Day 18

Three cock pheasants fighting at the edge of the woods beyond my door. They leap at one another then wander about quite contentedly, so I assume it's a mock fight. Meanwhile I'm thinking about men being slaughtered by machine guns and torn apart by shrapnel.

There's a poignant memorial at a cemetery, once a trench, near Fricourt: 'The Devonshires held this trench. The Devonshires hold it still.'

Half the World

Villa Hellebosch, my home for the next month, is peaceful, comfortable, charming. And - most important - it really does deliver time and space for an undivided focus on writing.

After a week of rushing around the world (not to mention the excess of pre-departure rushing that rushing around the world requires) it comes not a moment too soon.
My journey included three beautiful days at Lake Cavanaugh, Washington State, two brisk nights in Yorkshire, and three glorious, culture-laden days in Paris where I walked my feet to blisters and gobbled up an excess of art and music. Musee d'Orsay is definitely on the list for a return visit, while concerts in the city's lovely old churches, including the tiny and sublime Sainte Chapelle, proved the find of the trip and may be compulsory hereafter.
On Sunday evening Europe's efficient rail system delivered me to Brussels and thence on to Vollezele, and here I sit, dividing my time between the laptop and the view, and discovering that the novel I thought I was coming here to write has been taken over by another. So be it.

Today has been warm (19 degrees), the sun bright, though it now falls in lengthening shadows, the wind busy with twisting drifts of golden leaves. Windfall apples hide in the grass and the fields alternate between corn stubble and flowering mustard and freshly turned earth. TheVilla's woods smell of leafmast and wild mushrooms.
I am privileged to be here, to have this time and this place, to be writing 10 hours a day. I may not want to leave.

In praise of writing residencies

Last week my hard drive died, suddenly and inexplicably, leaving gaping holes in my backed up data. Turns out you don't know what you're missing as soon as you're missing it. It sneaks up on you kind of slow.
But it was a good week too. I was awarded a writing residency in Belgium. Dedicated writing time, no interruptions, no other demands on my time - it's hard to imagine but, I suspect, easy to experience.

Passa Porta International House of Literature is an international organisation based in Brussels. They have an apartment for writers in Brussels and two more in Flanders. October will find me heading for Europe, laptop under my arm, to focus on the new novel. (I'm hoping to have finished the current one first. For which some uninterrupted writing time would be extremely beneficial.)

Because Europe is so far away, because I don't get there very often, I'll be packing as much as I can into the time I'm away. Friends, agents, publishers, festivals, book fairs and research will be squeezed around the edges of the residency. Right now it feels kind of unreal: the first flush of excitement has worn off, the list of jobs that have to be done first is mounting. But still I catch myself, now and then, thinking: Nothing but time to write. No interruptions, no family, no garden, no business, no housework, no teaching, no editing, no magazines, just writing. Can it get any better than that?

And I do know that, somewhere along the way, it'll sneak up on me that I'm missing some of those things. And that, too, might become a part of the novel I write.

Holiday...?

I haven't had a holiday in a year. We finally plan a week away and on Day One two things happen: first, we have a fairly hair-raising trip in a small aeroplane; second, I spend a high proportion of the time planning how to work the experience into a novel - not just in terms of the specific words I might employ, but also in mentally debating the depth of reader skepticism.
Examples: The luggage hit the roof of the plane. Really? Yes, really. 
A plastic ice cream container is not the ideal receptacle for vomit, at least, not unless you get the lid on really fast. And off again, same speed. And on again, and... you get the idea. (Which beats the reality). 
In certain circumstances it's really not a big deal to be suddenly and somewhat unexpectedly covered in someone else's vomit. Who'd have thought it? (Maybe it helps if you're related.)
But a shower and a good night's sleep later, what's really interesting is that a writer is never on holiday. Battered (and spattered) by clear air turbulence, I was writing. In my head, sure, and maybe I'll never find a place to use that material, but I was, nonetheless, busily capturing it in words. Maybe it's a coping mechanism. Maybe it's a compulsion. Maybe writers don't ever get to have holidays because you never get to leave the writing behind.

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New Release

More goes into producing a book than you might think. The writing of course; that's definitely no small feat. And 'writing' means the first draft, the second, the third; editing, reading, re-reading, re-editing. And so on.
Then once it's in the publisher's hands there's yet more editing, there are marketing discussions, there are debates about the title, about the press release, the release date, the cover. Cover design is a long and sometimes frustrating process - no doubt for the designer as well! A lot of people have input and the author is not at the top of the list. Then there's proofing and more proofing and last minute amendments and...
And then it's out of your hands. That comes as a relief, for me anyway. It leaves me free to move on, to think about the next book (usually well and truly underway by this point), to write rather than tinker. And, just occasionally, to meander to the mailbox as I wait for those advance copies to arrive.

Writing and life

Writers have a significant advantage in dealing with the darker, messier, more painful side of life. To at least some extent, everything is material you can take apart, study and reassemble; material you can later turn loose on your characters.

Yesterday afternoon, as an orthopaedic surgeon shoved a needle through the capsule of my shoulder joint, a small part of my mind – maybe ten percent, maybe less – was analysing and recording. Not just pain (note to self: they prefer to call it ‘discomfort’) but my own response, and his. The room, the equipment, the observing trainee. The other ninety plus percent was quite comprehensively occupied with ‘ow-ow-ow-ow-ow’. But that ten percent pulls you through. And here’s the thing: afterwards, there’s plenty of time to study your own observations. At 2.37 in the morning, for example, when the lignocaine wears off.

One question I found myself toying with through the small hours was the classic ‘does art emulate life or does life emulate art’. (Okay, so you don’t do your best or most imaginative thinking at 2.37am.) The answer is both, of course. But in specific terms, a few years ago I wrote a scene where a character has two very painful injections into the shoulder – bone marrow in that case, but the general feel of the thing was the same. The scene returned to my mind during the night. Comforting, really. Turns out I got it pretty much right.

In an early draft of a novel that came out in 2008 I wrote a serious car accident. When a member of my family was, not long after, involved in a tragic accident – he recovered, but it was a long haul – I down-sized the incident in the novel: too close to the bone. In that same novel the main character’s mother has a fall while carrying a glass bowl, with resultant cuts and concussion. A few months later, while helping one of my sisters move house, our mother fell, carrying a glass bowl. Shattered shards, blood, kind and professional ambulance staff. You get the idea. But at 3 in the morning you can get to wondering whether writing it makes it real (at the time my sister suggested I add a lotto win into my next book, but as I never buy lotto tickets there wouldn’t really be any point). Of course it doesn’t. You write what’s already real. Ideally after the event – because then the idea of writing it can help you get through.