It doesn’t happen often but when it does there the effect has the same disorientation as cultural shock. I am talking about the twisted mental state that comes from crossing an international date line. Last Monday I left Cooper Square Street at 6.30 p.m., walked across the street and caught a taxi to Centre Street. The fare for that short trip was with tip $8 or about the same it cost for the 27K journey from my condo in Bangkok to the airport. But that is another matter. The EVA shuttle picked me up at 7.00 for Newark Airport. The flight departed on time at 11.00 p.m. and I caught some sleep on the seven hour flight to Anchorage. After topping up the fuel tank and crew change we were off two hours later. It was 12 hours flight time to Taipei. Another two hours on the ground for the final three-hour plus flight into Bangkok.

I arrived at the door to the condo at noon Bangkok time. It was now Wednesday. Something happened to Tuesday. It was chewed up and swallowed; disappeared into the void. I was doing okay until about 6.00 p.m. Bangkok time. It was if someone had put me in a sleeper lock. The kind professional wrestlers use but are probably fake. This was a real one, though. There is only one-way forward: fight for your reality, stay focused, tough it out but that isn’t easy. I told myself that the worst thing for jet lag is to fall asleep at 6.00 p.m. That is the rational mind talking. And when your body feels like it is free floating, and you are drifting in and out of zones of consciousness, the rational mind sputters, spits, and finally drifts away. You try to chase after it but even as you are running after that thought, you see it like a drowning man struggling for a life preserver just out of reach.

I kept my watch on New York time. I am looking at 7.30 a.m. in New York and 6.30 p.m. in Bangkok. Your mind and body try to stretch around that time distance. It is not that different from the cultural shock from trying to understand a foreign language. Your brain seeks to register meaning but fails in the task. Culture shock and jet lag are evil twins. They force us to face the limits of what our bodies and minds are capable of doing or performing. Most of the time we drift from lamp to post in our comfort zone, never hitting that outer zone where we hit a wall where I mind tips over like a tricycle, the wheels spinning the air, going nowhere.

I was happy to be back in Bangkok on Wednesday night. The reality was that I had no sense of where I was. The fog that descends when how you process reality shuts down is a kind of insanity. A temporary state in most cases; it is a condition that can be cured with a couple of nights of catch up sleep. The thing with culture shock is that the cure is much harder and longer, and the costs paid to sanity arguably higher. I have to remember where I am now. What I can say and can’t say. The rules of the game that apply require a rested mind. Sleep, thought, silence, and emerging again in look out of the window of place that I call home but can never quite be home. Reconciling myself that the cultural equivalent of jet lag, is like losing days. You have to find the will and the ability to let them go. No sense chasing after what can’t be retrieved.

That Tuesday is gone.

I am back. In zone of my choosing; or did it choose me?

This is where it gets ugly.

Last week I zapped off the manuscript of my new novel to my agent in New York. My wife told me to get working on the next book. It’s not because she’s worried about me slacking off and failing to pay the rent. No, it’s because she knows what happens when I’m not writing.

Ever read “The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde”? When I’m writing, I’m Dr Jekyll. All my unloveable urges are intellectualized and subsumed to a pleasure in the creative impulse. As soon as I stop writing, I shuffle about the apartment like Mr Hyde, hunched and suspicious, leering, weak-willed and a bit vicious.

It happens every time I finish a book and I’ve dealt with it on each occasion with a different degree of success. This time I’ve gone straight into the documentary research for my next book, which will be a historical novel. Even so, over the weekend I was conscious that the calm I feel when writing was leeching away. My teeth were on edge. I yelled at a motorist (admittedly he’d failed to stop when my son and I were on the crosswalk in front of him, but nonetheless…). I went a couple of days without shaving and, though I didn’t knock over any small girls standing on the street corner, I did start to think I was degenerating into a vulpine Hyde.

I turned to Robert Louis Stevenson’s classic and found this:

“Between these two, I now felt I had to choose. … My two natures had memory in common, but all other faculties were most unequally shared between them.…Strange as my circumstances were, the terms of this debate are as old and commonplace as man; much the same inducements and alarms cast the die for any tempted and trembling sinner; and it fell out with me, as it falls with so vast a majority of my fellows, that I chose the better part and was found wanting in the strength to keep to it.”

What makes Stevenson’s tale great (in its original, non-Hollywood form) is that he nailed so clearly the dilemma at the heart of every civilized man. Freud wrote that man fights wars because we can only bear the restraint and repression of civilization for so long, before we blow. In my case, I write novels for the same reason.

As a writer, I have to be closer to my emotions perhaps than anyone except a shrink. The emotions need to be close enough to the surface that I can put them into sentence form and into the mouths of characters on the page.

If I was an accountant I wouldn’t need to do that every day. So I’d probably let it go.

I’ve realized that the annual post-completion jitters and self-doubt is merely what happens when I feel the strain of repressing those emotions. When I’m writing I don’t have to tamp them down – in fact, the opposite, I tease them out and give them form. Between books, I have to fight them because there’s nowhere for them to go. (It’s a little bit like Manhattan in August when all the analysts take their holiday. Everyone breaks down and blames the heat, but it’s really that they have nowhere to unload their neuroses.)

So long as I know what’s going on, I know that I won’t really turn into Mr Hyde. Not often, anyway.

Sad news from İstanbul. The old sanatorium on the island of Heybeliada burnt down last Sunday. Heybeliada is the second largest of the Princes Islands which are a group of green and pleasant islands in the Sea of Marmara, south of İstanbul. The old sanatorium or the ‘tuberculosis hospital’ as it was known was a famous local landmark and, despite being empty and unused for several years, was still thought of with affection by ex-patients and local people. There were very good reasons for this.

As some of you will know, I worked in a hospital myself for many years. My hospital was a psychiatric institution and like Heybeliada, it was old. When I worked there it was designated for closure and many of our patients were in the process of being moved out into the community. Not all of them, especially the elderly people, always wanted to go. My hospital was run down and not even very comfortable when I was working there. But it had been so once and this was what the older patients remembered and why, in reality, they didn’t want to leave. Basically, at one time, a real therapeutic environment had been created, a true ‘asylum’ where those who were sick could take time and space to recover.

Under the directorship of a doctor called Tevfik İsmail Gokce, Heybeliada also became just such a beacon for those who suffered from tuberculosis and other afflictions of the lungs. Patients were provided with excellent food, plenty of fresh air, companionship and conversation as well as stimulating cultural activities like musical concerts and film shows. Artisans were even employed at one time to give those patients about to be discharged some practical skills and work experience. Life after hospital for those who had been diagnosed with tuberculosis was tough, just as it was and remains for those diagnosed with a mental health problem today.

Heaven forbid that we should return to the abuses that often existed within large institutions – particularly those designed for people with mental health problems. But I do believe that there is still a place for designated therapeutic environments where people may escape, for a while, the cut and thrust of everyday life. After all, to be sick is surely quite enough to cope with, without having to deal with employment hassles, domestic worries and the hell that can be modern life. I do believe that wherever possible patients should be cared for within the community and this is what most of them do want now, whatever their condition. But wouldn’t it be nice if there were some real, peaceful and therapeutic asylums out there for us when we feel we just can’t take any more? Places that would take you in, feed you, let you rest, stimulate your mind if you wanted and just give you some space?

Of course there are private facilities that provide just such a service but their fees put them out of the reach of most of us. The true meaning of asylum is a ‘place of safety’ and that is what Heybeliada and places like it were. So a sad passing but one which will not be forgotten. Because whatever may happen to a great hospital and all of its equipment and administrative apparatus, the one thing that remains for a long time afterwards are its patients. And they do remember and they make sure that the rest of us know about it too.

One of the advantages of being an author in an “exotic” locale is that people visit and want to hear from you as someone who knows the place well. It’s also one of the disadvantages.

Last Friday night, I drove out to Ein Kerem to meet one such group of visitors from Reboot (http://www.rebooters.net/), a U.S. organization that brings together mostly liberal – and certainly not conventional-thinking – Jews to discuss issues related to Judaism and Israel. It turned out to be one of those occasions where I take a certain amount of pleasure in the people I meet, but am also reminded why I chose to spend my days alone with imaginary characters.

Ein Kerem is an old village on the edge of Jerusalem that’s less regimented in its architecture and layout than the neighborhoods of the city built in the last 60 years. John the Baptist was born there. So was my son, because there’s now a hospital overlooking the valley with its collection of churches, convents and restaurants. When arrived, I stood by my car for a few minutes watching a desert fox prowl the street, its brush silhouetted against the lights of the hospital.

The Reboot people had spent the day being spat upon by ultra-Orthodox Jews who objected to their visit to a religious neighborhood of Jerusalem. The previous day a friend of mine who works with asylum seekers had shown them around a Tel Aviv slum where illegal immigrants from Africa and the Far East congregate.

In the private house where Reboot had arranged for the dinner, I went out to the garden with the 15 members of the group. The owner of the house started telling them about the village. She began with the fact that it had been home to Palestinian Arabs. She didn’t mention that in 1948 a massacre in a nearby village lead them to flee. One of the “Rebooters” called her on it: “What happened to the Arabs?”

Nothing wrong with that, except that it wasn’t really a question – he could’ve guessed the answer. There was a tone of self-righteous confrontation to which I’m deeply attuned after 13 years here.

Well, not as deeply attuned as I thought. Because then I made my mistake.

I’d been asked to speak about “Jerusalem and what it means to the Jews.” God knows why. But I never turn down an audience when there’s a chance of plugging my books. My mistake was to say that I’d be prepared to talk about broader political issues than Jerusalem.

I can do that perfectly well. For several hours in fact I discussed the changes – for the worse – in the chances for peace over the years. The growth of Israeli settlements, in the face of agreements to which Israel is a signatory. The sense among senior Palestinian politicians that they can let peace talks languish because time is somehow on their side. Everyone behaving as though the problems they’re prolonging will disappear.

But people don’t know the energy it costs me to discuss this shit. And after 13 years here that’s what it is. Shit.

As the evening drew on, I found myself subject to a familiar feeling. Sapped of energy, tightness at the back of my jaw, wanting to fall off my chair. I’d connected with a few members of the group. But still others wanted answers to questions which have no answer (unless you think, for example, that the world just hates Jews and wants Israel gone, or that Muslims are born crazy.) I suppose I ought to have said that politicians disgust me and let’s quit talking politics… Let’s talk about how you build a sentence. What it’s like to bury yourself in a novel for months at a time. How different a culture looks when you put aside politics and try to imagine the taste of hummus on a tongue that recalls a time when your mother fed it to you as a baby.

It’s not for nothing that the people closest to me at the table were the ones with which I connected and the ones at the farthest end asked questions on an impersonal political level. At the far end of the table I probably seemed like a lecturer, rather than the actual human being visible to those sitting close to me.

I wrote my novels to escape this sort of dialogue. I wanted to show the human concerns of the Palestinians I’d come to know, rather than the stereotypes of their political portrayal.

Why? Because politics in the Middle East goes around in circles. Circles of victimization, everyone competing to show that they’re misunderstood and that they suffer more than the other side of the conflict. Refusing to see the other side as human.

The longer I’m here the less interested I am in exploring that. Palestinians are people to me – not symbols of victimization and oppression. Israelis, too. To a novelist, people can be characters. To a politician, they’re only ever symbols and numbers to be shunted about or used.

When I talked to the Rebooters, I was able to explain this, but only when the conversation turned to my books. It’s fair enough that most of them hadn’t yet read my books and returned to political issues and media coverage of the conflict.

As I drove home through the empty streets of a quiet Jerusalem already six hours into the Jewish Sabbath, I realized that I turned to novels because I’d come to know myself well. I didn’t want to turn my attention outward as a journalist, to record the emotional responses of others. I wanted to take readers into my characters’ heads – and, of course, into mine. Into the extreme experiences and emotions I’d gone through covering the intifada, learning about the real Palestinian culture. I decided that I would no longer speak about political issues, except where they touched upon the content of my Palestinian crime novels.

From now on, the Middle East is me.

I’m such a city person! I live in the country and I love that too, but the city is really my natural habitat. Pounding the streets of central Manchester yesterday I felt incredibly uplifted and quite liberated by the relative anonymity of it all. After all, even if you know people in a city, you can’t know anything like that many. Not in relation to the size of the place.

Of course if you’re well-known all of that changes. Back in 2007 I was invited to a restaurant where a group of Manchester United footballers had dined several months before. The staff were still going over every small detail about that particular service. It was ‘Wayne did this’ and ‘Wayne did that’ as if they had some sort of intimate knowledge of Mr Rooney and his habits. It’s quite natural to want to get close to the rich and famous from time to time and in the normal course of events there isn’t really anything wrong with that.

But what happens when you are well-known but your work depends, to some extent, upon your keeping a fairly low profile? My detective, Çetin İkmen, is now quite well-known in my fictional İstanbul. He has been on television, in the newspapers and because he was born and bred in the city he knows a lot of people. He isn’t a young man and so he’s put a fair few villains behind bars and has, as a result of that and of just being a cop, he’s made some enemies. In the book I am writing now İkmen is being drawn into an issue that is very emotive for İstanbul people. I’m not going to let on what that is but, suffice to say, whichever side of this particular argument he takes, he’s going to be in trouble with someone. Further, in order to investigate this situation it would be useful if he could walk the streets, as I can, in a state of anonymity. But even in a city of 12 million people, he is known and so he has to rely upon others, who may or may not be twisting their observations to suit their own views, to be his eyes and his ears. Recognisable as he is, he can be attacked, abused, lied to and misdirected.

This does of course make for some very interesting twists, turns and big, fat red-herrings in my story, but as a real way of life I think it is hard. Although in the UK at the moment it is quite difficult to feel too much sympathy for politicians many of whom, we now know, have played fast and loose with their expense claims. But this being recognised/fame thing does give you some sympathy for them as they go about their everyday constituency work. How does Prime Minister Gordon Brown defend the existence of a library at a public meeting in his constituency at the moment? Like him or loathe him, it must be difficult to deal with everyday problems while the worlds press try to take pictures of your eyes. Is he going blind? Isn’t he going blind? Should, just maybe, the world wait until Mr Brown lets us all know? After all they are his eyes, it is his sight that is at stake.

So even in cities you can be hassled if you’re someone. It’s why, even if I were young and lovely and vocally talented, I wouldn’t put myself forward for any of these talent competitions like the X Factor. I love wandering around being myself, being free and alone and totally unmolested by others. True, the money that goes with all that, would come in very handy and I would still like to be a rather more well-known author. But to be recognised wherever I go? No, I don’t think so. Yesterday in central Manchester I pranced around in some dress shops ‘modelling’ some truly mad and totally inappropriate clothes. Now I ask you, would you want your mother to see you doing something like that on the 6 o’clock news?

I am writing this from Indianapolis, Indiana, the Bourchercon 2009 Mystery Writers convention. This is my first such convention and it is a good chance to connect with other writers. Tomorrow I am on a panel “Murder at the edge of the Map.” Also on the panel is Leighton Gage, Moderator, Tamar Myers, Ysrsa Sigurdardottir, and Michael Stanley.

The weather couldn’t be farther removed from Thailand. It is running about 5C during the day. Haven’t checked what happens at night. Not certain that I want to know.

Yesterday I talked with a recent computer science graduate who was selling iPhone covers at one of those open kiosks in a shopping mall. He couldn’t get a job. After some further questions, it turns out that he’s from Istanbul. That might have caused him a problem with a prospective employer.

I am back in Bangkok at the end of October and will be filing as usual. With one more brief report to follow for next Friday.

Posted by Christopher G. Moore

Writers live in their heads. What may be travel to you is location-scouting for me. In some ways, I’m never where I am. I’m imagining that place on the page in a future book. It won’t exist until I’ve written about it.

I was standing on a deserted bridge across the Rhine in the Swiss town of Rheinfelden a couple of weeks ago in the evening twilight. The river flowed very fast. The rain was steady. It patterned the field-grey surface of the water in scattered patches, so that it seemed as though the current slid beneath thin sheets of slow-moving, melting ice.

A woman went by on a bicycle, its tires making a subdued splatter in the puddles. Along one bank, a row of medieval buildings backed onto the river, overhanging it like the brighter constructions of Florence leaning toward the Arno. Somewhere on the other bank, a train went by. In the middle of the river, the 100-year-old bridge touched the head of a small wooded island. I went into the stand of pines.

“This is where they’ll meet,” I thought.

I don’t yet know who “they” are. I know that one of them is my father. Will be my father. I have in mind a plot, you see, for a thriller set in Italy and quiet points north. With the main character based on my father, who did secret work for the British government when I was growing up and traveled frequently in such places.

I don’t yet know quite how that plot will play out. In many respects, the places I find will build the plot for me. They’ll give me exciting spots that are spurs to action scenes. They’ll show me clandestine places that demand secret meetings. They’ll lead me to introspective moments for my characters.

Novels have to bubble like this for years. Just because I’m writing a book a year doesn’t mean that’s how long a book takes. Each of my Palestinian crime novels is based on ideas that fermented over more than a decade as a foreign correspondent here in Jerusalem. The novel I just shipped off to my agent, which is set in central Europe in 1791, was a seed planted in conversations with my wife while we traveled in Austria and the Czech Republic in 2003.

When my second novel, “A Grave in Gaza”, was published, people asked me if I’d been to Gaza especially for the book. Well, I made a couple of return trips to check that I remembered locations correctly. But I’d been in Gaza at least a few days a month – often more – for 11 years, by the time I wrote that book in 2006. If I hadn’t, a few days or even weeks scouting around Gaza wouldn’t have been enough.

Sometimes I see this fictionalizing of the reality around me as a psychological flaw. On the island in the Rhine, I might just as easily have thought “Oh, how peaceful. How lucky I am to be traveling at someone else’s expense in places I’d never otherwise have been. How wonderful that this is called work, that I can feel a creative surge here in this place.” I might also have looked at my watch and thought, “I’m lonely. At home now it’ll be the boy’s bathtime. Soon he’ll be in bed.”

I thought all of those things. But they won’t put words on the page or bread on the table.

I wandered up the main street of old Rheinfelden, cobbled and slick and empty. I stopped into a men’s store and bought a lightweight, blue raincoat.

“This is what he’ll wear.”

Back to the Hotel Schuetzen. I ate two little round steaks of Seeteufel. The frothy yellow vinegar sauce on the fish was one of the most delicious things I’ve ever tasted. I almost thought, “This is what he’ll eat.” But the character I envisage will be on a British government salary, so he’ll have to be a little more frugal. I was pleased, instead, to think: “This is the life, Matthew, my boy. This is the bloody life.”

Crime fiction authors are a strange lot. I include myself in this (very much so!). For months on end we sit in small, untidy rooms making up stuff and writing it down. None of the people we write about do or have ever, existed. Even so, we care about them. We are caring people. I know a lot of authors who give both time and money to worthy causes all over the world. I am patron of a mental health charity myself. And yet the nature of our work requires us to, albeit in fiction, kill mainly innocent people on a regular basis. What is more we generally do this with some relish.

Last Wednesday I left the Pennines and travelled south to my home-town of London. It took me nearly five hours in the car and I was thoroughly ‘driven out’ by the time I arrived in the West End. I’d gone down to do some business in the city as well as to attend the tenth anniversary party of a small independent crime fiction bookshop in Leicester Square. When I got there the book shop was packed with people drinking, eating canapés and talking. Mainly talking.

The day to day isolation involved in the writing process does mean that when authors get together it is a bit like a dam breaking. Only about a third of the people at the party were authors, but it was very easy to spot which third that was. Talking the hind and fore-legs off a multitude of donkeys, they babbled and giggled, chatted and enthused and I did it all with them.

Of course whenever people who haven’t seen each other for a while get together, conversation can cover many things. So we talked about our families, our publishers, money, the state of the nation, the frequently dismal lot of the crime fiction author, etc., etc. As time went on however, we got to the meat of this and probably every other coming together of crime fiction authors. I, I must admit, began it. ‘I’m going to burn a woman,’ I said.

‘Oh, that’s interesting,’ one of my colleagues said. ‘Is this corpse burning or…’

‘Oh, no she’s going to be alive,’ I responded casually. ‘Tied to something I think. Possibly a bed and then doused with some sort of accelerant.’

‘Maybe you could use lighter fuel,’ someone else put in.

‘Or petrol,’ another helpful soul opined.

‘Mmm. It’s a thought,’ I said. ‘You see she’s …’

‘Are you going to burn a living person?’ a woman I didn’t know who had been listening in asked. ‘That’s a terrible way to go, isn’t it? I’m working with poisons at the moment. I’ve done it before, but the attraction never ends.’

We all agreed at that point that poisons were very satisfying in all sorts of ways and that we all, from time to time, felt drawn back into ‘using’ them again. Then talk moved on to battery with heavy implements and finally the very different ways in which a person may expire if stabbed in the thigh. A good evening, in other words, was had by all. Everyone went away happy having talked themselves hoarse and topped up on wine, mini vegetable samosas and some interaction with actual living people.

It was only afterwards, as it always is, that the oddness of myself and my fellow crime authors conversations really struck home. Burning someone to death isn’t nice! In the normal course of events, talk like that would make people want to throw up. We did, after all, go into some of the ins and outs which I will not reproduce here. Of course in the case of an all crime author conversation, death, in a way, is our business and so we are bound to be concerned about it. We have to know about the ‘ins and outs’ in ways that most other folk do not. I suppose it’s the relish involved, which I share, that makes me gasp just a little bit when I think about it. We, as in crime authors, do generally love all that. Why that may be and why, in addition, crime fiction fans like reading about grisly events so much is something about which there has been some debate. Psychologists have over the years talked about such behaviour at length. And as a graduate in psychology myself I have read a few theories about this.

My favourite theory amongst these is the one that states that reading things like crime fiction allows a person to experience the inevitability of death in a safe way. Like the victim or victims of whatever fictional murderer we choose to read about, we are truly (or should be) tense with anticipation about what is to follow. Our eyes are wide, our hearts pound and some people even claim to sweat as the moment of the kill approaches. In a well written novel the reader will go right up to the moment of death with the victim. And yet he or she will not die. Instead of the voices of the choir eternal the reader will experience a feeling of relief at having ‘got away with it’ albeit in a vicarious fashion. Crime fiction allows us the thrills we imagine might accompany the experience of being hunted by a killer, without any of the risk. Would I rather read about someone being poisoned to death by her husband or go to my local hospital for some blood tests? It’s a no-brainer. The book is fictional entertainment, the hospital is real life, blood and guts with the possibility of having to face my own mortality built into its walls.

So think of me as I burn, stab and poison. It may be many, many more months before I’m let out to chat to others of ‘my kind’ again. Who knows what I will come up with next time?

Part One.

It’s a Sunday. It’s been a long week. Well, actually it’s been seven days but it feels like a long week. I go to the fridge and grab a can of Bier Lao to get me in the mood. I know she’s in the back room waiting for me. I’ve missed her. I know she’s been married for six months already but that doesn’t stop you missing a woman, does it? Nothing stops you missing a woman. I have a shower to wash off the cow dung. I’ve been standing up to my knees in it putting up a fence. I hope cows can’t jump. I slip into my Chelsea Football club away shirt and my muay Thai shorts. Nobody can accuse me of fashion. This crowd doesn’t care what I look like. I might as well be a fictional being as far as they’re concerned. A few more had arrived while I was making myself dung free. They turn up whenever they liked, Lao style. I don’t mind that.

I have a tray set up. A bottle of Johnnie, four stubbies of soda, ice, glasses and two Cokes for the boys. It’s all good natured and natural when I walk in. The women stand up to do the hostess thing. It’s in their blood. She’s one of them. God, she’s beautiful. Her husband hasn’t arrived yet.

“Where’s the doctor?” I ask.

“He’ll be here,” she says with that sideways smile of hers.

I knew where they’d be, him and his friend. The two old boys liked to stop off for a drink or six at Two Thumbs’ whiskey and cigarette stall behind the evening market. The policeman’s here, stressed from a day of dealing with budget cuts and paperwork. While his chubby wife cracks jokes and mixes drinks, he bounces their baby on his lap. I look forward to watching her grow up. Standing in the corner, rocking in time to a tune only he can hear, is the man who started off as our ‘extra’ then moved up through the lines of the chorus to join the stars. Behind the sofa, dressed for once, thank goodness, is the Indian. He smiles at me as I lean back over the seat to look down at him and his frog.

I look around at them with pleasure. We have been through a lot together. We are family. I know what they’re thinking, every one of them. I don’t put the words into their heads. They think for themselves and I know. They’re all alive. No less real than me. There’s a crash from the front step. Someone’s fallen over my bicycle. I hear him swear and then the laughter of another. They walk in, arm in arm.

“Who left that man trap in the doorway?” asks the doctor.

“If you were anywhere near sober you would have seen it,” says his friend.

“If I wore glasses made from the bottoms of goldfish bowls like yours, I’d have the world magnified two-hundred percent too.”

“Siri,” says his wife, sliding across the sofa. “Come and sit down. We’re all waiting for you. We have a new book to write.”

Part Two

I’m alone in the back room. Sorry, that should have been ‘Alone’. I’ve been sitting here for two days. I have six notebooks on the coffee table in front of me and a tub of forty biros bought on special at Tesco Lotus. I have a five liter cask of cheap California red and five bags of peanuts. It’s so quiet I can hear the footsteps of the lizard tippytapping across the ceiling. I look at the sofa, the cushions are still primped from the day the cleaning lady came in to do the house. Empty sofas, like empty school busses and empty bars, only remind you of times when they were full and happy. I am Alone. I have to think all by myself. It’s like an examination and there’s nobody here to whisper the answers to me. No, it’s a conundrum:

Q “Who has no world, no life and no friends until he makes them?

No, don’t peak. You try to work it out for yourself.

A “The writer of the first book of a new series”.

Writers of fiction are said to be in the creativity business. That bunches us with painters, dancers, singers, actors, film directors, Wall Street bankers, software programmers, and astrophysicists. It is, in other words, a crowded intersection where writers stand trying to flag a reader passing at warp speed, just to get from point A to point B. I have a feeling that creativity has some common elements that apply across many different fields. But let’s start with what many people believe is the definition of creativity: a vivid imagination.

No one can say that is entirely wrong when checking the list of creative workers above. But there are a few problems with the definition. While imagination is useful and indeed necessary, it is not sufficient to define creativity. What is missing? I have few ideas to share about the basic elements. No doubt one day cognitive scientist will have a better way of understanding creativity. But here’s my rough outline: clarity, coherence, insight, and truthfulness form the quantum creativity universe (in a slightly different way for everyone). No matter what extraordinary, vivid worlds, characters, scenes, word play, plots you imagine, these fundamental particles form the mass and energy necessary to sustain the life force that is creativity.

Clarity because we live in the midst of a dense fog of ideas, information, images. The speed at which life approaches us means what we experience is blurred, filled with ghostly specters detached from their context. We only partially comprehend the motives, needs, and wants of others, and the fast moving web of events which we witness around us also catches us, pulling us too close for a detached, second look. That is, we push against our personal limits of observation. In fiction, clarity focuses the reader on the context and illuminates meaning and purpose. Creative people lift the fog if only for a moment and provide a glimpse of how things are interconnected.

Coherence means that the whole book has a unified structure and persuasively builds a seamless organized system. There can be a book with brilliant sentences or paragraphs or scenes, and those may, when isolated, reach the height of creative achievement. But the book fails if the reader must dig through tons of ordinary clay to unearth the few gems submerged beneath. Like clarity, coherence is a universe where all the laws set in motion given the author a chance to explore the mysteries of events and characters in an ordered system.

Insight is that feeling in reading a book where the reader says, “That’s what I’ve always felt but never had put it in words.” Or “I often saw (felt, understood, was taught) A, B, and C but always thought of them as existing in isolation from one another and now I can see the connection between them.” Or “I had been to that place or done that activity many times but never stopped to consider the consequences of my involvement.”

Truthfulness is often the most difficult quality to achieve because rather than search for the truth we assume that we know what is true and false and can dispense with the search. Readers come to books in search of truths that they can’t find elsewhere. Creativity, in part, requires a journey where truth is the reward. It may knock over conventional wisdom, threaten the perceived way of understanding an idea, person or event, or it may undermine a belief system such as truth is always clear, evident and beyond dispute. Authors, the most creative ones, are able to connect readers to what is true in human relationships and what is a smokescreen that people find convenient to hide behind as they flee from reality.

Posted by Christopher G. Moore