Author interview: CM Taylor on the transformational arc

I saw CM Taylor (aka Craig) deliver a workshop on Character is Destiny at the York Festival of Writing and was hooked on the ideas he introduced in it. So much so that I invited him to come and teach an expanded version at a retreat. The Character is Destiny Retreat took place in March 2017 and there were two 3-hour workshops expanding on the ideas that intrigued me at York.

Delighted to have Craig here on the blog today talking about character development and the transformational arc.

Craig, you co-wrote a horror film that’s coming out soon about writers retreating to a remote island and terrifying things happening (I’m sure our retreat won’t be like that!) – can you tell us how writing characters for the screen and novels differs and also how and where it crosses over?
Yeah, that’s correct. The thing which makes a writers’ retreat an apt subject for a horror film is the same thing which makes it appropriate for advancing yourself creatively. You take yourself out of a normal environment, and put yourself in a situation where you can go into yourself, and, with the help of others, engage with your emotions and creative truths.

But about characters, and how writing characters for screen and prose differs, well, one of the main differences I would say is that in screenwriting you need to leave room for the actor and the director. In prose, you are the writer, the actor, and the director, and how you portray the character is the totality of that character’s portrayal. Whereas with screen, you are merely providing the ingredients which the director and the actor will cook up between them. You need to leave room for actors to act.

Plus in screenwriting you work a lot with sub-text. For example, the character can say the opposite of what they really feel and the actor’s face will convey this duplicity and conflict. Like in a film someone can say, “Yes, my Lord”, but their face and tone and body-language can mean, “I will kill you tomorrow.” So in screenwriting you don’t write the, “I will kill you tomorrow” bit, but in prose you kind of have to, because you do not have a twenty-foot high actor’s face to show the concealed meaning. So prose is more of a spoon-feeding kind of medium in a way, the sub-textual elements are fewer.

Now, there is all this stuff in creative writing teaching about showing not telling, and prose writers can learn a lot from screenwriters about that skill, but fundamentally, prose is obliged to be a slightly telling sort of medium. The kind of radical, bone dry showing-only that screenwriters trade in will just not work in prose. The reader does need to be told a little bit.

The unique strength of the novel as an art form is that it can slide behind the eyes of a character in the way that other mediums can’t. We can fall into the mulch of consciousness in the novel. It it is the closest thing to mind-reading humans have invented. Yet. So it’s concerned with interiority and the depiction of moment-by-moment consciousness in a way which the screen is just not. We can say almost exactly what is happening in the mind of a person in prose. But in screenwriting we have to convey what is happening in the mind of the person only through those things which can be seen. Actions, speech. Music can hint at unseen feelings too. And there are the techniques of voice-over, or a character writing a diary, say, or something of this nature. But in terms of the narrative arts, the totality of the un-mediated interior life is available most directly in prose.

The similarities between the two forms of narrative art is that their subjects are themselves subject to the same forces. In the novel and on screen, character is subject to the forces of personal history, subject to the forces of relationships (love, family, tribe, work), subject to the forces of the wider world, (what we might call history or society or war or the environment), and, (although many stories leave this aspect out), they are also subject to cosmic and religious impulses. Those are the four nooses which story tightens around a protagonist. So in both screen-writing and prose writing these same existential human pressures come to bear. And the goal of the writing is the same, to show a person in the grip of events and time, and to show how they change or do not change with regard to their experiences.

That really is narrative art. The depiction of the effects of time upon life.

The focus for this workshop is all about creating an emotional transformational arc for your characters alongside the main narrative arc and plot – can you tell us why you think this is so important to master for novel writing?
Well, psychologically, I think that there is a profound, subconscious, didactic element to stories, and the reason why we consume them with such unrelenting gusto is because they teach us how to live. We see a character in a transitional moment in their life, we see a character forced by life to make a tough choice, and we are desperate to see what they will do, so that we can judge if we would have done the same, so we can judge how different they are to us, or how not different at all.

We gulp down story so that we can see how characters negotiate the changes and horrors of life which await ourselves. On a subconscious level, characters are our avatars whom we scrutinise for advice about negotiating painful change. Stories are wiser than their tellers. They are our elders.

But as to why transformational screenwriting models of how best to depict moral and emotional change – be that heroic or tragic change – in narrative art are particularly pertinent to prose writers, well, a lot of writers of prose are perhaps overly attached to individual words and sentences, and paragraphs, at the expense of scenes and sequences and plot outcomes.

Screenwriters think more structurally on the whole. Prose writers tend to be hacking through the story jungle with a machete, while screenwriters are above the jungle in a chopper, burning that mother down. And I think if you were to honestly recall a favourite novel, years after you have finished reading, what you would probably remember is the fate of the character, or an amazing scene. In short, what happened to them. How they struggled under which forces.

The beauty or not of individual lines, or words, or purple passages, while perhaps paramount to the writer when they are writing, is not that which most readers take away. Narrative is concerned with fates, with what happens to a person when they are put under certain pressures. The pattern of choices a character makes which taken together results in a fate. So it is very important for writers of prose to deal with structure, to understand the underlying shapes of structure. And that’s where I go to screen-writing to steal that structural knowledge. There is without question an underlying structure to narrative art, in particular in the instance we are talking about here, with regard to how characters can be shown to change or not change under external and internal duress over the course of a story. There are real, teachable working models for this.

Which novels do you think have nailed this and why?
Well first of all, different types of novels, different genres of novels, deal with this in different ways. A geopolitical thriller will not trade in heavy emotional transformation, but if it wants to hook more readers in, readers who are interested in human meaning and not just the mechanics of plot, if it wants to add feeling to action, then it can in some unobtrusive simple, structural way deal with emotional transformation. Similarly, a literary novel may be almost exclusively concerned with the emotional development or transformation of the hero or heroine. There’s a whole genre of this – the bildungsroman, the novel of spiritual progress. So any genre can trade in the transformational arc.

A couple of novels I love that work well on the scale of human transformation and in very different ways are Staying On by Paul Scott, and The Van by Roddy Doyle.

Now The Van is a work of humorous social realism, set on a working class estate in Dublin and it concerns male friendship. Two unemployed guys, listless, low in self esteem, decide to set up a fast food van to sell to people coming out of the pubs after World Cup games. Brilliantly simple. Now because it is working on the level of social realism, the transformation here is going to be similarly realistic and small. We are not talking Macbeth here. So, through running a chipper with his mate, the main character gets the respect of his wife back because he’s been active not passive, and he loses his friendship with his partner who becomes bullying and domineering, and he gets his own self-respect back because he’s done something.

So it’s a very small plot. But it takes our hero from a passive moment in his life, through to a wiser sadder place where he holds knowledge of his friend’s character, but where he has a better marriage and more self-confidence. An irreversible change has been made in his character. It’s brilliantly done.

Now in terms of emotional change, Paul Scott’s Staying On concerns a timid wife, obliged to stay on in colonial India by her stubborn and uncommunicative husband. Now in the story he ultimately dies – in fact it is stated on the first page that he does – leaving her stranded. But he is ill first, and during the course of the illness she establishes a timid – to some extent imaginary – relationship with a friend from England, allowing her to confess her difficulties with her husband, and she works up the nerve to force her introverted husband to finally state their financial realities.

So that is again played out on a very micro level. Yes, the illness and then death of the husband is the huge external thing, the change, but the real meat, the emotional transformation, is internal, and comes from her pursuing a friendship in which she is able to gain support for her neglected emotions, and being able to ask her husband for some financial accountability which she never has felt entitled to do before. So she is bereaved and stuck but emboldened at the end. It’s a beautiful book.

What can the writers who take this workshop with you expect to learn?
Well I aim for very practical outcomes. There is a method that I use which fosters a writer’s theme, what they care about most, integrates that theme with character transformation, and then integrates character transformation with plot development. So the three main aspects of narrative art – theme, character and plot are all treated as part of the same moving concern and the same evolving structure. And it’s done in a way which privileges theme, and in such a way that character change is the glue which holds theme to plot, and we treat character change as a process which can be learned and mapped and replicated.

Many models of story are top-down, plot first, and they have their place, but the one I teach here is particularly interesting for prose writers because it privileges the writer’s emotions and themes and seamlessly integrates those with the structural aspects of writing. So what I expect everyone in the class to be able to do at the end of this retreat is have a replicable system of linking theme to character to plot. Now intuition can be great, but it can also be awful. Sometimes if you rely on intuition and inspiration you will be right and sometimes you will be wrong. So what I hope to do is offer a simple, repeatable method whereby you can test the usefulness of your inspiration against a system for unifying the three main aspects of writing.

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Author interview: Dean Lilleyman

Delighted to welcome Dean Lilleyman back to the blog today. He last visited to talk about his debut novel, Billy and the Devil, which is a reading experience not to be missed. He’s back now on the launch of his new book, The Gospel According to Johnny Bender, which I also thoroughly enjoyed and highly recommend.

Book blurb: ‘Once upon a time there was a village called Edendale, and some people were good and some people were bad and some people were in-between. Do we know who is what yet? I don’t think we do…’

During the celebrated carnival of 1979, the villagers danced beneath a mirror-ball, as a young girl drifted dead in the river. Who knew the truth of things? And would the truth matter? Now it’s 1999 and Edendale is holding another carnival. An anniversary to commemorate the life-changing events of twenty years before, by pretending it’s 1979…again. One day, two decades apart, the mirror-ball turning in the dark to light a truth.

Dean, I loved how the 2 days from 1979 and 1999 were weaved together and showed how the past influences the future, and also how some things never change. Can you tell us where the inspiration for this dual timeline story came from?
This all started from a mishmash of things scribbled on my walls, which is how I tend to put stories together. I like the idea of things forming themselves, no questioning why. The more things that get scribbled the more the glue seems to happen. I definitely write from where I’m at, so I guess there’s a relationship between these things, even if they do feel unconnected at first. I think the truth of the thing starts to show itself this way, maybe because I’m not presuming I know.

The Johnny scribbles started coming at a time where my life was dancing fuck-it on one end, but rattling loose at the other. These two ends definitely started to show a clash in the scribbles. For sure the past was trying to grab the now by the scruff and say hang on fella, the future a shrug, the now grinning a so what? Looking back, I see all this as a massive influence on how Johnny happened. And with the scribbles it’s not just what’s happening to me at the time, it’s the stuff I’m taking in. Books, films, music, whatever. Like jamjarring sparks.

When Johnny was coming together, one of the things was definitely seventies disco. It seemed to be soundtracking my headspace bang on. And the more I listened, the more it made sense. As Dennis says to Debbie in the book, soul music is oh baby I want you so much but I can’t have you, while disco says hey, yesterday’s gone, tomorrow’s not even here, only now now now, so let’s do it. There’s a gamble of moment here. Time. This fed another bunch of scribbles about the end of things. Culture seems rammed with this sense of precise guillotine endings from way back. Religious doom declarations, Nostradamus, Hollywood narrative, the end. But what if when one song ends, another begins? On and on, god, a DJ. History repeating, yet with little changes, but the core truth still hums, much like the best dance tracks. A structure that shaped the rhythms of this novel for sure. And, I knew I had to trap all this into an isolated place. So, Edendale.

Three of my favourite stories do this brilliantly. Under Milk Wood. Winesburg, Ohio. The Wicker Man. This instinct that time was to play a big part in this story, the idea that ends become beginnings, made it clear I needed two timelines dancing together. This seemed to offer up a strong frame for the thing that was shouting out about this story. Obsession. What happens when you try to get back something that is dead, gone. If Billy was about being drunk, no love, then much of Johnny is about being drunk on love, a love that becomes an obsession, that becomes a madness, and how far that madness could take you into the deepest hole, a fucked up Plato’s cavern showing the same shadow play over and over, “It’s the same old song, but with a different meaning since you been gone,” on and on. But. Tangent. William Goyen was once asked in an interview what starts him writing. He replied, “It starts with trouble, you don’t think it starts with peace, do you?”

The headiness of a night dancing and drinking, and how it differs but also kind of remains the same for younger and older people, is really well captured and has been used to great effect in driving the plot forward as well as creating atmosphere. How did you choose which songs to use in each part?
The songs are joined at the hip to what’s happening in the story, by lyric or feel or both. I suppose it became a kind of mixtape, or maybe several mixtapes over the course of a relationship. The first one is probably called I think I like you. The second, I think I love you. The third, I want you forever. The fourth, please don’t go I can’t live without you. I think there’s something very beautiful in trying to tell someone something in a song, or a mixtape, or a poem, story, novel.

Johnny Bender is a wonderful narrator that brings a surreal and sensitive element into the story – is he the character that came to you first?
When the wall scribbles became a loose storyline, got painted over and scribbled as a tighter idea, I felt strongly I needed a narrator. A compass. I liked the idea of this story having a flavour of folk tale to it, a bit like Lars von Trier’s Dogville. It makes a good contrary to the fuck-awful goings-on within. Makes the tone richer. As a character, Johnny is definitely modelled on the Shakespearean fool. Talks in riddles, sounds radged, but, if you listen properly and go with the flow, he’s telling you some big truths. When Johnny arrived, it wasn’t long before Blackbird got there too. That’s when I knew I had my story.

Just like in Billy and the Devil you capture small town, small minded England so well – what is it that drives you to delve into the psyche of these kind of characters?
When I first started writing, the writer that grabbed me by the scruff was Raymond Carver. Ordinary people, ordinary problems, delivered in a way that registered the importance of these problems to the character concerned. Feels real. Sounds a bit grandiose, but we’re all the centre of our own universe aren’t we? Our problems are important, because. But, with Edendale, I wanted to play with stereotypes too, twist them a bit, in the same way Sherwood Anderson does in Winesburg, Ohio. In that book he opens with a surreal prologue where an old man has a dream about the beginning of all things. The dream shows him a long line of people queueing up to collect their own personal truths before they enter life. For some people these truths become everything about them, so much so that they become grotesques, their truths walking ahead of them in all they do.

In Edendale there are most definitely people like that. Ordinary people who have become grotesques because of their truths. Mr King is one. Preaching community, yet we see him for what he is, a self-obsessed dickhead obsessed by power. And yes, some people in Edendale are bigots because of this grotesquery. But. Look outside. Turn the news on. Catch the bus into town. So-called shortfalls of resources being blamed on immigration, spawning violence and irrational knee-jerk reactions sparked by lies from self-obsessed powermongers, gobbled up by a worrying mass of people because they want a better quality of living, or some return to a Britain that never really was, buying the empty canted promises of these terrible manipulators, these liars so ridiculous they should be laughed at, but, they’re not, they’re gaining power and momentum based on these lies. History repeating.

But perhaps I’m naïve. My own personal politics, perhaps near childlike. But. Worldwide we seem to have enough resources. The problem is, and if there is going to be an end of times it’s going to be from this: money is now politics and money is now power, more than it has ever been, and yet in one swipe so many problems could be sorted by the simple act of sharing. But the fat cats won’t will they? They want to keep their voice the loudest, and in the world we live in, the loudest are the richest. And it is always, always, the underbelly that suffers, the ordinary people. Always.

Today I saw a video of Syrian children playing in a bomb crater, a bomb crater that had severed the water supply to a large part of a city, the pipe filling the crater with dirty water, and, the children were swimming, and laughing. I couldn’t tell whether this was the most uplifting thing I had seen, or the saddest. Powermongers either side, and these kids in the middle. I don’t even pretend to understand what the fuck is happening over there, and who is doing what for why, but I know this: these are ordinary people trapped by something they have no say in, and yet, we watch, build walls, close borders, stop these people escaping horrors that we are fortunate enough not to even be able to imagine.

In Billy and the Devil, there’s a scene where a farmhand kills a runt while Billy masturbates in the barn loft above, watching. Runts are not profitable. They cost too much to rear, and don’t put on enough bodyweight for saleable meat. It costs nothing to swing them by the back-legs, smash their head into a wall and be done. This is how the world works. History repeating. Again, again. But. 1930s Germany. A group of young people who wanted nothing to do with the rise of dangerous right-wing politics did something remarkable. They met in cellars, and danced to jazz records. Despite the fact that they could be locked up for doing so. In Syria, the kids swim in bomb craters. Tomorrow, they know, is uncertain.

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As alway, thanks for your honesty and passion, Dean, which jumps off the page in both your novels as well as your interviews for Retreat West.

If you’d like to read The Gospel According to Johnny Bender then you can get a copy here. Keep up to date with Dean and his writing on Twitter and his website.

What do you think about the themes of history repeating itself on a personal and political level? Are we always doomed to relive the same mistakes from the past over and over or can we break the cycles? Let’s talk!

Guest author: Katherine Hetzel on writing fantasy

Delighted to welcome Katherine Hetzel to the blog today. I’ve known Katherine for several years now after first meeting online then in person at the Festival of Writing in York, where we see each other every year now. She’s also previously won a short story competition and her story, The Colour of Life, provided the title for the first anthology of winners published by Retreat West.

She’s here today talking about her debut children’s novel, Starmark, which was published earlier this year. Thanks for visiting the blog, Katherine.

 

Fantasy has always been my favourite thing to read. It offers an escape from the everyday and ordinary and gives me the chance to immerse myself in new, impossible worlds inhabited by people who aren’t a bit like me, but who I can imagine being. I suppose it was inevitable then, that I should begin writing what I most loved to read: fantasy. It also has the advantage of not needing much research – I can quite literally make everything up!

I wrote for children because I saw as a volunteer ‘listener’ to readers in my local primary school’s classrooms, so many children who hated reading. As a confirmed bookworm, and with two bookwormy kids of my own, I wanted to change that. With the arrogance of ignorance, I began writing my first novel about ten years ago.

StarMark is actually my second novel but the first to be published. It’s a rags-to-riches story (because I’m a sucker for a happy(ish) ending) about Irvana, who discovers her past, which changes her future (a phrase I have pinched from a five star review on Goodreads with the reviewer’s permission!)

I think as a child, I wanted to be something different, something special. Perhaps we all did…I knew I wasn’t, though. So I used a lot of my imagination pretending to be ‘discovered’ as someone important with a real purpose in life. As an adult, with a very normal life (whatever that means) I found that in the fantasy I was still reading, birthmarks were often used as a device to indicate destiny.

Perhaps some of that childish desire to be special stayed with me even into adulthood, because that’s the point I started from when I first had the idea for the novel. Instead of Cinderella’s shoe, there’d be something on the skin – a magical mark which turned to gold at the coming to power. That’s what made you ‘special’. But…but…what if you had that mark and didn’t know? And someone else discovered it before you did? What kind of story would that make?

That’s when Irvana’s world came to life.

It’s very much a ‘pantsed’ novel rather than a ‘planned’ one, partly because during the eight years it took to achieve publication with Bedazzled Ink, I learned so much about the craft of writing and myself as a writer. The goalposts kept moving and I lost count of the number of edits I completed. I needed to create a world different enough for the reader to imagine comfortably but not so different to their experience they couldn’t connect with it. I needed strong, memorable characters that children could identify with, ones they could imagine having as friends – or enemies.

Most importantly, I needed to remember what it felt like to be a child so that I could see everything through Irvana’s eyes and feel everything through her body.

 

Although aimed at children, I’ve been surprised by how many adults have read StarMark too. Perhaps because it’s a story about growing up, about seeing where you came from, how it shaped you, and about accepting who you are meant to be? I reckon that’s something most of us can relate to, whatever our age.

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You can get a copy of StarMark here and there’s a reading guide to go with it too, available here.

Katherine’s second novel, Kingstone, will be published by Bedazzled Ink in June 2017 and she’s currently working on The Crystal Keeper’s Daughter.

You can keep up to date with her writing and other news on her website and on her blog.

Getting the voice right

Voice is something that a lot of writers have been asking me about recently when sending their work for feedback. I think when you are so close to your writing you can often feel that the voices you have in your story, especially when you have more than one narrator, are not distinct enough, or authentic enough.

I know I felt this way when writing As If I Were A River but in virtually every review I’ve had of the book the readers have said that the voices are really strong, really different, and really real. So, it can be difficult to tell when it’s your own work.

Part of the problem for me when writing that novel was that I became really annoyed with my main narrator, Kate, at one stage. It seems that I am not alone in this dilemma. Morna Piper’s guest blog for Mslexia What to do when you hate the sound of your own voice‘ reveals that she finds her narrator irritating. While a lively discussion of Gillian Flynn’s best-selling novel, Gone Girl, over On The Literary Sofa blog shows that voice can kill a novel completely no matter how clever the plot may be.

So how can you tell whether you are getting it right?

Well, as writers you all know that you are far too close to your own work to be able to tell. So my advice is feedback, feedback, feedback! Get as many writer friends as you can to read your work and let you know what they think. Use critiquing services if you can’t find anyone honest enough or if, like me, some of your most valued readers are now almost as close to your work as you are.

Even if I’m writing a story in third person point of view, I always do some exercises writing in first person for each character and find the ‘what if’ ones can work really well for this. Play around and get to know your characters well and you’ll find that the voices will come naturally.

Think about the novels you love and return to again and again. What are the voices like in those? Why is it that you keep returning there? Conversely, think about the novels you haven’t enjoyed and the ones you abandoned – why did they not draw you in?

As well as feedback, I definitely recommend reading more novels as a writer rather than just for pleasure and analysing them as you go. Also read Francine Prose’s Reading As A Writer, do the exercises in it, and eavesdrop whenever you can to hear different voices wherever you go.

Guest author: Daniel Gothard

Delighted to welcome Daniel Gothard back to the blog today. He appeared last year when his novel, Simon Says, was published and he’s back now as his latest, Reunited, comes out. It tells the story of a successful journalist, Ben, who attends a school reunion for a feature and adds a whole other layer of conflict to his already complex and confusing life. Thanks for coming, Dan. Over to you…

So, it’s almost time to launch your second novel with the same publisher – who has already done an incredible job with your first and is putting his heart, soul and faith, not to mention finance, into another book by you. How do you feel – elated at having another opportunity to show your artistic skills? Sure this story will be a much bigger success than the previous one – regardless of how well that previous one actually did? Or can you feel a creeping sense of the ‘What ifs’ beginning?

My next Urbane Publications novel – “Reunited” (out October 6th 2016) is set in 1992 and 2012. The central character, Ben Tallis, tells his story as a 16 year old keeping a journal – in the wake of his father’s death – and as a 36 year old journalist – ordered by his editor to attend a dreaded 20 year school reunion.

I loved writing this book; the thought of those ‘What ifs’ in my own past kept coming to mind – although the book is pure fiction – and I really enjoyed reviewing the sheer weirdness of being a teenager. It is such a strange time for most people: the changes in your mind and body, the social and sexual anxieties and the peer-group pressures. Of course things WERE different in my day and, even in 1992, the internet, mobile phones, email, etc, just didn’t feature. That actually did me a creative favour and let me focus on ‘real’ human contact – talking instead of texting.

My guess is we all have those moments of wondering how we could have done something differently in our pasts, used other words to express ourselves and become someone else perhaps. I wrote a short story in 2001 about the 30 year old me meeting the 15 year old me on a train; trying and failing to impart knowledge and edge myself away from the sad and painful sections of my following 15 years. I’m not sure whether that inspired “Reunited” but I do love the idea of time travel and thinking about alternative timelines.

I’m exactly where I want to be in life and am incredibly lucky to have my wife and three children. My ruminations aren’t embedded with sadness, just a feeling of wonderment.

Remembering doesn’t have to mean regretting.

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Wise words, Dan! You can keep up to date with Dan’s writing by following him on Twitter and get a copy of Reunited here.

Guest author: Tom Hocknell on researching historical fiction

Welcome to my latest guest author, Tom Hocknell, whose debut novel The Life Assistance Agency, is published on 22nd September 2016. Good luck with the book, Tom, it sounds fascinating…

Writing a novel is hard enough, without needing to know which side of bed 15th century London Ferryman slept on. After ‘don’t write from the POV of a cat’, the best writing advice is ‘don’t write historical fiction,’ which is presumably why I ignored it.

I have kept it to a minimum – 4 sections of a diary – but it still presented the perfect opportunity to avoid writing by doing research. I’m not using period dialogue either, nor chasing authenticity by writing in a quill.

Another warning. Establishing historical characters is the easy part. Problems arise when they want to know things. Unlike contemporary protagonists, who can cut your word count by 5000 words via a Google search, historical characters have to actually meet people, or spend half their lives reading books – after learning to bloody read first, which doesn’t necessarily make scintillating fiction. .

Of course nothing tells you that you’ve finished a novel involving a historical figure such as Dr Dee like an exhaustive exhibition on him being announced; of the sort you had prayed for when starting your research. It’s like finding everything you’ve Googled in the flesh, well, perhaps not everything. In light of my recent searches for a used car, garden compost and cheap flights, not to mention the OCCASIONAL search for more intimate distraction, this is for the best.

Of course the most frustrating thing is to discover that your fascinating 16th century alchemist and angel-caller isn’t your historical figure, but other people’s too. A memo must have gone out a few years ago, because Damon Albarn wrote an opera on Dr Dee, Peter Ackroyd a book, and Random House eventually declined my novel because they had already signed a trilogy of novels involving, yup, you guessed it. Dr Dee. I got to the party late, but at least I got there.

My delaying a visit to the Dr. Dee exhibition at London’s Royal College of Physicians is the stuff legends are made of, were legends compiled of illness, train cancellations and chicken-pocked childcare. However, facing another day of children’s TV spent wondering how, when, or indeed why, Noddy got his helicopter flying licence, while looking for a specific Lego figure last seen a year ago, I wrapped up the 2-year old amidst promises of ‘going on a choo choo train’ and actually left the house.

On arrival at London’s Royal College, the 2-year old was chuffed with his lanyard like only someone can be who has yet to spend his life required to wear it. He frowned as I purred at the exhibition of glass cabinets containing what appeared to be neatly labelled 400 year old recycling. It’s the reunification of Dr. Dee’s library, the largest collection of 1500s England. He returned from Europe in 1586 to find it ransacked; as you do if you’ve chosen the wrong house sitter.

The exhibition was thrilling, although the sort of thing my teenage self would be aghast at my attending, but these days I get excited by shutting my eyes for 5 minutes. Like Dr. Dee’s, I hope my belongings are collated one day, even if they provoke little else than: ‘what’s this pile of crap?’ ‘How many broken hole punches is it necessary to own?’ And ‘why does anyone need 3 copies of Raze’s seminal Break 4 Love 12”?’’ I can actually answer that, but only on request.

It’s hard to know what the 2-year liked the most, but it was either De lateribus et angels triangulorum by Nicholas Copernicus which was protected beneath heavy linen to protect it from sunlight, or the foot-operated pedal bin in the disabled toilet downstairs.

The 2-year old grew bored before I was able to properly coo at the actual crystal ball Dr. Dee and Edward Kelley once used to scry angels; he preferred to play with the lift button. I guess that’s similarly lofty aspirations. There was also a Quentin Blake illustration of Dee from 2011, which easily justified taking the toddler, that and later throwing sandwiches at pigeons in Regent’s Park. However, there was something truly magical about seeing the items I have grown so familiar with while writing my novel The Life Assistance Agency over the past few years.

The Life Assistance Agency with its research mostly done before London’s Royal College of Physicians exhibition can be purchased here.