This Itch of Writing

Trust me, I'm telling stories

I've just realised that this is my hundredth blog post, so thank you to everyone who's dropped by, read, commented, linked, or just said something that got me intrigued and sent me over here to work out what I think. For example:

Poet Sheenagh Pugh has been blogging here about Linda Grant's piece in The Guardian that also set me off on Rogues and Vagabonds. It's apparently even harder to persuade readers of poetry that the persona in the poem is not the poet, than it is to persuade the readers of novels that the author made it up. And then on Friday I had a drink for the first time in ages with a short-story-writing friend. She has an extremely high-powered professional life and a large family, and she writes strange, dark stories which don't spring directly from her everyday life, and would completely change how people saw her if they read them. So she writes under a pseudonym, and I sympathise hugely with that, and not just because negotiating contracts is hard to do with someone who's read your stories of... well, that would be telling. No, not just because it's bad for business: consciousness of external scrutiny of what you're doing (as opposed to consciousness of the need to communicate what you want to say) is creative disaster.

Meanwhile, she was sympathising with me about the fact that the advance reading copies (bound proofs to you and me) of A Secret Alchemy should be going out any day now. I'm bracing myself, not just because the early reviews - the ones the book trade reads - won't be long behind, but as anyone must brace themselves who writes any fiction rooted in well-known facts. To hear some - many - readers of historical fiction, you'd think that accurate facts are what they're looking for, and in some ways it is. It's frightening how many lovers of historical fiction were completely turned of real history by bad teaching at school. They still want their history fix, though, so the history in a novel is what matters to them, not the fiction. Of course I have my professional pride, and I hope I haven't got any facts wrong that I meant to get right. But I hope more that people read A Secret Alchemy as I meant it to be: a story. It's not history, though it has its roots in history. It's fiction, and anyone who wants history should go and read a history book: I made this up.

And I suddenly realised that so many fiction-readers read not to be transported elsewhere, as we all were so easily in childhood, but to get a fix of non-fiction: history, geography, science or a dozen other subjects in easy-to-swallow form. No wonder they're so upset when they realise that something isn't true in the factual sense. As well as all the reasons I touched on in 'Rogues and Vagabonds', I find this attitude annoying because it ignores what fiction is for, and if the author gets it wrong, it takes their fiction to task for not being what it was never meant to be. To my mind, if you want history, read history, if you want geography, read travel books. They're stories too, of course - though they play by different rules - because humans are story-telling creatures and we have no other way of making sense of our experience.

I'm telling stories by fiction rules, and I make no promises about what's true and what isn't in what I write, but only that I'll make that call as seems best to me at the time. All I promise is that, of itself, the story will be whole, will make sense, will be true to human experience, will satisfy you, the reader, as real life - real history - so often doesn't. Trust me, I'm telling stories.

Seized with desire

Over at Vulpes Libris there's an excellent interview with Susan Barrett, author of Fixing Shadows and The Inconstant Husband and, incidentally, a stablemate of mine at Headline Review. At one point she steps away from the questions and says, 'What fun writing this - it is a nice opportunity to post-rationalise, a bit of literary onanism.' Which made me laugh, but also got me thinking.

I guess whether we should pursue that precise analogy does depend on what you think of onanism as a form of pleasure, but post-rationalising is an interesting business. Yes, it's fun, though there are people who might say that writing 30,000 words of PhD commentary has to be the ultimate - um - well, you know what I mean. There's certainly a strong argument that, as Umberto Eco says in his essay 'Reflections on The Name of the Rose', 'The author must not interpret': that is, must not tell readers what to think of the book. And I do believe that to write a book in order to have interesting PhD-ish or even Vulpes-Libris-ish things to say about it would be a betrayal of what art is for, and comes perilously close to the recent Booker-winner who apparently half-admitted that s/he had written that book in order to win prizes. I also doubt if it would end up being a very good book.

But Eco goes on to say that even if the author must not interpret 'he [sic] may tell why and how he wrote his book'. If there is a whiff of self-admiration, of self-absorption in such telling, it's only really the self-consciousness of anyone who is asked to answer a question: the admiration and absorption is originally the questioner's. Deciding to write a novel is partly a matter of setting yourself a series of questions at different levels, from how did they get here and what happens next, to who's telling this story and is it past or present to them. The solution to these problems is the novel. Think of it that way, and talking about why and how you wrote it is merely another level of questions and answers.

If you can lay hands on a copy, I highly recommend Eco's brief account of writing his first, mega-selling novel. It's a while, I realised, since I read The Name of the Rose itself, but Eco's stylishly written and thought-provoking little essay has brought it all back. So I looked for the novel on my shelves, and realised, eventually, that I've never actually owned a copy: I must have borrowed my father's, which means I read it at least twenty-two years ago. It feels like eighteen months at the most: now that's a tribute to how much it gripped me at the time. Eco's account of it is delightful partly because, although his cultural, literary and theoretical erudition leaves the rest of us gasping, he still has to deal with the practicalities of his first novel as we all do: he bumps into the same problems, finds the same solutions, is constrained inconveniently as we are by the historical record, realises too late how last minute additions are being interpreted by others. All in all, there's something very delightful about the fact that even a professor of semiotics will admit to being seized with the desire to write a novel, 'Because I felt like poisoning a monk.'

Jumping the gap

I was startled, and slightly dismayed, to see that my normal 'Hm, must be about time for another blog post' reflex hasn't kicked in on time: it's been a longer gap since my last than I meant. Normally another idea starts to knock on the door quite soon, sparked by something that happens, someone else's blog, some conversation I've had. Maybe it was partly absorbed by putting some thoughts together on internet reviewing for Vulpes Libris. Maybe it was the fact that Wednesday evening, when it was already rather overdue, was very nicely taken up with a writing friend and a bottle of wine instead.

And now I'm here, I can't think of anything to post. I was about to write maybe it's because I've just come back from a dance class and I'd rather be in a hot bath, and now I've suddenly thought, yes, it is to do with the dance class.

You see, I've been thinking in words all day: finishing dealing with the copy-edit of A Secret Alchemy, writing my talk for Darwin Day and half a dozen other jobs. All of those generated little sparks, little ideas and grumbles and insights about writing, but no chance to develop them. And then a bite to eat, and off to dance. But dancing, I find, like horseriding, just isn't a word business at all. It's partly that it's all-absorbingly physical: by comparison writing must be the least physical art, just as the physical nature of a book is unimportant compared to the physical nature of a painting or a symphony. And the more directly I'm connecting the music and the space when I'm dancing - the more simultaneously I experience them both - the less my sequential, language-brain gets involved. When the class ended I had no words in me, and was grateful to get back in the car and go home without saying much to anyone.

It's good for us to be reminded that there are some things words don't do. Were I to try to convey what that hour and a half felt like, I could, of course: that's what writers do. But it would be a process of translation, finding verbal equivalents for what happened, and the reader would have to translate those words onwards, into their own body-memory of rhythm and movement in time, in space. And yet words on the page, which have so little body themselves, so little sensory existence, can carry that memory from my body to someone else's, jumping the un-measured and un-measurable gap between us like an electric charge, or a magic spell. 

Message for Allison

I don't usually post two days running, but this is something I've been meaning to do ever since I started this blog.

One of the strange things about being a novelist is that your whole drive is to tell a story that will be heard and yet, in the nature of things, for most of the time it's like singing in a soundproof room. One small proof that you're heard is your Amazon ranking, and the contact form on your website is another. I've had some lovely mails by that route, which brightened the day and made its quota of writing seem more worth while.

And then one day this September I got a mail by that route which made me cry. I can't quote it, it's too personal, but I so wanted to tell the writer how much it moved me, and I still do. I tried, but my reply bounced back. I tried from my other email, but the same happened, and I tried all over again with both, a few weeks later. Nothing works, and yet I so want to get in touch.

So, Allison, who wrote on the 10th September, if you read this, please know how important your mail was to me. You told me how much - how exactly - The Mathematics of Love resonated with your experience: experience which is far closer to what I was writing about than I've ever been. To be told I've touched a life I didn't know was there, that my words are understood better than I understand them myself, is deeply moving. Allison, if you're there, please mail through my site, or comment here. I'd so love to know you're somewhere out there still. 

Now you see me...

... and now I'm otherwise engaged for a few days, and may not be able to moderate comments or post. Funny how quickly you get addicted, not least to everyone's encouraging and interested comments so far. Talk soon.

Welcome to my blog

Hello, and welcome to This Itch of Writing (and thanks to John Donne for the title).

I wasn't going to start a blog, though so many writers have, because I spend quite enough time on the computer and online as it is. But one of the drawbacks of being a novelist is that your big writing project - however excited you are about it - takes so darned long. For months and years you're immersed in particular voices and places and times and ideas. And it's all very well being up to your neck in such rich and rare substances, but what do you do when you get an itch on your nose?

When his itch of writing needed scratching Donne wrote letters to his friends: fellow lawyers and gentlemen-at-arms, his mistresses and patrons. I'd love to think it wasn't a coincidence that one of his best love poems begins, Mark now this flea... The drawback of writing letters in the early seventeenth century was a postal system which relied on a friend to remember to drop the letter off in the alehouse in the next village but three, and hope it didn't fall behind the bar before someone found it.

Blogging is a bit more reliable. I have a website, here, which is my public face as Emma Darwin, novelist, the author of The Mathematics of Love and other works. This blog is, if not private, then certainly more personal. I spend much of my waking life writing and thinking about writing - my own and others' - and I even dream about it sometimes. So my blogging can't help but reflect that. But I'm feeling my way, really, about what and when I want to write here. Mind you, feeling one's way comes with the writer's territory: how do I know what I think till I see what I say? I'm hoping to see what I say, and what you say, over the next few months...