New Leaves

Leaves from my small plot for the new year.

And as for turning them over, or at least paying attention to them, I shall divide 2008 between writing my third novel, a modern Beauty and the Beast (it's really my second second novel, because the first second novel turned into a short story) and preparing and researching the stories of some of the survivors of the Titanic. This latter because my great-grandmother was a Titanic survivor and - at least in publishing terms - 2012 approaches fast.

Other leaves include sharpening my critical faculties when I'm working, and bluntening them when I'm with those I love. Somebody once said something like this:

Friendship welcomes the loved qualities and lets the wind take the rest.

I agree.

The writing process ...

... or should that be

the thicket?

I seem to go from a simple idea for a novel, a contemporary Beauty and the Beast in the case of my next novel, into a thicket of handwritten notes, ideas scribbled on stray pieces of paper, written scenes, more ideas, bits of plot, character notes, more ideas, structure notes, notes carefully filed in plastic folders with headings like 'Edward's Section' which become part of a pile of plastic folders on a blue stool beside me, and scenes. Not to mention the typed Word documents of all the above (sometimes writing by hand pleases me; sometimes I type) which are carefully filed in different subfolders in a folder called Beauty and the Beast. The subfolders are growing like the branches of a thicket.

All these notes
make
a thicket
in my head.
Through which it is difficult to see out.

And then this morning I knew that I had to make it simple. I knew that I had to write the one line that - like the root of the tree at the heart of the thicket - holds the whole thing up.

It is this: NOT DEPENDING ON OTHERS FOR YOUR SENSE OF YOURSELF.

From which I have begun the novel again.
And from which I will redraft it again and again.
And again.
Until the characters embody that simple idea.

But, of course, by the end the novel will be fat with the colours and smells and physical attributes, the inspirations and desperations and insights - in short, the characters - of the many unexpected paths (notes) that I trod along the way. So the paths and the notes that lead to them are useful, more than useful, essential. It's just that I hate that thicket feeling.

This morning, as I wondered where to file this, I realised that the best place was here. It would only get lost in the thicket otherwise.