Reflections (24 page)

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 extract 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.

It was a very vivid and often very distressing time for me. Just for starters, the Second World War broke out when I was five and the whole world went mad. Some of the time it was terrifying. The adults I knew were frightened, which is something that pulls the rug out from under any childhood sense of security, guns barked in the night, and searchlights crisscrossed looking for raiding bombers—to this day, a low-flying airplane makes me nervous—and nowhere seemed to be safe. Some of the time it was plain crazy, like the time I encountered one of my father's friends crawling about in the next-door field with a bush tied to his head. “Hallo, Mr. Cowey,” I shrilled innocently. “What are you doing crawling about with that bush on your head?” He rose up, bush and all, and tried to shout at me in a whisper, bright red in the face. “Shut up and go away, child! You're spoiling the exercise!” He was in the Home Guard, you see. Dad's Army.

The war caused complete disruption in what promised to be a peaceful suburban childhood, though, knowing my parents, I doubt the “peaceful.” My father, for instance, carried financial economy to a new and zany art form. My mother enjoyed quarreling. She did it with everyone all the time.

At the start of the war we were hurried away first to Wales and then—after my mother had quarreled with her in-laws—to the Lake District, where, coincidentally, we were lodged in the house that belonged to the Arthur Ransome children. One of the things that I gained from this, which I have only recently realized, was a very strong sense of the changing seasons of the year, and the effect the season has on the way you think and act. With the increasing urbanization of children's lives, I find this more important every year. Children need to be kept in touch with the cycle of the seasons. Every one of my books has its own season, or seasons. It is part of the feeling they bring with them when they are ready to be written—
Charmed Life
is an early autumn book,
Black Maria
takes place in the raw new weather of spring,
Fire and Hemlock
goes round the seasons several times—and this is as important to each book as the characters or the landscapes.

We were in the Lakes long enough to have a taste of each season, by which time my mother had quarreled with all the other mothers evacuated there. We moved to a nunnery in York, another strange interlude, and then, after a brief stay in London amid the bombs and gunfire, to a village in East Anglia. There my parents had the job of running a sort of conference center. Both of them found the fact that they had children an extreme nuisance and preferred to forget about us. We ran about on top of roofs and once nearly hanged my sister. My youngest sister tied her hair in knots to keep it out of her eyes, and this was not noticed for six months.

In my only attempt at semi-autobiography,
The Time of the Ghost
, I found I had to tone down both the hanging incident and the knots-in-the-hair episode. No one would have believed the reality. And this is true about the whole of this part of my life. I don't ever really write about it, but on the other hand I write about it all the time. What I do is a sort of translating. Every time I get a notion that might start a book going, I find I ask myself, “Will this idea translate my experience into something of value for people today?” For the experiences were much wider than mere neglect.

The first, outer layer of what I knew then was the global violence and insanity of the war and later the Cold War, which had a sort of icy saneness that was even more insane. I have never really lost this sense that the world is basically thoroughly unstable. I think this is why I tend to write about multiple parallel worlds—anything can happen and probably
is
doing somewhere. The next layer inward was the village itself. It was beautiful and full of eccentrics. At the more normal end of things I might cite the extremely refined and tweed-suited local nymphomaniac. You were liable to stumble over her in a ditch at any time, in her twin set and pearls, having it off with one of the bus drivers.

A wealth of material, you'd say. But I have never wanted to put this in a book directly. It just lies behind the slightly more normal things I
do
do. This sense that most people are crazy, if you look deep enough. Adults particularly, and children have to deal with them.

Encapsulated in this craziness, and crazy too in its own way, was the grand and beautiful old house that contained the conference center—it was haunted, by the way: one of the cleaners met the ghost and left in hysterics on the spot. But the fact about it that lives with me and truly does provide the basis for all I write is that this house had extensive grounds, divided into three sections. The first section was a huge graveled yard. It was where the nitty-gritty everyday things were, like our outhouse and the kitchen, and it had a lethal clothesline permanently and mostly invisibly in place halfway up, just at throat height. I have seen people felled there like oxen, and been felled myself. This yard was where all the cat or dog fights happened and was the site of all my mother's best quarrels. It was also where the gardener once cornered me and showed me a small, wicked yellow revolver, which he invited me to hold. It was heavy. As soon as I had hold of it I was seized with total horror. “This thing is Death,” I thought. But I tried to seem brave. I looked at it and sort of tweaked at a little metal bit hooked on to one side. “What's this?” “No, no, no! Don't move that! That's the safety catch!” he snapped. “That'll go off, that's loaded, you know.” I gave it back to him. But ever since then, I have thought of that yard as the place of ordinary life and death. The place where everything starts when I'm writing a book.

The next section was a brick-walled formal garden, consisting mostly of a large lawn sedately surrounded by shrubby borders. The part farthest from the house was raised and made a good stage. This was where the village and the conference people interacted, either to watch plays or operas put on by the house inmates, or to folk dance, and many a crazy thing went on there, including the time one of the county music advisers got carried away and sang a tenor aria from the top parapet while he rained confetti on the audience. It turned out he'd used all the toilet paper in the house. When this garden was not in use, we children tended to play the make-believe kind of game there, the kind where you walk about inventing it as you go on—the yard was where we mostly did the run-about-and-shout stuff. And this seems entirely fitting. With this garden you moved into the formal patterns of fantasy, the place where stories get made or adapted and most of the quieter fun or lunacy happened. I suspect this is the place where the central part of what I write gets made.

But there was another garden, across a road, which was always kept locked, where the conference people were never allowed to go. And this one was truly magical. It was like that garden in the story where the king has counted all the apples, because my father had hung labels on all the apple trees and he kept the key.