Geese sleep on one leg
We are having a fairly quiet time on the publishing front right now from the book production and events perspective – December always is quiet for publishers of literary work, since most people seem to want a celebrity biography in their Christmas stocking much more than they want a book of poetry! – which is one of the reasons why our last books of the year are published mid-November. And so it’s time to slowly sink back into my own writing again after a few distracted weeks doing other things. It’s strange how hard it is to get back into the writing rhythm after a longish break – almost as if the work (which by now has for sure taken on an independent life of its own in my mind) turns its back on you in a huff and has to be slowly cajoled into cooperating once again.
This time is especially difficult because during the break from it I had an epiphany – which means quite a bit of going back to the beginning and restructuring. A curious phenomenon, the literary epiphany, as those of you who are writers will know only too well. They seem to strike out of the blue, but really they don’t. I could perhaps have predicted mine if I’d been a bit more awake to what was going on in my own head and if I’d thought a little bit more carefully about why it was exactly that I was quite reluctant to get back to the novel again. Sometimes that’s just laziness or fatigue: it can be a very very hard thing to write your way into the world of the novel afresh each day, even when you’re on a roll. But sometimes it’s more than that. When it goes on for a long time people call it writer’s block – but I have to admit I don’t believe in the idea (oh, give yourself a few more years, I hear the more experienced among you say :- ) To me, that reluctance to engage with a piece of writing doesn’t need a whole new ’syndrome’ to describe it - it almost always just means that what you’re doing isn’t working. Something doesn’t feel right. Something needs to be fixed. And for me, that macro-level fixing always seems to go on in the background. It’s never something I can just sit down and work through – it simply happens, while I’m doing other things. And if I leave well enough alone and don’t try to force anything … well, an epiphany (a major problem solved) can be the result.
The particular epiphany I had related to what David referred to the other day as the ‘civil engineering’ that holds a piece of work together. And that’s always perhaps the hardest – and the most fun and rewarding, when it’s going well – part. For me that’s also always the most challenging part, as I love complicated narrative structures. This time around I was convinced I was going to write something very simple and pared down – a very fine thought, since The Long Delirious Burning Blue is 130,000 words long and has two narrators, in two different countries, each with fairly complicated narrative structures including significant flashbacks to a shared past. But it’s not to be. The new work keeps slipping away from me, twisting itself up and folding back on itself and forming extra layers … and, much as admire writers of very simple pared-down narratives whose very simplicity is actually their complexity (like Alice Thompson’s The Falconer, for example) that just doesn’t seem to be what I write. And if I try too hard to force it, then everything starts to feel contrived and that reluctance to engage starts to set in…
And that ability to step back from a work in progress and focus on something else and just let it all churn away for a while is, I think, one reason why I’m glad to combine writing with publishing and crofting, and why becoming a full-time writer would likely become way, way too much of a pressure. (And, if nothing else, having to concentrate sometimes on the other stuff provides a never-ending stream of very fine excuses for slower-than-expected progress :- )
Sharon
