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.

Sharing despair with Neil Gaiman

Answering a cris de cœur - in a forum of mainly published writers - of 'I hate Book Two!', someone posted this, which came originally from Neil Gaiman. I hope he won't mind me borrowing it: as you can imagine from this piece, (which I gather was originally written for NaNoWriMo) he has one of the best writing blogs on the net, which is well worth dropping by.

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The last novel I wrote (it was ANANSI BOYS, in case you were wondering) when I got three-quarters of the way through I called my agent. I told her how stupid I felt writing something no-one would ever want to read, how thin the characters were, how pointless the plot. I strongly suggested that I was ready to abandon this book and write something else instead, or perhaps I could abandon the book and take up a new life as a landscape gardener, bank-robber, short-order cook or marine biologist. And instead of sympathising or agreeing with me, or blasting me forward with a wave of enthusiasm---or even arguing with me---she simply said, suspiciously cheerfully, "Oh, you're at that part of the book, are you?"

I was shocked. "You mean I've done this before?"

"You don't remember?"

"Not really."

"Oh yes," she said. "You do this every time you write a novel. But so do all my other clients."

I didn't even get to feel unique in my despair.

So I put down the phone and drove down to the coffee house in which I was writing the book, filled my pen and carried on writing.

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About ten other writers on that forum piled in to agree, and we all agreed that it's not just second book syndrome, it's a seemingly inevitable part of the cycle of writing novels. Looking back, I remember when a certain book called Shadows in the Glass - otherwise known as The Mathematics of Love - was driving me to tears of exasperation. Did I really have to plod on, when I had this brilliant new idea of how I could, after all, write Anthony and Elizabeth Woodville? It's hard to remember that time now, and Book Two - otherwise known as A Secret Alchemy - had more than its share of 'I hate!' stages, and I'm remembering why I wanted to write it, and enjoying the way it's come out. And ever since that I hate stage I've been steadily more excited about Book Three - otherwise known as Book Three - and now I would cheerfully kill to get everything out of the way and all the preliminary research done so I could start it. But I must remember, I tell myself, that in a few months I'll be crying 'I hate Book Three!' because sparkling at me in the mists of my mind will be Book Four. I must remember...

But just in case, I think I'll just go and print out that Neil Gaiman story, and pin it up on the wall, directly above the monitor.

Sunday round-up: age-banding, and putting the cart before the horse

In 'Wanting, needing, yearning, dreaming' I said that thinking about a piece of writing after you've written it can teach you much more about how writing works than reading a textbook before you start. The more formalised insitutions of academic creative writing seem to divide into two kinds: the departments and degrees which discuss ideas and theories of writing, and then write to explore them, and the places where the writing comes first and the analysis afterwards. A piece in Times Higher Education argues that creative writing is reviving the sort of liberal humanism in English departments that Theory banished, but the piece and the comments didn't rule out the theory-first approach to CW from which I instinctively recoil. So why do I recoil from it? Primarily, you could argue, because I became a writer first, and only a (sort-of) academic second. But I don't think it's simply an accident of my career. I think writing first, analysing second is the nature of writing, and although it's perfectly possible to use writing as a tool to explore theoretical ideas, the writing that results shouldn't be regarded as art, nor those whose only writing is of this kind as creative artists.

The first impulse that makes people take to pen and paper is, you could say, like the kind of moment in a musical that I was discussing in 'Wanting, needing'... when the characters just have to burst into song: they have something to say - something they feel, think, believe - which can't be contained any longer. Of course what bursts out of you may be an idea, not a desire to retell Puss-in-Boots, but it's the desire that comes first. Even at the micro level of single sentences, the sentence comes first, and the analysis of whether it's the right sentence, and what to do if it's not, comes second. And at a slightly more macro level, all writing teachers know that the first thing you have to teach learner-writers is that though the outburst comes naturally, and first, so much of writing as art and craft is actually in the revising. So it seems to me that for the academy to theorise first and write second is putting the cart before the horse, even if it is easier to examine and sits more comfortably with the established processes of academic enquiry. Not only will it result in a lot of writing which has no value beyond being a demonstration of theory (which you could argue doesn't matter, if the purpose of a degree or a research project is academic enquiry) but in perverting the natural writing process such courses and academics are actually losing sight of what they purport to study. Creative writing as a discipline is process, and if it's not allowed to be itself, then it's not creative writing, but something else entirely.

And finally, the row about age-banding children's books rumbles on. I think the attempt by publishers to guide parents in choosing the right books for their children is well-meaning, since parents who have least confidence in choosing are probably the ones who are least used to decoding covers and blurbs and getting a feel for a book with a quick dip. Having heard the story from the horse's mouth of the teenage boy who tentatively asked if he'd be allowed into Waterstones if he was wearing trainers, I have some sympathy with this view. And with 20% of books being sold through Tesco's alone, most people are not buying books in places where a well-informed bookseller is there to help. But the initiative is back-firing. Some very heavyweight authors indeed, and the keen and opinionated booky readers of the blogosphere, argue that a single mark of 7+ or 13+ will put off more children than it will help, and that unifying the very different issues of reading-difficulty and content under a single mark is not only impossible, but a betrayal of everything that literature should be: wide-ranging and free-thinking. It's not actually a new question: does anyone else remember the guidance in the Puffin books of my youth. 'This book will appeal to girls of 10-12, and sensitive boys,' was typical, as I remember. But it was tucked away at the bottom of the blurb, infinitely less pre- and pro-scriptive in style than the proposed gaudy film-certificate symbols. The anti age-banding camp are here, and mega-selling Darren Shan makes his views known on Vulpes Libris, just above an interview with the very wonderful Barrington Stoke, who in their mission to make good books suitable for dyslexics and reluctant readers have grappled for a decade with these issues of content versus reading age. Meanwhile The Bookseller's account of events is here.

And now, back to today's other job, which is putting up yet another bookshelf. I'll swear they breed, those darned books...

Different voices and chocolate cake

So I'm trying to work out what to read at Pipe & Slippers, next Sunday. The slots aren't very long, which makes for a much more varied diet for the audience - and the bill really is varied - but harder decisions for me. And I do want to read from both The Mathematics of Love and A Secret Alchemy, though presumably a couple more books down the line I'll have to get over that one.

Do I go for bits at the beginning, which don't need too much explaining? Do I go for high drama, or something quieter which leads up to it and leaves the audience with a cliff-hanger? Do I worry about giving away any of the plot, or only the ending? Dialogue's livelier to read, but considering I used to be a drama student accents are not my forte, so it's usually safer to avoid them, though I can do the police in different voices. Do I go for several short bits, tasters of the many-layered, parallel-strandedness which is what I keep seeming to write, and all in ten or twenty minutes? Or do I go for a whole and single scene, something with a beginning, middle and end, with room for the characters to be liked or hated? After all, I do write novels, not haiku.

Yes, it's odd, trying to choose pieces out of a novel which both stand on their own, and represent the whole. (This is partly why any aspiring writer will tell you that writing the synopsis to go with their submissions to agents and editors often seems more agonising than writing the novel was, and partly why published authors will tell you that blurbs can cause such angst.) Since it took all those words to say what I wanted to say - tell the stories I wanted to tell - in the first place, then I guess I'm just going to have to get over my desire to represent everything: it can't be done.

One thing that works is to describe one of the book's themes, and read, say, two short bits which are both part of it. An alternative is to find a single passage that stands on its own, self-contained: a whole scene, a letter. It's tempting to go for a passage of description, but you'd better be a darned good reader to put that over, especially for the whole of the average twenty-minute slot, and still have people awake at the end.

One little difficulty is that your publisher would like you to read from their edition of the book, but books are designed to be held eighteen inches or so from your nose, with typography to suit. And microphones cause a whole new set of problems. I always prefer not to have one, but if everyone else uses it, then you sound very weedy without. If you hold the book right up - always supposing the damn mic doesn't get in the way, your face is totally invisible and your voice goes straight into the crack between the pages. If you drop the book you give yourself a neck-ache, your face is fairly invisible, and you send your rather squashed voice straight into the floor. Or you can lift your head, send your voice to the back of the room, and be unable to see a word that you're trying to read, let alone the pencil marking-up you laboured over. It's actually easier with an unpublished novel, because you can print it out nice and clear at a sensible size, there's room to mark it up, and you can then hold it one-handed well below eye-level. Or, of course, I've got the proof of A Secret Alchemy, but that's not, as you guys will know, what it'll look like in the end. And at the moment it's pristine: the spine uncreased and the pages dazzlingly clean, and I know it's silly, but I rather like it like that...

Well, I'll have to have decided all these things by Sunday 1st of June. If you're in South East London and fancy an afternoon of prose, poetry, comedy, accoustic music, full bar, coffee and chocolate cake, do drop by. The Ivy House is a gorgeous little Victorian pub theatre - the kind which were the original music halls - and doors open at 3pm, first act 3.30. The link at the top has all the details.

A Secret Alchemy

So here it is. A great moment...

I should say that this isn't the final cover, which has been delayed, but rather than delay the proofs going out Headline have given it this very elegant temporary dress. But nonetheless, as all authors know, the real excitement is that It Looks Like A Real Book! It's sitting plumply on my desk, being patted every now and again. I might resist the temptation to take it to bed with me, but then again I might not...I didn't resist with The Mathematics of Love, after all!

Not so much a bloggy week as a giggy one

Considering I'd assumed I was in something of a lull between books, I'm actually slightly busy on the author-in-public front, which is why I've been neglecting the blog. Despite my grumbling about the business (and I do mean business) of selling one's authorly personality and experience, as opposed to selling my books, I really enjoy the readings-and-signings side of it, because that (and the comments here) is when I actually meet people who've read my work: that's when you really feel that what you've been saying is being heard.

On Saturday I went to a conference at the University of Bedford on postgraduate creative writing: What is it? Is it inherently a paradox to try to create art in the academy? And lots of conversations about what-does-your-PhD-involve-then? The answers to the last question were interesting not just by way of swapping traveller's tales, but becausethe ideas - and regulations - of what constitutes a CW PhD are very varied, and so what we have to do is very varied too. Some fine arguments broke out over the coffee and sandwiches, which is just as it should be.

Then this evening I was at writLOUD, combining the launch of the Birkbeck MA's first published graduates, and a celebration of five years of writLOUD, which as well as showcasing Birkbeck and friends also supports Oxfam. There was great work read by Sally Hinchcliffe, Niki Aguirre and Matthew Loukes (can't find a link, I'm afraid) in the bar of RADA, which is a very nice and rather glamorous space compared to the hallowed but worn 1930s look that I remember from auditioning there, many years ago. For once, too, it had an excellent sound system: trust a theatre to do that properly! As is the way, I went with Debi Alper from Bloggers With Book Deals, joined up by pre-arrangement with another writing friend, and promptly bumped into a fourth BWBDer, (Sally's one too), Sarah Salway, someone I met on Saturday, and several other people I know. The writing world's a small one.

That was, if you like, past and present. As far as future's concerned, next is the quarterly Pipe and Slippers, a delightful Sunday afternoon of poetry, prose, acoustic music, chocolate cake and full bar, all in a Victorian pub in Nunhead in South East London. The next one is on Sunday 1st June, doors open at 3pm, and among a varied bill, I'll be reading from The Mathematics of Love and A Secret Alchemy. So if you fancy dropping by (all the details of how to get there are on their website) do come and say hello.

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.

That's it, almost certainly

So that's it, almost certainly: I've crawled through the proofs of A Secret Alchemy, finding every last misplaced comma, although it's also gone to a professional proofreader; I've picked up a couple of little anomalies that somehow between us we've all managed to miss; I've seen for the first time how the changes I made at the copy-editing stage integrate when I read it straight through; I've to-ed and fro-ed quadruple-checking the days of the week for one strand, and in another I've realised I've married the Duke of Buckingham to the wrong Woodville sister. The last real job is done, and the beast is face-down on my desk, waiting to go back to Headline, special delivery.

All being well, that's the end of my dealings with the actual words of A Secret Alchemy. From now on I'll be reading them aloud, discussing them, talking to people who've read them, nervously scanning reviews about them, but I won't be involved with them in the way that you are when you're writing. With a whimper (all those toings and froings) and something of a bang (it's a long time since I read it straight through, and d'you know, I really think it works), it has become a separate entity.

I'm glad. There isn't suddenly a book-shaped hole in my life as there is when you finish the real, mad, obsessive writing of a novel, and move onto the editorial stage. Rather, for some months now I've just wanted it to get out there, to be published, to free me to start the new novel. A Secret Alchemy hasn't been the easiest of novels to write - sometimes I wish that the thing that makes me want to write a book wasn't a deep unease about whether I can pull it off or not - and it's time I moved on.

But as all one's novels are, this one was written in - I could even say written by - a particular stage of my life. What's ended up in the book, and what was in there but got cut in revising, is nothing that anyone else would recognise as autobiographical, but how it is on the page is how I once was. That's the oddity: it's as if we co-existed for a while, but soon our existences will separate. And so, in stuffing a few hundred photocopied pages into a jiffy bag and going down to the post office, I'm saying goodbye to a part of my life. As grown-up, photographer Anna puts it at the beginning of The Mathematics of Love:

It was then - that moment - that the shutter opened, and snatched a scatter of the light and dark, throwing it on to this piece of glass, fixing the sun and shadow of those few seconds for ever. And then the sun moved on and took the day with it, while the plate held those shadows and kept them, and carried them to other places and to other times.

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.