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.
But to get back to Carol Oneir and her dreamer’s block—Carol has made two major mistakes where her characters are concerned: she has not only overworked her main characters, she has paid almost no attention to the rest. She dismisses everyone but her five main persons as her Cast of Thousands, people who cluster at the edges of things and only say “Rhubarb” and “Abracadabra.” She is astounded and indignant when they turn out to have feelings and needs like she does herself. And this is a really monumental error—because it causes her to be basically bored by her entire dream works. Being bored is the surest way I know to halt any kind of creative process.
If there is one thing I have learned, it is that you must have at least some emotional connection with every soul who figures in a story. You may like them, love them, find them disgusting, or hate them, but you must react to them in some way. You must see them as real and treat them with the same respect you would accord someone you meet in the street. Only then can they take on any life of their own. And they do. I always love it when people I know I have invented start behaving unexpectedly, as real people do—being themselves, in fact.
Naturally, if your people are doing their own thing, this is going to have an effect on the way the story goes. It is going to take on unexpected quirks and twists. It may even go in quite a different direction from the way you are expecting. For this reason, I always leave the story vague enough in my head that I can allow the characters room to alter it. And after an early shock when I was writing Wilkins’ Tooth, I always allow room for unexpected characters to appear too. I was quite shattered in this early book when my main protagonists knocked on a door. I was all set to see the door opened by the vague father of the two little girls they were trying to talk to. And instead the door was opened by the aunt, tall and covered with oil paint, with a cigarette wagging in her mouth.
Since then, this has happened quite often, and I always love it. For instance, although I suspect some people will find this hard to credit, I had no idea what Chrestomanci was going to be like until he first appeared in Mrs. Sharp’s kitchen. This is in spite of the fact that Charmed Life was a book that came into my head almost whole and entire from the start. I only knew there was going to be a great enchanter in it—I had left a sort of hole in the story where Chrestomanci was going to be, and all I did was trust that someone would be along to fill that hole. And Chrestomanci filled it more than adequately. It added no end to the excitement of writing that book, because I was discovering what Chrestomanci was like—and about his dressing gowns—quite as eagerly as anyone else might.
Poor Carol Oneir has probably secretly been dying to let all her characters loose and see what happens. She has certainly become mightily sick of at least four of her lead characters. But she has become trapped in commercial success and by the pressure put on her (mostly by her mama) to go on and do the same thing again. This is a pressure I find one really has to avoid if at all possible—that way lie boredom and blocks. Likewise it truly is fatal to yield to persuasion to write another book on the same lines as the first—unless, of course, your imagination is skipping expectantly up and down like a computer cursor, wanting to do just that. If it isn’t, you shouldn’t. But poor Carol is only twelve and has got herself stuffed into a mold. When Chrestomanci helps her free herself, the whole dream world explodes into an extravaganza of absurdities, the cast of thousands runs riot, her stock old man tries to behave like Santa Claus, and most of her other lead characters get drunk and head for the nearest casino. And Carol will have learned a valuable lesson. For there is such a thing as a character or characters running away with a story, and if you keep them on too tight a rein, my experience is that they do just that.
There is also such a thing as a story running away with itself, which is equally serious—because all narratives, long or short, need a definite shape, a shape you can usually actually draw as a diagram, and when this is not present, you don’t get a narrative, you get a mess. In my experience, this happens when the writer’s own idea of how the story should go conflicts with the story’s idea of how it wants to be. This is where, like Carol, one is doing two incompatible things at once—for a book, when one is writing it, can be as willful as any delinquent character. You have to let it have its head, just as if it were a person, and at the same time try to coax it in the direction you think it ought to go. Sometimes it just won’t. I have long been reconciled to quite a few books I write turning out quite different from the grand Platonic ideal I had when I first conceived and started to write them.
This brings me on to the really interesting bit. You notice that at the start of the extr
act I read, Carol Oneir says, “I get a feeling in my head first, which means a dream is ready to happen. . . .” Chrestomanci tactfully ignores this. It is not part of his remit to deal with the actual process of dream creation, only what has gone wrong with it. But this statement of Carol’s begs all the important questions. The statements that I and other writers make to the media likewise blur over this most central matter, which is, what goes on in your head to cause you to think you’re about to write a book? What things actually need to be present before you can?
This is what most younger readers are fumbling after when they ask, “Where do you get your ideas?” The trouble is, this is a question that has always struck me like “Have you stopped beating your wife yet?” I can get any number of ideas, but ninety-nine percent simply never could grow into a book that I could possibly write. It takes a certain specific something, and a certain kind of idea, even to get me started, and even then more than half of these don’t come to anything. I have cupboards and drawers full of barely begun writings.
I have been trying very hard for years to define what I do need to get started, ever since, in fact, I ran up against one of those holistic doctors—you know—“cure your body and your mind together.” A fine idea, if you can get it right. But this doctor would have it that my back problems were due to the fact that I spent too much time harking back to my past. “Look to the future,” he said, “and you’ll get much better ideas for your books then.” He made me so angry. As soon as he was out of sight, I yelled and threw cushions and jumped up and down, and swore, and threw more cushions. I wasn’t sure then quite why I was so angry, but I think I have it worked out by now.
First, of course, you can’t look to the future because it is a blank. It hasn’t happened yet. Even someone who is wanting to write about the year 9000 has to have something from the present day to base the narrative on—they have to rely on the fact that human nature and economics and physics tend to be the same whatever year it is. In other words, you need hooks to hang your story on to. We all do. And my hooks happen to be my childhood.