Button it

(NB: This post eventually comes around to writing, so bear with it if you know diddly squat about racing cars.)

If you're in the UK, you can't not have heard all about Mr Jensen Button, currently sitting way atop the Formula One driver's championship after six wins from seven races. You will have heard all about his story, the guy who - prior to this season - had won only one one race in nine years as a pro. Suddenly he's got maestro engineer Ross Brawn as his boss and it's all turned around. He's not only winning, but spanking the bare arses off the competition. (Erm, I didn't mean like that.)

Obviously, every man and his dominatrix puts it down to the car, not the driver.

Fair enough, but I think it's more subtle than that. In Jensen Button you have a driver who needs things to be just right. Things are off, he stops trying. He'll coast. He smiles to the outside world, secretly burning with frustration inside, waiting for something that might never come. But it did come: the Brawn GP car. Finally he has things just the way he wants them. The balance and movement of the car is perfectly attuned to his mind and body. He can operate it like an extension of himself. He can express himself in it.

Now, I said this would come around to writing and now it's going to. Over the past few years I've been having a bit of trial and error action with the novels I've been writing. There are one or two (written since KING OF THE ROAD - my last published one as we speak) that will never see the light of day. I was as surprised as anyone to learn that, and for a good long while I was smiling to the outside world, secretly burning with frustration inside. Then I made a discovery.

I am the Jensen Button of the book world.

(But without the money, fame, success etc...)

When I write a novel (not sure this holds for short stories) I need to feel like I'm in the skin of the narrator. I don't want to have to think hard about what he might do here, what reaction he might have to this comment or to that turn of events. That shit has to come naturally, man. If it feels like work, it is work. And I get enough of that in my day job. No, I truly believe - in fact, I know - that a brilliant novel can come from no more effort than applying arse to seat and repeating until done. If the conditions are right (ie: the author is right in the head of the narrator, playing him like Billy Preston on a Hammond organ) then the end product is gold.

I'm coming at this from the angle of first-person narrations. I don't really know how it applies to your third-person affairs. To be honest, that third-person stuff is like witchcraft to me. Telling the story through a character I can do, but tell the story yourself, talking about a bunch of people who don't exist? That's just weird. Third-person guys, I salute thee. (But I also fear you and your mysterious ways. So don't wave that necklace of shrunken heads anywhere near me, OK?)

I hope Jensen Button can pull it off and become world champion. I know he's a rich, pampered playboy type, but fuck it, the world needs those kind of guys. And it needs the kind of characters I can get along with.