As Dave responds:
“Piss off Eric. You’re comparing yourself with professionals…the cream of the cream…in England! And it’s only the freaks who play into their 40s. Elite freaks who do nothing but train all their lives. They don’t fuck their bodies carrying fridges. You can’t even kick since you did your ankle last time.”
I wanted Eric to be as old as it was possible for him to be so that his eventual adventures in England were just on the edge of plausibility. In fact, in the first draft he was 42, but the publisher (Ian Syson) convinced me to knock a couple of years off. He was probably right.
In a fairly short time, I had the basic shell of the story mapped out and short profiles of the main characters. Without even trying, the first 15 pages or so just poured out of me – but then I stopped. Mr Cleansheets sat in the hard drive equivalent of the bottom drawer for about eight years while I pursued other projects (one or two other half-written novels, three screenplays and a stage play).
It’s funny. I knew from the start that Cleansheets had enormous potential, so why didn’t I follow it through? Possibly the answer lies in the fact that I was too busy trying to be a “serious” writer and Mr Cleansheets was just something I did on the side for a bit of fun. But after a while, when I realised that “serious” writing was taking me nowhere, I began to re-examine my motives: why did I write? And what did I want to write about?
Budding writers are often advised to “write what you know about”. I guess you could also say: “write what you enjoy”, so all the elements were there in Cleansheets: football, sex, alcohol, football, evil villains, rock music, sex and football.
I love football. I can’t possibly express the depth of my adoration for playing, watching, coaching etc. I still play (at the age of 50) and cannot bear to contemplate giving it away (I hope to play until at least 60). I also coach and follow, in order of passion, the Socceroos, Gunners and Mariners. I probably fantasised about being a professional but it was never something I seriously pursued because I knew from the start that I wasn’t on the escalator.
But I knew about the existence of the escalator (that takes kids via representative teams to the big clubs and national teams), so that was the path that Eric took in my imagination. Indeed, at the age of 16 he was offered a trial with Manchester United, but never took up the opportunity. This does two things for the story – it gives Eric’s lunatic decision to go to England just a smidge of legitimacy, and it raises the question in the reader’s mind: why didn’t he go at 16 when they wanted him?
To tell the truth, I didn’t know the answer myself when I stopped at page 15, all those years ago. It was just a plot sleeper I’d created, to play with (or delete) later. When I finally made the decision in October 2007 to get serious about Mr Cleansheets, I still didn’t have a clue why he hadn’t gone when he first had the chance, but as the story grew in the telling, the answer became obvious. Ian Syson is a typical hard-bitten curmudgeon of a publisher, but he told me that when he read the passage on the bus after the Scunthorpe game, when Eric’s secret is revealed, it was one of the most powerful pieces of writing he’d ever experienced – indeed, that the merest hint of mist may have started to fracture his perception.
Another thing I “know” is rock music. I may never have been on the football escalator but I did attempt an ungainly clamber onto the rock music escalator in my early 20s. Alas, I wasn’t good enough, but I did learn a fair bit about the industry – enough to imbue Doreen’s character with my other great fantasy. What fun I had writing this book!
Possibly the characters I most enjoyed writing were the Blue Fury. I suspect that the reason for this is that all of us, somewhere in the rank id pits of our souls, are fascinated by the Dark Side. Violent criminals figure very largely in popular literature, and it’s fairly obvious why – they are untrammelled by the usual rules which constrain all we bourgeois suckers at the teat of civil society. What would it be like to be so free? Reading about it is vicariously emancipating but writing it – living in their unchained world – can be utterly exhilarating.
Especially the Beast. Not only is he a vicious football hooligan, he’s an intelligent, vicious football hooligan and therefore much more entertaining and scary. One of my favourite scenes is when Vinnie and the Beast are discussing the nature of terror while the Beast drips acid onto the table, forming the numbers 666.
“That’s what makes ‘im perfect,” said the Beast, concentrating on his work. “True terror don’t stem from scary strangers mate...it comes from the trusted and familiar suddenly turnin’ out ter be not what yer thought it was. When yer fink yer safe an’ among friends an’ suddenly realise yer in the clutches of fahkin’ evil...that’s yer true terror mate.”
Everyone who has read the original drafts (my Guinea Pigs) loves the Blue Fury. I constantly have friends quoting lines to me from Vinnie or the Beast and an ex-work colleague who sends me occasional emails purporting to be from Vinnie the Shiv. That’s probably when I started to realise I’d genuinely struck a chord with Mr Cleansheets. When the characters are so alive that people are trying to do their voices, quoting them and acting out their personae, you know that they really do love and live the book. And if the Guinea Pigs love it, why not thousands (if not millions) of others?
One possible reason why not is that any writer should always beware the praise of friends. Friends tend to pity the would-be writer in their midst and humour the poor, deluded fool with mild encouragement while thinking: for god’s sake, give it a rest! I am familiar with that mild encouragement, having received it in respect of earlier works (eg, Rites published in 2000) so I understand the difference between disingenuousness and wild enthusiasm – especially when coming from the same people. They tend to out themselves:
GP : “Oh mate, this is brilliant! You’ve totally nailed it with Mr Cleansheets!”
AD: “Didn’t you say I’d nailed it with Rites?”
GP: “Rites was shit.’
AD: “...Oh.”
GP: “I can tell you that now...because Cleansheets is fucking sensational.”
When I finally got back into Cleansheets and resumed from page 16, I had a fairly strong idea of the bare bones of the story, ie:
Eric goes to Manchester and is completely humiliated; wants to go home but realises he is somehow involved with the Danny Malone incident; gets involved with Mervyn and joins Bentham United; Blue Fury are hunting him; there are other baddies involved; Bentham United go on an amazing Cup run and end up playing Manchester United in the Cup Final.
That’s pretty much all I had, plus some detailed notes on the main characters and a few snippets of dialogue. It’s a long way from there to a 620 page first draft – which took me 13 months to write (mostly on the train on my way to work). In fact, the story really did just pour out of me, and it goes to show, if you’ve done your preparation before you start writing in earnest, you’ll make excellent progress and go down fewer blind alleys on your way to a draft. A first draft inevitably involves some experimentation, and some of it won’t work. The faster you learn to recognise when a plot thread or character isn’t working, the faster you’ll finish something of real quality. When something is wrong, the signs are obvious: you start departing from the spine of the story to accommodate a “bit”. The bit may be brilliant, but maybe it belongs somewhere else, or even in a different story. Never depart from the spine! Having said that, I’m sure I have departed from the spine here and there – as long as you don’t go too far and don’t make a habit of it.
Having created a 620 page draft, it was time to commence the editing process. The first phase, is to go through the story and try to identify all the side-tracks and blind alleys in order to delete them or connect them up in a meaningful way that adds to the story. You need to be really honest with yourself about every section, character and incident: does it kick the plot along? Does it give an insight into a character? If it is a side-track, is it at least fairly short and good enough/funny enough to be included? Can it somehow be made more relevant to the spine? Can it somehow do two or more of these things at once?
The second most satisfying things you can do while editing is delete an entire section, paragraph, sentence, exchange of dialogue or word. When doing so, it is crucial to be aware of the impact of the deletion (and the impact isn’t always immediately apparent – it might be 100 pp earlier or later).
The most satisfying thing is to recognise a poor passage and turn it into a strong passage. Sometimes, you’ve left a passage in because you need it for plot purposes but there’s something about it that just doesn’t gel. You can’t just read over such passages and think: that’ll have to do. If they’re wrong, you have to fix them – and sometimes, you can be truly inspired, turning dross into gold. An excellent way of achieving this is to come up with some sort of quirk that characterises the scene, and which plot and characterisation can bounce off. Characters become real in the mind of the reader when the reader sees them reacting to something – and that “something” doesn’t have to be important. It might be a cigarette butt or half a pineapple, but you can use it to colour the characters and give them depth. The reader will inevitably have his/her own response to the cigarette butt or half pineapple and will thereby understand the character on a more visceral level, especially if you can engage the senses of the reader (especially smell) when doing so.
Football and sex
Obviously, in writing a football book, you will from time to time need to describe some football action. I have read a few football stories in the past, mainly written for kids, and they’re all pretty unsatisfying when it comes to blow by blow accounts. If there was one thing I definitely wanted to achieve in Cleansheets, it was descriptions of football that were tangible, memorable and real. To my eternal joy, the various Guinea Pigs have endlessly raved to me about how real the football atmosphere seems in Cleansheets – so what’s the secret?
I can’t put my finger on it exactly – to some extent, it’s simply a manifestation of my writing style distilled from my decades of experience playing and watching football. But on reflection, I can deconstruct part of why it works. The first thing is context: so many people have told me that the Scunthorpe game left them totally exhilarated, but that game happens some 200 pages into the book. By the time you get to it, you know Eric (and his disappointments and motivations) really well. You know some of his team mates and the coach, and you actually care about them. If you read the passage without the back story, it would have none of the emotional impact it seems to have on the reader.
Another thing is: avoid too many blow by blow descriptions of the play. They have no impact if there are too many. It is best to concentrate on the atmosphere; what people are thinking and saying; what the crowd are doing; what other implications for the story there are in the on field/off field action. The Ipswich game is about 30 pp long and is a powerfully intense description of football – but there’s very little football described really, and what there is comes from numerous perspectives: Cleansheets; the TV commentator; Baz and Bones. And filtered through it all is my own personal football philosophy – Jimbo for example, is an open play move my own team used to employ, but can I get the lads I coach to do it? Can I fuck!
Writing about football is very similar to writing about sex. I really enjoy the bonking scenes in Mr Cleansheets and the same rules apply. Context: the first bonk scene between Eric and Doreen would be nothing without the fact that the reader has got to know them, likes them and desperately wants them to do it. There is some blow by blow description (pardon the pun) but once again it’s the atmosphere that matters – the lush description of the sensory overload in the dark shower transports us all into that place, and then the sexual description is interspersed with other perspectives (song lyrics) which blur its pornographic starkness and imbue the episode with richer levels of meaning and memory.
The next bonk scene is pure context and location, with virtually no descriptions. You know that something profoundly erotic is happening in the forest, but Eric actually refuses to describe it. I would guess that all readers have had a sexual experience in the bush/forest, or at least fantasised about it, which means that they bring their own experiences/images to that scene. A female Guinea Pig said to me that she loved that scene and would never look at pine cones the same way. When I pointed out that the pine cone was just something he was looking at (ie, it hadn’t been “used”), she blushed. I wonder why?
The other thing about football and sex scenes (and any other kind of action scene) is that they all have to be different. There is a popular Australian writer who would average four – five sex scenes in every book (and he’s written about 20 books). That’s 100 bonk scenes and they are all the same, following exactly the same sequence of actions. Not only is this lazy and unimaginative, it leaves me (at least) with the suspicion that if he so gets off on these actions (as to want to write about them every time), then maybe he’s never actually done them himself. Maybe they are, for him, still fantasies? What else can explain such obsession?
Football also needs to be different. The context part of that is simple – you’ll write a reserves game in the league very differently from the FA Cup Final. But the action, sequence and type of scoring etc is hard. You have to really put yourself in the game and actually see, feel and hear it happening around you – adding in the many subtle nuances from your own experience – the smell of the rain and fresh mown grass; the feel of wet hair in your eyes and on the back of your neck; the bitter-sweet pain of your scrapes and bruises after the game. That will give it the visceral flavour, but you still need to give the reader a different experience every time, which makes sense within the world of the book, and (as far as reasonably possible) adds to the plot and characterisation. I’ve had a few of the GPs tell me they were disappointed that they didn’t get full descriptions of the games between the fourth round and the final but – give me a break! The book would have been a thousand pages long!
And I have to save something for the sequel.
Finishing
Getting to the end was exhilarating. To some extent, the story was so strong it wrote itself, but the unfolding of the plot still had plenty of surprises even for me. Having tried for some 17 years to write something memorable and successful, I knew by the end of the first draft that I had something pretty strong, but by the third phase of editing (when I’d cut 100 pages of dross and replaced them with 30 pages of gold), I was absolutely certain that Mr Cleansheets was going to make a lot of people happy. As I write, that certainty remains to be tested.
Adrian Deans December 2009