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plot devices 'for the discerning wordsmith'.
'No thank you,' yelled Snell, taking me by the arm and walking us to a quieter
spot between Dr
Forthright's Chapter Ending Emporium and the Premier Mentor School.
'There are twenty-six floors in the Well,' he told me, waving a hand towards
the bustling crowd. 'Most of them are chaotic factories of fictional prose
like this one but the twenty-sixth sub-basement has an entrance to the Text
Sea we'll go down there and see them offloading the scrawltrawlers one
evening.'
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'What do they unload?'
'Words,' smiled Snell, 'words, words and more words. The building blocks of
fiction, the DNA of Story.'
'But I don't see any books being written,' I observed, looking around.
He chuckled.
'You Outlanders! Books may look like nothing more than words on a page but
they are actually an infinitely complex Imagino-Transference technology that
translates odd inky squiggles into pictures inside your head we're currently
using Book Operating System V8.3. Not for long, though Text Grand
Central want to upgrade the system.'
'Someone mentioned UltraWord"! on the news last night,' I observed.
'Fancy-pants name. It's BOOK V9 to me and you. WordMaster Libris should be
giving us a presentation shortly. UltraWord"! is being tested as we speak if
it's as good as they say it is, books will never be the same again!'
'Well,' I sighed, trying to get my head around this idea, 'I had always
thought novels were just, well, written
.'
'
Write is only the word we use to describe the recording process,' replied
Snell as we walked along. 'The
Well of Lost Plots is where we interface the writer's imagination with the
characters and plots so that it will make sense in the reader's mind. After
all, reading is arguably a far more creative and imaginative
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Jasper Fforde - Thursday Next 03 - The Well of Lost Plots process than
writing; when the reader creates emotion in their head, or the colours of the
sky during the setting sun, or the smell of a warm summer's breeze on their
face, they should reserve as much praise for themselves as they do for the
writer perhaps more.'
This was a new approach; I ran the idea around in my head.
'Really?' I replied, slightly doubtfully.
'Of course!' Snell laughed.
'Surf pounding the shingle wouldn't mean diddly unless you'd seen the waves
cascade on to the foreshore, or felt the breakers tremble the beach beneath
your feet, now, would it?'
'I suppose not.'
'Books,' said Snell, 'are a kind of magic.'
I thought about this for a moment and looked around at the chaotic fiction
factory. My husband was or is a novelist I had always wanted to know what
went on inside his head and this, I figured, was about the nearest I'd ever
get. We walked on, past a shop called 'A Minute Passed'. It sold descriptive
devices for
7
marking the passage of time this week they had a special on Seasonal
Changes.
'What happens to the books which are unpublished?' I asked wondering whether
the characters in
Caversham Heights really had so much to worry about.
'The failure rate is pretty high,' admitted Snell, 'and not just for reasons
of dubious merit.
Bunyan's
Bootscraper by John McSquurd is one of the best books ever written but it's
never been out of the author's hands. Most of the dross, rejects or otherwise
unpublished just languish down here in the Well until they are broken up for
salvage. Others are so bad they are just demolished the words are pulled
from the pages and tossed into the Text Sea.'
'All the characters are just recycled like waste cardboard or something?'
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Snell paused and coughed politely.
'I shouldn't waste too much sympathy on the one-dimensionals, Thursday. You'll
run yourself ragged and there really isn't the time or resources to
recharacterise them into anything more interesting.'
'Mr Snell, sir?'
It was a young man in an expensive suit, and he carried what looked like a
very stained pillowcase with something heavy in it about the size of a melon.
'Hello, Alfred!' said Snell, shaking the man's hand. 'Thursday, this is Garcia
he has been supplying the
Perkins & Snell series of books with intriguing plot devices for over ten
years. Remember the unidentified torso found floating in the Humber in
Dead among the Living
? Or the twenty-year-old corpse discovered with the bag of money bricked up in
the spare room in
Requiem for a Safecracker
?
'Of course!' I said, shaking the technician's hand. 'Good intriguing
page-turning stuff. How do you do?'
'Well, thank you,' replied Garcia, turning back to Snell after smiling
politely. 'I understand the next
Perkins & Snell novel is in the pipeline and I have a little something that
might interest you.'
He held the bag open and we looked inside. It was a head. More importantly, a
severed head.
A head in a bag?' queried Snell with a frown, looking closer.
'Indeed,' murmured Garcia proudly, 'but not any old head-in-a-bag. This one
has an intriguing tattoo on the nape of the neck. You can discover it in a
skip, outside your office, in a deceased suspect's deep-
freeze the possibilities are endless.'
Snell's eyes flashed excitedly. It was the sort of thing his next book needed
after the critical savaging of
Wax Lyrical for Death
.
'How much?' he asked.
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Jasper Fforde - Thursday Next 03 - The Well of Lost Plots
'Three hundred,' ventured Garcia.
'Three hundred?!' exclaimed Snell. 'I could buy a dozen head-in-a-bag plot
devices with that and still have change for a missing Nazi gold consignment.'
Garcia laughed. 'No one's using the old "missing Nazi gold consignment" plot
device any more. If you don't want the head you can pass I can sell heads
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