A tree-mendously merry Christmas!!

December 18th, 2011

Hello there. Terribly sorry it’s been so long, but I’ve been attempting to write a novel over these last 7 weeks amidst a Sisyphean cycle of household illness. Nonetheless, the battle has been victorious – I have finished the first draft of my new novel, which I’m currently calling THE SCATTERING. I have yet to send it to my agent and editor, and as such am hoping they like it as much as I do.

This novel is a reworking of a previous novel I wrote way back in 2008 when I was on maternity leave with my son. I had two children under the age of 18 months and I suddenly understood the importance of my relationship with my mother-in-law. I relied on her desperately to look after my little ones when I needed a nap, or when I needed to write – a need that kicked in around 4 weeks after giving birth. So off I went, several times a week for about three hours at a time, pounding at a laptop I’d borrowed – from my mother-in-law, I might add – and writing what was my first ever novel. My practice novel, I call it, titled ‘Trial & Eire.’ Perhaps unsurprisingly, it was about the relationship between a young woman and her mother-in-law, only the wife had been widowed, and the mother-in-law was resolutely odious.

I plodded on at the novel for about 5 months without any plan of where it was going, bumping into characters as I went, following my main character and antagonist around and generally enjoying their antics. At the end of it, I had 100,000 words of tangled fragments of something I felt was generally unsatisfactory. I sent off the first 50 pages to a couple of independent publishers, both of which pressed me to send them the rest of the novel, but I felt there was no real novel. There was just a jumbled collection of notes. And of course, when the idea for The Guardian Angel’s Journal struck in May 2009, ‘Trial & Eire’ was plonked in a bottom drawer.

Interestingly enough, I had intended T&E to stay in the bottom drawer for keeps. I really believed it was unfixable, too chaotic to rework. But roll forward a few of years, and my mother-in-law – who read the first draft of the book and absolutely loved it – is still harping on at me to finish it. She goes on about it so much – and to everyone who will listen – that I roll my eyes when she brings it up and wish she’d forget about it. It was a practice novel, I tell her. It was 100,000 words of cutting my teeth, so to speak. But the voices of the widow and her mother-in-law never left me. Their characters were so strong that I felt I knew them, and – weird as it sounds – I started to miss them. So when NaNoWriMo rolled around this year, I had a think about what I could do to fix T&E. After all, I had deemed it unfixable. I returned to the previous draft and, with a gap of over 3 years and 2 other completed novels by which to glean a different perspective, began to see the wood for the trees. I saw where I had gone wrong as clear as day – I had taken the premise and smothered it with too much other stuff. Too many characters, too many plots. Too much happening and not enough focus on the central idea, the relationship between the widow and her mother-in-law. I think I had lacked the confidence to develop this relationship, believing instead that I had to pepper the story with a myriad of plotlines worthy of Eastenders. It’s interesting to look back on early material like this – I wonder how many budding writers receive countless rejection letters because their novel suffers from the same flaw.

THE SCATTERING is a work I’m happy with because it does what T&E did not – it explores my characters, mines their relationship for the plot instead of circulating a plot around the characters. Revisiting my characters was just fabulous – once I worked out what was going to happen at the end I just let them get on with it. At one point we all ended up in Dresden – not literally, of course – and it was so surprising and intriguing to write in this way, to create a flexible plot structure that retained my focus on the outcome but allowed the characters to develop organically.

But had anyone told me a year ago that I would rewrite T&E, I would have told them – absolutely not. Don’t you know that book’s unfixable? How many unfinished drafts do YOU have that you think are unfixable? Unfixable, really? I wonder.
Merry Christmas!! I hope it’s your best one yet. x

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