The Joys of Cranking the Engine of a Novel

Recently, for the programme, I’ve been asking other writers how they start a novel and how they get on with completing it. I’ve also spoken specifically about how I was inspired to write my own novel The Lavender House. So, as I’m beginning a new novel, I thought I’d tell you how this process works in my case.

All writers work in their own way. I think I must be a seasonal writer. For years now, in late Winter/ early Spring I will be puzzling, speculating, making false starts, writing sketches (short scenes that may/might be in the novel) waiting for characters to walk onto my roughly prepared stage, into my dreamed landscape, demanding to be named and styled.

Notes, labels, names, sketches, images and maps start to litter the walls of my little room. My computer becomes petalled with notes and reminders. The novel grows first in a kind of impressionistic collage. The big table is stacked with opened books post-it-ed and ticker-taped with wild notes to myself.

In real Spring ( when the bluebells at the bottom of the garden are out) I feel impelled to start to write, to get into gear properly with this job . The story is bubbling up from the depths of my imagination, throwing up sentences and paragraphs like fire and gas from a volcano.The characters are elbowing their way out of the wings into the spotlight, moving from monologue to dialogue. Occasionally there are shrieks. Let me out! Let me out!

This is when I’ll write novel-stuff in my notebook wherever I am – car, cafes, hotels, park bench - taking pages like stored treasure back to the little room for the painstaking and rewarding process of transcription. Sometimes I’m amazed how brilliant the scribble is. Sometimes I can’t make it out, so perhaps it was too brilliant for this world… It's a mad, mad phase. I become more and more excited, and as the Summer moves into place I am buzzing away, writing every day, living the narrative and not noticing too much around me.

Sometimes at this midpoint there is a worrying haitus. Is it really a novel? Am I kidding myself? Am I deluded into thinking I can do this very hard thing? (Some people label this the Writer’s Block. I think it’s just the imagination muscle screaming for a rest.) So I take a good breather then I go back to the beginning and move more slowly forward again, editing and writing as I go.

With the coming of Autumn the days draw in and the growing darkness helps me to focus more closely on the way the narrative works. These latter stages are just as demanding and interesting but are as much intellectual as imaginative. This is the time when the firecrackers that I set away back in early Spring have to take their place in a coherent and interesting story. And in the end the form has to be right, The facts have to be right.

I don’t at all see this part of the process as a chore – it’s the final careful, creative act in making the novel work. It's like taking a garment you’ve just designed and made, and pressing it with care to make it fit and elegant for anyone who chooses to put it on.

By the beginning of December, with Winter set in, the novel is complete and ready to go on, on its own hopeful journey.

But now, with this lovely new novel (called so far XXX), I’m just at the beginning of this journey. I relish the familiar delight and and excited tension threading through my body. Writing like this is a visceral thing. Of all the things I do, my novel is where I am completely myself – travelling alone and enjoying it.

wx

(Pic tomorrow…)

The Blue Taffeta Dress

I’ve blah’d on here and in other places about the illusory nature of so-called ‘writer’s block’. Now it seems I’m just emerging from one of these things.

I have lectured myself about winter blues; about being physically and mentally tired after finishing the French Novel, not to mention the challenges of the Easington project; about using up my usually overflowing Ideas Basket; about the need for fallow time to give my mind a chance to spring back into place.

I acknowledged all that but it was painful to be in the middle of it. It struck me that writing is my one steady and true life-companion and I’m lonely without her. I am addicted to her deadlines and there is the possibility that the rolling deadlines - the organising feature of my life - are one way in which I feed that need.

I have my reasons for feeling used up. At the centre is the unique nature of the French Novel, where I explored the depths of my odd perceptions of time, space and life after death. These things are there at the core of my story of needy and funny Starr, of wise Modeste, and the miraculous boy Tib.

Perhaps I needed more recovery time after completing this novel than any other.

I tried to leave the write-stop (my new name for w.b…) alone. After all, there was Christmas and New Year with its baubles, presents and presentiments. There were my delightful and absorbing visitors. And there was the beautiful snow – although that was (and continues to be) an unwelcome and disabling visitor.

Then there was the afternoon by the fire with Debora sorting out old family photographs – particularly of her grandmother Barbara - so she could have copies. (You will note that the pictures of Barbara, inspired my previous, heartfelt post here.)

Apart from the photos of Barbara, images the whole of my life started to trickle before me – frowning baby , curly headed, earnest little girl,

and the only one out of uniform in sixth form groups,

and the astonishingly young and slender bride in a hired wedding gown ,

and the young and the older mother …

and the writer.

One very special snap emerged from the higgledy piggeldy pile - of myself at 11 with my older sister and younger brother in front of the door of the house we lived in then. My sister is wearing a flowered dress. I am wearing a dress in violet blue taffeta with a broderie anglaise trim on the collar and a ruched cummerbund. On my feet are inappropriate white, canvas plimsolls. I am thin. My arms and legs are stick-like.

I turned the snap over and there in a schoolgirl’s round hand is written. ‘I am in the flowered dress. The other girl is my sister.’

The Other Girl Is My Sister! Now there is a good title for a short story. Or a novel…

… and Bang! The the writer’s block /write-stop is gone.

I have gone from stop to GO. Debora and Barbara have done the trick.

wx

The Myths of Writer’s Block and ‘Daily Pages’

Writers’ pathways are interesting. Accounts of the writer’s lives in Writer’s Magazines and Sunday Supplements are compelling reading for interested readers and for those on a similar pathway towards publication or merely towards coherent and public self expression.

The inspiration, the daily writing habits, the search for a voice, the accidental meetings that make a difference, the early struggles … one could go on. Bedded in there are myths that are hard to shake off. Roald Dahl and Daphne du Maurier in their respective garden huts; JKRowling in relative poverty sitting writing in a café: these can inspire notions that ‘… if I have a a garden hut, if I write in cafés I too could produce, James and the Giant Peach, or Rebecca or Harry Potter…’ Dreaming of course. But it’s very proper for a writer to dream.

Another myth (or anti-myth?) is that of writer’s block – written about robust charm recently by 60 Going on 16. I’m known among my friends for believing that writer’s blocks are self derived myths based on physical or mental exhaustion, dearth of ideas, not enough reading, writing being given a low priority in a writer’s life or a writer’s deep lack of enjoyment in the writing process itself.

I have to admit, though, that in this last week this idea has given me pause for thought as for some scary days I have not been able to get to my day job – writing this new novel. To other writers I airily say Don’t worry, it’s not writer’s block – it’s a fallow time! your subconscious is working on it! your brain is shrieking for a rest! Not an easy thing to say to yourself , when you imagine you have literally lost the plot.

But yesterday to my great relief I got back to my story to discover the time had been fallow, the soil had enriched itself, my subconscious had been working on it, my brain had enjoyed its overdue rest. The plot was found again.

The other myth that abounds out there in Writingworld is the myth of ‘daily pages’, generated with honest intent by writing gurus such as Julia Cameron and Natalie Goldberg. In this world, writing a few pages of anything each day is a panacea for all writers ills - ‘writer’s block’, lack of ideas, lack of self belief …

In fact it is a good idea gone wild. At it’s best it can bed down a habit of broaching your subconscious, and is a useful beginning down the writer’s road. At its worst it can be a compensatory activity which is self-limiting: the shell without the grit of discipline, structure, and purposeful imagination that can produce decent writing.

What it is, is a good idea to be used rather than to be a place of rest, as though your randomised internal language is a cosy arm chair where you can doze instead of waking to the original writer that you can be.

My own favourite guru source is Dorothea Brande’s 1933 book On Becoming A Writer. I discovered this through the recommendation of John Braine in the introduction to one of his novels. I managed to obtain a copy of her book (though it was out of print…) , to be transfixed by its contents. I must have been part of a turning tide, as it was reissued in the next year and remains popular.

On Becoming a Writer is a simple two or three hour read, inspirational in tone, American in style, which makes you immediately was to get out your notebook and write. She advocates writing early in the morning when you are still in the sleep-wake mode; she says writing anything that comes to your head for half an hour, even if it is only I don’t want to be sitting here writing I don’t want to be setting here writing. It works. And from this concept - borrowed effectively by Goldberg, Cameron et al - comes the concept, now widespread, of ‘daily pages’.

But the best part of the Dorothea B concept - her twenty one day exercise – is often smudged to the sidelines.

Here is my version of the Twenty One Day Exercise

• write a single daily page for twenty one days. It’s important that you do not look back to yesterday’s page. Forge on.
• For twenty one days you write on a fresh page and do not look back.
• After twenty one days you make an hour or so at any time of day and read through what you have written with respect, as though your were reading someone else’s work.
• Then you read through again and make notes, because here you will find clues to - the kind of writer - the subject matter that preoccupies you - your normal vocabulary - your fundamental style.
• Take three paragraphs or sets of twenty lines from your daily pages and develop them into three separate pieces of writing. Could be a short story, first chapter of a novel, or a poem.
• Now work on these to some kind of conclusion for the next twenty one days.
• Work on. Return to the twenty one day cycle every now and then to refresh your inspiration.
• Don’t get into an eternal habit of daily pages that taps off all your inspiration and motivation and stops you writing for real.

If I hadn’t ‘found the plot’ again, I’d have turned back to Dorothea B ….

I have seen this method turn tentative writers into proper writers and existing writers into more honest, original writers.

Give it a go. You never know where it may lead….

wx