Behind the Words: Christmas, 2000

It’s weird reading this back now. It isn’t one of the sections I ever used for public readings so I haven’t really looked at it since the final, final, final proofread before it went to the printers in early 2016.

            The first thing that strikes me as odd, six years after writing it, is the central part Indiana Jones seems to play in my conception of Christmas. In the extract from Life is Elsewhere/Burn your Flags I posted last week, Cormac references Raiders of the Lost Ark. Here it’s The Last Crusade. That isn’t intentional, just one of those things the subconscious throws up, I guess. In fact, if I had realised it, I probably would have changed the reference - Goldfinger, Back to the Future, Empire Strikes Back, one of those movies that in my head is always watched on TV with adverts and the Christmas lights flickering in the corner.

            Another thing that I hadn't realised - or at least hadn't consciously thought about at the time - is how much of my life in 2015 went into this book, and particularly this chapter: Bouldering, which my wife and I had just taken up (I quit after breaking my leg, she continues to this day). My dad was on a sea kayaking trip around this time, so that filtered into the view. The paragraph about spreading through the Polynesian islands comes straight from Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs and Steel which I was reading (also a huge influence on Cloud Atlas, fact fans).

            A lot of this borrowing was for a specific reason. The Waves Burn Bright was written in a constant state of panic, not helped by the subject matter. After publishing First Time Solo, Freight gave me a two-book deal for Silma Hill, which was already written, and an undecided second book. I had many ideas, and a novel about Piper Alpha was none of them. While kicking around possibilities with Adrian, the publisher at Freight, we touched on the subject of James Robertson's The Professor of Truth, ostensibly about the Lockerbie bombing, and David Peace's contemporary historical fiction (or historiographic metafiction, academia fans) and I said it was strange how no one had ever written fiction about Piper Alpha.

            “Someone really should.”

            “You should,” he said.

            “No, no, no, no, no.”

            “Yes.”

I was insistent, but convincible. My attitude to things like this is, “Say yes, work out how later.” As a result, I live my life in waves of barely-controlled panic. The problem here wasn’t just the sensitive subject matter, it was that the terms of the contract only gave me a year from conception to delivery.

            My mental health at the time aside, this deadline meant I had little room for working out ancillary details like what movies Carrie might associate with Christmas (although for a field geologist, Indiana Jones isn't a leap) or whether she would have read Jared Diamond. I grabbed at likely details in the knowledge that there would be many rounds with my editor, Rodge Glass, and various proofreaders during which to catch things that made characters too obviously me.

       The choices you made, they could take you by surprise.

This line by Carrie, a kind of throwaway in the scene, has ended up - ironically - being the most symbolic to me of the whole book and, perhaps, of my life. We make choices without always understanding why we are leaning one way or the other. For Carrie, the idea is that she's driven by trauma and that all her decisions are fight or flight reflexes, something the reader understands but Carrie is very slow to see (yes, Carrie is an archetypal unreliable narrator). For me, I still don't know, really, how I ended up in Japan. Little decisions that snowball, the next step looking logical from where you are standing, it's only when you look back at the road you wonder where on Earth you thought you were going.

            I remember being very much struck by an image Dawkins uses to explain why evolution looks so startling from a certain perspective: look at a mountain from one angle and you see nothing but a sheer cliff face and your friend waving to you from the top, impossibly far away. It's only when you skirt round the side that you realise there's a smooth incline up which you can walk easily. Evolution isn't a leap up a cliff face, it's a series of slow, steady steps (disputed somewhat, there are two camps - slow steady steps versus sudden leaps forward: evolution by creeps and evolution by jerks, as it is amusingly known). Life isn't a leap up a cliff face but if you could see into the future, how much of it would look that way? The choices you made, they could take you by surprise. Put it on my gravestone.

See? Christmas and eventually I get round to death.

So, let's move on. The chapter ends with a kiss. A deliberate choice. I don't really do sex scenes. I don't see the point - we are all very skilled at imagining sex and you don't really need to know how I imagine sex. I do not aspire to that bad sex writing award. Not something I want on the CV.

            There is, of course, an actual sex scene in The Waves Burn Bright, which one reviewer felt was gratuitous (it's hard to tell from the review whether he is more affronted that there is sex at all, or that it isn't heteronormative). It's in there because it is hugely necessary, not for the sex itself, or for what it tells us about Carrie's sexuality, but for the symbolism of where it takes place, and when, what the moment means for Carrie's journey away from, and then towards home. When the Earth moves for a traumatised geologist on top of an active volcano on the far side of the world, that has meaning.  

            That moment aside, however, the artist in me prefers the slowly-closing bedroom door of old movies to the flung-open door of modern movies. Maybe it's age - there was a time I very much enjoyed sex scenes in films - but I think it's that the imagination is more powerful than anything a camera - or writer - can provide us with. All art is about engagement with the audience, leaving space for your reader, viewer, or listener to climb inside your work and experience it for themselves. The closed door provides that in a way that ring-side seats don’t (pun intended).

            I learned this week that this symbol

***

in publishing is called a "dinkus" and was at one point considered the novelistic equivalent of that closed bedroom door in the movies. It breaks the scene and leaves space for the imagination. Three stars for sex? Not a bad review if it’s out of five.

            While I am sympathetic to the intention, I hate the method. I despise the dinkus (and I was glad to learn it is called something that sounds like a synonym for an idiot). It is overused and unnecessary. If you are paragraphing properly (like you can't on Substack, something that is endlessly frustrating to me) then a line break serves the purpose much less intrusively than a dinkus. When I edit other people's work, it's the first thing that goes. It makes the page look ugly, and it makes your writing look like it lacks clarity. If it isn’t clear that the scene has ended, you have a problem that a three-star barrier can’t fix. I know this is trivial and not really worth getting worked up over, but when you spend a considerable amount of your waking adult life immersed in manuscripts, these things accumulate into massive irritations. I know Brandon Taylor agrees with me. Don't get me started on consecutive paragraphs that begin with the same word.

See, aren't you happier when I'm being miserable about Christmas rather than ranting about obscure uses of punctuation marks in fiction?

Now, I'm off to watch The Muppets' Christmas Carol and reminisce about playing Jacob Marley in a stage version of the story as a student. One day, in the not too distant future, I'll tell you all about how getting stoned and watching the full Apocolypse Now Redux on the big screen counts as method acting. God bless us, every one.