I trimmed my nails today – fingers and toes – and reflected on how long it’s been since I last gave time and attention to those tiny details which prevent one from looking like a mad-bag-cat woman. I think my most recent haircut was in February – the guy knows now to just hack at me savagely whenever we do meet and then we can try to last out the next four months. Not how to look your best when, well . . . basically you’re never going to.
But – despite the surrounding chaos – it was lovely to sit on Sark with the ravens and the bluebells and the Sarkese and to have six uninterrupted evenings with nothing but the novel, improvised dining on buttered digestive biscuits, peace and more novel. It made being under a deadline almost cosy. And the lady who was renting me the Hobbit hole eventually worked out that the dusty, peering and mumbling thing occasionally clumping past her door was relatively safe, if eccentric and biscuity. I have now reached the traditional Aboutathirdofthewaythrough Stage when I run everything off on paper again and hit it with a stick before going back into the next Stage, which I like to call The Horrifying Slog.
Meanwhile, I took an evening off when I finally made it home – via Weymouth, London, Chichester and London – and trotted out to see Derren Brown doing the range of excellent things that he does onstage. Now this is slightly because I have an interest in magic (Grandpop gave me a book about Houdini when I was tiny and it all went downhill from there), but it’s much more because I have an interest, of course, in story – in pure story and how powerful it can be. Why was I actually, in fact, reading The Hobbit in my burrow on Sark? Because the best of the children’s stories are so very, very vigorously themselves – they aim to transport, to suspend reality, and they do. They penetrate and delight and return us to ourselves, slightly altered, slightly more than we thought we could be. I read and believed The Hobbitt when I was young – it was company and exercise and joy – and reading it again reminds me of the uncomplicated faith I had in books, a faith that is useful to a writer. It also reminds me of the pleasure in the pages. I always hope (despite the filth and misery of which my narratives consist) to write in the spirit of that first enthusiasm and certainty and to try and pass on something of that fun to the reader – even though I write for adults and even though I’ll never succeed as I’d wish to.
And Mr Brown? Well – more of the same really, except played out in real time, in a very hot, very full theatre. Professionally speaking, Mr Brown is himself a story – like any very fine magician, he doesn’t throw out a succession of tricks, which, however wonderful, would still be just a number of ways of being clever using more or less layered and skulduggerous means. He tells us a story of himself and a story of where and who we are and of what is occurring, and he tells it so well that we believe it – even though we are all grown-ups and we know we should never, ever believe a magician. And, within the right story, magical effects can sit up and shine and become emotionally charged and personally significant and much more deeply and pleasantly misleading. The hand isn’t quicker than the eye – our eyes are really very quick – it’s just that the story makes us misinterpret the hand, forget the hand, assist the hand, whatever is necessary. The story is both an unlooked-for beauty and a lovely misdirection and – along with many other secretive and sneaky elements – it means that, for a while, we can believe in miracles and nonsense and people who’ve never existed and a range of exhilarating and puzzling and moving possibilities. As an audience member, this always makes me jump up and applaud like a happy sea lion. As a writer, this always reminds me that the magical fraternity have rather deftly (and typically) pocketed the term thaumaturgy – the working of wonders – for themselves, when really all the arts should have access to it, including the writers and – for goodness’ sake – shouldn’t I be trying to learn from those stories, from those illusions, when I’m in the business of making my own? I would say so.
Naturally, Mr Brown is – in his professional capacity – a great big fibber and delighted to say so. His dark arts aren’t really dark at all. But the dark is, of course, out there. I also like to explore the work of people I find entirely unentertaining, thuggish and morally repugnant – to examine the dark. (And I hope you know by now that I have no illusions about how high my moral high ground is, but even so . . .) The world is full of hucksters who want to sell you their way of cranking out hypnotic prose that’ll get clients to pay over the odds, or buy rubbish, or believe your self-help system/diet/philosophy/return from the dead/redemption, and so forth. They lie to you about your lying to other people and hope your greed will satisfy theirs. They offer you the letter format they suggest will guarantee replies, the way of presenting yourself that will guarantee you get the job, or win the poker game, or dominate your colleagues, or sell you a way of talking that’s meant to guarantee you can shag your chosen victim before they discover how dreadful you are . . . stories about stories about stories . . . And need I dwell on our latest election and all those words and words and words? Trust me, don’t trust him, blame them, be scared, be proud, be angry, be quiet . . . the interwoven narratives within narratives that we either buy, or don’t buy. It’s grubby and appalling and I don’t visit often, but I do nip in now and then, just to check what they’re peddling and how. In a time when art has to justify itself and when craft in prose is overlooked, or seen as foolishness, I like to stare at the undeniable power behind it all, the huge amoral force of story. We are the ones who chose to be dark or light, chose the stories we tell ourselves and others: in work, in play, in love . . . in all of our lives.
Then I go back to whatever temporary address I’m borrowing, get the head down and try working back to the wonder. Onwards.
XXVIII
GLAD I HAD the holiday then, cos the seemingly eternal trains, deadline-haunted scribbling and trying not to cough while speaking for Her Majesty’s Wireless kicked in immediately thereafter and hasn’t left me alone since. I did manage to batter the existing bit of the novel into a slightly less horrifying shape – mainly going to and from Inverness – but the thing is now chewing doggedly at the back of my head and whining for attention while I have to ignore it and get through a week of more short-term writing and seeing the students at Warwick. It’s my last visit of the year to the university, which is always slightly nerve-racking, as another crop of new writers prepares to plummet off what we might choose to call the savage cliffs of optimism, hoping to land in what we might choose to call the urine-filled thimble of British publishing. They are nice people, they work hard – I can only wish them well and try not to get tearful. And they may make it. Eventually. Send them all a kind thought, if you have time.
But after that – more novel. Ish. Kind of. In someone else’s house. But definitely novel. As far as I can tell.
At which point I usually compare my life to those of so many other novelists who are (perhaps inaccurately) quoted as saying they ‘always complete the final draft in my suite at the Carlyle’ or ‘my writing room faces the smaller of our lakes and has a delightfully inspiring view across the Chilterns/Dartmoor/the Swiss Alps/Dollis Hill . . .’ or ‘I always get up at 4 a.m., sip my organic mint tea – dew-kissed leaves fresh from the sunken garden – and then five or six thousand words can tumble forth before Freddie and Timmy and the dogs wake up and I have to oversee Marta while she makes them breakfast – she’s from the Philippines and simply doesn’t understand toast . . .’ and so forth.
Eventually, if you type anything at all, you will – of course – be asked about your Typical Writing Day and you will have to say something, or be sneered at and mocked during writerly social occasions. (Which may be why I avoid writerly social occasions.) It is never accepted as being factual or sincere, if your answer to the ‘What is your Typical Writing Day?’ question runs: ‘Dear God, I would beg for the ability to even contemplate a typical writing day, I would offer up my eye teeth – and my eye teeth are big, you could make scrimshaw snuff-boxes, if not children’s clogs, out of my eye teeth . . . I would offer up my entir
e supply of Kopi Luwak for the chance to have my typical writing day – help me, help me, bits keep dropping off . . .’
But I do have an Ideal Writing Day, a Hoped-for Writing Day, and sometimes – when I really do need to get cracking – I arrange one, if not more. After roughly twenty-five years, this is the best I can come up with.
Morning – I avoid it. I’m rubbish in the mornings, I can’t think, can barely speak and shouldn’t be allowed to type. I don’t want to eat breakfast, I want to be asleep and dreaming of my happy place – and, let me tell you, my happy place is really bloody happy, so don’t arrange unreasonably early meetings, don’t phone me, don’t buzz the doorbell, leave me be behind my blackout blind and go away.
Lunchtime – have shower. Wake up gently, but not so gently that I get confused in the shower and inhale soapy water. Dress in something comfortable; it should preserve me at an appropriate temperature and not chafe, annoy or depress. Then have first meal of the day. Ideally, this should be small and taste of nothing that’s distracting – porridge, oatcakes, play dough, styrofoam, maybe toast. Then eat toast (or less-stimulating substitute) and drink something containing a gentle amount of caffeine, while looking at my emails and discovering that none of them need to be answered and at least one of them is funny.
After lunch – put on shoes, nip down to get vegetables and sundries and to pick up non-email from the nice people who guard my PO Box and look askance at lumpy and/or oozing envelopes. Bring home spoils, go through mail and find – to my delight – that all of it can be thrown immediately into the recycling bag. Take off shoes. After that, do Tai Chi, because it does seem to help with concentration and gives me an important sense of smugness, balanced by the humiliation of wobbling and falling over if I get mentally or emotionally waylaid. Then do voice exercises because they are good for me, because without them performances have less welly – and I need all the Wellington I can get – and because cramming your brain with oxygen while feeling your own voice rattling your skull and being a tangible and forceful thing does no harm. If you’re about to head off for the study and yet another attempt to slap your voice down in print, then it probably does no harm at all.
After that – have slightly more caffeine, put on some suitably encouraging music and then waste time playing an incredibly simple game on my computer; this is almost like work, but not quite. Having promised myself one more game, suddenly open the current file for the novel (or short story, let’s not forget the short story . . .), tip my good-for-a-bad-back chair into the fully recumbent writing position and slide into the text gently via whatever is already there, inching forwards towards what is not there, but really should be by the time I have to cook dinner. Stop just before I run out of things to say. Turn off the music.
Pre-dinner – cook something which is fiddly and tedious, like stew or curry, while allowing the subconscious to fumble about at those things left unsaid in a manner which will encourage them to grow large and invite their chums round.
Dinner – eat while watching an uplifting and pleasant DVD with proper actors and a real script. Try to relax. Try not to think about the book. Finish meal with slightly more caffeine and possibly some fruit – which is good for me – and then lie on the sofa until the DVD has finished. Be as happy as possible. Hope that no one phones me and interrupts.
After dinner – go back to the study, turn on the music and write like a bastard, because I’m awake now, it’s getting/has got dark, I’m slightly wired with all that coffee and the idea I was studiously ignoring while I watched a movie is so keen for attention that it has actually agreed to cooperate.
After that. Shit! – look, it’s 2 a.m. How did that happen? Quite tired. Must remember to save work, to make multiple backups, to place the backups in locations that will be subject to different and, hopefully, non-simultaneous accidents, turn off computer, turn off music and then have a bath – total submersion if possible.
After that – sit on sofa, dripping gently and watching another nice DVD to chill out a bit, or I won’t sleep. Then tiptoe off to bed. Hope for dreams of a) Happy Place b) relevance to novel or the characters therein.
Repeat as necessary.
It doesn’t happen often, but when it does it’s such a help.
Hope your days are at least approaching your ideal. Onwards.
XXIX
NOW THEN, AS a variety of sporting events continue to annoy me and my novel turns its petulant head from me as if I were an unsatisfactory and clumsy-thumbed lover, I must find something writing-related with which to (hopefully) beguile you and (rather pathetically) distract myself from the savagely pointing and giggling paragraphs with which I am now faced on a daily basis.
Yes, it’s The Middle Bit of the novel – a completely soul-grinding and exhausting tramp across rewrites and rewrites and rewrites while I recalibrate my instruments to take into account the changing value of the Yen and the position of Venus, neither of which should exert a massive effect – but then again, over time, any slight discrepancy means I’ll end up taking an unwary walk into a chasm, rather than enjoying an amble amongst honeysuckle and endearing woodland creatures.
But enough of that . . . Mustn’t focus on the idea that my whole plot is only inches away from dropping off a cliff. I do. But I mustn’t.
So let’s distract me with a different brand of savage pointing and giggling and the question of appearance. My appearance.
Time was, writers didn’t have to appear – they didn’t need to support and maintain an appearance. Leastways, they may have – reciting around the cooking fire or across the banqueting table – being storytellers and storymakers, perhaps even simultaneously (or, in the case of Homer, perhaps being many storytellers, or a collective of some kind, or – who knows – a cave full of Mediterranean orphans forced to invent plotlines . . .), but that wasn’t really appearing, not in an aesthetically onerous sense – everyone was equally covered in mammoth blood and filth, or olive oil and filth, or leprosy and filth, and all was well. Authors existed, but were anonymous – their stories were fiddled with and added to and improved as necessary, which the authors partially prevented by making them rhyme and scan – but still, the emphasis was on the stories themselves, the characters, the heroes and heroines and excitingly unlikely animals and the monsters, deities and events.
Then the ages rolled by and parchment and reading and writing and professional scribes and so forth became possible and so books existed, in various forms, and this meant that they could influence, delight and speak without their authors. They could even – accidents and fires in Alexandria aside – outlive their creators, which may have led many authors to conclude: I shall leave all that public-appearance malarkey to troubadours and players and fools and recline here in my hermitage, making up stuff and being as ugly and ill-kempt as I see fit.
Later still, authors became more prominent. Chaucer was a bit of a star in his day, for example, but still didn’t undertake any broadcast interviews of which I am aware. He wrote The Canterbury Tales and they were funny and wise and moving and rude and people spoke in them the way that people actually spoke, so the people who read them, or heard them being read, or simply heard of them were rendered happy – end of story, no air-brushing, or HD-friendly preparation and fluffing required.
Moving on again, authors and publications and printing presses proliferated, but there still wasn’t a lot of appearing. Even though Shakespeare, for instance, was an actor and did perform onstage and give elegant little speeches at court, we have no idea what he really looked like – possibly fat-necked and brain-dead, as in his memorial bust at Stratford – possibly dapper and a bit louche, as in the latest re/discovered maybe-portrait. That portrait is interesting because – if it is of Shakespeare – it was made during his lifetime and may show early signs of what I term Author Appearance Anxiety: he’s wearing somebody’s very best doublet, if not actually his own, has a beard so well combed it’s alarming, and his hairline has been adjusted in a series of re
paintings so that its desperate retreat from his eyebrows has been not only arrested, but radically reversed.
And then we arrive at the age of lectures, recitations and readings. Dickens – an actor manqué with complicated reasons for wishing to be mobile and earning – trod the boards extensively. He may even have toured himself to death. He may also have caused publishers to notice how well his backlist sold after he’d been in town, giving his all to Little Nell for the admiring multitude. This may have helped to herald in the modern age of author-with-audience-related shindigs – and their accompanying on-the-road fatalities.
Now, those of you who read this blog regularly will know that I have no objection to reading or performing – both can be lovely, life-affirming and useful things. The hideous travel between gigs and the horrors of infectious, debilitating and frankly threatening accommodation have been dealt with elsewhere (and you can bet they will arise again), but the appearing . . . that’s a different matter.
As more and more events are billed – both dreadfully and wrongly – as A Chance to Meet the Author of . . ., cosmetically challenged writers such as myself have more and more opportunities to find themselves disappointing. You have no idea how guilty I feel when I consider the photographic reproduction of my head at the top of my Guardian blog or other newspaper manifestations, and the likelihood that you will have to look at it. I can and do – of course – avoid mirrors and dodge snapshots whenever I can, in many ways living like the owner of an ugly house in a lovely landscape: I get the delightful view and everyone else has to suffer my vile pinkwash, ill-considered storm porch and horrible proportions. But the business of being a writer requires photographs, is pathetically delighted by television outings and contractually insists on the public exposure of folk who otherwise sit alone with imaginary pals and fidget their hands about.
On Writing Page 11