Reflections (23 page)

Foremost, of course, was the highly sophisticated Geoffrey Chaucer. In
The Canterbury Tales
you could watch Chaucer show his sophistication by adjusting his style and manner according to who was telling what kind of story. He seems to
play
with narrative in a way that can be perfectly wicked at times (and I know I thought recently, “Well, if Chaucer can send up tail-rhyme romance in ‘Sir Thopas,' no doubt out of the same sort of irritation I feel at Californian writers of fantasy, then I can do the same in
The
Tough Guide
”). But with Chaucer, apart from “Sir Thopas,” each of his stories is a serious exercise in a certain type of narrative; he sets boundaries and shows what can be done within them, and without realizing it at the time, I joyfully picked up on this notion. There are fairly severe boundaries set if you write for children—and I don't mean tedious things like political correctness, which varies from decade to decade, I mean things like not using language that is too complicated and not using those kind of situations in which two people of opposite sexes are sparring for openings or dominance, because most children find both these things puzzling. And you want to give your readers the benefit of your own knowledge of the world without being overtly didactic, as I said. So you see what you can do inside these limits, and usually also, sadly, within certain limits of political correctness—as Chaucer himself says, making a virtue of necessity. And of course you can do a very great deal. It's a challenge. Chaucer himself only seems to have scratched the surface of what might be done—he didn't finish the exercise of
The
Canterbury Tales
. I think among what he did do, I admire most his ability to tell a story which is well known—as in “Troilus and Creseyde”—or a story in which it is quite clear what is coming—as in “The Reeve's Tale”—and still get you to respond as if you had no idea what was coming next. That is something I have tried to do too, and I know the difficulties. But Chaucer is such a deft and elastic writer, so experimental as well as serious, that I at least came away with the feeling that because he so obviously made narrative an exercise of skills, no one was ever quite comfortable telling a straight story again. It wasn't quite respectable to write a naive narrative like Malory did later. Malory wasn't respectable and probably didn't care; he just crashed ahead telling his story in
and-and-and
chunks, building brick by brick, telling the relevant and irrelevant things in almost exactly the same tone of voice, so that the overall shape was not apparent until he got to the end. But you feel everybody else found they couldn't do that; they had to make that kind of story at least an allegory, or put in a lot of philosophy. Or something more refined.

Now the beauty of this situation is that it frees up the straight story to be devoted to children. Unfortunately, it also frees it for writers from California to get to work with their quests and Dark Lords—there's a reverse side to everything. I know I did pounce on this freeing up: I can tell a story because no one else wants to! Oh good.

But then, by complete contrast, I came up against William Langland, who is doing something entirely different and wholly serious and not exactly straight narrative at all. Langland haunts me because he is such a strange mixture of deep thinking and jamming down what happens to be in his head and hoping, then thinking, thinking, taking in another swatch of ideas and thinking again. His work reminds me of the tide coming in: you know how one wave comes frilling up and erases a few footprints in the sand, and then goes back, and the next comes in over the top of it and gets a bit farther, until the sea is right up where the deep footprints and the ice-cream papers are. Langland seems to me quite as inexorable, and he covers pretty well everything in his way. And at the end of
Piers Plowman
the tide goes out again. Damn! Still haven't quite got to the seawall. Have to go out and look for Piers again. What has always impressed me here is what you can achieve if you get behind your narrative (or as-it-were narrative) and really push. The ideas start to run about over the top of it, interlaced like the foam on the top of waves. The first thing Langland taught me is that ideas are just as important as a story—I hadn't grasped that before then. The next thing was slightly more accidental, that is the way
what
you are saying and
how
you are saying it are very closely linked. I don't know if anyone here has ever tried to write Langland's kind of alliterative verse. I had a go once or twice. It's not easy. You find, unless you are violently inventive about it, that the form forces you to go back and repeat the latest half line at the beginning of the next line, only in different terms. Langland is good enough at it that he doesn't do this much, but the impulse is there and contributes to the overlapping, wave after wave, tide-coming-in nature of the narrative.

Learning a little from this, I discovered that I always had to let the book I was writing find its own style. Only in that way can you be sure that you are doing the right thing by your subject matter. It's a strange feeling, as if the book has a life of its own.

Of all the writers I discovered as a student, Langland gets under my skin most—witness the way I called my two griffins Kit and Callette. A long time ago, I wrote a novel that was based on
Piers Plowman
. Oh dear. Publishers to a man and woman sent it back to me on the grounds that the main character was not present at the most important parts of the action. Quite true. Probably only Langland could get away with something like that. Much later, I wrote another book called
Fire and Hemlock
, in which I tried not to make that mistake and in which I got behind the narrative and pushed, Langland fashion. Langland lies behind that particular book in a way I find it hard to define, even more than the ballad of “Tam Lin” or T. S. Eliot's
Four Quartets
, which are present in the foreground (possibly rather as the Bible and prayer book were to Langland—or so I hope). I think it is in the movement of the narrative that his influence lies, but I am not sure. It is orchestrated in a tidelike advance and retreat, full of partial repetitions, where some things acquire a new meaning at each advance. Or so I hope.

On the other hand, when I think about learning to orchestrate a narrative, particularly the more ordinary, clipping style of narrative, I realize that I learned that from the Gawain poet. He has it down absolutely in
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
. He knows when to pass quickly over time, and when to dwell on episodes. That is, he knows when to just tell you things were so and when to make you feel them so in your gut, and he knows what action to dwell on, and what colors, noises, details to highlight (or show in close-up); when to give direct speech, when indirect; and, even more important, how to balance the mixture out, so that the story is never overweighted in the wrong place. This is all the organizational stuff that Jane Austen had laboriously to teach herself when she rewrote
Pride and Prejudice
using an almanac. The Gawain poet has got it all. I think I use him as a sort of paradigm narrator all the time. Furthermore, he backs up my discovery in the National Gallery by having his story time in his own present time, really. His magical characters live in an up-to-date modern castle, with all the latest architectural features. I think my Chrestomanci books owe quite a lot to this.

I'll pass over Robert Henryson. I never got on with him. But there is one other work from within the time I think of as the Middle Ages, which almost did more than teach me—it came as a revelation—and that is “Sir Orfeo.” This is a work that, alas, lies behind quite a lot of the Californian quest stories and any modern Pre-Raphaelitism (which is still alive too, and living in California, where writers make romantic stories about elves and mist and dim blowings and things) and it is, of course, a romantic poem. I never could work out whether the person or persons who wrote it knew what they were doing or not. At any rate, the reason I found it such a revelation was that it was the story of Orpheus and Eurydice, which is the kind of story you might call “hard myth” (on an analogy with “hard science fiction,” meaning the crystal-clear, nitty-gritty, no-nonsense kind) which has been transmogrified into, as it were, “soft myth,” as a story of fairyland and enchantment. Orpheus goes to Hades. Sir Orfeo has to negotiate with something hazier, possibly with wider powers than a mere god of the dead—something that can grab you at midday if you sleep under a certain kind of tree. Until I read this poem, I hadn't realized that this sort of translation from one type of story to another was possible. Once I did realize, I did some furious thinking, lasting for about ten years, and came up with the discovery that translating need not apply only to types of story. You can make other kinds of translation as well, all equally useful and all equally telling. The other kinds I began to use straightaway and almost habitually. Are there minorities persecuted for physical facts they can't help? Then translate those minorities into witches who develop at puberty powers they can't suppress and get burned for it. Or I wanted to write about children of divorced parents whose mother remarries. Translate the problems these children have into magical or alchemical misadventures. Or a boy struggling into adolescence in the face of an unkind family? Have the boy's feelings appear in the shape of the Norse gods. But in all these instances you must not cheat. You must have the magical occurrences strongly effective in their own terms. They must leave their mark on the everyday life of the characters in the story, just as “Sir Orfeo” hangs together consistently in terms of faerie rather than Hades.

Oddly enough, it took me a while to learn to translate an actual story. I suppose I began doing it with
Charmed Life
, which is really what they call a Gothic Romance reversed—young heroine defenseless in frowning Cornish castle ruled by a flinty-hearted macho lord—only in this case the young heroine is a sort of fifth column for an attack on the castle and most people are defenseless before her. By then I was up and running and did it again with
Howl's Moving Castle
—fairy-story heroine goes bravely to castle to rescue prince under enchantment—except that in this case they rescue one another, quarreling fiercely while they do. And in
Hexwood
I had real medievalizing fun translating chunks of Arthurian stories into a story about a super-computer.

Actually, I find I have abashed myself considerably by comparing the things I do with these masterpieces out of the past. What I am really trying to describe are the things I found in the Middle Ages and what they meant to me. I think the Middle Ages invented
me
, rather than the other way round. And I'd like to conclude with telling you about the lady in Australia. I was in Sydney giving a talk and the lady came up to me saying she was writing a study of a book of mine called
The Magicians of Caprona
. I enjoyed writing that particular book. I got the name Caprona from Dante (another borrowing from the Middle Ages), and like Chaucer and Shakespeare after him, I'd cheerfully borrowed the story of Romeo and Juliet and put it in there. What the lady said to me was, “Pardon me, is your intertextuality intentional?” I said, “Your
what
?” And she said, “Did you know that you've put the story of Romeo and Juliet into your book?” “Oh that,” I said. “Yes, of course.” It seemed extraordinary to me that anyone could think that one could write anything without being heavily indebted to things that had gone before—and not know it. What I want to say is, yes, I do know really where I'm getting it from, and it is intentional, and very grateful I am too.

Some Truths About Writing

 

This was a talk given at the Children's Books Ireland conference in May 2002. Children's Books Ireland aims to create a greater understanding of the importance of books for young people.

 

 

T
he reason I gave this talk the title I did is that I found myself wanting to do something I have never seen properly done before, and that is to try and tell at least some of the truth about the way one actually writes a book—to describe what people call “the creative process” in fact.

This is something writers are always being called upon to do, usually for radio interviews. And I never listen to one of these without thinking, “She's lying!” or “He's saying what he thinks they want to hear.” Or just, “The same old guff!” For of course I have said the same kind of things myself—a sort of rash approximation to what the truth appears to be, along with a few spiky little insertions, usually to the effect that this particular thing really happened, or that thing was taken from real life, so that interviewer and listeners don't run away with the idea that fantasy has no connection with actual mundane existence. Most interviewers seem to me to have left both real life and fantasy so far behind that one is at a loss to know where they do stand. Some kind of media virtual place, perhaps. And, desperate to contact this person and to please them—and, above all, not to let oneself down in public—one produces something that sounds as if it might be true.

I had a bit of fun with this process in a story called “Carol Oneir's Hundredth Dream.” Carol is a twelve-year-old professional dreamer who suddenly finds she is suffering from, as it were, dreamer's block. She goes to the enchanter Chrestomanci to get this sorted out. Having pried away Carol's pushy mama, Chrestomanci invites Carol to tell him exactly what she does when she makes a dream.

 

This was something Carol had done hundreds of times before. She smiled graciously and began, “I get a feeling in my head first, which means a dream is ready to happen. Dreams come when they will, you know, and there is no stopping or putting them off. So I tell Mama and she helps me get settled on the special couch . . . and I drop off to sleep to the sound of [the spindle] gently humming and whirling. Then the dream takes me. . . . It is like a voyage of discovery—”

“When is this?” Chrestomanci interrupted in an offhand sort of way. “Does this dreaming happen at night?”

“It can happen at any time,” said Carol. “If a dream is ready, I can go to my couch and sleep during the day. . . . It is like a voyage of discovery, sometimes in caves underground, sometimes in palaces in the clouds—”

“Yes. And how long do you dream for? Six hours? Ten minutes?” Chrestomanci interrupted again.

“About half an hour,” said Carol. “Sometimes in the clouds or maybe in the southern seas. I never know . . . whom I will meet on my journey—”

“Do you finish a whole dream in half an hour?” Chrestomanci interrupted yet again.

“Of course not. Some of my dreams last for more than three hours,” Carol said. . . . “I can
control
my dreams. And I do my best work in regular half-hour stints. I wish you wouldn't keep interrupting when I'm doing my best to tell you!”

Chrestomanci . . . seemed surprised. “My dear young lady, you are
not
doing your best to tell me. You are giving me precisely the same flannel as you gave
The Times
and
the Croydon Gazette.
. . . You are telling me your dreams come unbidden—but you have one for half an hour every day—and that you never know where you'll go in them or what will happen—but you can control your dreams perfectly. That can't all be true, can it?'

“. . . This is the way dreams are,” Carol said. “And I am only the Seeing Eye.”

“As you told the
Manchester Guardian
,” Chrestomanci agreed, “if that was what they meant by ‘Oosung Oyo.' I see that must have been a misprint now.”
¹

 

Poor Carol. She is in a situation very familiar to writers being interviewed, called upon to supply graceful facts that will interest her audiences and to say simple things about a matter that is both very complicated and very, very private. So she doesn't exactly lie. She temporizes by describing external physical details—in much the same way as writers will describe how they have a special hut for writing in, or how long they work at their computers (I even heard one writer claim that he actually was a computer)—and then she adds a puff for her dreams. And as Chrestomanci points out, none of it adds up. There must, he implies, be more to it than that.

And of course there is. And this is the part that never ceases to fascinate me—the private things that go on inside your head when a book is being planned and written. For, as I said, Carol does not lie. Everything she claims is true, whether of dreaming or writing, and the things Chrestomanci declares cannot all be true at once, are in fact, indeed, all true at once. The human brain can lay one contradiction upon another and make the two things match without any trouble at all, and be aware of strict logic at the same time. This is what I find so fascinating.

Led on by this fascination, I once, when asked by a conference in Boston to give a talk about my book
Fire and Hemlock
, did have a stab at describing what went on while I wrote it.
²
I teased out every layer of this book. Starting with what I felt about heroes and the heroic, I went on to describe my passion for cello music and how a rereading of T. S. Eliot's
Four Quartets
sparked the actual book and gave rise to the presence of a quartet of musicians in it. I charted the various myths and folktales which surfaced and sank in the course of it, and of course I expounded on the ballads of “Tam Lin” and “Thomas the Rhymer”—regarded as the negative and positive of the same story—which were the framework for the narrative. I gave the paper and the audience nodded wisely. This, they seemed to feel, was real stuff. I then went to New York, where my publishers had taken a great interest and had asked for a copy of the talk. I went in to see Libby,
³
one of the editors—a wonderful wise lady with a voice like a sack of gravel being shaken. She was just finishing the paper as I walked in. She looked up from it and shook gravel at me:

“Very nice, Diana, but writers don't work like that.”

I wanted to shout, “Yes, I do! It's all true!” Instead I sort of gulped and answered, “No. You're absolutely right.” As soon as I thought, I realized that the book had not been written in at all the analytical way I had tried to describe. The second draft might have been, when I was trying to make clear all the various elements that went into it—a process I always liken to pointing up or grouting the basic brickwork—but the first draft had been written at white heat, in a state where I was unable to put it down. I wrote it in any spare five minutes I could find. I even got up at six in the morning to go on with it. This was so unheard of that my family wondered if I was ill. And such was the passion with which I was going at it, that it seemed to pull in all sorts of queer but relevant things from daily life—I can't tell you half the weird things, but I do remember being followed around by a van labeled
KING'S
LYNN
,
⁴
and going to a lecture where the speaker turned out to be the image of Mr. Leroy, with great black bags under his eyes, who proceeded to talk about both the
Four
Quartets
and the ballad of “Tam Lin,” in a lecture that I think was supposed to be about Shakespeare.

Yet the book got written with a shape and a coherent story. The various elements I so carefully dissected out in my Boston talk got fed in at the right places. And I know I was very careful throughout, even in the first draft, to keep the supernatural elements just a bare thread away from things that could have a normal explanation after all. This was one of the prime requirements from the book itself when it first came thundering into my head.

In other words, I was in
control
, just like Carol Oneir was in her dreams. So, in an odd way, Libby was right, but so was I. Two seemingly incompatible things had been going on at once.

So the first truth about the creative process is that one is doing two mutually incompatible things. Logical souls like Chrestomanci find this hard to accept.

Let's go back to Carol and Chrestomanci then. Chrestomanci finds a solution to Carol's problems with the aid of Tonino, whose gift is to enhance the magic of others, and has him enhance Carol's dream magic in order to force her to do three things. First, he makes her actually enter physically into her dream. This, though it is put in fantasy terms, is truly and exactly what one has to do if one is to write any work of fiction properly. One has to see, feel, smell, touch, and thoroughly experience what is going on as one writes. George Meredith talks of it (in
Diana of the Crossways
) as living a double life. And one does. I vividly remember, when I was writing
Dogsbody
, being a dog a lot of the time, wanting to scratch under my collar or raise a leg to deal with an itch behind my left ear—I've felt itchy ever since, really—and living through that lovely, multiple stretch that dogs do, tail and back legs first, then up the back through to the front legs. Or that rotating shake that gets mud on the ceiling. At the same time, although I didn't ever believe I was a dog, I did so thoroughly believe in the story that I was sure the sun—Sol—was an animate being. Every time I came to a passage with Sol in it, I used to lay that sheet of paper in the patch of sun on my desk, so that Sol could check it for accuracy. Honestly.

Of course, all this makes you inadequate for your own everyday existence. I get terribly absentminded and walk about in the street muttering to myself (these days I tell myself it's because I'm old, but it isn't—I've always done it). And when I was writing
Charmed Life
(another one I couldn't put down), I did one evening put my husband's shoes in the oven to cook for supper—luckily I noticed in time. This is the price one has to pay for living in a story and, more, believing in it. And it is a very important truth.

Chrestomanci also forces Carol to acknowledge a second and much more private truth: that she uses the same five characters again and again under different disguises. Now this does indeed happen, but I don't think I've ever heard a single writer admit it. Sometimes the fact is obvious, as in Dick Francis's books, whose protagonist is always pretty much the same, but mostly it is a lot less so. I don't know why it should be such a shameful thing to admit. Painters are allowed to portray the same haystack a hundred times, or the same lily pond, or whatever, but a writer is not allowed to put the same person in more than one book unless it is a sequel and that character has the same name. Some of this prohibition comes from readers and reviewers (who consider it cheating and uninventive), but I suspect the true reason is that writers themselves don't want to admit it. They squirm and wriggle and say anything, rather than that they use the same character more than once. Such repeated characters are always very near and dear to a writer's heart (as Melville who plays all the villains is to Carol), and it is a true invasion of privacy to have other people know that you have been carrying this person about, nestled in the soft spaces of your head. But the fact is, such characters have your emotions vested in them, and usually you have had them long enough that they have grown as many quirks and facets as a real live person. This actually makes them doubly valuable. You can be sure that, once introduced into any narrative, they are going to pull your feelings in there with them (and so those of any readers), and that they are going to behave like a real live person. You don't have to perform any grinding, mind-bending feats of imagination to get inside them—you know what they are like inside. You know how they speak and how they will react.

The third advantage of such characters is the one that makes you use them more than once. They have lived with you so long and have developed so many sides to them that you can use a piece of them here and a piece of them there—split them down the middle like a billet of wood, as it were—and still present them as rounded personalities for that particular narrative. My hope is that nobody has hitherto noticed when I do this. Does anyone know that Mr. Lynn in
Fire and Hemlock
and the Goon from
Archer's Goon
both derive from the same person, split like a billet of wood? (Those two books were written back to back, both at white heat, using the two halves of a person who had been in my head forever.) Or did anyone spot that Howl in
Howl's Moving Castle
and the Keeper of the Silver Casket in
A Tale of Time City
are similarly made out of another single person? Or Torquil in
Archer's Goon
and Tacroy from
The Lives of Christopher Chant
? The similarity of names might give that one away, I suppose.

Of course, you can use an actual live person in exactly this way too—split them up and introduce part of them as a whole in the right story. Living people always have sumptuously many sides to their personality, and so I have cheerfully pirated parts of live people too. I find I use real people quite a lot anyway—it is extraordinary how many acquaintances we all have who ought to be in a story—and being multifaceted the way living folk are, they split up really easily. For instance, Douglas and Caspar in
The Ogre Downstairs
are both portraits of my eldest son at different stages in his life; and Himself in
The Time of the Ghost
and the Sempitern in
A Tale of Time City
are portraits of my father—neither of them terribly flattering, I'm afraid. Similarly, Angus Flint in
Who Got Rid of Angus Flint
, the savage visitor who picks children up by their hair, and Al in
Drowned Ammet
, who is just as brutal—only with words and a gun—are in fact both derived from the one actual man.