Describe the place where you write/draw.

I write in a room piled with papers, most of which are not my own, to the sound of telephones ringing with automated messages wanting to tell me how important it is that I sue somebody about Payment Protection Insurance. I write on a coach, with my laptop on my knees, while the commuter traffic crawls along stop-start-stop-start and the rain makes everybody sigh. I write on the squidgy surfaces of my own brain, lying awake at three in the morning or washing up after supper and half a bottle of wine (this last works really well, until you have to put actual words to what you were thinking and suddenly you can’t remember half of it).

What is your most treasured possession?

That has to be my sanity. I keep putting it somewhere and having to find it again. I’m so pleased when I do.

What times of the day do you work?

Mornings, when not shirking. If I’m writing at other times it’s not work it’s fun, and it’s probably happening because I’m shirking something else.

What distracts you?

Nothing distracts me. I have a mind like a coiled spring, will-power like tempered steel. I am focus, concentration, intensity. I am like a spider, patiently spinning a web. I am like a panther, poised to spring. I am… OOOH! MUFFINS!!

What is your favourite smell?

Muffins. Read the rest of this entry »

Stories and the sea. They go together, and there’s a reason why.
It may look like more than one reason, because in our stories the sea appears, like a grand old actor, in many different roles. But when you get down to it, I think it’s the same one.
It can be a platform for adventure. It provides a strange world, away from the one we know, in which imagination can roam free. I loved the C S Forester’s Hornblower novels as a child. They were filled with the language of seafaring, yawing and luffing and weathering storms. The sea is full of riches for the storyteller. You can let it bring you islands of pirates, junks and slave ships, terrible monsters and all that. You can – and this is very useful, if you are putting together a story – use it as a way of getting from place to place, scene to scene. ‘All aboard,’
cried the captain. ‘We sail with the evening tide,’ and off you go, with
the wind in your sails and a song in your heart. Looked at this way, the
long grass of Neil and Daniel’s Sea of Green in Pirates of Pangea is doing exactly what a sea should, even though it’s not wet and those sharp-toothy things down there are not sharks.
But we also use the sea in another way. It has a presence. It’s a powerful source of imagery and mood music, that doesn’t need to act directly on the story in order to influence it. At the same time I was reading Forester I was also reading Tolkien (there were at least a couple of years in my life when I read almost nothing else.) In Lord of the Rings the actors never lay eyes on the sea – not until right at the very end. And yet it’s referred to again and again. It’s there, enormous, impervious even to the vast evil of the world, setting a border to everything, calling everything that is good and beautiful to cross its shores. And in the end, they do. How many stories end with a departure by water? It’s a way of drawing a line under things. It is the image of a peaceful, accepting death, without having to write the words ‘they died.’ The sea has the power to do that for you.
Why do we walk by the sea? Taking a coast path immediately limits your freedom. It cuts the directions you can head in down to two. But of course, it’s not the physical freedom that matters. It’s the mental freedom – peaceful, exciting, however you like it – of walking along in the company of something utterly strange. Something you can see, touch, even cross. But to which you can never belong.
That’s the stuff of stories.

If ‘favourite story from the year’ means ‘book that came out in 2011’ then I’d have to agree with Conrad: Moon Pie is an excellent read, touching and funny and sad. It does that trick of following a harrowing series of events through the eyes of a child who does not fully understand what is happening to her family. The reader (who is allowed to get it just a bit before the child) watches first with a feeling of helplessness as the child makes her discovery, and then in awe at the natural human courage with which she faces it. And I can say that without fear or favour because Simon’s not my editor.

But Tilda lets us roam more widely. ‘Books, films, news stories and all,‘ she says, and so begs the very large and interesting question of what really is a story, and what isn’t. Because when you start to look at it, pretty well everything’s a story in one way or another. Stories are the way we make sense of our world. We take our perceptions and fit them into a pattern. That’s a story.

(I say ‘sense’, but I don’t necessarily mean sense. Tony’s story of the invasion of sheep reminded me of a story my Dad used to tell us on long car journeys, which began with an invasion of ferocious steel-woolled sheep from Mars who were paranoid about a prophecy that they would Get Knitted. It made no sense at all but it was a very funny story.)

Of all the stories, fact and fiction, that came my way in 2011 I’d have to pick the one about the News of the World. Not through Schadenfreude but because of its shape. Read the rest of this entry »

A man rides out of the muddy forests of Germany. Before him is a house, the country retreat of a gentle-born family where mother and daughter sit in the decorous idleness of a dying empire.

Our hero dismounts below the blank windows. He strides purposefully up the steps and hammers at the door. It opens, revealing a surprised and self-important little servant. And…

…Is the hero expected to produce a card?

This is the eighteenth century. Jane Austen and all that. We know that calling cards were part of the ritual in Jane Austen’s Bath. But this is not Bath. We’re not in any spa town, or any town of any kind. We’re on the ancestral estate, which consists of about three peasants and a pig. Callers are rare. Well, we think they are. Suddenly we’re not too sure about that either. Anyway, there’s a war on.

Research? By all means try, if you think that you’re going to find anything that will help. Googling ‘eighteenth-century calling card’ will probably tell you something about Bath and Jane Austen, but it won’t help your mud-bespattered young hussaur in the Franconian forest. At least, not in English it won’t. What’s the German? Achtzehnjahundertebesuchskarte? Maybe, but will you understand the answer even if you find one? No? So why did we start writing this novel in the first place?

And that’s the point. In just seconds you’ve gone from doubting one small detail to doubting your right to produce this novel at all. Doubt is fatal. If you write in doubt, readers will sense your disbelief. They won’t believe your world either. You can have all the research in the world in there, but if you’ve put it in because you were afraid of getting something wrong, it will not convince.

This is why most writers say they don’t do research, or don’t do it until afterwards anyway. The story is what matters – the momentum with which it unfolds. Leap those steps two at a time, with your spurs jingling spitefully at your heels. Snarl at the pompous little servant who tries to block your way. [Square brackets around the card, if you must – we’ll think about that later.] Now stalk down the unlit corridor to where the heroine and her mother wait. And there say to them the things that will change their world.

That’s how you tell a story.

 John Dickinson worked for 17 years in Whitehall and Brussels before becoming an author. He has published five novels: The Cup of the World, The Widow and the King, The Fatal Child, The Lightstep and WE.

I could not possibly disagree with either Linda or Melanie.

Well, yes I could. On one little little point. Linda’s title for her post “Thieving Magpies” was no doubt intended to be provocative. I am duly provoked :)

‘Theft’ implies property. The thing that is stolen belongs to someone else. But to whom does a work like Jane Eyre belong? Or The Turn of the Screw or The Silver Chair? Of course the law may allow heirs and corporations to own rights over past works. But that seems a bit like allowing the descendant of some Victorian collector to own treasures that his ancestor looted from the tombs of the Pharoahs.

The big, old, much-loved stories belong to everyone. They get retold and retold, in many forms. Not a year goes by without another Jane Austen TV serialisation or film re-make. Now, it would be a brave writer who actually tried to re-write Pride and Predjudice, but shift it to another century, put it in different clothes, call it Bridget Jones’ Diary and it works. Who’s the poorer? Read the rest of this entry »

Yes, I have Archie moments.  I have so many that when I look back they all blur into a miasma of misunderstanding and confusion.  Only the really grisly ones stand out clearly, complete in themselves.  You know - the ones that make you scream when you remember them.  (And then of course everyone in the room turns round and looks at you: another Archie moment.  They breed, you see.)   

It was my first ever publisher’s party.  My debut novel was due out the following month.  I went up and down the crowded room, proudly wearing my badge John Dickinson – Author and introducing myself to everyone: ‘How do you do? I’m John Dickinson‘ just in case they couldn’t read. Everyone was very nice. They are, at publisher’s parties.

‘How do you do?’ I said to the next person. I squinted at their badge. This too said Author. ‘What do you write?’

The author laughed dismissively. Not much really, was the answer. Bits and pieces. Non-fiction, mostly.

Read the rest of this entry »