Rest and thinking time

I was glad to read in the university student newspaper Exposé (which Frog brings home) that Hilary Mantel – author of the multi-page novel Wolf Hall (which I couldn’t read) – considers three hours of writing new material more than enough for one day. (Working on material you’ve already written is another matter.) And as far as I remember from his autobiography, Roald Dahl wrote for two hours in the morning, then had an alcoholic drink, some lunch and a rest, before tackling another one and a half hours.

Rest, and thinking time, are vital to creative writing, as I keep telling myself – and keep forgetting – but walking is one of my ways of finding both.

Here some pictures from my walk this morning. It was my favourite sort of day – cloudy and still – and there was a Christmassy nip in the air. This is my default walk. It takes an hour and I can get to it straight from the garden.

I love this view, from the top of the field behind the house, and today the light was so mysterious. The sea is just over the horizon. You can see it from slightly higher up.

This path goes uphill for half an hour and gives me my aerobic exercise (or would do if I didn’t keep stopping to rest). It was looking particularly beautiful today, now that the leaves have started to turn.

You’ve seen these three beech trees before. They stand sentinel in the field at the top of the hill. I sit underneath them to look at the view and write my daily pages. They seem to accept me.

A giant spell

My shoulder is still painful and I’m still writing a painful part of the novel, but there’s not long to go now until I’m able to start turning around the lives of my characters.

What is fiction-writing? Why do I do it? Every time I ask myself that, I give a different answer. A couple of days ago, I came up with this.

A novel is a giant spell. First you describe life as it is and then you describe life as you’d like it to be, hoping somewhere in the process to make it so in reality.

Not the only one

Well, after I wrote the last post (about the goblin on my back), my back started to feel better. I then however came down with a two-day migraine, the result I think of getting in such a tizz about my back.

Today I’ve surfaced, although I still feel achy in all sorts of places and not a little wobbly.

I’m right in the middle of the book at the moment and I think it’s that taking things out of me. The good news though is that I feel completely involved in it – committed and bound up in all the emotions I’m writing about.

I had a long talk with Frog this morning about the plot and he made all sorts of suggestions. It’s so helpful to have a sounding board. Not to say editor, technical adviser and all-round encourager. As the writer Marian Keyes says of her husband, ‘On bad days he even has to wash and dress me.’

So I’m not the only one.

Get off my back, Goblin

Some of my best ideas come to me in the morning when I’m showering and brushing my teeth. Today I remembered a television programme I was watching last night. It was a surprisingly fascinating documentary about the food chain Iceland which is trying to change its image.

    ‘Do you have any doubts?’ asked the narrator of one manager as she put up the posters that completed the revamp of her store.

    ‘No,’ said the manager.

    She thought for a bit and then she spoke again. ‘You’re sunk if you have doubts.’

    What wise words.

    I’m fighting doubts all the time. It’s as if I have a goblin on my back trying to sabotage everything I do. No wonder my back hurts.

    At the beginning of this redraft of the novel, I could see several chapters ahead. I was buoyed up by the positive response of the YouWriteOn reviewers. Now, I’m getting to a really hazy part. I have no idea what happens next. If I allow doubts in I might seize up completely.

    Get off my back, Goblin.

Help!

My shoulder is still very painful. It’s about ten days now since it started. I’m doing everything I can to help it get better but it’s not shifting.

I’m managing to write a few hours a day and I’m managing the basics – washing, dressing, cooking, dogwalking. But the rest of my life has gone, which is very depressing.

It helped to make the connection with what I’m writing about, but I think I felt that once I’d made the connection the pain should have gone. And it ain’t.

Help!

(This is another of those posts that I wonder if I should be publishing. But, if this is to be an honest account of my writerly life, I suppose it has to include the bad as well as the good.) 

Connection?

Is there any connection, I wonder, between my bad shoulder (arm) and the fact that I’ve been writing about the most unhappy period of my life (in fictional form)?