Stop Thief!

The other day somebody asked me to look at his manuscript. But when I agreed, he got anxious about showing it to me, worrying that I might steal his work. I was insulted, of course, because it's as if he'd invited me into his house and then asked, as I stood on the threshold, 'You won't steal anything, will you? However, I wasn't particularly surprised. It happens a lot.

I don't know any author who writes for money. I don't mean that we don't all like getting paid. I'm as good at spending money as the next man or woman and I'm always pleased to see royalties being deposited in my bank account. Nevertheless, I don't do it for the money. I write because I'm compelled to, and that's true of every author I know.

If I were to examine my compulsion more closely, I could point to a whole series of drivers located almost exclusively in my childhood. I could say that I write to make sense of who I have become and how that happened, and that this is true even when my stories appear to have nothing whatsoever to do with me.

I could add that I'm fifty nine years old, I look after my grandchildren two days a week, and the other five days are a furious scramble to fit everything else in; but the older I get, the more urgent the need to unravel the tangled ball of string that is my inner world.

That's why I'm not interested in stealing anyone else's narratives. I have my own obsessions. If I don't write them down they keep me awake at night. In fact, they keep me awake at night even when I do write them down. So there's no need to chase after me crying, "Stop thief!" My pockets are empty. It's my head that's full.

Image http://www.nwkniterati.com

The Magical Language

The idea for my latest book, The Magical Detectives and the Forbidden Spell first began when I read a passage by the writer Thomas De Quincey. He's one of my favourite authors, not because he's a great writer. He can be pretty turgid a lot of the time but every now and again he has these little flashes of brilliance that make all the rest worth while.

For anyone who doesn't know it, De Quincey was a nineteenth century writer, a friend of the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge and, as he relates in his best-seller The Confessions of an English Opium Eater, a reformed drug-addict.

In his Autobiographical Sketches , which I much prefer to the Confessions, he describes the impact that hearing the story of Aladdin and his magic lamp had upon him when he was a child. But the story as De Quincey repeats it, is slightly different to the standard version. I've tried to track his version down but as far as I can see there is no evidence that it ever existed, except perhaps in his mind.

In De Quincey's Aladdin a magician living in Africa becomes aware by his secret art of an enchanted lamp locked away in a subterranean chamber from which it can only be released by the hands of an innocent child. But not just any child. The child who can bring the lamp back into the world must have a special horoscope written in the stars, entitling him to take possession of it. But where should such a child be found?

This is the point where De Quincey's version diverges from the regular version. In De Quincey's story the magician puts his ear to the ground and listens to the innumerable sounds of footsteps from every corner of the world and amongst them, at a distance of six thousand miles, playing in the streets of Baghdad he distinguishes the particular steps of Aladdin.

De Quincey was thrilled and obsessed by this image. He talked it over eagerly with his sister, Elizabeth, whom he looked up to greatly. Together they speculated about how the magician could tell from the sound of footsteps on the other side of the world, that this was the very boy he sought. And this was De Quincey's conclusion.

'It had seemed to me that the pulses of the heart, the motions of the will, the very phantoms of the brain must repeat themselves in secret hieroglyphics uttered by those flying footsteps and when I expressed this idea to Elizabeth, she nodded eagerly and told me how she firmly believed that all the inarticulate and brutal sound of the globe must represent a secret language, that somewhere there must be a key to that language and that the man or woman who could find that key would know all that there was to be known.'

When I read this passage I, too, felt thrilled because deep in some dark chamber of my mind I caught the glitter of a new story, a tale about a magical language of such incredible power that its use was forbidden and all knowledge of it hidden away from the world until a twist of fate that would bring a fragment of that language to the light of day.

Where Do You Get Your Ideas From?

I met a fellow children's author in the café of the National Gallery the other day. After our lunch he told me he was going to sit in front of a particular painting by Van Gogh for a long time. He said it helped him get ideas for his writing.

That's something I do, too, though Van Gogh doesn't work for me. I don't mean that I don't like his paintings. I love them. I just mean that they don't give me any ideas for stories. For me it's religious art that does the trick. It's all that imagery.

Last summer when I was in Italy I kept coming across representations of St Bartholomew. Every church I stepped into, there he was on the wall holding his own skin in one hand. Apparently, this is how he is always represented because he was martyred by being flayed alive.

When I got back to England I knew it would start to work its way into my writing and it did. I didn't write a story about someone being flayed alive. But I did write one about someone who goes through the psychological equivalent.

According to the internet St Bartholomew is the patron saint of tanners which seems like a fairly ironic occupation for him to end up with. I think there's a good case for appointing him to the position of patron saint of writers looking for ideas.

One Of Those Experiences

It’s been several years since I had one of those experiences but I had one this evening and as I write this I am still in a state of mild shock as a consequence.

I don’t know how other people get ideas for novels but I get them in one of two ways. Either I start with something small, an idea, a character, a place, a situation and then slowly build the story around it.

Alternatively, very occasionally, I am just sitting there, generally talking to someone, and I suddenly realise that the shape of a story is forming in my mind, a huge lump of it coalescing out of nowhere, starting off all shadowy and dim but getting more and more sharply defined with each second.

By now I’m no longer listening to whatever it was that the person I was speaking to was saying because my mind is turned completely inwards. My heartbeat is going like a train, I’m starting to hyper-ventilate and my whole body is tingling. I’m aware that there’s a very strong chance I might pass out if I allow it to go on much longer but I don’t want it to stop because the longer I can keep it going the more of the story I will see.

When I was younger I could keep concentrating for very much longer. I was braver then. But I’m fifty-six now and frankly I’m a little worried that I will have an aneurism or something. So eventually I decide to cash in my winnings and go home with what I’ve got. I make a list of the important points, along with a few of the choicest details, the ones I really enjoyed, and then I let my attention waver, telling myself that I’ll remember, yes of course I will.

But I’m lying, and I know I’m lying. The truth is that what I’ll have to do for the next six months is try to recreate the vision as best I can from the few pathetic fragments that are all I actually came away with. It’s always the same. I thought I had enough in my basket but when I look it’s just a handful of leaves and straw and bits of broken plaster, the head of a china doll, some bits of an old clay pipe, a torn fragment of a photograph, bus-tickets, sweet wrappers, and a piece of old carpet that got left out in the rain. And then I find it, under all this old junk there’s a single golden coin with my own head upon it.

The question is: will I be able to buy anything with it tomorrow?

Marrying My Muse

One popular myth about writers is that they are tortured souls whose work derives from unrequited love, financial hardship and general misery. They scratch away at their manuscripts by the light of a guttering candle in some solitary garret.

Not me. I dispensed with my misery in my childhood. Thirty four years ago this month I got married and my success as a writer, such as it is, I attribute to the emotional stability I have enjoyed for a third of a century. I work best when I’m happy. I run all my writing past Rosie, my wife, and if she says something needs to be cut or changed, I cut it or change it.

However, back in 1972 the announcement of my intention to get married was not well received. The seventies followed hard on the heels of the intoxicated sixties like the onset of a colossal hangover. Social norms had been toppled and were lying all about us in disarray. The job of clearing up after the party had not yet begun. Perhaps that explains the general negativity of my friends at university. One flatmate summed it up by responding to the great news with the question, ‘Why?’

‘Because we love each other and we want to spend the rest of our lives together,’ I told him. He looked unimpressed. ‘You don’t need a piece of paper to do that.’

My parents were even less enthusiastic. ‘Don’t tell your father!’ was my mother’s reflex response. ‘I think he might notice, Mum,’ I pointed out. ‘At least wait until the end of the summer,’ she begged.

Wearily I agreed, eighteen years of living with my father having conditioned me to a process of walking on eggshells. When the end of the summer came I decided I would wait no longer and broke the news. His reaction was entirely predictable. He objected and said he would not be coming to the wedding. I told him he wasn’t invited. That was the end of communication between us for a very long time.

In the end he did come to the wedding. He was prevailed upon by his sister, a nun in Philadelphia, who came over from the US with the specific intention of making him do the right thing. She was my father’s younger sister but the only person on earth he seemed to fear. A ferociously patriotic, hard line Republican, she was not standing for any nonsense. He was going to the wedding whether he or I wanted him to and that was the end of the matter.

Earlier that summer I had come to the end of my time at university and was working on a building site while applying for work as a secondary school teacher. The news of my impending marriage had leaked out onto the site where it was greeted with ironic amusement. One of my fellow labourers, a hard-drinking man, gave voice to the considered wisdom of the site in a fine example of metonymy: ‘It’ll be all sweetness and light until she gets you to the altar. Then you’ll see a change. You’ll come home at night to the cold dinner and the hot tongue.’

I’m pleased to say that his prediction proved wide of the mark.

The Labourer's Advice

I remember reading an interview with someone who was currently the darling of the media. I can’t remember who he was or what he had done. Something to do with theatre, or opera, or fashion perhaps. All I can recall was him saying this: I’ve been very fortunate in that I’ve never taken on any job that I didn’t want to do.

When I read this, my first thought was, I’m not sure you’ve been fortunate at all. Privileged perhaps but that’s not the same thing. In my experience you very often learn most from the things you don’t want to do.

When I was at university I worked on a building site in the summer holidays in order to make enough money to survive. I didn’t want to do it. I hated the work, mainly because I was a hopeless weakling who had spent the last eighteen years with his nose in a book.

I remember having to move a huge pile of paving stones on my first day. After I’d shifted about half a dozen, my back was aching and my soft, pink hands were torn and bleeding. But there were dozens more to shift so there was nothing for it but to keep picking them up and carrying them away. A few years later, however, I wrote a novel that featured a character who worked on a building site. It wasn’t hard to do because I knew all about it.

It was on that site that I began to understand properly that other people’s minds sometimes worked in very different ways to my own. That sounds a very obvious statement. Everyone is unique, after all. Surely I could have come to this relatively banal realisation just by looking around me – at the other people in my road, for example, or at the boys in my school, or the people in my church. Certainly I could have. But I didn’t. I was still a child.

The last Summer I worked on the site I was twenty-two and I was planning to get married in August. I was, and still remain, an incurable romantic and to say that I was in love with my wife-to-be is to make a considerable understatement. I was utterly crazy about her. One of my fellow students once said to me, ‘You really do worship the ground she treads on, don’t you?’ Without hesitation, I agreed.

It was known on the site that I was getting married and I was the butt of a number of jokes. Mostly well-meant but often very crude stuff. What really stuck in my mind though was when one of the other labourers, a short, square, block of a man with narrow mean-looking eyes, drew me aside and said, I hear you’re getting married. Let me give you a piece of advice.’

This was his advice. As soon as you’re married, give your wife a hell of a beating. Let her know who’s boss. After that you won’t have any trouble with her.

It wasn’t a joke. He was perfectly serious.

I was too stunned to reply. We stood there facing each other. He was looking me right in the eye, watching his advice sink in. Then he nodded and walked away.

I wouldn’t have had that experience if I hadn’t been working on the site. Perhaps you think that’s a good thing. I don’t. I think it’s important – especially for hopeless romantics who want to be novelists – to understand what really goes on in other people’s heads, and in other people’s lives.

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.