Now that my ladder's gone
I must lie down where all the ladders start
In the foul rag and bone shop of the heart.
W B Yeats wrote the Circus Animals’ Desertion at the end of his life. It is an old man’s poem about lacking inspiration - about losing his own youthful vigour in finding the muse - querying what he did with it - interrogating his former work on fanciful myths and moral struggles.
Yeats, stuck, looks for where he can find the authentic, and he ends in this magnificent last line. He must get down and dirty in his own being, his own heart - rooted in the strange, the used and the foul.
Many authors don’t want to delve too deeply into why they write what they do - where their stuff comes from. They are frightened of what they will see in the cellar, or that if they shine too bright a light, the ‘circus animals’, the freakshow of inspiration might scamper off.
Writing is a tension between the free range of the imagination and something disciplined, structured, and purposeful.
The questions
Yeats says in the poem ‘It was the dream itself enchanted me’. Enchantment with an idea is not necessarily enchantment with the work to deliver it. A story is an agglutinative process. ‘I’ve got a good idea’ brings a hundred questions and other ideas to shape it.
As for the core choices:
Should you write what burns in your heart, or what will sell?
Should you write to be read widely, or only for kindred souls?
Should you write to entertain, to send a message, or both?
Should you write ‘the same sort of book’ to build your readership, or more widely?
It seems obvious that these are spectrums, not yes-no issues.
Publishing commercially, or self-publishing in a business-like way, are good ways to reach a wider audience. Both impose constraints on what you do.
Several experienced writers I know, having made arguments for writing somewhere defined in the market, ultimately recommend what the heart wants. Many absolutely focus on what sells.
My recent work
I’m now querying a Victorian ghosty murder mystery DEAR HEART. I didn’t write this from nowhere – of ten ideas it was the most developed, and the one my then agent said was probably the best idea commercially. People who loved my two published books and who’ve seen a draft loved this.
I never delete any ideas, stories in any state of completion, research notes or versions. My computer back up is a true rag and bone shop.
I wrote Dear Heart because I loved the flawed, mostly lovable characters – who existed in another story written years ago. They were too good to waste and I had a couple of false starts before landing them back in 1880s England. I was determined to write characters more morally flawed than those in Our Child of the Stars. Also, I love Gene and Molly to bits but they’re awfully straight – I wanted to write characters at odds with society because of who they loved and how. I conceived of the main arc of the story as a solid detective story plot. I knew observations on the Victorian world shed a light on our own time. Finally, I write books and stories I would read if someone else wrote them.
Where does it go in the bookshop? Fantastic elements don’t stop it being a murder mystery. In fact, it’s a ‘fair’ detective story – you know exactly what the detective knows. A fantasy can be a coming-of-age novel, a romance, a war story, a heist movie or a comedy of manners. Conversely, many readers of murder mysteries read other things too. The subgenre ‘supernatural detective story’ may cover it.
Why write Young Adult (YA) fiction?
The novella is a platypus. It has only two points of view, one of a 16-year-old, the other an adult. Most chapters are in the teenager’s point of view. This makes the novella young adult (YA) by the current market dogma.
Indeed, YA stories typically involve a teenager struggling to understand themselves and their place in the world, which is certainly what happens here. My first unpublished novel was YA.
How far is the YA market for and read by young adults? Surveys suggest that at least half the readers of YA are over 18 – although lots are under thirty and few as old as me. Adults are big viewers of online YA dramas. It may even be that this affects how young adult stories are presented.
It is easy to present this as being escapist and a sign of an immature culture. Mind you, I remember a time when conventional fiction seemed to be about marriage difficulties and YA was ‘the repressive government and its client media are lying to you and using violence as spectacle to prevent reform.’
I know I read YA because it’s often short and accessible. It shows me different lives. It can be escapist, like many things, but it can look at serious issues. And I don’t necessarily want every story I read to be about mortgages, life insurance, bowel cancer tests and the school run. (Some stories must be. I am interested in the whole of life.)
There is a deeper reason – the rag and bone shop of my heart. Without wishing to, I revisit youth, childhood and family to process my own life, and those of people I know. Like many readers, I found myself distant from other children – in adulthood my understanding of the adults in my life changed. I grew up in a loving, solid, prosperous setting – a lucky one - yet I was policed about who I was and who I could become.
I was in my early thirties before I understood relationships, my sexuality, my relationship with the universe, and what I was doing in the world to improve it.
I write a lot about the drama of families. Not least as a brilliant way to make simple quests difficult! I revisit the experience of my youth and see its characters in more dimensions. Stories occur to me all the time from the young person’s viewpoint. I am interested in what might have been, and what could be. Many people my age appear to have no empathy for young people and the world we are leaving them.
I don’t know if write YA well enough for young people and I don’t know whether I intend to write lots of it.
I am obsessed with finishing this novella, even if it ends up too long. After all, a platypus works as a creature, whether you think it fits neatly into a genre or not.
Finale
With several other projects to complete, another idea comes
A troubled family in danger
Two speculative fiction tropes not usually seen together (one subverted)
Love, power, justice and a mildly hopeful ending
I may never write it but it shows where the heart is.
Let me know what you think - or what you want to hear about. And a more conventional update will come.
From the archive