Before I wrote a novel, I think I had this idea in my mind that literary output is created in a singular, unchanging moment in the author’s life. I don’t mean this in the sense that I thought any literary works were necessarily created quickly, but rather that the work is a reflection of the author’s exact self in a single exact period. That is, one coherent self wrote the work in question. One consistent being.
This wasn’t some reasoned position but rather an unconscious assumption. When I started seriously working on my novel, I realised that it wasn’t the case at all. Novels, it turns out, are long, and you have to keep living while you’re writing them. In my case, I was going through one of the most turbulent periods of my life, both personally and professionally, in the three years it took me to get from the very first idea to typing THE END. So I did change, a huge amount. I look at who I was when I first started and, more than anything else, I feel grateful to her for pushing ahead with such a significant project in spite of everything that was happening.
When I realised that my novel would never come from a singular authorial point of view, I moved past the anxiety of this and into a deeper understanding of what a novel is. And I realised that my productivity in writing short stories and poems, compared with my inability to complete a novel, came from my constant efforts to outrun my inner critic. In those days she was a great deal crueler and more destructive, and would burn a poem as soon as look at it. So I’d write it so quickly that she couldn’t get to me before I was finished. I’ve had to train her to treat me and my work a lot better in order to come to the end of writing a novel without destroying everything.
I still have that urge to destroy. After a long period of nothing but rejection from agents, competitions, fellowships and the like, I had some pretty severe ideas for edits on the manuscript. I think I’ve been quite effectively talked out of them. But the interesting thing is that I’ve come back, consciously, to the aforementioned unconscious assumption I used to have about literary output coming from a single coherent self. I think, perhaps, it’s more true than I thought, or true in a different way. You see, I could spend my whole life rewriting this novel to reflect my current tastes and interests and abilities. Or I could let it be what it is, a reflection of who I was and what I needed to think about and write in those three years. I’m grateful to be out of them, but I don’t want to lose what needed to be expressed.
It’s been a while since I posted here, mainly because it’s been a tough winter, dark and cold and wet, and I’ve been so tired, working hard for little money and getting more bad news than good. But I’ve kept reading, and thinking, and very much want to get back to my process of thinking and writing about what I’m reading. I loved The Great Believers and Sleep and I’m currently enjoying August Blue. I watched and thought a great deal about the film adaptation of H is for Hawk - many thoughts on my discomfort on the history of falconry metaphors forthcoming! And despite being ankle deep in mud and covered in rain today I did see the tiny leaf buds on a little tree and found myself hoping that the worst is over.
