Let me nail the ‘Long-Distance’ bit of the title as I don’t imagine that the ‘Loneliness’ part needs any explanation. It’s purely a function of time, not miles.
In the time-honoured cliché, I’d always felt a book lay within me, albeit invisibly deeply. Being made redundant and deciding to go freelance created the space and time in which to contemplate the possibility. I didn’t set out to write something that might be published. It was much more that I needed to know that I could do it; ‘it’ being create something from thin air that worked. ‘Worked’ meaning that it had integrity, a sense of purpose and being.
If you’d told me then it would take eighteen years from first contemplation to final realisation, I may well have taken up some other life challenge, perhaps crocheting or self-waxing.
But then again ...
Who, once they’ve written, would ever really want to be without the joy of sculpting a phrase that captures all you wanted – or relish that moment when a character leaps from the page in all its three-dimensional glory? I think it was Paul Auster who said that there is only one thing worse than writing, and that is ... not writing.
Of course, each of our books will differ dramatically: one of the reasons this is not a ‘How to write’ blog but an experience-sharing outreach project! It will over the coming weeks declaim as loudly as the written word can: YOU ARE NOT ALONE.
So, when I sat down in front of the dreaded blank screen, what did I have before me? Just the skimpiest outline of a core idea.
I had a long-held ambition to share my passion for classical music generally, and the late string quartets of Beethoven specifically. There was my main character - a great violinist. And I had been wrestling with a Very Big Question: how to find meaning in the teeth of catastrophe? That gave me the stirrings of a philosophical purpose and narrative line.
Now all I had to do is write the thing ... oh, and earn a living at the same time.
Ian Phillips is a freelance writer for businesses whose first novel, Grosse Fugue, will be published by Alliance Publishing Press on April 3rd. He’s tweeting developments @Ian_at_theWord.
Well, Christina, it's nice to know it has helped, even if completely unpredictable ways!
This question of reusing writing is interesting. Of course, composers did it frequently. Handel and Bach were inveterate recyclers, I guess on the basis that you can't keep a good tune down.
Can one do that with writing? Perhaps, Certainly, my last two months passing through a forensic edit makes me hope that some of the material I've had to discard may reappear some time in the future.
If you've managed it, then that's really good to know. Thanks.
Today's post re-enforced something which I figured out today as well. I had written a novel. It now lies in a box at the side of my desk. But I think I might have managed to re-use it. Not in it's orginal form and with plenty of tweaking. Long distance? Not as long as yourself but a year and a bit. At least I know now that I don't have to put as much pressure on myself to get it sorted out. Maybe this time round it will be a lot better.
Hi Lin,
Yup, we're certainly a breed apart!
There's a quote I've reserved for a later post by the amazing Portuguese writer, Fernando Pessoa. I'll share it with you now, but only you, so don't pass it on!
Of the act of writing, he said "When I am at the wheel, I am greater than myself." For me, that wonderfully captures the feeling when sparks are flying from the fingers and the words that come are precisely what I dreamed they would be.
And the inescapable truth is that writing is a solitary exercise which, as you've found, can subsume you entirely. The question we always ask of ourselves is 'Would we have it any other way?'
Thanks for continuing to read. It's great to know I'm not shouting into a desert!