The
questions most frequently asked of great novelists must surely
be: where do you get your ideas from, and how exactly do you
work? Well, from my very brief experience of writing great
novels, this is what the routine seems to be. You sit at your
desk in the morning. On this desk are a computer, a cup of
tea, a lucky gonk and some spare opium. You stare out of the
window for a couple of minutes, and then you begin to write.
Oh, it's great stuff. God, this is good. You can forget the
Booker, Salman, this year's is pretty much in the bag. After
what seems an age, you stare at your screen and the words
"Chapter One" stare back at you. You admire these
words for about five minutes, but then doubts set in. You
get up from your seat and pace up and down. You decide to
make more tea, but in the kitchen you spot a pile of ironing.
You do the ironing. Then you make another cup of tea, which
you drink in the kitchen, feeling miserable. You return to
your screen, and begin to type once more. By lunch, the words
"Chapter One" now read "Part the First".
It's certainly got style, but is it really an improvement?
You are not sure. By the end of the day, it's been changed
back to "Chapter One".
I am pleased to report, however, that this
is very much yesterday's way of writing the great novel. It
was all right for Dickens, Tolstoy and that crowd, but from
now on, the modern author will be doing it all by computer.
A businessman called Richard Lee has invented some software
called NewNovelist, which - for £29.99 - claims to take
the pain out of creativity. Lee was, until recently, a director
of a management training company and, as management gurus
tend to, he has decided that what novelists really need is
the application of some proper structural discipline. He has
broken down the process of writing a book into five stages.
The author still faces a blank sheet of paper - or at least
the computer version of a blank sheet of paper - but that
paper is surrounded by instructions. You will be guided gently
through the whole ghastly thing. It is so gentle that the
first instruction reads as follows:
"What we are going to do now.
1 Choose a name for your novel
2 Decide the story concept
3 Choose a story category
4 Choose a story type."
No mention here, the trained eye will have spotted, of making
cups of tea or skulking in the kitchen.
Let's skip the name for a moment and establish
the concept. "Think of this," the computer advises,
"as a headline that would be used in a newspaper if your
story were the lead article." Good advice, although whether
it turns out to be great advice depends on which newspaper
you happen to read. For example, take Animal Farm. If you
read The Sun, your story concept might be: It's Trough at
the Top! Shock for Labour as Pigs Seize Power. The Guardian,
on the other hand, might see things very differently: Animal
Rights Are Priority for New Government. The software itself
prefers the example of Lethal Weapon: "Lonely Cop solves,
through adversity, a major crime." To test the claims
of NewNovelist, I am planning to use it to produce a pioneering
work of chick-lit. My concept is "Love-tryst mum in death
plunge" and I thought I would call it Anna Karenina.
The next stage is story category. Using a series of pull-down
menus, the author is asked to choose exactly which type of
story is to be told. Is it plot, epic or character? I chose
epic. I see Anna Karenina as a huge doorstop of a novel in,
say, 239 chapters. After choosing "epic" from the
pull-down menu, I must then choose what type of story I intend
to tell.
According to NewNovelist, most stories can
be boiled down to 14 distinctive plots: puzzle, locale adventure,
chase, capture and escape, triumphant victim, revenge, kidnap
and rescue, supernatural, love story, intense love story,
coming of age, character adventure, excess and downfall, and
internal transformation. Although Anna Karenina will have
more than a touch of excess and downfall, my feeling is that
it's an intense love story. And so to stage four, world creation.
This is the bit in which you create your characters. To help
with this, the computer offers 22 characteristics to consider.
What moral is learned by your hero at the end of the story?
What things do they like most? How do they dress? What errors
do they continue to make through their lack of self- awareness?
This is obviously going to keep me very busy. I see a broad
sweep of about 142 characters: counts, princesses, dashing
army officers, a handful of peasants for comic effect, a governess
or two and somebody to handle the subplot. Once this has been
decided, you are ready to write your book. I regret to say,
however, that after the effort of trying to create 142 characters,
I have decided
 |
that being a great novelist is probably not
for me.
Most people, however, will find that the magic of NewNovelist
is that it doesn't feel as if you are writing a book. Most
writers fiddle with their computer as displacement activity.
For the cybernovelist, fiddling with the computer is actual
productive work. While you're filling in all the details about
your character, you are writing without knowing it. As far
as I can tell, there is only one drawback: you'll never get
the ironing done. |
