Title:
Forget Me
Not
Word
count:
65,116
Written:
February to July 2006
Story:
Here’s what I wrote in submission letters to agents and publishers
at the time...
Forget Me
Not takes
place in a world a little way removed from our own but still very recognisably
originating in modern Britain as we know it. It tells the story of a regime
where the ruling classes have decided that those who do the dull, ordinary,
menial tasks of the world would be far better off and happier with life if they
were not bothered with such soul-destroying handicaps as love, ambition, hopes
and dreams. To this end they have conditioned the majority of the populace to
forget all the personal details of their lives – they wake up each morning with
their memories wiped clean, a blank slate with only the basic knowledge needed
to perform their allocated jobs being maintained. Then, one day, a young woman
who is a part of this class – labelled ‘the Saved’, as the ruling elite
believes they have been salvaged from a life of depressed drudgery – begins to
remember the details of her life from day to day, and the novel follows her
story from her first remembrance to her tragic conclusion.
Opening:
It
was a day just like any other day.
She
opened her eyes and looked up at the plain grey ceiling. Instinctively, she
knew it was time to get up, but she did not want it to be. She wanted to remain
where she was, warm and safe under the white bed sheets. One quick glance to
her right, at the chronometer mounted next to the window, told her that this
was impossible. Seven o’clock. Time to get up.
Why
she had to get up at this time she did not know. She was though aware that
there would be terrible, dreadful consequences if she did not. So with a last,
savouring moment’s snugness and warmth under the covers, she braced herself,
flung them aside and exposed her naked and trembling form to the harsh realities
of the cold morning.
The
cold and the dawning realisation of a day at work ahead gave her the urge to
throw herself back into bed at once, but her instinct to save herself from harm
was stronger, and groggily she stood. Aside from the bed, the only other furniture
in the small, square room was a plain brown wardrobe. Just along from the
wardrobe, in the far corner, a doorway with no door led to whatever lay beyond.
She had a hazy, vague impression of what that might be, but no concrete images
came to mind.
Background:
I don’t recall specifically what prompted the idea of Forget Me Not, other than the idea for
the basis of the story coming randomly into my head at some point, and deciding
it would be an interesting idea to pursue. I wouldn’t say I am a particular fan
of dystopias as a literary genre, but being a great fan of George Orwell I was,
of course, already very familiar with Nineteen Eighty-Four, and I think that not long before I wrote Forget Me Not I had read The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood, so that would undoubtedly have been an
influence. The lead character in Forget Me Not is called April, a very definite nod to Nineteen Eighty-Four (which takes place
in that month, and I had a theory at the time that the month crops up more
often than others in Orwell’s work).
I actually started writing Forget
Me Not before I had even finished Lone Britannia, which probably shows you how much faith I had in how that other
novel was going. Throughout 2006, I was employed in a very dull job at Norfolk
County Council, as an administration assistant (i.e. a paper pusher) in the adult
social services department. Part of my role involved spending hours at a time
working in a windowless room in the centre of the sixth floor which was,
effectively, a large stationery cupboard. This dull work gave me a lot of time
to think, and as I was usually on my own, I must confess that I took to writing
out sections of Forget Me Not in
longhand.
After I’d finished Lone
Britannia in the spring, I began typing up and fleshing out Forget Me Not, and the writing continued
into the summer, battling against a laptop which was on its last legs and
needed to be turned over and repeatedly whacked on the bottom to get it to boot
up. It also had a propensity to freeze while writing, making almost constant
control-Ses between sentences an absolute necessity!
Looking
back:
It’s a short novel, which almost invariably means better when it
comes to my work – tighter and more focused. It has a definite beginning,
middle and end, and the protagonist, April, undergoes one of the better
examples of character development I’d come up with to this point. I think it’s
a nice central idea, too, and in better or more experienced hands something
might have resulted from it.
Once again, though – and thankfully, I think, for the final time
in my novel-writing efforts to date – it suffered from my impatience with the
process. I still had a naive belief that the first draft was pretty much it,
and hadn’t yet learned to take notice of all the very clever and successful
writers who said in interviews and articles that the rewriting and redrafting
was the important part of the process. I regarded a first draft as the best I
could do – foolishly, given how much you can improve a piece of writing with
hard work and care.
It actually turned out to be the last novel I would write for
three years. I did start some projects in 2007 and 2008, and got tens of
thousands of words into a couple of them, but everything eventually ground to a
halt, novel-wise. This was partly due to apathy on my part; partly due to
developments in my personal life; but mainly I think because I suddenly had
something very new and exciting happening in my life. In the summer of 2006 I
began getting one day a week of voluntary phone-answering work at BBC Radio Norfolk. This gradually developed into regular part-time and fill-in paid work
in 2007, and a full-time job there in the spring of 2008. As I climbed my way
into the spectacular good luck of a job at the BBC, writing took a bit of a
back seat.
It’s wrong to ever let your work get in the way of your passion,
and I would always throughout this period have said that writing was the most
important thing to me, if anyone had asked. But on the other hand, escaping
from Norfolk County Council was pretty important, too – it was a morale-sapping
place to be.
Submissions:
Forget Me
Not was the first ever novel of mine to have had its full manuscript
read by an agent, so that was progress of a sort. I’d submitted it first to
Laura Morris, the agent who’d entered into correspondence with me over 1963. It took her a few months to reply,
and when she did get back to me it was a personal, kind and entirely reasonable
“no thank you”.
In late 2006 and early 2007 I sent it to another 38 agents and
publishers – as with 1963, I actually
kept a spreadsheet tracking them all! One of these was the agency Gillon Aitken
Associates Ltd. A lady called Billie Hope wrote me an e-mail that contained one
of the most exciting lines of prose I have ever seen – I still get a little burst of
adrenaline now looking back at it:
“I read
with interest your letter of introduction dated the 5th of January
and would very much like to see the manuscript of ‘Forget Me Not’.”
She didn’t even ask for sample chapters – the whole manuscript,
straight away! I duly sent it off and of course the result was a rejection, but
she was good enough to exchange a few e-mails with me telling me what she
thought was wrong with it, and why she didn’t want to take it any further. One
of the major flaws was the simple fact that it was so much like a first draft –
still so full of clumsy writing and typographical errors, etc. She advised me
in future to take more time over the re-drafting, although it would take another
novel and another lady to drum that message more forcefully into my head.
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