Angela Young

… which I’ve just begun. Its working title is FOR THE LOVE OF LIFE.

That’s to say I’ve begun thinking about it, dreaming on it, planning it and writing a chapter or two (mostly because the writers’ group I belong to is meeting soon and I need some work to submit for their wise attention. Otherwise I’d continue the thinking and dreaming process, without writing, for longer. But these processes naturally inform each other anyway.)

I thought I had two novels ahead of me (in my imagination and in my notebooks, at least) but I find I have one. The two themes or guiding ideas I identified for two different novels have shown themselves to be opposite sides of the same theme / idea, which is a good and a bad thing. A good thing because this novel will be the richer for it. A bad thing because now I don’t know what my fourth novel’s guiding idea will be. So I must trust that in the years it takes me to write this one (two or three, I expect) another guiding idea / theme will emerge. Some days I feel confident that it will; on others I wonder.

But as writer Jennie Nash wrote, quoting Neil Gaiman and Alice Munro, in a piece for the Huff Post in 2010:

Writer Neil Gaiman has a great blog post on this concept, in which he says, ‘You get ideas from daydreaming. You get ideas from being bored. You get ideas all the time. The only difference between writers and other people is we notice when we’re doing it.’ I love that. Over time, a writer comes to trust that process and to trust the ideas that come their way. As Alice Munro said in a Paris Review interview, ‘I never have a problem with finding material. I wait for it to turn up, and it always turns up.’

So I needn’t worry, then.

And here is what I would have loved to have made, this month:

It’s less the 32 canvases (that make up the large picture at the end of the gallery) but the 51 iPad drawings that line all three remaining walls which, when you walk into the gallery, fill you with the joy of the knowledge that spring is coming, and with wonder that David Hockney, who’ll be 75 this summer, is not only still working, but innovating (he taught himself to draw on an iPad) and making extraordinarily beautiful, original work. Here he is talking about the show (which closed on 9 April 2012).

My great-grandmother, Noël Rothes, set sail from Southampton on RMS Titanic on 10 April 1912. She was one of 2,224 passengers and crew bound for New York. She was also, very luckily for her, one of 712 who were saved.

She boarded lifeboat number 8 at 1 am in the morning on 15 April 1912. She did everything she could to comfort a seventeen-year-old Spanish girl who had had to say goodbye to her eighteen-year-old husband (it was their honeymoon) and, despite the freezing cold and the fear, she remained calm, at least on the outside, and helped as many of the lifeboat passengers as she could. When Able Seaman Thomas Jones realised Noël also understood boats he put her at the tiller where she remained (he was the only seaman aboard), except when she took one of the oars or helped others learn to row, until they were picked up by RMS Carpathia at 8 am.

For her courage and tireless work, Able Seaman Thomas Jones made this for her, from one of the 8s he took from the bow of their lifeboat:

She said, when it was suggested to her that she would become famous for the things she did the night Titanic sank: ‘I hope not. I have done nothing.’ And that, I think, is how she would like to be remembered.

Soon after they arrived in New York Noël wrote this to her cousin:

The Press people here are really awful – one is never free and they are always printing imaginary interviews and photos of you which is maddening.

In an attempt to refute their ‘imaginary interviews’ she agreed to an interview with the New York Herald on 23 April 1912. She spoke about the terrible events of the night of 14-15 April 1912.

She praised the engineers who died at their posts stoking the furnaces so the passengers could see their way to the decks.

And then she said:

They were brave men all who stood back so that women should have at least a chance to live. Their memories should be held sacred in the mind of the world forever.

Taken in 1917, five years after the disaster, when she was 38

I think if she knew she was remembered 100 years later for what she did the night RMS Titanic sank, she would have been astonished. But if she knew that her words in praise of the brave men who stood back so that at least some of the women might be saved were also remembered, that might have been a comfort to her.

She wanted those who died to be remembered, not those who were lucky enough to live on.

My agent sent WRITTEN in WATER out to publishers on the 3rd of February and has given them until the 29th (that leap year day) to respond. So, perhaps an editor will ask me, or more to the point my novel, to marry her (or him) on that day. It would be good if s/he did. I’ll keep you posted.

I have been reading 

THE MASTER and MARGARITA by Mikhail Bulgakov

because I’m going to see Complicite’s production in March. It is an extraordinary novel about the Devil’s visit to devoutly (if that’s not a contradiction) atheistic Moscow. As Wikipedia says:

Bulgakov started writing the novel in 1928. He burnt the first manuscript in 1930, because he saw no future as a writer in the Soviet Union. The work was restarted in 1931. In 1935 Bulgakov went to Spaso House, the residence of U.S. Ambassador to the Soviet Union, William Bullitt. Bulgakov set the ball in the novel there. The second draft was completed in 1936 by which point all the major plot lines of the final version were in place. The third draft was finished in 1937. Bulgakov continued to polish the work with the aid of his wife, but was forced to stop work on the fourth version four weeks before his death in 1940.

A censored version (12% of the text removed and still more changed) of the book was first published in Moscow magazine (no. 11, 1966 and no. 1, 1967). The text of all the omitted and changed parts, with indications of the places of modification, was published in a samizdat version and, in 1967, the publisher Posev (Frankfurt) printed a version produced with the aid of these inserts.

In the Soviet Union the first complete version, prepared by Anna Saakyants, was published by Khudozhestvennaya Literatura in 1973, based on the version of the beginning of 1940 proofread by the publisher. This version remained the canonical edition until 1989, when the last version was prepared by literature expert Lidiya Yanovskaya based on all available manuscripts.

How very lucky we writers in the West are today. Our books may not always be published but when they are there is no state intervention, our books are not censored, we are not afraid to write whatever we wish to write, cuts are discussed and our manuscripts are published soon after they’re written.

And now for the thing I would like to have made this month, the Millau Viaduct:

 

The Second Severn Crossing has a similarly beautiful sail-like construction and because I think it breathtaking, unsurprisingly, Matthew Aldwater, one of the characters in SPEAKING of LOVE, thinks so too. When he crosses the Severn he is, perhaps, on his way towards speaking of love. A nice thought for this Valentine’s Day.

And so, in the days between Christmas and the dawn of 2012, I reread WRITTEN in WATER and revised it (yes, again, it is truly necessary and all part of the work of a writer) and then, on Sunday, 8 January, 2012, I submitted it to my agent. At lunchtime, by email, if you want to know.

It is now being read and then it will be submitted to publishers so, by the time I write my next column, there will, perhaps, be a result. I will keep you posted.

And my resolution for 2012, and for every subsequent year, is to write; to write fiction specifically and, most importantly, to write from my heart. For if I only write from my head things, writing-wise, go wrong, or at least they take a very long time to get right. As Robert Frost said,

No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader.
No surprise for the writer, no surprise for the reader.

And tears and surprise and laughter and love do not come form the head.

And now for the thing I wish I had made:

Isn’t it utterly beautiful? And absolutely astonishing? How DOES William Nicholson make us know that all we have to do is reach into the picture and take out the casket and see what else it would reflect? I would love to have made this painting.

… I teach patience and stubbornness.

So said Richard Bausch, who writes as well as teaching writing.

Without patience and stubbornness a writer of fiction would die (fictionally speaking). We need patience while we dream up our characters and discover who they are. We need, as I heard Jeanette Winterson say at the London Book Fair many years ago, to find time to sit by the well and fill up once more. We need patience to make the story (and to make the story work) and we need patience when we think it is done to listen to our editors and then to redraft and redraft and redraft. And then we need patience to leave the book alone to settle, more patience to go back to it and see what more there is to be done (Hemingway said he put his manuscripts away for three months so that when he looked at them again he could read objectively) and, finally, we need patience while our characters do their best to impress themselves upon publishers. And through all this time of patience we need the stubbornness to sit there and find the patience, the stubborness to go back to our desks when it is the very last thing we feel like doing, the stubbornness to push through the doubt (without which no writer can be a real writer) and the stubbornness just to hang on in there when all about you are doubting that a book is what you are working on at all.

WRITTEN in WATER is now rewritten for the manyieth time, with the inspired and inspiring help of a wonderful editor who said that, at times, she was transported and enthralled by the novel but at others there was more, much more, work to be done. I have done – to the best of my ability – that work and in the new year my agent will submit the manuscript to publishers. Wish it well, please.

THE THING I WOULD LOVE TO HAVE MADE this month is:

To have the imagination to create that tumbling confection of silvery curves would be delightful. To have the engineering knowledge to understand how to make steel bend like that. To give us all something so absolutely surprising and yet so utterly perfect that it seems as if it has always been, is genius. Frank Gehry‘s Bilbao Museum is a wonder.

PS: I’ll be offline for a little while because I’m moving (terrestrial) house. So … happy new year and see you in it.

I thought perhaps my wonderful editor might have sent me her report on the final draft of WRITTEN in WATER by the beginning of this week, but because she is a careful thoughtful editor it won’t be with me until the end of this week now, to give her the time she needs. But she did say, ‘I am really enjoying it again’, so all I can hope is she’ll feel like that all the way to the end of this (I hope) final draft. Then I can make whatever revisions are necessary and wing the mss to my agent for (with any luck) a sale before Christmas (that would be a wonderful present). If not, fingers crossed for a sale early in 2012 (the Titanic tragedy anniversary year).

This was beside me while I wrote WRITTEN in WATER and every time I pick it up, or simply look at it, I am filled with admiration for all those whose courage and selflessness (and singing voices) comforted hundreds of cold terrified passengers on that dreadful night.

And now for my monthly something-I-would-love-to-have-made:

I would love to have directed and written the script for A BEAUTIFUL MIND.

To my mind it is the most exquisite, tender film about one man’s mental disintegration (and, happily, his reintegration). There is a small section towards the end of the film which I reinvented (and acknowledged) for a scene in SPEAKING of LOVE where – look away now if you don’t want to know – John Nash asks two young students if they can also see a man who is asking him if he will allow the faculty to acknowledge and honour his work, something they refused to do much earlier in his life. He says, (I paraphrase) ‘Can you see him?’ And when they reply that they can, he says, ‘Just a habit. Something I do these days.’ But that little something encapsulates the whole horror of his schizophrenic hallucinations which by then were, happily, a thing of the past.

And Russell Crowe is incredible in the film. And Ron Howard’s direction is marvellous.

It moves me to tears every time I see it, and not just at the scene I’ve just described. It is a magnificent tribute to the power of the human mind to heal and to the courage of those whose minds travel along paths they would rather never travel.

PS: This post is now part of the THIRD SUNDAY BLOG CARNIVAL. Have a look. There are some interesting posts about writing and poetry and the whole glorious (and sometimes not so …) process.

It’s a hundred years, well, seven months, since last I wrote here and now my blog has become a column on my shiny new website. Welcome if it’s the first time you’ve been here, and welcome back if you’ve been to my old blog, writinglifeandtheuniverse, which has now migrated here.

Since April I’ve been rewriting WRITTEN in WATER, a novel which is very loosely based on my great-grandmother’s life, and what I’ve discovered is that to begin a novel confident that the few facts in your possession will emerge from their chrysalis into a butterfly of a novel is to mislead yourself (at least it is if you’re me). I thought that because I had some real-life characters and something of a real-life plot (my great-grandmother sailed on Titanic) a novel would easily emerge. Wrong.

I only had the bare bones of a story and that story had no heart. And because that story had no heart my own heart couldn’t engage with it.

But finally I find myself on the last leg. My heart is at last engaged mostly because, as I commented to Simon at Stuck-in-a-Book in September, I have been working with a brilliant freelance editor who’s been asking me questions that have sent me down paths towards a better book, and making the kinds of suggestions a writer dreams of because they open windows onto new mindscapes. She’s not at all prescriptive, but she has a knack of helping me see the book objectively and recognising which paths to follow and which not which is a difficult thing to do when you’re on your own in the woods of a book. I think she’s quite wonderful and I hope she’ll agree to work on every book I write from now on. She has read the rewritten first part and reacted very positively. Now she’s reading the rest and I’m waiting to hear how she feels.

When I’ve made any last changes my agent will do her very best to sell it. But the competition is hot now: there are two Titanic novels already out and two more coming out in April 2012 (the 100th anniversary of the tragic sinking). So we can only hope there’s a publisher out there who feels confident that WRITTEN in WATER has something to add to the collection.

And now for something a little different, something I plan to do each month. I’ll write about a book I wish I’d written, a song I wish I’d composed, a painting I wish I’d painted. Perhaps a house I wish I’d designed, a beach I wish I’d stood on … who knows. Something that has inspired me and moved me. Something I love. Something I aspire to.

This month it’s THE ENGLISH PATIENT by Michael Ondaatje

I would love to have written this book because it has an astonishing capacity to live on in the imagination. When I first read it I had trouble keeping all the threads in my head but Ondaatje’s prose is, well it’s not prose, it’s poetry so when I couldn’t keep the threads in my head I had to let my heart lead, the way you do with poetry, and then the characters stole their way in until, by the end, I’d fallen in love with every one of them, including the thief. Ondaatje seamlessly weaves stories within stories: the characters tell their own and other stories (the English Patient keeps his letters and drawings inside Herodotus’s HISTORIES) just the way we weave stories in our own lives. Only when we tell someone else about something that’s happened does that story truly become part of the fabric of our lives (and always we embellish a little … ).

After I saw the film I went back to the book and found so much more in it than I’d found at first, and now I think the way to read THE ENGLISH PATIENT is to let go of all desire for simple narrative threads and allow it to steal its way into your heart the way dreams do, chaotically, beautifully, terrifyingly, unexpectedly and delightfully.

How I would have loved to have written this book.