I’ve just finished reading Donna Tartt’s page-turner A Secret History, one of those books that everyone was reading on the Tube ten years ago and that I was too snobby to turn my attentions to. Turns out I was an idiot, because it’s a great book. Technically, it’s utterly masterful – gripping, well-paced, the writing is tight and succinct and has flashes of poetic beauty here and there. The characterisation works and the book explores interesting ideas. When I finish reading something like that, I stop and wonder to myself how on earth the writer did it. I mean “how” in two ways. Firstly, of course, in terms of technique: how did they manage to create the thing, weave such a detailed and complex web of plot and character? Where did the ideas and the language come from?
But I also mean how in practical terms. How did they organise their lives around writing it? Did they have to squeeze it in around another job? Did they write all day, or just for a few hours a day? (These two are particularly pertinent for a debut like Tartt’s) My questions sometimes cover the physical minutiae of the writing process. Did this person write at a desk? Did they have their own writing room, or, like me, just a corner in their living room? At the planning stages did they surround themselves with notes, or post-its or index cards? When they redrafted did they have hard copies of previous drafts at their side or did they work from the computer screen?
These thoughts go through my head constantly at the moment as I’m writing a novel myself. I’ve been ‘writing a novel’ on and off for about 8 years now, but have only really got serious about it in the last year or so. And it’s really hard (though obviously I know that there are way tougher jobs out there). Writing is a lonely business; you have no colleagues and you spend a lot of time wondering if you’re doing it right, whether the sentence you’ve just written makes any sense at all, whether what you’ve put on a page bears any resemblance to the living, breathing ideas in your head. All the momentum and energy have to come from you – if you don’t do it, it doesn’t exist. That’s fine on the days when you leap out of bed on a Saturday, sun streaming through the curtains, fresh as a daisy and full of inspiration for the long day ahead of you. But my day job is teaching, and there are frequently times when I come home from work and my brain power feels so depleted that all I want to do is hunker down under the duvet and watch the Great British Bake Off.
Because of all this, it’s lovely to talk to other writers and to hear other people talking about the creative process, which was one of the reasons I enjoyed the Squeeze documentary that was on BBC4 last week so much. Chris Difford and Glen Tilbrook were so eloquent and enthusiastic in the way they talked about their songwriting, and it was fascinating to hear about their method, in which Difford would pen his lyrics and then send them through to Tilbrook to add his melodic magic. I loved hearing Difford talk of the excitement he’d feel on getting a bunch of Tilbrook’s recorded demos in the post (it was ‘like Father Christmas coming’). My favourite bits were when Difford talked about how he wrote his lyrics. He talked about where his inspiration came from – the landscape sliding by on a bus journey from Heathrow to Blackheath, a photograph he’d seen, the Play for Today slots he used to watch on TV. But he also talked about the physical process – he showed us the paper on which he had written, long-hand, the lyrics to Up the Junction and told us how he wrote Tempted on the back of a fag box on the aforementioned bus journey.
Those songs are works of pure genius. Up the Junction, at just over 3 minutes, is one of the most perfect gems of a pop song going. And to hear about how it was created doesn’t strip away its magic, it adds to it.
It’s probably inevitable that we don’t really hear other types of writing talked about in this way. Squeeze’s songwriting is made more interesting by the collaborative dynamic, which is most of the time missing in fiction-writing. And let’s face it, sitting at a desk on your own in front of a laptop for hours at a time is inherently less sexy than writing pop songs on a guitar with your mate. But I do think – and perhaps my own writerly nerdiness comes into this – that it would be nice to hear a bit more about how books get written.
We hear a lot about bestsellers and literary prizes and all of that industry type of stuff, but the actual writing process doesn’t seem to get a whole lot of attention. I may be way off the mark on this and I hope I don’t seem precious, but my sense is that the actual labour of writing remains largely invisible in the mainstream. Maybe books are seen as too highfalutin to engage with in this way? Maybe all the post-structuralist death-of-the-author lit crit (which incidentally, I’m a fan of) has put people off discussing writing as something that a human being actually sits down and does? This is only something that has recently occurred to me and I would be genuinely interested to hear from other writers on the subject. A book is, after all, something that somebody spent many hours crafting, so why can’t we talk about this a bit more? Perhaps it might make the whole process a bit less lonely.
Faith of a saint, soul of a gambler 