It was my introduction to mythology and ancient history and a lot more, too, because Brewer’s is a serendipitous (see page 1063) book. In other words, you might not find what you’re looking for, but you will find three completely unexpected things that are probably more interesting. Reading one item in Brewer’s is like eating one peanut. It’s practically impossible. There are plenty of other useful books. But you start with Brewer’s.
Nevertheless, the book is hard to describe. You could call it a compendium (I didn’t find this in my ancient edition, but I did find “Complutensian Polyglot,” so the effort was not wasted) of myth, legend, quotation, historical byways, and slang, but that would still miss out quite a lot of it. A better description would be “an education,” in the truest sense. Brewer’s flowered in those pre–Trivial Pursuit days when people believed that if you patiently accumulated a knowledge of small things, a knowledge of big things would automatically evolve, and you would become a better person.
Brewer’s has been updated for this Millennium edition. It includes Gandalf as well as Attila the Hun (and why shouldn’t it?). Some of the duller nymphs and more obscure Classical items have been dropped to make space for such additions to the language as “hit the ground running” and “all dressed up and nowhere to go.” To be considered obscure by Brewer’s is a real badge of obscurity, and it is sad to see them go; but the serious Brewerite can only hope that Cassell might one day be persuaded to release a “preservative” edition, so that this detritus of myth and legend is not forever lost.
But today is tomorrow’s past. One day the Fab Four (ask your dad) will be one with … oh, some of the things that no one cares about anymore. Given the speed of change, they’re already well on their way. It’s an education in itself, seeing them take their place with old Roman senators and mythological fauna, and watching the dust settle. We’re the next millennium’s ancients.…
Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable is the first book to turn to when questions arise and the final desperate volume when the lesser reference books have failed. No bookshelf, no WORLD is complete without it. It’s as simple as that.
PAPERBACK WRITER
The Guardian, 6 December 2003
Maybe it’s the influence of the Net, but people talk about writing in terms of “getting.” Where do you get your ideas/your characters/the time? The unspoken words are: show me the coordinates of the Holy Grail.
And, at best, you throw up a barrage of clichés, which have become clichés because … well, they’re true, and they work. I’ve heard lots of authors talk on the subject and we all, in our various ways, come out with the same half a dozen or so clichés. And you get the sense that this isn’t exactly what’s wanted, but people go on asking, in the hope that one day you’ll forget and pass on the real secret.
Still, this newspaper paid. That’s one of the tips, by the way.
When I was thirteen, I went to my first science fiction convention. How long ago was that? So long ago that everyone wore sports jackets, except for Mike Moorcock.
Most science fiction writers were once fans. There’s a habit they have, not of paying back, but of paying forward; I know of no other branch of literature where the established “names” so keenly encourage wannabe writers to become their competitors.
I came back from that event determined to be a writer. After all, I’d shaken hands with Arthur C. Clarke, so now it was just a matter of hard work.…
The first thing I do when I finish writing a book is start a new one. This was a course of action suggested, I believe, by the late Douglas Adams, although regrettably he famously failed to follow his own advice.
The last few months of a book are taxing. E-mails zip back and forth, the overtones of the English word cacky are explained to the U.S. editor who soberly agrees that poop is no substitute, the author stares at text he’s read so often that he’s lost all grasp of it as a narrative, and rewrites and tinkers and then hits Send—
—and it’s gone, in these modern times, without even the therapy of printing it out. One minute you’re a writer, next minute you have written. And that’s the time, just at that point when the warm rosy glow of having finished a book is about to give way to the black pit of postnatal despair at having finished a book, that you start again. It also means you have an excuse for not tidying away your reference books, a consideration not to be lightly cast aside in this office, where books are used as bookmarks for other books.
The next title is not a book yet. It’s a possible intro, a possible name, maybe some sketches that could become scenes, a conversation, some newspaper clippings, a few bookmarks in an old history book, perhaps even ten thousand words typed to try things out. You are not a bum. You are now back in the game. You are working on a book.
You are also fiddling with your internal radio. Once you’re tuned in on the next book, research comes and kicks your door down. Something is casually mentioned on TV. A book about something else entirely throws out a historical fact that, right at this moment, you really need to know. You sit down to dinner next to an ambassador who is happy to chat about the legal questions that arise when a murder is committed in an embassy and the murderer flees outside, i.e., technically into another country, and the plot gulps down this tidbit.
People are magnificent research, almost the best there is. An old copper will tell you more about policing than a textbook ever will. An old lady is happy to talk about life as a midwife in the 1930s, a long way from any doctor, while your blood runs cold. A retired postman tells you it’s not just the front end of dogs that can make early-morning deliveries so fraught.…
Undirected research goes on all the time, of course. There’s no research like the research you’re doing when you think you’re just enjoying yourself. In Hay-on-Wye, under the very noses of other authors, I picked up that not-very-famous work The Cyclopedia of Commercial and Business ANECDOTES; comprising INTERESTING REMINISCENCES AND FACTS, Remarkable Traits and Humours (and so on, for sixty-four words). There are obvious nuggets on almost every page: Preserved Fish was a famous New York financier. Then there is what I might call secondary discovery, as in, for example, the dark delight of the Victorian author, when writing about a famous German family of financiers, in coming up with sentences like “soon there were rich Fuggers throughout Lower Saxony.” And finally there was the building up of some insight into the minds of the people for whom money was not the means to an end, or even the means to more money, but what the sea is for little fishes.