Ah, Sweet Mystery of Life

Editing DANNY is a fairly unique experience because, unlike conventional editing where I would simply be striving to communicate more clearly, I am also playing detective, finding the story, seeing what the words have to offer me. And it is in the words.

Because it's a process of excavation DANNY tends to offer me up what I need, sometimes in a single word or phrase. For example, I was editing a scene yesterday which was too unremarkable. The scene was needed but it didn't sound or feel right. It read like Danny & Ian, a new way. Then one of the characters said, "You can hurt me if you want" and it all became clear. Sadly, not in an instant. I spent the best part of two hours getting less than a page to run half-way right. It came out bit by bit, exactly like excavating a dig. Unnecessary words were stripped off, the bones revealed, then I could see what the disease was. Not in what was missing, but in what was present. I kept reading it over and over, asking myself what was really going on. Until I discovered it was contained in those seven words, "You can hurt me if you want."

You're expecting me to say that after that it was all plain sailing. Sadly, still no. What I have now though, which I didn't have before, is the bare bones of what that scene is actually about. On the next read through, and the next, and probably the next, it will be shaped and reshaped till it tells you what's really going on.

Ironically, to reach that point I have to take the scene beyond where it should go i.e. make it clear and obvious then go back into it and muddy it a little, make it less clear, give it ambiguity. And I don't do this for your sake - not at first - I do it for mine.

DANNY was written without a plot. Understand, this doesn't mean I had no idea what it was going to be about. I had already written The Boy With The Red Hair so many of the fundamentals of the brothers' relationship and the concept of a shifting love triangle was in place. So were some notions of power and how it could be held, manipulated and taken away. But what all the earlier writings had done was given me lots of questions, and for me questions are the single most influencing factor in whether a work is going to take off.

I don't know how unusual this is among writers, for there are certainly many who keep their plots laid out on index cards and follow them rigorously, but I need to be confused about what is happening.

If I can understand or anticipate behaviour too readily, if I feel someone isn't going to surprise me I lose interest. What is there to find out? There is no mystery, nothing to know.

This is the inherent weakness of genre fiction (and films), especially if they are formulaic.

Because I used to be an obsessional reader I know just about every plot in the history of English literature, and every character gambit known to man. What you can't possibly know, however, no matter how much you read, are those idiosyncratic twists that good writers bring to their work. Those weird little bits of themselves that make their work worth reading. It's an interesting thing, too, that those are the bits that can't be copied. You may think they can but, trust me, they can't.

It's that distinction, how difficult an author is to replicate (and it doesn't stop publishers trying) that marks them as being a true purple cow.

An example:- In the sixties Jacqueline Susann wrote "Valley of The Dolls". Ostensibly it was a purple cow. Nothing like it had never been seen before - other than maybe in 'pornography'. Publishers didn't want to know about it - who would want to read filth like that? Nevertheless one of them did take a chance and it went on to become a massive bestseller and Jacqueline became a household name synonymous with raunchy sex, drugs and excess.

The only trouble is she was a faux purple cow. Other than her content, which simply hadn't been seen in the mainstream before, there was nothing truly unique about her. Her prose was purple, her characters badly realised, her plots risible. All she had going for her was sex. And, in the nature of things, sexual tolerance always changes. Now she seems very tame stuff indeed. Such are the vagaries of fashion and public 'morals'.

If you go to a book shop now you can still find Jacqueline's book but its title is far bigger than her name and, indeed, many of the people reading this right now have probably never heard of her, unless they are aficionados of cult movies (Russ Meyer's Beyond The Valley of The Dolls was inspired by her book), or love vintage 'trash'.

  Jacqueline could be copied and, what's worse, she could be copied better than she was writing herself. Although, it must be said, her work must have a little of the true purple cow in it somewhere or it wouldn't be in print at all. It may, indeed, be the case that she hasn't been rediscovered yet and her true purple cow-ness will manifest itself to future audiences.

Emily Bronte, however, is a far more clear-cut case. She wrote a 'romance' by modern definitions, but she had superior writing skills and, more importantly, that vein of 'unique voice' (I refuse to start bandying words like genius around) running though her prose that prevents it from being authentically copied.

People try to copy her all the time, but all they ever succeed in doing is writing pale imitations or, worse, parodies. To this day there are things in Bronte that most writers are very hesitant to do. Listen to any TV or film producer (and many directors) on the dangers of alienating a viewer from the hero and you will realise no film hero in a Hollywood product would behave like Heathcliff - and yet we are the ones who are supposedly living in violent, brutal and overly-permissive times.

The fact is Bronte didn't care about whether she was offending or alienating anyone. Just as Dickens didn't care and Shakespeare didn't care. So, while people can copy them till they are blue in the face, they can never be them - and that's what keeps them purple cows.

So, did they all mine the story out of their unedited work? I really don't know. No-one does. What you can guess is they did let their characters lead instead of making them follow.

Take Shakespeare. Othello. We never find out why Iago does what he does. There are tiny clues... that lead us nowhere. They are all dead ends. He is arguably the (anti) hero of Othello - he is certainly the lead - and yet we have no idea why he is doing what he is doing. A whole play, everybody dead at the end, and we never ever get a motive. Think Shakespeare could sell that one in Hollywood? Think he thought one day, "Aha, I'll write a play where you never know the answer, the plebs will love that."? Maybe he did, but I suspect it was more that Shakespeare just 'knew' that's who Iago was - and he was content for that to be so.

Dickens tends to do this more with his minor characters. Why does Miss Havisham sit around with the rotten wedding breakfast? Because she was jilted? If you were jilted would you? Why is there an arguably sexual relish in her humiliation of Pip? Because she's still a virgin? Why does Magwich 'reform'? Because of charity pie and booze? Why is Bradley Headstone a psychopath? Because he had to work hard to become a schoolteacher?

I could go on all day, and you could argue good cases for many of these characters' motivations, just as you can with Iago. But the important thing here is we are never told . We can only guess. And that is the fun part, the part that keeps us reading.

And it's more than just a love of mystery. It's something fundamental in us, a need to make our own minds up, a desire for 'flawed' empathy, even a need to escape into someone's else's life without understanding why. Because the one thing we do inherently understand is that actually we understand very little. Life is full of weird and wonderful things that make no sense.

Mystery is everywhere. Many people hate it. It unnerves them and they need to know all the whys and wherefores and that everything will be alright in the morning, and that the guy will always get the girl. But the more adventurous among us love it because it gives us a reason to get up in the morning.

DANNY has more than its fair share of mysteries and it's my job, hidden away inside the tedious process of editing like a mystery in itself, to work some of them out and to leave some of them alone and to know how to tell the difference.

After all, I need to give you a reason to get up in the morning.