Venice in February - better weather next time?
Don’t get all huffy on me, but yesterday I booked myself into Venice for another week — the last week there — working on the new book. I know everyone thinks this life is one long junket, but trust me it isn’t. This book is set in Venice, and the first two visits for it took place in January and February when the city was bitterly cold and in some ways quite difficult.
I’m sure it will be a bit warmer by the time I get back there in May. But it’s worth putting down exactly why I’m heading back there because there are a couple of important points that need to be made.
First, the practical one. I want this book to be so steeped in this extraordinary city that people feel they’re there when they’re reading the book. That’s the same with pretty much everything I write really. But this book I want to be particularly rooted in the location, so that you can feel that February cold during carnival, smell the lagoon, taste those frittelle that the bakeries sell at that time of year. There are some precise geographical locations too — real places. By the time I go back in May I should — fingers crossed — have a very rough first draft of the finished book. So I can go to the real locations I’ve used and match them with how they’re described in the book.
This is fiction, remember. Made up. A pack of lies. But if I’m going to use a real place or painting or piece of architecture as a plot device I’m determined — perhaps stupidly — that I should get it as right as possible. I feel absolutely no such debt to people by the way, which is why I played fast and loose with figures like Vivaldi and Rousseau in my first Venetian book The Cemetery of Secrets. Buildings and paintings are still here. Those people are dead. What are they going to do? Sue?
Now to a more general point and one that’s not easy to explain. What I also want to do in Venice is read this work from an entirely different perspective. Not at my computer at home, in my familiar study. Not even printed out so I can read it at home either.
For some reason words change when you see them from a different perspective, in an unfamiliar location. The same manuscript will reveal an entirely new set of flaws and virtues depending on where and how it’s read. I always try to go through a paper printout — note that word paper – in a new and foreign place before sending off a book to the publishers and agents. For some reason the brain works differently when your surroundings change and all the everyday interruptions — phones and email and the web — are somewhere else.
Here’s another way to get perspective too. Just change the way you view your manuscript. Don’t just print it out double spaced in a familiar font. Try printing it in Times New Roman 10pt,as book pages too, as if you were looking at real typesetting. I can promise you’ll spot something you never ever saw before. That’s why authors shriek over galleys when they receive them. We always stare at something there and think, ‘How the hell did I miss that?’
For me perspective is essential. I want to be able to see a work from my point of view as an author, but also get an inkling about how readers will respond and enter it at some stage too. To do that I need get out of my office and lug a big manuscript envelope somewhere new, then sit down and start to read the whole thing afresh, with a new set of eyes, as much as is humanly possible.
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