What was I to make him do? The novelistic constraints meant I had to make him try various ways of getting ashore. But these had to be slow, recorded day after day, repetitive and monotonous. In the end I still had to write a novel, whose aim—let it be said in the face of every aesthete, and in full respect for the laws of the genre as they have come down to us from the Hellenistic romance to our own time, not to mention Aristotle’s Poetics— had to be that of providing narrative pleasure.
Fortunately I was the victim of another constraint. To conform to the spirit of the seventeenth-century novel, I had to introduce a Double, and I really did not know what to do with him. Suddenly this Double came good: while he tries to reach the island, learning each day to swim better (but never well enough), Roberto imagines the novel about his Double, and thus the one-step-forward-three-back structure could be reproduced, since Roberto cannot reach the island but makes his Double reach it, making him start from the point where he himself started. How nice to see a novel writing itself! I did not know where I would get to, because the novelistic constraint dictated that Roberto should not get anywhere. The novel ends because it heads directly toward its conclusion on its own. This is what I would like my Model Reader to notice. That the novel writes itself, since that is how it happened, and how it always happens, really.
Speaking of constraints, the finale of Baudolino had to take place in 1204, because I wanted to narrate the conquest of Constantinople. But Baudolino had to be born around the middle of the century (I fixed on 1142 as a point of reference, so as to have my character at the age of reason and consent at the time of many events I wanted to relate). The first mention of Prester Johns letter is around 1165, and I already make it circulate a few years later, but why then does Baudolino, after persuading Frederick to give him permission, not set off immediately for Prester John’s Kingdom? Because I had to have him coming back from the Kingdom only in 1204, so he could tell the tale to Nicetas during the burning of Constantinople. And what did I have to make Baudolino do in that interval of almost four decades? It was a bit like the business of the computer in Foucault’s Pendulum.
I make him do many things, and I constantly make him delay his departure. At the time it seemed like a waste to me, it was like inserting a series of temporal stopgaps into the story in order to arrive finally at that damned date of 1204. And yet, when you look at it closely (and I hope, or rather I know, that many readers did realize this), I created the Spasm of Desire (or, rather, the novel created it without my realizing it there and then). Baudolino wants the Kingdom but constantly has to postpone his search. Thus Prester John’s Kingdom grows in Baudolino’s desire, and in the reader’s eyes (I hope). Once more the advantages of constraints.
How I Write
At this point one can understand how useless are questions like «Do you begin with notes, immediately write the first or last chapter, write with pen, pencil, typewriter, or computer?» If one has to construct a world, day by day, and try out endless temporal structures, if the actions the characters perform and have to perform according to the logic of common sense or of narrative convention (or against narrative convention) have to fit with the logic of the constraints (involving constant rethinks, cancellations, and rewrites), there is no uniform way of writing a novel.
At least for me. I know of writers who wake up at 8:00 A.M., work at their keyboard from 8:30 to 12:00 («nulla dies sine linea; no day without at least a line»), and then stop and go out and enjoy themselves until evening. Not me. First of all, when I write a novel, the act of writing comes later. First I read, make notes, draw portraits of the characters, maps of the places, and plans for the time sequences. And these are done with a felt pen, or computer, depending on when and where one does this, or on the kind of narrative idea or detail one wants to record: on the back of a train ticket, if the idea comes to you on a train, in a notebook, on an index card, using ballpoint, tape recorder, or blackberry juice if really necessary.
Then what happens is that I chuck out, tear up, tear into pieces, forget things in different places, but I have boxes full of notebooks, with blocks of pages in different colors, bits of card, even sheets of foolscap. And this chaotic variety of props helps my memory, because I remember that I jotted down that particular note on the letterhead paper of a London hotel, and the first page of that chapter was scribbled down in my study, on an index card with pale blue lines, and using a Mont Blanc pen, whereas the following chapter was initially written down in the country, on the back of a recycled piece of draft paper.
I do not have any special method, days, hours, or seasons. But between the second and third novels I established a habit. I would collect ideas, write notes, make provisional drafts wherever I was, but then, when I could spend at least a week in my house in the country, that was where I would type out the chapters on the computer. When I left, I printed them out, corrected them, and left them to mature in a drawer, until the next time I returned to the country. The definitive versions of my first three novels were done there, usually in two or three weeks over the Christmas holidays.
The result was that I started to cultivate a superstition (I who am the least superstitious person in the world: I go under ladders, greet affectionately any black cats crossing my path, and, to punish superstitious students, I always fix my university exams for a Friday, so long as it is a thirteenth): the almost definitive version, apart from minor corrections, had to be completed by 5 January, my birthday. If I was not ready for that year, I would wait for the next year (and once, when I was almost ready in November, I put everything away so I could finish in January).
Here too, Baudolino was the exception. Or rather, it was written with the same rhythm, out in the country as usual, but about halfway through the writing, during the Christmas holidays of 1999, I got stuck. I thought it was due to the Millennium Bug. I was on the chapter with Barbarossa’s death, and what was to happen in that chapter dictated the final chapters, and the very way in which I would recount the journey toward Prester Johns Kingdom. I was blocked for several months, I could not imagine how to get over that hurdle, or around that cape. I could not do it, and I secretly yearned for those chapters (still to be written) that I had been most passionate about right from the start, the encounters with monsters and especially the meeting with Hypatia. I dreamed of being able to start on those chapters, but I did not want to do so until I had solved the problem that was obsessing me.
When I got back to the country, in the summer of 2000, I «rounded the cape» in the middle of June. I had begun to think about the novel in 1995, it had taken me five years to get halfway, and therefore—I said to myself—I still needed five more years to finish.
But obviously I had thought out the second half of the book so intensely in those five years that it had all sorted itself out in my head (or heart, or stomach, I don’t know). In short, between mid-June and the beginning of August the book was completed almost on its own, in a spurt (afterward there were a few months of checking and rewriting, but by then it was done, the story was finished). At that point another of my principles crumbled, because even a superstition is also a principle, however irrational it is. I had not finished the book for the 5 th of January.
There was something that was not quite right, I thought for a few days. Then, on 8 August my first grandchild was born. It all became clear, for this fourth occasion I had to finish the novel not on the day of my birthday but on his birth day. I dedicated the book to him and felt reassured.
The Computer and Writing
How much has the computer influenced my writing? A huge amount, in my experience, but I don’t know how much from the point of view of results.
By the way, seeing that Foucault’s Pendulum spoke of a computer that created poetry and connected events in an aleatory way, many interviewers wanted me at all costs to confess that the entire novel had been written by giving a program to the computer, which then invented everything. Note that these were all journalists who by now worked in
