Writing or Not Writing
Firstly an invitation:
I’d love you to join me on Wed, August 30th, 7pm-8pm when I'll be talking about The Silent Women and Creating the World of the Novel. Tickets are available on Eventbrite, and its free! (link to tickets below) Here is the blurb…
“I think that the joy of world building in fiction is honestly the joy of getting to play God. Because as an author, you get to build the world.” - Neil Gaiman
How do writers create their fictional world, its landscapes, both interior and exterior, its characters and tone, as well as its preoccupations and themes? Join us to hear Avril Joy, author of, The Silent Women, talk about bringing the Victorian world of Long Meadow Asylum to life and how she represents the women incarcerated there.
Praise for The Silent Women:
a truly captivating novel –unputdownable! A skillful portrayal of the human condition and a triumph of storytelling. - Anna Barker
Joy writes exquisitely about people and places... her novel contrasts the gothic horrors of the asylum with the beauty of the outside world. - Ali Bacon
If you would like to read The Silent Women, you can buy your copy HERE
Now to life and writing or not writing:
I am rather like the weather, in a state of indecision, blowing alternatively hot and cold, with wind and showers. I drift between considering beginning a new novel, dare I consider another so soon, when The Silent Women is still a newborn, barely out in the world? Why not have a rest? Indeed, why not? Here, I'm forced to admit that I'm not good at resting, and I do not like days in which I feel nothing has been achieved. I am horribly driven, which is both a curse and a blessing. But it feels too soon I think, so if not a novel then perhaps the memoir. Don't I always turn to it when I'm in between projects?
My black envelope file, marked Memoir, lies ready on my desk, it's full of fragments, longer pieces, poems and notes. Alongside it lie two notebooks with similar content. I begin to frame up a structure in my mind. I see how it might look. I have a working title, You, Me and Vermeer. I have books about Vermeer at the ready. I'm thinking hybrid, a memoir about my mother and myself, framed by how I fell in love with Vermeer, and with Art History, because that will challenge me and I always need a challenge.
Then the devilish indecision strikes and in my large current notebook I find myself re-visiting the first page of a novel (its only about 5 pages long, so far) that I wrote some time ago about a woman painter in seventeenth century Delft. I prevaricate. I download Laura Cumming's, Thuderclap, which takes the dramatic 1654 explosions in Delft that killed the painter Carel Fabritius, as its starting point–as it happens exactly when my novel begins–to explore Dutch Art and culture and her relationship with her father who was also a painter. I begin reading, so far I am full of admiration. It is beautifully written and unlike so many books about Art totally accessible and firmly connected to life as we live it, the world as we observe it. It is also totally different from anything I might write. Always a good thing.
Over the weekend I sleep a lot, very unusual for me but I feel depleted and my body aches. I seem to have caught another cold! I think about my options a lot. I know that it's not the best time to make a decision, and that I need to trust that the answer will arrive. It might be that I will write both, in which case, it’s a matter only of which first. But it might be - and here's an exciting thought - that I write something entirely different, that a new idea presents itself.
In the absence of writing, I read. I read what I think will be my Booker list favourite - Sebastian Barry's, Old God's Time. It's dark, difficult to take perhaps, though I am familiar with its themes. The prose is luscious, energetic, expansive - I love the way it’s written, but more than that I love that it's important. That he writes of things that need to be said and that his protagonist is 70. Yes, I like that too!
I get away from the desk, the books, the notebooks, on a gentle outing with a friend to Teesdale, where we eat scones, drink coffee then take a slow walk with her dog, Willow, examining the grass microscopically for wildflowers. I meet autumn gentian for the first time.
We sit on a bench and look out over the hills and moorland to where the heather is turning to purple and I vow inwardly, when I'm feeling more energetic to get out walking into the space that lies on my doorstep, as I know for fact that it will clear my thinking. Walking is good for solving problems and putting life into perspective, and who knows, that new idea just may pop unannounced into my head just when I'm not really thinking about it.
In the meantime I am minded to return to my Five Things Essay, which is about showing up, making an appointment with writing, coming to the page without preconception to list five things you have observed or are thinking about in the real world. Worries and, 'to do,' lists are banned.
Make a list of five things, writing a line or a few lines on each. When you come back to them later, they may stand alone, or you may see a connection, they may go on to gather steam and become an essay or a story...
Who knows they may become the start of the novel.
My Five Things for Tuesday
Donald Trump has been indicted and my Twitter feed is full of his supporters crying 'witch hunt.' So many voices, so much opinion, so little fact.
My parcel of books arrives, each with its new cover. I think, Sometimes a River Song has the cover it deserves.
The grasses in the fields by the river are as long as they were when my daughter Katie got married. The day before the wedding we picked huge bunches to decorate the church.
On my iPad a picture of the Red Fort in Agra, from Treasures of the Indus (BBC) which I was watching last night.
I have bang bang noodle salad in the fridge for lunch.
Thanks for reading
Avril x
Solvitur ambulando! And such extraordinary countryside to do it in too. x