Idealised Story Syndrome

My next book, The Magical Detectives, comes out in just a few days time. A week ago I received advance copies. It’s always such a pleasure to finally hold the book in your hand. I can still remember the very first time I had that experience though it was over twenty five years ago. But I can’t help wondering how much longer there will be objects called books to hold proudly in your hand.

Right now I am trying to respond to the editor’s comments on the next book in the series, The Magical Detectives and the Forbidden Spell, which is due out in July. The thing is, I sent in this manuscript in December 2009. Consequently, I can’t remember all that much about it. I’m having to find my way back into the book emotionally. It’s like going back to a house you used to live in and trying to remember where everything was.

Then there’s the tricky business of deciding about each and every one of the editor’s suggestions. Mostly these are unimportant to me. For example I have written,

He felt a great temptation to close his eyes and drift away. But he forced himself to keep them open

and my editor would rather I wrote,

He felt a great temptation to close his eyes and drift away. But he forced them to stay open.

That sort of thing doesn’t bother me in the least. What I do find difficult, however, is the tendency that all editors have, to believe that a story is something real that exists independent of the words the writer uses to describe it. I call this Idealised Story Syndrome.

The truth is that there is no story behind the words; the words are the story. Tamper with them just a little and the story changes just a little; tamper with them too much and the whole glittering edifice comes tumbling down around your ears.

I honestly don’t think they realise what a fragile thing a story is. Sometimes they seem to me like burly physical education teachers, whistles strung on cords around their necks, knocking the spineless thing into shape while the author looks on like a parent gazing helplessly through the railings, trying to suppress a cry of dismay.

What If They Want To Change Your Book?

Like it or not, getting published involves making compromises. The trick is to make only those compromises you are happy to live with in the long term. Some times you get it right; sometimes you don’t.

In my novel Balloon House, the central character’s name is Neve. Originally I spelled this the Irish way, Niamh. The editor wasn’t happy. Your readers won’t know how to pronounce it, she complained. In the end I agreed to spell the name exactly as it sounds. It annoyed the hell out of me but I decided it really didn’t matter. After all, the character wasn’t even Irish.

In my forthcoming book, The Magical Detective Agency, the central character’s name is Otto. My editor clearly thought that this was an odd choice and wanted to change it. She suggested I look at the list of the most popular names and choose one. This time I stuck to my guns. In my mind the character was unquestionably Otto. He had been right from the very start and I could not possibly imagine him with any other name. I won that round.

The compromises I made when writing my fantasy trilogy, The Promises Of Dr Sigmundus, were of a completely different order. The American publishers paid quite a lot of money (by my standards) for the rights but only on the condition that I would work with the editor on the manuscript. I agreed. After all, working with someone isn’t the same thing as being dictated to.

The editor felt that for the US market, the manuscript needed to be much tighter, much pacier. My UK editor, who was clearly flattering me to win me over, put it like this, ‘What you’ve written is a bit like French art film, Brian; what they want is more like a Hollywood blockbuster.’

I had my reservations of course but I agreed because I wanted to get the best book and to do that you always have to be open to criticism. It turned out to be quite a revelation. The US editor went to work with her pencil and she did not beat about the bush.

As the process unfolded I was extremely impressed by how much work she put in and how clear she was about what she wanted to achieve; but the cuts were very significant and took some swallowing. The second book, for example, ended up very much shorter than it started out.

It hurt, but the new version was tighter, sharper and really cut to the chase. Of course a great deal had been sacrificed and when some reviewers complained that it was too short on atmosphere I wanted to cry out: there’s another much fuller version on the hard drive of my computer that will never see the light of day.

Does this matter? Yes and No. The fact is that a successful book is never just the result of one person’s work. If you sell the foreign rights (which is what every author hopes to do), the translator will always transfer his or her particular vision to the book – they won’t be able to help it – and unless, the author is fluent in half a dozen languages he or she will never even know what has been changed.

The truth is that writing a novel is a two-way process; it’s about listening to other people’s views as well as your own. After all writing is a form of communication. Besides, in my opinion a book only fully exists when it is being read by someone else.; and if it doesn’t get published, it doesn’t get read.

Snow, Snow, Thick Thick Snow

I am so annoyed with myself, I could kick myself all round my office. I’ve got three quarters of the way through the current draft of my next book and I’ve set it in deep winter. I’ve had great fun describing the city in which the dénouement takes place – the heaps of dirty snow piled up against the kerbstones, the skeletal trees, the wind flinging grit and sleet in the faces of the characters. Then suddenly I realised that it can’t be winter. This is because of a tiny but absolutely critical detail that is present at the climax.

How could I have allowed this to happen? Simple. It’s that business of letting the story take control. It always feels like so much fun at the time. ‘Now the narrative is really coming to life!’ you tell yourself. ‘All I have to do is let it tell itself.’

This is the way that people who aren’t writers sometimes imagine writers working – fingers flying across the keyboard in a trance-like state as inspiration takes hold of the writer and he or she becomes merely an instrument in the creative process.

And what do you end up with? Mush.

Twenty five years writing and I still haven’t learned that if you’re going to leave the story in charge of itself, you have to watch it like a hawk. Otherwise it’s like giving a toddler a can of petrol and a box of matches and saying, ‘Go and play, kid. Just don’t bother me.’

All right I know, I’m going over the top here, having a tantrum in fact. And yes, I acknowledge that it’s all a question of balance and that it’s precisely this business of letting the narrative off the leash that makes the writing enjoyable for both the writer and, ultimately, for the reader.

But right now I've got no time to be reasonable. I’ve got to go back and strip out all that stuff about people having to pull sledges along the streets or falling into huge drifts of snow and replace it with description of an altogether milder season. It will be incredibly tedious and it will take absolutely ages.

But it serves me right.

Plus Ca Change, Plus C'est La Meme Chose

Well my Italian dream is over and I’m back in London. One thing I won’t miss is The Great Anointing which I went through every morning. Since, genetically, I am really designed for the mild, wet climate of the west of Ireland, I had to start every day by coating myself with vast quantities of sun block which had the effect of making me look even whiter than I am. This, coupled with my Marks and Spencers hat marked me out as a tourist as effectively as if I’d had ‘Englishman on holiday’ tattooed across my forehead.

As a result, waiters and shopkeepers invariably spoke to me in English, despite my best efforts to talk to them in their native language. I did get a few opportunities to speak Italian however, including one whole afternoon when I had lunch with an Italian friend and was even obliged a couple of times to use the subjunctive. My Italian teacher, whose name is Laura, would have been extremely pleased. She is very strict about the subjunctive.

I mentioned this to a frighteningly intelligent friend of mine who has more degrees than a thermometer and writes books, the titles of which are completely beyond my comprehension. He frowned and said, ‘What’s the subjunctive?’ So, in case you share his grammatical blind spot, the subjunctive is a tense* that indicates doubt or hypothesis. The example commonly given is ‘If I were you’. Normally we don’t say ‘I were happy’, we say ‘I was happy’. So why do we say ‘If I were you’? Because we are using the subjunctive, of course.

Actually, nowadays, most people probably say ‘If I was you’ because, as Laura regularly points out with a curl of the lip, the use of the subjunctive in English is dying out. She clearly regards this as a sign of the degeneracy of the English language.

I don’t agree. I just see it as a sensible process of rationalisation. This is the way I look at it. If someone says to you…(Oh dear! Strictly speaking I should have written ‘If someone were to say to you’ since I am now hypothesising) – anyway, to hell with that. If someone says to you ‘If I were you’, there is no element of doubt, is there? You don’t think to yourself, ‘Gosh! Is he me? Am I really someone else?’ No, you understand that the person speaking is simply giving you a piece of advice. There’s no confusion; so why do you need to use a special tense?

The gradual disappearance of the subjunctive is one of the things that is often referred to as a kind of litmus test of grammatical awareness by people who complain about a decline in editing standards. Personally, I don’t think there’s been any such decline at all. My editor is prepared to accept ‘If I were you’ or ‘If I was you’. She knows the difference but accepts that the English language is in a constant state of change.

Since my return to England I have discovered that I am now in Wikipedia However, according to my entry I live in London with my wife and two daughters. This only goes to show what happens when there is no overall editorial control of a text. My daughters are in fact both married with homes of their own. Indeed, my elder daughter is thirty-one today. (Happy Birthday, Em!) Which is, coincidentally, about the age I feel inside.

Unfortunately my birth certificate is unequivocal on this point. I am, in reality, fifty-five and have been writing children’s books for more than a quarter of a century. If I delve into what Shakespeare called ‘the deep backward and abysm of time’ I can even remember one of the Great Milestones Of Publishing.

I had been invited to have lunch with my editor at Oxford University Press. We were just leaving the building for a restaurant when Ron, my editor, was hailed by another editor (whose name I never caught) but who was clearly enormously excited about something.

‘Look at this, Ron!’ the Other Editor said, taking a sheaf of paper out of a large brown envelope. ‘It’s just arrived from America.'
‘What is it?’ asked Ron. ‘A set of proofs?’
The Other Editor shook his head. ‘It’s a manuscript,’ he said.
‘But it’s practically perfect!’ exclaimed Ron in amazement. ‘You could publish it as it stands.’
‘I know,’ said the Other Editor. Speaking almost reverently he added, ‘It’s been done on a word processor.’
Ron thumbed through the manuscript in awed silence.
'This is the future,’ the Other Editor assured him. ‘They’ll all be like this soon.’
Ron shook his head in dismay. ‘Then we’ll be out of a job,’ he observed gloomily.

The Other Editor was right. Pretty soon every manuscript they received (including mine) was being produced on a computer. However, Ron’s gloomy prediction that there would be no more need for editors proved untrue. As in the English language, some things (like the subjunctive) change, but others remain the same.

Real editing, as opposed to straightforward copy editing, is about vision, about understanding the audience, about recognising a voice, developing a story, encouraging talent and fitting all this into the overall strategy of the publishing house. I think there are as many people who can do that today as there always have been.

* Of course strictly speaking it's a mood not a tense as I remembered after writing this but I'm afraid I'm not up to explaining the difference