It struck me last night, while I was stewing in the mother of all traffic jams on the M25 that I treat my plotting/writing the same way I navigate through traffic. On Sunday I attended the christening in Surrey of my Best Man’s son, William – a catchy and heroic name, I say (ironically I am William’s godfather, so I’ll be putting aside first editions of the Secret War books for him on his fifteenth birthday).
The return journey to Sheffield was the worse car journey in living memory due to intense flooding on the M25 and the slip-road to the M1. After three hours of going nowhere, I navigated Sarah off the M25 and headed quite blindly towards the M40, trusting my instincts rather than the cack-handed and insular traffic reports coming out of the London local radio stations (it seems odd to me that no one puts out competent traffic news on BBC Radio on Sunday when you can get it every hour during the week – don’t people drive on Sundays?).
As darkness fell prematurely from the rain-laden storm clouds that were hammering everything into submission outside, I guided us through a couple of small towns and villages on a winding route that any Sat-Nav would be proud of. Our journey into the unknown took us through local flooding (we were lucky – a half hour later two villages we passed through were closed to the public) and further into darkness, until we emerged after 30 minutes - to some measure of relief - onto the M40 which was pretty bloody empty.
I couldn’t fucking believe it. If only that message had been conveyed to every driver heading north up the M1 – to divert onto the M40 – then Europe’s largest ‘car-park’ would have been only half as bad. I was relieved and enraged in equal measure. Sometimes I marvel at how Britain became an empire. Was it pure bloody luck? It certainly wasn’t common sense.
Anyway, quibbles aside (and back to the writing)… I’m an impatient sod, I really am. I can’t stand waiting around, especially in queues. In that respect I’m definitely not British, because Brits do queues very well. It’s not just about being polite, it’s about having the common sense to seek an alternative. And that’s what I do with my writing, I’m pragmatic when it comes to problems with plots. Take the current book for example. I’ve been looking through the plot of The Black Hours and while it runs rather well, the last acts need addressing because they sit uneasily on the cross-roads of fantastical adventure and hard-boiled thriller. The rest of the book is indeed a straightforward “what if” thriller, but the last three chapters are quite OTT in terms of what went before. I’m reminded of those James Bond films such as Moonraker or Die Another Day, when it all becomes too excessive, and while The Black Hours doesn’t go to that extreme, it does sit uneasily with what happened before, as though the last scenes of pyrotechnics makes light of what is in fact a very dark story.
So, without staying in the traffic jam i.e. being clogged up with an unwieldy ending, I’ve decided to go on a mystery tour, guided only by instinct, my sense of direction and an idea of where I want to end up. It means radically changing two chapters, but then I’m only starting the 2nd draft here, right? So I’ve plenty of slack to make those big amendments. I’m sure I’ll encounter some flooding here and there, and get bogged down in the odd dead-end, but it feels right. It felt right to head for the M40. It feels right to change this ending and not dupe the reader into a potential Hollywood-mishap of excessiveness.
It does change the book from being a historical adventure into something sterner, but a writer should always work for the story, rather than work the story for the writer, don’t you think? Otherwise you can become quite, quite lost - or worse: stuck in a jam that goes nowhere.
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