Rankin myself among the big names

In 2007, Orion Books published a 20th anniversary edition of Ian Rankin’s original Rebus novel, Knots & Crosses. I tell you this because I just picked up a copy at the local library book sale.

What attracted me to the book was the fact that, inside both the front and back covers, Orion included facsimiles of what appeared to be Rankin’s original notes and drafts for this life-changing novel.

As a wannabe writer myself, I am always interested in reading about how the most successful of my colleagues (yeah, right, I can include the likes of Ian Rankin, Dick Francis or Joanne Rowling as “colleagues”… that’s rich) got their start.

Rankin kindly includes a brief introduction in this edition in which he explains how this novel came into being. It’s an interesting bit of reading, as much for the information it provides about his inspiration and process as for the insights it gives into how he, 20 years later, looks back on his first Rebus novel with at least a small degree of embarrassment.

“I was a young man in love with language,” he writes of his 1987 self, “striving for a voice and sometimes overreaching.”

I read that and found myself nodding. Yeah, I know that feeling. I can’t look back at some of my earliest literary efforts without feeling a bit of a blush come over me. Did I really write that? Was I really that caught up in Joyce/Dickens/Woolf/Eliot that I would try to write just like them?

But I was also struck by Rankin’s description of the process by which Knots & Crosses came to be. “[L]ooking back,” he says in 2007, “what amazes me is that the idea of the book came so quickly and fluently, and that even those first few hand-written pages of text show few changes from the version that would see eventual publication.”

It’s at that point that the differences between Rankin and me as writers shine with such startling clarity: I struggle to find plots and have to work hard to establish layers of depth for my characters; exceptionally vivid characters flow naturally from him and evocative, effective lots seem to develop fluently for him.

Does that mean I can’t ever be successful? Of course not. Does it mean I will envy Ian Rankin and his natural brilliance? Maybe just a little bit.