I started writing my current novel - Rictangular Lenses - in early September 2016. There have been year-long gaps to the point where you might have thought I'd lost interest altogether. Brother Sir Hugh pointed out I started learning to sing the same year (early January) and there is no doubt I was absorbed by this new turning-point in my life. On the other hand I've been writing fiction since I was 11, the year 1946. Do the forties have any resonance for anyone who reads Tone Deaf?
I may not have written RL continuously but its existence nagged at me. In Lindsay I'd created the toughest of all the women who dominate my other four novels. She gives men hell and I've loved devising these torments; perhaps, deep down, I'm an unrevealed masochist. There was no way I'd let her drop into oblivion.
During the last six months I've resumed writing RL and I'm up to 75,181 words. For those who can't envisage what that means, an average medium-length novel probably tops out at about 100,000 words.
But here's a thing: creating RL has stretched over a decade and there's no doubt - even discounting learning to sing - during that period I've changed as a person and, thereby, as an author. I'm not sure I ever knew how RL would end but I've just completed a totally unexpected conversation between Lindsay and a concert pianist which must surely change the plot in a big way. How? I'm not sure. But then I'm kind of sure.
Am I being irritating? Cast your mind over the biographies of all the novel writers you've read: many have been downright peculiar, some close to criminal. It's not a job for healthy minds
Forties are never gonna resonate for me. Born in ‘54 and I’m 100% sure I don’t have another quarter century in me. Here in the U.S. we are now wishing the present would resonate less, though your jailing Andy warms our hearts. Write on.
ReplyDeleteMikeM: I was well aware that you hadn't lived through the forties, I only wondered whether there'd been family conversation about the war period as you were a child. For Brits the after-effects of war lingered on into the mid-fifties, reaching some sort of climax when bread (which had remained unrationed during the war) was rationed in peacetime! Hard to take. When I started work in 1951 the sub-editors required me (as a tea boy) to go out and get them cigarettes but finding the well-known brands (Players, Senior Service, etc) was a real bastard. The only brand that was readily available was Pasha and only the heavily addicted were prepared to smoke those.
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