Four Years of The Last Days as a Public Thing

and taking an idea for a walk

This morning Instagram reminded me it’s been four years since The Last Days was announced in The Bookseller, and of course it was described as luminous, which is not me being self-congratulatory, but instead facetious, because every second book, and mostly almost all memoirs written by women, are at some point described as luminous. I didn’t know that then. I had a lot to learn.

I still remember how sick I felt when it was announced. At that time, the manuscript veered, in my mind between heretical and essential, sailing too close to heretical most of the time. What I didn’t realise then, was that I still had so much cult thinking to undo. The manuscript sold in September 2020 on the proviso I rewrote it, when it was announced in November of the same year, I’d only just begun the rewrites. I didn’t know then either how lengthy the redrafting and editing process would be. It was another full year until the manuscript was signed off and the bulky legal report circumnavigated.

When I was tutoring a couple of weeks ago and talking to the cohort about editing, I was asked if I was happy with the final draft or if there was another draft I wished had made the cut. This isn’t a question I’ve ever been asked before, but is such an insightful question that I might borrow it to use when I’m chairing in the future. The final draft isn’t my favourite draft but it’s the right draft, and it matters to know the difference between the two.

Although I always tell people to write like everyone’s dead, even yourself, this only holds at early stages, and possibly later in the lead up to publication - it’s a trick to keep going, to write the stuff you don’t want anyone to see, to get over how hideously first, second, third, fourth, drafts read. But at some stage, you need to resurrect the reader, partly because otherwise no one’s going to buy the book, but also the reader needs to be considered, not so you can sell to them - I’m neither that clear eyed or calculated - but because you need to consider if the draft is the right draft for a reader to read. The Last Days is published by Ebury, a commercial imprint of Penguin Random House and although I used to entertain high literary ambitions, for The Last Days anything too overtly literary would have done a disservice, not only to Ebury, but also to the purpose of the book- which was to reach as large an audience as possible in order to expose the inner workings of a calculated business entity using cult tactics to masquerade as a religion. Tie that up in too many devices and you lose readers. It had to be immediate and to give the reader no excuse to put the book down.

A lot of writers, less so readers, tend to mistake commercial for easier, for less artistry, less crafting. There’s a certain snobbery about it. I’m not one of them. Writing a page turning book is really difficult on a technical and artistic level, right down to the conversations I had with my editor about leading a reader’s eye through the text, tricks I took with me to Ava Anna Ada. That’s the thing, you get a good editor and they’ll live inside your head forever, making themselves known on the page. Now when I read books edited by my Ebury editor, I can see her there.

I was, when I was learning how to write, such a sniffy little brat, that when I took a screenwriting elective at university, I decided I didn’t want to write screenplays. How simple the prose was, how basic the descriptions, and where was the interiority?

My god.

I’ve spent all morning working on a pilot, I’ve spent most of the year working on a screenplay. I love it because it’s so difficult. Because there’s so little to play with. Because there’s no interiority. Because all you’re left with are tells. And if you want to think about writing the truth, a screenplay’s the closest you’ll get to showing it, because in life there’s no interiority other than our own, all we have to work with are tells and the way people give themselves away all the time. I used to think I liked to people watch but now I know I got it wrong, if you want to write for screen and if you want to write good novels too, in fact, if you want to write good books, you can’t people watch. Why? Because the lens is wrong. You’re still seeing from behind your eyes. I think of Simon Armitage here and how he said Ted Hughes was so successful at writing nature because he became it, whereas Larkin only watched it.

You have to inhabit your characters. That’s partly why The Last Days took so many drafts and why the published draft was the right one. I did my best to inhabit everyone in that book. Maybe it was a dangerous thing to do, but it was the right thing for it. When I’m writing, I can’t people watch, I have to people see; it’s method writing, it’s seeing not from behind your eyes, but theirs, which is to say, it’s probably a dark art, voodoo perhaps, best left alone certainly.

Recently, I dressed up as the protagonist of my next novel, I had to see her in the mirror, had to know what she’d wear, how she’d move, what she was listening to as she did it. I’ve described it before as a deep sort of listening but maybe it’s not that, maybe it’s tuning in and once the ear is attuned, the fear comes that if you lose them, you won’t get them back.

Yesterday, I found I was playing an argument two characters were having as I took the children on a walk in the woods - sometimes it’s a difficult world to come back from. Sometimes I worry for my children.

I woke early this morning, I’d fallen asleep with a certain character problem and woke with it nearly solved. Storm Bert was at the window, the sky dark still, and I remembered what another one of the cohort said when we asked them why they wrote. Her answer was startling in its simplicity: to follow her curiosity. I love this. Most people want to find their voice or say something or be heard or be to seen. No, she wanted to follow her curiosity. I often think an essay is like this, it is to try something out, the French supporting this idea when to try translates as essayer; it is like taking an idea for a walk. How incredible to think of a manuscript in the same way, it being led by the writer’s curiosity and in turn leading the writer to new places.

The Last Days has taken me many places, some good, some less so, it has taken me physically to many places, the reach of it has surprised me, it surprises me still that two years after publication I’m still being asked to do things about it, it expanded my curiosity as a person and as a writer. If that version hadn’t been published, I doubt that would’ve happened. I also know if I hadn’t spent three years drafting, redrafting, re-redrafting, re-re-redrafting etc, it wouldn’t have affected my curiosity in the way it did, I wouldn’t be working on what I am now, I wouldn’t have realised either the appeal and the demands of writing commercially. A long way of saying that yes, the right draft was published, and it took that right draft to unearth a latent curiosity in me, one the cult had squashed and one I was, for a long time, afraid to follow.