The title of this blog comes from an essay by John Banville, collected in a book called The Agony and the Ego: The Art and Strategy of Fiction Writing Explained edited by Clare Boylan. Banville’s contribution is called Making Little Monsters Walk, and he begins by talking about misconceptions of what novelists do and how they do it. ‘When I hear a writer talking earnestly of how the characters in his latest book “took over the action” I am inclined to laugh’ says Banville, and adds, ‘or, if I am in a good mood, acknowledge a colleague doing his best to get through another interview.’ Fictional characters do not have free will or exercise volition, they are ‘easily born, and as easily killed off.’ There is much more to his argument, but the sentence that I’ve always remembered is this: ‘Under the artist’s humid scrutiny the object grows warm, it stirs and shies, giving off the blush of verisimilitude; the flash of his relentless gaze strikes them and the little monsters rise and walk, their bandages unfurling.’
I agree with Banville, the author remains in charge of the story, they can at any point decide to make the character walk, talk, eat sleep or die. But I also realise he’s saying more than simply that. At a certain point in the writing of a story – at least this has been true for me – some type of life begins to stir inside it, to come out of it. At some ill-defined moment after 2000 words or 10,000 or 20,000, you write a sentence or a scene or a piece of dialogue that surprises you. It might just be a turn of phrase or an image or, as happened recently to me, a dog might show up. And when the writing is going well, your mind feels open to these suggestions of life, these little monsters. Part of your writing mind stays in charge, but it’s in the background, happy to let another part stumble off in an unexpected direction. Events suggest more events, actions have reactions. Sometimes a line of dialogue can become the crux of an entire novel around which everything else seems to revolve.
And that’s part of what this blog is going to be about. About writing and making things, and the moments of creation when something sparks into life. How and when and why that happens. Hopefully not just my own personal experiences, but those of other writers I meet and talk to and read. My day job is in publishing where I’ve worked for the last (gulp) twenty-five years or so. I meet a lot of writers, and a lot of writers who are being published for the first time, or are trying to be. They all have different experiences of writing their books, of submitting them and getting them published, of what happens next. I love all those stories and want to tell some of them (but won’t be sharing without explicit permission).
But it will also be about publishing itself. Because I think one of the things that publishers don’t do well is tell the story of what they do. What happens between the manuscript arriving and the book appearing in the bookshop? Even before that – how do submissions work? How do publishers decide what to go with and why? Who really makes the money? (short answer, nobody). All these things are largely a mystery to many people, even those that are deeply interested in books and writers (though there are some excellent blogs about publishing, and I’m hoping to find and share more). I won’t be gossiping about my workplace! But I do want to talk about how it all works, and when it doesn’t.
Whisky will make an appearance at some stage, and food of all sorts, and football, and technology and probably mental health. These things occupy me. I want to think about them by writing them down and in public because, well, because it feels like the right time. So here goes.
Little Monsters Rise and Walk 