Maiden Post

So the purpose of this is to record how I'm getting on with my novel, called Dangerous Ideas from the Wood.  I suppose I ought to say a little about my motivation and what I've done so far.  I've got those jitters in my stomach, do you know?  This is really important to me.  OK, let's begin.

I want to write something that is worth reading.  I've been writing all my life, but up until now most of what I've done has been kind of derivative and juvenile.  A couple of years ago I was working on something called The Hardanger Fiddle, about a deal with the devil during the second world war that came out in flashbacks from an old people's home.  It was pretty much a tangential way of dealing with my grandfather's death.  But it was the first thing I wrote that I felt had value beyond the act of writing itself.  It was flawed and rough around the edges, but I felt it was a step up.  Then I got sidetracked into a science fiction thing which ended up as a horrible mess of spreadsheets: not the way to write a story.

And then I stumbled into the formula for these Dangerous Ideas from the Woods.  It came in fits and starts (the earliest sketch I have which is identifiably DIftW is older than The Hardanger Fiddle), and I've played with the shape of it and gone down many false avenues stretching the thing beyond breaking point.  Now I can sit down, select the Dangerous Ideas writing mode and go.  That doesn't mean I'm not going to continually question the limits and rules I've set out, but it is liberating to have boundaries.

I don't like giving things names.  If Alfred and Constance fall in love, that story is forever trapped in pre-war Britain (that's what those names conjure up for me, anyway).  But if two people fall in love, you've got a beautiful timeless comment on what it is to be human.  The Orcadian author George Mackay Brown (a hero of mine) uses the same characters in all of his work.  Sometimes he gives them different names, and sometimes he reuses names between books, but they're always the same.  How many times has he written of the beach-comber who lives at the edge of society?  This is not a weakness, it is a strength.  Mackay Brown's palette seems empirical and objective.  Through limiting himself in this way, he allows the important things he has to say, the things about time and permanence and people, to shine in the true brilliance of their simplicity and beauty.

What of the work at hand?  I have 30,000 words (not a great deal) of short stories written, about one third of which are destined only for the bin.  The trouble with short stories is that they don't sell.  "Oh, it's only short stories, he doesn't have the commitment or skill to write a novel."  This is unfair, but it is the perception of the book-reading public; I've thought it myself standing in bookshops.  So I'm going to use these short stories as sketches for a larger work.  About half of what I have already done could be bridged and abutted together one after another to form a continuous narrative, but I want to do something more sophisticated than that.  I want to have several strands going through the book, each exemplified by a different token tree.  So far I have written mostly of the characters surrounding the family who live in the glade of maples.  I have written about all I plan to about the three daughters of the glade of willows, although this work is of a moderate standard and needs a heavy edit.  I have just begun writing about the House of Cornus (dogwood), which is influenced by Arthurian ideas, and can be about King Arthur if you want it to be (in the end, kingship is kingship).  I want each of the strands and more to twist through each other in the finished work.  They will all come together at the cataclysmic climax, which I have already sketched out.

One final short thing.  My goal is not to write a novel, that is not sufficient.  Nor is it my goal to "be a writer," whatever that lifestyle description means.  My goal is to write a good novel.  I imagine it will take time, but I set this now as my single focus besides the inescapable duties of looking after myself and those around me.  If I come to the end of this with what I consider to be a good novel in my hands, I will be satisfied.  It would be a great waste if nobody read it, but that cannot be my purpose.