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.

The Sphinx Scrolls on television

This morning I hammered some lengthy nails into my front lawn. I’m not known for my gardening prowess, but I was rather pleased at my innovative lawn care technique. Strips of gleaming new turf were laid a week ago onto the Teletubbie-style mounds that we created in the front garden. The morning after, I discovered that a gang of delinquent crows had been attacking the turf for fun, peeling back the corners and dragging the smaller pieces from the top of the hills down to the driveway. They weren’t searching for worms beneath the grass. This was wanton, blatant vandalism. As the local scarecrow competition finished a few weeks ago I would have felt self-conscious about erecting a crucified straw man, so I had to find more subtle means of dealing with them.

Anti-social behaviour order? That doesn’t work, of course. It’s just a badge of honour to a crow with no sense of social responsibility. Shoot them? I think that’s frowned upon in some quarters. I read online that shiny CDs dangling from trees are effective bird deterrents, so I gathered some old, unwanted discs and strung them up in much the same manner as I would like to string up the crows. Next morning, same criminal damage once again. Oddly, though, the crows seemed to be going for the same patches of grass each time. I knew then what I had to do: nail the tempting turf to the ground. So far it seems to have worked.

What has that got to do with my novel? What, indeed, have I been doing with my novel since I last blogged more than two months ago? To answer the first question: nothing at all. And as for the second, quite a lot, really. August was spent mostly in Spain and the south of France with the usual intention to write but without much to show for it other than a mild suntan to the forearms, nose and neck. But literary things began to flow towards the end of that month and into September. The rewrite of chapter one was completed and I think it’s true to say that scarcely a single line of that opening chapter was retained from the previous draft. It reads like a new book, and a far more interesting one at that. I cut about five thousand words from the old draft, and I don’t miss a single one. The fresh writing style of this new chapter carried over into the rewrites of chapters two and three. The story is now awash with new ideas, twists and surprises and the prose is imbued with elegance and maturity. Having found ‘my voice’ I’m finding it easier to push ahead into the next chapters.

Monday this week was spent at the Southampton Boat Show, researching details for the scene in which one of my characters steals a large motor yacht from its mooring in Cannes. I had chosen a Sunseeker Manhattan 63 as the gin palace in question, but the original draft of that scene was written using information obtained online. Dressing smartly enough to be taken seriously as a potential buyer wangled me a guided tour of the real thing in Southampton. I told the helpful chap from Sunseeker that I was featuring one of their boats in my novel, and asked how my character might go about stealing such a vessel? Is there a weakness in its security? Do owners usually hide their keys somewhere on deck? Would my character get caught before he left the marina? Oddly enough, Mr Sunseeker thought it would be imprudent to reveal how one might hotwire one of his lavishly equipped and even more lavishly priced boats, so I shall resort to working out my own theoretical criminal method based on what I had seen, and no revelations will be made that would threaten the ability of any owners of such boats to get a good night’s sleep. After all, I might eventually sell enough copies of my novel to buy one myself, and I don’t want to have to worry about joy-riders taking it for a spin.

Other than this blog I haven’t done anything to publicise The Sphinx Scrolls, but then I became involved in a television show earlier this month. I had a visit from one of those antiques programmes made by the BBC. They filmed the presenter’s arrival at my front garden, then took a shot of him walking up to meet me in the back garden where I was working on my laptop. ‘Hello,’ he said, ‘what are you doing today?’ ‘Writing my novel,’ I replied. ‘And what is your novel called?’ ‘The Sphinx Scrolls,’ I told him before he proceeded to sell me a set of 1963 porcelain jugs shaped like the heads of The Beatles. I don’t know if my book plug will make it to the final edit, but the show will be on BBC2, I think, some time in October, so I’ll look out for it then. Hopefully it will be the first of many television spots for this book. The only disappointing thing about the filming was that it was done the day before the turf was laid on my Teletubbie hills, so the front garden won’t be looking its best for its TV debut. But at least the viewers won’t see dangling discs, six inch nails and leather-clad, tattooed crows tearing the place apart.

4th July and nothing to celebrate?

June has come and gone with virtually no progress on my novel, and already it’s the 4th of July. So nothing to celebrate, then. Looking back over the past month my achievements seem mainly to reside in the garden: I built a log cabin for my mum (getting quite good at these things now) and planted some palm trees. And on one hot night we took my micro camper van to the New Forest and camped in it for the first time. It wasn’t a total success: I spent an hour inflating the airbed only for the valve to break just as I was ready to put it in the can, so we slept on the built-in rock’n’roll bed that came with it. The ‘double’ mattress was three feet wide and as soft as a slab of granite. Not exactly luxury.

Part of the reason for not writing anything last month:

buying, collecting and planting these two rather straggly trees on my front garden.

But the lack of writing during June meant that my brain recovered enough to find some inspiration again. I think I was getting overwhelmed by the sheer scale of the redrafting that still lay ahead, and one particular issue had prevented me from getting started: the flashbacks in the opening chapter.

It’s really important to start a novel well. We all know that. And that’s why I’ve rewritten the opening chapter to The Sphinx Scrolls many times. When I was working on the book back in 2001 I thought it would be cool to open the first chapter at the most dramatic point in the early part of the story – with the heroine facing execution. This inevitably necessitated a number of flashbacks to explain how she had come to be in this predicament, but the structure seemed to fit the situation because it was like her life was flashing before her eyes. So far, so good.

Things got messy during the more recent rewrites. I wanted to introduce a juicy subplot and add more depth to the novel, and this required more flashbacks in that opening chapter. Trouble was, the new scenes were jumping back all over the place in terms of location and chronology, and I had found myself with a first chapter that had become too long and too confusing.

The daunting prospect of fixing this chapter was the main reason for my literary procrastination for most of the last month. That, and the sheer exhaustion of building that log cabin under relentless and uncharacteristically blazing sunshine for two solid weeks.
 Today, however, I cracked it. I decided that I was not going to use my muscles today. No jogging, no construction work, and only minimal gardening. Today would be a brain day. It would have helped if Pooch hadn’t decided to wake me up at 6:20 am, but I compensated for my weary start to the day with a good dose of caffeine. My next trick was to allocate specific time to writing, and I scheduled three stints of two hours each, leaving time in between for essentials such as eating, watering the palm trees and watching Top Gear.

Having set out my plan for the day I decided it would be less overwhelming to extract the opening chapter and put it into a separate Word document. I knew it needed major surgery, but in case things went badly wrong I had the original version to return to. But if things went well I would be able to transplant the new, improved chapter in place of the old, rambling one.

The next step simply involved putting every jumbled up part of that chapter, flashbacks and all, into chronological order. I didn’t know if it would work that way, but at least it would tidy everything up and give me something easier to work with. That didn’t take long, just ten minutes or so, and as soon as I read the story in the correct order I realised how much the flashback technique had compromised essential detail. Parts of the story had been glossed over too quickly, creating a lack of credibility in places. Now I had a chance to build the story on stronger foundations. I decided to rewrite the first page entirely from scratch.

An hour passed. I had a sentence on the screen. Another hour: another sentence. Time for a break. Two sentences in one morning had exhausted me. Bearing in mind these were to be the first lines of the novel I didn’t feel that I’d wasted any time. It had been tough. I wanted my novel to open succinctly and memorably like The Day of the Triffids. I rejected line after line, word after word, until something started to emerge that I liked.

After lunch and a quick trip to the garden centre for fifteen bags of compost (so much for not using my muscles) I ploughed on with page one of the novel. Soon I had a whole paragraph. Wait – no, I had to scrub a line that didn’t work. The book went backwards for a while. Time passed while I researched the details of the scene on the Internet. I even watched clips of Guatemalan breakfast television to make sure I described everything correctly (I’ve never seen such a long-winded and pointless weather forecast for a country that’s always hot). Suddenly the lines were flowing again. I was achieving my goal of a more subtle, mature writing style. It was a huge improvement on the words I’d written ten or more years before. Into the third writing session of the day and I was getting a decent word count for this new chapter. By the time the electric guitar riffs of Top Gear dragged me away from my computer I had contributed almost a thousand words to the novel. No flashbacks so far, just an elegant introduction to the main character as she slowly becomes aware that all is not well in Guatemala City today.

So, after all, perhaps I do have something to celebrate today?

A new novel is born

A weird literary phenomenon happened yesterday. I got up fairly early to start work, about 7am, but ‘Er Indoors was sound asleep – as was Pooch on the end of the bed – so I left them in their slumber. Ordinarily I would go back an hour or so later, armed with a cup of coffee, to begin the slow process of bringing her back to consciousness. Only I didn’t. I left it until nearly 10am before putting the coffee next to the bed. Still she didn’t wake up, so I crept out and left her there. The day before she had been working incredibly hard restoring our house and I knew she needed to rest.

So there I was in my converted garage, tapping away on my computer and making hardly any progress at all on my novel, when at about 10:15 Katia showed up, barely awake, telling me she had just downloaded a future bestselling novel from the cosmos in her sleep. She knew the story in great detail and had even witnessed scenes from its movie adaptation. Apparently Einstein used this trick – he didn’t actually think up boffy stuff himself, he just downloaded it into his subconscious from the cosmic eBook library in the sky.

I’ve experienced useful and creative dreams too. When I was eleven years old I bought a bottle holder to put on my bicycle, but despite a whole day trying to fit it I couldn’t attach the components to frame of the bike. I went to sleep frustrated, but in my dream I solved the problem –the flat metal brackets needed to be bent backwards around the frame. In the morning I tried it out, and it was a perfect fit. More recently I’ve had dreams about movie plots which seemed totally logical and exciting whilst I was asleep, but the moment I woke up I would realise that the story was insane and full of holes.

Katia’s story, unlike my own dreams, was completely coherent from start to finish. It was also interesting and original, and not entirely unrelated to some of the themes in The Sphinx Scrolls. Probably wouldn’t be a sequel, but it could be an equal. She was convinced it was a bestseller because that was how it appeared in the dream. So I put my own writing to one side and opened a new Word document called ‘Katia’s Story’ and wrote down everything she told me. I then added details of my own which I thought would enhance the story, and now I have the basis of a plot for a new novel. I can’t give away the plot here, I’m afraid, but it’s going to make a really exciting book, believe me.

Having taken 14 years to get close to finishing my first novel, I hope that some shortcuts might be available if I write my next book based on her dream. Perhaps she can download a chapter at a time in future dreams, or dictate to me in her sleep? Perhaps I can stick a USB cable in her ear and download the whole thing straight into my laptop? I love the idea that this whole book is already sitting up there in the cosmos waiting to be downloaded. Maybe that’s how all inspiration occurs – we build a connection between our minds and a huge cosmic database of songs, poems, jokes, plays, sitcoms and novels? It’s a lovely idea, but it could prove complicated for intellectual property lawyers.

For now I just want to focus on finishing my book. It’s 173,000 words closer to being finished than Katia’s story, after all. But I am happy to interrupt that progress if the next book is handed to be on a cosmic USB stick…