Planning a new book

Back in the 1960s, when John Burley began the job of turning out novel after novel, most fiction writers used the pen or the typewriter, or both, as the means of creating and evolving manuscripts. Draft would follow draft as the author worked his way towards the finished product.

Each draft would be the springboard for the next as the author scribbled in new sentences, deleted unwanted ones, or took out the scissors and sticky tape and re-arranged whole pages. If they were lucky there would be a spouse or partner to do the hard work of typing up each new draft.

Burley liked to start with the pen. And he was one of the fortunate ones; his wife, Muriel, would often take on the task of producing the typewritten copies of successive drafts. But she was more than a typist: as he made clear in several dedications, she was also his collaborater and constructive critic. She would point to a gap in a story’s logic, to a flaw in grammar, or a continuity issue.

It helped them both, and satisfied his fascination with character, to have a page on which were sketched relationships between characters, as shown by this example of an early list of the characters in Wycliffe and the Tangled Web:

Note the title at the top of the page; it appears that at this stage the book was to be called Wycliffe in Bread Street. The diagram and those that follow appear in a manuscript book entitled Plot Notes.

In the next diagram the cast of characters has changed.

James is still at the centre, Alice and Bertie have been retained but (at the left of the diagram) George has been scratched out. And the Rule family has been introduced, belatedly to judge by the crabbed way that Jane Rule is squeezed in at the top corner of the page.

Note too that ages and dates of birth have been added to the characters. This was an important step and helped to make them real. Another device that appears in the Plot Notes is a pencilled map showing a key area.

In Wycliffe and the Tangled Web, Tregelles farm is the home of the Rule family, related to the Clemos through James Clemo's mother.

James Clemo owns the caravan park, and his large stone-built house is located beside the entrance to the caravan park.

Hilda, daughter of James and the girl who has gone missing, was last seen on a field path that "runs through fields belonging to Tregellas Farm which adjoins the Clemo caravan site and belongs to a relative. Here, where the path enters Clemo land, it passes through woodland and skirts a disused quarry which is flooded."

In the sketched map, the quarry (marked witha Q), is seen immediately to the left of the lower "caravan site" caption.

The use of a map was not an ingredient of every planning process; in the case of the pages headed "Paul's Court", there is no map although the diagram showing the characters and their relationships is quite comprehensive. For Wycliffe and the Winsor Blue there is a map in plan showing the key buildings and a further drawing detailing the frontages of the buildings.

In these ways, the author would have familiarised himself with the details of the story until, once he knew his characters and their environment, the writing could start.

© M de Pace

A taste of the books that John Burley kept on his bookshelves:

Most authors have a weakness for reference books, their shelves crammed with material relating to their general interests as well as sources of information for the books they write. John Burley was no exception as his son Alan reminds us:

"The books in his library gave a good indication of his interests.  In his later years there were sections on history (world, national and local), philosophy, psychology, medicine, zoology, physics, mankind, evolution, biography, religion and the arts, together with many reference books and a large variety of novels."  See Memories of my father on the second page of this website.

Burley made a habit of signing and dating each new book so that it becomes possible to link these sources to the books he wrote. Such links might be academic since an author's purchases are driven as much by interest or curiosity as need. And who is to say which reference books were read or skimmed immediately.

Even so, reference books are consulted when planning a new novel and, as the following very short list demonstrates, it is an interesting area to explore. Note, for example, the acquisition of The Victorian Underworld in 1978, the year before the publication of Burley's Gothic novel Charles and Elizabeth.

The list is in date sequence:

Taylor's Principles and Practice of Medical Jurisprudence in 2 Volumes – Sir Sydney Smith (editor). Signed by W.J.Burley and dated by him April 1966

The Laboratory Detectives – Norman Lucas. Signed by W.J.Burley and dated by him December 1971

The Victorian Underworld - Kellow Chesney. Signed by W.J.Burley and dated by him February 1978.

An Outline of Scientific Criminology – Nigel Morland. Signed by W.J.Burley and dated by him April 19 1978.

Murder Ink – Dilys Winn. Signed by W.J.Burley and dated by him May 1979.

Textbook of Automatic Pistols – R.K. Wilson & I.V. Hogg. Signed by W.J.Burley and dated by him August 1981.

A Cornishman Abroad – A.L. Rowse. Signed by the author on the title page. Signed by W.J.Burley and dated by him November 1981.

Science Against Crime – Yvonne Deutch (editor). Signed by W.J.Burley and dated by him March 1984.

Criminology – Stephan Hurwitz & Karl Christiansen. Signed by W.J.Burley and dated by him March 1987.

Detective Fiction. The Collector's Guide – John Cooper & B.A. Pike. Signed by W.J.Burley and dated by him March 1989.

Bloomsbury Good Reading Guide to Murder,Crime Fiction and Thrillers -
Kenneth and Valerie Macleish. Signed by W.J.Burley on the title page and dated by him August 1991.