I’d always wondered, like many people do, if I could write a novel
Writing R.C.
Not knowing if you can do something or how you might do something are probably the very best reasons for giving that something a go. I’d always wondered, like many people do, if I could write a novel, or how you were supposed to go about writing a novel. Eventually, I got the chance to find out. More truthfully, I eventually made it a priority to do it, and so I did it.
R.C.* was originally entitled Ballardville, and was originally meant to be a collection of short stories, which was as much as I felt confident or capable of achieving on the back of the To Infinity And Beyond experiment in 2019. But when I was considering submitting an application to Arts Council England’s Developing Your Creative Practice fund in 2021, there seemed no reason not to push myself to aim bigger.
As the old working title suggests, it started out very much as a novel-length homage to J G Ballard — fuelled by some incredible research trips to the British Library, looking at and handling notes, synopses and manuscripts from JGB’s personal archive, texts he typewrote and then annotated with his spidery doctory handwriting — and by a revelatory lunch with Chris Beckett, the British Library archivist who had done all of that archiving.
Over time, however, R.C. became its own weird and wonderful thing, with grains of Ballard bound up in its literary concrete, for sure, but also granules of Georges Perec and a few flakes of Tales Of The Unexpected stirred in for good measure. Some people have speculated on it being a COVID lockdown novel, in terms of me responding to aspects of the global pandemic experience, or in terms of what my own personal experience of those strange times might have been.
The truth is probably more prosaic. When I was redrafting it, I came to see it as a space where I raked over my complex feelings about the city I was living in at the time when I planned and wrote it. Most prosaically of all, it was a magnificent cathartic outlet for my intensely negative feelings about living in a tiny flat, having by then spent ten years surrounded by largely unseen people all living their noisy, intrusive lives just beyond the paper-thin walls and ceilings.
* — To preserve a bit of privacy (as well as intellectual property), all unpublished novels are referred to across the site by the abbreviations of their current working titles; as works (hopefully) come into publication, full titles will replace these abbreviations.
