The plot was beginning to take shape, its long chronological lines appearing, dare I say, quite gracefully in my mind’s eye. But my writer’s tale is not one of romantic poverty or greats arcs of streaming consciousness liberated between bar jobs and waiting tables.
Writing ... and writing
I’d like to dedicate this post to my father, Geoffrey, who died on Friday.
The plot was beginning to take shape, its long chronological lines appearing, dare I say, quite gracefully in my mind’s eye. But my writer’s tale is not one of romantic poverty or greats arcs of streaming consciousness liberated between bar jobs and waiting tables.
I had been a senior(ish) executive who’d done such glamorous jobs as running Robert Maxwell’s law publisher or managing ad campaigns for dialysis machines and chemicals.
Sadly, none of that had provided financial security so I turned to writing and advising businesses on communications. And thus I found myself churning out speeches, brochures, websites, in fact the whole panoply of message-carriers, in fractured parallel to composing the novel.
The main lesson I learned was discipline and compartmentalisation. If I’d been earning all day, don’t touch Grosse Fugue. Creating a complex corporate communications is the antithesis of literature. That’s not to say, it can’t be satisfying, only that it’s a completely different writing experience. If during periods of high endeavour, the itch needed scratching, go back to the book but only for background reading. If business was slack, get stuck in.
It didn’t exactly make for smooth progress! I was dimly aware of professional novelists who had a strict regimen of preparing, writing, relaxing. But that, to me, was the stuff of paradise, where a career was on an even keel and both accommodated and demanded structure. It seemed – and seems – a luxury resort way beyond my current horizon (albeit lusted after in great gobbets of desire).
And that really set the pattern for the intervening years. It was staccato progress, interspersed with earning money, prolonged crises of confidence and marvellous moments of self-belief.
I kept beat to that wonderful line by Fernando Pessoa on the glories of actually writing: “When I am at the wheel, I am greater than myself.”
But it wasn’t only writing. My imagination doesn’t stretch to conjuring whole worlds from nothing. It has to be rooted in historical reality, so there was at times more reading than writing as I immersed myself in factual accounts of the times I sought to recreate. My next post will look at this part of the process.
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.
Thanks for your sympathies, Christina.
As I said in my response to Louise, having a number of options may be indicative of a lack of confidence in one or more of them.
I have a few choices ahead of me once the launch of 'Grosse Fugue' is out of the way and the book selling like hot cakes (ahem). One involves an enormous amount of research, another virtually none. I'm going to see how I feel when the time comes to grab Pessoa's wheel.
My instinct from my current perspective is that I will need to be tenacious and stick with my choice for a period of time, even if the actual writing isn't going particularly well. It's all too easy to find reasons not to write, in my personal experience.
I hope you soon decide which of your two plotlines to go for and then really set about it with vigour and commitment. I can promise you it'll be worthwhile and incredibly rewarding.
I don't disagree with anything you say there, Adrian, except perhaps your line about the point of reading a great work if the settings are different. I don't think I'm quite there on that one.
I'll give you a general example from a future post, if I may. In 'Grosse Fugue', there was one key section that (a) needed accurate research and (b) represented the single greatest challenge to me in intellectual, emotional and narrative terms. I didn't feel I could progress until I had written it, even though I was teeming with ideas that would follow it chronologically. I then read how a particular writer had written a Proustian 'romain fleuve' in sections divorced from their narrative logic, stitching the whole thing together like a quilt. As he won a Nobel Prize, I think we can say that it worked. This liberated me to put to one side the looming challenge until I was ready. It was, in fact, the very last section completed.
We can never be absolutely certain of what we can learn from the masters.
Louise,
I had something of an epiphany when I read your post. I have dabbled with a couple of other ideas and not been able to focus on them and make excellent headway. And, yes, I too have been seduced by the allure of research as, perhaps, a substitute for writing!
I wonder, in my case, whether it's a tacit, unconscious acknowledgement of the weakness of the core idea as the basis for a novel-length production. I think, perhaps, I need to review these concepts and see whether there are short stories or novellas somewhere within them.
WARNING: EXTENDED ANALOGY ALERT. The fact is, to extend the Pessoa line in the original post, sometimes we have to lash ourselves to that wheel and ride/write out the storm. Get some big stuff down on payment and see what it looks like when the sea is a bit calmer.