Once More With Footnotes

Dad!"
     
     
                  And I see the falling snow, how it glitters ...
                  And I hear the creaking.
                  God help us, every one.
     

Maybe it's the influence of the Net, but people talk about writing in terms of "getting. " Where do you get your ideas/your characters/the time? The unspoken words are: show me the co-ordinates of the Holy Grail.
     
    And, at best, you throw up a barrage of cliché s, which have become cliché s because ... well, they're true, and they wo rk. I've heard lots of authors talk on the subject and we all, in our various ways, come out with the same half a dozen or so cliché s. And you get the sense that this isn't exactly what's wanted, but people go on asking, in the hope that one day you'll for get and pass on the real secret.
     
    Still, this newspaper paid. That's one of the tips, by the way.
     
     
     
     
     
P aperback W riter
     
                  When I was thirteen, I went to my first science fiction convention. How long ago was that? So long ago that everyone wore sports ja ckets, except for Mike Moorcock.
     
                  Most science fiction writers were once fans. There's a habit they have, not of paying back, but of paying forward; I know of no other branch of literature where the established "names" so keenly encourage wannabe writers to become their competitors.
     
                  I came back from that event determined to be a writer. After all, I'd shaken hands with Arthur C. Clarke, so now it was just a matter of hard work ...
     
                  The first thing I do when I finish a new book is start a new one. This w as a course of action suggested, I believe, by the late Douglas Adams, although regrettably he famously failed to follow his own advice.
     
                  The last few months of a book are taxing. E-mails zip back and forth, the overtones of the English word "cacky" are e xplained to the US editor who soberly agrees that "poop" is no substitute, the author stares at text they've read so often that they've lost all grasp of it as a narrative, and rewrites and tinkers and then hits Send —
     
                  — and it's gone, in these modern time s, without even the therapy of printing it out. One minute you're a writer, next minute you have written. And that's the time, just at that point when the warm rosy glow of having finished a book is about to give way to the black pit of post-natal despair at having finished a book, that you start again. It also means you have an excuse for not tidying away your reference books, a consideration not to be lightly cast aside in this office, where books are used as bookmarks for other books.
     
                  The next title is not a book yet. It's a possible intro, a possible name, maybe some sketches that could become scenes, a conversation, some newspaper clippings, a few bookmarks in an old history book, perhaps even ten thousand words typed to try things out. You are not a bum. You are now back in the game. You are working on a book.
     
                  You are also fiddling with your internal radio. Once you're tuned in on the next book, research comes and kicks your door down. Something is casually mentioned on TV. A book about something el se entirely throws our a historical fact that, right at this moment, you really need to know. You sit down to dinner next to an ambassador who is happy to chat about the legal questions that arise when a murder is committed in a embassy and the murderer fl ees outside, i.e., technically into another country, and the plot gulps down this tidbit.
     
                  People are magnificent research, almost the best there is. An old copper will tell you more about policing than a textbook ever will. An old lady is happy to talk a bout life as a midwife in the 1930s, a long way from any doctor, while your blood runs cold. A retired postman tells you it's not just the front end of dogs that can make early-morning deliveries so fraught ...
     
                  Undirected research goes on all the time, o f course. There's no research like the research you're doing when you think you're just enjoying yourself. In Hay-on-Wye, under very noses of other authors, I picked up that not-very-famous work The Cyclopedia of Commercial and Business ANECDOTES; comprisi ng INTERESTING REMINISCENCES AND FACTS,