I've never written a full-length autobiography. I don't really intend to. But, here on this website, I'm free to indulge in an experiment or two. It also gives me chance to answer some frequently asked questions. So, imagine this is a chunky book. Imagine what the cover is like, imagine the aroma of new paper, and maybe a grainy black and white photograph of me on the back sitting at the computer, with framed covers of novels in front of me on the wall, and a higgledy-piggledy clutter on shelves to my right, filled with books, photographs of family, Laurel & Hardy, Pil Creek in Cornwall where author Leo Walmsley lived in an old army hut on boiled sheeps' heads and creatures he fished from the sea. And there's a squat clay figure that stands beside an autographed photograph of William Hartnall. The clay figure with deep gouged eyes and a mysterious leer looks as if it was excavated from a Neolithic tumulus. It was, however, made by my daughter when she was five – but perhaps she was tapping into some primeval archetype anyway. So, here it is: the imaginary autobiography in your hands, unpriced and definitely NOT available at all good bookshops.
Instead of beginning 'I was born April 20 in the small Yorkshire town of Ossett on the outskirts of Wakefield...', just push your thumb into the middle of the book and open a page at random.
It begins on an ordinary winter's day a few years ago. A school day when my thirteen year old son, Alex, and Helen, seven, have to be up, washed, dressed, breakfasted, then sent on their way to school. By this time, Sam the dog is ready for his walk. He's either pushing me impatiently with his nose or running to his leash that hangs on the kitchen wall by the refrigerator to nudge that. Maybe in his mind it is the leash rather than me that takes him for a walk. But by chance both human and dog some how end up getting attached to either end of it.
Anyway, there's a kind of routine chaos to it all. Pens are forgotten from bags, hair brushing is over-looked, I've neglected to complete a permission slip for some school trip, so hurriedly scribble away on the work top, surrounded by breakfast pots, toast crusts with gory wounds of strawberry jam. But we're generally away to our various destinations on time. Alex has a short walk to high school. Helen climbs into the front seat of the car, waving good-bye with a post-breakfast chocolate cookie to mum, Janet. It's enough to make a dietician turn in their skinny little grave.
Locked into an old habit I start the conversation in the car, with Helen sat beside me. "It looks as if it might snow today."
Helen's not interested in the weather. "Dad, what do you think it's like to be dead?"
"I don't know."
"You wouldn't be able to feel anything, would you?"
"I don't think so."
"So it wouldn't hurt being dead?"
"No, it wouldn't hurt."
Just as I'm beginning to think my seven-year-old daughter's beginning to frighten herself with some death obsession she chuckles amused by an idea. "If we put telephones in graves we could phone them up and ask them, couldn't we?"
"I suppose we could." I swing the car out into the main road to school and make a mental note to write Helen's comment down. It sounds ideal material for a short story. The chattering dead. Cadaevers with mobiles. Text messaging from garrulous bones.
"Are you going to the supermarket this morning, Dad?"
"No. I'm waiting for a call from Robin."
"The man with the dogs?"
"That's the one. He's a television director and he's got a meeting with a production company in London this morning."
"Are you going?"
"No, as I say, I'll be sat at home by the phone ... waiting."
"What for?"
"Well, it's all to do with this television series we're planning."
"Will you be in it?"
"No, I'll be writing it."
"Do you get paid for it?"
"Questions, questions, daughter, dear. But yes."
"Lots?"
"Enough."
"Enough for a house with a swimming pool?"
"No." I grin at her. "Not as much as that. A few years ago everyone got paid heaps of money in television but it's changing because there's so many television channels to fill. Last year I was planning to write for a television series with a budget of £70,000 per half-hour episode. If we got the go ahead today from this company in London then the budget will be around £10,000 per episode."
"That's not much."
"No, it's not. Especially when it will mean a lot of work, and a lot of travelling."
"Don't you want to write books any more?"
"Of course I do, sweet plum, but books don't pay nearly as much money as people think. If we can get a contract for this television series then it means a secure income for the next twelve months."
"I wish you'd write books."
Which was Helen-speak for 'I wish you'd stay at home and write books.' The truth of the matter was that if Robin got the green light today for the twenty-six part series then I'd be globe trotting for up to a year. It sounded glamorous – Egypt, Mexico, Italy, and sun blasted places I could only spell with the aid of an atlas – but it would depth charge family life and my book writing career alike.
But the bitter fact of life is: Money. A word that's either ugly or beautiful depending on whether you've got it, or you ain't got it. After the financial ups, downs, and deeper downs, of writing books for a living for five years, a regular salary would be a real lifeline. And way back then five years ago the Clarks lived a near cash-free existence, and the words 'Dad, I've grown out of my shoes; they don't fit me anymore' gave me a real shiver of dread. But I'm digressing like a don't-know-what...
I dropped Helen off at the school gates, then drove back home. The TV production meeting wouldn't be until 9.30 in London, so I wouldn't expect a call from Robin until eleven at the earliest. So, for the time being, I could continue with the usual routine.
As soon as I climbed out of the car, Sam, a black mongrel that looks the spit of the jackal god Anubis that guards Tutankamen's tomb, bulleted down the drive, all gleaming eyes, white teeth and whipping black tail. When he's due for his walk his excitement is explosive.
A moment later, and chained firmly together, I set out on the half-hour adventure. We live in a village surrounded by arable fields, which sounds picturesque, and it certainly isn't ugly, but there aren't many places to walk with so much of the land either ploughed into mud deserts or bulging with crops. Choices are limited to walks across a football field, or a path by the sewage works. Or sometimes we take a cinder track as far as a railway line where inter-city expresses thunder by, looking like sleek blue pythons with a long intestine full of commuters. The sound they make could have rolled in from a William Hope Hodgson fantasy. First of all, there's a kind of deep guitar twang that shimmers along, all ghostly and resonant through the overhead power lines as they carry the sound of the approaching train. Steel rails hum with a strange goblin intensity, then comes the crash of wheels on the track, the roar of the motor, and the surging bow wave of air. Just for a second, as you walk along the frozen track where, only a moment before, there had only been the dog and a few rabbits for company, suddenly you catch sight of a surreal blur of faces, chewing bacon baps, or murmuring into mobile phones. And they're all snugly warm in a brightly-lit air-conditioned tube that exists in some bizarre limbo land between cities. The sound hits you, bypassing your ears, to flash through gristle and bone direct to your brain. Not so much heard as a mental detonation that's all crash and fury. Then as quickly as it was here, it's gone. A shrapnel splinter of one metropolis, blasting away to merge with another two hundred miles away. Seeds speeding to fertilize another urban egg. There's some Freudian sexual imagery surfacing there. I wish I'd brought tape machine to make a note of it. Because sure as eggs are eggs I'll have forgotten it by the time I get home.
Already I'm distracted by the dog bounding like a kangaroo through long grass after a mouse. Believe me, it is distracting when he catches one. Gripping the screaming rodent by the hind quarters in his teeth he tosses it into the air like a smart Alec throwing a grape into the air before catching it, headfirst and swallowing it with just enough of a chew for me to hear tiny bones crackling like matchsticks. Yep, that's distracting.
Now what was that Freudian image of a train?
Nope, it's gone. Forgotten.
But for me that's the process of writing. Hearing, seeing, experiencing events, conversations, then forgetting them completely before dredging them back as I write. But they aren't a string of retrieved memories. Down in the mental cache a transformation's been taking place, like wine left in a cellar to age, they return transformed with all the potency of dead people returning as ghosts; there's something of the night about them now. With an aura darkly gleaming. So, that's what I do: walk the dog, and in an undisciplined, non-intellectual, non-conscious way become human kitchen tissue soaking in everything: spectacles like the train spurting along the track. Or seeing old broken bones in the dirt of our thousand-year-old village churchyard. Little pieces of shin and femur have turned into something like pottery over the centuries. They're cold – surprisingly cold – to the touch, and clink together like cups when tapped together. While shards of skull have become porous and oddly biscuit-like. Oddly, I've never picked any of the long deads' teeth from the dirt. Did they loose their teeth before death? A long-lived community that died toothless and china boned? Or do teeth decay to paste in an acid soil?
Even these small mysteries fuel a writer's imagination, driving it forward to new story horizons. And a question I'm often asked at book signings, radio interviews or whatever is: 'Where do you get your ideas from?' Now I can reply glibly: 'In my local cemetery.' Hmm... maybe not. People might get the wrong idea entirely.
Now, that reminds me of something else... See? With this being an experiment in autobiography, not your regular book, I can leap off at right angles to something else. I meet lots of people who want to be writers but feel they've hit an obstacle and are struggling to raise their craft to the next level. This was one of the advance set of questions sent to me when I was giving a talk to a writers' group in a maximum-security prison. So as I went through the security checks at the prison gate I ran the answer through my mind. One of the main hitches is that the fledgling writer's characters don't come to life in their imagination, and it's hard to care about cardboard characters, or to be able to divine their motivation, or their responses when they're in a crisis. So, if you've hit what seems to be a dead-end the fault could lie with the character.
My tip is breathe life into your character (and when you're a writer you have these God-like powers, so don't be afraid to use 'em!). One technique to animate your character is for YOU to get to know them inside out. Do this by setting your character a questionnaire. Questions can be trivial or profound – a mix of the two works best. Here are some examples:
Feel free to invent more. Aim for about twenty or so then sit down and answer them from your character's point of view. Your favorite color might be blue. Don't be chained. Your character might chose yellow. At first I guarantee this exercise will seem boring as hell. You'll wonder why you bothered doing it. You'll mutter darkly about that Simon Clark for even suggesting it. But persevere. At first you'll give one-word answers. Then you'll give one-sentence answers. But then you'll find the floodgates open and you're writing one page, two pages. Perhaps it's the one about the most significant person in your character's life. It might be a moving recollection of your character's favorite uncle who taught your character to swim in childhood but then died himself in a tragic swimming accident... a swimming accident in a lake with sinister reputation. All of a sudden you realize you're beginning to know your character, much in the same way as if you spend an afternoon talking to a stranger and they reveal telling incidents in their life. You empathize with them over the death of a pet or a laugh together over an anecdote relating to a father's hilarious efforts to assemble a flat-pack wardrobe. Now you know your character. You know how they will react when they're confronted with an assailant with a gun, or seeing their child hanging by their fingertips from a cliff. Your writing will be more potent and more involving because as you write you care about your character, too. Even though you might have to kill them for the sake of the plot you'll experience a stab of grief. This will shine through in your writing to make your reader experience that emotion, too.
This exercise is worthwhile at the planning stage of a story or novel. When I applied this technique to Bernice Mochardi in Vampyrrhic (originally she was going to be a minor character) I knew how important she was to the plot. Not only that, but as I answered her questionaire (in character, remember) I wrote the first page of my novel without even realizing it at first – then I got a heck of a buzz as I thought to myself 'This is it. This is how Vampyrrhic starts.'
Well, if you're a writer give the questionnaire a whir. Then drop me a line if it works.
Right, it's THAT time again. The dog is nudging me to head out for our walk. Glancing back over what I've written here, I realize I picked a day from around five years ago. Things have moved on. My son, Alex, is heading off to university; his school days are long behind him. My daughter, Helen, has probably forgotten our conversation about the dead and buried with telephones. Just now she's announced that she intends to work at Gracelands, Tennessee when she leaves school in around six years time. Just between you and me, I guess she's got a thing about Elvis.
No, the TV series never did get made. I'm glad. I stayed with doing what I love: writing novels. They became more successful than I dared imagine. And then there was the book promotion tour that saw me walking down a palm tree lined boulevard in Hollywood. The sun was shining brilliantly. I loved soaking up the sights, sounds and aromas of this magic town. And I was just about to cross the road to the Roosevelt Hotel (once home to the Oscars back in the world of black and white movies) when suddenly... well... this sounds like the start of the next installment of OVER AT SIMON'S. But Sam, the dog, grows restless. It's time to close the imaginary autobiography and put it back on the shelf. For now anyway...