by Iain Banks
James saw something in it though, and took the risk of publishing this weird story by a complete unknown, and I will forever be in his debt for that. I owe him just as much thanks for an opposite kind of favour too, because I once submitted a book to him which I wasn’t sure about and he told me it wasn’t good enough and he wasn’t prepared to publish it.
I met up with him at his and Hilary’s house at Peckam Rye a few days later; he was trying to repair the marble-topped table he’d broken when he’d realised the manuscript just wasn’t good enough (thumped it with his fist – only time I ever heard of James inflicting physical damage on human, beast or inanimate object). He confirmed he couldn’t take the book, but he also told me that there would be at least half a dozen publishers in London who’d jump at the chance of taking it on if I wanted to submit it elsewhere, and he wouldn’t stand in my way if I wanted to do so – those other publishers would know the book wasn’t very good, too, but I was a youngish and moderately hot property at the time and they’d publish the book just to get me on board and hope the next one might mark a return to form. This would be a strategic mistake for me to make, because a weak book remains a weak book, but James could understand any writer’s reluctance to throw away months of work.
I took James’ advice, salvaged the few good bits, threw the rest of the clunker away and wrote The Bridge instead. Arguably still my best book, so boy was that guy right.
Irreplaceable, unforgettable, James died just before this book, Raw Spirit, was finished.
It was with James one day that we both discovered just how subjective an experience whisky appreciation is. Our usual way of working, both while he was employed by Macmillan and afterwards when he went freelance, was that I’d go to the house in Peckam and we’d work through the manuscript of my latest book, sitting side by side at a table. Usually this would take most of a working day; once or twice it took two days. We always argued like hell but we almost always agreed in the end (and James was almost always right). I never had anything less than a great time and my principal memories of those one- or two-day sessions feature lots of uproarious laughter from the pair of us.
We were going through this whole process one day not long after James’ 40th birthday and – as was usual – we helped the creative process along with a heart starter; a little whisky each. James had been given a bottle of Laphroaig for his birthday by one of his friends; a 40-year-old, appropriately. I was pretty much just used to the 10-year-old and I’d never seen a 40 year-old Laphroaig (disappointingly, it looked like the plain label design hadn’t changed much in the intervening years). I felt quite privileged that James had chosen this as our mind-lubricating dram of the day. We both sipped it, savoured it, and agreed it was something very special indeed. We kept on taking small sips as we went through the book.
There was a point where we wanted to change something and I couldn’t think quite how to do it or didn’t think the offending bit needed changing in the first place, so James sat staring at the manuscript trying to work out how he would suggest redoing the relevant words. Released from concentrating on the book, my gaze fell on the bottle sitting on the far edge of the table, near the wall. Maybe the light was falling on it in just such a way as to make the chicanery obvious – I don’t know – but for whatever reason, I looked more and more closely at the ‘40’ bit of the ‘40 years old’ legend on the bottle’s label. I picked the bottle up, I squinted at it while James mulled over whatever he was mulling over and then I said, ‘James, this isn’t a bottle of 40-year-old at all. It’s a bottle of 10-year-old which some devious cheapskate scumbag has altered by adding a sort of small upside-down “7” shape to the “1” to make it look like a “4”. With a thin black marker pen, by the look of it.’ I held the bottle up to the light. ‘See?’
James’s eyes widened alarmingly as he stared at it. Eventually he said, ‘Bastard!’
The point is, until that point we really had thought that what we were drinking was something above and beyond your normal 10-year old Laphroaig. Just thinking it was old and rare and special had helped make it so in our minds. Either our noses weren’t up to the job in the first place, or our brains were ignoring what our noses were telling us. Either way, a humbling, salutary experience. I never liked to ask whether James mentioned all this to whatever so-called friend had set out to hoodwink him, but I think a stern talking-to would have been in order.
However. To the Macallan distillery, back on Speyside, overlooking the river itself from a ridge on the north-west bank a mile or so from Craigellachie. The photogenic bit that you see on the cartons is Easter Elchies house, which – along with a long, low, tastefully executed extension alongside – houses offices and doubles as a corporate entertainment venue. The distillery itself is to the right as you approach it down the drive. The Visitor Centre is to the left and is quite new, with lots of pale wood furniture in interestingly sculpted, organic-looking shapes. We’re booked in for the extended tour, which features a range of whiskies to taste at the end in a special tasting room next to the professional tasters’ facility, but first there’s the usual walk round the plant, notable for the proliferation of relatively small stills in a big, wide-windowed space which feels oddly like a ship’s engine room (‘oddly’ because ships’ engine rooms are not normally notorious for having enormous windows looking out to valleys in Speyside).
‘We’ve been thinking of a plot for your next book,’ one of our hosts tells me genially as we look round.
‘Really?’ I say.
In the circumstances, ‘Really’ is Authorial for ‘Oh-oh.’
‘We thought, you could have a body turn up in a mash tun and your Inspector What’s-his-name would have to investigate.’
‘Inspector Rebus?’
‘That’s him!’
‘Ah. That’s Ian Rankin. My name’s Iain Banks.’
‘Oops.’
‘That’s okay.’ I smile widely to show that it really is okay (some writers can get amazingly petulant over this sort of thing). ‘A few years ago it was always Irvine Welsh I got mistaken for. I’m used to it.’
Writers: What Not to Say.
Right. Clichéd subjects/questions writers encounter all the time. There are two in particular. The less common one is, If I give you this brilliant plot, you could write it and we could split the loot. What do you think? (Not that the people at Macallan were after riches or fame, they were just trying to be helpful and make me feel welcome.) But you do get the full commercial proposition now and again. I dare say if I lived in London and went to lots of dinner parties this would happen to me a lot more often than it does.
It has to be said that this is not usually a good thing to say to a writer. Often we have lots of plots and ideas of our own lying around and just lack the time to write them. Adding one of yours to the mess that’s long-since boiled all over a distant back burner isn’t really going to do either of us any good.
Even if you do have a sure-fire idea, it’s very rare indeed for a writer to share the credit for a book like that. Frankly we are much more likely to let you tell us the idea and then just steal it. Unless you’ve got lots of witnesses and/or are a senior partner in a legal firm specialising in litigation and intellectual property law, that’ll be that. If you seriously think that a writer’s going to sign some sort of legally binding agreement before being told an idea for a plot, well, you’re welcome to try.
Stealing stuff is what writers have been doing probably since before writing was even invented – if you include as honorary writers the prehistoric story tellers who earned their share of meat by telling stories round the camp fire at night rather than going out and helping to catch it. One of our more shameless defences is that Shakespeare nicked ideas, themes and indeed whole plots from other writers, so if it was good enough for him, it’s good enough for us. (It does no good to point out that it’s different for Shakespeare because he was a genius – that’s a highly morally dubious defence in the first place, and, besides, all writ
ers secretly think they’re geniuses too so they’d only take that as further encouragement.)
To the people who insist they really do have a great idea but they just can’t write, I’d say that given some of the books I’ve read, or at least started to read, it would appear that not being able to write is absolutely no obstacle whatsoever to writing a book and securing a publishing contract. Though becoming famous in some other field first may help.
The other, much more common inquiry is, Where do you get your ideas from?
Leaving aside the obvious, ‘Class A drugs, actually,’ or, ‘A wee man in Auchtermuchty,’ I’ve sometimes wondered what sort of answer people really expect to this. What class of possible reply are people anticipating, or are they completely in the dark regarding the creative process?
The answer, by the way, is startlingly simple; writers get their ideas from the same place as everybody else. When asked The Question by an individual, it’s perfectly okay to look them in the eye and say, ‘Well, the same place as you do.’ This usually leads to people saying they don’t have ideas.
But everyone does. Everybody has ideas. If you’ve ever had a sexual fantasy that wasn’t a perfect copy of somebody else’s – you’ve had an idea. If you’ve ever thought about what you’d do if you won the Lottery – you’ve had an idea. If you’ve ever passed some time pondering the exact form of words you would use – having just heard from your bank that the Lottery cheque has cleared – to tell your boss or colleagues how much you have enjoyed working with them over the years – you’ve had an idea. If you’ve ever read a book or watched a film and thought, But what if this had happened instead of that – you’ve had an idea. If you’ve ever been walking down the road with lurid red kebab sauce dripping onto your good shoes when you suddenly think of the stingingly witty reply you should have come out with half an hour earlier in the pub, when somebody insulted you or said something you wanted to take issue with but couldn’t quite work out what it was you wanted to say at the time – then you’ve had an idea.
Some of these ideas would qualify as rudimentary plots, some as lines of dialogue, but they are all ideas and everybody has them. If there is some benighted, possibly genetically deficient part of humanity that genuinely doesn’t ever have an idea of this nature, ever ever ever, then they surely constitute a vanishing tiny minority of our species, and as far as I know I’ve never met one of them.
The difference is simply that writers do this idea-generating sort of stuff more frequently and more consistently than the sort of person who doesn’t realise that they even have ideas of their own, and – perhaps more to the point – we do it deliberately. We mostly start doing it when we’re quite young and it becomes a habit; we’re always on the lookout for ideas, whether they’re generated by our own lives, by the lives of people we know, by the lives of people we don’t know – via reports in news media – or by the works of other writers – non-fiction works as well as fiction.
Where do I get my ideas from? Here’s an example:
In 1978 I went on holiday to the States. I had an uncle in Washington DC and an aunt in Los Angeles and to get from one to the other I decided to try one of these drive-away schemes where you drive somebody’s car from one coast to the other for them (meanwhile they’ve flown). I was driving along Interstate 40 through Texas when I came to a part of the highway where the median had been burned.
The median is what a lot of Interstates have instead of central crash-barriers; essentially it’s a shallow V of ground, maybe a hundred feet broad, between the two carriageways. If something goes pear-shaped on one carriageway and a vehicle – especially one of those colossal American trucks – starts heading towards the other carriageway, it doesn’t smash through a crash barrier into the oncoming traffic or even bounce off it to hurtle across its own side of the road, it just trundles down towards the bottom of the gently sloped median. This is actually a really good idea, if you have Texan amounts of land to play with.
Driving at the then legal limit of 55 miles per hour – which I was dutifully doing, though I did seem to be entirely the slowest vehicle on the road – for eight hours a day, for five days, through mostly very flat scenery, can tend to create an almost Zen-like trance state in the driver. I tried to keep myself alert by constantly changing radio stations, attempting to identify passing cars and trucks, and just generally looking around for anything interesting. For an hour or so, the median to my left had been just a near-featureless green blur of grass, like the land on either side of the Interstate. Then suddenly the median was black. Burned black.
I looked in my rear view mirror and saw where a ragged line separated green from black. It looked kind of odd, too, because the land on either side of the Interstate – low hills rising to a blue sky – was still luxuriantly green with long, breeze-ruffled grass.
Probably somebody had thrown a cigarette out of their vehicle window and the wind had fanned the flames along the median (and nothing burning had been picked up by the wind and blown across either carriageway to ignite the grass beyond). It struck me that it must have looked distinctly weird at the time, to have seen a line of advancing fire making its way along the median while the countryside on both sides it was unaffected. If it had happened at night and you’d seen it from some distance away, it would have looked even stranger.
I wondered how I could use this idea, this image. I thought of myself entirely as a science fiction writer at the time and one of the neat things about being an SF writer is that you get to extrapolate. I always interpreted this as carte blanche to grossly exaggerate, to take every idea to its non-Earthbound limit, and this was exactly what happened to this idea.
I started thinking about a long line of land sitting in a sea or lake, and the fire spreading from end to end. Or maybe a circular island, a sort of thin doughnut shape; that burning. Of course the fire would go out eventually … Unless the circular island was so big that the plants left behind after the fire had passed had time to grow back before the fire circled back round again (I’d read about – or seen on Life on Earth – plants in Australia that couldn’t successfully seed until they’d been through a fire). A never-ending wave of fire … Now we were getting into decent skiffy-type ideas, I thought. And with SF, you’re allowed, even expected to keep upping the scale. So, if you made the island really big … it could girdle a planet! You could have a sort of island continent going right round a world, edged with sea to north and south. On Earth it would be like having nothing but ocean except between the tropics. Big enough planet, fast enough growing plants (I remembered reading about some bamboo species which grows so fast you can hear it creaking as it gets taller); it should be possible …
A couple of years later, when I was looking for an exotic setting for the climax of a novel called The Player of Games, the fire-planet thing was already there, sitting on the shelf just waiting to be used.
Anyway, that is where ideas come from.
Macallan has a cat. Unlike the nameless mog of Old Pulteney, this one is blessed with a name. He’s called Cyril, and when we see him he’s lying stretched out, shaggily luxurious, on a large wooden desk in the pleasantly warm still room, beneath a flat-screen computer display edged in gleaming, polished brass and showing some colourful custom software indicating the state of the local storage vessels, pipe work and valves. It’s a wonderful, almost iconic sight worth stopping to stare and grin at (I would have taken a photograph, but that, of course, would inevitably have led to the whole place instantly blowing up and burning down).
Macallan uses Golden Promise barley, a variety which is out of favour with farmers these days because it produces much less yield than more recent, more productive but less tasty forms. As a result, Golden Promise has become hard to get hold of over the years and even Macallan has had to resort to other varieties, using only about 30 per cent Golden Promise since 1994. It’ll be interesting to see whether the 10-year-old Macallan bottled in 2004 tastes appreciably different compared to the year before.
The 21 small stills are heated directly with gas, which also alters the taste of the final product compared to stills heated indirectly with steam pipes, introducing a caramelised, slightly burned flavour into the mix.
The main influence on the taste of Macallan, however, is the sherry casks it’s exclusively matured in, and the distillery goes to some lengths to control their supply. Macallan buys 70- to 80-year-old Spanish-grown oak, has it made into sherry butts in Jerez and then loans the barrels to various bodegas for three years; one year for the fermentation of the dry oloroso sherry and two for storage. Then the complete butts are shipped intact to Speyside. This is more expensive than breaking them up for shipping, as happens with most American bourbon barrels, but it’s reckoned complete casks have a stronger influence on the maturing whisky than re-formed ones. In most Macallan two-thirds of the whisky will be from first-fill casks and one-third from second-fill. Using nothing but sherry, rather than a mixture of mostly bourbon with a dash of sherry, makes the whole process expensive, but without its profound sherry influence Macallan would hardly be Macallan.
Those Italians again; they have their own special edition of the stuff, bottled at seven years old. Look, are we sure these people actually drink such eccentrically young whiskies? They’re not using it as fashionably expensive after-shave or something, are they? It isn’t being drizzled into the fuel tanks of sundry Vespas and Fiats to produce an increase in power and a pleasant pong in the crowded streets of Rome and Milan, is it?