Why I’m A Writer

It’s an odd calling. Frustrating at times. I’ve often thought it would be nice not to have a creative streak. I’d love to be able to spend a day doing nothing and not feel guilty about it. But I feel a deep, entrenched shame whenever a whole day passes without any words making it from my head to my word processor. For those fortunate enough not to be afflicted by this curse of creativity it’s probably hard to imagine what it feels like. Perhaps if you imagine you’re still at school and you go to bed having failed to finish your homework, and you know the teacher’s going to make you regret your laziness the next day. It’s a bit like that feeling. Conversely, at the end of a productive literary day the endorphin rush is immense. There’s no greater feeling than knowing your book has taken a giant leap towards completion. That’s the force that motivates me to write.

I’ve thought of myself as a writer since Lady Di haircuts and leg warmers were the height of fashion. I haven’t actually been a writer during every one of those intervening years. Some years would go by with no creative output at all. Others would see plays, books, songs, sitcoms, or other literary products taking shape. Some went nowhere other than the filing cabinet (and later, the virtual filing cabinet of the computer); others saw publication, production or recording. By the age of 15, I had a folder crammed full of ideas for books, plays and films that I wanted to write, and almost 30 years later I still have that folder and I still haven’t had time to work on them. It doesn’t really matter now: I think the time for topical satires about Thatcher’s Britain and sketches written for Frankie Howerd may have passed. But the failure to complete the unrealistic mountain of ideas for writing projects I had in my youth is yet another source of irrational regret.

Being a writer is emotionally tough. It’s a self-punishing existence that demands anti-social hours and which rarely pays a return that bears any relation to the number of hours worked. So why am I a writer? That’s not easy to answer with words, even for someone who thinks they’re a wordsmith. I think I can answer the question more fully with a photograph. Last Tuesday was Pancake Day. I’ve always loved pancakes, but this year was the first time I ever attempted to cook my own pancakes. They’re great, those little flat discs that flip so beautifully in the air and taste delicious with maple syrup. Here is a picture of the first pancake ever to come from my batterie of culinary skills:

And that is why I’m a writer. Nuff said.

Ancient and Modern Egypt

Egyptologists have had a worrisome start to 2011. It’s hard to feel sorry for the undemocratic Mubarak regime that was overthrown last month, but sudden and chaotic political change has had unfortunate side effects. The Egyptian army protected the country’s historic sites for the first ten days of the uprising, and then shifted their focus to other priorities. This left the Tourist Police and unarmed security guards with the job of protecting all those sites, which has sadly been a logistical impossibility. Robbers have been able to steal priceless artefacts including statues of Tutankhamen from the Egyptian Museum. Tombs have been destroyed. Storage warehouses containing antiquities have been looted.

Another unexpected turn of events was the resignation this week of Dr. Zahi Hawass, a government minister who has been in charge of the Giza Plateau for almost 20 years. When I started writing The Sphinx Scrolls I quickly learned that Dr. Hawass controlled all archaeological digs and research at the pyramids and the Sphinx. He seemed to be strongly patriotic, and would usually refuse permits for any ‘New Age’ inspired excavations that might find signs that these great monuments were not built by Egyptian Pharaohs. In particular, the search for a possible ‘Hall of Records’ at the Sphinx, has made slow progress.

Since the existence of such a repository of ancient knowledge is key to my novel, I’ve had mixed feelings about the difficulties researchers have had in trying to establish whether such a thing exists. On the one hand, it would be fascinating if permission would be granted to excavate the fissures and chambers that ground penetrating radar surveys have identified close to and under the Sphinx. On the other hand, it might take away some of the magic of my novel if a time capsule of lost knowledge were discovered. After all, the Nag Hammadi Library was found in a mostly legible state after almost two millennia, so it’s possible for properly sealed texts to survive far longer in the dry conditions of the Giza Plateau. On balance, of course, I’d be delighted if the chambers could be opened up and investigated, and for any long hidden knowledge to be discovered.

If the exit of Dr. Hawass results in a more liberal replacement in that role, and if that opens the way for archaeological digs that have hitherto been refused, and if those digs actually find something unexpected about the history of humanity (and that’s a lot of ifs…), then I’d have to rewrite the end of my novel. Might take me a few months, but it’s not that big a deal. I won’t mind. It’s far harder for humanity to rediscover the wisdom it may once have possessed. If our ancestors took the trouble to write some advice for us and put it in a very safe place, I think we should take the trouble to find it and read it. And that, in a nutshell, is what my book is about.

World Book Day

By my calculations (extrapolated using a wooden 30cm ruler and an O Level in Maths) the 200,000 ish words in my novel would fit once around the world… if printed in a continuous line using a typeface large enough for each word to stretch a tenth of a mile. And a bit. Not sure what size type that would be: my copy of Word only goes up to 72. And that doesn’t look like a tenth of a mile (and a bit) to me. Anyway, by that extraordinarily dubious link I come to World Book Day, which is today. Actually it’s not quite that simple: World Book Day is today in the UK and Ireland, but, for reasons that are beyond the comprehension of a humble book person such as myself, it is not World Book Day anywhere else in the world. Other countries, it seems, prefer to celebrate their tomes at other times. Wherever you are in the world today, though, I hope you buy a book, or read a book, or at least think about reading a book. In an age where even dogs have their own laptops it’s important to remember the advantages of the simple book:

I might have invented the bit about dogs having laptops, by the way, although there are probably some Californian pooches ahead of the curve in that respect.

My novel has already moved forward satisfyingly today, and tonight’s dinner engagement has been postponed due to sickly, spewing hosts, so I’ll take advantage of a spare evening and keep editing until late, possibly until World Book Day closes its global doors on the two countries in which it’s taking place.

Writing Backwards

On 1^st March 2010 I set myself the challenge of completing the rewrites of my novel in three months. In the books I’ve written about writing (How to be a Writer etc) I’m always going on about the need to redraft a book many times until it’s perfect. I thought I’d be able to get through several drafts in three months, but it took that entire time to do one draft (remember this book is more than 180,000 words). And at the end of that draft I still had sections of the book that simply contained notes such as ‘Otto chapter needed here’ or ‘Insert Ratty chapter’.

Towards the end of the year I made a small change to one of the lead characters, and the knock-on effect of that change necessitated that I cut 23,000 words from the text (instead of being a true war hero I made him a fake war hero – more interesting and original, but all the fighting sequences in which he featured had to go). This was just as well, since the new chapters I’d written to fill in the gaps had pushed the word count above 200,000, which I see as a sensible upper limit. So the word count peaked at, I think, about 203,000, was then trimmed down to 180,000, and has since crept up again to 189,000. It’s like a bush that keeps growing and needs regular trimming to keep its overall shape. It means I’m writing backwards sometimes, but it really is like cutting out the dead leaves and giving space for the rest of the plant to bloom.

I’m going to set myself a new three month challenge, now. I’m going to attempt the following:

1. Finish the current draft, which involves major restructuring, new characters, new chapters, a new beginning and a new ending (I’m 80% through that draft right now).
2. Complete a fast read-through and minor editing draft, just to make sure the major changes and new themes hang together well.
3. Complete a slow ‘quality of language’ draft. This will involve saturating my head with bestselling contemporary and literary fiction to ensure that the quality of my writing (stylistic techniques, imagery, vocabulary, pace etc) stands shoulder-to-shoulder with the best of them. My possible distant relative Joshua Ferris is already inspiring me with his demonstration of the craft of writing in his new bestseller The Unnamed which I started reading yesterday.
4. Complete a quick logic and consistency draft (checking for logical progression of events, revelation of information, consistency in characters and speaking styles).
5. Proofread the book.
6. Read the whole book out loud to ‘Er Indoors. It’s amazing how many mistakes jump out at you when reading aloud even when you think the book is already perfect.

There are bound to be further issues to fix after that, but I’m confident I can finish this book by summer 2011, a mere 15 years after I scribbled the first draft of the first chapter in red biro in a hammock in the south of France. I certainly hope so, anyway: after 200,000 words I’m almost out of ink.