Writers are a motley bunch. Take a core sample through the Society of Authors and you'll find high-literateurs, cheerful writers of category fiction, self-publishers of exquisite nature books, academics, and authors of joke books for the Christmas market, and that's before you've got your own name-label safely on. We have only a few things in common: bodies the shape you'd expect from working sitting down in reach of the kitchen, a slightly mad look in our eyes from too much time spent alone, a tendency to talk too much when another human being does heave over the horizon, and a tendency not to discuss work in progress.
There are people who assume we're not talking because we don't want our ideas pinched. This is often true of biographers, who dread being elbow-to-elbow with another burrower in the archives and finding the market divided between them at publication. It's also true of journalists and others working on the latest sexy news subject. But among fiction writers I don't think it's that at all. Aspiring writers get terribly worried about anyone else having the bright idea of combining Bridget Jones with Terminator Three. But most of us know that it's not what you do, it's how it's done, that matters.
So, why, when someone asks, 'What's the new one about?', do I produce my single, standard sentence, and try to move the conversation swiftly on? It's partly because it's not usually a terribly impressive sentence. I've never really cracked the 'What's it about?' question for TMoL, though it's the first question every interviewer asks. A little bit of my reluctance to go into detail is the dread of someone saying or showing that they don't think much of it. Even if you don't accord them any authority on such matters, it can really throw your confidence, and skew the next few day's work.
But the real reason is that the only thing that keeps you going through the long haul of a novel is the burning desire to tell the story. It has to burn pretty hot, for months and years, because in some moods you'd rather be doing anything than writing. Posy Simmonds, who nails the writing life with a scary and hilarious precision, has a lovely cartoon of the Jehovah's Witnesses' astonishment at being greeted with pleasure and coffee, instead of slammed doors, at the umpteenth door they knock on. They don't know, as we do, that the coffee-offerer is a writer who has spent the morning looking for ways of Not Writing.
The story we want to tell exists in our heads from the beginning. It's difficult to describe how it exists, because it seems to be there even when we have only the faintest idea of the beginning, know little about the middle, and nothing about the end. Or maybe it's only the end we know. Either way, the story does seem to be there. I sometimes wonder if it's like a mathematician who 'sees' that they can prove something - that something is true - long before they've actually worked it out.
It's there, and we want to tell it. That's the basic drive of a writer: to somehow find the words to express this shape that's in our heads, and get them out there, and know that people hear them. And if the people are sitting round a supper table, listening eagerly and asking what happened next, that burning desire is slaked. Why, then, bother to get up in the cold morning and face a page or a monitor that doesn't look at you wide-eyed, or laugh, or shiver, or fill your glass and pass you the chocolates? So we don't talk, not in detail, not at length, because that page, that monitor, has to be our audience instead. Even if it means sitting mumchance in the pub, or talking too much about something else, or getting a reputation for being surly or arrogant, we're saving it up. But just you wait. I promise it'll be worth it.
