This Itch of Writing

In search of odd, crunchy details

I realised sadly a few weeks ago that I was going to have to go to France to research the new novel. This is, of course, the worst possible aspect of the writing life: that we can travel to beautiful or at least interesting places, and set off the whole lot, from the first cup of coffee at the airport, by way of hotel bills, entry tickets and photo printing costs, to the last steak-frites, against tax. I remember saying to my father that it seemed odd that Ian Fleming had suddenly upped and set a whole James Bond novel, You Only Live Twice, in Japan. 'I expect he fancied a tax-free holiday there,' said my father. These days I know enough about Fleming (though some things I rather wish I didn't) to know that it wasn't quite as simple as that, but the point stands.

So I don't expect anyone to sympathise when I say that this kind of research isn't without its difficulties. For one thing you can only go when real life permits, which means it may not be the best time from the point of view of your work on the novel. I find that research comes in three kinds, all of which have their optimum moment: the rock-bottom basics which you can't start a novel without, the set-dressing, and the stuff you didn't know you'd need.

The rock-bottom basics are anything which affects the big architecture of the novel: rough travel times and distances, whether your characters can have the jobs you want them too, the basic mores of the world in which they live. These are the foundations of plot and structure, and changing the structure of a novel is like trying to turn an oil tanker round, so it's as well to check how long a broken leg takes to mend before you plot the damn thing. (I learnt that one the hard way, and one of my first tax-deductible purchases was an immense nursing textbook, to make sure it never happened again.) So getting these right at the beginning, is really, really worth it, but they're not, mostly, things that depend on getting your feet on the ground.

Calling the second kind set-dressing doesn't do it justice, because the textures of food and the sounds of cloth and the games your characters play when they're drunk on - what? - are more than incidental: they're the warp and weft of your novel's fabric, the things which will make its world come alive. They're also the things which will carry much of the non-narrative ideas, and the springboard for much of your figurative language (and if your figurative language isn't part of such non-narrative structures, then maybe it should be). I've built up a fair library of histories of transport, marriage, sex, food, costume, churches, medicine, castles, debutantes, sailors, housewives and saints, and there's always the net, for that quick grab for some necessary facts. But for the curves and crags of the landscape and the smell of the backstreets there's no substitute for going there. If you leave going there late, you'll know what you want, but it may be too late for what you find to inform - shape, illuminate, transform - your original conception of the novel. If you go too early you may not be looking for the right things, because your knowledge of the novel is still theoretical, based on paper plans, not an actual entity.

And this is even more true of the stuff you didn't know you'd need: the stuff you only see when you get there. Could I have known, till I was wandering the streets of Bilbao, that on that Atlantic coast those tall, typically southern European buildings would have their typical balconies glassed in? How perfect for a novel that was all about windows, reflections, light and above all voyeurism! But of course the earlier you are in the process of writing the novel, the more you have to accept that you may miss things that you could have used: so much is still misty, un-formed, undeveloped. And again, if you go later, you may find things which contradict or shake your confidence in what you've written: must you go back and cut or re-write even good things? 

And then there's remembering that a novel is not a travel book. While generalising and vagueness (because you don't know the odd, crunchy detail of it) is death to good writing, it can be a drawback to be too wedded to the facts of a place, as of a time. For one thing, haven't we all read books which canter along nicely, then trip and fall flat on a slab of prose that might be straight out of the Rough Guide? And for another, it can be particularly hard to judge a piece of writing coolly when it cost you a lot in time or money, or when you just loved the place, and have succumbed to the most basic writerly desire of all: to get down on paper what has moved or excited or fascinated you. Those are the darlings we're exhorted to murder, so maybe while I'm away, along with the postcards and the wine, I should pick up a nice big Sabatier knife in that delightful market, just for the purpose. (I'm going by train, so it won't be a problem to bring home.)

But who knows what will happen? There's never a single, right time for research, and certainly not when you have to combine so many different kinds of research in one place, at one time. You can't step in the same river twice, and that's part of the nature of creativity: we struggle to create something whole and satisfying, permanent and written in bronze, while recognising that even a change in the direction of the breeze might have resulted in a different book altogether.

Drilling deep

But if I was arguing in Trust me, I'm telling stories for being allowed to play fast and loose with historical (or, indeed, any other) facts, I do see that there's not a lot of point in fiction that doesn't grapple with the realities of human existence in some way. It doesn't need Bruno Bettelheim to tell us that even fairy stories say important things to us: that enchantment has its uses. A fairy story may also be - pace Freud - a growing-up myth; many an opera - pace Jung - is an integration of animus and anima; and a well-crafted modern comedy makes us laugh at our uneasily comfortable modern lives which we never thought to laugh about. And that's not to exclude the science fiction and fantasy branches of the fiction tree either: it's simply that they play by different set of rules about what's defined as 'believable' - dragons, for instance.

So even though the definition of a novelist's trade could be that We Make Things Up, any novel needs a bedrock of human existence - human truth, if not historical or geographical fact - because without it fiction is pointless. The difficulty is that every reader has a very slightly different frame of reference for testing such truth, based on a slightly different experience of the world. Write about what you can make me believe you know is my slogan for aspiring writers, but what I'll believe as a reader is as much about me as it is about you. I never did discover what it was about Anna, in The Mathematics of Love, that meant a fellow-workshopper didn't believe she'd been brought up on a council estate, but since the others in the workshop did believe she had, I didn't feel obliged to re-write Anna, or her childhood.

That ought to mean that the further away the world of a novel is from the world of its readers, the faster and looser I can play with mere facts, without shaking my readers' faith in that bedrock of human truth, because who can tell me I'm 'wrong'? But, lacking the believability so easily established (in theory) by the novelist of modern life with an Ordnance Survey map and a bit of eavesdropping on buses, you can argue that those of us who set our fiction in other worlds - the past, the future, different continents or different galaxies - have to drill even deeper into human bedrock before we can start to build our story.

Trust me, I'm telling stories

I've just realised that this is my hundredth blog post, so thank you to everyone who's dropped by, read, commented, linked, or just said something that got me intrigued and sent me over here to work out what I think. For example:

Poet Sheenagh Pugh has been blogging here about Linda Grant's piece in The Guardian that also set me off on Rogues and Vagabonds. It's apparently even harder to persuade readers of poetry that the persona in the poem is not the poet, than it is to persuade the readers of novels that the author made it up. And then on Friday I had a drink for the first time in ages with a short-story-writing friend. She has an extremely high-powered professional life and a large family, and she writes strange, dark stories which don't spring directly from her everyday life, and would completely change how people saw her if they read them. So she writes under a pseudonym, and I sympathise hugely with that, and not just because negotiating contracts is hard to do with someone who's read your stories of... well, that would be telling. No, not just because it's bad for business: consciousness of external scrutiny of what you're doing (as opposed to consciousness of the need to communicate what you want to say) is creative disaster.

Meanwhile, she was sympathising with me about the fact that the advance reading copies (bound proofs to you and me) of A Secret Alchemy should be going out any day now. I'm bracing myself, not just because the early reviews - the ones the book trade reads - won't be long behind, but as anyone must brace themselves who writes any fiction rooted in well-known facts. To hear some - many - readers of historical fiction, you'd think that accurate facts are what they're looking for, and in some ways it is. It's frightening how many lovers of historical fiction were completely turned of real history by bad teaching at school. They still want their history fix, though, so the history in a novel is what matters to them, not the fiction. Of course I have my professional pride, and I hope I haven't got any facts wrong that I meant to get right. But I hope more that people read A Secret Alchemy as I meant it to be: a story. It's not history, though it has its roots in history. It's fiction, and anyone who wants history should go and read a history book: I made this up.

And I suddenly realised that so many fiction-readers read not to be transported elsewhere, as we all were so easily in childhood, but to get a fix of non-fiction: history, geography, science or a dozen other subjects in easy-to-swallow form. No wonder they're so upset when they realise that something isn't true in the factual sense. As well as all the reasons I touched on in 'Rogues and Vagabonds', I find this attitude annoying because it ignores what fiction is for, and if the author gets it wrong, it takes their fiction to task for not being what it was never meant to be. To my mind, if you want history, read history, if you want geography, read travel books. They're stories too, of course - though they play by different rules - because humans are story-telling creatures and we have no other way of making sense of our experience.

I'm telling stories by fiction rules, and I make no promises about what's true and what isn't in what I write, but only that I'll make that call as seems best to me at the time. All I promise is that, of itself, the story will be whole, will make sense, will be true to human experience, will satisfy you, the reader, as real life - real history - so often doesn't. Trust me, I'm telling stories.

Seized with desire

Over at Vulpes Libris there's an excellent interview with Susan Barrett, author of Fixing Shadows and The Inconstant Husband and, incidentally, a stablemate of mine at Headline Review. At one point she steps away from the questions and says, 'What fun writing this - it is a nice opportunity to post-rationalise, a bit of literary onanism.' Which made me laugh, but also got me thinking.

I guess whether we should pursue that precise analogy does depend on what you think of onanism as a form of pleasure, but post-rationalising is an interesting business. Yes, it's fun, though there are people who might say that writing 30,000 words of PhD commentary has to be the ultimate - um - well, you know what I mean. There's certainly a strong argument that, as Umberto Eco says in his essay 'Reflections on The Name of the Rose', 'The author must not interpret': that is, must not tell readers what to think of the book. And I do believe that to write a book in order to have interesting PhD-ish or even Vulpes-Libris-ish things to say about it would be a betrayal of what art is for, and comes perilously close to the recent Booker-winner who apparently half-admitted that s/he had written that book in order to win prizes. I also doubt if it would end up being a very good book.

But Eco goes on to say that even if the author must not interpret 'he [sic] may tell why and how he wrote his book'. If there is a whiff of self-admiration, of self-absorption in such telling, it's only really the self-consciousness of anyone who is asked to answer a question: the admiration and absorption is originally the questioner's. Deciding to write a novel is partly a matter of setting yourself a series of questions at different levels, from how did they get here and what happens next, to who's telling this story and is it past or present to them. The solution to these problems is the novel. Think of it that way, and talking about why and how you wrote it is merely another level of questions and answers.

If you can lay hands on a copy, I highly recommend Eco's brief account of writing his first, mega-selling novel. It's a while, I realised, since I read The Name of the Rose itself, but Eco's stylishly written and thought-provoking little essay has brought it all back. So I looked for the novel on my shelves, and realised, eventually, that I've never actually owned a copy: I must have borrowed my father's, which means I read it at least twenty-two years ago. It feels like eighteen months at the most: now that's a tribute to how much it gripped me at the time. Eco's account of it is delightful partly because, although his cultural, literary and theoretical erudition leaves the rest of us gasping, he still has to deal with the practicalities of his first novel as we all do: he bumps into the same problems, finds the same solutions, is constrained inconveniently as we are by the historical record, realises too late how last minute additions are being interpreted by others. All in all, there's something very delightful about the fact that even a professor of semiotics will admit to being seized with the desire to write a novel, 'Because I felt like poisoning a monk.'

Not exactly simple

The proofs of A Secret Alchemy have arrived but, come hell or high water, Thursday is PhD day so I haven't looked at them properly yet. It will be interesting to go through them, because it must be a couple of months since I've looked at the actual text, which is probably the longest gap since I started writing it. For the commentary on it that I'm writing for my PhD, I'm in the odd position of noticing things as a student of literature that I never noticed when I was writing it. But for proof checking I need a completely different mindset: a cold, uninvolved eye that notices typos (increasingly rare thanks to spell-checkers), but also a mind making slightly more sense of it all, so that I see literals (not rare at all because spell-checkers are blind to homophones and textual idiocies) and slips of typography - the italics that bleed on even when the quoted letter is done, the missing squiggle between two voices - that only I will recognise. Now that teaching and marking at Goldsmiths is done with, it's all less panic-stricken, but I still found myself noticing with slightly wary interest just how many different elements make up a week of the writing life:

• sandwich lunch tomorrow to advise aspiring-writer-friend of acquaintance
• giving back essays with appropriate helpful (if also admonitory) comments
• Phd commentary - another 2,000 words today about parallel narrative in A Secret Alchemy
• checking proofs of A Secret Alchemy - a day's work at least
• reading the current research book for the new, nameless novel - not much more to read
• a flurry of emails about the design of the cover for A Secret Alchemy, including me digging out and sending some links to images Headline and the designer (the same as for The Mathematics of Love - hooray!) might not have already
• reading fiction for the Phd commentary: at the moment According to Queenie by Beryl Bainbridge, Arthur and George by Julian Barnes and The Stone Virgin by Barry Unsworth
• researching lit. crit. books for the issues I want to discuss in the PhD commentary. Anyone know if there's any discussion of parallel narrative as a form, or shall I have to plough my way through thousands of irrelevant papers about books which happen to have parallel narratives, in search of the odd paragraph or sentence?
• ditto historical fiction which includes real historical characters
• returning some shockingly overdue books which were research for the new novel to the Goldsmiths library and paying the fine
• going to the London Library to borrow the same and some others because they don't charge fines and have a far bigger collection
• resisting the super-tempting next research book for the new novel
• thinking hard about whether to apply for the vacancy the Open University has announced for online lecturers in creative writing: would it be valuable experience and money, or The Last Straw?
• find scissors to cut a non-fiction review out of the TLS which is relevant to the new novel and put cutting in that folder
• obsessive checking of email to see if the final cover's for A Secret Alchemy has come through
• obsessive checking of email to see if my US editor has sent the notes she's working on
• obsessive checking of email to see if Radio Four producer has sent list of topics we discussed for short programme
• fossicking with PayPal because they've demanded half a dozen kinds of authentication to comply (they say) with money laundering regulations. I only set the darned thing up because it seemed the best way of dealing with payments for editorial reports. I wish I hadn't bothered but stuck to cheques instead
• suppressing ideas (prompted by fellow writer's agonies over Second Novel Syndrome) about the book on creative writing which I want to write
• ditto the book on historical fiction I want to write
• ditto the panic that after the new novel, I might never have another novel to write again. I know perfectly well that as soon as I enter the doldrums of that one - about half-way into the first draft - something new and sparkly and much more fun will begin to clamour. But at the moment it's a blank
• writing another blog post

And that's before I've done the laundry, cooked the supper, gone to the supermarket, checked if it's true that the car needs to have its MOT done, acknowledged the children's existence, and ignored the fact that the house has subsidence and the lawn needs mowing.

No, I'm not complaining. It was much less fun being unpublished. But it's not exactly simple either.

Rogues and vagabonds

Over at The Guardian Linda Grant and Melissa Benn have both been... I nearly said 'ruminating', but that's too gentle and contemplative a word: both pieces have a distinctly acerbic tone, and I'm not surprised. Anyway, they're both talking about the obsession readers and journalists have with the autobiographical origins of a writer's fiction.

At my most charitable, I can understand - even regard it as flattering - that people are interested in where our fiction comes from, and of course that may include (must include, at one level) our own lives. Indeed, I would rather people turned up to listen to me and others on a festival panel than didn't, even if it does mean my being asked every darned time whether I'll ever write about The Ancestor. And I'm relatively safe, writing mainly historically, compared to Melissa Benn, setting her novel in a modern political family (no, as she says, the father in the book isn't her father Tony, etc....) I shan't be using this blog to announce that actually I'm a male veteran of Waterloo or the mother of the Princes in the Tower. To fiction writers it's what we make up that's the exciting bit: the challenge that gets us going is to write what, by definition, we don't know with seeming authenticity. By contrast our own lives are too familiar to be interesting. And yet readers and journalists insist on thinking the latter is the important thing.

No wonder that a writing acquaintance of mine has as her e-mail signature: 'I make things up'. It's significant that the rise and rise of the misery memoir is based on the reader believing that these tales of horrors redeemed actually happened; witness the outrage when every now and again a story turns out to be not 'true' by whatever tacitly operating standards readers apply. I'm always asked about research, but bugger research, as Graham Swift says (he who got into huge trouble for not being a born and bred Fenlander when, by imagining Waterland so well, he had 'made' readers believe he must be). It's as if the only explanation readers and journalists can accept for a story that grips the reader, that seems 'real' while they're reading, is that the writer experienced it themselves. But all art operates at the mimetic, not actual, level of human experience: by definition it isn't real. Even the Tate's scandalous Bricks ceased to be 'real' in the actual sense, once imported into a gallery: they're no longer doing what bricks are designed do, they're a mimesis of brickiness.

Anybody would think that most of the reading world has never got over discovering that Goldilocks didn't actually like porridge, or that the two actors so heartbreakingly in love on stage aren't in love off it, because he's an egomaniac and she's gay. Neither the evidence nor my impeccably liberal upbringing will allow me to consider the possibility that most of the reading world is very stupid, and I find it hard to believe that human nature after several millenia has suddenly abandoned the pleasures of storytelling: not many people think that Middle Earth exists, but that hasn't done Tolkein's sales any harm.

So why does it make me so cross to have it assumed that fiction writers are really writing fact lightly disguised, even as I trot out for yet another journalist how my sister gave me the air fare to San Sebastian so I could write the Spanish parts of The Mathematics of Love better? I think it's because it devalues the part of my writing self which is most precious, most intangible, and most central to what I do: my imagination. Yes, what I imagine must have some roots in reality, but that Spanish trip was in service of imagination, so I could write what I imagined better, not a substitute for it. Back home, endless tea and innumerable reference books are in service of my imagination in much the same way. The world is quite enough inclined to assume that writing a novel only takes a bit of sitting down. It really does devalue what we do to suggest that all it then takes is a little self-examination and we can start signing six-figure deals.

But there's something deeper even than this. Is there perhaps a covert puritanism operating, too, in this insistence that what so grips readers must be 'true' in the dully factual sense? One reason that actors were suspect for so many centuries is because they're not what they seem: when social order is based on people having a set place in the hierarchy, it's threatened by commoners who can appear to be gentlemen, whores who seem to be heroines. The novel, too, was highly suspect to a Protestant world for whom authentic feeling should be dedicated to one's relationship with God, and the highest virtues were hard work and honest plainness. To such a world fiction encouraged feeling - excitement, emotion, passion - by trickery, and the illusions of a made-up story were dangerously seductive. Like the misogynist who pursues women while hating them for his own desire, the world wants what we can give them - they want to laugh and cry, wonder and rage, feel pity and terror, beyond what their own lives can provide - but they fear us for being able to move them so. Nowadays, they don't bury us in unconsecrated ground, like Molière. They just tell us, loud and clear and endlessly, that we didn't make it up, not really.

Not reading -

- to follow on from Not writing

   

though while I was away a bit of Talking about The Mathematics of Love, A Secret Alchemy, and writing in general was posted on Vulpes Libris

The working kitchen and the critic

Do you remember the story about the woman who was stunned to discover that she'd been talking prose all her life? I'm feeling a bit like that. This morning I knuckled down to my PhD, which today meant trying to collect together and make sense of as many taxonomies of historical fiction as I can find. How do you define hist fic, from Scott and the predecessors he denied, to now? What are the different kinds? Is it different if you have real historical characters in it, about whom the reader might have an opinion already? Is it different if the author is trying to shed light on their own time, instead of that past time? And so on. The library books and papers from learned journals litter my desk.

There I was, interestedly but meekly making notes about Scott, Balzac, Renault, Tremain and the huge, huge row that blew up over William Styron's The Confessions of Nat Turner, and trying not to get self-conscious about the new novel. How can I hold onto my conviction that what I write is worth writing, worth someone's £7.99 and several hours of their full attention, when Henry Esmond and A Tale of Two Cities are weighed and found wanting by Avrom Fleishmann? How do 'History as pastoral' vs. 'History as drama' (Harry E. Shaw) fit with fiction which 'invents a past,' vs. that which 'disguises a documented past'? (Joseph W. Turner). Should I be worrying about where the new novel - which has a form and a soul, though not yet a name - fits in these taxonomies? Too often it seems books are judged by how neatly they fit a theoretical structure, not the other way round. I'll forgive any academic who actually acknowledges, as Turner does, that, 'We should be wary... about confusing the value of a novel with the amount of analytical criticism that it requires, or the specifically theoretical issues that it raises.' But still, this isn't much to do with me trying to decide about tenses and first-versus-third person and voice, is it?

Working novelists are pragmatists. I don't plan and write a novel bearing in mind a critical field or recent developments in the genre, any more than I do to sell millions or win prizes. I write a novel because I have a story I can't bear not to tell, and almost all my craft and art, such as it is, goes into telling it as well as I can. Of course I enjoy the challenge of pinning down just a little of the zeitgeist of a time in history, conjuring up 'them' and 'then', as well as using that time, maybe obliquely, to say something about 'us' and 'now'. But in the end a story's a story: either the reader listens, or they wander off.

But when I get asked why I write historical fiction, once we've got past the undeniable fact that sex is more fun to write when corsets are involved, I usually find myself saying something about how I write historical fiction because history is how I see the world: it would be less natural to leave the history out. My sense of now and then always co-exist, so inevitably it creeps into my novels. And it's true that as I try to pin down that co-existence, in some way the novels change from being set in history, to being about history.

Still, that's bath-thinking, top-of-the-bus brooding, doing-the-washing-up contemplation, compared to the hands-dirty nuts and bolts of getting the words down and the plot straight (or crooked, according to genre). So you can imagine how disconcerted I was to read Turner saying this:

The best historical fiction, in my view, is ultimately about itself, about the meaning and making of history, about man's [sic] fate to live in history and his attempt to live in awareness of it.

Now that sounds much grander and more philosophical than I'll aspire to. Besides, if I worry too much about philosophy I might end up like the centipede, who walked perfectly well till someone asked him if he started with his right foot or his left. But it is encouraging to realise, after the event, that I am trying to do in a small way what other, greater writers have tried to do. Maybe all those critics sitting in their studies aren't so removed from the working kitchen of writing after all.

I'll not be back, I think

One of the questions that was asked on Monday, at the Stoke Newington Bookshop, was why I don't stick to writing the same period as so many historical writers do. I've been asked, 'What period do you write?' before, and been surprised at my inquirer's surprise when I say, 'Whatever takes my fancy next.' But this time, maybe because I'd been talking about my work and had some really insightful questions, or maybe because the inquirer was Charles Palliser, the question has made me think.

Why don't I write the same period? But why would I write the same period? Historical period in fiction isn't just wallpaper, set dressing, an excuse for nice frocks and fancy words. At least, it may be all those things, but in the historical fiction I read and want to write, it's so much more as well. We don't need the physicists to tell us that time is the same as space: every place in history has its own nature, just as Rebus' Edinburgh or Pratchett's Discworld do. For me Edward IV's England or Suffolk in the 1970s are environments but also, like Edinburgh and Discworld, characters - or at least entities - in their own right. Not just a certain set of hills and rivers and road names, but part of what people are: these places in time/space have formed what they fear, hope, believe, how they fight and love, how they live and die.

I certainly don't pick a period to write for any of the reasons you might think - not ease of research or easy marketing. It's not even entirely a matter of my choosing - or not choosing - when/where to write about next.  It arrives as characters sometimes arrive and sometimes before any of them do: hazy but recognisable, demanding to be written. It's like a cloud in my head which, like some child's fantasy, bears inside it a whole world in all its exact and individual detail, which I must write my way into. And when I have, I've done with it. I've often been asked if I'd write a sequel to The Mathematics of Love, and I can't imagine doing so, just as I can't imagine setting a new novel in a old world. I've told the story that wanted to be told, said what I want to say, and unless those same characters - or that same world - somehow began to insist again, with some absolutely new story to tell, I don't think I'll be back.

Once upon a time...

I've been tackling the commentary on A Secret Alchemy, which is thirty percent of the PhD, and it's all gone rather postmodern. It starts routinely enough, if a form - the PhD thesis - which was originally designed for physicists, and only with difficult fitted to the humanities, can be called routine as it deforms itself to fit artists and artistic practice. The interesting thing is, does it in turn deform us?

I'm supposed to be writing 30,000 words on the use of narrative technique in A Secret Alchemy, and also 'its relation to other literary works, and an exposition of the aims and concerns that lay behind its composition... [it] shall make it clear that the candidate is well-acquainted with the history and contemporary developments of the genre in which he or she is working... and the critical field associated with it, and is able independently to analyse, interpret and evaluate debates and theoretical positions associated with it.'

Still with me? No, me neither, much of the time. Maybe it would be easier if I'd kept a diary while I was writing the novel, but I'm not a diary keeper. Maybe it would be easier if I thought about my novels in terms of 'I want to write Ackroyd crossed with Heyer', or if I had Ricoeuring fantasies, or enjoyed having my mind Foucaulted (all right, I'll stop now). Quite often I don't even take notes when I'm researching, let alone anything I could turn into a proper reference (MLA bibliographic style, since you ask). So in fact what I'm doing is not stating the facts about writing a novel and then analysing them, I'm trying to make a coherent product, with beginning, middle and end (plus footnotes) from a process - writing a novel - whose beginning is misty, whose middle is usually muddle, and whose end hasn't happened yet. I'm telling a story.

And, yes, A Secret Alchemy is about storytelling. Since two of the three narrators really existed, I was always going to have to decide for myself how to un-tether the world I wanted to write about - how to make a novel - from the history that made me want to write it. And then I realised that not only did Thomas Malory have a walk-on part, but that... No, it'll take too long to explain, you'll have to read the book. While I was writing it I started to read things for the commentary about how storytelling works, and of course they did end up in the novel, not because I set out to put them there, but because whatever's going on in my head tends to end up in the novel of the moment: after a few years under the bed they read like the diaries I don't write.

So though I hope that no one reading A Secret Alchemy will notice, because they'll be too busy wondering what really happened to Ned and Dickon, it pleases my more postmodern self that my commentary is really a story about how storytelling works in a novel which is all about storytelling. After all, another true way to tell the story would be, 'Once upon a time, I went to see a Shakespeare play about Henry VI...'