Tempt­ing hats, kinky chairs and reverse-somersaulting climaxes

Word­count = 86,150

I’ve spent much of the last three weeks inform­ing the reader (also the spouse, the neigh­bour and the teen-aged sales assist­ant at J.B. HiFi) of my rev­el­a­tion that before I could type a single word of the grand cli­max of The Last Monk, time would be required to per­col­ate, to mull, and gen­er­ally to walk around parks scowl­ing at ducks in the vain hope that someone would ask me what I was look­ing so thought­ful about.

Quite a bit of time, I thought. About a fortnight. 

As it hap­pens, it took about six hours.

The best per­col­at­ing is done out­side the house. In fact, for the abso­lutely optimum res­ult, it is neces­sary to travel as far from the com­puter, the teapot and the hat col­lec­tion as pos­sible [hat col­lec­tions are, it is safe to say, trouble for a writer dying for a new idea at a quarter to four in the after­noon, when the chapter is two pages short and all tea has been drunk and all the sand­wiches made and damn it that deer­stalker is just lying over there and no one’s try­ing it on…].

I chose the State Lib­rary. The La Trobe Read­ing Room at the heart of the SLV is an impos­ing, ser­i­ous place: a four-storey, domed cav­ern lined with niches and inac­cess­ible ledges, its desks are arranged in long, axial lines like spokes in a great wheel.

I would say that it is awe­somely silent, which is what it should be, but the stew­ards of the La Trobe care­fully main­tain a long-held and, for lib­rar­i­ans, deeply kinky tra­di­tion, which is the chairs.

The heavy, uncush­ioned wooden chairs in the La Trobe Read­ing Room are seem­ingly ori­ginal fit­tings, and are extraordin­ary for two reas­ons. The first is their volume: they are, without a doubt, the loudest chairs any­where in the bib­li­o­philic world. Each one emits a blood-curdling metal­lic shriek at reg­u­lar inter­vals, whether or not the per­son sit­ting on it has actu­ally moved.

This is caused by the ancient set of springs arrayed around the single, cent­ral leg sup­port­ing the seat, and this in turn leads to the second extraordin­ary thing about the seats: it is abso­lutely impossible to lean back in one without exit­ing it. The springs some­how pre­vent the seat from fall­ing for­ward, or to either side, but as soon as the centre of grav­ity of the occu­pant shifts aft of the leg, the whole con­trap­tion tips back­ward viol­ently, per­haps to afford a bet­ter view of the newly-renovated ceiling.

Whatever the reason, the upshot is that if, after a pro­trac­ted period of study bent over some ancient and eso­teric book of lore, you sud­denly come to some pro­foundly mov­ing rev­el­a­tion about the essen­tial one­ness of all being and the trans­it­ory nature of human thought in an infin­ite uni­verse, you may sit back to take in this utterly unique moment, unex­pec­tedly per­form a reverse somer­sault and spread your­self across the carpet.

I chose my seat with care and spread out the tools required: my note­book, some multi-coloured sys­tem cards, a pen and scis­sors. I cut the sys­tem cards into small strips and on each one wrote a single plot point or import­ant event which needs to take place in the cli­max. One col­our for each plot­line, one card for each event. In two hours I had a couple of dozen cards spread across the desk, in no par­tic­u­lar order, each card culled from five years’ worth of notes or spon­tan­eous inspiration.

Once all the pieces of the puzzle are laid out, it’s a mat­ter of build­ing the pic­ture, just like a jig­saw, although obvi­ously I’d prefer it didn’t turn out to be a pic­ture of the Eif­fel Tower or kit­tens play­ing with balls of wool.

In what order should things hap­pen? Who tells the story? What’s import­ant, what’s abso­lutely vital, and what can be left in the back­ground? How fast should it hap­pen? When does the reader learn the import­ant inform­a­tion, and from whom?

It is, in fact, a reverse jig­saw: you start with the pieces, each of which has a shape and some detail, and then you decide what kind of pic­ture you want to make with them. Along the way, you throw out some pieces and write new ones, because you’ve real­ised you can make a much bet­ter pic­ture that way.

It took about four hours. I ended up with sev­en­teen sys­tem cards in two col­ours, arranged in plot order. It looked very much like this:

It was the cli­max of my book, in point form. I can see the end now. It looks good.

I smiled, leaned back, unex­pec­tedly per­formed a reverse somer­sault and went home.

There is now only one more step required before I can begin typ­ing out the last pages of my novel. That step is, of course, this: