Father and Son
An author (or two) in the family
If your father
is someone like Peter Dickinson, writer of over fifty books, winner of two
Carnegie medals and umpteen awards worldwide, you'll just have grown up
breathing stories.
Like this one, say.
A dictator is developing weapons of mass destruction. One day he will use them.
A scientist in the same country sets out to win the dictator’s favour and be appointed to control the weapons, so that when the time comes he can prevent them from being used.
To achieve this he carries out all the orders the dictator gives him, including murder. He tells himself that these crimes are necessary to achieve a far greater good. He is given the post he seeks.
War comes. At last our hero receives the order to unleash the weapons and kill millions.
And now we have alternative endings.
Either i) Our hero has been so corrupted by the things he has done that he no longer cares whether the weapons are used or not. We leave him playing patience in the quiet of his room. If the game comes out, he will withhold the order. If it does not, he will fire.
Or ii) For some reason the weapons do get fired. But they do not work. Because someone else – perhaps a scientist whom our hero had subsequently liquidated on the dictator’s orders – had already designed and built them to fail. And therefore every crime our hero has committed was always going to be in vain.
I can remember we worked this one out together. We were in the car going north on the A34. He must have been driving me up to Oxford at the start of a university term, about 25 years ago. I can remember our excitement and the way we sparked off each other as we elaborated the basic idea. And I’m fairly sure that it was Dad who provided the key elements in the story – the moral complexity and the bitter twist at the end.
These are
exactly the sort of ideas that influence my writing now: the moral dilemma, the
bad deed done for the best of reasons. Yet Dad doesn’t write that stuff himself.
Or if he does you’d have to look hard to find it.
I was never planning to be a writer. But as soon as I was in full-time employment and without much to occupy my evenings I started on my first manuscript. Why? Because it was innately obvious to me that writing was something that was there to be done. And now that I’ve left my other career I adopt the same working pattern that he did – except that I don’t have his discipline, so the start and finish times get a bit fuzzy at the edges and there are rather too many trips to the kitchen for coffee, biscuits, fruit etc. Dad would just go into the study and shut the door. Something to do with having two rampaging boys in the house, I suppose.
That first manuscript got demolished. He took it off my desk one day (with my permission), read it, and told me what he thought of it. It was a painful but necessary experience. And in fact it was not as painful as when he was teaching me to drive – mainly because it didn’t last so long. Then, after my mother died, the American writer Robin McKinley came along, married him, and in due course read the manuscript too. Her advice was less blunt but no less clear. I started another. And when she had read that, she put me in touch with her agents. It was the biggest single step forward in my writing career.
Has it all helped? Of course it has. I’d be stupid to pretend otherwise. The interesting question is where the ‘dynasty’ goes from here. I have any number of creative nieces and nephews. I have a daughter who writes poetry and a son who is plotting books. So what advice would I give the next generation?
Well, I might say that there’s a risk to your self-respect if you follow in family footsteps and then for whatever reason it doesn’t work out. But they’re bright enough to know that and they wouldn’t take it from me anyway. (I wouldn’t have taken it from him, would I?)
Or I might – and probably would – drone on about the economics of it. Being one of a dynasty is no guarantee, my boy. Don’t expect anyone to publish you just because of your surname... etc... bore, bore, bore... Sometimes I frighten myself just by the thought of listening to myself.
And then of course I’d say yes, write. Absolutely. Write, and let others see what you’ve written. Because that’s what you’ll do whatever I tell you.