Last night we were watching a programme on television about the Edinburgh Festival in which a survivor of a Second World War concentration camp was talking about a play she has written on the subject. ‘Keep calm,’ her father apparently told as he was being taken away by the Nazis. ‘Calmness is strength.’ ‘There are victims’, she said, ‘and there are observers. I was an observer.’
I remember too that the father of writer-illustrator Judith Kerr said something similar, as recorded in her riveting autobiographical trilogy which starts with the book When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit. Her father was a German-Jewish writer critical of the Nazis, and he and his family had to flee the country when Judith was a child (leaving behind her precious toy).
Today is the day I can look through the full text of my novel (printed out in a typeface that I wouldn’t normally use and left for two weeks according to the writing exercise I mentioned in an earlier post).
I take the typescript out into the garden and try to read it but am filled with disgust. It just won’t do. I think that the trouble is, it’s too close to my life. On the one hand, I’ve already written an autobiography that covers much the same ground so I’m bored. On the other, there’s too much to say and I can’t be detached about it. I want to chuck everything in just to make a point. I’m not calm. I’m not observing.
I need to start again, picking just one strand maybe, and I’m tempted by the diary form. As I’ve said before, if I could write a novel in the same way I write this blog (confidently, regularly, without looking too far ahead but with a clear idea of theme) I might avoid the awful extremes (of overload and paralysis) that novel-writing causes me.
Or is that too much to hope for?
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