Reflections (34 page)

 

CB:
Do they have their own astrology?

 

DWJ:
Oh, they do! Yes. But I only got glimpses of it. I got sent a summary of it by the main publishing lady, but it was so different from anything we have here that I almost couldn't take it in. So I really don't understand the popularity of things in Japan—but it does seem to work!

 

CB:
Are there any mythological figures or stories that you would steer clear of? I'm thinking of a preface that Garth Nix wrote to one of his stories, where in the first draft he'd used some kind of Aboriginal material and he'd been warned off because this was seen as trespassing on the cultural property, if not identity, of—
⁴

 

DWJ:
The Aborigines warned him off?

 

CB:
His publisher did
.

 

DWJ:
Yes, the Australians are very sensitive about that, I know. I would avoid Aboriginal myths because I don't really know them. Though you can see that the land is actually engorged with them, really. When I was in Perth, a whole road was closed and we had to take an enormous detour avoiding the river because apparently there was a river spirit in there, a very large one, and the Aborigines said it would be disturbed by cars thundering along the bank of the river. So every day there were huge traffic jams trying to get round the secondary roads.

 

CB:
The river spirit wasn't there all the time, then?

 

DWJ:
It had suddenly appeared and taken up its station. It seemed to occupy about an acre of river—quite a lot, anyway, and it may have had strands running off it, I don't know. Anyway, the Aborigines had brought caravans and camped by the place to warn people off. And the town council had said, “Yes, of course we will do what you want,” because there was an awful lot of guilt, understandably, about the treatment of the Aborigines.

 

CB:
Perhaps we could talk a little about influence? You've mentioned in the book the impact Tolkien had on you, for example, but what does influence actually mean, for you? It's not the same as “taking ideas from,” is it?

 

DWJ:
No, I think it's more about the way to do it. With Tolkien, as I say in this book, it was “Gosh, you can write a whole three-volume fantasy—this is marvelous, let's do this thing.” With other influences like C. S. Lewis, the “how to do it” thing that grabbed me was that he was always so completely clear about what was happening. You are never in any doubt who is where, and doing what—and much more complicated things than that.

 

CB:
He had a very well-organized mind, I think.

 

DWJ:
Yes, though you wouldn't know it to look at him. And—let's see about other influences. . . .

 

CB:
W
hen I interviewed you on a previous occasion, you mentioned George Meredith as an influence. Can you expand on that?

 

DWJ:
Well, Meredith has this perfectly serious, and even overly serious emotional account of things in his books, but every so often they burst into—well, not exactly fantasy, but things that are so fantastic that you might think of them as fantasy. Also, they're very funny. It's the mingle, the seamless mingle that he does between things that are funny and things that are extremely serious.
The Egoist
is a very good example, but there are others.
Evan Harrington
is one. I shouldn't suppose anyone has read it. In that book, somebody is masquerading quite unintentionally as an aristocrat at a weekend country house party. It isn't sidesplittingly hilarious, it's just continuous-chuckle hilarious. It's also really very sensitive about this bloke's feelings. And then there's
Diana of the Crossways
, which again in its central parts is extremely serious, and it gives
me
a start of guilt when I think of what that woman did, but it still has these extraordinary comic bits, which are seamlessly plaited in. And that really is something I do find I like to do, and how I would want to do things. I wouldn't want to just tell a serious narrative, or just a hilariously silly one.

 

CB:
So it's not just “Here's a serious scene, and now it's time for a bit of light relief so let's have a comic scene,” but somehow plaiting them more closely than that?

 

DWJ:
Much more closely, yes. And one's arriving out of the other.

 

CB:
I also remember your image of Langland's way of writing
Piers Plowman
being like the tide creeping up the shore, one wave after another and a little higher each time, and that this lies behind the structure of
Fire and Hemlock
in some way.

 

DWJ:
Yes, it did. But it's very difficult to describe how.

 

CB:
What I've just described is fairly amorphous. You couldn't pin down a passage and say, “Yes, here's the page where she does
that
!”

 

DWJ:
I suppose it's the threat turning into more-than-threat that's gradually creeping in
Fire and Hemlock
.

 

CB:
Things that were merely translucent becoming opaque.

 

DWJ:
That's right. Which is one of the awful things that tends to happen to you in puberty, actually. Everything suddenly becomes opaque and confusing and too complicated to cope with. And you have to fight your way out of that. But never say that any of my books are about growing up!

 

CB:
No!

 

DWJ:
Or I shall reach for my gun!

 

CB:
Or about the necessity of coming to terms with it!

 

DWJ:
Quite, yes! As if anyone ever really does.

 

CB:
I know you're dyslexic and left-handed, and in both those ways you're coming at things from a slightly unusual angle, and I wonder if you feel that has had any relevance to the way you see and therefore write about the world?

 

DWJ:
It probably has, but the trouble is, you see, that it's normal for me. All it is is a struggle to try and keep level with right-handed ways of going on. I wouldn't know about that, because the way I see things is, to me, normal. But I think you're probably right and I think it probably does.

 

CB:
I was thinking of that part in
The Merlin Conspiracy
where it turns out that Grundo's magic is at ninety degrees to the magic of the universe he lives in.

 

DWJ:
Yes, he does everything back to front. Yes, that was the bit where I thought, “Well, there are quite a lot of people who are dyslexic; let's give them a champion, as it were.”

One thing it's very good for, actually, being dyslexic, is solving anagrams. It ought to make me a past master at Scrabble, but it doesn't—but I'm very good at anagrams in crosswords, because I think my brain stores things scrambled as opposed to ordinary brains.

 

CB:
The unscrambling muscles must be quite well developed.

 

DWJ:
I think they are, yes. Though I did fail a driving test purely through dyslexia, because every time he told me to turn right I turned left. And we got lost. The examiner was furious, seething, and he failed me on the spot. Which was reasonable, of course. Goodness knows where we ended up. It was a completely strange part of Oxford to me, and obviously to the examiner as well. He couldn't wait to get out of the car when we finally worked our way back to civilization.

 

CB:
It's probably too big a question to take in one go, but it would be fascinating if you could talk through your writing process, from beginning to end. Is there a pattern which tends to repeat, or is the process with every book unique?

 

DWJ:
If it did repeat I'd get very bored. The only pattern that does repeat is that I write it out in longhand first and concentrate on getting the story down, and then do a very careful second draft, which is for publication, in which I've got all the wrong bits right and so forth.

 

CB:
And at that point has anyone else seen it? Editors? Members of your family?

 

DWJ:
No, I wait until there's a second draft available, because it's in longhand and nobody can really read my writing.

 

CB:
And do you talk about how it's going as you write? Do you discuss the plot, and so on?

 

DWJ:
Very rarely. I find that it kills it dead if I talk about it. I tried talking to my agent about plots early on, and I found that these were the things that just went “No, no, no,” like that, and petered out. So I found that the best thing was to keep absolutely mum and let the book do its thing. It does in many ways feel like automatic writing. And
then
you can talk about it, afterward. But I know what I'm doing.

    They start in all sorts of different ways, books. Two have been started by pictures. One is a photograph called “Intimate Landscapes,” with a Judas tree in the foreground, and an inspissate woodland otherwise. That gave rise to
Hexwood
.

 

CB:
Really?

 

DWJ:
If you look at it there is no boundary to that wood. It just goes on. And I stared at it and stared at it and I knew that was going to produce something.
Fire and Hemlock
came from another photograph, which is
called
“Fire and Hemlock,” a nighttime picture of some straw bales burning behind a whole row of hemlock heads, which is a gorgeous photograph, though it's faded a bit over the years. And the weird thing about that is that sometimes you look at it and you think there are people in there, and sometimes you look at it and you know there aren't, and it really does seem to change all the time. I thought when I'd written the book that maybe the people would vanish for good, but they haven't.

 

CB:
Are they in the flames, or in the—

 

DWJ:
No, in the shadowy bits around. Sometimes there are four or five of them. The
Hexwood
one has no people in at all.

      I don't know what caused
Hexwood
to need to be written back-to-front and sideways, though I always knew it was going to be. It's just that they drop into your head in a certain shape and say, “This is how I'm going to be,” and very often you get disappointed because they never are quite what they said they would be. I've got used to that now, but I try to get them as close as possible.

Various books were inspired by music.
The Magicians of Caprona
was one.

 

CB:
Which music was that?

 

DWJ:
“Vltava” by Smetana. That lovely river bit; there's a tune in there that absolutely cries out for words, and yet there are no words. And then
The Homeward Bounders
was inspired by train journeys at night, coming home from dreadful school visits. I would look out, and there would be several layers of reflections from the various windows, and you would get lights weaving about, and lights beyond that and reflections beyond that, and you would think this could be a transparent box of worlds, and so in the book they turned out to be.

 

CB:
I didn't know that.

 

DWJ:
None of these things are making the story—they're making the basic concept. The story is another matter, and that really wrestles itself.

 

CB:
And do you find when you send it finally to publishers and editors that you have a good experience? Do you enjoy being edited?

 

DWJ:
I
hate
being edited, because my second draft is as careful as I can get it. I try to get it absolutely mistake free, and absolutely as I feel the book needs to be. Then some editor comes along and says, “Change Chapter Eight to Chapter Five, take a huge lump out of Chapter Nine, and let's cut Chapter One altogether.” And you think, No, I'm going to hit the ceiling any moment. Then I call for my agent before I get my hands round this person's throat.

Editors were very majestic in the days when I first started writing. There was one who got hold of
The Ogre Downstairs
, and rewrote the ending entirely in her own purple prose, which was not in the least like mine, and I decided I was going to change publishers. “No, no, no,” said my agent. “You mustn't do that. Carry on and see if you can manage to persuade her.” And of course I couldn't persuade her. And then
Charmed Life
: I know by the time I'd done the second draft it was absolutely perfect, it really, really was, I mean just as it is at this moment, you know. And this woman rang me up and wrote to me and told me exactly this sort of thing: “You must take out this chunk and that chunk and rewrite this and alter that,” and I was furious. And I thought surely we can do something about this. And thank God it was the days before computers. I said, “Send me the typescript back and I'll see what I can do.” So she did, and I cut out the bits she told me to alter, in irregular jagged shapes, then stuck them back in exactly the same place with Sellotape, only crooked, so it looked as if I'd taken pieces out and put new pieces in. And then I sent it back to her, and she rang up and said, “Oh, your alterations have made
such
a difference.” And I thought, “Right! Hereafter I will take no notice of anybody who tries to edit my books.” And I don't. I make a frightful fuss if anybody tries to, now.