The death this week of Terrance Dicks, the prolific Dr Who writer who penned more than 60 novels extending the TV Time Lord’s adventures, made me realise something: I love novelisations.
The appeal of my stack of those old slim Target paperbacks, written by the likes of Dicks, Malcolm Hulke and others, was obvious in my childhood, growing up as I did at the tail end of the Jon Pertwee years. Tom Baker was “my” Doctor, so the chances of ever seeing the old William Hartnell or Patrick Troughton adventures were absolutely zero. In the days before endless repeats and on-demand viewing, paperbacks were the only way I could experience those stories.
Devotees of the Bullet Journal, a cultish notebook-organization system tagged in more than eight million posts on Instagram, will tell you that there are two kinds of notebook people: those who keep multiple notebooks and those who keep just one. Most of us are multiple-notebook people, living our lives haphazardly, writing things down as we go: a notebook for the office, another for groceries and appointments, one for dreams and doodles, one for furtive rants. The multiple-notebook person maintains a wall calendar, a desk calendar, and two calendar apps. She has scribbled a list of movies to watch on a sticky note that she will never find again. She has an app full of cryptic asides (“Rice bowls,” “Bat room”). She has no idea where her bank details are. The multiple-notebook person lives in a kind of organizational purgatory. Her intentions are good, her approach delinquent.
Ryder Carroll, the thirty-nine-year-old digital designer who invented the Bullet Journal, used to be a multiple-notebook person. Born in Vienna to American teachers, he was a squirmy, distracted child, constantly behind and anxious in school. As a teen-ager, he was given a diagnosis of attention-deficit disorder, and he began to develop small journaling tricks to get through his classes; in college, at Skidmore, he carried around six notebooks to keep track of everything. He also scrapbooked and made collages. He started writing down his thoughts in short bursts throughout the day and found that it calmed him, allowing him to see past his anxieties to their root causes. “When there’s a barking dog outside, you can’t hear anything else,” he told me recently, by way of analogy. “But when you go to the window you realize there might be something wrong, you think about it, you get the context. It’s barking at something. You actually get up and look. And, for me, writing is that process.”
Baltimore Jack was dead. In a place where even the speediest travel slowly, the word spread up and down the length of the Appalachian Trail from Georgia to Maine in a matter of hours. It was May 4, 2016, and one of the most beloved, brilliant, and exasperating antiheroes in the history of long-distance walking was gone.
He was 57, and it was the beginning of his 21st year on the trail. Over that time, he had become a sort of everywhere-at-once presence, bandages wrapped around his battered knees, relying on snack cakes, lasagna, Jim Beam, cigarettes, and the kindness of others to survive. It was a kindness he usually returned.
How do you capture the realities of climate change in a novel — not just its causes and symptoms, but the ever-changing, ever-weirder ways it is manifesting, within the conventional framework of a story with a beginning, middle and end?
Answering that question is, according to the writer Amitav Ghosh, the literary world’s great challenge. “I feel completely convinced that we have to change our fictional practices in order to deal with the world that we’re in,” he said.