“I Have Always Been a Victim of My Ideas”

I went through a phase of my life where almost everywhere I went, or everything that happened to me, provoked an idea for a book.

Actually, thinking about it, I don’t believe this was a phase at all. It’s just the way I am, all the time. It’s probably an illness, and can certainly be an inconvenience. You end up with a lot of ideas and not enough time to work on any of them. Then there are the books you dream. Those are the best. But, oh, the sadness upon waking, when you realize that the masterpiece you thought you had written, the book that is the perfect literary expression of your soul, not only doesn’t exist, but never will. You try to hang on to the essence of the book your subconscious mind presented you with, you may even be tempted to go looking for it in that box where you keep all of your discarded dreams (otherwise known as rejected manuscripts), but any attempt to re-create it is bound to result in the bitterest disappointment.

Reading a book is a life experience, just like going to a new city, or meeting a new set of people. Actually it is both of those things, the difference being that none of it’s real and everything that happens, happens internally. Indeed, for some people this is no less real. So given this condition I have, it’s inevitable that reading certain books will provoke ideas for other books.

Storytelling is my way of trying to process and understand the world. If something makes an impression on me, I will want to imagine myself into it. This applies whether I see an interesting group of people in the park: “What’s the story there?” Or whether I encounter a fascinating character--or milieu--in a novel.

I don’t feel I have to apologize for this and I don’t mind, incidentally, if people dismiss it as a glorified form of fan fiction. Maybe it is. But for me it’s a literary endeavor that has deep roots. Shakespeare generally took his characters--and indeed his plots--from either history or other writers. It’s the way the ancient writers operated too, as I learnt when I studied Classics. And there are respected modern examples, too. The Wide Sargasso Sea, by Jean Rhys, is a wonderful book, a great book in its own right. It played a crucial role in giving me “permission” to take on the work of another writer, in validating my enterprise. For those of you who don’t know the novel, it tells the story of the first Mrs. Rochester: a literary prequel to Jane Eyre, rather than a sequel.

So it seems natural to me to write in this way. But perhaps, also, there was an element of calculation in it. As I said in my previous post, I did look upon this as the last throw of the dice as far as getting published was concerned.

To prepare for this stint on The Rap Sheet, I looked back at some notes I took with me to a meeting I had with a publisher--not, as it turned out, the publisher who ended up taking Gentle Axe. This was fairly early on in my writing process. I think I had maybe written a couple of chapters and had a fairly developed storyline. What I was looking for was some kind of affirmation from a publisher that I wouldn’t be wasting my time if I gave up however many years of my life it would take to write this thing. Pointless, really, as I knew I was going to write it anyhow. But even I realized it was a monumental task, so I wanted some encouragement. My agent managed to get two publishers interested enough to sit down and chat.

Here’s an extract from my notes at the time:

The genre is historical crime. A hybrid genre.

The demands of the crime genre. Procedural. Detection. Forensic. Medical. Technical.

The demands of the historical genre. Period. Setting. Detail. Texture. Authenticity.

What you look for, as a reader, in a historical crime novel is slightly different from what you look for in a pure historical novel or a pure crime novel.

It is a balancing act. There are competing elements. The way through is to concentrate on STORY. Story is the primary demand of any genre.

So, the way I have tried to resolve these tensions is in the plotting. The plots--and crimes--arise from the period, from the ideas, conflicts, people specific to the time and place.

An extra element of the genre in this case is the literary. I have taken a character from an existing work of literature--in fact, from one of the masterpieces of literature. The detective Porfiry Petrovich from Crime and Punishment. I fully acknowledge the effrontery of this. It is an act of high cheek, of which some will disapprove. I believe it will help to get the book noticed (for good or bad).

The element of calculation I was talking about comes through in that last sentence. My reason for bringing it up in my meetings with publishers was because I hoped it would help to sell the book to them.

To be fair to myself, I don’t think you choose the ideas that happen to you. You’re hit by them, and your status can most accurately be described as victim. Yes, I have always been a victim of my ideas. The element of choice comes in when you decide which of the ideas that have hit you are the ones you will pay attention to and develop.

It didn’t really work out with either of the publishers I spoke to in the way I’d hoped. Neither of them said no, yet neither of them pulled out a contract. They said what I think is only sensible: “We need to see more. Yes, it’s a good idea, but we need to see how you do it.” Actually, one of the editors I spoke to also said: “Can you dumb it down a bit? I love the St. Petersburg setting, but it’s a bit too literary for our list.” And yes, she did actually use the phrase “dumb down.” I was pretty horrified, as well as confused.

To answer her question, though: No, I couldn’t dumb it down. I can only write the way I write, and this is the way my approach to this idea has come out.

And there seemed to be no alternative. I had to write the thing, with or without the encouragement of publishers.