Getting to BackThere's a novel. It's called Going Back. At least, it will be…

Funny thing, fiction.

I mean, it’s all made up, isn’t it?  So I can put anything I like in it, and as long as I can convince my readers that my world is consistent, everything is up for grabs; I can say what I want.  Can’t I?

Well, I’m not Jasper Fforde, whose fictional world includes dodos, airships, Neanderthals and Greek gods living in Swindon – his universe is deliberately silly, and mine isn’t intended to be.  On the other hand, I’m not Stef Penney, who was – astonishingly - criticized in some quarters for imagining  the Canadian wilderness: she is agoraphobic, and was unable to go and experience it for herself.  This caused some people to temporarily forget the meaning of the word ‘fiction’ and question her first novel’s authenticity.

Going Back is based, very loosely, on some things which really did happen to me, so is set in as real a world as I can make it.  Certain things happen in the story which need, for my own peace of mind as much as the reader’s, to be plausible.  Some of them are easily verifiable – I remember them clearly enough, and can ask other people about them if my memory is vague.  Some of them are clear enough in my head, even if they are entirely made up – Anne’s house in Godalming, for example, is just an identikit English suburban house; it doesn’t need to be based on a real place; the picture I have of it in my mind’s eye is more than enough for it to pass the test of verisimilitude.

But there are a few crucial items which need research.  Even 10 years ago, when I first wrote the short story which spawned this monster, I’d have found some of this quite difficult.  Indeed, there are innocent bystanders out there who suddenly received emails from me, just because I thought they might have been on the same bus as me back in 1978.  I asked for memories, but few of them overlapped.  In the book, Andrew notices this phenomenon, too:

“I thought about finding someone else who had been on the trip, and asking them, but you weren’t exactly talking to me, and I had no idea where to find anyone but Mark, and he was no help.”

“I didn’t know you had spoken to Mark.”

“I didn’t – we exchanged a couple of emails, but he remembered stuff that had happened to him, and almost none of it related to me, as far as I could see.”

My German village in the story is fictional; if you look for Hohenügel in Google Maps, you won’t find it.  If you have a reasonable grasp of German geography, however, you’ll probably be able to work it out (and if you’ve read the original non-fiction piece which started this whole thing off, you’ll be in no doubt).  I changed the names because one or two of the less savoury characters in my story are analogues for real people who – presumably – did real jobs in a real place back in 1978.  Like any respectable fiction writer, I want my characters to exist in their own universe, not to overlap in any way with someone real – let’s face it, someone who might sue.

But my fictional village exists in a real world – it is, in 1978, right on the border with East Germany, and a casual remark from one of my email correspondents all those years ago about going into East Germany illegaly on the back of a motorbike led to a pivotal scene in Going Back.

When I wrote it, it was with the idea that I would go back at some point and fill in the blanks – figure out how it might have been possible for someone to cross that border on a motorbike without weeks of meticulous pre-planning.  I lived much closer to Germany then than I do now, and I thought it would be a matter of one day going back (hah!) to visit the area, asking a few questions, visiting the border museums and adjusting my story to suit.

Now, of course, just popping over to Germany is pretty much out of the question.  So I rely on research.  Which, unsurprisingly, is much easier now than it was.  Indeed, thanks to Google and Google Translate, I have found all manner of relevant details, including this page which, although it’s in German, does give me just enough to rewrite that section, which has worried me since I first thought of it, and make it plausible.

No, I didn’t go there – then or now.  No, I didn’t even leave my own chair to find out what I needed to know.  And I’m sure that in some important way or other, my fictional version will not quite stack up with the way it really was if you lived on that border at that time in history.  But it will make sense in my fictional world, and that. really, should be enough.

Now, enough blogging about it – I really should go and, you know, rewrite it.

I’m supposed to be reading right now.  And, to be fair, I am reading.  It’s just that, after so long away, I want to be writing – actually putting words on a page – too.  I have re-read parts of Going Back now, shying away a little form my idea of reading parts 1 and 3 consecutively, and figuring out what has to be in part 2.  It’s too daunting a task to tackle straight off, and I’m thinking around it at the moment.

I’ve also been reading the Weekend Novelist book (see below).  I’m a little torn – it offers sensible advice, and some useful exercises, but it’s also not really aimed at a novel like mine.  I’m guessing the average Weekend Novelist writes genre fiction, and has a straightforward story arc, with subplots and so on.  Mine is a little more, well, complicated than that, especially in the shifting timeframes, and the way the subplots turn out to be main plots, and vice versa.

I’m not setting myself up to be Thomas Pynchon or anything; but some of these exercises don’t really apply to me, I’m afraid.

However, all is not lost.  There’s an early exercise in the book, designed to get you to think more deeply about your protagonist.  It involves going back to before the beginning of your story and writing about what your character was doing an hour, a week, a month, a year,and so on before the story starts.  I have seized on this, and 3,000 words later (yes, I know; I’m supposed to be subtracting from the hulk, but none of this will go in the finished version, I think), I have some text which has a) caused me to be pleased that I can still wirte coherently about these characters, b) convinced me that I can still actually, you know, write, and c) given me someting to post here.  So, without further ado, I present a small section of the back story work I’ve been doing.  You’ll notice that I was unable to restrict myself to my protagonist, and that this isn’t the entire 3,000 words.  I may post more of it later…

Going Back even further – one hour before the primary timeline starts.

The classical 3 act structure, as explained by many people (I first came across it in a book by Alan Alda) goes something like this:

• Chase your hero up a tree
• Throw rocks at him
• Get him down from the tree

This popped up in my Twitter feed this afternoon, just as I was contemplating doing some actual writing.  As I said yesterday, right now for ‘writing’ substitute ‘reading’; I really need to get back under the skin of the story before I start trying to change it.

But I worry.  I worry that I am wasting time, that I need to be getting on with it, that if I want to be a ‘writer’, I need to stop wasting time.  So thank you to Betsy Morais and The Atlantic for reminding me that it’s OK to work at your own pace, and it’s definitely OK not to start until you have some life under your belt.

The best advice I ever had about being a writer – and I’m afraid I can’t remember who said it to me – was “if you want to be a writer, write.”  And over the last few years, I have tried to follow that advice.  When people ask me what I do, I still talk about my other jobs, my ‘real’ jobs, but I more often than not admit to being a writer.  I think it’s important to feel that what I do is a real thing, with a real purpose to it.  And a real end prodict, which is where my promise of yesterday comes in.

An excerpt, I blithely promised.  So far this afternoon, I’ve spent time sifting through the book as it stands, looking for something representative, and wondering how on earth I’m supposed to define ‘representative’.  And, you know what?  I got caught up in the story again, and started reading it as if it was a book.  This, my friends, is a good thing.  But I’m no nearer to identifying a representative sample than I was before 5 boys came home from school and turned this place into a madhouse.

No, only 2 of the boys are mine.

So, instead, I’m going to muse on not how to write, but when.  Every writer does it differently – some rise early, and do nothing else until they have completed their allotted number of words; some write whenever they have a spare moment, or like M. Jenni, are ‘Sunday writers’.  I’ve tried all of the above, and, honestly, they all work to some degree, but I seem to write best in the evenings.  I need quiet, but not silence – I don’t mind the cats shouting around the house, as long as they’re not doing it in my office, and I prefer to have orchestral music on in the background.  Then I can shut the door and just let the story go where it will.  Music with words doesn’t work; I always want to sing along, and no-one needs to hear that.  Total silence also just feels wrong; I probably spend too much time trying to hear what’s going on elsewhere, or am distracted by something outside. So, it’s usually Shostakovich or Mahler, less often Bruckner or Sibelius.  If I need to be shaken out of a rut, Messiaen or Bartok often does the trick.

And then I got to wondering – can I tell what I was listening to as I wrote what I’m reading?  Well, in some cases, I think I can – there’s a piece in Part 3, for instance, which was obviously written under the spell of the magnificent final movement of Mahler’s Ninth…

And there I have it: extract no. 1 is a clear illustration of how the music I’m listening to creeps into the story almost unnoticed.  It’s also a pivotal, if underplayed, scene – the relationship between these two characters changes subtly but permanently as a result of what happens here:

Going Back: an extract from Part 3:

Clare asked him to put the music back on – “I’m calm now, and I’d like to know about the music which makes you cry, if you don’t mind.”  Andrew had to think about it for a minute, then remembered that it was the Mahler, which he felt spoke for itself.  He explained a little about it anyway, and wondered idly how long it would take him to drive to Meiernigg  – a place he had always wanted to see – from here.  If things get really bad, he thought, I can just escape there.

The music soothed and calmed him, without making him too emotional.  He tried to explain that it had less emotional force for him if it was divorced from the rest of the symphony, but Clare shushed him – she was listening intently, and he smiled to see it.

They arrived in Hohenügel shortly before the end of the movement, and Clare pulled the car over to the side of the road as they left the autobahn so that they could hear the end of it.  She took several deep breaths once it was done, then turned and smiled at him.  “I may have to revise my opinion of a few things,” she said.  “I never quite saw the point of all that classical stuff, but I may be getting the general idea.  Jesus, that was sad, wasn’t it?”

Andrew rarely needed an invitation to gush about music, and he gently disagreed with her.  “On the surface, it is, yes.  He’s dying, and he knows it.  It is a lingering farewell, but it’s also a statement of defiance and intent.  I always hear it as the musical equivalent of ‘rage against the dying of the light’.  I do find it can reduce me to tears if I’m not careful, but I can also find it enormously uplifting if I’m in the right mood.”

“Which is it today?”

“I’m not sure; I never quite engaged with it – too much else on my mind, I suppose – but it has calmed me and I think I may be ready for whatever might be coming.”

“Well, you’d better be, big guy, because it’s coming, like it or not.”

OK, I’m officially scared now – some part of my book is out there in the public domain.  Please trat it kindly, won’t you?