Pleurisy, Nabokov and me

I recently wrote this short piece for the Vintage books blog about how I got into writing fiction, which I largely put down to a nasty lung infection contracted in the Andes at the age of twenty. The accompanying pictures, put through my rather rudimentary scanner, have come out looking like they were taken about 100 years ago using a Box Brownie, but maybe that all adds to the general sense of ancient history... 

Digging them out, I found myself wondering what happened to my two companions on that journey, Vanessa and Julia, both then students at New Hall. One I know spent a long time in Madrid working for Reuters (we met up there c.1990 when I too was journalistically employed there). The other became an expert on China, a while before it became a manufacturing superpower. More than that, I do not know...

Krushchev's footwear

Uta aged 8 (third row, right) in the uniform of the Thälmann Pioneers. (Click to enlarge)

I've just written a piece for the Vintage Books blog on how I came to write The Valley of Unknowing, and why. Needless to say, if I hadn't met and married a former resident (see above), it never would have happened. The piece begins:

I was a child of the Cold War. To be more precise, I was a child of a nasty cold snap during the Cold War. I was born the year of the Cuban Missile Crisis, when exploding cigars were a serious hazard, and when feisty Russian leaders waved their shoes at the UN General Assembly to demonstrate the superiority of Soviet cobbling. 

Now read on...

http://www.vintage-books.co.uk/blog/from-the-author/PhilipSington/?revision#.T7TGaTVvEyM.twitter

Author in a tight spot

Writers have been known to adopt desperate measures to get a little peace and quiet. But though my house has never been more full of people – small children with snot and temperatures, an au pair, a recuperating parent with a bewildering pharmaceutical regime, and an endless parade of tradesmen – that’s not what I’m up to in these photographs. Things aren’t that bad, not quite.

I’m actually in the process of fitting insulation beneath a section of roof, rendered highly inaccessible by a recently added stud wall within. Why my Albanian builders (and their British overseers) didn’t do this for me, before the stud wall was built, is for them to explain. But, fed up with corner-cutting and delay, I decided to let my friend Heiko, who knows an immense amount about this sort of thing, take on the job instead. The only problem was that Heiko – who was stuck underground for hours during the 7/7 terror attacks, in a packed rush-hour train – suffers from bouts of claustrophobia. So I decided to help. It turned out to be hot, dirty, suffocating work, but strangely satisfying once completed – not that I’m planning a second foray any time soon.

Actually I’ve always liked the idea of writers having a manual trade, or at least being good with their hands. The notion of the novelist as a pure intellectual, spinning tales in the splendid isolation of a rural retreat, is unattractive to me. I like my artists to get their hands dirty, and to interact with the physical world as directly as possible. That’s probably why Bruno Krug, the central character in The Valley of Unknowing – it would be inaccurate to call him a hero – is a man who writes for a living and plumbs on the side (though it was once the other way around).

Actually, I could do with Bruno’s plumbing skills right now, because the Balkan bloke who came to fit up the new bathroom was something of a let-down. I suppose if he wrote good poetry or something, that would make up for his professional deficiencies. But it would have to be very, very good.

Christmas under construction

Building works, complicated by the strange lay-out of our house, have been going on around us since late November. With noise and dirt and endless consultations with my Albanian builders, plumbers and electricians, this has not been a very productive time work-wise. Still, at least the roof is now finished, finally freeing us from the nightly dread of indoor rain, in spite of the fact that there are now holes of various sizes all over the building (several of which I found myself forlornly plugging with old champagne corks...)

With luck things should have returned to normal by the end of January, and then I'll be able to get back to writing and research. In the meantime it is nice to receive updates on the progress of other work-related projects, even if I'm not actually involved in the creating. In that vein, I just received this short video taken at technical rehearsals in Rotterdam for the one-woman drama based on The Einstein Girl. Apparently the music, which I rather like, is used in the show.

Welcome to Limbo

Some writers complain about the solitary nature of their business. They miss the proverbial chat around the office water cooler, the effortless lunching opportunities and the instant quasi-social life that most work environments provide. Other writers revel in their solitude and get back to it as soon as humanly possible. Personally, my ideal would be to mix periods of solitary writing with bouts of joint or collective endeavour. For me originating new material – at least of certain kinds – can be fun when done in small groups, provided there is mutual respect, and everyone gets along.

What I have never enjoyed is the period that follows immediately after the writing has stopped, when work must go out into the world and be judged. The time spent waiting for a response is time spent in limbo, and I’ve never yet met a writer who likes it. In fact, the more solitary the work up to that point, the less the content has been discussed, tested and sneak-previewed head of completion, the more onerous this interval is; because the less easy it is to anticipate the reaction. The writer has been labouring in the dark for a year or two on something that may turn out to be a golden goose or a complete turkey, meet all his hopes for it, or none at all. The first readings will give the him a good idea where the truth lies.

In the case of the book I’ve just finished, I'm even more in the dark than usual. I’ve shared very little of its content with anyone; and both thematically and stylistically it represents a departure for me. I really have no idea if anyone will, to use the over-worked phrase, ‘get it.’ But I'm going to find out soon, because my completed second draft is out with a trusted reader. I have entered limbo; and though I've been here many times before, I find it's as gloomy as ever.

The best way to get through such periods (for there are usually many) is to start work at once on something new. It’s not just a question of taking your mind off the fate or appeal of your last work; it’s a question of redirecting your ambitions away from it, so that all your eggs aren’t psychologically in the one basket. Of course, this is easier said than done just after you've completed a book. In my case, it’s next to impossible, with a new baby expected at the beginning of April. That said, I have managed to put together a short story for my German publisher's 50th anniversary anthology, to be published later this year (in German only!). Unfortunately, that task is now complete. So it looks for the moment as if I’ll have to fall back on DIY. All those untouched tubes and tins, earnestly acquired with running repairs in mind, may finally get opened - if I can just find the big screwdriver...

Turning Greene

My plan to start drafting the new book next month is starting to look tenuous. As often happens when I get into the depths of research, I find there is more and more I want to know – more and more I ought to know. As if preparing for a long journey, I want to make sure I have an adequate mental map and all the necessary paperwork before I set out.

My setting is the former GDR. My wife grew up there (she was sixteen when the wall came down) and I myself made several trips behind the ‘Iron Curtain’ during the 1980s, when there still was one. So it’s a world that’s been part of my world, in one way or another, for some time. But that’s not enough. Reality is made up of small details, but so much has changed in East Germany over the past twenty years, it’s quite a business rebuilding it, little piece by little piece.

And then there’s the issue of what it actually felt like to live there. East Germany was a police state like no other in European history. The State Security Service (Stasi) had 97,000 employees, the bulk of which were involved with keeping tabs on East Germany’s 17 million citizens. In addition, it received regular information from a network of informers known as Inoffizielle Mitarbeiter – literally, ‘unofficial collaborators’. These informers numbered some 173,000. In all, one in every sixty-three people worked for or reported regularly to the Stasi. Probably hundreds of thousands more informed on their fellow citizens part-time. Wire-taps, bugging and mail intercepts kept a secret army of bureaucrats busy up and down the country. Citizens who were judged unreliable or disloyal could expect to suffer, although most often the damage was done without explanation or acknowledgement: education curtailed, career paths blocked, travel permits denied. Even the secrecy was secret.

Yet people lived, or tried to live, normal lives: to maintain friendships, to harbour ambitions, to raise children. How easy was that? What kind of psychological adaptations (or contortions) were necessary? Or was it possible – indeed easy – to ignore the nature of the system, or to accept it?

After the Wall came down, the Germany government granted people the right to discover whether the Stasi had kept a file on them, and to see that file. My father-in-law was one of the many who exercised that right. As he’d suspected, he found he had been the subject of a Stasi Operative Personenkontrolle over a number of years. In his file were the names of close colleagues and acquaintances who had regularly informed on him. Fortunately, as the son of an active Liberal party activist, he had been brought up to expect surveillance; and had been careful. Even so, it is highly unlikely that my wife, despite finishing top of her class at school, would have been permitted a university education had not the Wall come down just in time.

Once I was content to know all this only in outline. But now it's too valuable a resource to ignore. All the same, I’m not sure how I feel about turning up in Germany next time with a tape recorder and a note book in my pocket. Graham Greene said: “Every novelist has something in common with a spy: he watches, he overhears, he seeks motives and analyses character, and in his attempt to serve literature he is unscrupulous.”

Plan B from Inner Space

Like the wheels of Soviet industry, I always work to a plan. Some book plans are more detailed than others, but without them, I don't think I would get very far. The difficulty is knowing when to stop planning and start drafting.

Plans appear less difficult and often less troublesome than producing prose - you can fill a screen with story notes in a fraction of the time it takes to write a page of finished text. For that reason, it is tempting to skimp, and get on with the "real" work of writing. This is a mistake, at least for me. In my experience, the writing you do in your head, the ideas that fuel the drafting process, are pretty much the make-or-break. An effective story, poorly written, can always be re-written (although that doesn't mean it will be, heaven knows). A bad story well written is still a bad story, and will probably remain so, no matter how you primp and polish it.

It's a pity nobody teaches the dark art of outlining. It’s much trickier than it looks. As you develop your premise, a huge number of narrative possibilities present themselves. You want to give each of them due consideration. You want to be sure that you are developing the story in the most interesting and original way. But spend too long pondering and the whole enterprise can lose its freshness. You need a degree of uncertainty, the possibility of discovery (even revelation if you're really ambitious) for the business of writing to be enjoyable. Because, ironically, it is in the act of writing that originality most often arises, when you are familiar with the particular world of your particular story, and can see its possibilities most clearly. Nail down too precisely what is going to happen ahead of times and the you can find yourself navigating through an imaginative desert, where nothing very spontaneous occurs.

Fortunately right now I am at a stage in the cycle - well, two cycles, actually - where no hard planning is required. The main book I’m working on is at the research stage. This means that I have a rough plan (most detailed on the set-up and main characters), a setting and some notes suggesting narrative possibilities. As well as factual background, I am hoping the research will turn up some little gems of knowledge that will help me refine the plan. (For ‘gem’ read anything truly surprising, arresting or downright shocking. When researching, I’m part scholar and part tabloid hack.)