Excavating writing fossils

I’ve been clearing out my desk. Well, both my desks, actually: we’re all moving around at work so I’ve taken the opportunity to chuck quite a lot of stuff. But I meant my desk at home, the bottom drawer of which is full of exercise books containing longhand drafts of my three novels and quite a lot else besides.

It isn’t quite so full now. Having decided that the literary critics of the future are unlikely to care enough to compare my early drafts with the finished products, and that I need the space, I’ve started ripping out and recycling pages. I’ve been glancing through them as I go, though. I’ve noticed a few things: the mild shock when I come across a character with what is now the wrong name; the surprise when I find snippets from projects which I’d have said shared nothing with each other butted up on facing pages; the odd work-related note. I didn’t think I’d started A Spoke In The Wheel before I’d got Speak Its Name done and dusted, but there are Polly and Vicki just across the page from Peter and… who’s Gina? Oh, right, yes.

Then there’s this. It’s a sort of warm-up exercise, trying to get myself into the right frame of mind – that is, the character’s frame of mind – to write one of the trickier scenes in Speak Its Name. I can’t remember now whether I felt particularly stuck and needed to write something that wasn’t the scene to get myself going, or whether I just knew that it had to be good, but I knew immediately what this was all about.

Lydia is fed up with Colette because:

• she doesn’t appreciate how easy she has it
• she never washes up
• she is pressurising [sic] her to come out
• it was her idea to get Becky involved
• it would never have happend if Will hadn’t found out, this whole house…
• so scared of confrontation, so conflict averse, never talk about anything
• unilateral decisions about the two of them
• always cooks late
• bigoted about science
• thinks Lydia’s friends are stupid and lets it show
• this house is not as much fun as she thought it was going to be
• and she hates being beholden to people
• in a way she’s responsible for Lydia having to think about any of it
• Lydia still doesn’t quite believe a F/F relationship can be godly, blames Colette for getting her into it
• she is just so noble and self-sacrificial it’s not true
• why both, when they can’t be married?

That’s Colette who’s just so noble and self-sacrificial, as if you couldn’t guess. I do like the way that this is a mixture of the little day-to-day annoyances and the big existential incompatibilities. And I’m pleased that almost all these themes are still in play in The Real World, even though things have moved on. At least my characterisation’s consistent.

Then down the bottom of the page I’ve written:

give them something to laugh about

“coming out party”

The coming out party comes quite a bit later, in the finished work; apparently it was very much connected to this scene in my mind – but I’d forgotten: that’s what this row is about. I’m not sure about ‘give them something to laugh about’; it might be what turned into ‘He shall have his resignation’. Which really does come quite a bit later – and is very much connected to the ‘coming out party’.

Interestingly, the next thing I wrote wasn’t the row. It was the making up. Over the page:

Lydia stayed in bed until past ten eleven, until she could be sure that Colette would have left the house. She had been awake for hours, had watched the narrow line of pale December light creep across the ceiling, listened to the rain spitting pettily against the window…

Which isn’t all that different from what ended up in the finished book. Page 214 of the paperback, if you’re playing along at home:

Dawn broke and dulled to drizzle. Lydia stayed in bed until past eleven, until she could be sure that Colette would have left the house; she lay there watching the narrow line of light creep across the ceiling, listening to the rain spitting listlessly against the window…

Now I catch myself thinking about why I made those changes; if they were successful; whether I’d do the same thing again. Which wasn’t going to be the point of this blog post. Apologies, hypothetical literary critics of the future; that’s all you’re going to get. Most of this volume’s already gone for recycling, and that presumably included the actual row (now page 210-214).

Which was going to be my point: that little exercise worked, even if it wasn’t quite the way I was expecting, or indeed, remembered. I’ll try to remember, next time I’m stuck on or intimidated by a scene: write it down, write down everything that’s going on in the point of view character’s head, wind it up and wind it up, and then – let it go. Stand back and let the scene write itself. Even if it wasn’t the one you were expecting.