Pleased to meet you!

It’s been happening again, that thing.

I’m sitting at my keyboard, thinking I’m writing a novel and doing what authors do. Managing the plot. Creating characters. Making things happen. Deciding who does what and why. After all, it’s fiction. Then, even as I type the words, I become an observer. Forced to stop my silly game of authorial control, I see what really happened, like playing the action on a DVD. They show me what they did, the people in my story, what they said, they even hint at why. Now and then I’m forced to watch, helpless, as someone I wasn’t even expecting walks in to the room bold as brass, someone (I now realise) who will be essential to untangling the mess of motivations and situations I plotted (Ha! Ha!) when I wrote that first plan a few weeks ago.

I don’t spend much time scanning social media but even my quick, half-awake early morning visits to Twitter reveal that I’m not the only writer to experience this phenomenon. But I still don’t understand what’s going on. I’m more convinced than ever that I don’t write what I make up. I write what I’ve already watched taking place. After a few lines, I close my eyes and just wait to see the next bit of the current scene, with no idea what might happen. Of course, I decide which episode I’ll watch (‘I need to write the bit where…’) but after that, it’s all down to them, those people I thought I’d just made up, conjured from the rich tapestry of stereotypes who populate my imagination after six decades of story-reading. But it turns out they’re real, my characters, they have lives and they want me to get the facts right.

They have names, too. Between you and me, it’s a bit creepy sometimes, the way it goes. Today, for example, a new character has just joined the story, a cook who worked for a family in London in 1799. I didn’t know she’d be arriving. She’s a very minor character (at least, as far as I know at the moment but she might have more to tell me) and I needed to know her name. That’s it exactly. She really did have a name and it’s not for me to just make one up. I did what I usually do, and looked for her name. Sometimes it’s the parish registers I go to, for the right place and the right years. Today I knew I’d find her in the trial transcripts for the Old Bailey in London. I scanned down hundreds of names until I found her. There she was. Poor woman stole a loaf of bread while she distracted the baker by discussing the cost of cooking a gooseberry pie in his oven. But it was definitely her.

Mrs Whiskin, pleased to meet you, after all this time. I look forward to getting to know you.