Stories that make sense
I can never quite decide who is my favourite Golden Age detective novelist, Agatha Christie or Dorothy L. Sayers. Today I’m going with Sayers.
I started with Busman’s Honeymoon. Fortunately, reading things out of order has never bothered me much. Didn’t understand much of it at the time. It didn’t stop me.
Don’t worry, that radiator wasn’t on, and anyway, I took all the books off it as soon as I’d finished taking the photo.
Tomorrow evening my church choir will be singing Maurice Duruflé’s Requiem. It’s an oddly appropriate choice for Remembrance Sunday, and it feels even more so given recent events: it was commissioned by the Vichy government in 1941, but Duruflé only finished it in 1947, after the war was over and the world was picking up the pieces.
Part of that, I suspect, is because Duruflé had a tendency to drag his feet on things he didn’t want to do. Only one of his works, the Notre Père, is not based on Gregorian chant, and that is because he only finished it after his wife had started writing it for him, having been requested repeatedly to set the Lord’s Prayer in the vernacular.
But part of it is the simple fact that art takes time. To create, to perform, to consume art, absorbs our attention for long enough to give us a new perspective. The six years that it took Duruflé to write the Requiem, the forty minutes that it takes to sing or to listen to it – that time makes space for things to change, for us to change.
For a couple of years I had a habit of picking up The Count of Monte Cristo in about October, when the days were getting shorter and my mood was getting lower. It’s about 1100 pages long; by the time I got to the end, something would have shifted.
One of the greatest gifts of art is the way that it takes us out of what we think is our own timeline; shows us – sometimes quite literally – the bigger picture; allows us to step back from the overwhelming emotion. Sometimes that feels like a betrayal: how can we possibly feel any less angry, any less hurt, any less scared, than we do at the moment? Surely this devastating news deserves nothing less than everything we have?
The last news story that made me cry was the murder of Jo Cox MP, just before the referendum in which the UK voted to leave the European Union. After that, nothing has really surprised me. Disappointed me, yes, but not surprised me.
The one before that was the General Synod decision in 2012, the one that voted against the appointment of women bishops. That was a November vote, too.
From where I am now, I am thinking, gosh, was that all I had to cry about in 2012? But it only seems trivial now because I know what happened next. When I’d cried about it, I wrote a blog post. Having written the blog post, I found that I was still hurt and angry, still feeling rejected because of a fundamental part of my own identity, and the only thing I could think of to do with that was write fiction.
Lydia choked, rolled onto her side, and sat up. ‘I never realised,’ she said wonderingly, ‘how much it was going to hurt. It goes right into the heart. They don’t want me. They were OK with the person they thought I was, so long as she stayed in her place, and was happy to teach the approved version of events and not rock the boat, but they don’t want the person I really am. I always knew, in theory, that I was only there on sufferance, that as soon as anyone worked out who I really was I’d be out on my ear, but it didn’t hit me until today how terrible it was, when you understand the reality that nobody wants you.’
That was where I began with the final draft. It went on from there: a year of writing; a year of editing; a year of becoming brave enough to put it out under my own name. I burned up the anger that had first fuelled it; I put it all into the text.
By the time I published Speak Its Name on 2 February 2016, six women had been consecrated as bishops in the Church of England. While I was writing, things had changed.
I’m not saying that things will magically become better if we can only wait it out. For some people it is, indeed, already too late. I am not saying that art can fix everything. There are some things that are just wrong. Nevertheless, it is the best tool that I have to make something good, something useful, perhaps even something beautiful, out of emotions that, left unchecked or harnessed for ill, will destroy the world.
The Kobo was a Christmas present last year. I mostly use it for reading: long fanfic; out of copyright books from Project Gutenberg; new books, when it’s looking unlikely that I’ll get to a bookshop in time to read the thing before the next book club meeting; books that in paper format would be too thick or heavy to go in my handbag; things that exist in electronic format only.
If you haven’t come across The Comfortable Courtesan yet, I thoroughly recommend her. She’s the narrator and main character of an early nineteenth century soap opera that’s been going for about eighteen months in our time, and several years in the time of the action. It’s often gentle, occasionally melodramatic, always sex positive, usually funny, sometimes sad, and invariably a welcome interlude in my day.
Coming up with a title is my least favourite part of writing a book. I think it’s the weight of expectation. My usual method is to pick a working title, usually one word, and pray for something better to turn up.
I was really pleased when Speak Its Name occurred to me: the association with same-sex love, combined with the overarching theme of saying things the way they are, made it pretty much perfect.
Anyway, I think I might finally have one for the book that I’m currently working on, which I’ve been calling Wheels for want of anything better. I had been wondering if I could pun on spoke/speak, getting sidetracked by West Side Story (wire-spoke wheel in America!), and scouring If for lines to appropriate or undermine. However, for the moment I have settled on (drumroll, please!):
A Spoke in the Wheel
Or I might drop the indefinite article:
Spoke in the Wheel
Or maybe make it plural:
Spoke in the Wheels
Or wake up tomorrow and wonder what on earth I was thinking. We’ll see. But at the moment it feels like I’m on the right track.
A book by a Hungarian about British culture, and a diagram explaining to English-speaking tourists how to use the Parisian transport system. That ought to do it.
Good luck to everybody preparing to set sail on the good ship NaNoWriMo!
I won’t be taking part, having found several years ago that such a gigantic wordcount was incompatible with a full-time job, at least for me. Besides, I hit fifty thousand words half-way through September (well, I did start in March…) I remember it being tremendous fun, though, and the combination of low stakes, an ambitious target, and a community of enthusiastic people, was a potent mixture.
If you’re writing a novel this November I hope you have a fabulous time.
The film The Way follows a baby boomer dentist, played by Martin Sheen, and some acquaintances he picks up along the way, along the Camino Francés to Santiago de Compostela.
I am the worst person with whom to watch it – well, me and every other returned pilgrim, I suppose – because I find it difficult to restrain myself from giving a running commentary on every building and geographical feature I recognise. And, at a little more than half way through, screaming, ‘Where’s the meseta gone?’
The meseta is the plain that takes up a lot of Castile and a significant distance of the Camino – nearly two weeks, at the speed we went. It is day after day of flat, grinding, almost featureless, path. It’s either hot and dusty, as it was when we walked it, or bitingly cold, as it will be when my brother cycles it in November. There is an awful lot of it, and it goes on, and on, and on.
You wouldn’t know this from The Way. Oh, there are some shots of cornfields and what have you, but they come nowhere near conveying the sheer thirsty tedium of the meseta. In The Way, you get the mountains at the beginning and the hills at the end, but you don’t get the long, long plain in the middle. It’s like one of those greetings cards that pulls out from both sides to reveal as much again in the middle. It’s an oddly truncated pilgrimage.
Of course, a hundred kilometres of nothing would have made The Way a very different film. Havi Brooks talks about the slow motion montage, how practice (or any repetitive activity, really) feels like you’re not getting anywhere, and how in a film it would be over in a flash, except you’d still have the sense of time passing.
In terms of the current book, I am in the middle of the slow motion montage, half-way across the meseta. Slogging away. Cranking out another hundred words, another page, another five hundred words. Catching sight of a snippet, and thinking it’s terrible. Re-reading a page, and thinking perhaps it isn’t so bad. Re-reading a chapter, and counting the holes in the fabric.
Filling the holes.
Another hundred words. Another fifty words. Another sentence.
I am beginning to see a line of hills in the distance.
It’s been an exhausting autumn for me. September is always difficult, October takes me further into the darkness (until that blessed moment when the clocks go back and I’m getting up in the light again) and this year it’s been further complicated by my having begun a new job just over a month ago.
I’m enjoying the job, but it takes up a lot of my brain capacity, and by the time I get home I’m good for nothing but a cup of tea and an episode of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. Nor are my (usually infallible) train journeys working. Part of it is where I’ve got to with the book: I’ve reached the point of diminishing returns, where the majority of the plot is down on the page, and I don’t have any big scenes left to throw myself into. It’s detailed work now, filling in little gaps, writing perhaps a sentence at a time. Those magic summer evenings when the words were dropping off my pen feel like a very long time ago.
I’ve been taking things easier. For the first time since I started this project, I’ve modified my goal and entertained the possibility of writing less than eight thousand words in a month. I’ve hit the fifty thousand word mark, and from here on in it’s as important to take out unnecessary words as it is to put new ones in.
The traditional storm of doubt has swept in. It feels as if it’s never going to be finished, and that I am going to offend all my friends, and nobody will ever speak to me again, and also it’s not worth bothering with. The infuriating thing about this round is that I now know that this is a temporary state of affairs, so I might as well just push on through. I can’t really allow myself the luxury of a good sulk, because it would feel ever so fake.
There are two things that are encouraging optimism, however:
It’s been a while since I cooked anything out of this book, and years since I lived in a bedsit, but I still turn to it when I need a dose of Katharine Whitehorn’s humour and realism. It makes me believe that I can get through pretty much anything, and reminds me that I’m free of the mice and the leaking roof, too.
Kathleen Jowitt 