just because someone throws you slightly more than your usual portion of crumbs. Nine times out of ten it means nothing at all.

I’ve had my share of success. I’ve been up for plenty of awards. My books are translated into lots of languages. Even now a book I wrote back in 1993, which has been in print somewhere in the world ever since, is doing very well in South America. But my publishers have never before said, ‘we think this could be very commercial’.

My problem is, I don’t actually try to write books that will sell. I just write the book that’s in my head. There was an album by the rock musician, Kevin Ayers about thirty years ago which I rather liked, entitled Whatever She Brings We Sing and that sums it up for me. Whatever the muse puts into my head is what comes out on paper.

It would be great to be one of those writers who surveys the market, understands the parameters of the industry, calculates the mood of the reading public and writes something that captures the spirit of the age. But that’s not how I work. I’m an author because I’m compelled to write and that’s all there is to it.

Anyway, there are at least twelve months before I find out whether Catherine of the trendy haircut was just being nice, or whether it’s true. And in the meantime I have another book coming out next month, Nathaniel Wolfe and the Bodysnatchers, which has at least managed to make it into the Reading Agency’s Summer Reading Challenge. The Head of Sales, who was passing when I met up with Catherine, told me with a big smile that this was ‘very good news’.

He is one of the few men in the organisation. I like him and I think he likes me. However, our relationship did come under some considerable strain when I persuaded him to go to a dancing class. (Readers of this blog will know that I am a regular Lindy Hopper). He left half way through the class and told me that he had never been so humiliated in his life.

I know just how he felt. Being an author is a bit like going to a dance class for the first time. You think it’s going to be great fun until you realise that everybody else seems to know a great deal more than you do. They pull off all sorts of flashy moves with the greatest of ease while you are having trouble remembering which is your left foot and which is your right. By the time the class is over you have sworn never to return. But if you’ve got the bug, somehow or other you find yourself turning up a week later, full of hope and ready to make a fool of yourself all over again.

Somebody Else's Suit

The advance copies for my next book have arrived. (This is one I wrote twelve months ago, not the one I’ve just finished, obviously.) Everyone at my publishing house thinks the cover is great and who am I to argue? The thing is, there’s just one little detail I’m not happy about.

What can I do about it? Well, nothing actually. The plain fact is that a writer generally has very little input into the cover of his or her book – even though it’s the one thing that can really launch or sink it. If you’re lucky they show you a rough of the artwork and then maybe you get to see another stage, but it’s all done at one remove and by the time you actually get presented with the finished item, it’s way too late to change anything, unless you want to delay your book for another six months and make yourself really unpopular with your publisher.

So if you don’t like the cover, you  just have to put up with it. Even if it’s nothing like your own vision of the book. Even if you think it’s badly drawn. Even if you think the colours are garish. Even if you wouldn’t buy a book with a cover like that yourself.

What does it feel like when this happens? It feels like you’ve turned up to a wedding wearing somebody else’s suit. The legs are a bit too short and the chest is a bit too tight and it’s a weird colour that you would never have chosen but everyone is slapping you on the back and saying you look great so what the hell?

Now before I give you the wrong impression, I should make it clear that I actually do like this cover. And no-one else even notices the thing that I'm unhappy about (unless I point it out to them). Which means, of course that my editor is right. It’s a great cover and I’m just being hyper-critical.

But this was my baby once and now it’s not any more. It’s grown up and left home. If I don’t like the way it wears its hair, the time it goes to bed or the company it keeps, that’s too bad. I simply have to learn let go, that’s all. Easier said than done.

Tyger, Tyger

I heard it said once that in the subconscious it is always now and that seems true to me. Some experiences are so vivid that even years later we have only to close our eyes and we are right back there re-living those moments in all their intensity. They wait for us like tigers stalking the borders of our consciousness.

The night before last, for example, I found myself sitting up in bed, disorientated and panting, adrenalin rushing through my system, as a nightmare subsided, not once, not twice but five separate times.

I am a very happily married man. Indeed I may be the most happily married man in the history of happily married men. I have two grown up daughters whom I dote on and who are very kind to me. I own a nice house in London and I’ve even got an allotment* where I can lose myself in the natural world. Nevertheless, there have been plenty of dreadful moments in my life, as I’m sure there are in everyone’s.

One of the places I regularly return to in my dreams is the secondary school I attended as a teenager. Run by Jesuit priests who maintained discipline with a rubber strap, and policed by a system of organised bullying, it was seven years of sheer hell. My only escape was to lose myself in Latin poetry and English composition. I was never happier than the day I left . Yet when night falls, I regularly find myself transported there once again, walking its dusty corridors, inhaling the scent of male sweat, chalk dust, school dinners and fear.

But those corridors are also one of the first places I look when I need a new idea for a story. Not that my novels are all nightmarish. By no means. The one I’ve just finished is essentially a comedy. But you have to have a little sorrow to mix in with the laughter. It’s like salt. Without it, nothing tastes right.

Take a story like Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone. It’s essentially a romp, an entertainment. Nevertheless, it begins with an orphaned boy shut in a cupboard by his adoptive parents, picked on, bullied and abused. Everything that follows – Hogwarts, Hagrid and the whole box of tricks, devolves its emotional charge from that initial situation.

In my opinion, to make a story work you have to put in some of your own tears. Even if you shed them years after the event sitting up in bed in the middle of the night.

That’s why I’m a children’s writer, I suppose. I never really recovered from my own childhood. I just put it in a hole in the ground and covered it up. But it keeps on digging its way out and finding its way back to me, decayed, rotten but horribly familiar.

* That’s a strip of land for growing vegetables for non-UK readers.

Making Friends With Dragons

My agent rang me up on Friday to say how much she enjoyed the First Draft of my new book. That was nice of her but then she is a very nice woman. She has performed all sorts of kind actions in the time we’ve known each other, including on one occasion driving me home from a party in Central London during a snowstorm when I was, insanely, wearing a light Summer suit.

After her call, I recalled how incredibly intimidated I was by agents when I first started out trying to be a writer. The idea of contacting one was a bit like setting out to slay a dragon and I regularly meet aspiring authors nowadays who have the same attitude.

To such jaundiced individuals agents are at best a necessary evil and at worst a parasitic life-form. I had a graphic illustration of this when I arranged for my agent to give a talk to a group of students on a publishing course run by a friend. When I asked her how it went she told me that many of the students had been openly hostile.

I think this comes about because people get confused about what agents actually do. They exist to sell author’s work. That’s it. Plain and simple. They’re not a general critiquing service, though people often treat them as such. A friend who joined a writing group, reported that one of the writers who’d been struggling with a half-finished novel for some time said she was thinking of ‘sending it to a few agents to get a bit of feedback.’

In my opinion that’s a bit like going into the office of an estate agent (or realtor to use the US term) and saying, ‘Listen, I don’t actually have a house to sell just a lorry load of bricks, but when I do it will have five bedrooms a fully-fitted kitchen, a bathroom with an enormous jacuzzi, a large mature garden and heated outdoor swimming pool. Are you interested in selling it?’

It’s because they get asked questions like this that agents can seem inaccessible and even frosty to writers at the beginning of their careers. But the fact is, they exist to sell literary property and, given something saleable, they will work hard to sell it, because in doing so their own interests combine with the writer’s.

Of course they don’t always get it right. An unpublished writer once showed me a manuscript for children which I thought was very good. I recommended an agent to her. The agent read it and liked it. Then she asked her daughter to read it. The daughter didn’t like it. So the agent decided to reject it. I advised the author to go directly to a publisher I thought would like it, and they did. Which only goes to prove that agents are human, like everyone else. They don’t always listen to the right people or make the best choices.

But the truth is that the real problem generally lies not with the agents but with us, the writers. I regularly read manuscripts by developing authors and I have to tell you that an awful lot of them are so bad it’s almost physically painful reading them. Only a sense of responisbility and the memory of my own early days keeps me plodding on to the end. In these unpromising manuscripts it’s nearly always the case that the writer isn’t considering the audience at all. He or she is thinking only of his or her own creative impulses. This is the book he or she wants to write and the rest of us should therefore be prepared to read it, whether we like it or not. But no-one has to read anything. We can pick and choose. That’s the beauty of the market.

So if you get overwhelmingly rejected by agents, my advice is this: don’t get mad; and certainly don’t waste time thinking about getting even; just get better.

Editing Standards UK v US

I've been published by 11 publishers in the UK (4 fiction, the rest non-fiction) and 2 in the US (both fiction). That's obviously not a representative sample so what I'm about to say is only my opinion. Nevertheless, judging from my limited experience one country's approach to editing is much tougher than the other's. One country accepts the occasional typographical error, one does not; one takes a rigorous approach to syntax and punctuation, one is relatively relaxed. Can you guess which is which?

This Mortal Coil

Dreams run in my family. That’s a silly thing to say, of course, since everybody dreams. But what I mean is that my mother, and her mother too, believed they received messages in their dreams. For example when my mother was living in London in the nineteen fifties she dreamed three nights running that her own mother, back in Ireland had died. She saw the funeral and saw her self there. This was long before people in the rural West of Ireland had access to telephones so my mother could not just phone home to check that all was well. Then on the fourth morning she received a telegram to say that her mother had died.

I share my mother’s conviction about dreams However, the messages I receive are generally less direct, more open to interpretation – a sign of the times perhaps. In the dream about Time’s Workshop that I described in my last post there was one feature which has continued to intrigue me. At one point in the dream I came across a man working on a very peculiar object. Unlike all the other things in the workshop, it seemed to have no obvious use. It was a great coil of wood in the shape of a Catherine Wheel but larger than a table and it was studded with nails.

I knew right away that this uncertain artefact was something to do with me and as I watched the workman studiously pulling out the nails one by one with a pair of pliers, I realised that it did not bode well. With each nail that was withdrawn, I found myself wincing, not in pain exactly but in a kind of sympathy for the inarticulate thing that lay there at his mercy.

Since then I have pondered what the significance of the wooden coil might be and I have come to the conclusion that it was my life. After all, in Hamlet Shakespeare describes dying as ‘shuffling off this mortal coil’ and I have learned from a little research on the internet that the word coil was commonly used in the sixteenth century to mean tumults and troubles.

I’m reminded of that marvellous passage in A Christmas Carol when the ghost of Jacob Marley appears to Ebenezer Scrooge. Marley carries a great chain with him which is described as ‘wound about him like a tail’. It is made up of cash-boxes, keys, padlocks, ledgers, deeds, and heavy purses wrought in steel. When Scrooge asks him why he wears it, Marley replies, ‘I wear the chain I forged in life....I made it link by link, and yard by yard; I girded it on of my own free will, and of my own free will I wore it.’

It seems to me then that the strange wooden coil is something I have manufactured in the course of my everyday life. It is a symbol of all my successes and failures. And if it is not too literal an interpretation, I rather fancy that the nails the workman was so assiduously removing one by one were the novels I have written that have disappeared into the remaindered bin. If that is so, then I must try to make those nails a great deal harder to remove. They must be driven much deeper into the wood with all the hammering I can muster so that in the years to come Time’s busy workman will need more than just determination and a pair of pliers to remove them.

Time's Workshop

I emailed my First Draft to my editor yesterday and now I have no idea what to do with myself. I’ve been sitting down at my computer at a quarter to eight every morning for ages and pushing on with my novel. Now, suddenly, there’s no novel to work on. Fortunately, I’m contracted to write a sequel but I can’t start on that yet. There has to be a fallow period in between, otherwise you just find yourself writing the first novel all over again.

What I need to do is to lose myself in a good book and I’ve got a stack of those beside my desk. And there’s plenty of domestic administration that needs my attention. But I just keep wanting to write. It’s such a contrary business writing a novel. When you’re doing it, you’re always thinking about getting to the end. Once you’ve got to the end, you miss it terribly.

I remember meeting John Rowe Townsend when I had just started my career as a writer. He was the grand old man of UK children’s writing at that time. ‘What are you working on at the moment?’ he asked. I wasn’t working on anything as a matter of fact and I tried to tell him this but I was rather intimidated because he was a big cheese and I was no kind of cheese at all so I just mumbled incoherently. In return, he smiled knowingly as if he thought I was keeping some astonishingly brilliant idea under wraps. ‘A writer is always working on something,’ he said. And over the years I’ve discovered that he was right because even when you’re convinced you’re not working on something, you are really. It all goes on under the surface.

Last night I dreamed I was in a vast workshop filled with workers industriously damaging goods of every kind. They were tearing the pages of books, scratching the surface of tables, pulling the stitches in clothes. Some of them looked up from their work long enough to give me a hostile glare and I felt terribly guilty, though I had no idea what my crime was. At some point in the dream I became aware that these busy artisans were doing the work of Time. They were aging everything in the world and they resented my presence for I was engaged in the process of trying to salvage something from Time’s degradation.

Not that I really imagine my work will achieve immortality. My first nine books are already out of print and all the rest will no doubt follow in due course. But you still have to try, don’t you? As an author you have to dare to believe you may one day produce a gem that will outlast you.

So, I will make a start on my pile of unread books and I will get on with the tedious domestic stuff but all the while a little part of me that even I am not aware of will be sneaking around Time’s workshop trying to steal bits and pieces from under the noses of the workers. Anything will do. It might be as small as a pair of ladies’ leather gloves or as large as a double-decker bus. Size is not important. Significance is what I’m looking for. If I can just assemble enough significant details, I may find I have the makings of another story.