Writing ‘The Blue Walls of Heaven’
I’ve crammed most, if not quite all, of my many obsessions into The Blue Walls of Heaven. Whether or not this was a good idea is a question readers will judge for themselves. An obsession has a wide spectrum: all the way from appreciation and a need to understand, through loneliness, paranoia and recklessness, to morbidity, jealousy, revenge, lust, desire to possess the unpossessable, self-destruction and genocide. To some extent a writer has to be obsessed by something, whether it be an idea, object or person, otherwise he won’t achieve anything of worth. Writers are driven people, but generally not driven by what drives many others: power, fame, wealth, status. They’re driven by subtler forces, on the whole. In my case, it was a question that has haunted my adult life from the beginning: how does someone rise up out of the darkness of self-hate, ignorance, self-division and envy, to achieve something of real and universal value? I spent the best part of eight years pondering this in different ways, while writing other things. And very slowly, with enormous reluctance, the story took shape.
I say ‘took shape’ with some hesitation, because for most of that time shape was painfully absent. What began the thing was a question without any shape to give it material form: what might happen to an intelligent and curious young man (not totally unlike my former self you might say) when he hears inexplicable noises in the middle of the night, and they don’t ever go away? And underneath this question you could perhaps sense another: what happens when we are determined to get to the bottom of something that interferes in the calm routine of our lives, for which we have no rational explanation? And so the story started for me one morning in the spring of 2005. I thought it had the potential of becoming an interesting short story, so I pursued it every day for a couple of weeks until an ending of a sort presented itself: the young man went mad. End of story. It took up perhaps ten A4 pages.
But something tugged at my mind: was it really the end? Or was madness a perhaps too-easy resolution of the idea of the irrational erupting in someone’s life? And in any case, madness was not exactly a resolution of anything: indeed it provoked far more uneasy questions than it solved. I had to write more.
Somewhere around then was when I realized I had a real ‘character’ on my hands. And when you get to that stage you have to start taking his life (and your own of course) seriously. Which for me meant accepting that I was now a full-time writer with a body and mind to support and virtually no regular income. That moment was a difficult one. For years I’d played the game of being a writer who wasnt really writing, except when the mood took me. It was all too easy to escape the ‘no ideas’ syndrome and take refuge in endless ‘necessary’ domestic jobs and errands. But now I had an idea – more than that, I had a character who was demanding a life, and only I could give it to him. I had to sort myself out and get the job – the real job – done while the opportunity was present. I was very aware that the muse – if so it was – wouldn’t wait for ever. To badly misquote Blake: I must create my own story, or be enslaved by another’s. After all, what else was there to do?
At this point I was ambushed by another dilemma. Although I’ve been obsessed by science fiction since reading all of H G Wells’s short stories at the age of eleven, I was absolutely sure that I didn’t want to write a science fiction novel. There were two reasons for this. First, well, let’s be honest, SF wasn’t really serious literature was it? It was essentially escapism, weightless fantasy for nerds and geeks, where aliens were always evil and the tribes of men were always fighting off semi-sentient menaces. It was cowboys and indians for the space age, and I wanted no part in all that nonsense. Secondly, I felt that with very few exceptions, SF didnt do human relationships, and what I was really at root interested in was the driving forces of relationships, and in particular what happens when they are thwarted: the pathology of relationships. This is what mainstream novels do supremely well; you could say it was what the modern novel was born for. But if I was honest (and I was gradually getting better at being honest) I was also interested in ideas that have powered SF since the days of Jules Verne and H G Wells: the nature of time, indeed spacetime itself, the nature of consciousness and reality, what an alien mind might be like, and man’s place in the great cosmic scheme of things. A modest agenda.
But here was the dilemma: how could these things be combined in one seamless work of fiction, without compromising either the exploration of the ideas or the credibility of the characters?
I initially tried to solve this dilemma by concentrating on the characters and marginalizing the ideas. But, surprise surprise, the SF ideas would not be excluded: they were too integral to the scheme I already had in my head waiting its chance to be released into the story. As I wrote, one by one they’d slip in, trying their best to be invisible. I tolerated this situation for some months, feeling perplexed and sometimes defeated, until one morning of sun and wind and showers I woke up and saw – in that proverbial lightbulb flash – that they had to be there, because they were implicit in the whole scheme of the novel: my problem had been not the ideas themselves, but in my labelling them as ‘science fiction ideas’. They weren’t science fiction ideas, any more than a mountain was a geologist’s or a cartographer’s idea. They were part of reality, part of man’s unending quest for understanding of himself and of the universe. So I gave in, welcomed the time-slips, the hyperdrives, the quantum synchrony, the superconscious neural network, the hyperspace labyrinth posing as a garbage chute…
… and at last it clicked together and the energy came back. I had a novel.
And then happened what all writers say happens when you’re really into something: the characters start talking back. That’s the scary part: you seem to have created something that’s alive, and has its own will. I say ‘seem’. because it’s really (isn’t it?) a metaphor: a character is an area of our imagination that appears to be autonomous. We develop knowledge of it by the acts of writing and listening. And the listening’s important: listening means being completely receptive to what’s there, not judging it or trying to control it. I admit I wasn’t very good at listening; that was because I was too interested in the plot I’d devised, and not enough interested in the characters. Later I realized that plot is entirely secondary to character: character is the driver of the story. You may nudge a character down a particular path, and he may go or he may refuse, or cause trouble. You have to be open to that, and not try to control. The writer is a listener, not a controller. He listens and responds appropriately to the needs of the overall situation. And there is nothing quite so thrilling as stepping back from the controls and seeing the outcome of giving a character his freedom.
After a few months of this, you begin to notice something: a world has come into being. A world full of people (potentially, if not actually there), weather, animals, landscape, background events (a war in Syria, surprisingly, in my case). Wherever you cast the eye of your imagination, you see vivid details of that world, just as if it had always existed quite independently of you. I became fascinated by this process. Did I really create a whole world, or did I only imagine I did? (I imagine God sometimes wonders that too). Once created, does it continue to exist, even when I’m not thinking about it? Do any of these imaginef worlds ever interact with each other, or with the real world? These questions inevitably cropped up while I was actually writing the book, and so spilled over into it, so in a sense I’ve answered my own question. It is all quite mind-boggling, and has begun to make me wonder about the ‘reality’ I take for granted whenever I stroll down to the local Sainsbury’s for some eggs.
A good example of this process in action might be the labyrinth section at the end of Book One. I was faced with the problem of how to end the book fairly tidily, after Adam had killed Rachel. I wanted to explore his mental states at this point, to get a closer look at what had driven him to that desperate act. Was he to get away scott free, with no retribution? Or was he to be caught and convicted of murder or manslaughter? Either of these didn’t seem appropriate from the dramatic point of view, because they brought closure too soon, they closed down the possibilities of understanding, rather than judging and dismissing him as a criminal with no future outside prison.
He was on the stairway after leaving his flat to dispose of the evidence of Rachel’s possessions. The police were waiting at the bottom, and beginning to get suspicious. There was no way out. End of story. And at that point I noticed something I’d not noticed before: a small door in the wall. Where did that come from? Suddenly it all sprang into focus, and the rest of the book was written in that moment. All that remained were the words.
I say I ‘saw’ the door; but surely the truth is I invented it for the sole purpose of giving Adam an exit strategy? You could say that, but then what invented it? I certainly didn’t sit back and work it out consciously. One moment it wasn’t there, the next it was. In a very literal sense, I saw it. There was something else at work, unbeknown to my conscious strategising mind. Call it if you like imagination, but does that bring us any nearer? What is the imagination? Do I personally have an imagination? Does everyone? Does it have access to data that I don’t? Can I call upon it at will to solve my everyday problems? Does it outlive my physical brain?
I don’t know the answer to any of these questions. But I don’t need to. I simply need to be open to the process they set going in my mind. This I imagine is what we mean by creativity. Openness to an ongoing process, and willingness to respond. What I do know is the joy and energy it gives me when I engage and co-operate with that process.
Stephen Parr, 1st January 2012
