Becoming a walker

I was just racking my brains for something interesting to post last night, when the rain stopped. So I went out for a walk instead. It had been one of those dull days in all senses - hence the lack of bloggy inspiration - much taken up with post offices, photocopiers, supermarkets and misbehaving computers. So even though it was dark by then, and still damp, and there was only time for a quick loop of one of my usual walks where the terrain and the timing are completely familiar, it was good to get out with no more paraphernalia than a house key and a fiver in my pocket.

Sometimes, on such a duty walk, I take with me something to think about, (similarly my father used to take a couple of Times crossword clues in his head to work on) but I had no particular knot to unpick last night. So I was striding along, not deliberately thinking about anything, when I remembered something in Dorothea Brande's Becoming a Writer, still the classic how-to-write book and to my mind one of the few worth taking to heart. She tells a story from when she was teaching creative writing at night school in New York in the 1930s. One of Brande's students was a single parent with several children and absolutely no money. Her life was incredibly hard, it was terribly difficult for her to find the time and the energy to write, but the class was the one thing she did for herself. And then good fortune came to this woman: she married again and had plenty of time and money. 'But when will I do my thinking,' she said, 'now I've got nothing to scrub?'

Brande's book, if you haven't come across it (or even if you have) isn't about how to shape your plot or character, or pick the right word or the lucrative market, let alone get an agent or a deal. It's about, literally, becoming a writer: how you open the trap doors in yourself that are normally kept locked by years of conditioning or lack of confidence, by a misplaced puritanism or a ferocious Inner Critic. Then, through those trap doors will come... whatever comes. That's frightening stuff, but the moment when you stare at the page and realise you don't know where those words came from is the moment you become a writer.

Rhythm, Brande suggests, is one of the things which unlocks those doors, whether you find it in scrubbing a floor or swimming ten lengths. Walking is one of the most fundamental rhythms of all and one of the easiest to make happen. Trainers, jacket, and you're off. Even before the exercise endorphins kick in my mind is slipping loose from its moorings, floating off, jumping the tracks, going off-piste...

And a last thought: isn't it interesting that the metaphors that occurred to me for that sensation are all about the physical experience of travelling? To go on a journey is often used as a metaphor for inner, emotional and spiritual change, but the word also implies a destination and perhaps a route, even if it's a hazy one. I think I've used the metaphor before on here that most closely describes how writing novels feels to me: like making for a mountain top I can see, but by way of a whole landscape of sunken lanes, crossroads, fords and even villages that I can't. Now, where did I put my walking boots?

Comments

[Moira]

Mowing the lawn is good, too ... Most of my best ideas come to me in the bit through the orchard. :o)

[Laura Vivanco]

This, together with something you wrote in your previous post,

"But as all one's novels are, this one was written in - I could even say written by - a particular stage of my life. What's ended up in the book, and what was in there but got cut in revising, is nothing that anyone else would recognise as autobiographical, but how it is on the page is how I once was."

made me think of part of a poem by Antonio Machado. This is an excerpt from a translation:

Traveller, there is no road;
the road is made as you travel [...]
and as you turn to look back
you can see the path that
shall not be walked on again.

http://www.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/ocotillo/retreat97/caminante.html

There's a bit more about that poem here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antonio_Machado#Machado_References_in_Popular_Culture in case anyone's interested.

[Nik]

Great post, Emma, as ever. And what a fantastic extract from Moira.

Nik

[Sue Guiney]

My best thinking often happens in the shower. Hmm. Not sure what to make of that.

[Janet]

I don't know if this is a coincidence but I followed your link to Dorothea Brande's 'Becoming a Writer' on Amazon. As there were only 4 left I ordered one for a friend. Today they are out of stock.

[Jim Murdoch]

When I look at each of my novels, including my current one, in each one the protagonist takes a journey; they're never the same person(s) they were at the end of the book that they were at its start. It's probably due to the fact that I don't start off with a plan myself, simply a character or two and a direction and off we go; the book is as much of a journey of discovery for me as it is for my readers.

Why my current book is proving so hard is not that I have writer's block – far from it – but the book keeps heading off in directions I'm not comfortable writing about. I've already completely reworked my protagonist from being a girl in her twenties to being one in her fifties bit it's just brought different problems. This is proving anything but a walk in the park. But, hey, what is a journey without an obstacle or two to overcome?

[Emma Darwin]

Laura, thank you for that extract. And, yes, mowing the lawn I can imagine. (Well, sort of. I don't mow lawns...)

Hot water's good too - showers are utilitarian for me, but I do excellent, directed thinking in the bath.

Good to know, Janet, that Dorothea Brande's still selling - fantastic book! And, yes, who knows if it's coincidence?

Jim, my characters always undergo change which you could figure as a journey, and quite often it involves a physical journey too. I usually know what I want that change to be from the start, but as to how it happens - yes, sometimes you find it isn't at all how you'd planned, and you can come hard up against something you don't want to write.

The journey thing gave rise to something which no one's noticed in The Mathematics of Love: the equivalence of time and space, most especially in those pre-telephone days.