Saturday 17 March 2018

Old book, new book

I’m busy wrapping up the edit of my fourth novel, Theo & Flora. My editor and I, we’ve been fighting, as we always do. “What do you mean here?” she says. “Why are you changing the sense there?” I say. Thousands upon thousands of track-changes comments slowly being whittled away – accepted, rejected, debated, argued about – until there are none. 
        A compromise, perhaps, by both of us. Sometimes I win, sometimes she does. That’s how it feels, anyway. I always imagine that, at the end of it all, we each stalk away muttering under our own little thunderclouds, ready to kick the nearest available dog.
        The process reminds me of an old thought experiment in which you’re asked to imagine that your aunt gives you a new shirt. It becomes your favourite shirt and you wear it at every opportunity. But over time it becomes worn and threadbare, so you have it mended and patched, until there is nothing left of the original fabric. Is it still the shirt your aunt gave you, or not?

        Most people might think about this for a few minutes before moving on with their lives. But writers instinctively complicate things. Why did your aunt give you a shirt? Is she an aunt on your mother’s side or your father’s? Is she even a real aunt, or just someone you call Aunty? What does she look like? What colour is the shirt? What is it made from? Does the gift of the shirt represent her affection for you, or is it a metaphor for her controlling nature? Was it in fact a new shirt, or had it recently belonged to her dead husband? How did he die?
        Not that the editor’s work entirely subsumes the writer’s at all. More than anything, the editor’s role is to simplify – to remind the writer that, sometimes, a shirt is just a shirt. And at the end of the edit, the work emerges sharper, more nuanced, more lithe and alive. Otherwise why bother? 

        Yet, the process is so fraught and intense that I dream about it. I edit furiously in my sleep, and rewrite perfectly acceptable passages over and over again, or decide to expunge every comma or every instance of the word “but” or never to use the present continuous. And then I awake, and lie there panicking like one of those patients who are lucid during surgery but completely paralysed, and I have to promise myself I will never again write another book before I am able to fall asleep once more.
        It’s also no help that every time I’ve set out on the process, the arrival of the first edit in my in-box inevitably presages a perfect storm of other obligations, all of which conspire to keep me from the work as much as possible, for as long as possible. A family crisis, a burst geyser, teenager issues, the 9-5 day job that suddenly comes with 7-11 obligations for weeks on end. And even though the publishing machine moves like a sloth swimming through peanut butter – at least to someone used to the Marty McFly deadlines of the advertising business – there is always, always an editing deadline to be met.
        The second-worst thing is actually finishing the edit. Because as I accept (or reject – it’s still my book, I tell myself) the very last track-changes suggestions, I am also accepting that there’s nothing more I can do about it, other than argue with the publisher over the cover design.
        And nor do the dreams stop at this point. They simply change tack, and now my sleep-self starts rewriting from scratch, beginning with an opening line that puts "Call me Ishmael" to shame, and closing in a way that makes Nick Carraway’s final observations sound like the voice-over for a dogfood commercial. I awake in the sunny dawn with a smile – for I have rewritten the book, overnight, and it is perfect. Of course I haven’t, and of course it isn’t, and besides, the lumpy beast has gone off for proofreading and typesetting anyway.
        “I’m going to take a break from this writing thing for a few months,” I always tell my wife, who always rolls her eyes.
        Because the very worst thing has already happened halfway through the editing storm, and that is the taking root of a new idea, for a new book.
        Why does this happen when I’m moving along at my average editing speed of a page per hour, am on Page 32 of 294, at 12.37 at night, when I have to be at an 8am meeting that will take me an hour to get to in the traffic? There’s no curbing it – I’ve tried four times now – and it arrives with a soft ping, as and when it wants to, with the first tentative notes of a voice I’ve never tried, or in the form of an intriguing but still blurry character, or a gently explosive catalyst for a story that as yet has no beginning or end.
        It’s a problem. It’s a problem because I know that if I don’t get down the barest sketch of the idea immediately, it will fade away like dawn mist. And it’s a problem because I know that a line or two will never be enough, and that I’ll have no option but to answer the pressing questions that immediately arise: Is she his real aunt? Why did she give him a shirt? And how many buttons does it have?


No comments:

Post a Comment