Radio Ga Ga

Writing's a funny pastime.  You'd think all types (if you'll forgive the pun) of story would be the same, but it doesn't work like that.  At least, it doesn't for me.  Some come out as prose, others don't want to work that way and insist on attempting to be drama, and some are amenable enough to let me try them out in different ways.

A confession: I have had a lifelong love affair with the spoken word.  As a child I listened to my favourite stories over and over again on LP and cassette (oh, just google them, young people, I'm not going to digress now).  I spent teenage illnesses in bed listening to Journey Into Space (a repeat, I hasten to add - I'm not quite that old).  And had BBC Radio 7 (now Radio 4 Extra) not launched when it did, I'd have finished my thesis a year earlier instead of losing hours pretending to study simulation results while listening agog to Fatherland and The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, headphones clamped over my unkempt studenty hair.  Which is why, despite its stubborn refusal to turn into anything coherent, I have persisted with the Difficult Second Novel.  It may not be working as a book, went my reasoning, but perhaps it would work for radio.  Perhaps the problem was that I was trying to tell the story in the wrong way.

So I'd poke and I'd prod and I'd try to work out the casting and play it in my head and still the damn thing wouldn't come.  And then last night I pulled at the threads again after a gap of nearly a year, expecting the knots to bite harder, becoming more intractable and impossible to resolve than ever, only this time I tugged from a slightly different angle and suddenly there I was, standing in a windswept garden near midnight (I'm not being poetical, I was out in all that rotten weather) with an armful of yarn that needs knitting into a workable narrative (yeah, that was the poetic bit).  And I think it's going to be a novel after all, not a radio play.

Which is a Good Thing, of course, but I've been so set on hearing this one rather than reading it that I'll have to get it published, just so I can have it as an audiobook.  Can I have Anton Lesser reading it, please?

Probably nothing sinister

I thought that once the book was out there that would be it.  Looking for Buttons is finished, there is nothing more for me to glean.

Then this evening I realised that Fergus is left-handed.  I can't understand why I hadn't noticed before.  This is bugging me.

Honestly, you think you know someone so well and then you find they've been holding out on you...

[Adding the labels to this post, as I clicked on 'fictional characters' I distinctly heard a Scottish voice shout, "Oi!"  I think this is the point where I have a strong cup of tea and a little lie down.]

Turning back at the last minute

I stopped writing a while ago.  Nothing was coming together and sales of Looking for Buttons have not been particularly encouraging (yes, I know admitting this is not good PR but I am nothing if not a realist) so I was pretty much ready to call it a day.

And then today, I wrote a poem.  It was a peculiar experience.  Past attempts at poetry have been jolly fripperies, pastiches of childhood favourites.  I did go through the adolescent angst-poet phase twenty years ago, but that - I hope - left no evidence to condemn me.  But today was something else entirely.  I wasn't trying to do anything writerly, in fact it was as crushingly mundane as brushing my teeth prior to getting one of them filled (I have a kamikaze wisdom tooth).  And there, without warning, was the poem, nebulous at first but clearer by the second, like wiping grime from a railway carriage window with the hem of my sleeve to catch a fleeting glimpse of something true.  It wasn't writing, it was more the process of remembering something I didn't know I knew.

I'm not going to publish the poem here, not now.  I need to live with it for a while and I suspect it might be more personal than I realise.  Showing it to other people might be like flashing my knickers at the Archbishop of Canterbury: perfectly feasible in this day and age but not terribly wise.  But it seems that although I've given up writing, my subconscious hasn't.

And so on I plod...