The well of lost plots by Jasper Fforde Page B

even altered plotlines to include older male mentor figures! Do you think that was wrong?”
    “I’m not sure,” I said, slightly confused.
    “At least the Merlin type is a popular character. Stick a new hat on him and he can appear pretty much anywhere. Try getting rid of thousands of Mrs. Danvers. There isn’t a huge demand for creepy fifty-something housekeepers; even buy-two-get-one-free deals didn’t help — we use them on anti-mispeling duty, you know. A sort of army.”
    “What’s it like?” I asked.
    “How do you mean?”
    “Being fictional.”
    “Ah!” replied Snell slowly. “Yes — fictional.”
    I realized too late that I had gone too far — it was how I imagined a dog would feel if you brought up the question of distemper in polite conversation.
    “I forgive your inquisitiveness, Miss Next, and since you are an Outlander, I will take no offense. If I were you, I shouldn’t inquire too deeply about the past of fictioneers. We all aspire to be ourselves, an original character in a litany of fiction so vast that we know we cannot. After basic training at St. Tabularasa’s, I progressed to the Dupin school for detectives; I went on field trips around the works of Hammett, Chandler and Sayers before attending a postgraduate course at the Agatha Christie finishing school. I would have liked to be an original, but I was born seventy years too late for that.”
    He stopped and paused for reflection. I was sorry to have raised the point. It can’t be easy, being an amalgamation of all that has been written before.
    “Right!” he said, finishing his coffee. “That’s enough about me. Ready?”
    I nodded.
    “Then let’s go.”
    So, taking my hand, he transported us both out of
Caversham Heights
and into the endless corridors of the Well of Lost Plots.
     
     
    The Well was similar to the library as regards the fabric of the building — dark wood, thick carpet, tons of shelves — but here the similarity ended. Firstly, it was
noisy
. Tradesmen, artisans, technicians and Generics all walked about the broad corridors appearing and vanishing as they moved from book to book, building, changing and deleting to the author’s wishes. Crates and packing cases lay scattered about the corridors, and people ate, slept and conducted their business in shops and small houses built in the manner of an untidy shantytown. Advertising billboards and posters were everywhere, promoting some form of goods or services unique to the business of writing. 1
    “I think I’m picking up junkfootnoterphone messages, Snell,” I said above the hubbub. “Should I be worried?”
    “You get them all the time down here. Ignore them — and never pass on chain footnotes.” 2
    We were accosted by a stout man wearing a sandwich board advertising bespoke 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 down here 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 subbasement has an entrance to the Text Sea — we’ll go down there and see them off-loading the scrawltrawlers one evening.”
    “What do they unload?”
    “Words” — Snell smiled — “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 imaginotransference technology that translates odd, inky squiggles into pictures inside your head. Vast storycode engines at Text Grand Central throughput the images to the readers as they scan the text in the Outland. We’re currently using Book Operating System V8.3 — not for