Peach

The whole 'pen to paper' game feels odd at the moment. I've spent three years working on The Only Children and it's now ready to be sent to agents and anyone else who'd care to read it. The agony and the uncertainty have resulted in 60,000 pretty coherent words. I'm trying to decide what to write next but I'm also making an attempt to deconstruct - and hopefully, understand - the process which has gripped most of my free time for the last thirty-six months or so.

In the beginning was the idea. A moment of clarity that invaded my thoughts when I was sitting on a train speeding away from Waterloo. Sorry if this sounds pseud-y, but in that precise instant, in that one split-second, the idea was a thing of beauty. Pristine, untouched and completely new. Then I had to bring it into the real world, at which point everything went downhill.

Or perhaps I'm being too harsh on myself? After all, the original idea has remained intact. Yes, several aspects of the story have been changed along the way: my main character, Pauline, has gone from having three kids to one; on a few occasions, she had to fight her husband Martin to be the book's narrator; for quite a while, she wasn't even called Pauline. But central to all the alterations and amendments was the understanding that the basic premise had to be respected. And it has been.

The first year saw the least writing. In fact, the first few months saw almost no writing at all, just tons of endless scribbling. Ideas were jotted down. Characters were proposed and rejected. Crucial plot points were worked out, ditched as unfeasible, then retrieved from the bin. At least two anonymous blogs were set up (oh yes they were!), written from Pauline's point of view. One of 'her' posts even got a touching response from a random blog-surfer. But although I can now look back and see that all these activities were important parts of the whole process, at the time, I thought I was doing nothing at all. Just shutting myself in my room night after night, getting the ear plugs out and staring at an empty page for hours.

Year Two got me to a Beginning, a Middle and an End: the novel's 'beats' were worked out and mapped in a sort of non-pictorial storyboard. Again, the quantity of writing being produced was by no means monumental, but then I was also devoting considerable time to research. Books on all sorts of topics arrived in brown Amazon parcels: architecture, particularly that of churches and places of worship; Sudden Infant Death Syndrome; sleepwalking; the roles and functions of a coroner; Motor Neurone Disease. As it happens, the results of all this bookworming are not overtly discernible in the final novel, but I guess they're there in the background, hovering with just enough visibility to make the characters' motivations and situations credible.

And then there was the final year, when all possible avenues of distraction turned into dead ends bearing a simple sign: "Write." There was nothing else for it: I had to keep the keys tapping and the ink flowing. By the beginning of May the first draft was complete. Then came more research, some of which threatened - but, mercifully, failed - to shatter every single joint in the plot's backbone. The Divine L made many useful comments, all of which influenced the second draft. And then came the home stretch, the final, eight-week marathon which probably saw me writing (or rewriting) as many words as I'd produced in the preceding thirty-four months. All notions of 'free time' were abandoned. Communication with the outside world was reduced to a minimum. And then, one evening, just a few weeks ago, it came: the moment when I was able to sit back, take a deep breath and click on Print.

If The Only Children has got a future - and initial reactions from people suggest it definitely has - then I realise it's still got to travel some distance to get there. But I suppose it's now going to take on a life of its own, whereas I've got to swing all the way back to the beginning to find another idea to which to devote a little chunk of my being. I recently read an editorial piece which suggested that almost all writers produce their best work in their 30s; once they hit 40, their output becomes lukewarm. I'm not sure that's entirely true, but it may explain why I've frantically taken to jotting down any little half-thought or dim vision which pops into my mind: a scrap of dialogue; a telling scene; an intriguing character trait. Hopefully one of them will grow into something more substantial. And then the whole cycle will begin all over again, although I doubt it'll be any easier than the first time.

Comments

Tom Jackson said…
"and to anyone else who would care to read it" --
Do you really mean that, Dariush?
Because, if you do, I would very much like to join the queue.
Congrats on finishing the Herculean task.
It was my browsing in Facebook this afternoon that took me to your website and this splendid news.
Greetings from the Canaries to the Divine L and to your good self,
from the definitely mortal T and A
Blogger said…
Thanks very much for the comment, Tom. And rest assured, your name is very high on the list of people to whom I'd like to send the book.

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