The phrase originates, according to Wikipedia, with Jean-Paul Sartre who, in his 1948 play Les mains sales (Dirty Hands), called for the eradication of class ‘par tous les moyens nécessaires’; and it was picked up by Frantz Fanon in a 1960 speech to the Accra Positive Action Conference, ‘Why we use violence’, calling for the ending of colonialism.
It passed into Anglophone popular culture in a speech given
by Malcolm X in 1965:
We declare our right on this earth to be a man, to be a human being, to be respected as a human being, to be given the rights of a human being in this society, on this earth, in this day, which we intend to bring into existence by any means necessary.
Thereafter it became a standard trope of calls for revolutionary change. I first encountered it in literature put out by the anarchist group Class War during the 1990s…
…but it applies equally to writing a novel.
There are all sorts of recipes out there for how you achieve this.
- You can plan it all out as a three-act structure with turning points, on a mind map or a Trello board.
- Any number of story-generating software packages will take you through Joseph Campbell’s hero’s journey: the call to adventure, refusal of the call, crossing the threshold, and all the rest of it
- You can follow the Snowflake Method and progressively map complexity onto a simple structure
- You can buy an ouija board on Amazon, find a spirit guide and take the novel as dictation from the Other Side…
…or you can simply make it up as you go along. Write a first sentence. Write another. And so on until everyone’s dead or you’re too bored to continue.
I’ve tried most of these approaches and invariably ended up with a chaotic mess.
There’s no magic bullet. No one recipe works. In the end, I don’t trust Robert McKee or Joseph Campbell. I mix and match, borrow and steal. I change the sexes of my characters. I turn them from investment bankers into mineral prospectors on a distant planet. I kill off the dog. I don’t kill off the dog. The dog kills everybody…
So much can go wrong. I start with a carefully-wrought plan, then realise that I’m calling upon a character to do something utterly implausible. I discover that you simply can’t get an Uber in Baku at three o’clock in the morning. I wonder if my chronically shy, indecisive character would really run away and join a circus. Whatever.
In his account of the first ascent of Everest in 1953, Edmund Hillary describes how, almost at the summit, he and Tenzing Norgay found their way blocked by a huge, unclimbable rock step.
Search as I could, I was unable to see an easy route up to the step or, in fact, any route at all. Finally, in desperation I examined the right-hand end of the bluff. Attached to this and overhanging the precipitous East face was a large cornice. This cornice, in preparation for its inevitable crash down the mountainside, had started to lose its grip on the rock and a long narrow vertical crack had been formed between the rock and the ice. The crack was large enough to take the human frame and though it offered little security, it was at least a route. I quickly made up my mind—Tenzing had an excellent belay and we must be near the top—it was worth a try.
Edmund Hillary, High Adventure: The True Story of the First Ascent of Everest (1955)
You take the risk and trust yourself. Your judgment. Your mistakes.
You do the rewrites. Five. Ten. As many as it takes.
You do what you have to do, to get the job done.
By any means necessary.
Featured image ©The Harold & Esther Edgerton Foundation. Layout constraints precluded the inclusion of a mugshot of Frantz Fanon
Donald Hounam 