…at least, that’s the plan. My new year’s resolution is to try and live a little more creatively, to put myself at the heart of my writing and not get too distracted by the pressures of earning a living, being a mum, being a wife, being a daughter - though all of those matter and are important to me. I’ve got seventy pages of my new novel under my belt and I’m beginning to get under the skin of it (or it’s getting under my skin — or both).
When I first started writing I planned everything in advance: I did masses of research, had notes on all my characters and charts to plan out what should happen when. I had all the chapters mapped out in advance and for each chapter had lists of every scene. I don’t do any of that now. I’ve got a notebook (fetishly bound in red leather) and I jot down a few thoughts in that in case I forget them, but otherwise I float free. The more I write, the less I prepare externally. It is as if everything peripheral is some kind of distraction, which doesn’t necessarily reveal a character or a plot, but can set them too soon. This has been a long process of reduction over many years and the downside is that it involves more rewriting, but that is part of the journey to the centre of the story in any case.
There’s a photograph that I look at often. It shows a statue in Leige of a diver poised to enter the water and it seems to me to be the perfect metaphor for writing - the diver is ready to fly, to immerse himself, to disappear into the unknown.The figure is elegant and aspiring and on the verge of something; he is as muscular as good prose should be. Every time I see him I want to pick up my pen and write.
The Diver
