Writing Jane Austen (24 page)

He would do some research of his own, find out a bit more about what made writers tick. Or not tick, as the case might be.

The next morning, his head whirling, Henry closed his computer and sat back in his chair. He flicked a pencil between his fingers, and
looked at the textbook awaiting his attention.
Solar Astronomy in H-alpha.
What an ordered and simple world that was compared to the strange realm inhabited by writers, who seemed to suffer from all kinds of complaints, some of them obvious, like advanced sententiousness and chronic ego-inflation, some puzzling, such as only being able to write with your feet in a bucket of icy water, others dotty—why would dangling a crystal in front of your screen do anything for your writing?

His eyes fell on another book,
Foundations of Quantum Chromodynamics: An Introduction to Perturbative Methods in Gauge Theories
. No, he was wrong, there were stranger places than inside a writer’s mind. Although maybe a writer’s mind was a quantum computer; after all, Penrose said it might be. Seven plots, wasn’t that the magic number? And presumably, any novel started in a particular way could end up with one of an infinite number of variations.

This was getting interesting. Assume a protagonist, an antagonist—what else? One of those sites he’d found had a useful analysis of what went into a novel. He flipped open his screen, made a quick retrace, and there it was. Protagonist, co-protagonist, antagonist, major characters, minor characters. Acts one, two, three. Opening, inciting incident, crisis, climax, ending. So, let the protagonist be
a,
the co-protagonist
b
and the antagonist
x,
and let there be seven plots, then… Did Georgina know all about this stuff? Were writers born knowing it, or did they sweat through it, as one might modules on fluid dynamics or magnetohydrodynamics?

He would ask her. He’d like to do that right away, but if she were writing today, it would be criminal to interrupt.

She wasn’t at her computer, she was standing at the door. “I was going to have some coffee, how about you?”

“Anna is monitoring your caffeine intake.”

“Anna isn’t here.”

“I think you’ll find that Anna has hidden the coffee.”

Georgina let out a wail and rubbed her hair with both hands. “My mind’s a blank, I need to pep it up.”

“Draw up that chair. Have a look at this, it’s fascinating.”

Georgina looked at the screen, blinked, shook her head, looked again. “Fascinating?”

“Yes. How does that structure work for Jane Austen’s novels? If you can work that out, and if there’s a pattern, then you have a template. Won’t that make your job easier?”

“I don’t need a template, I need a story.”

Georgina slouched off to hunt for the hidden coffee, and Henry, knowing he should be doing his own work, went back to the structure of the novel. After a few minutes, he swung his chair round and got up. He went out of his study and called down from the landing for his sister. “Maud!”

“What?”

“Can you remember the plots of all Jane Austen’s novels?”

“Why?”

“I want to analyze them, to help Georgina with her plot.”

“You aren’t talking plagiarism, are you?”

“Structure.”

“Okay, what have you got?” Maud came jumping down the stairs and sat in Henry’s chair. “We can’t do this for all six books, that’d tax my brain too much. Let’s do
Pride and Prejudice
. Or
Emma,
I don’t mind.”

“
Pride and Prejudice,
then. Protagonist, Elizabeth. Co-protagonist?”

“Mr. Darcy, of course. The romantic hero of all romantic heroes. He carries Elizabeth’s missing happiness.”

“What?”

“That’s what the co-protagonist is for, I read about it. Opening? Easy, you get the whole set-up except for Mr. Darcy. The Bennets, the stranger arriving in their midst who’s going to marry one of the daughters, the conflict between Mr. and Mrs. Bennet.”

Georgina was back, holding a tray with a teapot and three mugs. “No coffee, so it’s going to have to be a tea fix.” She edged some books to one side and put the tray down on the table. “No chocolate biscuits, either; Anna must have a grudge against me. Why are you talking about the Bennets?”

“Because we’re helping you,” said Maud, not taking her eyes from the screen. “Look, here’s an interactive chart for planning your novel. No wonder everybody in the world is writing a novel; sorry, Georgina. Inciting incident?”

“Elizabeth meets Darcy at the dance and is prejudiced against him,” said Georgina. She poured the tea and handed a mug to Henry and one to Maud.

“What does the protagonist want?”

“To get away from her mother,” said Georgina.

“To make a good marriage,” said Henry.

“Obstacles?”

“Mr. Collins and Mr. Wickham, and her family, of course,” said Georgina. “I shouldn’t be doing this, I should be at my own computer, writing.”

“You haven’t got a plot,” said Maud, without turning her head. “You’ve got a few pages of someone else’s plot, that’s all. Mind you, there are a lot of decisions you don’t have to make.”

“Such as?” said Henry.

“Genre.
Love and Friendship
isn’t going to be another Harry Potter, or a Batman story, or a mediaeval time slip with a drippy modern heroine, or a tense thriller about shooting the president of the U.S.A., or a harrowing tale of paedophilia or whatever, is it? It’s a romantic comedy. It’s about love and happiness. And, given the title, about friendship, too. Come on, let’s have the crisis.”

“What crisis?”

“It says here it’s what comes in about the middle of the book. That’s easy, anyhow, it’s Mr. Darcy’s proposal. End of act two is
next, that’s got to be a downer, if you want to have a happy ending.”

“Who says?” Georgina was intrigued, but also suspicious. “I never did any of this when I wrote my first book.”

“Maybe you should have done,” said Henry. “Downer—that’s got to be where that idiotic Lydia runs off with Wickham.”

“Ending—second proposal, happiness all round,” Maud finished triumphantly. “There are sections here for sub-plots, but Georgina needs to think up a main plot before she goes haring off after the subs, so I won’t put in Jane and Bingley or poor Charlotte’s terrible fate. Now I’ll print it, and voilà!”

“Voilà is all very well, and now we know how
Pride and Prejudice
works, but how does that help me?”

“It’s a pattern. A model,” said Henry. “How many pages do you have of the handwritten manuscript?”

“It comes to about three thousand words.”

“And what happens? Come on, you’ve refused to tell us, but you have to if you want our help.”

“Lady Carcenet is a widow who’s summoned a cousin’s young daughter, Susan, to come to Bath to be a companion to her.”

“Is that it?” asked Maud.

“Isn’t there a Susan in
Mansfield Park
?” said Henry.

“Futile Fanny’s sister,” said Maud. “At the end, she comes to take Fanny’s place at
Mansfield Park,
and I tell you what, she’d have been a much more interesting heroine than Fanny Price. I hope you’re going to have a lively heroine, Gina, and not one who’s exhausted if she walks through the shrubbery. And don’t forget the shrubbery, there are lots of shrubberies in Jane Austen.”

“Never mind the shrubberies, Gina needs a storyline. Susan meets her match, that’s a given. So what comes between them?”

“Lady Carcenet,” said Maud promptly. “You can tell she’s no good, not with a name like that. She’ll be a spiteful old besom, a Lady Catherine all over again.”

Henry was still thinking about
Pride and Prejudice
. “Could you tell from the opening chapter what was going to happen in the rest of the book?”

“No,” said Georgina. “I’d say that Mr. Bingley was going to be the hero.”

“You wouldn’t,” said Maud. “Think about it, you can’t have a hero called Bingley.”

“I haven’t got a hero called anything,” said Georgina. “But thank you very much, both of you. I’ll take this page on
Pride and Prejudice
; who knows, it may inspire me.”

“I’ll lend you my Tom Lehrer CD if you like,” said Maud. “You can listen to the Lobachevsky plagiarism song. And, remember, Shakespeare pinched most of his plots.”

“Geniuses can do that, hacks can’t.”

Georgina took herself and her tea away. Maud made a tutting noise. “I don’t think it’s a good sign if a writer calls herself a hack.”

“It does suggest a certain lack of confidence and self-esteem,” Henry said.

For the next week, Georgina spent hours every day at her desk. She plotted and planned and outlined, she drew up character biographies, and she produced ever more complicated diagrams with lines and coloured circles and arrows.

Sensing the futility of all this, she returned to the novels. She read the opening chapters and then flicked her way through the rest
of the books, reminding herself of how the stories worked. She got up the site Maud and Henry had used to analyze
Pride and Prejudice,
and made an analysis of the other five novels.

How had Jane Austen planned and outlined her books? Georgina didn’t know enough about literature to have any idea how nineteenth-century novelists wrote. A first draft, then worked over in painstaking detail, crossing out a word here, inserting a phrase there? How did those writers manage without a word processor? It would have been bad enough in the days of the typewriter, having to type the whole thing out again; just imagine having to copy out one hundred and sixty thousand words by hand with that quill pen, making the fair version which would go to the printer.

Come to that, imagine being a printer in the nineteenth century, working from handwritten manuscripts, setting every letter of the type by hand, making up the pages. Skilled work, a job rendered entirely superfluous by modern technology. What she produced on her computer could, within seconds, emerge in a bookshop as a bound finished copy.

Only, at the rate she was going, the bound and finished copy would have an extent of about ten pages, since she hadn’t managed to produce a single word of her own.

Henry, Maud and Anna treated her with the kind of tolerant gentleness that would be appropriate to an ill child or an injured pet. This annoyed Georgina intensely; she would much rather they had harangued and nagged her. Then she could have had an argument and felt the vitality of anger, instead of the strangling powerlessness and helplessness that overcame her as she sat there, hour after hour.

Henry was concerned. Every day when he got back from college, he looked an enquiry at Maud, and she in turn shook her head. Anna went around with a frown on her face, endlessly cooking chicken broth and planning delicious meals to tempt Georgina, who had quite lost her appetite.

The three of them were sitting round the kitchen table, racking their brains as to what they could do to help Georgina, when the front doorbell rang. Maud ran upstairs to answer it, and a few minutes later came running back down the stairs, talking and laughing. Behind her was a young man of about Henry’s age, a head shorter than him, with untidy brown hair and big brown eyes. Charles Grandison, Henry and Maud’s country cousin.

Henry greeted him with a friendly slap on the shoulder. “Charlie, good to see you. What brings you to London?”

Charles lived in Kent, where he bred wild boar. “Visiting some of my best customers,” he said. “Any chance of a bed for the night?”

Anna took out another glass and poured wine for Charles. He took no notice of Henry and paid no attention to Maud’s chatter, but was looking intently at Anna. “Aren’t you going to introduce me, Henry?”

Henry was taken aback and stopped, “Haven’t you met Anna before? Anna, I do apologize. This is Charlie Grandison, my cousin.”

Anna gravely shook hands with him and then, her mind on practical matters, inquired if he would be dining with them.

Charles looked pleased. “If that’s all right. If you have enough, as long as it isn’t chops, or anything else that won’t stretch.”

Maud sniffed the air. A fragrant aroma, rich with garlic and spices, filled the kitchen. “Lamb, cooked for hours in wine with lots of garlic and onions. Am I right, Anna?”

“You’re lucky, Charlie,” Maud told him. “It would be a lean, mean fish night tonight normally, but at the moment Anna is trying to feed up Georgina, so there’s plenty for one extra. You remember Georgina?”

“Your lodger,” said Charles. “The writer, fearfully clever, frightened the wits out of me, I have to say.”

Anna exclaimed at this. “It is true that she is clever, and works at the university, but how could she frighten anyone?”

“Writers are funny people, aren’t they?” said Charles, still not taking his eyes off Anna as she moved around the kitchen. “A head full of strange ideas, and you’re never sure when you’re with them that they aren’t taking notes, and you’ll find yourself in their next book, sounding like a perfect ass.”

“Most writers say they never use real people in their books,” said Maud severely. “They say real people are far too dull. And Georgina might say she finds you frightening because you work with wild boar. That’s fairly formidable, don’t you think?”

Anna came back to the table, face alight with interest. “Wild boar? What do you have to do with wild boar? Do you hunt them?”

Charles laughed. “No, I breed them. We raise them for food, not for hunting. I have hunted wild boar, in Germany, really just to see what it was like. I’ve never been so frightened in my life. They’re vicious creatures, they go for you out of pure spite.”

“The piglets are cute,” said Maud. “I love their little stripes.”

“They aren’t cute when they grow up and weigh half a ton,”
said Charles. “But I respect them, and we mostly get on okay.”

“I have an excellent recipe for wild boar,” said Anna. “We have a lot of wild boar in Poland, which is where I come from.”

“Poland?” said Charles, interested. “I’ve never been to Poland. Tell me about it.”

Henry and Maud exchanged glances. Henry got up from the table. “I’ll leave you and Anna to talk about Poland and wild boar, Charlie. I’ve got a bit of work I want to do before dinner.”