Medieval tomb time

I haven’t written or edited a word of my novel today. The 170,000 word document remained unopened for the first time since I set myself the goal at the beginning of March of getting it completed within 90 days. This was in part due to today being another Ikea flat-pack assembly day (a white bedside table to go next to the four poster bed – turned out perfectly first time for a change). The lack of writing progress was also due to a more interesting cause, which was that I finally made it over to Chichester cathedral to take a close look at the Arundel tomb to see how I can incorporate it into the plot of The Sphinx Scrolls.

The Arundel tomb, in common with most of my self-assembly furniture, has a few bits broken off. A carving of a dog is missing its nose, giving it a distinctly porcine appearance. The knight himself has a rather unconvincing replacement nose which is black (the rest of him is grey stone) giving him the look of a dark-nosed drink enthusiast. The stone sword that once lay by his side has clearly met with an unfortunate end, and only its hilt remains. His wife is lacking a finger. Other than that they’re in pretty good shape considering the effigies were carved about 635 years ago. Philip Larkin’s poem is hanging on a pillar next to the tomb, and very few people paid it any attention.

Here’s how the tomb looks:

And this is a close-up of them holding hands:

One of the most interesting features of this cathedral is the remains of the significant Roman building that lies beneath it. The cathedral was built almost 1,000 years ago, and by then the Roman ruins they built over were already themselves 1,000 years old. The sheer scope of history visible in this place is phenomenal. Here’s a picture of the Roman mosaic and pottery found beneath the floor of the cathedral:

The fact that this cathedral was built over the remains of an earlier civilisation is an interesting parallel to one of the themes of the novel, so I think I’ll bring this into the story somewhere.

Flat pack clues

I’ve spent the day wrestling with the clues and their potential meanings in the novel. Well, actually it was only half of the day, the other half having been spent wrestling with the construction of an Ikea four poster bed. Inevitably this involved building a large section, realising that a key component in the middle of it was upside-down, then taking it all apart and starting again. I now have wood glue on my fingers, which I love peeling off, and in my hair, which is somewhat less enjoyable. But some of the glue ended up in the joints of the bed where it was supposed to be, and the bed is finished. It looks like a bed, and it seems to be the correct way up. This success was achieved with only the occasional glance at the instructions. I prefer to regard it more as a three-dimensional jigsaw puzzle, with one piece giving me a clue as to what the next piece might be.

That’s similar to the way I put clues into my novel. I don’t have an instruction manual to follow (not that I’d bother with it even if I did), so I like to take one idea and see where I can run with it. An inscription on a stele is my starting point, but that will lead to other clues in other locations and by solving those mini-mysteries the characters will progress through the key parts of the plot.

I can’t go into detail about the clues investigated by the characters in the novel, other than to say that I’m working with ideas that are complex, inter-related, subtle, elegant, and mind-blowing. They also have to fit together in a watertight way, be logical, believable and enjoyable. I didn’t make it to the cathedral today to investigate the link in the chain represented by the hand holding stone effigies and the Philip Larkin poem, but it’s Saturday tomorrow and I’ll try to get down there in the morning. Sherlock Holmes would always pick up on clues and their significance very easily, saying the logical process of deduction was ‘elementary’. Creating sophisticated clues from nothing isn’t elementary at all: it’s very intricate and challenging, but I’m confident I can make it work.

Sometimes a trail of clues will progress steadily before suddenly, without warning, reaching a dead end. No matter which way I look at it I can’t find a way to make it work and I’ll have to unravel it and start again. It’s frustrating to create something that looks like it’s going to be brilliant only to have to undo it all and work backwards. But as a regular buyer of Ikea flat pack furniture I’m pretty much used to working that way.

“Time has transfigured them into Untruth”

I’ve really enjoyed today’s progress on The Sphinx Scrolls because it involved writing a new chapter for Ratty, who is a delight to write for. He’s back in England investigating something Ruby said to him enigmatically in Guatemala. She had quoted a line from a Philip Larkin poem about a medieval tomb on which two stone effigies lie hand in hand. Ratty had taken her to that tomb on their one and only disastrous date together back when they were undergraduates. After reading the poem to her and then suggesting that he and Ruby might spend eternity together like that she had scarpered very quickly.

“Time has transfigured them into Untruth” is the line from the poem that gets him thinking. She is trying to make a subtle reference to something important that Ratty would be able to understand but which would wash over the other person present. It has something to do with the significance of the Mayan stele he is trying to sell, and it’s enough to make him decide not to go through with the deal. And I have to do some research myself to find a way to fit all the pieces together. The tomb in question isn’t far from I live, so if I have time I might swing by there tomorrow and see if there’s anything useful for Ratty to notice that could shed some light on what Ruby means.

The new chapter has pushed the word count to almost 170,000. It’s comforting to see the novel grow once more after having cut so many tens of thousands of words some years ago. At least I can be sure that the sequences I cut back then added nothing to the story – they went off at right angles from the plot line, then simply doubled back to where they started. Cool scenes in themselves, but completely unnecessary to the success of the story. Whereas these new chapters (which mostly deal with subplots) I’m putting in here and there serve a dual purpose:

1. They interrupt the main plot at suspenseful moments to create a need to keep reading in order to find out what happens, and
2. They add layers of mystery, depth and intrigue to the story.

This particular new chapter I wrote today helps to delay a big plot revelation and feeds the reader a new mystery to keep those pages turning. I hope I’ll have the Philip Larkin connection all figured out by the weekend, otherwise I’ll be keeping my character Ratty larkin’ about in a cathedral in a state of befuddlement. And that’s not unlike how I expect to be when I start researching the tomb tomorrow.