Beginning

Conquering the Blank Page

Beginning: Conquering the Blank Page

Where to start?

For a long time, I was put off beginning anything by Iris Murdoch's (correct) observation that 'All novels are the wreck of a good idea'. Most writers don't start in the sense that they can look back and think this is where it all began. They don't begin by readying the quill pen, rolling up their sleeves before applying it to a sheet of pristine foolscap to inscribe Chapter One in a regal hand. Most writing projects are begun with an idea that strikes when they're nowhere near a sheet of paper or able to access their i-Phone's notes function. In the shower. Or changing a nappy. Or in the middle of a meeting at work. Whether it's a poem or a screenplay or an epic novel, all start with what Martin Amis described as 'a throb'. The good vibration of a sound idea. One that will carry you through the years of poverty and breakdown required to complete it. The throb marks the moment when dreaming becomes action, when potential and possibility finally have to solidify into something actual. Or, as David Hare said about the vague feeling of melancholy that accompanies the catharsis of starting a project: 'Once it was everything. Now it has to be something'.

In this sense, the problem of beginning is, paradoxically, more like the problem of ending. The great dilemma of when – and how – to call time on all prior, failed attempts. Those false starts and bum-steers that litter or plague every writer’s so-called career (and, if it's a first book, they don’t have one yet). At what point can they definitively say to the world: ‘Hi. Here I am. Please give me a paragraph’s grace, because, despite the oppressive weight of 400 years of soaring prose from Cervantes to Woolf to Baldwin, I’m going to have a go myself’? Only when they can confidently announce the above will they be able to ditch the unpublishable crap they nevertheless secretly hope will one day be appended to their Collected Works under ‘Juvenilia’.

Naturally, a beginning shouldn’t be seen as merely a gauntlet set down by the greats. An artist must first have something to say, as Kandinsky warned, axiomatically. It’s how to say what you have to say that forms the crux of the problem. The overall tone or mode or register, let alone fundamental questions of exposition, or first-person versus third, et cetera. The opening line is a bell that has to be struck from the very first word. Heaney, in the introduction to his translation of Beowulf, called this ‘finding the enabling note’. And the musical metaphor is apt. Start off in the wrong key, and it’s all downhill from there.

Like the famous deathbed line (Nelson’s, Larkin’s), the famous first line also exerts an anxiety of influence. There was no possibility of taking a walk that . . . If I am out of my mind, it’s . . . All happy families. You get the picture. Judging by the preceding examples, a quiet or neutral tone seems the best option. But thinking about it too much can be paralysing. The original first line of my first novel, Byron Easy, was: I must never get my hands on a gun. I remember where I was when I wrote it. I was lying on a wine-spattered futon in a Crouch End attic room, not dissimilar to the one Byron almost immolates in the novel. At the time I was working in a recording studio and not earning much money. I wish I could say I was sharing a hipbath with Vicky Licorish, as Jeanette Winterson states in her introduction to Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, but I have nothing so glamorously demi-monde to offer. However, a roll-up cigarette was most certainly dwindling in my pub-stolen Bass ashtray. A January rain was spitting inimically against the sash window. And I was flushed with the adrenalin of beginning. On balance, I was pretty proud of the line. I felt I had located the voice; had ended all my previous failed attempts to hear it. What’s more, this opening salvo was – rather self-consciously, as I knew Byron Easy was to be a failed poet – a pentameter. I must never get my hands on a gun. I imagined this was mighty clever until, many years later, my agent drew a crisp blue line though it, yawning that she had ‘read it all before.’ And she was correct. It’s the opening line of a third-rate thriller.

Thus began the long process of revision. The beginning pages of a novel are always the ones that endure the most stringent rewriting, and Byron Easy was no exception. Looking at the present opening pages again, they are almost unrecognisable from those of the Crouch End days. They seem more a palimpsest, a mosaic formed from the competing demands of establishing character, incident, narrative momentum, and, of course, voice. In the end, I settled for My name is Byron Easy. Logical, perhaps, with the book being an eponymous novel (although that title changed over time too. One working handle was Station to Station. Second-hand, yes, but not as rubbish as Trimalchio in West Egg). Announcing the protagonist in the first line has precedent, of course. Call me Ishmael. Although, frustratingly, little is made of this spellbinding narrator’s name in the remaining 500 pages of Melville’s epic. And maybe, looking back, too much is made of mine. It’s easy to get carried away when juvenilia is still shackling one’s ankles. No matter. I had solved the problem of beginning, and (not quite the same thing in terms of becoming a novelist) of making a start.

The worst thing a writer can do, while in the act, is imagine the paragraph they’re struggling with appearing between stout hardcovers on a groaning Waterstone’s table – that heart-stoppingly glamorous moment of seeing the finished artefact sitting there, ticking intelligently; a literary time-bomb, waiting to explode in the face of an unsuspecting reader. To become self-conscious about the future of the work is fatal. Just get it down, the mad voice insists, inwardly.

The same practical attitude should apply to the writing process. I wish I'd encountered Ray Bradbury’s peerless advice ('put your butt in the chair and write on a regular basis') much earlier. After I'd finished my first novel - which was written all over the place - I decided to stick to a very strict and controlled regime. Alarm, 6.10 am. Blind trudge to the living-room desk, 6.30. An oil drum of tea. Commence reading back the previous day’s work, 7.30 . . . Helplessly peruse a paragraph of Nabokov, Turgenev, Alice Munro – succulent breakfast sweetmeats, 7.40. . . Then, at some point, inspiration would take one up on its wings, and actual writing would get done. Until 9.30 am, when it was time (for this author at least) to think about making an actual living. But it was a satisfyingly predictable and ordered routine – undergone at the same desk, six days a week. Trollope would have patted me on the head. What brought it to an end was the arrival of small children. I still get up early, but any writing now has to end at 7.30am.

It's a much-discussed fact that where one writes can profoundly influence a novel. In retrospect, there was something to be said for writing my debut all over the place – like one of those road albums (Led Zep II, say) where each track is recorded and mixed in a different studio. I always feel one can tell: can detect the different textures, spot the joins. The wide, plane-tree-planted streets of Crouch End were the backdrop for the writing of the first chapter of the book, along with chunks of the second and third. So far, so conventional. There probably isn’t a living room in Crouch that hasn’t had a novel attempted in it over the years. And I liked my two years of living there – maybe the lack of a Tube station, the village vibe, informed the fiction. There’s something hopeful and energetic and concentrated about that first chapter. After this idyll, the rest of the book was written on a helter-skelter ride through different locations. A streaking GNER train for the railway sequences (literally looking out of the window, pen in hand). A Brockley back bedroom, belonging to a girlfriend, for Byron’s back story (covering up what I was scribbling, like Austen, every time she came noseying in). The august library at UCL – oddly enough, some of the more erotic passages were forged here. Boredom? Or all that dry-as-dust learning making one horny? Other pages were whipped off in notebooks on the way to gigs; in the bath; in stolen moments at eccentric times of the day. Finally, the book was completed on an ailing PC in the Walthamstow flat where I was living at the time; facing a cancelled piece of brickwork to maximise concentration; endlessly reworking the last chapters. It’s a wonder any of it adds up. If you happen to be considering a novel, don’t try this at home. Office space, regular hours, and an en-suite jacuzzi is the way to go.

Yet, looking back, nothing can beat the unfettered freedom of those Crouch End pages. The occasional luxury of writing all day until dusk fell; then looking down from an attic window, Larkin-style, onto the heads of people waiting for the W7 bus; a sunset honouring the green glass of Alexandra Place. And all of it stored in the memory banks, ready to force my hand across the virgin page the following morning. All I needed to do was forget Iris Murdoch.