Death

I have an idea for a scene, or a sequence. Danny comes to face death. Whether because he's in a coma, or because death is otherwise a presence in the family, I'm not sure. But he is brought to the door of death: the threshold beyond which he will come face-to-face with this greatest terror of all.

Needless to say, he is terrified. The fear is a living thing, a black wing around him, a night without stars or moon. A great hollow sound, the roar of an unseen and unimaginable creature.

It takes all his courage to agree to cross the threshold. But he does it, inspired perhaps by a fear even greater: a fear for his family, his mother and/or father, perhaps a sibling.

In the scene I've imagined thus far, he passes through this terrible door and finds himself in an ordinary room. A clock ticks on the mantlepiece. A table is laid ready for tea, flanked by two or three dining chairs. (I imagine it a rather Victorian or Edwardian room, but I couldn't say why.) There is sunlight at the windows. There are bookshelves filled with books waiting to be read. There's a side table with a lamp, and a single wooden chair against the wall.

He stands, terrified, waiting for death to arrive. Surely at any moment some slavering thing will burst into the room, or a silent, black-cloaked wraith will materialise before him?

Nothing happens.

Nothing happens.

"Where is it?" he asks. "Where's death?"

"It's here," says his companion, or guide (still got to figure that one out!)

"No, it's not. I can't see it. Where is it?"

He is pointed towards the chair by the wall. A chair so ordinary and dull you wouldn't notice if it was there, or if it disappeared. Danny stares at it, trying to divine what terrible mysterious force might be held within it. Perhaps if one sits on it, death comes screaming up from the underworld to claim your soul?

No: it's just a chair. Part of the furniture. Ever-present, but utterly ordinary. So unremarkable, in fact, that it's almost laughable how people allow it to overcome so much of their lives. In the whole room, which offers so many other interesting items – books, food and drink, comfort – why on earth would anyone obsess about this small, unremarkable thing; this irrelevance?

It is not death that is terrible, but the fear of death. It's not the chair that matters, it's the room. Life is the point, not death. It's something human beings have got wrong for so long – even to the point of creating entire religions focused on death. Danny is lucky: he is shown how wrong this is early in life.

Coma

The Big Sleep was always death, but it would perhaps be a better description of coma. I wonder whether Danny could, as a result of a car accident or a disease, be plunged into a coma - and so into a potentially inescapable dreamland.

I had a thought about him reaching a point (a bit like It's A Wonderful Life) whee he feels his parents – specifically his Mum – aren't interested in him. He feels depressed and taken for granted. Perhaps there's something going on with his parents he isn't aware of, or which he only vaguely understands, and it means they're distracted. Their love and approval is so important to him, this new distraction feels like a betrayal.

Is the new distraction a pregnancy? Or some problem that's arisen – a 'grown-ups issue'?

By the time whatever event it is occurs, and he enters the coma, he feels pushed aside and forgotten – and he's also become familiar with dreamland, to the point where it offers a useful escape for him. But the coma means it's an escape he may never be able to undo. Lots of children feel they want to escape their parents – but would be terrified if they were to succeed, for good.

In the coma, Danny comes to face death, and/or his fear of death. I'll do a separate post about this sequence, which I've had going round in my head for a while. But he also comes to the Room of Strange Doorways, and is allowed access to his mother's dreams.

His mother, of course, is in hell: her cherished child is hovering at death's door. In her dreams, which focus entirely on this dread and nascent grief, he is shocked and terrified by her feelings – he had no idea she could feel this way. He sees her love for him: a well as deep as the stars. And her fear for him: a flint blade pressed to her heart. This is where he discovers there is no world as foreign as the inside of someone else's head – but also the truth about how human beings carry each other around within themselves.

It's this astonishing discovery that inspires his climb out of the coma.

An outline...

We need a spine for the story. I see it being quite episodic, which is almost dictated by the subject: you sleep, you wake, you sleep, you wake. But it still needs a strong throughline.

I had an idea for this, but I'm not sure I really want to make it as sad as this! Alec, see what you think.

My thought was that Danny's mother gets pregnant. It's all very exciting. Shortly befor she announces this impending arrival, Danny starts having his incredibly vivid – lucid – dreams. He meets the Rag and Bone Man, and sees himself in the night mirror. He enters dreamland, and is befriended by the guide character, whom for some reason I want to call Kipper. So let's use that for now.

The pregnancy continues, and Danny has some terrific adventures with Kipper. (I know, we need to say what those are – essentially it's his (and the reader's) introduction to our central notion of dreamland. The place you can do anything, but where you're not altogether in control.)

The baby comes, perhaps prematurely, and immediately there are concerns. Danny has his first dream in which Kipper dies. (Yep, Kipper is a personification of the baby.)

The baby gets very sick, and the Eden of the great rambling artistic home starts coming apart. Danny's mother is in deep distress, his father retreats into his studio.

At school, people know about the sick baby. Danny is the target for a bully, Nathan, who sees the situation as a good way to get at Danny.

Ultimately, of course, the baby dies. The story reaches its nadir. Mum and Dad in pieces. And in the dreams, Kipper's continuous, and often amusing, deaths, end with one final one. Kipper is really gone. Danny loses his friend.

From there, Danny has to find his way out. Out of the grief and blackness. He has to face his fear of death. And somehow he has to save his parents from their grief. This is where the Room of Strange Doorways comes in. Danny has to find out what's really going on with Mum and Dad. He has to go inside their heads. (Or perhaps just one of their heads.)

The final chapters are the climb away from that awful low point. The arc takes Danny, who is of course also going through the big change of puberty, through an experience of death and grief and out the other side.

I think this could all be very powerful, but I'm not sure I want to write a story quite this dark/serious. Alec, let me know what you think.

Danny's Guide 2

Alec had the good idea that this guide of Danny's could appear in a different guise in every dream. He/She/It always has similar characteristics, but may be a cat, or a boy, or really odd things like a clock or a boat. It's nice that it supports him in all sorts of ways. The only thing is I'm concerned that it could be seen as close to Philip Pullman's idea of the daemon. But this isn't Danny's soul – in fact, it's not even really part of him. It's an emissary from dreamland, shaping itself to his imagination.

Alec's other interesting idea was that in every dream, this character dies in one way or another. (A bit "Oh my God, they killed Kenny!") Initially, this is awful for Danny – he loses his friend. Ultimately it could become funny – oh, not again!

But this did lead to a rather dark potential storyline - see the next post.

Danny's parents

I'd like to give Danny an unusual background. His parents are both a little nutty – they're artists, I think. His Dad's a sculptor, who creates strange, abstract things in his studio in the garden. His Mum, I think, is a writer, as well as a teacher. She brings in the bacon. His Dad's the more obsessive one.

I've always loved the David Bowie song, Kooks. I imagine his parents like this: "a couple of kooks, hung up on romancing." They adore Danny, but they have their own way of showing it.

They all live in a rambling Victorian house that's always untidy and struggling for order. Danny loves it, loves exploring and making hiding places and creating. Danny may have a sibling, perhaps a sister, who is much more fussy and practical, and living in this madhouse drives her potty. Her room is a model of order and good taste. She's not boring – just different. And exasperated with her entire family.

I think somehow Danny has to save his family. That's the story. But from what?

Worlds within worlds

One of the things about many 'other world' books is that the ordinary world starts to feel just that: ordinary. I'd like to retain a sense of wonder at our own world, and the many worlds it contains. For example, the book definitely takes place in winter. Winter is the 'night' of the world, a time of dreams and magic, when the night is given full rein. And that makes it a world in itself – it's utterly different from the stifling, dozy time of Summer, all blowsy and blooming and bright.

Winter is a subtler and oddly more wakeful time. The chill gives you a buzz and sharpens you up, whereas the sun makes you drowsy and slow, like a sleepy bumble bee. I like the idea that Winter, and the night, are both times of heightened awareness, when magic comes to the surface. But it's magic we can all experience. Magic doesn't have to be Narnia and wizards. It can be standing in an open field on a winter's night, among a throng of stars.

Danny's Guide

Danny perhaps has a guide through dreamland. A friend who knows the way. (Another Alice allusion: the Cheshire Cat.) But in his case, it's the imaginary friend he conjures up in his waking hours. Dreamland latches onto this powerful figure in Danny's mind, and the imaginary friend becomes a channel for dreamland to guide Danny along his way.

The Room of Strange Doorways

This was the title of another story that I wrote around the time of The Autumn Girl. It was a light-hearted fantasy tale of a little man who sat at the confluence of all worlds: The Room of Strange Doorways. Here, an infinite number of doors opened onto an infinite number of worlds.

Perhaps there is a similar 'room' in dreamland: a special, even sacred, place, where all dreams converge. A sort of collective unconscious. Normally, one cannot escape one's own dreams and enter someone else's, but I think this may be one of Danny's ultimate tasks. However strange our own dreams are, the strangest world you could ever visit would be somebody else's head – to actually move around inside someone's dreams, memories, thoughts.

It may be that, in order to save someone – his father? – Danny has to enter that person's dreams via this room of strange doorways.

Danny the powerful dreamer

Danny, the main character, is unusually gifted, with a very powerful imagination. His 'energy' allows this other world to manifest itself with unusual strength.

But also, as with normal dreams, the images Danny conjures are drawn from the waking world. So there really is a rag and bone man that he sees - some rather dilapidated old fellow and his ageing horse – and transforms in dreams into the mystical figure of Sleep, drawn by the great horse of Night. Other images, too, reflect across the divide between waking and dreaming.

Reflection is a useful image: in the original story, the main character sees a mirror atop Sleep's mound of junk. A mirror that tilts to show the stars – or a well. Which, like Alice's looking glass, is a doorway to another world. Or at least gives a skewed and bizarre reflection of the world, as dreams do of our waking lives.

The world of dreams

I've been trying to work out exactly how it all works. In the story, dreamland is somehow beyond us all: the Rag and Bone Man is an emissary from that world, so it's not simply inside our heads.

But I think the way it works is that dreamland is an extra dimension to the world, but one which has no form of its own. It's somehow an energy, or something basically so peculiar that we can't begin to visualise it. So to interact, it uses our own imaginations: it forms around our ideas and dreams the way pearls form around grains of sand. Everything the main character, whom I'm calling Danny (for the moment), perceives in dreamland is a combination of that other world and his own imagination.

Danny is a powerful dreamer. Highly imaginative, a daydreamer, a future poet or artist. His dreams are vivid, both sleeping and daydreaming, and he's frequently in trouble at school for not paying attention.

That's why dreamland, this other world, finds him. It uses imagination as a bridge, or a channel to this world. And through it, Danny learns lessons, faces demons, and triumphs.

Exactly how, I still have to decide...

Getting started

When I was still at school, I wrote a short story called The Autumn Girl. It was hopelessly romantic, as was I (I wrote it for an unrequited love), but it was easily the best thing I'd written at the time.

In it, a young boy falls in love with a strange, wild girl, who tells him that it rains more under the trees. He says that's not true, but she insists. It turns out she's rather more than human, or at least different from human, and inhabits the world of dream as much as this world. Her rain under the trees is a metaphor for imagination – the ability to turn the normal world upside-down and make it as you wish.

The bit of the story that really stuck with me, though, was the idea of where dreams come from. In the story, the boy discovers that dreams are dispensed by a silent rag and bone man, Sleep, whose cart is loaded with a myserious muddle of junk: the stuff of dreams. The cart is drawn by a great dark horse named Night.

The idea resurfaced when I signed up for this project, and the more I thought about it the more I found I still liked and cared about that central idea. A lot of the original story is typical teenage tosh, but there was a lyricism and strangeness about it that I still find powerful.

Seeing Alex's illustrations confirmed that this was a good way to go. They combine impressively crafted representative portraiture with abstract patterns and colours. And as we talked, he mentioned 'farce' and 'darkness', two words that seemed particularly appropriate for the world of dreams.

So here we are. I have a ludicrously ambitious notion to write a children's novel. Or perhaps a novel for young people, as in early teens. And we have an initial deadline of January 24 to present some work.

Better crack on, eh Alex?