Living Dangerously

Well I didn’t win the award. It was won by Shadow Forest by Mat Haig, which I’m ashamed to admit I haven’t read. But I will. It was a very well organised and rewarding event, and it was extremely enjoyable meeting the other authors.

There were just a couple of flies in the ointment. The first was the hotel which was really pretty grim. There’s a tv programme in the UK called The Hotel Inspector in which a successful hotelier goes along to failing hotels and tries to turn them round. This place ought to be next on her list in my opinion.

That was down to the local council who funded the event. The other problem was entirely my mistake. I haven’t had anything alcoholic to drink for at least eighteen months. But when I was having dinner with two of the other authors someone said, ‘Shall we have a bottle of wine?’ and I thought, ‘Why not? It is a bloody award ceremony, after all.’

I only had two glasses but the next morning I felt like Tutankhammen – very, very old, utterly desiccated and with a shocking headache. It was as if I’d never learnt to drink alcohol at all, as if I was about sixteen and starting all over again on cheap cider.

Since that was no way to start a day of delivering inspiring talks to enthusiastic children and dedicated librarians, I had to resort to more biochemical intervention. First I tried paracetamol but that had absolutely no effect. So there was only one thing for it – caffeine. For a brief instant I flirted with the idea of coffee but I knew that would have been madness. It took me so long to get off it in the first place, I couldn’t go through that again.

So it had to be tea. I had about four cups one after the other. And what a difference it made. I felt like I had amphetamine sulphate rushing through my veins. Soon I was ready to talk to anyone about anything. I was enthusiastic, I was excited, I was caffienated.

Now it’s much later and I’m back home after spending a lot of hours on trains. It’s not even nine thirty and I’m dying to go to bed but I know I won’t be able to sleep. That’s drugs, for you I suppose. When you’re an old man you just can’t cope with them. From tomorrow it’s back to clean living.

The Magic Spell

Have you ever heard your voice on an answering machine and cringed? Has someone every handed you a photo saying, Here’s a good one of you? And you find yourself thinking, 'That’s a good photo of me! Oh my god, what’s a bad photo like?’

Not many of us really like the way we are. But what can you do about it? Well you could have voice-training lessons or go in for radical plastic surgery, I suppose. But that sort of thing didn’t make Michael Jackson very happy, did it? Alternatively you could just shrug and forget it.

It’s exactly the same with writing, in my opinion. There’s absolutely no point in agonising about whether you writing is any good or not. Editors and publicists will tell you your latest book is terrific and with a glass of wine in your hand you will probably believe them. Then, when they drift away to talk to someone else, you remember that this is their job. They were never going to tell you anything else. Ten minutes later you overhear them say the same thing about a book that you feel from the very centre of your being is complete and utter tripe.

There are the reviewers of course, but often they seem to have their own agendas. Some of them are simply using your book as a sharpening stone for their wit. Then there are those who seem to be writing about a completely different book from the one you remember writing. I’ve read reviews praising things about my books that I have always felt were their greatest weaknesses and criticising things that I happily assumed to be their strengths.

Of course there are the readers who send you letters and emails telling you that your book made a huge difference to them. That’s always a joy to hear but it’s not necessarily a measure of worth. There are certain pop songs that cause a huge explosion of emotion in me every time I hear them because they are so inextricably bound up with events in my life. They seem like the most brilliant expressions of what was happening to me at that time. But to other people they are just nice tunes.

Finally there are award ceremonies. I’m heading up north to one later this week and I can’t deny that I’ll be pleased as Punch if my book wins and thoroughly gutted if doesn’t. But I have to remind myself that getting shortlisted or even winning an award is not a goal in itself. It’s not even a light to guide you through the darkness. How many prize-winning books have you read and thought, how could this possibly have won?

My solution is simply not to try to decide whether my books are good or bad, but just to get on and write the next one. I write, not to be liked, but because somewhere deep in my childhood everything inside my head got scrunched up like a piece of paper thrown in a litter bin. On that piece of paper was all the information about who I really am. A magic spell to make me happy and contented with myself. There’s absolutely no hope of ever finding it again. So, somehow I have to make a new spell. I keep trying and trying but whenever I get to the end of my latest attempt it never has exactly the right cadence.

Plotting

I am plotting at the moment. Not to bring down the government, though I can’t say I’m not tempted, but the outline of a new book. Getting the story, which I have already decided on in some detail, into the right order. Making sure events unfold in a way that is both exciting to read and sustains the narrative over the length of the book.

I enjoy plotting because it’s fun swapping round parts of the story, deciding that though the obvious thing to do would be to tell this particular episode before that one, it might be much more interesting if I did it the other way round. Trying to find the perfect configuration, like one of those movable number puzzles where you have to get the squares in sequence.

But I also dislike it because with plotting, more that with writing, there are periods where nothing seems to be happening. You realise that although you thought you had the story all worked out in your head, once you begin to run through it in detail there are big holes that need to be filled and you can’t think of any easy way to fill them. You sit there mesmerized by the holes, thinking over and over again, ‘How did that happen?’ Soon you start to panic. Maybe the whole story is ill-conceived. Maybe you’ve been wasting your time for the last two weeks. Maybe you should pack this whole writing business in.

I hate that. It feels like I’ve fallen into one of those holes and I just keep falling for days. Finally I have to go back to the moment in the plot just before the hole opened up because that’s nearly always where the problem lies. It isn’t that I need a new episode to fill in the hole, after all. It’s that there’s a fundamental problem with the direction the story was taking. So I have to haul it back to where I want it to be. That inevitably involves shifting events and characters further along the plotline but that’s never impossible. Just hard work.

I used to do my plotting and my writing at the same time. Making it up as I went along. I thought that writing an outline was such a bore, took all the spontaneity, all the creativity out of it. Not any more. Too many redrafts that way. Now I think the whole thing through in my head to the end. I don’t want to get three quarters of the way through and find great cracks appearing on the path in front of me. I like my pain up front where I can look it in the face and say, ‘You don’t scare me! I’m going to plan you out of existence!’

Just Wondering

A writer friend of mine said today, ‘All writers have a problem with authority’. She was saying this to explain her earlier comment that writers are, on the whole, difficult people. I wondered whether it was true. It’s certainly true for me. I have always had a problem with authority. But is it true for all writers? Or even for most of them? Are writers more stroppy than everyone else? Or is it just me and her?

A Hand-Made Cart

A few nights ago I dreamed I was pushing a wooden cart festooned with ballons through a crowded street. It was a rather makeshift cart. I’d obviously knocked it together myself and it rattled precariously along the cobbled streets. But it stayed in one piece. Unfortunately, everybody else seemed to be going in the opposite direction so it was very difficult to make progress. I had to be polite but very determined.

I was asked to give a talk to some aspiring authors recently about making a career as a writer. I was tempted to tell them about my dream because that’s exactly what being a professional writer can seem like sometimes. But in the end I didn’t because I thought it might be too discouraging.

Instead, I stuck to practical stuff. I tried to emphasise that writing is a long game. A lot of first time authors get absolutely stuck on their first manuscript. They have spent so long slaving away at it that they become fixated with it. They reach a point where, instead of changing their manuscript so that publishers will want to buy it, they want publishers to change so that they will recognises the brilliance of their manuscript.

When that doesn’t happen they become embittered and an embittered author is an ugly thing. Consequently agents, editors, even friends shy away and the embittered author becomes isolated. He comforts himself by repeating commonly held myths about publishing such as, you have to know people to get published.

But it isn’t true. You don’t have to know someone. What you have to do to get published is write a book that people will want to read. And if you don’t achieve that with your first manuscript, then forget it and start on another. Remember, even if that first manuscript had got published, you would still have to write another. You are always going to have to write another. That’s what being an author is all about.

Italian Dreams

My Italian teacher made the point today that when learning another language you have to exchange one set of metaphors for another because different cultures use different word pictures to describe the world. This is probably a truism in language learning circles but it struck me forcibly

It is eight and a half weeks until I go to Italy and I am counting the days. I find the Renaissance art that one stumbles upon almost everywhere one goes in Umbria and Tuscany incredibly affecting. It has impacted on my writing enormously.

That may sound absurdly pretentious considering that I am a writer of fantasy for teenagers and pre-teens; but it’s true nonetheless. The sight of a bejewelled reliquary in a museum in Cortona was the inspiration for my most recent book which will be published next year. A picture of the Annunciation that I saw in a gallery in Florence was the inspiration for an episode in my fantasy The Mendini Canticle or, as it appears in the US, The Resurrection Fields.

It is remarkable that hundreds of years after they were created these images still have the power to cause creative explosions in the mind of someone utterly removed from the world that gave them birth.

The Third Kingdom

About ten years ago I was having dinner with a French friend of mine. We were talking in French. At least she was talking in French; I was talking in broken French. ‘How would you describe yourself, Brian?’ she asked.

‘Well,’ I began, ‘I would say that I was a middle aged man…’ I broke off because she had burst into laughter.

‘What’s so funny?’ I demanded. Surely at forty-five my claim to be middle-aged was still sustainable? Or would I have to call myself an old man from now on?

But it turned out that what had prompted her laughter was the fact that I had said, in excellent French, I am a man of the Middle Ages.

Well I have just finished reading The Discarded Image by C S Lewis in which he outlines the medieval world-view and I have come to the conclusion that my unintended description of myself was right, after all. I am a man of the Middle Ages. Everything I read in the book struck me as infinitely more plausible and familiar than the world-view espoused by contemporary media.

I was particularly taken with his chapter called The Longaevi. The Longaevi (or long-livers) were those who did not strictly fit into medieval theology, which allowed for four orders of beings: angels, humans, devils, and animals. The Longaevi included all those who could not be encompassed within these categories but whom the medievals, despite the best efforts of the church, refused to stop believing in: faeries, sprites, goblins – call them what you will

I think fantasy writers are like those people of the middle ages, refusing to depopulate their imaginations to suit contemporary rationalism because both experience and intuition tell them that there are other realms where the tyranny of the everyday is left behind.

One thing that troubled the medievals greatly was whether the Longaevi had souls and if so what would happen to them on the Last Day. They came up with a great many ingenious solutions to this conundrum. My favourite was the Third Kingdom half way between heaven and hell. This was the natural abode of the Longaevi where they would remain for all time in the expectation of neither doom nor reward.

Doesn’t that sound an awful lot like the place where most writers end up?

Umpteen Plus One

I’m on the second draft of my latest book, by which I mean I’m rewriting the first draft in response to my editor’s comments. Actually the first draft wasn’t the first draft at all; it was the umpteenth. So this is the umpteenth plus one. All of the earlier drafts were imposed upon me by myself, of course. But that doesn't make it any easier.

People are sometimes surprised when I tell them how many times a professional writer has to redraft a manuscript to get it to a publishable standard. ‘But how do you know when it’s finally finished?’ they ask.

My answer is what I call the potential homicide test. If there's a serious likelihood that the next time an editor asks you to change a sentence you may beat them to death with their own keyboard, then the manuscript is finished

Unfortunately, or fortunately, I haven’t got to that point yet.

The Stain On The Wall

As a child, one of the earliest displays of the power of language that I witnessed was when each Sunday in the church which my family attended, after the Gospel had been read, the priest would ascend the pulpit and begin his sermon.

At that time we had two priests. They each started their homily in the same way: ‘In the name of the father and of the son and of the holy ghost. My dear people…’ But that was where the similarity ended.

One of them was exceptionally good at delivering sermons. I thought of him as the Powerful Priest. His manner was deliberately conversational, as if he were taking the whole congregation into his confidence. Often he peppered his sermon with little stories about people he had encountered. These were sometimes comical, though never cruel, and there was always a strong moral punchline at the end.

The other priest was a complete contrast. He was a nervous man with a thin, quavering voice. His manner was distracted, his talks rambling and incoherent. I thought of him as the Weak Priest. The congregation shifted and fidgeted while he was in the pulpit and parents struggled to make their children behave as he floundered about, trying to find an ending.

It was an object lesson in the importance of structure. Of course the Powerful Priest was a more confident man by nature, secure in his sense of himself. Nevertheless, it was also evident to me that the clear structure of his story-telling in itself created confidence.

It was equally obvious that the Weak Priest never gave himself a chance. There were no hooks to draw in the audience in, no signposts to show them where he was going, no payoff at the end to produce the sense of satisfaction we had all been waiting for.

During the Weak Priest’s sermons I used to stare at a large stain on the wall made by penetrating damp. It looked to me like a map of some imaginary continent and I saw myself sailing around its coastline in a boat, stopping at little islands to pick up supplies and trade with the natives.

But during the Powerful Priest’s sermons I looked straight ahead, willingly surrendering the navigation of that boat, letting him show me countries I would never have dreamed of visiting myself.

Since those days I have learned to sail entirely different seas beneath stars that I doubt either of those men would recognise. But I have not forgotten that early lesson: have a very good idea what you are going to say before you presume to address your audience or they may find something else more entertaining to do with their time.

Looking For The New World

Today I’m reading through the shortlist for the 2009 Apprenticeships In Fiction scheme. The opening chapters of twelve novels, four for children, eight for adults, have been weeded out from the original long list of submissions. We don’t have to settle on a fixed number who will qualify as apprentices; just as many as we think are good enough.

Sometimes the task is enjoyable; sometimes it isn’t. You can recognize that a manuscript is good without liking it yourself. And of course someone else can think something is marvellous that you think is dreadful.

I’ve just finished one that I really liked, one that I was compelled to keep reading from the very first line. There were things about it that need to be improved but there was a great deal of potential there. And that’s exciting. A writer beginning to explore her own talent.

I don’t believe that anyone can be a writer. It’s just not that simple. It needs a special combination of qualities. But one of them is definitely a desire to discover new territory in your own imagination.

That’s what I thought I saw in that manuscript. Like Columbus setting off from Spain in search of the Indies. No proper map, an incomplete understanding of the journey he has undertaken and a crew that are not all quite as convinced as their master. But the captain stares out at the huge expanse of ocean with a hungry look on his face.