Irises, art and Jeanette Winterson

Truth to tell, I've found it hard to get back to the work in progress since my work frenzy before the Easter break. I've opened up the files, tinkered around a bit, and then closed them up again. Sometimes that's the way it goes, and I try to see the positive in that, because what happens is that it gets handed over to the sub-conscious, or the creative part of the mind, or whatever you want to call the magic of writing. For the past week I haven't been able to write much, not even a blog post, but I have had two important ideas for the next novel that have made me reassess what I have done so far and will improve it immeasurably.

For me, the way this re-firing works is that I give myself time to wander around, observing what's all around and making connections. I take my camera everywhere. I frame shots and then reframe by enlarging and cropping the images. All the while I'm looking and thinking. These irises at the northern edge of our garden, for example. You can't be in the South of France and not connect them to Van Gogh's irises. If you look very closely, especially in the centre-right part of my photo, you can even see the same speckle of yellow weed in the field behind as in his painting.

 

This looking for detail is what Eve did, in The Lantern, and it's a way of digging in deeper, becoming aware of the interlocking of times past and the present. It's also about experience, description and interpretation, and all the points between that artists and writers have in common. And then there's reading. I read a great deal anyway, but even more when I'm not working. You simply can't be a writer if you're not a reader in the first place.

 

Jeanette Winterson is a brave and brilliant writer who looks deep and makes every word count, and at the end of her novel Lighthousekeeping I found an interview with her in which she perfectly expresses how I feel about the way novels can explore the wild uproar of life while offering the security and order to be found in connections and patterns.

 

"Storytelling is a way of establishing connections, imaginative connections for ourselves, a way of joining up disparate material and making sense of the world. (...) I think that art is one way of discovering a genuine and unforced pattern in our lives and in the world around us and that's why writing can never be formulaic: it can never be done according to plan because it arises from a deeper part of the self which I think is less neurotic than the conscious mind and less afraid of not immediately having a shape to put on every new situation. (...) Nothing in the story ever quite works out in the way you imagine it will: there are always surprises, there are always twists and turns."

 

"...doing things slowly and doing things well - finding time for your friends, cooking properly, reading, going for walks, playing - all of the things which apparently yield no results. You don't make money that way and you don't get on in life that way, but what you get is something much more important. You get space for your mind. We don't have a lot of that and, of course, you can't believe in art in the way that I do and not believe that people need space for the mind, to slow down and to find time."

 

And as a final illustration of the point, here are the same irises, photographed from a different angle, with the setting sun in the west. A completely different set of plants, you might think, but no. Just the way the light has struck them.

 

A writing update

 

"So how's the book going?" friends ask when I emerge from my study, and I'm never sure how much they really want to know. They probably could do without the re-enactment of the knotty plot crisis in section two, which involved pacing up and down the kitchen while stabbing a biro into my own head. An account of 'flu survival while being unable to work for two weeks will probably suffice. They can be spared details of the cold sweats and near delirium after the phone call from my editor in New York who only asked some basic, logical questions.

 

But one of the attractions of writers' blogs, whether reading or writing them, is that there is a core of honesty. Otherwise, why would you bother doing either, right? I find it interesting to know how the process works for other writers, how fast they work, what interventions and constraints there are in producing a new novel. Sometimes, there's an element of reassurance. There's a useful sense of how long it takes from first idea to finished book.

 

So, for those who are interested in such matters, here's how it's going. I had an end of March deadline to deliver the first draft of the book I've been writing since September, incorporating a novella I wrote earlier in the year - delivery to my literary agents in the first instance; delivery to publishers was fixed for the end of June. I am extremely lucky to have two literary agents these days, one in New York and one in London. It's quite the dream team.

 

I sent the manuscript in mid-March and enjoyed my freedom, not expecting to hear anything until a few weeks after Easter. Over lunch in London in mid-April with both my agents Stephanie and Araminta (who are great friends and colleagues) I was given the great news that they thought the first draft was good enough to go straight to the publishers on both sides of the Atlantic. Hurray, champagne all round - we were ahead of schedule by two and a half months!

 

Perhaps it was partly relief after all the intense work that brought me down with the 'flu, perhaps it was the busy social time the following week. At any rate, I was knocked out for a fortnight and came round to find that editorial work was already starting. When the call came from my editor at HarperCollins in New York, my brain was so foggy I couldn't even remember the names of my own characters. A few days of panic ensued, during which I had to take a long hard look at the nuts of bolts of my plot - marvelling at my editor's laser focus on the crucial issues. (It's astonishing how the asking of a very simple question can open up weaknesses.)

 

I'm feeling much better now, in all senses. The editorial process has begun, while waiting for more notes from the UK publishers, Orion. I'll keep you posted.