A Literary Life

Having been ill for a number of weeks - the dreaded flu, bad cough, aching bones - I have read little, written less and slept more than ever. I did read a wonderful novel, though: David Vann's Legend of a Suicide. I have little I want to say about it now: and I have reviewed it on my other blog: but wanted to say it's a novel that has gotten me thinking. If you love good fiction, then please do read this wonderfully moving piece. I'll stop by when I've processed my thoughts.

Blogging is writing. Someone told me that. Still there is something I find nauseatingly banal about blogging; it strikes me as not writing, but distilling into form a diatribe best left unwritten, unspoken, unsung. I write every day (or so I tell people), and I genuinely do try every day, but there are days when the prose will not come, when it is swallowed up by life, by work demands, social demands, when I cannot concentrate as the television is on too loudly next door and the sound of it cuts into my thought. I also go on long walks, passing the miles, five into ten into fifteen, and when I return sometimes I am simply too tired to write. Sometimes I just have to finish that novel I am reading. It is in these interstices I am told I should blog. ‘It’s still writing’, but the tone of their wording, the implication of that sentence is that blogging is writing without intelligence. I cannot write without intelligence. I do not think anybody should write without intelligence. ...

So yesterday I continued working on the most difficult pages of my new novel, Grass and Ember, a particularly harrowing four chapter arc that ends one characters story and propels the reader into the final third of the novel. I've been working slowly on these pages, as it seems each word needs to be precise, more precise than I usually go for. I like my prose to have looseness, almost like a conversation, but this needed the exactness of poetry, it needed to sing. Now when I write I mostly do it in silence. I loathe distraction when I'm writing because I like to lose myself in the work. I see sentences rising up, a symphony of words, and a distraction can cause all those words to come tumbling down, and my reconstruction of them never feels as solid as the first elusive thought I saw. However, launching into this four chapter arc I found my resistance was up, I simply did not want to go there and write them, to think what my character would have to think for this sequence ...

'The Inheritance of Things Past' continues to sell well, especially considering the minimal advertising it has won and the lack of publicity in the British press. To those who have bought it already I thank you, and if you are considering it, then thank you too. For those who have yet to hear of my novel, its summary is something like this: Will Hargreaves, a successful film producer, learns he has cancer. Fleeing to the wilds of Scotland he remembers the moments that have led him to this: His fiery relationship with a beautiful singer, Sarah Crowe, and the truth and depth of his love for a work colleague, Laura Johnson. Facing up to his past is only the beginning of a journey that will teach Will how to live and how to love... It has been praised by playwright Dic Edwards as "Very impressive: strange and original in feel." It is available from all good retailers for £6-99. Sales pitch over. I started 'Inheritance' as a short story for my Creative Writin...