Monk Quixote

My long fic­tion is largely cen­tred around Tom, and the uni­verses he cre­ates for him­self. This opens up lots of use­ful metaphors, and occa­sion­ally, expec­ta­tions in the reader. Although as the crit­i­cism I most fre­quently receive is ‘what the fuck?’ (except my read­ers are usu­ally a smidgeon more polite) I guess these are very dark uni­verses. Rid­den with black holes of plot. And humour.

What­ever, they need more light to show the way. A chart per­haps. Some light ori­en­teer­ing is per­mis­si­ble, but guided tours are preferable.

And speak­ing of Guides, I guess, at some very low wattage some­where in the base­ment of my mind is the idea that I’m try­ing to write the anti-Hitchhiker. No benev­o­lent omni­scient nar­ra­tor. No phi­los­o­phy. Just con­fused, self­ish nar­cis­sism. Less ‘where is my towel’ and more ‘who’s respon­si­ble for man­u­fac­tur­ing tow­els around here anyway?’.

Oh dear. That sounds dread­ful. I must have swal­lowed an under­grad­u­ate piece of toast this morn­ing. I’d prob­a­bly have writ­ten an essay with that title once (the towel man­u­fac­ture bit, not the under­grad­u­ate toast…). I seem to remem­ber hand­ing in a prose poem as an essay once. Serves ‘em right say I, for killing all the ele­phants of cer­tainty. Give me a blun­der­buss and we pro­les will fire holes in your ivory towers.

Or some such non­sense. I’d have a stern word with my younger self now.

Any­way. Today’s idle mus­ing was brought to you (a) by tired­ness — I wrote a lot yes­ter­day, and I am much more ner­vous about the result than usual. I kept find­ing edi­to­r­ial con­ti­nu­ity errors. Or imag­in­ing things or phrases that the reader might find odd if omit­ted. I even had one of those dread­ful sequences when you find you are about to type out the exchange between two peo­ple say­ing good­night to each other.

The prob­lem I find, is that I imag­ine my scene as a film — and yet I only have the one voice to tell the story. As the action is told only from one point of view I have to manoeu­vre other play­ers around the ‘stage’ in what feels like quite a clumsy fash­ion.  I guess that’s why it’s called a craft. Prac­tise the practice.

So I’ve been think­ing about the amount of hand-holding I do in the book.

And lo… (b) a train of thoughts insti­gated by an inter­est­ing tweet from @jscarroll (Jonathan Car­roll)- the God of inter­est­ing things on twit­ter. Seri­ously. He’s my (and count­less oth­ers’) per­sonal cura­tor of the curi­ous. Or ticket-inspector of odd­ness, I sup­pose, if this is really a train. Ahem. The quote:

Writ­ing allows you to draw a map of your world for oth­ers to fol­low if they are interested.

Which is so true.  And it chimes with some­thing Neil Gaiman says a lot (on his jour­nal, I have yet to meet the bird’s nest in ques­tion) about why he writes.

I write to find out what hap­pens next.

Of course the log­i­cal prob­lem with com­bin­ing the two sen­tences is that you end up with some­one who doesn’t know where they’re going lead­ing a bunch of peo­ple in blind­folds and hop­ing the lot of them don’t fall off a cliff.  Or wan­der around in ever decreas­ing cir­cles look­ing for a check­point that doesn’t exist (one for the ori­en­teers there).

So hav­ing started this post with grandiose ideas of author as swash­buck­ling pio­neer, one foot firmly on the stern of the good ship adven­ture, I find that I am really a hope­less crea­ture, fran­ti­cally run­ning from one check­point to another and hop­ing that I can see the next one from where I am. Like a really bad episode of Scooby Doo. With­out the dog biscuits.

Or to put it another way, your hap­less author is in fact, a mole, sim­ply push­ing dirt out of the way in the hope of find­ing either wor­m­vana, the myth­i­cal land of ver­mi­celli feasts and celes­tial mole vir­gins, or the sky. And hop­ing that nei­ther is poi­soned, or about to be clouded by a farmer/gardener’s shovel.

And all the while, being wor­ried about being sued for the wrong­ful man­u­fac­ture, use or dis­tri­b­u­tion of tow­els, or items fash­ioned to be tow­els but in fact sim­ply pages from a still-to-be-completed novel.

Fear and para­noia are not good map-makers.

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