Kingsley Amis once remarked that there are two sorts of books: the ones that you think will be hard to write, and indeed they are, and the ones you think will be easy to write - and they are hard to write, too. For me, The Anatomy of Ghosts fell into the first category.
I knew it would be hard to write for three reasons, because my novels usually are, and because this one would be a standalone, and because this time I was being foolish enough to try something I hadn't done before. Sometimes I envy authors who just write series novels, because in my experience these novels aren't quite as hard as the standalones. As I found with my Lydmouth and Dougal series, once the first novels was out of the way, the later ones weren't so difficult as I'd feared. I knew the main characters. I knew the setting, particularly for Lydmouth, where the setting is like another character. Above all I knew the flavour I was aiming for.
'Flavour'? I might have said 'texture' or 'smell' or something equally vague and metaphorical. But other writers of fiction will know just what I mean. Each book - or series - has an indefinable atmosphere, a sort of interior weather. The author has to find that before the novel will come alive in any way. Otherwise it's just facts and ideas, marks in a notebook and squiggles on a screen.
Writing a standalone book is always hard because everything has to be built from scratch. It's frustrating, time-consuming, economically irrational - and, if all goes well, hugely exciting. The author can at least be sure it will never be dull.
I know more than usual about the painful gestation process of The Anatomy of Ghosts because from the start I set out to keep a record of progress. At some points in the writing, however, it would be more accurate to describe it as regress, as first one draft, then another, went out of the window.
For years I'd had a vague idea of a murder mystery with a ghost set in the eighteenth century, when people thought rather differently about ghosts from the way they do now. The other, equally vague idea, was that it should be set in Cambridge, a city I used to know well but no longer do. A fictional college, Jerusalem, is mentioned in several of my other novels. I felt that perhaps it was time to explore the place. The two ideas collided, and I knew I had something that might eventually turn into a novel. I had at least a hint of the 'flavour'.
The title, The Anatomy of Ghosts, came early, which was a good sign because the title is part of that elusive 'flavour' for me. The ideas came easily, too. The problem was, there were far too many of them, and I didn't know which were the right ones. For seven months, I researched, planned and brooded about the book. I work with my wife, Caroline, and we spent hours, if not days, discussing the possibilities and weighing up angles of approach. But all I had at the end of it was a mass of information, most of irrelevant, stacks of characters and situations that that failed to fit together, and a growing sense of panic.
Where would we authors be without panic? It was panic that made me plunge into the book as if into a pool of very cold water. It wasn't pleasant. But a character emerged somehow - John Holdsworth, a bookseller whose wife and child had recently died. He lived by the Thames with a view across the water of St Paul's. (It would have been more convenient if he had lived in Cambridge but I wanted him to visit the university as a stranger, and besides I could see him on Bankside.)
The book began as Holdsworth's own narrative, in the first person. But somehow it failed to work and after six weeks I rejigged what I had in the third person. That was better. Then I wrote about 40,000 words. Then I started again, cutting out a third of the characters and several strands of the plot.
With this new approach, I reached the point when (yet again) I had a 20,000-word opening. By this time it was the anniversary of when I'd started work on the novel. If my rate of production were averaged across the year it would come out at about 400 words a week. My British editors were being extraordinarily patient and kind, but the American publisher was becoming understandably restive.
'Painfully slow,' I wrote in my record. 'Flaccid crap. Wading through treacle.'
Three months later, I had another night of long knives, slaying characters and scenes, often with regret, because I now realised they weren't needed. Slowly, page by page, a story was emerging. I never knew quite what was happening next, which meant the writing of the book was full of false starts and cul de sacs. Writing fiction is a process of refinement. It isn't pretty. Sometimes it's like slicing flesh off yourself.
Then at last - after about eighteen months - the novel began to flow. After twenty-two months it reached an ending. This draft was too long, too flabby, at 165,000 words. So I began the final draft - which meant cutting and rewriting the previous one. Nearly 40,000 words fell under the axe.
Finally, nearly two years after I started, I had a novel to show my agent and publishers. That wasn't the end of it, of course, for a book can always be improved and good editors should be cherished. But the editorial process was very much a matter of refining what was already there.
At this stage a novel is no longer a private entity, jealousy guarded by the author (and in this case his wife as well). It's then a semi-public thing that exists outside the home, like a child that goes to school. On this occasion, the last phase took another five or six months, though of course I was working on the next book by then, and the editing required only a few days here and a few days there.
Now it's time for The Anatomy of Ghosts to be published. That's when the child leaves home altogether, to extend the analogy, and passes entirely beyond the parents' control. And that's when it gets really scary. For the parent.
Andrew Taylor
www.andrew-taylor.co.uk
The Anatomy of Ghosts is published by Michael Joseph
