The Ideas for Novel Generation Scheme...

Like many of you, I am a frustrated writer. Well, maybe that's not strictly true. I want to be a writer and I do, barring those occupational hazards, the blocks and cramps, indeed write. In fact, I find it, on the whole, to be a deeply rewarding and enjoyable enterprise to the extent that it's not really frustrating at all.

What is frustrating is the strange impulse that, once you've written something, leads one to suspect that this perhaps is only part of the deal. There follows the suspicion that one really ought to do something with some of the piles of paper that accrue like wormcasts as a by-product of the writing process - namely to contrive some mechanism by which what you've written might someday be read by other people. This, as many of us are finding out, is where blogs come in useful. Unfortunately, unless you are Belle de Jour or The Huffington Post or The Grauniad, spiritually uplifting though they may be, they don't really pay in a commercial sense.

To complicate matters further, I seem to be one of those people who, as Brian Eno put it, prefers making plans to executing them. This inability to see things through may be an advantage in journalism, where the half-baked and un-thought through are actively encouraged, if not actually de rigeur - but it is somewhat of an impediment when it comes to the business of writing a novel. Consequently, my personal paper piles abound with the single sheet synopsis and the encouraging first chapter taken no further. Anything more substantial is normally the result of some grandiose attempt to cobble these unfinished fragments together in some ghastly uber-narrative (usually narrated by a some saucy female book editor with a penchant for a diveres portfolio of sexual fetishes, as it goes).

But then it struck me: what better outlet for these poorly formed, but potentially fecund (not to mention money-spinning) seeds-of-a-novel than the blogosphere? Surely, out there in ether-space, there must be my mirror image - a master technician who can rattle off 400,000 words with the same ease with which Paula Radcliffe runs marathons (well, until she collapses in a spindly heap on the roadside, blubbing her arse off, that is...) but whose work lacks the spark of originality, the left of field brilliance abundant in these bookish homunculi. In short, all I need, is to post 'em up and s/he will come - the Paul McCartney to my John Lennon.

So here goes - the first in what could be a lengthy series. Or not.

It's All Dick.

The plot:

It's January 1962. As the snow piles up knee-deep all over smoggy London Town, an unsigned group from Liverpool triumphantly bring down the curtain on their audition for Decca Records. Dick Rowe likes what he hears. "Groups of guitars are the way ahead - I think they're FAB!" he tells the group's manager, Mr. Brian Epstein. Within a month, the band's debut single 'The Sheik of Araby' is filling the nation's remaindered baskets.

After three more similarly underwhelming releases, the band decide to jack it in and leave global domination to the Dave Clark Five whose 'Tottenham sound' is driving Britain's youth to an earsplitting pitch of manic hysteria. It's back to the dole queues for the never-to-be-fab-four as Harold Wilson's slump in the polls ushers in another half century of hidebound, scandal-ridden tory rule.

As Dave Clark and the other four board their Pan Am flight bound for New York to conquer America, news hits the wires that Lee Harvey Oswald, the man whose unsuccessful Presidential assasination attempt has been the main talking point in the US for the last three months, could be released by 1970 with good behaviour. The increasingly troubled administration is coming under fire from all sides as the number of 'military advisors' being despatched to Vietnam reaches 100,000 and the circumstantial evidence linking JFK to the deaths of Marilyn Monroe, Sam Cooke, Malcolm X and Cassius Clay becomes ever harder to refute.

His controversial decision - announced during an emotional speech in the divided city of Hamburg (think about it....) - to divert funding for the embryonic US space programme to the Asian theatre of war serves to strengthen the belief that this is a Presidency on the rocks...

Next step: Just run with it...

The Pitch for dimwitted agents/editors: SSGB jamming with Revolution in the Head...

Would be a good vee-hikle for?: Brian? dh? Len Deighton?

Who would play whom in the made for TV version?:

Dick Rowe: Tom Hanks

Dave Clark: Robert Downey Jr.

The Other Four: Franz Ferdinand.

Harold Wilson: Miriam Margolis.

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