Around that time I went down to Somerset to interview Anthony Powell, who wrote the 12-volume sequence of novels, A Dance to the Music of Time. It was a small coup, I suppose, as he was a big name and he did not talk to the press that much, preferring to set down his views and recollections in regular volumes of memoirs. The reason I got to see him was that my editor at Heinemann was his as well; the two had known each other for ages. In fact the editor, Roland, was a little like one of the countless professional but slightly bohemian figures in the pages of Music of Time. Powell was 77 at the time. He’d been a contemporary of George Orwell (or rather Eric Blair) at Eton, and seemed to know everyone in the the various strata of the English establishment. His brother-in-law was Lord Longford, whose sister Violet he had married. Powell was very clear-eyed on this business of putting real people into books. Disguise them, he said. If someone is tall and thin and clean-shaven, make him squat and fat, and give him a ginger beard for good measure. He said it impishly, as if he’d sent thousands of readers, and possible “victims” off on wild goose chases. Apparently Longford was convinced that he was the model for Widmerpool, the second most recurrent character after the narrator. As Widmerpool is an unlovely, dogged presence, Longford was not happy about it, yet the likelihood is that something or someone (perhaps himself) had got him looking in the wrong place; another, more aristocratic but relatively minor character in the sequence is more likely to have been modelled on Longford.
 Anyway, the point is that when people write fiction, they may well be wanting to say things about particular people and have chosen this medium precisely so that they can cover their tracks. They are also very glad, and flattered, when their readers find  an essential realism in the work. So, it’s a difficult dance, whether to the music of time or to some more mundane melody.  Something similar goes on in plays, but with the  big difference that your imagination is not engaged in the same way; you do not have to flesh someone out in your mind because the actors are doing it for you. I did write more prose fiction, but not very much - about half a dozen novellas of fifteen to twenty thousand words. It was one of these, Going Over, that got published after it had won a competition run by a literary magazine, but in general publishers and agents aren’t drawn to things of that intermediate length. I find it strange, since we are always hearing about the shortening of attention spans. The success of the doorstep-sized paperback seems to contradict that assumption.
  As I say, plays are generally fiction too, but they are playing different games.  I must have written a dozen or more, and most of these have been produced or presented in one form or another. It can be exhilarating and harrowing to see them performed. I can’t pretend I wasn’t thrilled to hear a full theatre giving a great big, collective, abandoned laugh at some of my lines – as spoken by Prunella Scales. One of them was a rather juvenile language-joke which involved her saying she was going to nip over the road to Alberto, her  hairdresser, “for a quick blow job.” Nor can I pretend that I haven’t been sad and contemptuous – towards myself – to hear for the fortieth time lines that I didn’t rate all that highly in the first place. I don’t mean to be morbid at all when I say that there is a strong argument for writers being dead. That way the directors can do what they want without fear of dissapproval – from that quarter at least. And the writers don’t have to give an account of themselves. They don’t even have to try, which is a great advance on the present situation, where you have to try and say what you mean, or what your characters mean, when you don’t know the answer even though you do know that the speech in question is in some essential way right. Having said that, I’ve genrally been delighted at being edited, or else told to make some quite hefty alterations. I always balk at it, just because of the work involved, and the fear that in remaking bits of it you will accidently damage healthy tissue. But I can’t think of a time that it has not been a good idea to listen to the director’s  criticisms of the text. I completely understand it when playwrights stand their ground on particular things; but to never re-write, to always consdider your words inviolate as if by some divine right is grandiose and deluded.
 The first ones I had staged were in fringe theatres in London. One of them was called The Changing, and told the story of Middleton and Rowley’s play of not quite the same title, “The Changeling,” being put on in a pub theatre. One night some latecomers couldn’t work out what was going on when they came through from the pub’s front bar into the dark little theatre at the back. They sat down on the nearest chairs, which happened to be on the stage. When the lights came back up they found themselves looking out at the audience, and thinking that was the show. But then these two people in Jacobean costumes came on from the side and took their chairs from them.
  I’ve sat through some shockers by other people, as well as by some of the most riveting performances I’ve seen in any medium. What’s always claimed, and rightly so, for the theatre is that it’s live, it’s happening in front of you and a collection of others, and it will never be exactly the same as it is being now, as  you watch it. It’s a potent appeal, and one of the factors that keeps me going to see plays, even if I sometimes do so with misgivings.
 One of the best times I’ve had with my own work was when a company called Eastern Angles took a production touring the region for three months. The play was called The Edge of the Land, and, whatever its shortcomings were, was true to the label. It was set, in part, in 1953, the year of the freak floods that killed more than 300 people along the east coast of England, not to mention nearly two thousand more across the water in Holland. It was a very unorthodox play, I suppose, with the actors having to morph into a total of about 40 different characters. Later, the director Ivan Cutting said one of the reasons he’d taken it on was to see if he could overcome the challenge of stage directions such as “She turns into her mother.” We went all round the little village halls and the theatres of the bigger towns. A few times the audience would contain people who’d been children when the floods struck, and there they were, seeing the story enacted, in the very same village that had been ravaged by the tide.
 With writing of all kinds, I think that if you are working in a particular form, then other ideas suggest themselves to you not as candidates for some other type of treatment, but for that same form. Write plays and you will – unless the experience scars you for life – feel inclined to write more. It’s a matter of habit, and of practice. The world becomes just that tiny bit more play-shaped. I’ve got a few on the go at the moment. That is, I’ve got one that I’ve just finished re-working drastically, another that very nearly got put on and is still living in hope, and a third which I keep failing to write. I go at it and then do a U-turn away from it, lke a horse refusing at a five-bar gate. Maybe it shouldn’t be a play at all, but something else. Except that it’s not giving me any clues.

 

Alan Franks on the craft of creative writing



For me to try and tell anyone about the writing of fiction would be a bit rich. I’ve only had two works published, a novel called Boychester’s Bugle and a novella called Going Over. Still, how the first one came about felt like a good narrative, living in it as I was. The Sunday Times thought it was worth a brief article.  I’d got a bit frustrated by writing short things, mostly song lyrics and journalism, and my then wife suggested I should try something longer. Fine, I said, but what about. She hadn’t any particular ideas either, but said she was sure something would turn up if I thought hard enough about it.  So I did. In fact I started thinking about it on the train to work the next day, and the day after that and the day after that. Eventually I did find myself scribbling down some dialogue and possible story lines. In fact it was probably this which led me on to writing plays, which are after all fiction, and I don’t think they should be completely banished from that category just because they are written in dialogue rather than prose. What I would say is that prose is as hard as it gets, like breaking boulders sometimes, while with dialogue you can to some extent hitch a lift on the ways people speak. Still, I always find myself thinking that whatever medium I’m trying to write in is the hardest. All that says is that writing is hard, which is not news.
 I thought the only way I would finish a book would be to make a daily target of words, one that was rigourous but feasible. I settled on a thousand words, or five sides of the spiral-bound notebook I was writing in. Five hundred words on the way into work, the journey taking about an hour, and five hundred back. Top-ups were allowed at other times, like lunch, or early mornings, and I had an undertaking with myself that whenever I failed to make the thousand I would do more the next day, or the one after, to compensate. A thousand words is an awful lot when you can’t write anything, and nothing when you can.
 I had a rough, a really very rough sense of structure, in which someone unpleasant would get his come-uppance from someone he head been persecuting. There were several characters involved; one of them was called Boychester, as in Boychester’s Bugle, the eventual name of the book; another was an Irishman called Cathal Dwyer and a third was a young Jewish man called Camina. The first and last weren’t really modelled on anyone, but Dwyer’s speech, and perhaps his soul, came from someone whom I knew. At least, if I had not known this man, then this fictional person would not have come into being in the way he did. The character was obsessed with Irish history, and had a hamster called Charles Stuart Parnell, the great nineteenth century political leader brought down by scandal. As for Camina, he was tormented by dreams in which he found himself as Isaac Rosenberg, the tragic young First War poet from East London.
 I don’t know why these characters went the ways they did, only that they found a sort of life of their own by negotiating with each other and with me. That’s the only way I can describe it. If it sounds odd, all I can say is that it didn’t feel like it, and many experienced professional fiction writers say more or less the same thing – the characters fashion themselves as much as you do.
 To cut a long story (well, it was about 600 scribbled notebook pages), I finished it. I still hadn’t told my wife that I was doing it. I don’t quite know why – I suppose I didn’t want to raise her or anybody else’s expectations. I do know that, having got that far with it in secrecy, I thought I’d try and continue that way for a while longer. The next problem was how to type it up wthout anyone knowing. At that time I was a member of a baby-sitting circle, in which parents of young children would do reciprocal shifts of child-minding. The trick was to find the houses with nice quiet children who went to bed early and without a fuss; I took a typewriter with me and got into a routine of about five or six sheets of A4 per baby-sit – about three thousand words. There was one house with a single, really loud little boy who seemed never to sleep, but two or three others with exemplary, docile, tired children. By 8.30 or nine I was at the keyboard, and carried on till the parents got back around midnight. Fifteen or twenty of these  evenings, over a period of a few months, and I was done. About 200 pages of typescript. When I finally showed it to my wife, she was very surprised, having forgotten our conversation all those months earlier. She read it and liked it. There was a rather knowing quality to her laughter as she kept seeing parallels between the characters and people we knew. Some of these I denied, but others I couldn’t credibly disown.
 I fired off letters to publishers and most of them replied. Of these, about half said they’d have a look at the manuscript, and of that number about a quarter, i.e. two or three, wrote back to say thanks but no thanks. There was one which said it had very nearly decided to publish it – nearly but not quite. Very disappointing, much more so than the ones that got nowehere near, but enough encouragement to make me carry on.
 Then  the phone rang and it was someone from Heinemann. He said he thought it was terrific; I was convinced this was a hoax by some nasty piece of work from my past, but it was not. I met the man for lunch, during which my spirits slumped again as he spent the entire meal without discussing the book. I concluded that he must be “auditioning” me for some non-fiction project which the company wanted to do. It was only afterwards, as we were saying goodbye on the pavement, that he mentioned the book was on the spring list and I would get my contract in the post before the end of the week.
 It came out and it did OK. Some of the reviews were more than OK, while others thought it was juvenile and unfunny. As for the reaction of the man on whom I’d based Cathal Dwyer, I’d put the problem out of my mind. It seemed so insoluble that it was best left alone. To deal with it would have meant altering the character substantially and that in turn would have meant altering the book substantially. I couldn’t do it, but then still less could I consider cancelling the whole thing. I got a letter from him. It was warm and generous, but he wanted me to know that he knew, and who could blame him. This he did by quibbling with the spelling of a particular name. “The rest,” he said, “you’ve got more or less right.”