Working methods

I am always interested in how writers go about their work. This is not just the everyday nosiness of wondering what their workspace looks like (although it is partly that), but a curiosity about the mental processes involved, how they organize their material, and whether they have specific quirks.

Take me, for example. I cannot sit with my back to the door. I don’t like to do that in any situation, but when it comes to writing it is a big no-no. The same goes for writing in company. I can happily scribble notes and ideas wherever they occur to me, but when it comes to writing proper, I have to be alone. The thought of sitting at the kitchen table whilst the family conducts its merry business about me as I work is the stuff of nightmares.

This is partly because I like to be organized. I have to have everything to hand. My notes are put into ring binders; my reference books have to be in the right order so I can pick them up with having to look; my coffee mug needs to be where the cat won’t shed hairs into it when she wanders across the desk.

But this is just surface stuff. Down in the recesses of the mind where no one else would be wise to venture, I also have to work in a certain way. I didn’t become conscious of this until recently, when I was researching ‘Charlie Cornelius’, but I am extremely visual. That is, I have to be able to see a scene in my head before I can write it down.

The realisation came because ‘Charlie Cornelius’ is the first book I have written with full and fast access to the Internet. I have been able to track thousands of photographs of the period, some of them very specific. As I was doing this, I found I was putting them into folders in story order. I was creating a storyboard, much as they do in the pre-production stage of film making.

I got quite excited about this (sad, isn’t it) and thought back to all the other fiction I had written over the years. My notes were littered with sketches, photos, and references to places I knew well. I remember visiting the locations in Wealden Hill and its sequel, Hob, taking photographs, pacing out and timing distances, making notes. And with the sections in Wealden Hill that take place in faery, vivid dreams came to my aid.

I would, as I did with my other novels, play each scene in my head until I had the background detail, the character’s movements, their speech, their clothes… rehearsing it over and again until I could write a description of the scene as economically as possible.

In some cases, of course, I had to use my imagination. I have never been inside Thames House or handled the trigger mechanism of a nuclear device, let alone watched a zero point energy powered spacecraft emerge from the waters of Loch Ness, but research can make imagining those things so much easier.

Up to now, however, I have not based my characters on real people. That is, I have not used pictures of actual people to generate descriptions. In this respect, Charlie is new step. All the characters have been of my own making, except for Charlie herself. I know precisely what she looks like as an adult as I saw a face and knew that she was Charlie. From that I have been able to construct in my mind a picture of Charlie as a child and how she looks as she grows up. Whether anyone else will recognise the actress on whom her features are based is another matter, but it has, for me, added another dimension to a character who is very much a living being.