As I’ve come to the end of Trinity Moon, I’ve found myself thinking about how it all began. As one so often finds, in endings are the echoes of the beginning and as I wrote these last few scenes I got to pondering. On questions of honour and integrity, on promises given and the value of a man’s word, both to himself and those to whom he gives it.

I’ve spoken many times of how Songs started, but never where Gair came from or why he has grey eyes. The answer is in a poem. A classic some might say; others might think it’s a bit cheesy. Certainly it’s one of the most accessible poems I was exposed to as a child, and studying English Literature to A Level means I’ve read a lot of poetry. Some of it I’ve even enjoyed.

Anyway, this poem’s been stuck in my head since I was about nine years old. You’re probably familiar with it. It tells a story and poses endless questions about who and why and where and when which I’ve spent the last thirty years trying to answer. It has an awful lot to do with why I’m a writer, so if you’re looking for someone to blame, here he is.

The Listeners by Walter De La Mare

‘Is there anybody there?’ said the Traveller,

Knocking on the moonlit door;

And his horse in the silence champed the grasses

Of the forest’s ferny floor:

And a bird flew up out of the turret,

Above the Traveller’s head

And he smote upon the door again a second time;

‘Is there anybody there?’ he said.

But no one descended to the Traveller;

No head from the leaf-fringed sill

Leaned over and looked into his grey eyes,

Where he stood perplexed and still.

But only a host of phantom listeners

That dwelt in the lone house then

Stood listening in the quiet of the moonlight

To that voice from the world of men:

Stood thronging the faint moonbeams on the dark stair,

That goes down to the empty hall,

Hearkening in an air stirred and shaken

By the lonely Traveller’s call.

And he felt in his heart their strangeness,

Their stillness answering his cry,

While his horse moved, cropping the dark turf,

‘Neath the starred and leafy sky;

For he suddenly smote on the door, even

Louder, and lifted his head:-

‘Tell them I came, and no one answered,

That I kept my word,’ he said.

Never the least stir made the listeners,

Though every word he spake

Fell echoing through the shadowiness of the still house

From the one man left awake:

Ay, they heard his foot upon the stirrup,

And the sound of iron on stone,

And how the silence surged softly backward,

When the plunging hoofs were gone.

It’s one of those cringe-worthy pieces of corporate management-speak that should have passed its best before date long before now, but which you still hear trotted out by the same people who think it’s cool to say “That’s blue-sky thinking!  Let’s run it up the flagpole and see who salutes.”  Urgh.

But as it happens, I have one.  An idea shower, not a flagpole, in case you were wondering.  It’s also the place where I go every day to get clean, but the washing part seems to be a side-effect of its true purpose, which is to shower me with inspiration.

Inspiration is a funny thing.  It can’t be bottled, pinned down, put under a microscope.  It’s powerful enough to kick-start 20-year, 12-volume fantasy series, yet as transient and ephemeral as a waft of perfume from someone in the crowd around you on the Tube.  Writers can spend days–years–searching for it in vain, surviving on sheer perspiration instead, then when they least expect it, they wake up in the middle of the night with their brains fizzing.

Lately all my best ideas have come to me whilst I’m in the shower.  It might be the warm water and suds putting me into a Zen-like state where my mind is wide open to the random inspiration particles sleeting through the universe, or it might be that I’m only half awake and therefore unable to dodge the hefty kick my subconscious has just delivered like an eight-inch-thick printout from the batch job that was running on the server overnight.  I really don’t know where they come from, or how they get into my brain, but answers to persistent problems always seem to arrive whilst I’m showering.

Like this morning.  There I am, soaping myself and hoping I’ll be done before the milkman arrives for his money (like ideas, telephones and doorbells always ring whilst the water’s running), when I suddenly realise *why* Character A has to be where he is and what he has to do whilst he’s there, after he’s been trailing across the landscape for two-thirds of the book without a clear purpose that I could identify other than that I just *knew* he had to be there.  Now I know why, and it all makes sense.  Pieces of the story are dropping into place so seamlessly that I can no longer see the joins.

By ‘eck, I don’t know what they’re putting in that Palmolive sea minerals shower gel, but it’s good stuff.

Someone asked me the other day why I write.  Easy.  I write because I don’t know how not to.

I’ve been a storyteller all my life.  Since I could hold a pen, and make marks on paper that weren’t just copying something off the blackboard.  It’s as natural to me as breathing.

As time went on, the stories got longer, more complex.  I’d get an idea and just run with it, to see where it took me.  When I was 14, one of those ideas took me on a wild, 260-page adventure cranked out on an old Adler portable typewriter (forever remembered as the Tripewriter) in one-and-a-half linespacing.  I can still smell the carbon paper.

That was my first attempt at writing a book.  Of course, I didn’t tell anyone I was writing a book; that kind of admission, in high school, can have Consequences, and I was already in enough trouble with the cool kids because I wore glasses, didn’t smoke, and handed my homework in on time.  Talk about making it hard for yourself! How I got out alive is anyone’s guess.

Of course, like most first attempts at novels, it was a load of rubbish.  Derivative, cliche-ridden and agonisingly bad prose, but I enjoyed the process.  More than enjoyed it.  I was hooked.  I wrote more.  When my Dad brought home a BBC Model B computer (he was involved in the schools IT advisory service for the local education authority at the time) I taught myself to use the basic word-processing package that came with it and the words continued to flow.  Now I could write into the night without the Tripewriter keeping the rest of the household awake.  Bliss.

But I never thought I was writing for an audience.  I was writing for me, because I wanted to find out what happened next in each story.  Years passed, as they are wont to do, and “Songs” limped, in fits and starts, into something approaching novel length, though I still refused to call it a book anywhere but inside my head.  I had a subscription to Writer’s News & Writing Magazine, and I called myself a writer, but that was it.  I still only had an intended audience of one.  Me.

I can’t remember what prompted me to put an excerpt up on a writers’ website for some feedback.  Probably chivvied into it by my husband.  Even he hadn’t read anything I’d written up to this point, but I guess he saw some potential underneath all the self-doubt.  That was the first time I’d ever given house-room to the idea that actually, there might be people out there who would want to find out what happens next as much as I did.

Revelation.  It was a whole new world.  People said nice things about my writing; some of them even said they’d enjoyed it.  Whoa.  Headrush, even bigger than the one I got the first time I said, out loud, to another person, “I’m writing a book.”

This was just the confidence-boost I’d needed.  I joined another site, got more feedback, finished “Songs” and with some trepidation, submitted it to literary agents.  I was fully prepared for rejection, but I knew it wouldn’t stop me writing the rest of the books in the series.  Nothing could, short of ceasing to breathe, because I had to find out what happened next.

All the stories are in my head, you see.  Layers and layers of them, too big and too dense to see the whole thing at once.  Each time I write a scene, it’s like it makes a space through which I can see the next one.  So I write that, and there’s the next one, on and on like a conjurer’s gaudy handkerchiefs.  I have a pretty good idea where it will end, but it’s the getting there, the discovery, that’s the exciting part.

That’s why I don’t plan.  Scratch that, won’t plan.  Can’t.  I’ve tried, and it hammers almost all the creative magic out of the process for me.  If I try to nail the story down beyond a vague outline what I write feels, to me, flat.  Forced.  In some unquantifiable but deeply important way, wrong.

You see, it’s not about  knowing what happens next.  I already do, subconsciously, somewhere under all those layers.  No, what’s important is the Finding Out.

Terry Pratchett once said in an interview that you’ve got to keep an eye on your secondary characters, or they’ll take over the show.  Turn your back for five minutes and there they are, merrily rearranging the plot to suit themselves, the blighters, and generally making more work for the poor put-upon writer.

I thought I might avoid that with Trinity Moon, since I was working from a synopsis (a heretofore unheard-of event, I might add, which has proved helpful and frustrating in equal measure).  Everything’s chugging along nicely, and I come to an action scene where Gair throws a lock on Ne’er-do-well No. 1 and laying his sword across the fellow’s neck, threatens to cut his throat.

Whereupon the strangest thing happens.  Ne’er-do-well No. 1 takes a firm grip on My Hero’s family jewels and purrs, in a very feminine voice: “Not if I geld you first, Empire.”

Eh?  Where did she come from?

<scrolls through preceding paragraphs>

Nope.  No girls there.  WTF?

So I continue typing, to see where I will be taken, and suddenly she’s sitting cross-legged on the table, twirling her dagger through her fingers and eating my dates.  Gair’s dates.  Whatever.  The saucy minx.  She’s got backstory, she’s got attitude, she’s sensual and snarky and inordinately fond of knives, and she’s made herself right at home in the story without so much as a by-your-leave.

I’ve just been mugged by my own imagination.  And I didn’t feel a thing.

The unsung ones, now quietly dropping off their respective perches and we never know anything about them until their obituary shows up in the newspaper. And you read it, and you think to yourself: “Bloody hell!” and sit there, quite stunned.

Freddie Spencer Chapman is one such. Worked behind enemy lines in the Malaya campaign of WWII, cheerfully blowing up the enemy with bamboo-and-gelignite bombs and inflicting so much damage with two comrades that the Japanese thought they were being taken on by 200 crack commandos. A life that, if it was fiction, would be dismissed as unbelievably far-fetched.

Read his obit, and I dare you not to be moved, inspired, uplifted, and also saddened that we don’t seem to make ‘em like that any more.