What writing a novel taught me about Liz Truss

So I wrote a book. It’s a novel about a man who thinks he’s one thing when in fact he’s another. I can’t really give an opinion on whether it’s any good because I wrote the thing, but it ended up being what you might call an “anti-spy novel”. People who’ve read it have said it’s not bad.

What follows here is not some naked piece of self-promotion. Ok, perhaps there is a whiff of self-promotion to it, but the point of this is not my book, or really anything to do with the specifics of the book. The point is that writing a novel tells you something. Or at least, it taught me something and the more I’ve chewed it over, the more significant it has begun to seem.

The point is this. I put together a plan for my novel. It was a pretty decent plan, which sketched out the plot and the backstories of the characters – everything I would need to get the thing done. The urge to plan is a pretty fundamental instinct. Humanity has always longed to control the future, even though it’s obviously impossible, but you might as well give it a go.

So I gave it a go, and I put together a plan. But the book I ended up with was nothing like my plan. More than that, the end result was something that I never could have planned in the first place. The strange thing was, it was impossible for me to know how the book was going to turn out until I had started writing it.

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This is not to claim that I was struck by some kind of divine authorial lightning. I don’t believe in that sort of stuff. The point is much less dramatic, but no less important and it is this: that a book needs to work.

This means two things. First, that 80,000 words of writing should contain no continuity errors – a character cannot put down a mug of tea, and then two lines later, put down the same mug all over again. Getting that continuity right is a pretty big task all on its own. That’s the easy bit.

Second, and much more difficult, is the fact that the characters and the situations all need to work together in a way that is logically and emotionally and tonally consistent. A person can’t talk one way then suddenly start talking in another. They can’t behave one way, and then become a completely different person, or do something that would make a reasonable reader think “naaaa, they’d never do that”. The book can’t set out on one trajectory, and suddenly switch to a new, totally different tack.

Or to bring it back to the here and now, you can’t start on an article about novel-writing and suddenly jump to, say, a meditation on Liz Truss’s mini-budget. A leap like that would be so jarring as to make the whole thing collapse into nonsense. Unless, that is, you could find a way to force the new, surprising turn into the overall logic of what you wanted to say.

Liz Truss? Novel writing? Is there any way of sticking those two together? Well, perhaps. One way of doing it would be to say that Truss’s great failure was that she wasn’t a novelist. She didn’t sit down at a desk and set out in writing the full, internally consistent account of how her mini-budget plan was going to work. That was where she went wrong, because if she had actually behaved like an author, then the errors in her story would have leapt at her off the page.

But she didn’t, and as a consequence she lost control of her plot, which turned out to be stuffed full of contradictions and outright stupidities, none of which she noticed until it was far too late. Worse, Truss thought she was the main character, but she was wrong. The lead role actually belonged to the bond market, and it ripped her plotline to pieces.

And yet she pressed on, wrapped in the delusional conviction that her offering to the nation hadn’t actually been a total failure. In her mind it had been a great success, and the real problem was that no one else understood how great it had really been.

This is the fate of people who make big, bold assertions that they don’t think through in full: they fall into a state of delusion. Look at Brexit. Putin. Look at Trump, for god’s sake – now there’s a deluded one. But would he even be capable of thinking an idea through to its logical conclusions? Or for that matter, would Trump ever be able to write a novel – and if Trump could write, would it be possible to understand him?

And so it seems that Liz Truss does have a place in an article about novel-writing after all. As does Trump. But I can’t crow too much about these smart-arsed literary insights, because the jury is still out on my book.

There will be reviews. A friend read it recently and said it was “quirky”, which was like a dagger in the ribs. And writing it was extremely tough going. About two-thirds of the way through I realised I’d made a terrible mistake which meant re-drafting pretty much the entire thing.