by Tim Lees
How can you write for years—and I mean years—and still miss one of the key components of the craft?
I don’t know, but I did it. And it still baffles me, exactly how it happened.
I started writing early. This, in itself, is no advantage. At seven, I produced my magnum opus, Return to the Lost World, a book my schoolteacher considered so prodigious that she sent me to the Headmaster with it. This was a man most noted in my family for having once patted my mother on the bum, a gesture she did not appreciate. He now compounded his sins by writing his comments in the middle of the text, not on the endpapers where I knew reviews were meant to go.
Book ruined. I never finished it.
At eleven, I read Tolkien, and decided that I had to a) draw a map, b) compose some songs, and c) invent a language, all before I started my new, epic fantasy.
That one was never finished, either.
But by my teens, I’d begun to get the hang of things, and started putting chunks of my own life into my fiction. Most of what I wrote was derivative, often of work I didn’t really understand—Ballard’s Atrocity Exhibition, or Moorcock’s Jerry Cornelius stories, for instance—but I could see that, by injecting something personal into it, even a location I knew well, I was starting to make the work my own. Eventually, I wrote directly about my own life. I was a teenager, angry and frustrated with the world, and with myself, as teenagers rightly are. There was plenty of material available.
And, with this promising new direction… I gave up.
Education got in the way. I was busy. After that, I was still busy, trying to become a rock star. It seemed a good career move at the time, and what I lacked in talent, I made up for in… well.
(Reader: I did not become a rock star.)
I got a job in Scotland. A tiny town with sparse public transport and no way out, even at weekends. My heart was in Manchester. So were my friends. I wrote about them, each afternoon, while sitting in a cafe on the main street. When my job came to an end, I went off, travelling for a few months around Europe and North Africa, alone.
And this was where my education really began. Solitude was part of it. It showed me I could cope with unfamiliar, often tricky, situations. It also changed my writing.
I wrote from loneliness. I wrote from boredom, waiting at train stations, or sitting in restaurants on my own. I wrote because I’d no-one else to talk to. And I found out not only how to use words in a way that was more innate, more natural to me, but also how I saw the world, especially the strange and occasionally harrowing circumstances in which I found myself.
None of this writing was saleable in itself, though I was sometimes surprised by what worked and what didn’t. At one point, sitting in another cafe, this time in Athens, I wrote about the vehicles going by outside, briefly describing each one. I was just passing the time, but, reading back, it turned out to be an interesting piece. The ramshackle trucks and adapted motorbikes said a lot more about the place than most of the interactions with locals that I’d carefully transcribed. You never know what’s going to work. Keep everything. Put it aside, read it later. It may prove useful.
So I went back to England, with a stack of new experiences, and a mindset far removed from the kind of fiction I’d been reading (and writing) in my teens. If I’d stuck with that, I might have produced something I could sell. Not good, but saleable. Instead, I was deep in the realm of what’s now called “autofiction.” I’d read Kerouac, and later Isherwood, who did a similar thing but with a more English sensibility. I was young, convinced my own life was both fascinating and unique. Which, like everyone’s, it was; but making that apparent to a reader was a very different matter. I had neither Kerouac’s gift for words, nor Isherwood’s presence at a significant historical nexus—nor, I should add, his skill at shaping personal experience into structured stories. (It completely escaped me that he was actually making a lot of it up, something I no longer trusted myself to do; I’d recognised my knowledge of the world was limited, and, as a result, I’d temporarily lost the confidence to invent.)
What followed, then, were years spent polishing, revising, tweaking sentences, and spending hours—weeks—debating between this word and that, working really hard—and coming up with nothing.
Why?
It baffles me now. It baffled me then. But I had absolutely zero understanding of plot. Plots, indeed, seemed like a phony imposition, a bit of fakery no honest writer would employ. My own life didn’t have a plot. Climactic resolutions simply didn’t happen; situations frizzled out—and so did my books. Yes, I had a few good scenes, but where was the big finish? Where, indeed, was the big middle?
Now, there are some perfectly good novels with no real plot, or else a picaresque abundance of plots—but I wasn’t writing them. And without a strong sense of plot, it was hard to see where a book was going. If it was going anywhere at all.
I fell ill and started writing short stories. I got a better response from the SF mags than the literary ones, and that pushed me back into genre work. Don’t underestimate the power of the market. If a writer wants to be published, that’s going to determine the kind of work they do. (I think David Byrne made a similar point about music.) Better yet, the SF markets paid, a matter of considerable importance to me at the time. (The literary markets, by and large, didn’t.) Soon enough, stories just seemed to download into my head, following structures I’d absorbed long ago, without even thinking about it. All that early reading had paid off.
But a novel? No. Beyond me.
I was working at a university then. The arts faculty offered a course in novel writing, under poet/publisher Michael Schmidt and novelist/biographer Richard Francis. I got an interview with Richard, told him from the start that I didn’t plan to take his course, and he, with great generosity, still spent an hour or more giving me advice. I mentioned that I used to teach creative writing, a job I’d essentially conned my way into, and was therefore somewhat cynical about the whole idea.
As I pointed out, Hemingway wouldn’t have taken a course.
“No,” said Richard, “but he went to Paris, joined Gertrude Stein’s salon, which was full of writers, and learned from them.”
“Oh yeah…”
I did the course.
The most helpful comment I ever got was from another student. I was talking about my WIP and asking, should a character take such-and-such a course of action? To which she replied, in tones dark with sarcasm, “Well, at least it would mean something would happen.”
I had failed to learn Evelyn Waugh’s cardinal rule, which says exactly that: make things happen.
At the same time, I discovered comics. Vertigo was in its stride, with Sandman, Preacher, and The Invisibles all flagship titles. Here were plot-driven stories, considerably smarter than the average Hollywood movie, and all at once… I could see how to do things. The lessons spilled over, regardless of genre or medium. Anyone who’s learned a musical instrument will recognise these sudden breakthroughs, when all at once you can do something that you’ve struggled with for ages. They usually come when you’ve stopped trying, and the unconscious takes over. It works in writing, too.
I discovered this: once you have a plot—some sort of situation that needs to be developed and resolved—the course of the story almost sets itself. It has to go this way, then that way, and then a final surge to the conclusion. And you can play around with it—reversals, false leads, etc.—because the main structure’s already there. This is all so obvious to most people, yet had been a blind spot for me, and I still have no clear notion why. As I said above, a plot seemed like a thing to be imposed, rather than arising naturally—something fake, artificial… and then, suddenly, it didn’t. It grew from the characters, and the situation, and became the core of the whole enterprise.
I’ve written some very plot-driven books—The God Hunter, Frankenstein’s Prescription—but even the semi-autobiographical The Other Country, with its numerous vignettes and character-studies, still follows a kind of two-stage plot: 1) the central character finds himself in an unfamiliar environment (a psychiatric hospital) to which he must adjust; 2) he has to deal with a particularly difficult and violent patient, over a prolonged period of time. The transition from real life to fiction involved a number of changes, including some entirely fictional scenes, a few instances of the main character, Ray, moving centre-stage in a situation where I had been merely peripheral, or not present at all; and, notably, cutting out a lot of the day-to-day violence which we, as staff, were regularly called upon to deescalate and contain—but by cutting it, I hope it made the violence towards the end more shocking. So, despite the publisher’s somewhat cheeky(!) categorisation, this was not a memoir—true in spirit, but not in detail.
There are no real rules in writing, except this: if you can make it work, it works. There are good books which are very, very light on plot. So far, I haven’t written one. But discovering how to integrate plot and character was a major step forward.
And no, you don’t need to invent a language. You already have one. You just need to find out what it is.
