One of the pleasures of writing fiction is that you can sit at your desk and just make up what you are too lazy to go and find out. But sometimes I do stir myself to look for things, and when I find something interesting but irrelevant to my immediate purpose, I save it up for a later book, and invent a context to fit it. In the Retiring Room at Jordan, for example, after the dinner that takes place in the first chapter:
The Master lit the spirit-lamp under the little silver chafing-dish and heated some butter before cutting open half a dozen poppy-heads and tossing them in. Poppy was always served after a Feast: it clarified the mind and stimulated the tongue, and made for rich conversation. It was traditional for the Master to cook it himself.
(TGC, 19)
Heaven forfend that the rector of Exeter should feel obliged to serve opium after dinner, but this is an alternative universe, after all. I lifted that dainty detail from the diary of an English lady living in India before the Mutiny, which I’d come across ten years before while I was looking for something else entirely. I knew I could use it somewhere.
The way a novelist “researches”—this one, anyway—is quite different from the coherent, focused, disciplined sort of reading which I imagine you need to do if you want an academic career. Despite my three years at Oxford, I never mastered that sort of grown-up reading: I couldn’t do it then, and I don’t do it now. Instead, intrigued by this patch of colour or that scent, beguiled by a pretty shape or blown sideways by a wayward breeze, I flit from book to book, subject to subject, place to place; and it is only later, in solitude and silence, that I begin the laborious process of changing it all into something else.
Fiction, of course, allows you to change things into other things as much as you like. The part of Oxford known as Jericho (whose name, by the way, suggested that of Jordan) is, in real life, thoroughly respectable: terraces of small Victorian houses built for labourers, now occupied by young professionals and their families; the campanile of St. Barnabas, the embodiment of Victorian high church Romanesque; and, of course, the great building of the university press, sometimes apparently mistaken for a rather distinguished college, not only by tourists. (I have known editors who had the same impression.) However, the area has always struck me as having a hidden character, more raffish and jaunty altogether, with an air of horse-trading, minor crime, and a sort of fairground bohemianism. That is the Jericho I describe in the story.
A similar sort of opportunistic transformation went to work on the highly respectable road called Linkside, north of Sunderland Avenue and its strange, artificial-looking hornbeam trees. Behind the neat houses is a pretty little lake which used to be a brickworks, apparently. I was describing Lyra’s life among the other children of Oxford:
…the rich seething stew of alliances and enmities and feuds and treaties…The children (young servants, and the children of servants, and Lyra) of one college waged war on those of another. But this enmity was swept aside when the town children attacked a colleger: then all the colleges banded together and went into battle against the townies. This rivalry was hundreds of years old, and very deep and satisfying.
But even this was forgotten when the other enemies threatened. One enemy was perennial: the brick-burners’ children, who lived by the Claybeds and were despised by collegers and townies alike. Last year Lyra and some townies had made a temporary truce and raided the Claybeds, pelting the brick-burners’ children with lumps of heavy clay and tipping over the soggy castle they’d built, before rolling them over and over in the clinging substance they lived by until victors and vanquished alike resembled a flock of shrieking golems.
(TGC, 36)
That idea came to me the moment I began the paragraph, and not a second before. I needed to describe an enemy for Lyra who would make a contrast with the slippery, light-fingered, here-today-and-gone-tomorrow enemy I was going to describe in the following paragraph, the Jericho enemy, and since I live only ten minutes’ walk from the lake in question, I suppose I just thought of it. This enemy had to be different, so the thought process went: dull - slow - heavy - mud - clay - bricks - ah! Linkside! Got it! The battle in the Claybeds would turn out to be very useful 1,034 pages later, but I certainly didn’t know that when I was writing Chapter 3 of the first book.
The commonest question writers get asked is: where do you get your ideas from? The truthful answer is: I dunno. They just turn up. But when you are wandering about with your mouth open and your eyes glazed waiting for them to do so, there are few better places to wander about in than Oxford, as many novelists have discovered. I put it down to the mists from the river, which have a solvent effect on reality. A city where South Parade is in the north and North Parade is in the south, where Paradise is lost under a car park, where the Magdalen gargoyles climb down at night and fight with those from New College, is a place where, as I began by saying, likelihood evaporates.
I shall always be grateful to Exeter College for letting me in and allowing me to discover the fact. If it is, in fact, a fact.
THIS ARTICLE FIRST APPEARED IN THE GUARDIAN, 27 JULY 2002.
And my tuition was free, and furthermore I had a local authority grant to cover my living expenses. But we’ve done away with all that sort of thing. It felt rather like civilization.
Intention
WHAT DO YOU MEAN?
On the sorts of questions authors are most frequently asked, with reference to The Scarecrow and His Servant
“What was your intention when writing this book?”
“What did you mean by the passage on page 108?”
“What did you want the reader to feel at the end?”
“What message did you intend the book to deliver?”
Authors of novels, especially novels for children, know that questions such as these are not uncommon. This might be surprising, in view of the fact that more than sixty years have gone by since Wimsatt and Beardsley published their famous essay “The Intentional Fallacy” (in the Sewanee Review, 1946), except that somehow it isn’t surprising at all to find that lengthy and passionate discussion among literary critics has not the slightest influence on the way most readers read most books. Clearly, for many readers, the author’s intention still does matter, and getting it right, or not reading against this supposed intention, is an important part of the satisfaction, or perhaps the relief from anxiety, they hope to feel.
Recently I answered online a number of questions from readers of His Dark Materials, including this one: “Is a reader ‘allowed’ to have a Christian/religious reading of a text that is supposed to be atheistic?”
What seems to be going on here is the feeling that reading is a sort of test, which the reader passes or fails according to how closely the interpretation matches the one the author intended. It would be easy to criticise or mock this feeling, but it is genuine. It comes from the same source as the indignation readers feel when a text they believed was a truthful memoir turns out to be fiction, and it’s almost certainly related to the anger felt by a child who learns what the rest of the family has known for years, namely that he is adopted. It’s the desire not to be made a fool of: the wish not to be shown up as ignorant of a truth that everyone else knows.
In fact, it’s a natural human feeling. People think there really is an answer. I should probably qualify that by saying that it’s young readers, or unsophisticated readers, who seem to be most anxious to know the author’s intention. English Literature graduates will have all the arguments about the intentional fallacy at their fingertips, and a dozen other fallacies besides. But do we expect all readers to have that sort of knowledge? It would be absurd. There are plenty of other things for people to be interested in. The question is how we deal with this one.
What I want to examine here is what part intention really plays in the writing of a book, and whether it really helps readers to know what that intention is. Unfortunately, writer
s are not always trustworthy when they tell us about their intentions. Firstly, they might not remember; secondly, they might not want to reveal their true intentions anyway; thirdly, the context of the question sometimes determines the sort of answer it gets. Questions like this tend to be asked at events such as literary festivals, where the task in hand is that of entertaining an audience rather than revealing deep and complex truths, and faced with that task, the storyteller’s instinct in front of an audience takes over and shapes a few scraps of half-remembered fact and a sprinkle of invention into a coherent and interesting narrative: a story about their intentions.
But they—they? I mean we. I mean I. I, we, and they do that with most questions, especially the old favourite: “Where do you get your ideas from?”
We do it because it’s necessary. One of the occupational hazards the modern writer has to negotiate is the book tour, and it’s in the course of such a tour that we have most need of such instant stories about telling a story, because the same questions come up in every interview, at every bookstore, with every audience, twenty, fifty, a hundred times; and in sheer self-defence we develop a performance, with a set of neat anecdotes and one-liners and pat answers. And one of the consequences of this anti-madness strategy is that our audiences, which consist for the most part of people who like reading but don’t necessarily follow the convolutions of literary theory, come to believe—or are confirmed in an existing belief—that there really is a simple answer to such questions as “What did you intend when you wrote this book?,” and that that answer matters to their reading of it.
But here, I hope, I can abandon the pat answers and tell a little more, or as much as I know, anyway, of the truth about my intentions when I wrote one of my books, The Scarecrow and His Servant.
This tells the story of a scarecrow who miraculously comes to life, engages a young boy called Jack as his servant, and wanders about a land which seems to be a sort of fairy-tale Italy. After several adventures, during which they are followed without their knowledge by a lawyer representing the obviously villainous Buffaloni Corporation, they discover that the Scarecrow, thanks to the will that his maker had hidden in his stuffing, is the real owner of a farm in a place called Spring Valley. The Buffaloni Corporation, which had illegally taken possession of the land, is foiled and evicted, and the Scarecrow and his servant live happily ever after.
The story forms a book 240 pages in length, and is illustrated with delicate pen-and-ink drawings by Peter Bailey. I mention that because it was part of my intention to write a story with pictures, and because Peter Bailey had done such delightful illustrations for some of my previous books. So I had his talent in mind from the start, and I intended to write a story that would suit his light and fantastical style.
But as I write those words I know that “intended” should really have been “hoped.” And this is perhaps the first thing to say about writing and intention: intending to write a particular kind of story is not the same sort of thing as intending to rake up the leaves on the lawn, or telephone one’s cousin, or buy a present for one’s grandchild. We know we can do those things. We don’t know we can write a story that will be funny, or moving, or exciting, though we hope we can. All we can honestly intend to do is try.
Then there is the matter of the subject, the characters, and the setting. This is also difficult to explain in terms of intention. I can recall the moment the notion of this story first came to me: it was during a performance of Leonard Bernstein’s Candide at the National Theatre in London in 1999. I found the relationship between Candide and his servant Cacambo intriguing, and wondered about other such simple master/clever servant pairs, such as Bertie Wooster and Jeeves. I liked the inbuilt dynamics of the relationship. Did that mean that I intended to write a story about such a pair? Not yet, but the possibility was there. However, the observation struck me with a particular resonance, which I’ve learned means that I probably am going to write about it.
There were two other sources that I was conscious of. One was a book of reproductions of the younger Tiepolo’s lively and brilliant drawings in pen and brown wash of Punchinello. Punchinello, or Pulcinella, was one of the characters in the commedia dell’arte, and whereas the Scarecrow is not Pulcinella, he has this in common with him as well as with the other commedia characters, that he is flat and not round. I had found that an absence of psychology in my protagonists was a positive advantage in writing fairy tales of the sort this was going to be, and the sort of intense vivid character embodied in the commedia mask—its reactions instant and predictable and its attempts at subtlety absurdly obvious—was exactly the sort of personality I could already sense developing when I thought of the Scarecrow. Again, it’s impossible to separate what is intention here from what is something else—hope, as I’ve suggested, or simple fascination: here’s a new character to play with. And, of course, the commedia background suggested Italy, and that soon became inseparable from the rest of the idea.
The second source I was aware of was a book of vivid watercolour sketches sent me by a friend, a poet and painter living in Japan, who had become intrigued by the scarecrows Japanese farmers made for their fields. Anything will do: a pink plastic Wellington boot, a toy plane on a string, a doll trailing scores of coloured ribbons. They are a riot of improvisation. My friend had sketched dozens of these, and the infinite transmutability of the Japanese scarecrows certainly played a part in one important development of the plot, when the lawyer for the Buffalonis is trying to prove that the Scarecrow in the witness box is not the Scarecrow mentioned in the will, since every single part of him has now been replaced by something else.
But at what point did I intend to make that idea a part of the plot? From the beginning? I don’t think so. I seem to remember I found it with a start of pleasure as I was writing the court scene, but all that might indicate is that my mind had been preparing the way without my being aware of it: that my intention had been unconscious. However, once I had become aware, I could go back and prepare the way by making sure that in the course of each adventure the Scarecrow lost a leg, or an arm, or his clothes, and his servant Jack found a replacement. I definitely remember intending to do that.
In fact, it may be that the major decisions are out of our control, and the intentions we’re conscious of are concerned with matters of detail. That certainly goes for what we’re going to write in the first place. I learned a long time ago that it was a mistake to intend, in a calm and rational way, having looked at a range of options and considered their relative merits and drawbacks, to write a certain book rather than another. The part of me that intended to write that particular book wasn’t capable of it, and the part of me that was capable of writing books didn’t want to write that one.
Among those major decisions, the ones that are made for me, is the one about voice and point of view. I couldn’t truthfully say that I “intend” to write in the third person, though I almost invariably do write like that. Nor did I “intend” to make the voice that tells His Dark Materials different in tone from the voice that tells the Sally Lockhart novels, or both of them different from the voice that tells The Scarecrow and His Servant and my other fairy tales, though they are. The voice I found, in each case, seemed to be what the story wanted. And although I think those voices are different, I dare say that if anyone were to perform a stylistic analysis by computer of all my various stories, it would show that I have certain habits and mannerisms that would always give me away, no matter which “voice” I was using; but as I don’t know what they are, I can’t say that I intend anything very much in connection with them.
The aspect of the author’s intention that readers are perhaps most concerned about is the one about “message.” After the first and second volumes of His Dark Materials had been published, but before the third, I was asked many times which of the characters were supposed to be good, and which bad; whom should the readers cheer for, and whom should they boo? Th
ey were clearly frustrated by the lack of a clear signal from the author, or the book itself, or the publisher via the blurb, and they felt unmoored, so to speak. The answer I gave was, in effect, “I’m not going to tell you, but the story isn’t over yet. Wait till you’ve read it all, and then decide for yourself. But what are you going to think when someone you’ve taken for a bad character does something good? Or when a good character does something bad? It’s probably better to think about good or bad actions rather than good or bad characters. People are complicated.”
Audiences seemed satisfied with that, and the question faded away; it was seldom asked in that form after the final book was published. But anxiety about religion and morality is particularly sharp in the present age, so variants of that question turn up still, such as the one I quoted earlier: is it all right to think X, when the book is apparently intended to say Y? What’s the correct view? What’s the right answer? People clearly feel that intention matters a great deal, and that they can trust the author to tell them about it.
The final aspect of “intention” I shall look at here is to do with audience. “What age of reader is this book written for?” is a question that different authors feel differently about. Some are quite happy to say, “It’s for sixth and seventh graders,” or, “It’s for thirteen and upwards.” Others are decidedly not. In 2008 most publishers of children’s books in the UK announced that in an attempt to increase sales they were going to put an age-figure on the cover of every book, of the form 5+, 7+, 9+, and so on, to help adult purchasers in non-specialist bookstores decide whether a particular book would make a suitable present for a particular child. They met a passionate and determined resistance from many authors, who felt that their efforts to write books that would welcome readers of a wide age-range were being undermined by their own publishers, and that the age-figure would actively discourage many children from reading books they might otherwise enjoy. The argument continues, but again it shows the problematic nature of “intention.” Does age-guidance of any sort imply that the book is intended for a particular kind of reader? My own view is that the only appropriate verb to use is, again, hope rather than intend. We have no right to expect any audience at all; the idea of sorting our readers out before they’ve even seen the first sentence seems to me presumptuous in the extreme.
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