::mslexia author method::

The Margaret Atwood Method
From Interview no. 10

• Ideas for books occur usually when you are in the middle of another project. They take a mostly visual form: an old woman with a container, for example. Note them down or sketch them. Put them in a drawer.

• When you are ready to start your next book, root out your ideas and examine them. Select the least obvious. By now it will have expanded. There may be a sister; a death, or deaths; a mystery; hidden papers of great import. A form of autism, perhaps; the fashion for hand-tinting photographs; the evolution of button manufacturing.

• Start by anchoring the characters in time. On squared paper devise a calendar for each. Write ‘0’ in the month of his/her birth and use this to calculate exactly how old that character is at any one time. Though you will not tell the story in chronological order (Heaven forefend), this allows you to orchestrate several interweaving storylines (five is a good number) without getting lost. It also situates each character in real time, which furnishes clues about the kinds of underwear (if any) they favour; their religious beliefs; the methods they use for making butter or selecting wallpaper.

• Filling in your various calendars with seminal events (births, marriages, wars) may take many weeks. This is when the plotting of your book takes place. For example: if your heroine is conceived during a war, and her father is a soldier, you must engineer some plausible means of putting father and mother in the necessary juxtaposition at the appropriate time. (Beware of plotting too carefully, however. You must allow scope for your subconscious to surprise you. This is the fun of writing. Otherwise it’s just painting by numbers.)

• Now you’re ready to begin writing: in longhand, focussing intensely, scribbling furiously, trying to hallucinate each scene as though wearing a virtual reality headset. It’s an organic text, bristling with asterisks, arrows, additions; scratchings out and reinstatings. After two hours, you have 30 pages and it’s time to start painstakingly transcribing onto your computer (you are a slow typist).

• 20,000 words later, you realise you’ve made a terrible mistake. The old lady should be alive, not dead. The lovers are taking over the story. Why on earth have you written it in third person?

• Go back to the beginning and start again. Be prepared for several further false starts, before surprising yourself with a recipe that works.

• Your troubles are far from over, however. The book’s five narratives all affect one another, so you have to keep them all in your head and switch between them at appropriate moments. As each narrative develops, it becomes like juggling with two plates, three sticks and a leg of lamb.

• At the end of the first draft, it’s time to check your facts. Up to this point the details in your story derive from your own prodigious recall of sociological and historical trivia. But now you want the truth. Despatch your three researchers off to ferret out Brownie songs, the date when cellophane was invented, and the like.

• Their findings result in alterations, elaborations or deletions in each of your five narratives. Which have repercussions on some or all of the others. Which necessitate a second draft. Which throws up a new set of facts to be checked. Which necessitate a third draft…and so on, repeatedly, until you have completed a sixth draft and both you and your researchers are exhausted.

Now you’re ready to begin writing: in longhand, focussing intensely, scribbling furiously, trying to hallucinate each scene as though wearing a virtual reality headset.