How I Came to Write My 420,000 Word Novel
When the inner pressure to write overcomes the resistance to writing
Most mornings, for over ten years, when I wasn’t teaching, I would sit down for three hours at a time to eke out a narrative consisting of several contributing threads I intended to form the architecture of a novel. I continued and edited and edited and revised and revised until there it was, I had it — at around 420,000 words or roughly 1200 pages.
That was, in part, how I went about writing the thing. (There were also the copious research and the gluttonous consumption of the novels of so many real writers from whom I was doing my best to learn.)
That, in broad strokes, was the process. But how did I come to write this presumptuous leviathan? I’d never attempted to pen a novel before nor write any fiction apart from a couple of misjudged screenplays, and had barely attempted anything for years. I had no writers, no journalists, no filmmakers, no artists in my family background to validate me, so what was it that prompted me to embark on an enterprise so apparently foolhardy?
At first, I thought I’d try another screenplay. But that wouldn’t have been adequate given what I was to discover — not with the material and canvas I found myself envisaging.
One day, during a visit to my native England, my father, suffering from chronic Parkinsons, handed me a cardboard box overflowing with his pre-internet research into our family history — passing the baton to me, so to speak.
At around that time, I was discovering the novels of W. G. Sebald and their flaneurial narratives and distinctive metafictional discourse, the likes of which I couldn’t remember encountering ever before. Austerlitz, The Emigrants, Vertigo, and in particular The Rings of Saturn seemed to awake in me a sense of the possibilities of prose and fiction free of the constraints I had picked up in my adherence to movies, particularly mainstream movies.
Here was the articulation of innovative connective tissue, the interplay of history and anecdote, of documentation and mischievous invention that promised a way forward I’d never before imagined.
When it comes to film — since I’m hardly going to dismiss the medium dominant in my life — this was the year of Paul Thomas Anderson’s There Will Be Blood. Adapted from a novel by Upton Sinclair, this rambling epic of the screen alerted me to the constraints I had previously been subjugated by, and to which this film paid little attention.
Back in Los Angeles, I was teaching class to young directors whose courage in their life choice and their bold fledgling filmmaking could do nothing but leave me inspired.
So the impetus was there, some possible material maybe: the unlikely admixture of stories from my family history, my research into it — a narrative in itself — plus my work as an educator and my sense of my students, plus that rich terrain of the essay, of philosophy, of prose by turns meditative and mischievous to which the works of Sebald beckoned.
What all this was suggesting to me as well was the centrality, the foundation of voice.
More than technique, more than the ingenuities of plot, more than the expectations, even the imperatives of the novel, voice, I came to realize, is the primary enabler.
I was beginning to think I might even have it — at least after a fashion. The only way to find out, it struck me, was to make a start…
In my family research, I came across a two times great grandfather on leave from his service as a river pilot in India in 1858. He and his 17-year old mistress, my two times great grandmother, were resident in Marylebone, then in Middlesex but now in London, and not so far from Madame Tussaud’s wax museum. I decided to have them set eyes on each other, for the first time, in Tussaud’s Chamber of Horrors. I was soon imagining the moment, finding its tone of dark comedy, and before long had a rough draft of my first chapter, together with some hint of voice I didn’t wish to think about or define too much. (I’m not sure the artist should consciously consider their voice. If they feel it, they should forget about it and just get on with their work. If it’s there, it will come out)
I was deciding to take two pairs of my great great grandparents, one paternal (a drunken railway signalman and his heroic wife), one maternal (the pilot and his mistress), give them each a narrative thread, add the auto-fictional contemporary story of a film school teacher of dubious character based loosely on myself and my insecurities, as well as indefensible thoughts that would flash across my mind before being consigned to what Jung called the shadow — where they rightly belonged. I would wind these three narratives around each other, chapter by chapter, in a form something like DNA’s double helix but triple in construction. The teacher would be researching his great grandparents, as I was doing, while jealous of a prodigiously talented student in his class and acting on his envy. The threads would connect across time and space.
One element of the book’s structure then…
The next step was related to linear structure. I recalled a class given by Three Colors director Krzysztof Kieślowski that I had on a DVD and would play to my students. The master talked of how, in constructing a treatment then a screenplay, he would constantly switch from detail to big picture and back again, from the granular to the architectural, over and over, the one informing the nature of the other as the entirety came together.
I followed suit and this brought me to realize the book should be comprised of six sections or sub-books.
From the moment I started, I found myself writing in the point of view of each character, these fictional precarious beings allotted alternating chapters, not in the first person but in my favorite mode of narrative POV — third person intimate or limited. And my great great grandmothers were having every bit as much to say as the men.
As the work and my research progressed, I ambitiously imagined the book to be a combination of W. G. Sebald’s distinctive forays and the historical fiction of authors such as Hilary Mantel (Wolf Hall) and Marguerite Yourcenar (Memoirs of Hadrian). I fell short of course but I gratefully took from the lessons of those writers.
Here’s a passage from the historical fiction angle describing my great great grandfather’s arrival in India at fifteen years of age in 1843 as an apprentice in the “Honorable East India Company”, in its Bengal Pilot Service (“Honorable” that outfit certainly never was):
The sky had not at first been visible as the ship began its approach towards the delta in January of 1843 and when all Alexander Scott had been able to see at the Sandheads was the pilot brig aglow in the last smother of night.
Both vessels, one after the other, had fired maroons to dazzle the heavens and there had followed a wait of half an hour or more until he heard a busying aboard the brig, shortly after which, barely perceptible in the dawn’s meagre lambency, the pinnace carrying the pilot himself, the navigator of the Bengal Service, began to ply its steady way towards them.
By the time this officer, a confident stocky man in cap and frock coat of navy blue calico, had with his young leadsman climbed aboard The Lord Hungerford to be greeted by Captain Piggot, a third individual following them — a native servant it seemed to Alexander, who laden down with cooking utensils had made a fearful racket when clambering up the side — the first of the golden shafts from the east had struck the flat waves and the black ocean around them seemed suddenly alive as though a fire had shot across a rippled plain to consume all in its path.
He hadn’t known whether to marvel at the sight or ignore it. Could he allow himself, despite his disdain for the fanciful exaggerations of the poets, to interpret this as an augury of a future that was soon to be his, or was it merely the start of the day, a day like any other?
Certainly neither Captain Piggot nor his crew — the bosuns and the officers on deck and the men following their commands — nor the two arrivals or the servant, made any comment, nor appeared to regard the pageant as anything of the slightest significance, and so he quickly forgot the intimation. There was work to do for these men, tasks to which, he knew, he must soon acquaint himself.
I had been researching this young, aspiring “leadsman” and his progress up the ranks in the India Office Records at the British Library. This is an excerpt in which I describe the place through the eyes of my fictional alter ego, himself researching Alexander Scott:
The stairways that criss-cross the atrium hold within their embrace a vast core that rises, as though born of the strata below — the London clay and bedrock — through the lower tiers, on up through the mezzanine, the balconies, and the balustrades of the ascending floors, and higher still to the white opacity hanging six storeys above.
This broad column — a building inside a building, he observes — has two four-sided integuments, the one within the other, the outer of glass, sheen hard, ascent clean, icy membrane perceptible to the eye by the slashes and strokes of mirrored light glancing off its machined perfection.
The inner, behind the gloss of glass, comprises a congeries of books, side by side, row upon row, shelf over shelf — tomes, manuscripts, ledgers, chronicles, histories, manuals, manifestos, atlases, gazetteers, dictionaries, novels, novellas, bibles, omnibuses, treatises and tracts — volumes sacred, profane, printed, inked, scrawled in pencil, their dim discourse fading, or painted in vivid pigment, and laden with gold leaf burnished and pristine as the day the pages were stuck in the stink of hot glue and bound between their boards.
Ancient to modern, masterpiece to mediocrity, literature to record, the rarified to the base — erudite philosophy to meretricious gossip, slander, libel and character assassination — they stand shoulder to shoulder, the hundreds and thousands, each spine a sentinel, each title a weapon, crammed on shelves that stretch the pellucid breadth of the structure…
Here’s something else from the hapless film school teacher’s thread. His brilliant student is on the verge of securing a fictional movie star the teacher knew before his fame for his first feature. When the three meet, in the Oxfordshire village of my paternal laboring ancestors, the actor, called Jonathan Jacks mischievously humiliates his former friend, my alter ego, in front of his student:
“But if you weren’t teaching, if you were on a set, now, this minute, here, the three of us characters, our conversation a scene, how would you break it down, stage it, shoot it? If we were actors what would you say to us? About our objectives, obstacles, actions? Should we remain in situ or should we move? What would you say to your DP? Would you have him move the camera or not? What lenses would you think right? How should we be lit? Those curtains,” he indicates the emerald drapes framing the window, “should they be open that much? More? Less? And you on that chair (is it uncomfortable?) — is that chair right? When you fidget about on it does that introduce an element of comedy tonally out of place in an otherwise tense scene?”
The reader often finds the teacher alone with his thoughts. I used the tangled morass of plugs and cables under my own desk as the prompt for this passage about his musings on the whereabouts of the seat of the soul:
The quintessence of us you say? Isn’t it a bit of a stretch to imagine that such a thing exists, somewhere within us? Aren’t we all not so much predicated upon some unchanging metaphysical core but more the consequence of a mishmash of incongruous facets and functions — stimulative, instinctive, genetic, memetic, bio-chemical, bio-electrical, cultural and other stuff too probably — all squabbling and fighting for dominance?
(Where free will fits into this commotion, if it does, confuses him, so whether one’s autonomous self can be truly autonomous is a conundrum that has him stumped).
Absent any novel insight of his own, he agrees with those who consider that if such a thing as an essence of self were to exist, having survived the cynics of the twentieth century, which would render it a plucky entity indeed, it would surely lurk in the watery cortex of the brain, in its grey, squidgy matter, or more specifically in one part of it, the frontal lobes or Broca’s Area or Wernicke’s where capacity for language is supposedly located, or perhaps it would drift around the entire soggy apparatus eschewing any permanent foundation.
It’s not as if there aren’t times when it feels that way, when it seems to be here now, there next, above after, below after that, forwards later, back later still, left-side one moment, right-side the next (when he’s on occasions feeling rational).
Toward the novel’s end there’s an episode that takes place in the mountain station atop Mount Jacinto overlooking Palm Springs. Fictional alter-ego Paul Markham meets with purely fictional character Terpsichore Stibbs, new wife of the fictional movie star Jonathan Jacks. I used my own experience of visiting the spot, having brought into the story for Paul the illness I myself had gone through a few years before and putting my fears from that period on the page:
“I don’t get it,” Paul says, breathing the sun’s benevolence as he peers past a coin-slot telescope, gazes over the tundra enshrouding the station, decks, rails, outbuildings and slopes nacreous with glare, and stares out across the amphitheatre beyond, silent and remote, its vast autochthonous haze so ponderously geological in shift that if someone doesn’t hurry it up the past will fall so far behind the present there won’t be a past anymore, and the world will consist of nothing but shopping malls, video games, and social media.
“We could have met in Palm Springs,” he protests. “Why didn’t we?”
Her shades glint. The sun emergent upon her appearance? Or maybe a hidden flash of eyes so swift the lenses have been taken unawares. He turns to the tectonic stretch before them, horizoned in vacant glory: the geometry of Palm Springs, the vast sleeve of the Coachella Valley, the querulous foothills beyond, the upturned and rising massif — a ridge saurian further still — and the high desert parched to Joshua Tree, to Twenty Nine Palms and the interior continent landlocked thereafter.
Two hundred miles on a clear day, or so he’s read. London to Manchester. Room to swing a cat — any such swingable creature to hand…
“I didn’t want to see you, like, just any-old-where,” she says. “I needed to get away. You know how it is with Jonny. He’s a guy. Guys let things get to them.”
“So what’s got to him so we have to meet eight miles high?”
Terpsichore adjusts the child carrier, pulls at the shoulder straps to get comfortable, or to prepare herself perhaps for what she’s come to say. The vista sings its inaudible anthem meanwhile, the arc overhead that engulfs its expanse a welling ocean whose soundless blue could swallow Paul up, he fears, and perhaps will if treatment and surgery don’t do their job.
This novel Alidade has never been published. Plaudits from a couple of notable authors kindly reading chapters were generously encouraging, an agent about to go for it until her boss stepped in, opining that the storytelling was too slow. (Yes, its a novel not a car) but other agents ignored my queries, only the occasional soul responding with a summary rejection.
Director Steven Soderbergh, in his briefest of Academy Awards speeches in 2000, made sure to thank “anyone who spends part of their day creating.”
Being such an “anyone”, I recalled those words frequently. They gave me support, page upon page, while allowing me to feel among the many who “spend part of their day creating” — a notion both fortifying and energizing.
There has turned out to be another benefit to the daily scribbling (if one can scribble on a laptop’s keyboard) and that is I don’t think I could have written and and published the two books of non-fiction I’ve produced since without it. The experience of writing fiction taught me to think through sentences on the page and to co-opt this symbiosis of mind and prose in my address to the reader.
Now I can offer another benefit, the most important one maybe: that by revealing my endeavor in this article I hope I may prompt those readers who might be hesitating to make a start, whether on a short story, a novella, a novel of whatever length or ambition to go ahead and to make that start.
Like myself, you might reap rewards you never anticipated. Perhaps, even, you might find your work published…
Peter Markham
November 2024
Author:
- The Art of the Filmmaker: The Practical Aesthetics of the Screen (Oxford University Press) 10/23
- What’s the Story? The Director Meets Their Screenplay (Focal Press/Routledge) 9/20
