This week I have been doing two things 1) in the mornings, I’ve been working through the scene sheets I have created and writing / revising my novel scene by scene 2) in the afternoons, small boy allowing, I’ve been creating a paperback version of one of my books about writing. In other words, I’ve got into a habit. I’ve been turning up. I’ve talked about the scene sheets before, so there is nothing new to report. Habit forming is going well.
Instead, I want to tell you the story of how I wrote my first novel, The Water’s Edge. At first, I thought I was a poet, but I was down by the lake at UEA, aged 19, a first-year undergraduate, and was dark, and I started writing across the page because I couldn’t see what I was doing. When I got back to my room in Waverly Terrace, I figured I had been writing prose.
The Water’s Edge started out as a monologue I wrote for a mock exam at UEA when I was a second-year undergraduate. One of the prompts on the exam paper was ‘Returning’ and I had no idea what to write. I sat on a swing on Dereham Road in Norwich, near where I lived, and suddenly imagined Persephone spiraling up out of the ground like a goddess-shaped drill.
In the finished monologue, I played Persephone just back from Hades at her welcome home party. I had the words inside a copy of Just Seventeen. It was 1993. John Major had been in power for a year, we were mid-recession, I didn’t even have an email address, let alone an internet connection, no money, a job washing up in the Co-op café in Norwich, and I had no idea how I would get a job when I graduated, or what I would do.
In the midst of all this, I sat on the floor of my room on Dereham road, bits of paper scattered around me, and decided to turn my play into a modern version of the Persephone story – again I had no idea how I was going to do it, but I decided to do it anyway, knowing it was imperfect, and missing elements of I didn’t know what. I wrote loads, often by hand, in scruffy handwriting only I could understand. Poetic descriptions of Demeter dancing, for instance, the smell of autumn, bonfires, that kind of thing. I now know this as ‘freewriting’ but didn’t at the time – it felt compulsive.
Now I know that this was training, that I was putting in the practice and ‘turning up’, inexpertly, imperfectly, chaotically, utterly lacking in confidence one minute (and trying to create a new lesbian feminist language the next!!) The training I was doing took time, but it was also the most perfect kind of training I could have done. It has led to a confidence in drafting: getting words down on the page so I can craft them later. The younger me didn’t know it, but I was learning about habit. It was a bit like I was trying to bake a cake but had to experiment first to work out what the ingredients were and what the cake would look like in the end. Habit is a vital first ingredient.
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