Always keep the story moving forward.
Characters who contradict themselves are more human.
You don’t need to spend six months on a trawler to write about a trawlerman.
Dialogue is not conversation.
It’s better to do than to describe.
Life is a mess to which fiction brings a shape, which is why it’s called fiction.
There’s a difference between being realistic and being believable.
Make sure that something always remains hidden.
What your hero thinks he wants might be different from what he needs.
Nobody knows why people fall in love.
Believe what you write, even when it’s all made up.
No matter how deeply hidden, there will always be love.
Always love.
I had reached the bottom of the page.
No longer ashamed of the notebooks I had hidden for so long, I put them out on the shelf, for all to see.
1 It’s commonly said that the English write as if their mothers are reading over their shoulders. See the dedication in Russell Brand’s autobiography.
36
The Sovereignty of Words
IF LIFE IS a series of locked doors you must find ways to open, books provided me with the first of many keys. But when I was ten, they were also my private shame. I was embarrassed to be seen carrying them everywhere I went, but couldn’t help myself. If I had walked around the streets clutching a football to my chest, or a bicycle pump or even a shoe last, no one would have made fun of me. Books were things I seemed to be forever hiding. I stuffed them under beds and on top of cupboards, tucked them up my jumper and even hid them inside the brick air vent in the front garden until I could safely smuggle them upstairs. They gave too much away about me, and – as adults were always saying – the money spent on a book could be spent in other far more useful and practical ways. ‘You could have bought a puncture kit for that,’ my father had once said when he saw the price of a book. But all through my childhood I had a secret I could barely acknowledge, which was that if I had to make a choice between buying a book or buying a shirt to keep out the cold, I would always have chosen the book. I was sure that if this secret was revealed, it would make me look weak and stupid in the eyes of others. It was a long time before I began to suspect that it might actually make me stronger.
After I had my first novel published, I felt there was something I needed to do.
I went back to Westerdale Road on one final visit. I walked along the same street, retracing my steps from where the little orange brick house had stood, towards the East Greenwich Public Library. The sky was the colour of a bus driver’s socks, it was raining lightly and the street lights were just coming on. The road was as empty as it had ever been, but judging by the dozen or so road signs along its way I could tell it now prioritized vehicles, not people. No children played on these pavements any more.
This time, I was not going to the library to borrow books. I was going to give some back. I was taking a few of my own favourite novels, from Scoop to Orlando to The Crystal World, from Gormenghast to The Stirk of Stirk to The White Cutter. I was just going to walk in and quietly leave them on the shelves, correctly alphabetized, to repay in some small part the debt I owed, in the hope that another ten-year-old child would find them there and begin to read.
This time, as I walked up the street with my armful of books, I realized I had nothing to hide. The printed page had not imprisoned my thoughts but had given them shape and set them free. Instead of shrinking away until they were invisible, the books in my hands seemed to grow plumper and lighter with every step I took. Each book had a different voice, and each voice could be distinctly heard. Some were yellowed and tinged with obsolescence, others were as stinging and insistent as they had been upon first reading. And there were new voices that had never been heard before, the memories of those who had been overlooked or ignored, now newly empowered by paper and print. These writers could be discovered with the rest – although you still had to be directed to them. The library directed children by encouraging them to browse. Without it, I would never have found the books I loved.
It seemed that as I walked the words expanded, signing themselves on the glittering damp air above me, doubling and folding like musical harmonies or sharp and shimmering drips of paint, reflecting their rainbow colours on the houses all around until the entire sky of lowering cloud was filled with sentences and phrases and quotes and descriptions of every kind, spiralling and exploding in every direction. The words became all the emotions they represented, laughter and argument, pleasure, exhilaration and endless, boundless delight.
Faced with such a cacophony of imagination, the rational brick-and-concrete world could only crumble and fall away like burned paper, blackening and drifting from view. The sturdy, sensible Victorian houses of London, branching out across the suburbs like concrete cilia, could not contain the force of these flimsy pages. Surrounded by this heuristic army, I wondered how I could ever have really been afraid of anything at all.
With the precious cargo in my arms, I headed through the rain towards the welcoming lights of the library.
About the Author
Christopher Fowler is the acclaimed author of seven Bryant & May mysteries, including the award-winning Full Dark House. He lives in King’s Cross, London.
For more information on Christopher Fowler and his books, see his website at www.christopherfowler.co.uk
Also by Christopher Fowler
FULL DARK HOUSE
THE WATER ROOM
SEVENTY-SEVEN CLOCKS
TEN-SECOND STAIRCASE
WHITE CORRIDOR
THE VICTORIA VANISHES
BRYANT & MAY ON THE LOOSE
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PAPERBOY
A BANTAM BOOK: 9780553820096
Version 1.0 Epub ISBN 9781409080138
First published in Great Britain
in 2009 by Doubleday
an imprint of Transworld Publishers
Copyright © Christopher Fowler 2009
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