::mslexia author method::

The Pat Barker Method
From Interview no. 5

• Notice that an idea about some dark aspect of human nature has settled into your mind. The idea has a vague shape that reflects the characters’ relationships to one another. (You know hardly anything about these characters, but don’t worry. They will emerge when you start writing.)

• At 8 o’clock one morning begin typing as fast as you can without looking at the screen or correcting your mistakes. Five hours later you will have written 3,000 words of Serbo-Croat.

• Continue like this for three days until your first chapter is complete, making sure you end with a ‘hook’ - an unsolved mystery or a moment of tension - that will make people want to read on to the next chapter. (You will not want to go on to the next chapter. The irony will not be lost on you.)

• Continue producing Serbo-Croatian five hours a day, five days a week for twelve weeks, then type ‘The End’ and print out an 180,000-word manuscript.

• Now select three coloured crayons and adopt a fierce critical stance. Begin marking the margins with the different colours as follows: POT (potential, of some conceivable value), OK (not total crap) and CRAP (crap). Take no prisoners.

• Panic. (‘It’s all crap. There’s no book there at all.’)

• Start all over again, using the POT segments as stepping stones for your second draft. Fortunately they will be in a vaguely coherent order due to the vague shape and handy hooks you have previously supplied.

• Up your work-rate to seven hours a day, typing rapidly as before but with clearer structure and more definite characters.

• Twelve weeks later print out another 180,000 words.

• Now start to think of your reader. Using coloured pens, sketch the trajectory of the main plot, ensuring that it moves from climax to plateau to climax to plateau to climax, in mounting intensity, like the Three Bears (you are very strict about this). Sketch in the subplots, ensuring they peak during the plateaux of the main plot.

• Up your work rate to eight hours a day seven days a week. Edit and reorder. Your concentration will be total. The characters are alive for you. All your discarded drafts mean you have imagined them in many situations.

• Go through the text, removing awkward constructions, tricksy language, difficult vocabulary. Nothing should come between the reader and the writing. You want yourself, as the author, to become invisible.

Get a feel for the environment of your novel. Your notes don’t have to fill volumes. Collect visual imagery and pin pictures round your desk – they convey much more than text.