16/100, are you inside the story?

And I don't mean are you in the story.

I spent all yesterday in archives. I’m writing something historical, and although I’ve had the facts for a while, the facts leave the story out. Facts aren’t action - that’s why lots of people find straight up history books boring (not me), it’s in the spaces between the facts that people, characters, live. A letter isn’t a scene, but the circumstances surrounding the letter are. I was thinking this yesterday as I sifted through box after box, volume after volume. By about 3pm, blood sugar low, excitement high, I became enraptured with the diaries of my antagonist. I’m not giving anything away because I am fiercely protective of this story - but he was a peculiar man, his high regard for nature making him ill-placed to see women as anything other than specimens. In the historical telling of the story, he comes off pretty badly, a straight up pantomime villain, and it would be easy to write him this way but the easy way isn’t always the most effective. I like complicated people. We’re all someone’s villain.

Reading his diaries, the pages interspersed with carefully pressed flowers, dried almost to ash 156 years after he picked them, detailed drawings of the view from mountains he climbed, and lists of near fatal experiments he conducted on himself, he came alive to me. For an afternoon, I was in his head. It felt like a trespass. A land grab perhaps. I got what I needed and left the archives.

When The last Days was going through acquisitions, Penguin asked me to rewrite chunks of it. Understandable, since it was in second person. I love second person, I think it’s the true voice of trauma and its dissociation, but readers mostly don’t; before acquiring it, PRH needed to know I could hit the right notes. And for a while, I couldn’t. After an unsuccessful second attempt, I spoke to my future editor on the phone. She encouraged me to think about where the reader was, were they on my shoulder or at arms’ length. This was and still is one of the most helpful pieces of advice I’ve been given. I went away and rewrote scenes. The following week they offered on the book. Suddenly, I knew how to let the reader in.

It’s a similar thing when writing character, for a while there often seems to be a resistance on the part of the characters, as if they need to learn to trust you as the writer. I often feel like mine hide from me, giving me the run around until they know I’ll tell the story their way and not mine.

Last week, or maybe the week before, I couldn’t sleep. I often can’t. This time I found a film about Ted Hughes. I thought hearing him read his work might help. I love a good regional accent, until you hit the south, then I’m out. Watching it didn’t help. It woke me up too much. There’s a bit in it where Simon Armitage talks about Hughes’ way of writing nature versus Larkin’s approach. Hughes he says, becomes the thing he’s watching, and in being it, he’s able to convey the it-ness of the thing, whereas Larkin’s more than likely watching from a train window. I liked this slight dig, one poet to another. But he’s right about Hughes, that’s how he captures and conveys the filth and dirt and awfulness of nature right alongside the searing beauty of it. In becoming it, he doesn’t sanitise it or deify it, he sees that he, we, are it, and it is us, there’s an essentiality to it. I have thought of this often over the last few days, while trying to tunnel my way inside new characters. I must become then.

I often think of writing as the process of submission. In life, I do not like to submit. But when writing, it’s really essential to get yourself out the way, even when you’re writing about yourself, otherwise the work’s all ego, no substance. Without letting the ego go, the work becomes a veneer of sorts, with the gloss of performance obscuring the lack of truth. Writing of substance demands the process of getting yourself out the way, the process of non-attachment. It’s a useful discipline.

I am now on a train back to London. The rest of the day will be spent transcribing letters, diaries, and court minutes, and with each painstaking line, I can feel myself getting deeper and deeper into the story as it reveals itself to me, and I begin to disappear.