PG Wodehouse – and there are no better words with which to begin a treatise on the subject of literary composition – once wrote a letter to his great friend, Bill Townend, in which he lamented the loss of his faculties, as old age began to take its toll on his ability to compose the plots of his novels. He offered as evidence a sequence of plot notes which went something like this:
The grandfather could find the stolen jewels in the butler’s pantry…
(There is no grandfather in the story)
Remember that the burglar does not know why Bill wanted the keys…
(There is no burglar in the story)
The Great-Aunt should not know about Libby’s secret.
(There is no Great-Aunt in the story either)
Now, dear old “Plum’s” plots were pretty tortuous at the best of times; and he was about eighty at the time that he wrote that letter. But it is a singular example of how authors – even one of the greatest craftsmen in the English language – seem to have a remarkable talent for messing things up.
I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately, not least because I am now half-way through the second draft of my next novel, Jerusalem, and the creative process has been slowed repeatedly by the fact that I keep stopping and staring in slack-jawed horror at what a mess I made of the first draft.
A little background here. Jerusalem is the first novel I’ve ever written in which I made a serious effort to plan the whole thing from start to finish before I started writing. It’s a series-closer, and I was confronted with some fairly major issues in beginning the book, such as – how does it all end? And – how do I tie together all those loose threads from the first two books?
It’s not the first series-closer I’ve written. Back in the days when I was writing Young Adult fiction in the guise of MJ Kingston, I wrote a series-closer; a book entitled The Quite Polite Revolution. It’s a good title. The problem is, the title was probably the best thing about the whole book. The pressure got to me, people. I’m not saying that Revolution is a bad book: it got the job done, and actually MJ’s fans liked it a lot. But it wasn’t the book that the first two in the series deserved.
So when I came to start Jerusalem, I got a big piece of paper and wrote at the top of it: where am I now? And I wrote at the bottom of it: where do I want to be? And then I worked out, in detail, how I intended to get from one to the other. This was going to be my plot. It was great. I then went back to the first two books (which hadn’t been published at that point) and added a few things that I needed to be there for later – which is only cheating if you’re being particularly strict – and Bob, I thought, was my Uncle.
Then I started writing the book.
People, I made a hash of it. For a start, I completely ignored the carefully-worked out story I’d created for Joe Ackerman, and instead wrote something which teetered on the brink of black comedy. I’ve no idea why. Also, I spent ages on the early chapters, where not very much happens, and raced through the final, climactic chapters as though I had a bus to catch. There were far too many sequences in which everybody just sat around and chatted about how awful things were, and kept being nice to each other.
And two of my characters insisted – absolutely insisted – on falling in love with each other, when this had, in no way, been part of the original plan.
This phenomenon of fictional characters taking on minds of their own is well-documented, of course. DH Lawrence used to complain about it a lot. Lady Chatterley’s Lover, for instance, actually started out as a gentle comedy about gardening, before the two main characters started getting sweaty in a potting-shed and the whole thing went to hell in a hand-basket*.
* Editor’s note: this version of events is probably not true.
DH Lawrence. The hunted expression is probably because he's just realised what his characters are up to behind his back.
But my pair were pretty determined. I tried to stop them, people. I tried re-writing their scenes. But no, the minute my back was turned, there they were again, sneaking off together, glancing at each other with fluttering hearts and, for all I know, having sneaky trysts in the heather, possibly involving hoarded Tobermory Single Malt Whisky and, God help us, mutton pie. The fact that both of them were female hardly helped. I already had one lesbian couple in the series – Frankie and Chelsea – and I didn’t think I needed another.
In the end, I began to see the advantages of their affair, and let them get on with it. I firmly believe that my subconscious is a far better author than I am, and my subconscious clearly wanted them to be together. Who am I to stand in the way of young love? It worked out pretty well in the end. But then Albert Clamp started having Certain Feelings about his second-in-command, a twenty-five-year-old homicidal maniac named Charlotte “Minty” Pepper, and I put my foot down with a firm hand and, like a stern Victorian father, put a stop to it…
The rest of it, though…my characters kept stopping in the middle of the action and having wistful conversations about the old days. They kept smiling at each other. There they were, sealing meaningful friendships, being supportive, and teaching each other Valuable Life Lessons in the middle of a war zone. It was like someone had filmed an episode of Sesame Street on the location set of The Walking Dead.
In the end, I lost my rag. My Scrivener note for Chapter Eight reads as follows:
IT’S THE APOCALYPSE, NOT A F***ING CAMPING-TRIP!
…which would probably be quite a good tag-line for the book.
I’m back on track now. When you get to see Jerusalem – March or April next year, with any luck – you’ll find that it’s nasty. It’s dark. But there is hope, love, humanity, too. Because that’s what the whole thing is about.
I just ask you to forget that you ever read this post while you’re reading it.