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Number 4 No, I'm not English, but nothing quickens my imagination more than a fog-bound moor, windy heath, river mist in an old fishing village, and the names of British pubs like The Stargazey, the 15th mystery in the Richard Jury/Melrose Plant series. The villain in this book is, for my money, the most interesting one I have ever created. In books, if not in life, I have unbridled admiration for malice and mendacity and am generally unhappy with myself when I can't get those qualities down on paper. But in The Stargazey, I do believe I've succeeded. Readers ask me where I get my ideas. "Ideas" come in the form of images. It's the need to verbalize or explain the image that ultimately comes to be what the book is "about." Writers (at least this one) do not say at the outset, "I want to write a book about-." One of the most potent images for me is the sign that sways in one of those guazy English rains outside the public house. It's hard to ignore a place called The Five Bells and Bladebone. It's almost as hard to resist lifting a pint of Old Growler or Old Peculier once inside the pub. All of my books are named after pubs and, yes, the pubs are for real. I might move a pub from, say, Somerset to Dartmoor, or use a pub that's defunct, but the name of the pub is always authentic. The titles are not randomly chosen; indeed, I can't begin a book unless I have the name of it. It is the story that follows from the title, not the title chosen later for the story. I never know how a book will turn out when I begin it. I don't know why these bodies are adding up or who is killing people, but I do know the feelings I want to bring about on the part of the reader. The Yorkshire moors have always seemed cradled in silence; when I passed a pub called The Old Silent out in the middle of nowhere in the dead of winter, I was smitten. I wanted the reader (even though the book wasn't written) to share (usually Richard Jury's) feelings of desolation and mourning in a landscape bathed in silence. The first chapter of The Old Silent (the 10th book in the Richard Jury series) is almost wholly description. There is minimal action and no dialogue until the end when the silence is shattered by a gunshot. This contrast between stillness and tumult is also true of the first half and the second half of the book, where the stillness and emptiness of the Yorkshire moors are set against the commotion and clamor of London and a rock band. I am not overly concerned with plot as such. Obviously, if you start with a chapter such as the one above and intend the story to proceed from it, you could write yourself into a corner. I always do. In The Case Has Altered, I didn't know until I was nearly finished with it who had killed these women or why. I can still remember the street corner I stood on, wondering about the murderer, waiting for the light to change and-Eureka!-I thought, oh, of course! Who else? This must sound like a sloppy way of going about the writing process, but it's really the only way I can do it. I recall a decade ago when I got stuck half-way through a book, telling myself, "For God's sake! Write an outline!" I set out to do this and when I came to the point in the outline where I'd got stuck in the story, I got stuck in the outline, too. The reason I give to anyone who expresses surprise that I don't know the plot until the book is almost written is: there is no plot until the book is written. "Plot" to my way of thinking grows out of all the other parts-character, description, atmosphere, dialogue. It can't exist free of them any more than a person can "exist" as skeleton, free of blood, muscle, tissue. Pub names can actually be the crux of a story, since these strange names are so suggestive of character and atmosphere. I wandered through the streets of London's East End-Whitechapel, Ratcliffe, Wapping, Limehouse-and came upon a pub called The Five Bells and Bladebone. It has the dubious distinction of having once sat atop an abbatoir where animals were slaughtered to furnish meat for the ships; it was one of the back-street boozers that served as stop-offs and tap houses for fishermen, dockers and blue-collar workers. The setting was so atmospheric that I couldn't resist having a character walk through Limehouse while "images of bloody East End flashed like knives in and out of Sadie Diver's mind each time she heard the sound of footsteps behind her on the dark walk from Limehouse. She was still thinking of it as her heels clicked wetly on the fog-draped pavements of Wapping." Poor Sadie might well be thinking of knives flashing, since she's going to meet up with one in her walk to Wapping Old Stairs. My characters in their little English village always gather at The Jack and Hammer. This is one need that pubs serve: a regular meeting place. You can find the same people there at the same time of day. Pubs really are home-away-from-homes in England. They can also be the place where you entertain your guests (instead of sitting around the living room staring at the telly). And a pub is especially good at breaking down social barriers. Clerks and farmers can stand cheek-to-jowl with a lord of the manor or a nobleman. Have we gathering places over here that approach the British pub? Not bars, certainly; not our faux French cafes; not the places that cater for the cappuccino crowd. I can imagine the end of British hope and glory, but not the end of the British pub. |
Number 3
--Lou Reed One of my favorite episodes in the Richard Jury books comes in The Old Silent, when Melrose Plant discovers Lou Reed and starts wandering around with earphones, listening to Lou's several songs about Caroline. When I walked into a coffee shop in Juneau and heard Lou singing "A Walk on the Wild Side" I thought Yes! This was the place! I was doing some research for a future book and wanted to see the habitat of the rare Spirit Bear, overlooking the fact that this bear roams British Columbia, not Alaska. Nevertheless, I was in Juneau scheduled for an "adventure trek" of the Tongas rainforest, specifically Admiralty Island , which boasts the biggest concentration of brown bears in the world. This meant taking a float plane to somewhere and then kayaking to Admiralty Island. Don't get the impression I'm used to kayaks, rivers, and bears. I'm about as adventuresome as Caroline. But I was willing to suffer for research. I did. After the kayak business, hard enough if you've never seen a kayak, there was a mile and a half trudge to the lookout-station, the first part of which was uphill. The guides liked to point out the vegetation that was trampled which clued us into the fact that bears had passed through. (I figured they had to go somewhere, so why not here?) Finally, we got to the look-out station, a little hut built up on stilts, above a salmon stream where the bears come cared about was sitting down. Like Caroline, I sat and I sat as my confederates stood trying to nail some wildlife with binoculars and cameras. "Okay, everyone, time to got back." Oh, wonderful, Martha thought, As she got up off the floor. . . |
Number 2 I just returned from London where I was (as usual) asked, "are you over here to research a new book?" My answer to this is "Whatever." The notion that most people have of "researching" is the writer in a graveyard (or pub) scribbling in a notebook. My "research" is both sloppier and more visceral. For instance, I drove around Lincolnshire looking for a pub I'd read about in some dusty tome on pubs called "The Red Last," a name that I would have loved to use as a title. In the hamlet of Cowbit, near the wonderfully Sayers-ish-sounding village, Deeping St. Nicholas, I found a white cottage with "The Red Last" scrolled over its door. This, then, was what had been a pub. I had better luck with "The Case Has Altered," on the other side of Spaulding. The regulars were bunched around the bar and the owner was topping up pints. I mentioned this cottage and asked a gentleman sitting next to me (wearing dark glasses and a lot of gold jewelry, odd for the Lincolnshire fens) if he knew what the name meant: "The Red Last." "Well, it's like for shoes, innit?" Then the rest of them had to toss in their tuppence about cobblers and "lasts" for shoes, but all agreeing that's what it must mean-the "last" for a shoe. Finally, the owner (whose name I think was Dave) said, "Maybe it means the end, say, like in chess: " 'The black goes first, the red last.'" I was stunned by his sheer deductive brilliance. The rest of us had shoes stuck in our minds and couldn't see around that association. Consequently, when I was stuck two-thirds of the way through "The Case Has Altered" and couldn't figure out who killed Dorcas or why, I remembered the publican's comment. Wow! Dave saved the day!! |
Number 1 Part of the time I live in Washington, D.C., and part of the time in Santa Fe, NM. When Santa Feans (an appellation they take seriously) discover that I actually live here, they invariably say, "I imagine it's so much easier to write here, isn't it? So peaceful, mystical, beautiful, inspiring." My answer to that is "No." Not "no", Santa Fe isn't peaceful and beautiful; rather, "no", it's not easier to write here. People who talk about a writing "environment" as being necessary for creation and "inspiration" I regard suspiciously. I knew a poet who renovated a large room in his house, turning it into a library. A lot of bookshelves, library steps, an actual writing table (no jumble of a "desk" here, thanks) which held a leather bound notebook (the only appropriate kind for writing poems) and a quill pen. So far as I know, he never wrote anything there. It was probably too precious to disturb. Everyplace (or no place) is a writing "environment." Was it Djuna Barnes or Marguerite Young, or even Gertrude Stein who deliberately chose to plop herself down on a bench in as noisy a place as she could find to show herself she could write under any conditions? The person who needs to surround himself with the accouterments of writing-the quill pens or the Mont Blancs, the leatherbound journals, pedestaled dictionaries-are probably more interested in convincing the world outside (and even more so, themselves) that a writer lives here. Writing takes place on an inner landscape, not an outer. |
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