Angela Young

It’s Dying Matters Awareness Week and, as Iris Murdoch said (she’s quoted on the Awareness Week page):

Bereavement is a darkness impenetrable to the imagination of the unbereaved.

I think – although everything changes in the writing of a novel – but at the moment I think my third novel will be narrated by a beneficent angel of death because, particularly since my mother died at the beginning of 2011, I’ve been thinking about how little we talk about death or prepare ourselves for it. My novel will try to answer the question: how is it possible to have a good death?

Dr Kate Granger, a doctor and terminally ill cancer patient who muses about life and death has written openly, honestly and courageously about what a good death means (I heard her recently in a Radio 4 programme called How to Have a Good Death) and I urge you to listen to / read her words.

My idea for the novel – which is called For the Love of Life – is that the presence of an angel of death will make sure that the character whose death he is lives the most keenly experienced life she possibly can. And the angel will discover, through his growing love of life – and his love for her in particular – what it is to live like that. I want to write a novel that urges us to celebrate life because we remember death. There are other novels narrated by death, or which feature death as a major character: they include The Book Thief (Markus Zusak, Black Swan, 2007) and Tea Obreht’s Orange-prize-winning The Tiger’s Wife (Phoenix, 2011) and as Jon Underwood, who runs the Death Cafe website (Death Cafes are places where people gather to talk about death: their own or that of a loved one), said on Radio 4′s Saturday Live on 11 May:

Talking about sex won’t make you pregnant. Talking about death won’t make you die.

And as Maggie Callanan says in this interview:

Our dying is as unique as our living has been.

It seems to me that if we honestly accept that we will die we will live a more fulfilled, joyous, painful, sad, glorious, furious, loving and examined life than ever we will if we think this unique life of ours will never end. I’ll do my best to show that this is so.

And the thing I’d love to have made this month is The Garden of Cosmic Speculation by Charles Jencks:

It’s in Dumfriesshire, Scotland, and Charles Jencks’s wife Maggie Keswick Jencks, who created the blueprint for cancer care centres that recognise how design can help recovery (they became the Maggie Centres) said:

Above all, what matters is not to lose the joy of living in the fear of dying.

Jacob Ross is running a three-part master class in writing the short story, the novel and genre fiction for the wonderful TLC (without whose wise criticism I doubt Speaking of Love would ever have found a publisher). The short story part was on 23 March, but the others are still to come and, should writing fiction be your thing, I heartily recommend them. Ross is a brilliantly inventive (as well as down-to-earth) course leader, and a delight to learn from and discuss with.

And one of the things I would like to have been, in a parallel life where all things are possible, is a campanologist (both making and ringing). When I was thinking about what the thing I would love to have made would be this month, an image of a large cast iron bell filled my mind and I thought of Iris Murdoch‘s The Bell, that strange story of the sunken bell (can’t you just hear it booming beneath the water?) which is, eventually, hauled up on to dry land. I also thought about how, when I heard church bells ringing in London one cold evening last week, I was immediately transported to a tiny English village where my mother used to live, and then to a friend’s wedding many many years ago, and then to my father’s Thanksgiving Service … so church bells have, even in my without-an-organised-religious-faith life, heralded important moments; and our world would be the poorer without them (just as it was during the Second World War, when so many church bells remained silent). See here for a history of bell-ringing in these islands.

And this photograph of the 2012 Olympic Bell, by Neil Thomas, comes from the Olympic Bell webpage at the Whitechapel Bell Foundry website.

On Tuesday, at the last CCWC Advanced Writing Course of the spring term (where, by the way, is spring?) we broke the rules and found that, in breaking them, a freedom and spontaneous playfulness broke into our writing. If, for instance, you change point of view in the middle of a scene, you’ll very likely discover aspects of your characters you’d never have discovered if you’d been sticking to the never-change-point-of-view-in-the-middle-of-a-scene rule. If you begin every sentence in a scene with the same phrase, you might find you’ve written a poem. If you begin every sentence in a scene with the same phrase and change point of view you might find the passage surprisingly easy to follow, and/or that it’s suddenly become funny, because writing can be sharp and clear when it’s freed from all the rules we follow so slavishly in order to write well.

If we know the rules but break them consciously, jewels may appear.

Here are some writers on their rules, from a 2010 article in the Guardian. I particularly like Anne Enright and Neil Gaiman for their humour, but they all make good sense.

And the thing I’d love to have made this month is the extraordinary Moorish-influenced, hand-carved fretwork interior at number 575 Wandsworth Road in London. It was made by the Kenyan poet and author Khadambi Asalache who left the property to the National Trust in his will. Photo: Simon Upton from this Daily Telegraph article.

Charles Duc d’Orleans (1394-1465) wrote this love poem for his wife, in 1415, after his capture at the Battle of Agincourt:

Go forth, my hert, with my lady; Loke that we spare no business To serve her with such lowliness, That ye get her grace and mercy.

Pray her of times prively
That she keep trewly her promise
Go forth, my hert, with my lady; Loke that we spare no business To serve her with such lowliness, That ye get her grace and mercy.

I must as a hertless body
Abide alone in hevyness,
And ye shal do wel with your maistress pleasure
In plesans glad and mery.
Go forth, my hert, with my lady; Loke that we spare no business To serve her with such lowliness, That ye get her grace and mercy.

The Duc D’Orleans was interned in England, in various places, including Wallingford Castle for twenty-four years. He missed his wife, Bonne d’Armagnac, and loved her trewly but he never saw her again to tell her what was in his hert for she died before he was released, in 1440. But perhaps she knew his hert had gone forth with her.

And, on this Valentine’s day, the thing I would like to have made, or written, in this case, is The Examined Life by Stephen Grosz. In a parallel world I would have learned to psychoanalyse with the compassion, lucidity and self-knowledge that Grosz manages. His book was serialised on Radio 4′s Book of the Week earlier this year and that serialisation sent me to his book. It’s a spare, clear account of why (and how) we need to tell the stories of our lives, and why we need those stories to be heard. As Grosz, a still-practising psychoanalyst, writes in the Preface:

The philosopher Simone Weil describes how two prisoners in adjoining cells learn, over a very long period of time, to talk to each other by tapping on the wall. “The wall is the thing which separates them, but it is also their means of communication,” she writes. “Every separation is a link”.

This book is about that wall. It’s about our desire to talk, to understand and be understood. It’s also about listening to each other, not just the words but the gaps in between. What I’m describing here isn’t a magical process. It’s something that is a part of our everyday lives – we tap, we listen.

And that is a very patient love.

Sometime last week I heard part of an interview with John le Carre about the making of character. This is what he said:

You can’t actually make up a character out of other people, you simply can’t. You grab the bits that are appealing to you, that touch you or alienate you, but in the end you’ve got to make them sit up and run and talk and laugh and fail, from bits of yourself. [my bold]

Somehow or another you’ve got to extend your own nature wide enough to be able to say, ‘Yes, in those circumstances I could commit murder.’

Here is the interview in full. It was made for Front Row, the interviewer was the inimitably wonderful renaissance man, Mark Lawson, and it was first broadcast on BBC Radio 4 on 22 May 2009. This part is about nine minutes in. Heaven knows how I heard it last week, but I’m so glad I did. It’s so very reassuring to hear, from a master, that, somehow, and with a large spade or a small scalpel, I’ll draw mine out of me, too.

And there’s a silly little bonus at the front of the interview: it’s Brenda saying, ‘Yes, Tom. Yes, yes, yes.’ (At the end of The Archers. Do you need to ask?) But, almost four years later, they’re still not married. Will they ever tie the knot?

And the pieces I would love to have made – they’ve been haunting me recently – are Antony Gormley‘s iron men. Perhaps it’s their unexpectedness in the landscape, or their loneliness, or their simple beauty, or their stillness, or all of these things that set me thinking about what it is to be a living human who finds herself on this strange and beautiful planet, both observing and observed.

I’ve struggled to understand free indirect style, let alone how to use it in fiction. But in James Wood’s brilliant How Fiction Works

all is made wondrously clear through his lucid prose. As he writes, on page 11:

Thanks to free indirect style, we see things through the character’s eyes and language but also through the author’s eyes and language, too. We inhabit omniscience and partiality at once. A gap opens between author and character, and the bridge – which is free indirect style itself – between them simultaneously closes that gap and draws attention to its distance.

This is merely another definition of dramatic irony: to see through a character’s eyes while being encouraged to see more than the character can see (an unreliability identical to the unreliable first-person narrator’s).

It’s a way of writing in the third person but, from time to time, from a first-person perspective without saying she thought, she wondered, she imagined, she hallucinated … or any other descriptive. It’s a short cut into the mind of the character and, subtly, into what the writer feels about that character. Wood gives this lovely example (on page 18 of How Fiction Works) from Jane Austen‘s Pride and Prejudice:

Sir William Lucas had been formerly in trade in Meryton, where he had made a tolerable fortune and risen to the honour of knighthood by an address to the King, during his mayoralty. The distinction had perhaps been felt too strongly. It had given him a disgust to his business and to his residence in a small market town; and quitting them both, he had removed with his family to a house about a mile from Meryton, denominated from that period Lucas Lodge, where he could think with pleasure of his own importance … .

Austen has, in Wood’s words, ‘Handed the language over to Sir William; but she is still tartly in control’. Glorious.

And if anyone’s wondering about, or trying to find, a good, indeed an absolutely wonderful, creative writing course I heartily recommend (and wish I’d dreamed up myself) Maggie Hamand‘s Complete Creative Writing Course and her book. It was she who sent me down the free indirect style road in the first place. Thank you, Maggie.

… at the turn of the century before last. Published by Frederick Warne & Co., (also publishers of Beatrix Potter’s work) in 1870 and reprinted many times since, Modern Etiquette is invaluable for a glimpse of the codes of behaviour people were advised to follow in the late 19th-century. In the Introduction it states:

Society has its grammar as language has; and the rules of that grammar must be learnt, either orally or from reading. It is to teach these rules to all classes that we present this book to the public.

It describes a society in which ‘distinctions of rank are becoming constantly less marked’. This, from page 7, advises on suitable subjects for conversation when making morning calls (which, naturally, take place between 3 and 5 pm …):

Take pains to acquire the habit of small talk for such occasions, which must not, however, degenerate into gossip; and never let the conversation sink into an awkward silence. Inquiries as to the well-being of your visitor’s family or relatives; the public topics of the day; even the weather will always furnish matter for chit-chat without discussing the characters of other people. Nothing is more under-bred than scandal.

The weather … still a subject when all else fails (or even if it doesn’t).

And the thing I admire, would love to have dreamed up myself, this month is Peace Direct. It’s based on the simple idea (aren’t the simple ones always the best?) that local people know their communities and so are the ones best able to promote peace within them:

Peace Direct finds local peacebuilders in conflict areas, and funds and promotes their work.

Support their work if you possibly can.

Stephen Fry wrote (I found it here, thank you Lydia Netzer, although I couldn’t find it directly from him):

The problem with a second novel is that it takes almost no time to write compared with a first novel. If I write my first novel in a month at the age of 23, and my second novel takes me two years, which have I written more quickly? The second of course. The first took 23 years, and contains all the experience, pain, stored-up artistry, anger, love, hope, comic invention and despair of that lifetime. The second is an act of professional writing. That is why it is so much more difficult.

In my case the numbers are: 7 years at the age of 56 (and the years before 56, of course) and coming up for 5. But I’ve learned so much about how to write a novel this second time, much more than ever I did while writing the first one, for Fry’s reasons. I’ve discovered so much about what to do and what not to do and I’m still discovering and now I know I’ll continue discovering for as long as I write. But I think – and hope – I’m on the home straight with my second novel now (although I’ve said that before and been wrong …). By the beginning of next year I’ll know.

And the thing I’d like to have invented this month is Get into Reading. It’s the most extraordinary organisation, founded by Jane Davis in 1997. She wrote this:

I realised that what I’d always believed about literature, that it can help people understand and make decisions about their lives, to be undeniably true: that it can get people excited about thinking, and build kindness and community. Literature is not an aesthetic experience but practical help for being human.

Get into Reading groups read with people in mental health institutions, in nursing and residential homes, in libraries, with children and with adults, with the socially excluded, with people who hardly read at all and with those who read often. In a study into interventions for common mental health problems carried out by the University of Liverpool (where Get into Reading began) one of the conclusions was:

The evidence suggested a reduction in depressive symptoms for Get into Reading group participants.

Now isn’t that just wonderful? You can read yourself well. Practical help for being human.

I’ve just finished reading Kate Grenville‘s Searching for the Secret River: it’s brilliant, and a must-read for anyone who writes historical fiction (my second, about-to-be-redrafted, novel is one of those). Searching for the Secret River is a kind and wise book about writing and the process, the stumbling blocks and the breakthroughs. It’s about the gradual accretion of things – including things that have just happened in your own life that might prove to be part of the eventual book (like overhearing a spitting competition between one of her children and a friend and transposing it to an eighteenth-century London wharf). It’s about realising that sometimes you end up with more than one story in your book and you must choose which story to cut and which to keep; it’s about beginning with non-fiction and realising that the best way to tell the truth about a particular series of events is through fiction because fiction allows the writer the freedom to write scenes that didn’t happen (or cannot be proved), but scenes that illuminate and make resonant what did happen.

The hard part of the writing wasn’t finding the words – they seemed to come reasonably easily. If they started to come reluctantly, I stopped and began with something else. The hard part was finding the picture. Once I could see and hear the moment, I could write it … . The worst times were when I tried to write the scene anyway, throwing words at something I couldn’t see or hear … . I’d read it back and groan aloud at the deadness of it. It was dead because it was phoney … . [There were] no pictures, no sounds, no smells – no life.

from pages 159-160. The spitting part comes just after that … . And I shan’t forget the seeing and the hearing and the sounds: they will be my touchstones from now on. Thank you, Kate Grenville. And in the end this wonderfully lucid book showed me that to write fiction you must be prepared for anything and everything to happen as you write and not allow any of these things to discourage you, even the fact that it might take five years. Grenville quotes from The Letters of Jane Austen: ‘In the night we invent a few hard names for the stars.’ As she says, ‘Who knew what Jane Austen meant by it, but it set off a vivd image in my mind … .’ And that is surely the whole point.

And the thing I would have loved to have made this month is a sculpture made by a dear friend of mine:

I call her Moon Woman, although she was never given that name when she was being made. But isn’t she beautiful?

It’s the stories behind the gold medals at London 2012 that have intrigued and heartened me because they apply not only to sport, but to anything we each choose to do or to be or to become.

In writing, it is in the rewriting (which often means many many drafts) that the real work begins: the first draft is the clay from which the story will be sculpted. And the disappointment that comes when a piece of work is rejected acts as the spur to deciding what to do next: how to improve the piece, what to cut, what to strengthen, how to write the next rewrite. Sometimes a completely new approach is necessary.

The heptathlete, Jessica Ennis, sat at home during the Beijing Olympics four years ago with a fractured foot (see the Guardian, Saturday 4 August). She was told she might not run competitively ever again. But she fought her way back and I can only imagine the courage, tenacity, determination and pain of every kind she had to fight and find her way through to get there. A year later she was world champion and at this Olympics, three years after that, she won gold with a personal best of 6,955 points.

The heart of the matter is the personal best, not the gold. Very few win gold medals. In my profession very few win the Man Booker. But we can all strive for our own personal bests in our own chosen fields with strong hearts and steady determination, without giving in or giving up, whatever the setbacks. It’s the only way to make our best work. As Robert Browning wrote, in his poem Andrea del Sarto:

Ah, but a man’s reach should exceed his grasp,                             Or what’s a heaven for?

Without difficulties overcome along the way, how much less sweet (and how much less likely) the final reward.

And the thing I’d love to have made this month is the Heatherwick Studio’s magnificent Olympic torch. I didn’t know, on the opening night, or didn’t take it in, that the Studio had designed it: all I could think was what an extraordinary genius of an engineer (or engineers) must have imagined it (and now I also wonder about the setbacks they might have encountered and overcome along the way):

And now that the torch has been extinguished, each country will take home one of the 204 petals to remember this extraordinary Olympian coming-together. The Heatherwick Studio (Thomas Heatherwick, the founder, is head of a studio of 83 designers) has an exhibition at the Victoria & Albert museum in London until the end of September.

… is the name of a magical storytelling festival held at St Donat’s Castle in south Wales every other year. It takes its name from Dylan Thomas’s Poem in October. Here are the second, fourth, fifth and seventh verses:

My birthday began with the water -
Birds and the birds of the winged trees flying my name
Above the farms and the white horses
And I rose
In a rainy autumn
And walked abroad in a shower of all my days
High tide and the heron dived when I took the road
Over the border
And the gates
Of the town closed as the town awoke.

Pale rain over the dwindling harbour
And over the sea wet church the size of a snail
With its horns through mist and the castle
Brown as owls
But all the gardens
Of spring and summer were blooming in the tall tales
Beyond the border and under the lark full cloud.
There could I marvel
My birthday
Away but the weather turned around.

It turned away from the blithe country
And down the other air and the blue altered sky
Streamed again a wonder of summer
With apples
Pears and red currants
And I saw in the turning so clearly a child’s
Forgotten mornings when he walked with his mother
Through the parables
Of sunlight
And the legends of the green chapels.

And there could I marvel my birthday
Away but the weather turned around.
And the true
Joy of the long dead child sang burning
In the sun.
It was my thirtieth
Year to heaven and I stood there then in the summer noon
Though the town below lay leaved with October blood.
O may my heart’s truth
Still be sung
On this high hill in a year’s turning.

Dylan Thomas, Poem in October from The Collected Poems of Dylan Thomas, (Orion). Used by permission of David Higham Associates, London, as agents for the Trustees of the Copyrights of Dylan Thomas. And also from THE POEMS OF DYLAN THOMAS, copyright © 1945 by The Trustees for the Copyrights of Dylan Thomas, first published in POETRY. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp., New York.

‘O may my heart’s truth still be sung … .’ A writer’s dearest wish and greatest task. A poem I would love to have written. A poem that was written out for me, by hand, by David Benedictus on my own thirtieth birthday. A poem I failed utterly to understand, then. I even asked him if he’d written it himself; he must have despaired (he never replied). But it’s a poem I understand so much better now, a full thirty (and one) years on. A prophetic poem full of the promise and the hope of all writers, and a poem that gave a storytelling festival its name, a storytelling festival that reminded me how necessary it is for writers not only to write, but to take time away from writing and sit by the well of inspiration of others’ words, and wait. And listen with our hearts. For that way lies the path to the parables in the sunlight, the legends in the green chapels, the tall tales beyond the border. The wellspring.

Beyond the Border is a biennial storytelling festival. I urge you to go, in 2014.

… looks absolutely wonderful. It runs between 3 -12 July and Noo Saro-Wiwa and Mark Haddon I’d love to hear, but there’s so much, including a debate about last year’s riots in London, writing classes and much much more.

And the thing I would like to have made, this month, is the present series of programmes on Radio 4 presented by Richard Holloway, writer and former Bishop of Edinburgh and a man who now describes himself as an after-religionist. The series is a collection of personal essays on the relationship between faith and doubt over the last 3,000 years. It’s called Honest Doubt. Wonderful title, wonderful series, wonderful idea. I hope the programmes will be available to hear again for longer than the existing few days.

Radio 4 didn’t link this image of the Buddha with the series, but I did:

… 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 my second novel 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 my second novel 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 my second novel, which is very loosely based on my great-grandmother’s life, 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 my second novel 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.