Writing, not Posting

I am writing or, more to the point, doing this before I write. I have laid the foundations and now I'm building the trellises and the supports around which the plants of my story will grow.

(image found here)

I still agree with John Fowles when he says that writing is an organic process. He wrote this, on pages 85 & 86 of my copy of The French Lieutenant's Woman:

You may think novelists always have fixed plans to which they work, so that the future predicted by Chapter One is always inexorably the actuality of Chapter Thirteen. But novelists write for countless different reasons. ... Only one same reason is shared by all of us: we wish to create worlds as real as, but other than the world that is. Or was. This is why we cannot plan. We know a world is an organism, not a machine. We also know that a genuinely created world must be independent of its creator; a planned world (a world that fully reveals its planning) is a dead world.

but living breathing organisms also need a purpose and a direction and, as they grow, they conceal, and can replace, the 'planned world' - the pergolas, around which they began their growth.

When the pergolas and the trellises are completed, I shall write.

So I won't be posting for some time.

I don't know how long.

But, for the moment, the MATs have flown.

(image found here)

Monet and painting, MATing and writing

Today MATing translates as 'writing this before I begin to stare through the window'. Sometimes it takes much staring before I can write.

This story knows what I mean:

One day Monet was sitting on the bench in his garden at Giverny staring at the waterlily pond. His neighbour walked by, poked his nose over the hedge and said, 'Bonjour Monsieur Monet, I see you are not working today. There are many things I'd like to talk to you about.' And he opened the gate and walked in. But Monet didn't look at him, nor did he speak to him, and after a while the neighbour left in a huff.

The next day Monet's neighbour poked his nose over the hedge and quickly ducked back down again because Monet was at his easel, painting, by the waterlily pond. But Monet called out, 'It's all right, Monsieur le Voisin, come in. I'm not working today. Now, what was it you wanted to talk about?'

Builders and fishermen, a MAT with a purpose

I am MATing, but there is a point. (Well, I would say that wouldn't I?)

Last night the boyf and I were talking about writing and I said I felt as if I was assembling, not writing at the moment. I'm just collecting the already-written pieces of my third (sorry, second) novel and putting them into a different order now that I've decided to write the story in the third person. I said I didn't feel really connected to what I was doing the way I do when I am struck by an idea that I think will work, or when I have managed to make the language sing. I was just assembling.

But the boyf said, wisely, that we have to be builders as well as interior decorators when we write and that all the foundation-laying and brick-assembling, let alone the plastering, plumbing, wiring and insulation, have to be done before we can do the bit that makes the heart sing.

He told me that in the days when he was in the building trade, the plasterers and bricklayers, the plumbers and electricians would ask to come back to a job when it was finished - just so's they could see how it looked when the walls were painted, the carpets laid and the curtains hung. They wanted to see the beautiful results of their invisible work, results that couldn't exist without all that they had done, even though all that they had done wasn't visible.

In his Memoirs Pablo Neruda wrote:

The work of writers has much in common with the work of ... Arctic fishermen. The writer has to look for the river and if he finds it frozen over he has to drill a hole in the ice. He must have a good deal of patience, weather the cold ... look for the deep water, cast the proper hook, and after all that work, he pulls out a tiny little fish. So he must fish again ... eventually landing a bigger fish. And another and another.

A moment ago I didn't know I was going to go from assembling to fishing ... but that's what happens.

At the moment I'm building: assembling, bricklaying, plumbing and wiring. When that's done I will put on my cold weather gear and go fishing. And when I finally make it back with my catch ... towards the middle of this year with any luck ... I will begin eating, decorating (and singing).

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.

The LibraryThing

I have spent most of today making a library of my books (no, I mean making a library of a small number of my books) on my library at the LibraryThing - a wonderful invention which I discovered when a member kindly wrote a review of SPEAKING of LOVE there.

And as I chose the small number of books I put into my virtual library today (I made myself exclude any that I hadn't really read. There were far too many, but there were also some that I know I'll never read because I bought them so's I'd seem fantastically intelligent - The History of Western Philosophy - or fantastically groovy - SEED - don't ask, but so groovy and weird that its publisher isn't even listed in its pages).

Anyway I began thinking about how much the books that I have read have meant to me, what friends they have been in dark times, how thought-provoking, how comforting, how they've given me places to escape to, how reassuring they've been, how making-me-sit-up-and-take-notice, how funny, how I-wish-I'd-written-that, how I-must-go-and-write-NOW but oddly, never how much blood sweat and tears their writers must have bled, sweated and cried to write them, even though I too now know what it's like to write a whole novel. Which proves the writing-a-novel-is-like-childbirth point ... you forget the pain, until you do it again.

One of the many wonderful things that the LibraryThing does is they make it possible to post random books from my library on my blog ... see These I Have Loved on the right ... don't the covers look inviting? If only there was time to read them all, all over again.

Back to reality

So, back to reality in my writing room (I'll be there in a minute, when I've written this MAT ... er, I mean, blog) after a dizzy day yesterday living on the adrenalin that Stuck in a Book's review of Speaking of Love generated. Before I was published, a line or two from an enthusiastic (even when rejecting) publisher was enough to live on for several months: it returned lost courage and refuelled the hope chest. Now that Speaking of Love is published, a review of two pages is enough to live on (I speak spiritually, natch) for as many years.

The thing is I write mostly because I have to, because I feel so much better when I have written and better still if what I have written says back to me at least something of that intangible, difficult-to-grasp mysterious wisp-of-an idea that I had when I began to write whatever it is that I am working on at the time.

But the other reason I write, and I'm sure it's true of many writers, is to engage with and to touch the people who read what I have written. (Not all of them, obviously.)

When I'm reading I want the writer's imagination and use of language to gently capture me, and I want the characters and their situations to live with me just as vividly when I'm not reading the book as when I am. I've just begun The Gift of Rain by Tan Twan Eng (Booker prize longlisted) and I can see the woman staring across at the island while he watches her, and cooks for her. And Eng has captured that misty sense of the beginning of an idea in his misty, rainy landscape.

When I read I want the way the characters feel, or don't feel, to affect me. The only way a writer can know if she's done this is for a reader to tell her. When I have loved a book I write and say so to the writer. Penelope Lively wrote this, after I'd written to say how much I loved The Photograph:

Such a warm response from a reader lights up the day.

She's right. It does.

Writing, MATs and ticker-tape turn ups

On Friday morning, in the bath, before I started work (a bath can be a MAT, but only if I'm still in it after the practical stuff is over), the sentence, 'On the whole we resist falling in love' turned up in my head. This isn't unusual (not that sentence, but sentences in general, or phrases, often turn up in my head). Sometimes they're connected with the piece I'm writing at the time, sometimes they're not, but they stream through my head on what seems to me to be ticker-tape, although they stream horizontally, not vertically, and if they're not connected with the piece I'm writing at the time, they're often springboards to the next. (A springboarding ticker-tape?)

I've just Googled ticker-tape to make sure it was what I thought it was, and here is a rather beautiful (copyrighted) image of a working replica of a stock ticker, and a Wikipedia entry that explains.

Anyway, the short-story-that-was-a-novel found itself being given, 'On the whole we resist falling in love' as its new opening sentence and (I hate to say this for fear of the wrath of the writing gods ... but ...) beginning that way imposed a structure on the story that works. At least it worked on Friday and it was still working yesterday. And so, naturally, I am resisting getting back to it by posting this MAT-blog in case (a) I'm proved wrong today, or (b) it continues to work and so requires me to continue to put one word after another. One word after another ... that was the word I needed in Sunday's blog - not one word in front of another, nor one word behind another.

And so, with trepidation, to work.

Life in my writing room

The walls are covered with quotations, this is one of my favourites: 'A writer is somebody for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.' Thomas Mann. My head is always full of words but, this afternoon, they seem to be mixing with each other and making a grey sludge, rather than mixing with me and making black marks on white. So I'm avoiding writing the short story that I'm somewhere lost in the middle of, and posting my first blog instead.

The thing a writer learns the quickest (and probably knew even before she knew she was going to spend her life putting one word after another), is multiple avoidance techniques, or MATs. These, when listed end to end, would circle the universe at least once, but of course they are never listed, that would be too much like writing, they are simply done. (I never knew how much I liked staring through the window, for instance.) Posting a blog, you could argue, is a MAT, but it's not a true MAT because it requires me to put one word after another, even if in the wrong direction.

Anyone else out there suffering from an acute case of the MATs?