The New Book
I suddenly had the thought just now that Simone Makes Spaghetti doesn't sound like a very promising title for a chapter from a new novel. It puts me in mind of an American sit com from the sixties - something like The Dick Van Dyke Show (why is that never on TV), or something that made it to the pilot stage but no further.
I'm not worried though the new novel is going well. I decided when I was in Paris last summer (sounds exotic but the flight cost about 50 quid each and we stayed in a cheap hotel, me and parts of the family) while I was staring at a Rothko at Bourbourg (pretentious, moi?) that this next piece of fiction was going to be in three parts. I'm that kind of person, I'm afraid.
It's a good way of making decisions though, I have to say. Otherwise I would have started this second novel with no idea of where it was going, just like the first ( Big School ). With that I just groped my way along and just hoped that I would manage to bash it into some sort of shape as I went along. Did I do it? You'll just have to tell me. All I know is, writing this one where I know I just have three parts to deal with makes it a whole lot easier. It's the magic of the Three. I got that looking at the Rothko. It was one in the style for which he is famous, a painting consisting of three vertical coloured panels. It was so beautiful and I was so happy standing in the museum of modern art there last August that I thought, right, here we go: this book is going to be about art. It's going to be a murder mystery that starts with a murder in an art gallery. About seven months later I decided to read some piece of shit called The Da Vinci Code which started, guess how? Yep, you don't need me to tell you, do you?
Fortunately by this time, the idea of writing a murder mystery went out of the window. It was just too much effort and time to do the research into police detective work, set against the fact that I was gagging-mad to start. And also, somewhere in the autumn of last year, 2005, I got the idea that I'd make the second novel about a guy in a radio station. I don't really know why my mind came up with this idea in embryo, apart from the fact that I seem to have spent much of the last ten or fifteen years listening to Radio 5 (its more like 13, but what the hell). Not that 5 is local, you understand, but all the BBC local stations are sort of like 5, except that they play music virtually all day and 5 doesn't. At all. Okay then, both local and 5 have people on who talk to their audience at least some of the time. That'll do.
Another reason was a play that had stuck in my head from the time I saw it about fifteen years ago: it had Alexei Sayle playing a presenter of a talk radio show and it was good - and I thought then, way, way, back before I had any idea of writing about anything other than diatribes for football fanzines what a good scenario that was for a piece of drama. Or rather, the lone gun at the mike makes for a very suitable customer to focus a story around. Don't know why it stuck in my mind so much it just did.
Not that I knew who the focus of the story was going to be when I started doing some research into Beeb radio stations in March (2006) I had no idea. I kept an open mind. Of course, to focus a story around a presenter is handy because it offers you so much, so many options. In his professional life he interacts with work colleagues but also his listeners. So it gives the writer the chance to write scenes where he (or she if it was going to be a gun-ess) is interviewing people in the studio, down a telephone line, in another studio or taking calls from listeners. You can make a lot of things happen.
I went to three stations over the following five weeks, met people, hung out and generally got in the way. I liked the atmosphere very much and I have to say, quickly came to admire the work the folk did there. Nice people, the ones I met. It's just a shame BBC local radio plays such dire music (excepting the obsession that the programmer somewhere deep in the colon of BBC radio has for Motown, Atlantic and Stax) it's the only reason I'm not a devoted fan of the one in my neck of the woods. I do listen to breakfast show presenter Andy Whittaker, who I think is very, very good, but his show ends at nine, a time when at the moment I'm still groping for the kettle as I start making the first drink of the day.
I started my research by talking to Andy before I ever heard him broadcast, and from there, slowly, a storyline began to develop. I don't know exactly how the ideas come together, but they do. I did decide to focus the story on a lone gun, a guy in the studio, the stations top gun, who in this country's local and national radio system is the breakfast show presenter.
If there are any aspiring writers out there, don't think too hard about plot (so say many other novelists, I'm given to understand), but think hard and work very hard on character. At the research stage I wrote down a cast list: the workers at my imaginary radio station. Then I gave the ones I thought would take a major part in the drama a back story. I spent a few weeks on this. My lead characters, a breakfast presenter currently named Giles and his girlfriend, Leah, I developed through Astrology. I believe that our personalities are fundamentally derived from out birth sign (Sun sign). I found one that matched a go-getting presenter with natural leader skills, and matched him with a woman with a sign that would inevitably lead them into conflict.
When I started to write the story, which is fairly explosive right at the start, the system worked. If I wanted to work out their reactions to situations, research into their signs gave me what I needed to give the drama reality. I could clearly see the characters moving around and I could see their body language and hear their voice tones. The characters immediately had consistency. You've started to invent the character out of something solid (for me, anyway). Otherwise you're basing a character on someone you know, or trying to invent a type out of thin air who doesn't have much substance. Leah's back story came into play too as a result of her sign. This is to do things inside-out, but it worked. Young Leah's early life was dictated by her astrological personality and the fact of her great beauty (no-one was beautiful in Big School in the conventional sense, so this time I thought I'd make this different, ready for the TV serial).
As the piece of work is still only halfway completed, I'm loath to tell you what that storyline is. Sounds precious, but there we are. It's more superstition. It might never get finished. I had the big outline drawn at the beginning, but no details. Halfway through, I have to say that I don't know very much at all about what is going to happen in the final part of the book. I have a planned ending, but only the final detail, the big destination. Like you're taking a big European holiday where you start in Paris and end in Berlin , but between the two points, you have no fixed visiting points. How I get there will be how the characters get there. How they get there, I've no clear idea. I like it that way. I like the mystery. Now on a second novel, I've begun to see, I think, how novels are written, or at least, how this sort of novel is written, one that is not rigidly planned. As I say, I don't know what's going to be in part three, what action, what activity is. The important thing at this point is that I have a realistic and to me, interesting drama on my hands. I have confidence that it's going to work out fine in the end. That the journey is going to be interesting and enjoyable for me and eventual readers. It's exciting not to know how I'm going to reach Berlin . Like I would enjoy the freedom of being able to visit Prague, Budapest, Riga or Stockholm en route, I am enjoying the freedom of knowing that the characters, with a little creative pushing from me, will dictate which cities and towns we visit along the way. Just get me to Berlin in about 8 weeks, guys!
I'm steaming along now at a rate of around 2500 words a day - now that I've been able to cast off the ball and chain of the World Cup. Matches at 2, 5 and 8, then 5 and 8 for two weeks slows you down alright when the idea of missing a game is absolutely unthinkable. If the story takes a bit of a dip in the first few chapters of part two when you read it, there's the reason right there.
The new book has reached the stage of real solidity. Simone does indeed make spaghetti in the middle part of the story, and I'm very happy she does, because at the time she's trying to get someone out of the mire. The chapter headings are only working titles, but the title of the book which began as a working title, The Angel of Barton Townes, is looking more and more solid by the week, setting almost with the inevitability of gelatine. I'm now 8 weeks into the writing stage. Momentum is gathering. Characters are becoming more and more real. My pal Ben, the man who I'm force feeding each chapter as it's written, likes the story very much, so author optimism is rising. In about eight weeks time the preliminary major draft will be written and Ill know whether The Angel is going to be a book worth reading. I think it will. It's very different to Big School. It isn't flamboyant; it isn't a comedy; it's much more restrained, almost underwritten. It isn't full of similes and metaphors. But it's becoming a very, very enjoyable book to write, and I think it will be worth reading, most especially, I'm hoping, for all those who work in BBC local radio stations from Cumbria to Kent, Northumbria to Cornwall.
Craig
July 8th 2006