This Itch of Writing

In search of odd, crunchy details

I realised sadly a few weeks ago that I was going to have to go to France to research the new novel. This is, of course, the worst possible aspect of the writing life: that we can travel to beautiful or at least interesting places, and set off the whole lot, from the first cup of coffee at the airport, by way of hotel bills, entry tickets and photo printing costs, to the last steak-frites, against tax. I remember saying to my father that it seemed odd that Ian Fleming had suddenly upped and set a whole James Bond novel, You Only Live Twice, in Japan. 'I expect he fancied a tax-free holiday there,' said my father. These days I know enough about Fleming (though some things I rather wish I didn't) to know that it wasn't quite as simple as that, but the point stands.

So I don't expect anyone to sympathise when I say that this kind of research isn't without its difficulties. For one thing you can only go when real life permits, which means it may not be the best time from the point of view of your work on the novel. I find that research comes in three kinds, all of which have their optimum moment: the rock-bottom basics which you can't start a novel without, the set-dressing, and the stuff you didn't know you'd need.

The rock-bottom basics are anything which affects the big architecture of the novel: rough travel times and distances, whether your characters can have the jobs you want them too, the basic mores of the world in which they live. These are the foundations of plot and structure, and changing the structure of a novel is like trying to turn an oil tanker round, so it's as well to check how long a broken leg takes to mend before you plot the damn thing. (I learnt that one the hard way, and one of my first tax-deductible purchases was an immense nursing textbook, to make sure it never happened again.) So getting these right at the beginning, is really, really worth it, but they're not, mostly, things that depend on getting your feet on the ground.

Calling the second kind set-dressing doesn't do it justice, because the textures of food and the sounds of cloth and the games your characters play when they're drunk on - what? - are more than incidental: they're the warp and weft of your novel's fabric, the things which will make its world come alive. They're also the things which will carry much of the non-narrative ideas, and the springboard for much of your figurative language (and if your figurative language isn't part of such non-narrative structures, then maybe it should be). I've built up a fair library of histories of transport, marriage, sex, food, costume, churches, medicine, castles, debutantes, sailors, housewives and saints, and there's always the net, for that quick grab for some necessary facts. But for the curves and crags of the landscape and the smell of the backstreets there's no substitute for going there. If you leave going there late, you'll know what you want, but it may be too late for what you find to inform - shape, illuminate, transform - your original conception of the novel. If you go too early you may not be looking for the right things, because your knowledge of the novel is still theoretical, based on paper plans, not an actual entity.

And this is even more true of the stuff you didn't know you'd need: the stuff you only see when you get there. Could I have known, till I was wandering the streets of Bilbao, that on that Atlantic coast those tall, typically southern European buildings would have their typical balconies glassed in? How perfect for a novel that was all about windows, reflections, light and above all voyeurism! But of course the earlier you are in the process of writing the novel, the more you have to accept that you may miss things that you could have used: so much is still misty, un-formed, undeveloped. And again, if you go later, you may find things which contradict or shake your confidence in what you've written: must you go back and cut or re-write even good things? 

And then there's remembering that a novel is not a travel book. While generalising and vagueness (because you don't know the odd, crunchy detail of it) is death to good writing, it can be a drawback to be too wedded to the facts of a place, as of a time. For one thing, haven't we all read books which canter along nicely, then trip and fall flat on a slab of prose that might be straight out of the Rough Guide? And for another, it can be particularly hard to judge a piece of writing coolly when it cost you a lot in time or money, or when you just loved the place, and have succumbed to the most basic writerly desire of all: to get down on paper what has moved or excited or fascinated you. Those are the darlings we're exhorted to murder, so maybe while I'm away, along with the postcards and the wine, I should pick up a nice big Sabatier knife in that delightful market, just for the purpose. (I'm going by train, so it won't be a problem to bring home.)

But who knows what will happen? There's never a single, right time for research, and certainly not when you have to combine so many different kinds of research in one place, at one time. You can't step in the same river twice, and that's part of the nature of creativity: we struggle to create something whole and satisfying, permanent and written in bronze, while recognising that even a change in the direction of the breeze might have resulted in a different book altogether.

Sharing despair with Neil Gaiman

Answering a cris de cœur - in a forum of mainly published writers - of 'I hate Book Two!', someone posted this, which came originally from Neil Gaiman. I hope he won't mind me borrowing it: as you can imagine from this piece, (which I gather was originally written for NaNoWriMo) he has one of the best writing blogs on the net, which is well worth dropping by.

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The last novel I wrote (it was ANANSI BOYS, in case you were wondering) when I got three-quarters of the way through I called my agent. I told her how stupid I felt writing something no-one would ever want to read, how thin the characters were, how pointless the plot. I strongly suggested that I was ready to abandon this book and write something else instead, or perhaps I could abandon the book and take up a new life as a landscape gardener, bank-robber, short-order cook or marine biologist. And instead of sympathising or agreeing with me, or blasting me forward with a wave of enthusiasm---or even arguing with me---she simply said, suspiciously cheerfully, "Oh, you're at that part of the book, are you?"

I was shocked. "You mean I've done this before?"

"You don't remember?"

"Not really."

"Oh yes," she said. "You do this every time you write a novel. But so do all my other clients."

I didn't even get to feel unique in my despair.

So I put down the phone and drove down to the coffee house in which I was writing the book, filled my pen and carried on writing.

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About ten other writers on that forum piled in to agree, and we all agreed that it's not just second book syndrome, it's a seemingly inevitable part of the cycle of writing novels. Looking back, I remember when a certain book called Shadows in the Glass - otherwise known as The Mathematics of Love - was driving me to tears of exasperation. Did I really have to plod on, when I had this brilliant new idea of how I could, after all, write Anthony and Elizabeth Woodville? It's hard to remember that time now, and Book Two - otherwise known as A Secret Alchemy - had more than its share of 'I hate!' stages, and I'm remembering why I wanted to write it, and enjoying the way it's come out. And ever since that I hate stage I've been steadily more excited about Book Three - otherwise known as Book Three - and now I would cheerfully kill to get everything out of the way and all the preliminary research done so I could start it. But I must remember, I tell myself, that in a few months I'll be crying 'I hate Book Three!' because sparkling at me in the mists of my mind will be Book Four. I must remember...

But just in case, I think I'll just go and print out that Neil Gaiman story, and pin it up on the wall, directly above the monitor.

Where did the week go?

Oh dear, oh dear, time does slip by during half term. What with having family to stay, and an editorial report to write, and a PhD chapter to finish, and vast quanties of reading for that and the new novel, and a big update for my website about A Secret Alchemy - temporary cover, extract, reading-group-questions, how-I-came-to-write-it and all - the poor blog's been going hungry.

A truly superb production of Pygmalion at the Old Vic is one of my better excuses. I know the play pretty well, and it never fails to be good value, but here was a subtlety of thinking and acting I've never seen used on such an old warhorse of a play. Shaw's a wordy writer even at his best - clearly a novelist manqué - but talk about what goes on in the spaces between the words... It was the kind of production where you can see just how important Ibsen was to Shaw, and just what a difference the right acting and directing can make.

Firmly told that it's the play My Fair Lady is based on, but the ending is different, the teenagers settled down with reasonable eagerness, and absolutely loved it, and the granny (who played Freddy Eynsford-Hill as a schoolgirl just after the war and as an English teacher and long-term RSC fan has high theatrical standards) did too. Even a nerdy middle-generation novelist like me was completely gripped. I could only quibble with the pronunciation of Clara, since I refuse to believe that an English girl of that date would have said it like a German, and the angle of Eliza's very gorgeous hat. But then, if they'd put it on as it should be, we wouldn't have been able to see her eyes, and so much would have been lost. In the end it's no good being authentic if it means you're not communicating.

Talking of which, it's nearly midnight. Only my reading for Pipe & Slippers to give a final run through, but maybe I need to go to bed instead. Or maybe a bath, and some thinking about the new novel. I can't do it when I'm in the middle of an editorial report, but that's gone safely off and my mind is free to get back to what it really wants to do. The business that Pygmalion's all about, of people being translated from their background into someone else's, and what then happens when they turn round, and see their route home cut off... that's really interesting... Hmmmm...

That's it, almost certainly

So that's it, almost certainly: I've crawled through the proofs of A Secret Alchemy, finding every last misplaced comma, although it's also gone to a professional proofreader; I've picked up a couple of little anomalies that somehow between us we've all managed to miss; I've seen for the first time how the changes I made at the copy-editing stage integrate when I read it straight through; I've to-ed and fro-ed quadruple-checking the days of the week for one strand, and in another I've realised I've married the Duke of Buckingham to the wrong Woodville sister. The last real job is done, and the beast is face-down on my desk, waiting to go back to Headline, special delivery.

All being well, that's the end of my dealings with the actual words of A Secret Alchemy. From now on I'll be reading them aloud, discussing them, talking to people who've read them, nervously scanning reviews about them, but I won't be involved with them in the way that you are when you're writing. With a whimper (all those toings and froings) and something of a bang (it's a long time since I read it straight through, and d'you know, I really think it works), it has become a separate entity.

I'm glad. There isn't suddenly a book-shaped hole in my life as there is when you finish the real, mad, obsessive writing of a novel, and move onto the editorial stage. Rather, for some months now I've just wanted it to get out there, to be published, to free me to start the new novel. A Secret Alchemy hasn't been the easiest of novels to write - sometimes I wish that the thing that makes me want to write a book wasn't a deep unease about whether I can pull it off or not - and it's time I moved on.

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. That's the oddity: it's as if we co-existed for a while, but soon our existences will separate. And so, in stuffing a few hundred photocopied pages into a jiffy bag and going down to the post office, I'm saying goodbye to a part of my life. As grown-up, photographer Anna puts it at the beginning of The Mathematics of Love:

It was then - that moment - that the shutter opened, and snatched a scatter of the light and dark, throwing it on to this piece of glass, fixing the sun and shadow of those few seconds for ever. And then the sun moved on and took the day with it, while the plate held those shadows and kept them, and carried them to other places and to other times.

William & Mary will have to wait

This morning I got up earlier than I consider altogether decent for a Saturday morning, in order to drive to Hampton Court to do some research. It was cold and grey, with dull light and a nasty east wind, and there was scarcely anyone about except for security people with their coats buttoned up to their chins and an air of bracing themselves for the day as much as the weather. I found my way through arches and past gates as instructed, collected my pass, and trudged past the backs of low buildings - storehouses, offices, goods yards and so on - and through the gardens. Under not-yet-leafed trees what must have been spectacular carpets of daffodils are brown and shrivelled now: between them a few bluebells are showing. Seemingly miles away, and far above our heads, the roof of the Tudor hall and the chimneys and pinnacles of the great gateways are elaborate and remote: an untidy accumulation of Wolsey's blood-coloured grandeur, staring down everyone who approaches. I could smell the woodsmoke where they were lighting the fires in Henry VIII's kitchens. It began to rain.

Through a door in a wall, and round a corner and a couple of centuries, the long, long William & Mary front stretches away. The cream-coloured pillars and windows and even the clipped baytrees are as regular as a regiment, eyes fixed on the prospect across the formal garden. It must often have been as cold and grey for them on ordinary days: not rich or sunlit or exciting, just working days. I turned under a portico, beyond which in a courtyard a fountain was being thrown about by the wind, so that the noise echoed around among the pillars while I looked for the right door. It was tucked in a corner and I knocked, bare knuckles on old, hard wood. Of course: how else could I summon the inhabitants of a place like this?

Hampton Court has two faces, their backs joined but their gaze in opposite directions. I love the place, but today this doubleness of aspect and character was confusing. The glamour and violence of Elysabeth and Antony's world in A Secret Alchemy is not distant in time or nature from Henry's, and that's where I should be, that's the world I've lived in for so long. But the clean, clear rhythm of Wren's palace speaks to me of the world I want to enter: the ordering of science, the balance and elegance of form, the confidence of reason. It's not as simple as that, of course. The late fifteenth century saw the beginnings of humanism, of scientific enquiry, of classical scholarship and modern economics: you can read their words, and understand. The late seventeenth century was still a land of witch-hunts, starvation, heresy and violence, and they're so often still blind to what we can see so clearly. But each world for me has its own particular texture of smell and colour and sound: music, too, and a certain feeling on the skin.

But I can't live in two places at once. Treading along the thick, shifting gravel of the paths I felt unsteady, unreal, as you do on a long journey, suspended between two places which hold two separate meanings. No, I can't work if I have to gaze in two opposite directions. Much of me wants to: in many ways I've cast off from Here - A Secret Alchemy - and want to get There and settle down. But there's a lot to do still, Here, and I want to do it properly, because I've lived here too long to ride off without a backward glance. William and Mary will have to wait.

Not exactly simple

The proofs of A Secret Alchemy have arrived but, come hell or high water, Thursday is PhD day so I haven't looked at them properly yet. It will be interesting to go through them, because it must be a couple of months since I've looked at the actual text, which is probably the longest gap since I started writing it. For the commentary on it that I'm writing for my PhD, I'm in the odd position of noticing things as a student of literature that I never noticed when I was writing it. But for proof checking I need a completely different mindset: a cold, uninvolved eye that notices typos (increasingly rare thanks to spell-checkers), but also a mind making slightly more sense of it all, so that I see literals (not rare at all because spell-checkers are blind to homophones and textual idiocies) and slips of typography - the italics that bleed on even when the quoted letter is done, the missing squiggle between two voices - that only I will recognise. Now that teaching and marking at Goldsmiths is done with, it's all less panic-stricken, but I still found myself noticing with slightly wary interest just how many different elements make up a week of the writing life:

• sandwich lunch tomorrow to advise aspiring-writer-friend of acquaintance
• giving back essays with appropriate helpful (if also admonitory) comments
• Phd commentary - another 2,000 words today about parallel narrative in A Secret Alchemy
• checking proofs of A Secret Alchemy - a day's work at least
• reading the current research book for the new, nameless novel - not much more to read
• a flurry of emails about the design of the cover for A Secret Alchemy, including me digging out and sending some links to images Headline and the designer (the same as for The Mathematics of Love - hooray!) might not have already
• reading fiction for the Phd commentary: at the moment According to Queenie by Beryl Bainbridge, Arthur and George by Julian Barnes and The Stone Virgin by Barry Unsworth
• researching lit. crit. books for the issues I want to discuss in the PhD commentary. Anyone know if there's any discussion of parallel narrative as a form, or shall I have to plough my way through thousands of irrelevant papers about books which happen to have parallel narratives, in search of the odd paragraph or sentence?
• ditto historical fiction which includes real historical characters
• returning some shockingly overdue books which were research for the new novel to the Goldsmiths library and paying the fine
• going to the London Library to borrow the same and some others because they don't charge fines and have a far bigger collection
• resisting the super-tempting next research book for the new novel
• thinking hard about whether to apply for the vacancy the Open University has announced for online lecturers in creative writing: would it be valuable experience and money, or The Last Straw?
• find scissors to cut a non-fiction review out of the TLS which is relevant to the new novel and put cutting in that folder
• obsessive checking of email to see if the final cover's for A Secret Alchemy has come through
• obsessive checking of email to see if my US editor has sent the notes she's working on
• obsessive checking of email to see if Radio Four producer has sent list of topics we discussed for short programme
• fossicking with PayPal because they've demanded half a dozen kinds of authentication to comply (they say) with money laundering regulations. I only set the darned thing up because it seemed the best way of dealing with payments for editorial reports. I wish I hadn't bothered but stuck to cheques instead
• suppressing ideas (prompted by fellow writer's agonies over Second Novel Syndrome) about the book on creative writing which I want to write
• ditto the book on historical fiction I want to write
• ditto the panic that after the new novel, I might never have another novel to write again. I know perfectly well that as soon as I enter the doldrums of that one - about half-way into the first draft - something new and sparkly and much more fun will begin to clamour. But at the moment it's a blank
• writing another blog post

And that's before I've done the laundry, cooked the supper, gone to the supermarket, checked if it's true that the car needs to have its MOT done, acknowledged the children's existence, and ignored the fact that the house has subsidence and the lawn needs mowing.

No, I'm not complaining. It was much less fun being unpublished. But it's not exactly simple either.

Not reading -

- to follow on from Not writing

   

though while I was away a bit of Talking about The Mathematics of Love, A Secret Alchemy, and writing in general was posted on Vulpes Libris

The working kitchen and the critic

Do you remember the story about the woman who was stunned to discover that she'd been talking prose all her life? I'm feeling a bit like that. This morning I knuckled down to my PhD, which today meant trying to collect together and make sense of as many taxonomies of historical fiction as I can find. How do you define hist fic, from Scott and the predecessors he denied, to now? What are the different kinds? Is it different if you have real historical characters in it, about whom the reader might have an opinion already? Is it different if the author is trying to shed light on their own time, instead of that past time? And so on. The library books and papers from learned journals litter my desk.

There I was, interestedly but meekly making notes about Scott, Balzac, Renault, Tremain and the huge, huge row that blew up over William Styron's The Confessions of Nat Turner, and trying not to get self-conscious about the new novel. How can I hold onto my conviction that what I write is worth writing, worth someone's £7.99 and several hours of their full attention, when Henry Esmond and A Tale of Two Cities are weighed and found wanting by Avrom Fleishmann? How do 'History as pastoral' vs. 'History as drama' (Harry E. Shaw) fit with fiction which 'invents a past,' vs. that which 'disguises a documented past'? (Joseph W. Turner). Should I be worrying about where the new novel - which has a form and a soul, though not yet a name - fits in these taxonomies? Too often it seems books are judged by how neatly they fit a theoretical structure, not the other way round. I'll forgive any academic who actually acknowledges, as Turner does, that, 'We should be wary... about confusing the value of a novel with the amount of analytical criticism that it requires, or the specifically theoretical issues that it raises.' But still, this isn't much to do with me trying to decide about tenses and first-versus-third person and voice, is it?

Working novelists are pragmatists. I don't plan and write a novel bearing in mind a critical field or recent developments in the genre, any more than I do to sell millions or win prizes. I write a novel because I have a story I can't bear not to tell, and almost all my craft and art, such as it is, goes into telling it as well as I can. Of course I enjoy the challenge of pinning down just a little of the zeitgeist of a time in history, conjuring up 'them' and 'then', as well as using that time, maybe obliquely, to say something about 'us' and 'now'. But in the end a story's a story: either the reader listens, or they wander off.

But when I get asked why I write historical fiction, once we've got past the undeniable fact that sex is more fun to write when corsets are involved, I usually find myself saying something about how I write historical fiction because history is how I see the world: it would be less natural to leave the history out. My sense of now and then always co-exist, so inevitably it creeps into my novels. And it's true that as I try to pin down that co-existence, in some way the novels change from being set in history, to being about history.

Still, that's bath-thinking, top-of-the-bus brooding, doing-the-washing-up contemplation, compared to the hands-dirty nuts and bolts of getting the words down and the plot straight (or crooked, according to genre). So you can imagine how disconcerted I was to read Turner saying this:

The best historical fiction, in my view, is ultimately about itself, about the meaning and making of history, about man's [sic] fate to live in history and his attempt to live in awareness of it.

Now that sounds much grander and more philosophical than I'll aspire to. Besides, if I worry too much about philosophy I might end up like the centipede, who walked perfectly well till someone asked him if he started with his right foot or his left. But it is encouraging to realise, after the event, that I am trying to do in a small way what other, greater writers have tried to do. Maybe all those critics sitting in their studies aren't so removed from the working kitchen of writing after all.

Any day now

Life has been full of small, perhaps ordinary things which between them seem to have shifted my horizons slightly.

First of all I dropped down to my new gym for the first time, and had a good session. It's really frightening just how unfit you can get when you're a writer. In a life where the most exercise that work gives you is going downstairs to put the kettle on, it can be really hard to persuade yourself that it's more important to go for a walk than it is to get another couple of hundred words down. But the trouble with exercise is that it's not just you who needs to get into shape, it's the exercise: it has to be the shape that fits the rest of life, and when life changes shape, what used to fit suddenly doesn't. The gym that's beyond the far end of the school run fits until you're no longer doing the school run, and the one that suits the dead afternoons when you've written yourself out by lunchtime is no good if your day is now full of work that you can do even when your brain's lightly fried. But - ah - that exercise high... I floated home, and believe me or believe me not, am shoving things aside to make a slot for the next session.

One of the products of that high has been a title and a synopsis for the new, nameless novel. My agent asked for them, and I was interested to realise that it felt possible. Usually I can't work out how to sum the novel up until it's written, and not easily then: 'What's it about?' is still the question I find hardest to answer, whether it's for an interested friend or a radio host. And usually I wait for a title to emerge as I write, only sometimes of course it doesn't. By the time I realise that, the dull working title has stuck and I can't think of any thing more. (For the same reason my children had many a soft toy who never got further than 'Bear' or 'Rabbit'). But I have planned this new novel - in pencil, admittedly - and I do know what I think happens. With earlier novels I resisted telling anyone, whereas now I'm happy to tell my agent, though I shan't be posting the synopsis publicly any time soon. I'm surprised that I am happy to do so, though. Perhaps it's because, while you could call The Mathematics of Love a double concerto, and A Secret Alchemy a triple one, and most of the time I didn't know where the soloists would go next, the new novel which is still publicly nameless is more of a chamber opera: in my head it looks a bit like one of those models of an atom, with all the electrons orbiting round a central point, their paths intricately interwoven.

Then it was the last teaching day at Goldsmiths, and a definite sense of demob-happiness in the corridors, though I still have a pile of essays to mark. Not only is it the holidays, in that sense if no other, but I've decided not to teach the literature seminars next year. It's time to concentrate on the PhD and get it finished, on editorial reports, on the new writing-mentoring scheme that a novelist friend is setting up, on the production process for A Secret Alchemy here, and with a time delay like a satellite connection, the same in the US... and there's the little matter of Easter eggs to buy, and my cameras to dig out and dust off, because I'm going on a photography course.

But above all there's the new novel. I feared that writing a synopsis would put me off, because it's very much biased towards the bones of the plot rather than the interweaving of all the elements which the actual novel will be. If the success of a novel isn't in what the author does but how they do it, synopses are still crudely about what they're doing: in that way they say everything and nothing, and are terrifying in how they can make your work seem the merest formulaic rubbish. But not this time: at some moments I want to write it so badly that everything else in front of me is slightly faded-looking. I dare say my desire won't last. When I get down to it the material will be a lot more recalcitrant, I'll do more research and discover that my most brilliant idea founders on stagecoach timetables or gender roles, and so on. But it's a long time since I started a novel, and just now I feel as excited as a child setting off to go round the world: any day now I'll look down and see the gap appearing between the ship and the land, and know that we're off.

Bodies crying out

My new novel arrived today.

It fell in a lump into my mental lap, rather as I imagine telepathy would happen if it did, just as I was scooting round a particularly tricky little pair of mini-roundabouts by Brockley Station. (My fellow south east Londoners know exactly where I mean.) I was on my way to Goldsmiths to lead a seminar, and my students were very tolerant of how long it took me to wrench my mind away from the new novel towards John Donne and Allen Ginsburg.

Of course it's not really a hand-me-down from the Muse, though I do see why it's so often describe in those terms. I've been letting myself think about all the different bits properly but undirectedly, open-endedly, un-demandingly, in the gaps of the rest of life, for about six months now or even a year, ever since I began to see the light at the end of A Secret Alchemy. (Maybe when it comes to writing novels I'm just naturally adulterous.) Sometimes I've decided to think about it, even to sitting down with pen and paper for notes and diagrams, and sometimes the reverse happens: it decides to borrow my brain to work itself out. This can result in my buying all the wrong things in the supermarket, but is basically A Good Thing.

Whereas with The Mathematics of Love I had a longstanding character - Stephen - who needed to tell his story, and with A Secret Alchemy I have two real people whose story is irresistible, the new novel has come from something I want to explore... embody... anatomise. An idea at the core of humanness, which I want to gut. If that sounds a bit physical, maybe that's right: novels are physical things, or they are when I write them. They're about bodies: touches, looks, eyes and ears, wounds and scars, passionate sex and off-balance love, the electric charge across your skin when a particular person looks at you, the pain of an old battle injury which is also an unfathomable kind of guilt. 'Theme' is too abstract a word for fiction - it belongs to the absolute abstraction of music - and for some reason I'm allergic to using it about my writing. For me writing is all about embodying ideas in real, exact, detailed, particular existence. I find I think more in terms of not themes but threads: from dark to brilliant light, from smooth silk to lumpy twine, from coarse hemp to fine cotton to fragile spider's web. And there are other threads too, of plot, of voice, of 'now' and of 'then', of love and hate and indifference, of all the material things which embody so much more than material existence.

I've known the actors of my drama for a while, though I don't yet know them as what writers commonly call characters, and I've known which voices will tell their story and on what terms since Sunday: that's another thing which suddenly arrived after weeks of not-really-thinking about it. What came to me today is the basics of plot and structure: the mainspring which will power the interaction of events and relationships which is a novel. All I want to do now is submerge, to plan, to write the first sentence knowing the rest will follow.

But I can't. There's the commentary on A Secret Alchemy for my PhD to finish, manuscript reports to write, seminars to prepare, essays to mark, clothes to wash, children to feed, a Mother's Day card to buy. Until now, I could just let the new novel do as it wanted, think or be thought, speak or be silent. Now it's not silent, it's crying out.