In this last weekend of #indieapril, the month where we celebrate indie authors, I’d like to champion an author published by an independent publisher whose work I feel deserves a much wider audience.
I first came across James Christie’s book, Dear Miss Landau, after it was chosen for an episode of the BBC Radio 4 programme A Good Read. His memoir describes a trip across America to meet his heroine, Juliet Landau, who played Drusilla in Buffy the Vampire Slayer. But this isn’t just a road-trip memoir. James Christie is autistic, and his journey is like no other I’ve read.
As Harriet Gilbert, presenter of A Good Read, puts it: ‘You get a bit fed up with fictions where characters with autism are kind of there as a device in order to explore the meaning of truth or goodness or whatever it is…This is somebody who really has to live with Asperger’s describing his world for us.’
In the years since I read James’s book, he’s become a friend, and you can read my first interview with him here,
James is back on my blog today to talk about the torment and determination it took him to write and research his latest release, The Legend of John Macnab.
Raiders, Research and Rocky
Over nearly thirty years between 1994-2022 I dreamed up, laboured on, researched and wrote the hell out of The Legend of John Macnab, the second sequel to John Buchan’s 1925 novel John Macnab and structured around the Book of Deer, a Scottish manuscript arguably more important than the Stone of Destiny but strangely unheard of. I found out about it while I was cataloguing a Scottish stately home’s rare book collection. It was like coming across the Lost Ark of the Covenant and being able to keep it under your bed so only you could look at it…
The Book of Deer is a gospel illuminated manuscript written at the Abbey of Deer in the 10th century and, it must excitedly be stressed, has the very first annotations ever written in Scottish Gaelic. They detail Columba’s legendary eastward trek from Iona across the disunited Alba and Pictland of antiquity in order to found the Monastery of Deer in Moray.
The Book of Deer is in the same class as the Lindisfarne Gospels and the Book of Kells. And when the then Prince Charles saw a similar gospel book in Cambridge just over twenty years ago, he immediately grasped its importance and insisted that, when the day came, the Augustine Gospels were to be carried in his coronation procession…
To paraphrase Raiders of the Lost Ark, “we are simply passing through history. These, these books, are history.”
As I delved into this Book’s history, it was as exciting in its academic way as the moment Indiana Jones found the location of the Ark in Tanis’ map room. However, when it came to incorporating it into my novel, the work involved in seamlessly twining together fictional plot elements leading up to the Scottish devolution referendum of 1997 with actual Royal history, church history, Islamic history (the art of illumination came out of the East) and events like Culloden and even the death of Princess Diana, also in 1997, was absolutely murderous and by any rational analysis probably should have been impossible.
But not, maybe, if you’re autistic.
Dear Miss Landau was quite an easy writing job, but what my fans probably don’t know is how I was able to write it with such seeming effortlessness..
As a quote in Dear Miss Landau explains:
“According to the article How To Be A Genius in the New Scientist of September 16 2006, although some people are indeed born with greater genetic gifts than others “some critical things line up so that a person of good intelligence can put in the sustained, focused effort it takes to achieve extraordinary mastery.” Just having great talent or intelligence on its own was not enough, it seemed. That talent had to be built, honed and painstakingly sculpted. There also seemed to be a ten-year rule: “it seems you have to put in at least a decade of focused work to master something and bring greatness within reach.”
What happened to the brain as a result of this work?
The article seemed to have the answer:
“Eric Kandel of Columbia University in New York, who won a Nobel prize in 2000 for discovering much of the neural basis of memory and learning, has shown that both the number and strength of the nerve connections associated with a memory or skill increase in proportion to how often and how emphatically the lesson is repeated. So focused study and practice literally build the neural networks of expertise.”
(Dear Miss Landau, p. 44)
This is the first brute requirement of the editing and research work you have to carry out in order to create a successful novel:
Manacle yourself screaming to your machine for at least ten years to build your ability.
And there ain’t no shortcuts. Or so it was at least, with me, as I bloodily honed my craft via endless drafts of Macnab.
Not only that, Macnab and the Book of Deer were exceptionally difficult subjects for a first novel. Some classics like J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye are narrowly focused on nary more than a character or two in a scarcely described contemporary setting.
This was not the case with Macnab; I had scarcely any knowledge of history or the importance of gospel illuminated manuscripts, had to learn everything from scratch, work out the motivations of people who’d died up to fourteen centuries ago, comment on 17th century politics and even rewrite Scottish history in a couple of places…
And the finished product had to be seamless and coherent. It had somehow to be boiled down to the standard commercial length of ca. 75,000 words and it had to be an enjoyable experience for the reader. Every word, reference and pause had meticulously to be weighed and calculated. It was the work of years, somehow carried out by a brain which was worse at learning than 97% of the population.
By 2009, I was creatively exhausted. I rather unwisely presented the Macnab manuscript to a writers’ group for their opinion and, in literary terms, I was hanged, drawn and quartered.
Another brute requirement of the writing process:
You gotta take the hits.
And you have to listen to and learn from criticism.
But it’s never easy.
So Macnab, it seemed, was dead. The Dear Miss Landau carnival suddenly swept me away and my Great Scottish Novel was consigned to an obsolete Word document in a forgotten folder…
But then the strangest thing happened: on the night of a general election seven years later I mentioned to my publisher that I had this old manuscript which, rather topically, dealt with Scottish history, politics and the 1997 referendum. “It doesn’t work,” I insisted, “but maybe we can make some money out of it.”
I didn’t expect to hear any more after I sent the ms. to her, so you could have knocked me down with a feather when she said it was “too good to be forgotten” and with a bit of revising and tightening, could be published.
All those thousands of hours of work had paid off! I’d been nearer to the jackpot than I’d ever imagined, and now that I had the skills I’d honed the hard way it was a relatively easy task just to tidy up the existing text.
But here’s the last and final brute requirement:
Your heart’s blood’s gotta be on every page.
Every. Single. One.
So, after twenty-one years, it came down to that one final night.
Imagine the length of time it had taken. I’d started Macnab in the last millennium…
Re-editing the text had actually been quite easy, but then my publisher sent me the last draft, asking me to check for a few mistakes…
There were hundreds.
Oh God.
Note this blog’s title.
You might not think Rocky has much to do with literary pursuits, but it is a perfect analogy for the process of research and editing.
In a literary sense, the entire process of writing Macnab had been as tough as the sequence in 1982’s Conan the Barbarian in which the young savage is manacled to a corn-grinder and forced to push it round and round whether it be wind, snow, hail or shine…
That’s how it was, and you might think that that, in and of itself, was tough enough.
You would be wrong.
Having endured the literary equivalent of the relentless grinding Rocky Balboa went through at the hands of Apollo Creed in their rematch and like Conan learning that that which does not kill you makes you stronger, rather than cruise through the metaphorical fifteenth and final round to a points victory, I had to come out, ringworn and beaten up, face my own demons, give everything I had and pull out a last round knockout.
When Creed tiredly tells Rocky “you’re going down,” and the equally weary pug replies “nah, no way,” that was me.
I worked eleven hours straight on the last draft and sent a twenty-three page set of closely-typed notes to my publisher. She promptly did a John McEnroe, saying “you cannot be serious,” before making every correction she could and publishing Macnab.
It was 75,950 words long.
The reviews were good.
The whole process didn’t leave me punchy, but I honestly knew I could never do that level of research again.
I guess the Asperger’s focus got me through (it took longer than a Kubrick movie!), but I am amazed my brain didn’t collapse under the terrifying loadings of information I subjected it to.
I thought that was that, but seven years later the Book of Deer was exhibited at Aberdeen Art Gallery and after nearly thirty years I was at last able to look upon it.
I felt like Heinrich Schliemann gazing upon the face of Agamemnon.
Truly.
I sat there and communed with it for two days.
Nobody noticed.
Such is the writer’s life.
Or, as it is said at the end of the Book:
“For chubus caich duini i mbia arrath in lebrán collí
ara tardda bendacht for anmain intruagáin rodscríbai.”
(Let it be on the conscience of everyone who uses this splendid little book,
that they say a blessing for the soul of the wretch who wrote it.)
*
Thank you so much for taking the time to write this article, James. I love your quotation from the Book of Deer. How poignant it is that these words of the writer can be read by us today. Wishing you every blessing on your book’s release!
And if you’ve enjoyed James’s post, or have any comments or questions, please do drop in and let us know. We’d love to hear from you!