The Bliss Lecture / delivered at the Bath Festival / 4th March 2015
And bliss indeed it is to be a novelist, to live ina fictional universe, to spend a lifetime creating fictionalworldsin which your characters do as you want, have the opinions you choose for them, conclude what you want them to conclude, and if they disagree with you, why,you can always just kill them off. You might indeed seenovelists assimply thwarted power freaks (in the same way that you might see psycho-therapistsas individuals who havebeen thwarted in their attempts to write novelsand so turntheir attention to real, living people and strive to bring themto desirable conclusions.) The fictional world you are immersed in, yournovel, can absorb you more than the life you are actually living, to the confusion ofthose around you, children, family, friends.
I have been living such a life for all offifty years, I realise: I can see myself as an unrepentantaddict. Back and back I go to the bliss ofwrestling with language.Another novel and another and another and fifty years have passed.
The first novel Iwrote was in 1967,The Fat Woman’s Joke, based on a TV play I’d written in 1965 – which for someone always as youth-fixated as the world is now, who thought they would rather die than reach forty – is rather alarming!I do remember writing the last line on the No 11 bus going upFleet Street, and writing‘The End’(those were pencil-and-paper days),and with that came the realisation that if I had done it once I could go on doing it for the rest of my days:and so I did. It was a triumphant moment. I don’t forget it.
I have enormous sympathy with writers who are on their first novel, and are having to write it withoutany firm knowledge that they are going to be published. That is a tremendous act of faith.Creating a so far un-thought-of universe is an onerous and exhausting job; it is also the triumph of hope over common sense, while all around say ‘why don’tyoujust get a proper job?’ or jeering ‘don’t give up your day job’.And meanwhile wives, husbands, children all want attention. I remember a novelist friend of mine, Penelope Mortimer, who couldn’t find her typewriter for ages, and then discovered that herthree year old daughterhad buried it in the garden.
Those around you can indeed be driven to extreme acts: and even if you succeed your achievements do not necessarily bring happiness. A change in power relationships within the home can bring trouble with it.
It was about 50 years ago that I had my first press interview. I’d just written my first novel and was beginning to make a name for myself as that oddity, a female TV dramatist. It was to be in theGuardian. I was thrilled. The features editor ranga couple of hours before the journalist wasdue and said he’dmissed his train and could I interview myself:eleven hundred words by sixo’clock that evening. I have not before or since had such a request but I set about it, with all the buoyancy and confidence of youth andwrote a piece of self investigation which has stood me in good stead to this day. I realised I was not one person but a myriad persons. I might look and seem like a single individual but I was not. Like all novelists I was a split personality. Two of these personalities, A and B, composed the writer part.C was the one who appeared to the outside world as a perfectly normal person.
A is the creative right-brain fuzzy thinker – the creator, the embarrassing one, who writes out of dreams and is struck with inspiration: who oozes all over the page in lurid soppy words, who uses too many adjectives and adverbs – and is frighteningly female. But without A, nothing:the page stays blank.B is male and shares the head with A. He’s the one with the red pencil. He’s the editor, the left-brain one, the organiser, the rational one who gets his tuppence worth in even as the words are being formed and says,‘You can’t possibly say that, that’s terrible, people will laugh at you, recognise you as the imposter you are’: B is the one who strikes out the sentences A holds most dear.
A fights back for every word, and screams with pain when words go. A and B are like wife and husband fighting for precedence, learning to live with each other. It’s only when left and right brains are evenly balanced and are cooperating, making amiable allowances for each other that productive work is achieved.
The third personality, C, the one on outward show, who does the shopping,cleaning, looks after the children and has a job, the one people see and respond to, is barely aware of the existence ofA and B. This C looks at the neatly typed and growing pile ofprinted pages on the table with a kind of amazement. When on earth did she find time to do all that? She can’t remember. A and B, the writers,are well aware of C. Indeed they use her as their slave to ease their path, put food of their table, keep the rent paid, keep the house warm, leaving A and B free to indulge their addiction, enjoy the joysand labour of invention, the bliss of editing,the close, concentrated, rewarding work of changing this word for that, that semi-colon for this full stop.The truth is that A & B rather despise poor serviceable C, but can’t do without her.
I could see as I investigated myself that I was a classic case of split personality. One or two of the personalities know about the existence of the others, while the rest have no idea what the body, powered by a different personality, is up to at different times of the day. C might wake up in the morning as the hardworking, pleasant personality she is, but with a splitting headache and a torn nightie after a night on the tiles and have no memory of it whatsoever. My Hyde knows about Dr Jekyll; and despises him. Dr Jekyll has no idea about what Mr Hyde is up to.
The finished publishable pages start to pile up in a satisfactory manner, but C, looking on, has very little knowledge of the fightbetween A andB going on in her own head, but just wonders why every now and then she finds herself staring into space instead of getting on with her ‘real’ work –housework, dayjob. Did I really do that? is what C thinks, looking at the book that’s sitting on the desk in front of her.
And as life as a publishedwriter became more and more complex with publicity and interviews,C found herself as time went on, able to take on more roles that she once thought possible: other personalities came popping up as necessity arose. D made an appearance, D being thedelinquent whom A and B milkfor copy. A and B knew about D but keep her from C, who might well be shocked. And for a time there was E, the World Traveller whom Conly knew about because she kept having to get air tickets and take her clothes to the cleaners, and then there was F, the one who was no longer terrified of speaking in public, and it’s F who is standing here before you today. Allare governed by A and B, who honestly don’t care much what goes on so long as they are kept warm and fed, and allowed to get on with what they are doing,endlessly arguing over the meaning and relevance and strength of words, and possible divergencies of plot and character.
Asked whether it’s A or B who is the happiest I will say B the editor.A has the full burden of creation which is tiring, difficult and exhausting and keeps her full of self doubt – all this fishing about in the murky pool of the group unconscious to find some rumoured lost treasure– B has the easier more rational task, standing on the edge of the pool after the hard work has been done and the treasure hooked,turning the unconsciousinto an acceptable conscious, taking enormous pleasure tidying things up, changing the odd fullstop into the occasional colon, persuadingA thatsilence is golden.B the one who cuts the text, presses the delete button and when asked ‘Are you quite sure?’ presses OK. B is the onewho has ultimate power in theABC triumvirate. Lucky old him.
If you are writing your first novel, as I’m sure many of those present here today are, and you are intouch with your inner editor B, ask him to remind you not to let you stray too far from the point. The first novel can tempt the insecure novelist to get everything they’ve ever thought or known or experienced in life into the book. To see yourself as having a writing life in front of you, and at least ten novels to go, helps you not squander your material.Life before you become a published writer is more real and un-selfconscious and also probably more painful than anything that happens after. Make your novel about one thing at a time, and be sparing with your material; it is to your advantage, and the readers that you do.
As a writer, you save yourself an awful lot of time if A and B are at one while you write, fight their battles out before you commit the word to the page, because then little rewriting is needed. It was easier perhaps when the words were written with a pen on paper, which takes a fraction of a second longer than it takes to get words on to a computer screen. Since the advent of the computer words arrive faster on the page. Today’s computer written act of fiction is spell and grammar and readability checked and in general encouraged to conform, but seldom comes to the reader with the shock of the new.
My new book Mischief contains a selection of my short stories fromthe last45 years,about twenty in chronological order, filtered down from the more than a hundred I’ve written. It ends up with a hundred-page sci-fi novella calledThe Ted Dreams which I wrote last year with an ebook reader in mind – I am by no means a cultural Luddite. I recognise and welcome the advent of the naked text as it appears on a Kindle. It iswithout the customary frills of a published book which makes it so attractive to the reader as a physical object. For the e-book I believe that anew kind of writing is required. Writers have to write now for a world in which readersare busy, on the move, andhave little time for contemplation and reflection. So the writer has to focus more, write better, cut to the chase, do more of the readers’ contemplative work for them before they even get to it. Catch their attention as they run. What thenew reader wants is surprise, suspense and entertainment. Well, give it to them. It doesn’t make you any less of a writer, just a more accomplished one.
But maybe something is lost even as something is gained. Fifteen years ago I moved from writing by hand to writing on the computer. Looking at thestories in Mischief, which are in chronological order, I can detectadifference in style. Thosewritten by hand leave more to the reader’s imagination, just as a black and white film makes one’s imagination workharder thanone in colour –also containing what is left unsaid.In the post-Millennium world every sentence makesswift and perfect sense. Editing,once a matter of Tippex, and cost, time and labour – of getting it right first-time-round – is now so easy that inner-editor B takes too much precedence over inner-inspirationalA.Things become less intuitive and more rational.
But however it’s achieved, the process of editing continues to be bliss. I teach creative writing to graduatestudents at Bath Spa University down the road. Working with them on theirnovels gives me enormous pleasure. They do all the hard creative work, I content myselfwith the frills and thrills of editing. I consider myself blessed. One learns as one teaches. The other day I was with a class when one of the studentsremarked that she always put the ‘he said/she said’before speech, not after: ‘was that OK?’ Most of the class said they did it the other way round: not “Mary said[colon]: ‘open the door’” (thus getting into punctuation hell about whether to use a correct colon or a less noticeable comma) but simply ‘Open the door[comma],’ said Mary.”
I looked throughMischief, which I had with me: I saw that I normally put the ‘Mary said/John said’, at the end, to specify whohad spoken. But just occasionally I did it the other way round – and wondering why, realised it was a way of throwing the emphasis on who was speaking rather than what was being said, and a perfectly legitimate usage. It is in such small details (which to anyone but a writer might seem bathetic), as you discover from what you have written what it is youare doing, and can pass it on, that bliss is derived.
FAY WELDON
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