Alma Alexander

While it is absolutely true that a writer, any writer, is the worst possible judge of his or her own work – especially after the third rewrite, when you’re no longer sure about anything at all and you start doubting every word on that page to the extent that you cannot conceive why on EARTH anybody else who didn’t have to read this stuff might possibly actually WANT to – there is a sort of instinct that you develop about things, especially if you’ve been doing this sort of thing for a while and you have some experience under your belt.

A while ago I wrote a couple of pages of New Novel, and even before I printed them out to get a second opinion from my first editor (who is married to me, but who doesn’t let that fact interfere with the sometimes brutal honesty of his reactions to my work) I knew that they were not good enough. What I had written down was so dense, so condensed, it was four scenes of story stuffed into six paragraphs – it was a synopsis of what I needed to write. I had written this particular piece of work as a narrative which was supposed to take its place in the book itself – but it wasn’t going to happen. It needed unpacking first, heavily.

My instinct was spot-on. My first editor told me the exact thing I had been thinking, without my having said a word about it.

I don’t do this kind of thing all that often – I usually have the opposite problem, writing too much, giving too much detail, because I’ve got it all in my mind’s eye and it’s a rich vision and in trying to put it across I fall into the trap of describing a Victorian attic, with every doily and tchochke in the picture. I have to rein myself back, study the vision, figure out which tchotchkes need to stay in and which doilies I need to whip away out of sight. But that’s what first drafts are for, exploring attics.

But the opposite of knowing that something is inadequate is knowing that it is good. And every now and then something is good enough to be nothing less than a gift from the Gods.

Often it’s my characters who will come up with these things, stuff I SWEAR I have never thought, or said, or intended to put into a book, until I see myself typing it and it appears on the computer screen as though by magic and then I can only sit back and stare at it and wonder where it had come from… because not a syllable of it came, at least not consciously, from me.

I’ll give you two examples.

The first is something of a small spoiler, so if you haven’t read “The Secrets of Jin Shei” and want to do so without knowing this particular tale, please do skip ahead to the asterisks…

When I wrote “The Secrets of Jin Shei”, there was a scene that I wrote early on which served a couple of purposes in the narrative – one was to establish the character of Xaforn, my warrior girl, and her absolute devotion to the concept of honour, and to living her life with that as her guiding star; the other was to begin a relationship between two people who would make unlikely friends, even unlikely allies, because of how very different, on the face of it, they were from one another.

Xaforn led a life of honour and austerity, was a foundling who had adopted the Imperial Guard as her family and would be willing to die to protect that family and uphold its traditions. Qiaan was a child of a Guard Captain and so knew those traditions from the inside – but she was (from Xaforn’s point of view, at least) soft, and weak; Qiaan lived protected while Xaforn did the protecting, Qiaan had the hearth and the family and Xaforn would be standing guard on the ramparts in the storm in order to keep that hearth and family safe.

These two girls bonded over the fate of a tiny feral kitten which Xaforn found a handful of bully-boys torturing – and could not allow them to continue, because some of them were of the Guard, her chosen family, the family which held honour sacred, which would never condone wanton cruelty like this.

Xaforn, still a slight child and a female to boot, took on three boys older and bigger than herself on the kitten’s behalf. But if it had ended there, the boys might as well have killed the little animal – because Xaforn had not the necessary skills or instincts to ensure the kitten’s survival. It was Qiaan who stepped in and provided that.

Xaforn won the kitten’s freedom. Qiaan won its life.

She gets into trouble over the incident, but also gains a reputation – and the justifications she gives for her actions finally settle on two simple reasons: one, the torturing was being done by Guards and Guards have more honour than that, and two, there was at least one outsider involved in the matter and it was “our cat”.

Later in the book, much later, Qiaan finds herself being used as a puppet figurehead “leading” a revolution against the crown – something that Xaforn, as one of the Imperial Guard, is sworn to prevent. The revolution goes badly awry and Qiann is deemed expendable – and is almost murdered.

And then, suddenly, Xaforn is there, out of nowhere, dealing with Qiaan’s assailants, and realising that Qiaan herself is badly wounded. When they hear reinforcements come, Qiaan begs Xaforn to go and leave her there – but Xaforn will not. When Qiaan realises that the reinforcements are Imperial Guard, that Xaforn will be fighting her own (probably to the death) in order to protect her friend, Qiaan demands to know why she should be worth such a sacrifice.

“Because,” Xaforn says, simply and quietly, “you are my cat.”

I SWEAR those words did not come from me. I swear I did not know that Xaforn would say them, was even thinking this.

But it is perfect. Utterly perfect. It is completely in character. This phrase encapsulates and explains everything, and this is one of the emotional high-points of the entire book.

I have a character to thank for that piece of dialogue – gift from the Gods, from their spirit into my hand and my keyboard, I was a channel, nothing else. And all I could do was sit back and stare at the screen and shake my head in astonishment.

* * * * *

END OF SPOILER

That is how you know that you have written something good, possibly something great. When you sit there looking at it, having just written it, and you cannot believe that the words on that screen, freshly minted, have come, could POSSIBLY have come, from you.

I was given another such gift only the other day, writing my new novel.

Once again, I have a character who has taken a step away from being dead letters on a page and into being flesh-and-blood three-dimensionally real, with a personality larger than life, a sense of humour, an ability to articulate her own thoughts and responses over and above and beyond what I am capable of imparting to her.

She meets another character, in a scene of 3000 words or so which I wrote at a sitting and which needs practically no editing at all.

And I sat back and looked at a particular dialogue exchange, and it was the Gods speaking again – because I had certainly not planned to write anything of the sort. These were two real people, having a real conversation.

I love it when things come together like this. When occasionally there’s a blaze of… something… when the muse walks into the room and smiles.

The little miracle, right there on your computer screen.

In the back of my mind there is a tiny grotto of a temple where I retire every night to say my literary prayers. On nights like these, when the little miracles are spilled like diamond dust across the rest of the prose, the bits I know I have crafted from my own knowledge and experience and ability and my own conscious thinking, I light an extra little candle of gratitude in that temple – because I know I do not do this writing thing alone, and when the Gods come to visit, I am always humbled and thankful that I am still sometimes their favoured child.