“WHEN YOU’VE HAD a bit more practice, will you try to write a real book?”1
This frequent question is asked in the context of my having written four novels “for children”, and, by now, there is a stock answer ready that seals off the conversation harmlessly, without bloodshed.
I do not write for children, but entirely for myself. Yet I do write for some children, and have done so from the beginning. This contradiction may be explained by two levels at which the brain works. Hindsight gives scope for rationalisation, but, at the time, the conscious motive for an action is crude and opportunist.
For this reason, any romantic picture of The Artist must be discarded straight away. I became an author through no burning ambition, but through a process of elimination, which lasted from the age of sixteen to twenty-one, rejecting everything until I had isolated the only occupation to offer what seemed necessary: complete physical and intellectual freedom from the tyranny of job, place, boss and time. The fact that ever since that decision I have worked a twenty-four-hour day, seven-day week, fifty-two-week year is a nice irony.
No publisher is interested in an unknown with nothing to show, nor is it common to find the sympathetic publisher and editor for a manuscript at the first attempt. I was lucky. Two years to write the book; one year to find the publisher; one year to publish. Four years of dole queues and National Assistance. Some sharp lessons in human communication were learnt in this period, and one interview with the committee of the National Assistance board was so hilarious that it later provided material for a radio play. But “success” changes public attitude, and what was once called skiving, or irresponsibility, or failure to see reality, is now called integrity.
My first attempt, The Weirdstone of Brisingamen, is a fairly bad book, but there had to be a start somewhere, and consolation rests in the even worse first drafts of the opening chapter, which I pin up when things seem to be going well. Only recently have I come to realise that, when writing for myself, I am still writing for children; or, rather, for adolescents. By adolescence I mean an arbitrary age of somewhere between ten and eighteen. This group of people is the most important of all, and it makes the best audience. Few adults read with a comparable involvement. Yet I suspect that even here is not the true answer. In each of my books, the child protagonists have aged. The distance between them and me has stayed the same. Is that a coincidence, or have I been engaged in something much more subtle and unconscious, to do with my own psyche, not theirs?
But an argument can still be made that avoids such inner plunderings. The age of the individual does not necessarily relate to the maturity. Therefore, in order to connect, the book must be written for all levels of experience. This means that any given piece of text must work at simple plot level, so that the reader is compelled to turn the page, if only to find out what happens next; and it must also work for me, and for every stage of reader in between. My concern for the reader is slight, to say the least, but I am concerned not to be the agent of future illiteracy. Anything else that comes through is a bonus. An onion can be peeled down through its layers, but it is always at every layer an onion. I try to write onions.
The disciplines of poetry are called for to achieve validity at so many levels. Simplicity, pace, compression are needed, so that the reader who has not experienced what I am getting at will not be held up, since the same text is also fulfilling the demands of the plot. And my requirements are satisfied, because this discipline has made me reduce what I have to say to its purest form, communicating primarily with the emotions.
I make the first draft in longhand, because the elbow is the best editor, revise to the point of illegibility, and type out the result, some, but only a little, revision taking place on the typewriter. This first typescript is corrected, and, when it is as good as it can be made, a clean, second typescript is prepared, corrected, and sent to the publisher, who sends back a long editorial comment. Any second thoughts engendered by this are put into the typescript, and I consider the book finished. Corrections at the proof stage are almost entirely of compositor’s errors.
The internal activities of a story’s growth, however, are almost impossible to describe. Every book is the first: or ought to be. By this, I mean that any facility gained through experience should be outweighed by one’s own critical development. The author should become harder to please. And not only is every book the first, by this definition, but no two books arrive through the same door. As a rough generalisation, there does seem to be a flexible pattern common to them all.
It is this. An isolated idea presents itself. It can come from anywhere: something that happens; something seen; something said. It can be an attitude, a colour, a sound in a particular context. I react to it, usually forget it; but it is filed away by my subconscious.
Later, and there is no saying how long that will be, another idea happens involuntarily, and a spark flies. The two ideas stand out clearly, and I know that they will be a book. The moment is always involuntary and instantaneous: a moment of particularly clear vision. The spark must be fed, and I begin to define the areas of research needed to arrive at the shape of what the story is going to be. It is an hallucination, but there is always the sense that the book exists already, has always existed, and the task is not invention but clarification. I must make the invisible object such that other people can see it. The period of research varies. It has never been less than a year, and the most, to date, three years. The spark struck by the primary ideas is all that originality is or can be, and the discovery of the point where hitherto unconnected themes meet is the excitement of writing.
As with all the books so far, The Owl Service contains elements of fantasy, drawing on non-Classical mythological themes. This is because the elements of myth work deeply and are powerful tools. Myth is not entertainment, but rather the crystallisation of experience, and, far from being escapist, fantasy is an intensification of reality. When I first read Math vab Mathonwy, it struck me as being such a modern story of the damage people do to each other, not through evil, but through the unhappy combination of circumstance that throws otherwise harmless personalities together. So far, and for about three years, no more than that.
Then I happened to see a dinner service that was decorated with an abstract floral pattern. The owner had toyed with the pattern, and had found, by tracing it, and by moving the components around so that they fitted into one another, the model of an owl could be made. The spark flew.
Welsh geology (I always start from first principles); Welsh political and economic history; Welsh law; these were the main areas. Nothing may show in the book, but I feel compelled to know everything before I can move. It is a weakness, not a strength.
I learnt Welsh in order not to use it. Through the language it is possible to read the mind of a people; but just as important seemed the avoidance of the superficial in characterisation: the “Come you by here, bach” school of writing. Presented with such a sentence, we know that the speaker is Welsh. We may guess that the author knows Welsh, especially if, from time to time, a gratuitous, and untranslated, line of the language is inserted. We can admire the author’s erudition, or be irritated by it, but we do not experience what it is to be Welsh. This is “reality” laid on with a trowel, and it remains external and false.
By learning the language I hoped to discover how a character would feel and think, and hence, react. The importance is not to know that someone is Welsh (“Diolch yn fawr, I’m sure,” said Williams the Post) but to experience the relevance of the fact. The success or failure of The Owl Service here is impossible for me to judge, but I am warmed to learn that the publisher has been approached to negotiate the Welsh translation rights of the book.
On a more general level: the ideas have struck a spark, and the spark has been fed. There is nothing else to be done but to write. At this stage, panic sets in, because the ground has been covered, and there just is no story.
Coming to terms with this has been difficult. I call it the “Oh-my-God” bit. I find myself unable to function at any but the lowest levels. The days are spent asleep, or reading pulp novels, and the evenings to the worst of television. Then a sudden, unpredictable, brilliantly original idea erupts, which makes me race around for a while, prophesying a great future. And then I remember where the idea came from. It is an amalgam of that book, and that film, and that conversation, and that book, and those notes, and that book, and that book . . .
There follows a string of such unexpected flashes of worked-out ideas, which have to undergo another process of shaping and selection, but this part is relatively straightforward, and it is possible to get on with the excitement of telling the story. The worked-out ideas form stepping-stones over which the book must travel with a simple logic. The details are never planned, but grow from day to day, which helps to overcome the deadly manual labour as well as to give the whole an organic development.
This has been, of course, no more than a statement of intent, since all books fall short of the vision, and the original question is truer than the questioner knows. There is always the hope that I shall write a real book: when I’ve had a bit more practice.
1 First published in The Times Literary Supplement, 6 June 1968.