My Animal Life(65)

But I still felt terrible shame and unease when other people asked about my writing. I was unable to admit I had been rejected. Yet my internal landscape was slowly shifting. I had been rejected. So what would I do now? The tall agent was becoming more languid, and talked, one day when I went to see him, about another author, very well-known, who had written a book that was turned down. ‘He decided in the end he had to let it go.’ The lesson was indirect, but clear enough. Time had slipped on. We were heading fast for 1997, and I hadn’t had a book out since 1994.

Down the road from us a couple, Steve and Suzanne, had moved in with a daughter, Isobel, two years younger than Rosa, and the man, Steve Shill, was a writer and director who later migrated to America and worked on The Sopranos and The Wire. As usual, new friends brought new ideas. (Never just stay at home and suffer.) Steve lent me a guide to film structure. At the same time, John Coldstream sent me a book to review called The Next 500 Years, by Adrian Berry, an overview of scientific predictions. It was speculative, but fizzed with ideas. The piece of information that excited me most was that, contrary to what I had always assumed, our temperate climate was not the norm; in fact, the earth’s default state was ice. Ice ages lasted for 100,000 years; arrived suddenly, over ten or twenty years; and were interspersed by temperate periods of only 8,000–14,000 years. And it was 12,000 years since the last ice age. The maths were suggestive. My mind started spinning.

With both books in my bag I travelled up to Newcastle to do a session with the creative writing students on ‘Structure’. Structure is the weakness of creative writing courses; only brief pieces of writing can be discussed in a two-hour workshop, so some students become brilliant at writing individual chapters of novels, but have a weak overall grasp of structure or story. (And too many twentieth-century novels are weak on story. Yet story is what readers like, and they’re right, it’s what we need from art: stories to help us navigate the confusion of our own life-stories.) I read Steve’s book on film structure on the train, and liked its vigour. Yes, three acts, like every good drama. With plot points and a mid-point, a swoop up to the climax, a dip to the end—I loved this stuff. I sat on the train and redrafted this structure in terms of a 250-page novel. On which page should the plot points come? And the climax? I made a diagram for the students, and suggested that they try it out.

On the three-hour journey home, things crystallised. I was a writer, but what was I writing? It was time to write myself out of trouble. The only thing I could do was write, and no one, no one could stop me writing (Vic’s daughter would never give up). The two books in my bag, and the students, came together. I took my own advice, and tried it out. I roughed out a story, with three acts, and plot points. We were in the middle of the next century, and an ice age had come upon us very fast. And I remember the excitement of sitting down at home and working into the night on the outline of a story as I followed, scene by scene, my model film structure. I had needed an idea, something utterly different from the rambling themes of the earlier novel; I needed a rope to guide me to the end, for I would not have dared follow my nose again, after my big, loose structure had led me to disaster. Within two days, I was given both things. I took what I was given and ran with it.

I wrote The Ice People in less than six months. I wrote it as comedy, as satire, though there were links with The Keeper of the Gate: I had a biracial hero, Saul, who was trying to take his son Luke back to Africa, away from the ice that was advancing from the north. The arrow of population flow was reversed. It was Africa’s turn to restrict immigration. This new book was clear and short, with plenty of adventure. It felt totally different from its predecessor. My spirits improved. I was doing what I did. Now life would surely revert to normal. Nick loved the book. I sent it to the agent. He was less expressive, but said it was ‘good’. He sent it to our joint first choice of publishers—and of course there were fewer to send to than before, not just because the publishing world was contracting as more independents were sucked into conglomerates, but because I had been published by several already.

My hopes were high, but it began again, the catalogue of disappointing letters, and this time it was even harder to bear. I couldn’t believe it, but it re-ran, the disaster movie of rejection. (Yet I knew they were wrong. This time they were wrong. I was absolutely sure this book was good. The other one had been so strange and unwieldy that I could hardly bear to think about it, but this one was carefully edited. I was over the worst of my RSI and the chaotic haste of Rosa’s early childhood. I do have a cool side; I am hard on myself, but my considered opinion was, this book hacked it.)