Trivia / Gormenghast

• Creator Breakdown: Peake's Parkinson's Disease aggravated his emotional and mental instability, before writing the third and died after finishing only one chapter of Titus Awakes, which would have been the fourth. The omnibus edition ends with a list of the tropes Peake intended to use later on (although not referred to by WikiWord, of course) and the words "what these books could have been." For example, there was going to be a revisitation of Gormenghast during an interregnum in which Prunesquallor is in charge. Titus Alone had to be edited severely because Peake had put in plot elements that arguably made absolutely no sense given the plots of the previous two books.
• Died During Production: Peake was planning on a cycle of seven novels, but contracted Parkinson's Disease, leading to his death at the age of only 57.
• Writing by the Seat of Your Pants: Peake did this the entire way through, having started the story with nothing more than some strong mental images of the castle and a handful of its inhabitants. Pretty much the entire story from beginning to end was improvised, which explains both the weird tangents it goes on from time to time as well as sudden twists like the flood that kills half the cast. Whenever Peake came to an impasse in writing he had an interesting way of figuring out what to do next; he would draw portraits of the characters and simply imagine what they had to say to each other, and then from that work out what they might do next at whichever point he was at in the novel.

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