A Slip of the Keyboard (4 page)

I was lucky. Incredibly so, when I think of all the ways things could have gone. But when the floppy-eared Spaniel of Luck sniffs at your cuffs it helps if you have a collar and piece of string in your pocket. In my case, it was a sequel.

I get asked all the time, in letters and e-mails and questions from the floor: “Can you give me a few tips about being a writer?” And you sense that gleam in the eye, that hope that somehow, this time, you’ll drop your guard and hand over the map to the Holy Grail or, preferably, its URL. I detect, now, a slightly worrying edge to all this, a hint of indignation that grammar, spelling, and punctuation have a part to play (“Don’t publishers have people to do all that?”
was one response) and that the universe is remiss in not making allowance for the fact that you don’t have the time.

So, instead, I give tips on how to be a professional boxer. A good diet is essential, of course, as is a daily regime of exercise. Pay attention to your footwork, it will often get you out of trouble. Go down to the gym every day—every day of your life that finds you waking up capable of standing. Take every opportunity to watch a good professional fight. In fact watch as many bouts as you can, because you can even learn something from the fighters who get it wrong. Don’t listen to what they say, watch what they do. And don’t forget the diet and the exercise and the roadwork.

Got it? Well, becoming a writer is basically exactly the same thing, except that it isn’t about boxing.

It’s as simple as that.

Foreword to
Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable
Millennium Edition, 1999

I was a
Brewer’s
boy. I first grasped the spine of my secondhand copy when I was twelve. It’s still in amazing condition, considering the work I’ve made it do.

It was my introduction to mythology and ancient history and a lot more, too, because
Brewer’s
is a serendipitous (see page 1063)
book. In other words, you might not find what you’re looking for, but you will find three completely unexpected things that are probably more interesting. Reading one item in
Brewer’s
is like eating one peanut. It’s practically impossible. There are plenty of other useful books. But you start with
Brewer’s
.

Nevertheless, the book is hard to describe. You could call it a compendium (I didn’t find this in my ancient edition, but I did find “Complutensian Polyglot,” so the effort was not wasted) of myth, legend, quotation, historical byways, and slang, but that would still miss out quite a lot of it. A better description would be “an education,” in the truest sense.
Brewer’s
flowered in those pre–Trivial Pursuit days when people believed that if you patiently accumulated a knowledge of small things, a knowledge of big things would automatically evolve, and you would become a better person.

Brewer’s
has been updated for this Millennium edition. It includes Gandalf as well as Attila the Hun (and why shouldn’t it?). Some of the duller nymphs and more obscure Classical items have been dropped to make space for such additions to the language as “hit the ground running” and “all dressed up and nowhere to go.” To be considered obscure by
Brewer’s
is a real badge of obscurity, and it is sad to see them go; but the serious Brewerite can only hope that Cassell might one day be persuaded to release a “preservative” edition, so that this detritus of myth and legend is not forever lost.

But today is tomorrow’s past. One day the Fab Four (ask your dad) will be one with … oh, some of the things that no one cares about anymore. Given the speed of change, they’re already well on their way. It’s an education in itself, seeing them take their place with old Roman senators and mythological fauna, and watching the dust settle. We’re the next millennium’s ancients.…

Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable
is the first book to turn to when questions arise and the final desperate volume when the lesser reference books have failed. No bookshelf, no WORLD is complete without it. It’s as simple as that.

The Guardian
,
6 December 2003

When I was thirteen, I went to my first science fiction convention. How long ago was that? So long ago that everyone wore sports jackets, except for Mike Moorcock.

Most science fiction writers were once fans. There’s a habit they
have, not of paying back, but of paying forward; I know of no other branch of literature where the established “names” so keenly encourage wannabe writers to become their competitors.

I came back from that event determined to be a writer. After all, I’d shaken hands with Arthur C. Clarke, so now it was just a matter of hard work.…

The first thing I do when I finish writing a book is start a new one. This was a course of action suggested, I believe, by the late Douglas Adams, although regrettably he famously failed to follow his own advice.

The last few months of a book are taxing. E-mails zip back and forth, the overtones of the English word
cacky
are explained to the U.S. editor who soberly agrees that
poop
is no substitute, the author stares at text he’s read so often that he’s lost all grasp of it as a narrative, and rewrites and tinkers and then hits Send—

—and it’s gone, in these modern times, without even the therapy of printing it out. One minute you’re a writer, next minute you have written. And that’s the time, just at that point when the warm rosy glow of having finished a book is about to give way to the black pit of postnatal despair at having finished a book, that you start again. It also means you have an excuse for not tidying away your reference books, a consideration not to be lightly cast aside in this office, where books are used as bookmarks for other books.

The next title is not a book yet. It’s a possible intro, a possible name, maybe some sketches that could become scenes, a conversation, some newspaper clippings, a few bookmarks in an old history book, perhaps even ten thousand words typed to try things out. You are not a bum. You are now back in the game. You are working on a book.

You are also fiddling with your internal radio. Once you’re tuned in on the next book, research comes and kicks your door down. Something is casually mentioned on TV. A book about something else entirely throws out a historical fact that, right at this moment,
you really need to know. You sit down to dinner next to an ambassador who is happy to chat about the legal questions that arise when a murder is committed in an embassy and the murderer flees outside, i.e., technically into another country, and the plot gulps down this tidbit.

People are magnificent research, almost the best there is. An old copper will tell you more about policing than a textbook ever will. An old lady is happy to talk about life as a midwife in the 1930s, a long way from any doctor, while your blood runs cold. A retired postman tells you it’s not just the front end of dogs that can make early-morning deliveries so fraught.…

Undirected research goes on all the time, of course. There’s no research like the research you’re doing when you think you’re just enjoying yourself. In Hay-on-Wye, under the very noses of other authors, I picked up that not-very-famous work
The Cyclopedia of Commercial and Business ANECDOTES; comprising INTERESTING REMINISCENCES AND FACTS, Remarkable Traits and Humours
(and so on, for sixty-four words). There are obvious nuggets on almost every page: Preserved Fish was a famous New York financier. Then there is what I might call secondary discovery, as in, for example, the dark delight of the Victorian author, when writing about a famous German family of financiers, in coming up with sentences like “soon there were rich Fuggers throughout Lower Saxony.” And finally there was the building up of some insight into the minds of the people for whom money was not the means to an end, or even the means to more money, but what the sea is for little fishes.

I’ve learned one or two things over the years. One is that the best time to work out a book is in bed, just after you’ve woken up. I think my brain is on time-share to a better author overnight. A notebook is vital at this point. So is actually being fully awake. If I had been fully awake I probably would have written a fuller note than “MegaPED:” on the back of a card by my bed the other day. It’s
probably the key to a plot idea, but don’t ask me, I only wrote it down.

And if you think you have a book evolving, now is the time to write the flap copy. The blurb, in fact. An author should never be too proud to write their own flap copy. Getting the heart and soul of a book into fewer than a hundred words helps you focus. More than half the skill of writing lies in tricking the book out of your own head.

July 1999

Let’s start with this: on the face of it there is not a lot for the author in a signing tour, and the more popular the author, the less there is. If it’s going well, it’s exhausting; if it’s going badly, it’s exhausting and frustrating and a lesson in humility. I’m not certain it sells that many extra books; it simply means that books sold in that town will be sold mostly at this one shop. It doesn’t hugely affect the bestseller list—Bookwatch, for example, “adjusts” returns from shops that have held signings to ensure these don’t distort the national figure, and a very successful author will have to work very hard to influence their position on the list. Meals happen at odd times or not at all. You live out of a suitcase. The world blurs.