Tag: writing

The moving finger writes

kathleenjowittLeave a comment
A jagged-edged leaf, with some cracks and holes in it orange-red in full sunlight, on a thorny stem, with other leaves and blue sky beyond.

We’re into the final stretch of the Church year – All Saints’ tide; Kingdom season; the season of remembrance; whatever you like to call it. November. The readings at daily prayer (more like twice-weekly prayer, for me, but we will not dwell on that) get distinctly apocalyptic – quite literally. We get Revelation. We also get Daniel.

The book of Daniel is a load of fun if you’re eight. I still enjoy it now. You get the title character in the lions’ den; you get Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego in the fiery furnace; you get the moving finger; you get duelling angels; you get the four great beasts and the ten horns; you get the statue with feet of clay. You get the obvious Sunday school morality (faithfulness rewarded in the face of horrific torture and certain death!) and the esoteric (mene, mene, tekel, parsin). You get memorable catchphrases: feet of clay; the writing on the wall.

And it always feels particularly apposite in November. For a start, there are US elections every other year, and I don’t know about you, but for quite a long time I’ve been approaching those with a sort of “Oh God, what now?” that teeters on the line between prayer and despair. (This year turned out brilliantly, yes; an answer to prayer, in the form of hard work, organising, mobilisation, and, no doubt blazing righteous fury – but I didn’t know that for the first few chapters.) For a long time, Nebuchadnezzar’s dream of a mighty but flawed statue representing mighty but flawed kingdoms and Daniel’s tribulations with successive rulers, have seemed to have had rather a lot to say to a time in which we’re all nervously watching to see what the all-powerful, arrogant, not-exactly-stable, head of state is going to do next.

Enough of that. Considerably more frivolously, November is National Novel Writing Month. Or it used to be: as far as I understand it, NaNoWriMo dissolved in a puff of methane while I wasn’t paying attention. Something about generative AI, and possibly also volunteer misconduct. I’m not going to look it up now. Anyway, NaNoWriMo used to be a challenge in which one attempted to write a novel (50,000 words, which these days is considered to be on the short side) with one’s own pen/pencil/word processor and mind, during the month of November. I attempted it three or four times, succeeded once (the eventual result of that was Speak Its Name, not that much of those original 50,000 words made it into the published version), and generally found it incompatible with a full-time job.

But that wasn’t my point. So, back before generative AI ruined everything, NaNoWriMo participants famously found all sorts of ways to pad their word count. Spell out acronyms. Uncontract contractions. Repeat everything you could possibly get away with repeating.

Back to Daniel. The story that ends with Shadrach, Meschach, and Abednego in the fiery furnace begins with Nebuchadnezzar

My Pa used to tell a story of a man who, having been assigned Daniel 3 to read, dutifully read out the dimensions of the golden calf, and the list of

the princes, the governors, and the captains, the judges, the treasurers, the counsellors, the sheriffs, and all the rulers of the provinces

who turn up to worship it. They come up twice, with every single rank listed again, in the first three verses. And they are instructed as follows:

at what time ye hear the sound of the cornet, flute, harp, sackbut, psaltery, dulcimer, and all kinds of musick, ye fall down and worship the golden image that Nebuchadnezzar the king hath set up

And then they hear

the sound of the cornet, flute, harp, sackbut, psaltery, and all kinds of musick

But! Some snitches report to Nebuchadnezzar that, despite his having commanded

that every man that shall hear the sound of the cornet, flute, harp, sackbut, psaltery, and dulcimer, and all kinds of musick, shall fall down and worship the golden image

Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego are very naughty boys and have not done so.

So Nebuchadnezzar summons them and asks if they are absolutely sure about this not worshipping the golden calf, when they hear the… well, you know how this is going to go.

At which point the old buffer who was reading the lesson gave up and simply said,

(Band as before.)

Do you think Daniel was doing NaNoWriMo?

Glorious returns

kathleenjowittLeave a comment
The head of a flower from which many yellow tubular petals have fallen away, leaving behind star-shaped holes

The thing about writing contemporaries – the thing that I found, anyway – is that the main characters stick around in one’s head and continue to have opinions about what’s going on in the world. Particularly General Synod (Stancester) and professional cycling (A Spoke in the Wheel). Every election result, doping scandal, every disappointing decision, every too-good-to-be-true stage win, I’d know what they thought of it. More generally, I tended to have a good idea of what they were up to now, where life had taken them. I wasn’t intending to do anything with it (probably; you never know) but if I asked myself what so-and-so was doing I’d just know.

And then the next project happened to be a historical novel, and the one after that was far future sci-fi*, and nobody in either of those would understand what’s going on in the world today, beyond the very generic ‘ugh, human nature’. And then I stopped writing altogether, more or less, and didn’t have time to follow cycling any more, and Twitter became unreadable, and everybody went away. It wasn’t quite as definite as that. They just weren’t there any more. Last year Issues in Human Sexuality was binned (not before time), and neither Lydia nor Colette had a thing to say about it, never mind the fact that they both had very strong opinions on it in The Real World and I, personally, cried.

The other week, though, just after I’d got going again, I was at a parent-and-toddler group, and there was Lydia – at least, not there, but very definitely knee deep in small children, in some other church hall. She isn’t even in this new book, I don’t think. Not outside the chapter headings. Probably. Anyway, it was very nice to see her. I’d missed her.

*Does this mean that I have three novels on the go at the moment? Yes, I’m afraid it does. Is that slowing up progress on all of them? I’m honestly not sure. What seems to be happening in practice is that the Shiny New Novel is getting most of the attention, but the others are getting a sentence a day**, and you know, that’s more than anything was getting before, so we’ll go with that.

**Assuming I get any writing time at the computer. If not, Shiny New Novel might get something in a notebook if it’s lucky, and the rest of them take their chances.

Back to Stancester

kathleenjowittLeave a comment
Church with an octagonal tower

I’ve been reading my own books.

I was at least partly prompted, I have to admit, by an entity that emailed me assuring me that it was not a spammer, telling me how inspirational my books could be, and scolding me for what a disaster my publicity has been of late. I know, sender of unsolicited negging guilt-trippy business pitches. I know.

At the present moment, I would have trouble telling you where you can actually buy my books, and I’m painfully aware that they aren’t available in as many places as they should be. As for things like having a social media presence, for what that’s worth these days, and knowing whether or not my mailing list works… *hollow laughter*

Up until very recently, I didn’t care at all. I did not have the capacity to care. The last five years have not left me much room to write, still less to care about selling about what I’d already written. And it was the not-writing that was bothering me.

In a slightly wacky but nonetheless effective practice, I had an imaginary conversation with the version of my future self who has actually been managing to write something. She had robust opinions about my correspondent’s sense of boundaries, but she agreed that my books were worth reading, and suggested I do that.

I was going to start with the work-in-progress workbook on how to write your book while you have a day job, in the hope that my past writing self would have something helpful to say, but, for fairly obvious reasons, the books I have in EPUB format are the ones I’ve already published. So I returned to Stancester. Speak Its Name last Tuesday. The Real World last Wednesday.

Anyway, it turns out they aren’t bad at all. Rereading, I have (of course) found several things I’d do differently now, but only a couple that really made me cringe. (Although I think I had an old file for Speak Its Name. I have vivid memories of fixing all those inconsistently curly inverted commas, and who the hell is Lucy? Didn’t I write her out? Combine her with Georgia?) A while ago I thought The Real World was the best thing I’d ever written, but then it got comprehensively ignored. Now I don’t think it’s stand-out brilliant, but I do think it’s still pretty good. They keep you reading. At least, they kept me reading – and I know what happens.

And now I seem to be writing the third. Don’t get excited: it’s four pages, just over 1000 words, and only about half of those are new. (Yes, I had started writing it some time in the five years of life upheaval…) And does anyone actually want to read Will and Georgia’s lockdown diaries? I doubt it. I’m not even sure that I want to write them. But there’s still a shred of that magnificent indifference clinging to me. I don’t care whether anybody wants to read it. It’s what wants to be written, so off we go.

Meanwhile, my future writing self is drinking coffee and smiling quietly, and talking me down from the old familiar “but can I really write this?” wobble. I haven’t broached the topic of sorting out distribution and publicity for the books I already have. It does not feel like a priority, not when there’s writing to be done. Still, I have just gone through all the links from my book pages and removed some of the dead ones. It’s a start. Thank you for the nudge, mystery correspondent.

The long, fast, week

kathleenjowittLeave a comment
The sun rises beyond a line of trees, a field, a goods train, a railway line, and a station platform
Looking east, in March

The days are long, but the years are short.

I can’t remember where I read that. Somewhere, presumably, in the small pool of books I’ve swum through in the last few years. Something about life with a very small child. Maybe one of the parenting ones, but it feels a little too generalised, too cheesy. True, though. The days are long. Yesterday I went to bed at nine o’clock to stop the day getting any longer, though admittedly yesterday wasn’t really the child’s fault.

The years? I don’t know. The last two-and-three-quarter years actually feel like they’ve lasted quite a long time, but they’re part of a six year stretch that seems to have been working on a different calendar entirely. That said, I’m not sure how I’m forty, or how I’ve suddenly been working for the same organisation for fifteen years.

What I really notice, though, are the weeks. Now we’re in a routine where many things happen once, and only once, a week, it’s amazing how they fly by. Rhyme Time again? Well, yes, it’s Friday. I suppose it does feel like quite a long time since Friday, but even so. And then you miss one Rhyme Time, go to the next two, are away for the one after that, and then fail to get out of the door for the last one, and there’s a month gone. And again, the weeks feel like they last forever as they’re happening, but they’re gone just like that. Work deadlines rear up at me out of the darkness. Lent just didn’t seem to happen and suddenly it’s half-way through April and we’re well into Easter season.

My evenings, too, I’ve set aside for particular things, in the hope that I’ll get at least something done. Monday for making, Friday for mending. Tuesday for writing (no, collapsing into bed at 9pm did not allow me to write anything, but I’m feeling better for it today). Saturday for keeping in touch with people. Wednesday for whatever I feel like. The weeks go fast and I get very little done in them. And that’s just the way it is.

I can see it happening, the days I take the train to London. One week I’m waking up in the dark, turning my bike lights on before I cycle to the station, ten minutes into the train journey before the sun comes up over frosty fens. Next week, the sky’s beginning to get light in the east as I huff my way up the hill. The clocks go forward, and we’re back to square one, but not quite. A week later, I’m watching the sunrise from a bench. A week after that, my daylight-powered motivation is sufficiently recharged for me to get out of the door half an hour earlier (you know you’re early when you meet the Cambridge University women’s rowing team coming out of the station on your way in). Another week, and I don’t need the bike lights. And every time, the sunrise is swinging further and further round to the north, and a week is just the right gap to make it really obvious. In a very beautiful way, though.

Which leaves me – where? Somewhere in the middle of a world that seems to be spinning very fast. Perhaps I just need to let it. There’s nothing I can do about the sunrise. Perhaps all I need to do is notice it, enjoy it, slow time back down by not trying to make the best use of it, whatever that even would have been.

Anyway, I’ll see you next week. Probably.

A railway station early in the morning, with a clear blue sky shading to pink at the horizon, and a half-moon low in the sky above bare trees
Looking south, in April

Fifteen years

kathleenjowittLeave a comment
The legs of a person wearing a black skirt and tights and red shoes with double ankle straps, standing on a grassy lawn in front of a low wall and a blue car
Here’s a picture from 2010. I loved these shoes. But that’s another story.

Earlier today I was on a video call with a new colleague. He asked how long I’d been with our employer. I joined in 2010, I said, started in a regional office, moved to HQ in 2013…

At this point another colleague joined and said, yes, new colleague had been remarking how people either seemed to have joined yesterday or have been around for fifteen years.

Yes, I said, and I’m still wondering when I flipped from the one category into the other, apparently overnight.

Inside, though, I was going, Fifteen years? Really? But yes: the arithmetic is simple, it’s the getting my head around it that’s proving challenging. The anniversary slid past without my noticing a couple of months ago. Somewhere between 2013 and here, I became an old-timer.

Compare the starting point with where I am now, and it’s obvious. I live in a different town, county, region. I look very different – my hair’s gone almost completely white. Come to think of it, I started 2010 with barely any eyebrows, having pulled them out in a bad mental health patch.

I started 2010 as a depressed temp, the confidence knocked out of me by failing to get a job I’d been doing for several months, equally scared of giving myself time to breathe and of finishing any piece of work lest there be nothing more for me to do. It took me a long time to find my feet in the union world. In some ways it seemed like the job I’d been born to do, if only I’d known it existed before, working to change the world for the better every day. In others, I felt like a fraud: too shy, too introverted, too posh, too cynical, too everything, or possibly not everything enough. These days I know what I’m good at, I can see how it serves the movement, and I mostly get to do that.

Things change gradually. Even the big changes – office, job title, team, grade – took a while for me to grow into them. There are a few days that stand out in my memory as having moved me forwards significantly, but so much of it was just turning up, and doing the job, and doing the job, and doing the job day after day, and eventually realising that actually I was pretty good at it.

Outside work, too, things changed gradually. Three books, with a couple of pages written per day, and not every day at that; gradually working up the nerve to put them out into the world myself. Getting confident cycling, first on a trike and then on a bike. Buying a house; having a baby; losing both parents: big changes, those, but again, you get used to them gradually, day by day, living in the new world until you’re at home there. Second chances (there were plenty of jobs I didn’t get); another dance with vocation, parting on better terms this time round. It’s quite a lot, really; when I stop and think about it I’m not so surprised that it’s taken fifteen years to get here.

If I could go back to 2010, if I thought 2010-me would believe me, I’d tell her… Hang in there. It works out better than you could possibly imagine.

But I don’t need to. Because she did.

Good enough is not bad at all, or, Book Bus Stories: this year it’s a zine

kathleenjowittLeave a comment
A stack of photocopied A3 paper covered in dense handwritten text. Some sheets have been folded down into A6 booklets.

Last year, Book Bus Stories was an exhibition. Next year, it might finally be a book. But this year, it’s a zine.

I haven’t been writing much in recent months; you may have seen how quiet I’ve been over here and guessed that it reflects a prolonged period of literary inactivity offline. I haven’t had much time, I haven’t had much energy, and, if I’m honest, a lot of the time I’ve been lacking the inclination too. It’s a side-effect of motherhood that I didn’t expect at all: for well over a decade I’d had a story more or less constantly writing itself in my head – until I had a baby, and it all just – went. It was if my brain had been replaced with someone else’s, someone who didn’t write, and had no interest in writing. Which was just as well, really, because she didn’t have the time and the energy.

Every now and again an idea rushed back in, and I’d get very excited. And either I’d lie awake with a sleeping child in the crook of my elbow and know that if I moved I’d wake her, or by some miracle I’d find an hour and get it written down, and then it would stick there because by the next time I got a free hour there’d be something else that needed doing, or that seemed more fun.

Meanwhile, Smashwords (which I use to distribute the ebook versions of my Stancester books) kept sending me emails about migrating my account to Draft2Digital, which kept reminding me that I’d never sorted out my tax code on there and therefore had (a frankly pitiful amount of) money sitting on my account, and every time I felt irritated and slightly despairing of ever selling any more of my existing books, let alone ever finishing a new one. 2020 – the last time I published a book – was getting longer and longer ago, and I was feeling less and less like the person who’d done it.

Then one lunchtime I went to the Wellcome Collection. They had an exhibition of zines, mostly by disabled people. They talked about how zines are amateur, scruffy, don’t have to be perfect. In the corner was a table with paper and pens and a sign encouraging you to have a go at making your own zine, about saying the things you had to say.

I had things to say, things about grief and loss and memory.

I thought, I could do a zine.

A book still seemed a very long way out of reach, but I could do a zine. Or I could at least try one. I went back to my desk and folded a sheet of A4 paper into eighths. I drew a bus across two of them. A little doggerel quatrain emerged from my mind with barely any trouble at all.

Back at home, I unearthed an A3 pad and started on the real thing. There was a poem I’d written years ago, intended for the eventual Book Bus Stories book, which went straight in. In a charity shop I found a book of photographs of Paris, all chic and moody and monochrome, which, combined with the experience of speedrunning a dozen years of (moody, monochrome) family photographs while preparing for my mother’s funeral, made me think everything looks better in black and white, and then, everything looks sadder in black and white. That became a piece.

I photocopied several pages of my father’s Paris Is Well Worth A Bus and, after several false starts, got a reasonable blackout poem down.

I stuck down a Kimberley Ales beermat and an Artichaut de Bretagne sticker to make wheels. I got out the Dymo machine.

The cat trod on the paper while I was working on it and I remembered my father yelling “Trolloper!” at her; I drew a cloud around the pawprint and wrote about how it helps and hurts to remember things like that.

I filled in the body of the bus, the platform, the window frames. I thought I was done. Then I went to Gay’s The Word (on a bit of a weepy high because the General Synod of the Church of England had finally done away with Issues in Human Sexuality as a requirement for ordinands), picked up Joe Brainard’s I Remember, read about twenty pages, and knew that I needed to fill in all the white space with the things I don’t remember.

On Friday I took the whole thing to the library and did a photocopy by way of a test. It looked great. (Everything does, in fact, look better in black and white.) I took it to the print shop and got a proper print run (fifty, in fact) done. Then I took the whole lot home and, over the weekend and today, cut and folded the lot into booklets. Now they’re packed in a box, ready to go down to Ventnor Fringe and the Book Bus with me tomorrow. It’s a good feeling.

I made a zine. It’s not perfect. And it’s not a book. But it’s good enough, and it turns out that good enough is actually great.

Return of the writing brain

kathleenjowitt1 Comment
Sky, winter sunlight, and bare branches are reflected in a puddle on a tarmac path

My writing brain started up good and proper yesterday. I don’t know why. Maybe it’s having managed to post here every day for a month and more. Maybe it was having a day in which I’d promised myself I’d do no work and only minimal Cursillo admin. Maybe it’s because it’s almost eighteen months since the baby was born and that’s just how long it takes for a brain to get going again. Maybe it’s because I did some actual proper singing and it unblocked some metaphorical tubes. Or maybe I’d just knitted some arbitrary length of combined sock. Who knows.

Anyway, in the morning I found myself rereading some things I’d written. I fixed an plot hole in one of them. And I found myself thinking more and more about the project I was working on up until, well, a little more than eighteen months ago. Actually, it’s been bouncing around in my head for the last few days, but yesterday it started demanding my attention. And now it’s telling me I need to read the book on the Dance Band Era, and get hold of a wind-up gramophone and play the 78s, and rescue all the rest of the dance band 78s, and read I don’t know, who survived the First World War and wrote about it? Siegfried Sassoon, read Siegfried Sassoon, and oh yes, definitely David Blaize, and probably pick up that First World War history that I got about as far as 1915 in, and find out about twilight sleep and would an upper middle class woman be expected to breastfeed in 1924, and work out a better name for my hero (he is called Julian at the moment, which is a bit misleading)… And probably reread Romeo and Juliet just for the hell of it except that’s probably not the best use of my limited time, or rewatch it, except goodness knows I never get three straight hours free these days. And I would say read Surprised by Joy if I hadn’t just read it and concluded that, while I’m very pleased for C. S. Lewis that he got out an environment that was making him miserable, it would have been useful for me if he’d stayed on and could have written about what it was like being at school and watching form by form carted off to war, knowing your time was coming. (And good grief I don’t think his Professor Kirkpatrick as written would have let him get away with the logical fallacies in Mere Christianity, but that’s not remotely relevant.)

I started getting lines writing themselves again. I found myself wanting to reread what’s already there to make sure I hadn’t written them already, or written something that they would contradict. The cogs were turning, turning, getting up to speed. The writing brain was well and truly running. It kept me up mapping what fandom (such as there is) calls the Montacrew onto early twentieth century public school dynamics (let the reader understand). And then the toddler woke up and insisted on a really, really long feed.

You recall that I am meant to be resting and recovering. So yes, today was a washout (although I did some more singing practice and am feeling a lot better about my impending performance – and finished reading Touch Not The Cat, which is very slightly relevant.) So no, I haven’t actually added any new words to this project yet. But I’m so very glad to see it again.

Excavating writing fossils 2: yarn forward

kathleenjowittLeave a comment
A folded A4 envelope with knitting instructions written in two columns. A fluffy black cat with white paws is passing through the frame.

I still have another page from a dead notebook to share with you, but this isn’t it. This, as you see, is an old envelope with a bit of knitting pattern written on it. Indeed, it fell out of a knitting book earlier today as I was finishing a baby hat – this hat:

A baby's knitted hat in grey yarn with a white trim and a pattern of deer and a crowned heart in white

Experienced knitters will see that this hat and the pattern on the envelope have nothing to do with each other. Indeed, as with the last post, I can remember exactly what I was trying to do: lengthen a short-sleeved blouse to turn it into a cycling jersey. I didn’t finish that; it’s still sitting at the bottom of my knitting bag.

I’m a bit of an intermittent knitter, you see. At the moment I am possessed with a wild enthusiasm for it, am telling myself that I am going to make all the socks in Cute Knits for Baby Feet, and plenty for myself as well. Since socks are a lot quicker than blouses I may even get a few finished. As you see, I have most definitely finished that hat.

Then I turned the envelope over, and I found something quite different:

The other side of the envelope has a note reading: 'Daisy's friend is called Pippin. The alien actress is bewildered by people mistaking her stage name for her real name or vice versa'. The cat is reclining behind the envelope as if posing

Daisy’s friend is called Pippin.

The alien actress is bewildered by people mistaking her stage name for her real name or vice versa

I know exactly what that’s about too. Or, rather, exactly what those are about: these are two separate notes about two separate stories.

The first one is Daisy’s Yarn. (Here, have a PDF.) That got finished, rejected by whatever call for submissions I originally wrote it for, shopped around a bit, and picked up by a podcast that now seems to have vanished off the face of the earth. Fairly standard.

The second one is a Book Bus Story. Or it’s going to be a Book Bus Story. I don’t really have a proper link for that yet, but it’s going to be something like this, except a book. There’s a draft of that story on the page – it’s inspired, by the way, by the way that transport enthusiasts often make a careful note of 3267’s 1970 British registration number and ignore the real story – but I’m not happy with it yet. My hope is to get Book Bus Stories done so that I can sell it at next year’s Ventnor Fringe. Will that happen? Who knows? I have a lot of writing hopes and at the moment most of them just aren’t happening.

That’s not all there was to the envelope.

The envelope is presented spread out with two A6 invitation cards to The Authors' Awards and The Authors' Awards Winners' Tea Party, Tuesday 20th June 2017

Invitations to my first and – so far – most glamorous literary prize event. I swanked about that quite enough back in 2017, so I won’t repeat myself now. All the same, it was quite a boost to my self-esteem to remember that I was there and I did that.

I don’t know if I can save the alien actress story. There are more words to it than that line, but there isn’t much more substance, and I have no idea what it needs. I’m almost certainly going to frog that blouse. Tony gave me one of his cycling jerseys and it fits me fine, and anyway, I haven’t been out on my road bike for well over two years.

That’s not really the point, though. The point is this: all the years when I wasn’t doing any knitting aren’t relevant now, when I am, when I’m finishing hats and socks all over the place, and looking forward to trying cables for the first time. I was knitting, and then I wasn’t, and now I am again. So I might as well trust that it’s going to be the same for writing, that I’m going to get back into it, writing notes to myself and turning them into stories within months or weeks.

Maybe there’ll be more glamorous prize nights. Or any sort of prize nights. I don’t mind. At the moment I’d just like to be sure that I’m going to get another book done – and I can’t be sure, because the only way to get a book done is to do it, and at the moment I’m not doing it. But I’m glad this particular fossil came to the surface: it makes me believe that I can.

Excavating writing fossils

kathleenjowittLeave a comment
A large rock on a stony beach contains a battered ammonite fossil

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.

Why am I not writing?

kathleenjowittLeave a comment
A fluffy black and white cat peers around the corner of a laptop

Why am I not writing?

I have about one hour in every day in which I have both hands free, and writing has been coming a long way down the list of things I could do in it. And it’s never the same hour for very long: I don’t seem to be able to adjust to the ever-changing routine quickly enough to get much done. Sometimes I see the moment and grab it, but not often.

Why am I not writing?

So much of my life at the moment is focused on the baby, dependent on the baby. That’s why I’m not writing much here. I don’t want her to embark on life to find that the internet already knows all about her. This time is private.

Why am I not writing?

It just doesn’t seem very important at the moment. There’s nothing in particular that needs to be written by me, now. No idea has yet grabbed me by the throat and insisted I write it.

Why am I not writing?

My creative energy is going on other things. Smocking. Cursillo. What to do with a bus that’s a bookshop when it doesn’t have books in it.

Why am I not writing?

I just don’t feel like it.

Why am I not writing?

#
ghhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhFGRt

Why am I not writing?

(There is a cat on my keyboard.)

Why am I not writing?

I am writing.

I am writing.

Little by little. More and more, week by week. Even when I wasn’t writing at all, I was writing. I’ve kept my diary up to date all this past year, and never had to catch up more than a week at a time. Even when I had to write in very large letters to fill a day, or just stick in a picture instead. I’ve written reports. I’ve written letters – fewer than I’d have liked, but some. I’ve even opened up some of my pre-baby projects and added a line here and a line there. There hasn’t been one big bam! I’m writing again! moment – or, rather, there have been several, but they haven’t released an exciting new flood of words. More an occasional dribble.

But I’m writing.

And even if I wasn’t…

… that would be fine. There’s more to me than writing, more than I know about yet. And, while writing is one of the most important ways in which I find out about myself, it isn’t the only way. This last year – these last four years – has been a time of huge transition for me, in many different dimensions. I’m still emerging.

Who knows, I might write about that.