Forget the cat

So –

I was about to hold forth on Purpose –

Which is a very good topic and one that absolutely no one talks about enough including me –

And I was all nicely settled. Trip to the gym: done. Child to piano exam: done. Dog walk: done. Tea to hand: yes. Dog settled: oh yessity-yes. But –

A noise from the kitchen, as of things being tipped over and nuts being stolen –

Which means that Raf the Squizzel has come in through his squizzel flap and is choosing to steal from us over the hard graft of finding nuts in the rain outside. And –

Raf (or Rafe?) is welcome to his nuts of course, but there is a 0% chance –

And I do mean a big fat zero, no “point anythings” to be seen –

That Dibble will be content to lie next to me and lick his paws when there is squizzeling going on in the next room –

And, what is as much to the point, Raf doesn’t just like the nuts, he likes to run up and down on me, infuriating the dog, and happily jumping around on the keyboard as a way to ensure that my attention is on him not on the damn screen, and if I can hear Raf, he can hear me, and will come a-calling very soon –

But –

You thought this was a story of Doom and Despair – a tale of Failure – but it is not. I snuck my way to the kitchen door –

Ninja-like, you say? A human stealth-weapon –?

Well, maybe so, yes, perhaps there was a touch of the ninjas, but no headband. I don’t look cool in a headband –

And I closed the damn door. Dog, tea and laptop on this side. Nut-stealing squizzel on the other.

Phew. Done. Ready.

So: Purpose.

Why do we write? Why do I? Why do you?

Well, yes, we like it. And yes, we hope to make some readers happy. And maybe if we make enough readers happy, we’ll make some money  and get those other things – festival appearances and the like – which seem like part of the picture.

But the book. Your story.

What is its purpose, please? I wonder if there is a single good book anywhere that isn’t importantly purpose-driven.

What do I mean? Well, Philip Pullman wrote His Dark Materials trilogy with an explicit anti-church message. (Or at least, an anti-authority message: PP wants a world where people get to think for themselves, make their own decisions.)

That purpose gave the book a heft that just didn’t come from any number of polar bears or cliff ghasts or even daemons wandering through Oxford colleges.

Any really good book has that heft, I think. It can be massively explicit – as with Philip Pullman or (even more so) with To Kill a Mockingbird, or pretty much everything by Toni Morrison.

It can certainly be personal rather than political. You can’t read The Spy who Came In From the Cold without thinking (rightly) that Le Carre had something big to say about love and betrayal in a time of cold war. And in fact you might think that the cold war was really only a backdrop, or even, in effect, a metaphor for something personal. Perhaps Le Carre would have thought the same way about love and betrayal even if he lived in a world full of hippies throwing flowers at each other.

It can also be ambiguous or very deeply hidden. Does Raymond Chandler have big points to make about his world of 1940s Los Angeles? Well, maybe, but if he does, those points are deeply buried. (I think RC wants to talk about what it is to be good, or even noble, in a modern, urban, capitalist world. But, in RC’s view, the modern world doesn’t really admit notions of nobility, so neither RC nor his narrator can openly address the subject – so all the reader gets, or appears to get, is silence.) Plenty of other books have a very strong sense of purpose, but one so tightly suppressed that it’s never really disclosed. Colm Toibin’s Brooklyn would be the poster-child for not talking about its subject.

But what does all this mean for you?

I don’t think you can glue purpose onto a book. You can be authentic, or nothing.

A lot of action-type stories just start with a hero presumed to be good (a Tom Cruise type) and an enemy who’s definitely bad (which you know because they have some facial or verbal peculiarity and because they say scary things to do with bombs.) And that’s it. The machinery of plot just operates without the whole good/bad thing ever getting really investigated any further.

But any plot always throws up complications and loose ends and the like. How do you deal with those? How does your hero or heroine?

In one of the Fiona books, Fiona solves a long-past missing persons case by figuring out that the person – widely presumed to have been murdered – is in fact alive and well and living near Bournemouth. Job done, right?

And yes: her job was done in the sense that she’d arrested all the actual bad guys and cleared up all the mysteries that she started with.

Except, the missing girl had a dad, who missed her profoundly and whose life had run into the sands – or at least, the gloopy Welsh mud equivalent of those sands.

So what does an authentically good police officer do in those circumstances? Well, without much talking about it, over the course of the book, Fiona had coaxed and cajoled the man to clean up his house – and his life. She’s nudged him into becoming the man his daughter would have wanted him to be. And, that done, Fiona gets the dad in a car, drives him down to the south coast, makes him buy some yellow tulips, and plonks him outside the door of the house where his daughter now lives.

That sounds like a good way to establish Fiona’s above-and-beyond sense of morality. It’s not enough, not for her, to crack open a crime ring. She has to do what she can to put together the lives that have been broken.

Forget the cat

There’s a famous (and quite useful) book on screenwriting, Save the Cat. The title comes from an idea that to establish a character’s fundamental decency, you want to have them save a cat from some kind of trouble early in the story.

But I think (at least with novels) this is basically nonsense.

It feels so glued on, so inauthentic.

The thing about Fiona and her farmer and the yellow tulips is that, by this point in the book, we feel that this is absolutely something she would do. Not just that: but the whole business of getting the old guy down to the south coast isn’t something we rush past in the opening pages of the book: it takes up precious page space at the very end. Because those pages are the book’s finale, they have an aura that none of the others do. So Fiona commits, and the reader feels that the author has committed, and the little bit of purpose – some statement about what it is to be noble in our world – feels authentic.

And that’s it: the message for the day. Does your book have authentic purpose? It’s fine (and probably good, in fact) if you can’t precisely define what that purpose is. But can you feel it? Is it there? It probably should be. Your book will be better if it is.

FEEDBACK FRIDAY / Purpose

Purpose – that’s something very tricky to show in a 250-word passage, but let’s give it a go. Feel free to edit a longer passage to get it down to the right kind of length. Give us enough explanation to understand the context. And just show us something that hints at the point of your writing. This could be really subtle. It doesn’t have to show your character being good. It could be (say) about the difficulty of belonging to two worlds (the themes of Colm Toibin’s Brooklyn.) Just show us something to suggest why you’ve written the book. When you’re ready, log in to Townhouse and share your work in this forum.

250 words or so. Title & context. Go for it. I’ve put a chunk of that Fiona ‘n’ tulip stuff below, so you know what I mean.

Til soon.

Harry