On Deciding What to Write Next

Not Really

I am still waiting for Leigh to finish the new novel, and to tell me what she thinks.

She’s about thirty pages from the end. She’s very good at poker face.

While waiting for her verdict, I’ve been thinking about what to write next.

However, this is a bit of a false question.

First, because I have several pieces of unfinished writing — some novel length, some just story-starts. I could go back to any of these but have already been drawn to one in particular.

Second, and more vitally, because I don’t think I have much choice in what I write.

I don’t believe there really is a decision as such.

Yes, there are times when I get a commission, limiting what I can do, and other times — as with Dead Boy Detectives (which got a good review in the Guardian today) — when I’m doing work for hire.

Mostly, though, I look back at the books I’ve written and ask myself why?

Why Corpsing? Why Hospital? Why Patience?

For each, whilst I was on the dark side of the moon of writing them, I had a conscious explanation of why I was doing that I was doing.

With Corpsing, say, I wanted to learn how to write action. Sentences like this —

The Mondeo’s engine started.

I mounted up and took off, back the way I’d come.

The Mondeo pulled a U-ey. The Mercedes copied it, ten yards behind.

I cycled along Pimlico Road and turned up Lower Sloane Street. The two cars followed.

Simple as that.

But I don’t think that’s the real reason that exact book came out of me when and how it did.

I have half a dozen other explanations —

• a love of crime novels, especially thrillers

• an obsession with what it would feel like to be shot

• a desire to write a bestseller

• a good idea for a title

• a wish to write about trendy people in London

• a blood-red Quentin Tarantino wave that swept me along

And none of them really get to the truth.

Why that narrator? Why those actions?

Despite all the writing advice in the world, and all the pop psychology, and all the genuine psychoanalysis, and all the theories of free will versus determinism — I have no real idea how or why that book happened.

Or any of my other books.

It’s a corny sentence. I’m half ashamed of letting it stand —

Why we write what we write remains a mystery.

Thank goodness.

Henry James said it, once and for all —

“We work in the dark — we do what we can — we give what we have. Our doubt is our passion, and our passion is our task. The rest is the madness of art.”

If we understand ourselves too well, we become copyists rather than artists.

And so I’m not really deciding what to write next. I am leaving myself open to the possibility of picking up this or that half-finished thing, or starting another.

I’ll cross my fingers, follow my instinct, hope against hope, and head off into the dark.

As usual.