Taking stock...

I'm off to Qatar tomorrow for a three-day translation conference. This is about as glamorous as my life gets - even more glamorous, and this is saying something, than medieval-lynch-mob-decorated CAKE - but this post is not simply boasting. Obviously it is mainly boasting, and I'm sure I'll do more boasting when I get back, hopefully with pictures (I'm hoping for a sunlit portrait of me against a wonderful panorama of Doha - think blazing blond hair, white shirt, English-Patient chic - although judging by previous experience all my photos will almost certainly involve lots of squinting, a sunburn line across my nose from my sunglasses, and a ridiculous hat). But... well, maybe it's just me, but I find there's something about flying halfway across the world that focuses the mind on mortality.

I am not a nervous flier. Well, no, I am a bit of a nervous flier (I don't fly very much, and it scares me for much the same reasons that I play Euromillions, i.e. the triumph of imagination over statistics), but I think this particular phenomenon is more to do with the way journeys mark milestones - the way I was strangely thoughtful before I set out for Santiago de Compostela, for example, which didn't involve any flying. Medieval pilgrims always used to write their wills before they left home, and while that was quite sensible, really, because in those days it really was hazardous, I think it's a good tradition. Then again, I have no money, so writing my will isn't really worth the time.*

But instead I have been Taking Stock of my life. And I thought I would share my thoughts with you. Just in case. (NB: this is, as you might expect given the above, a singularly self-absorbed blog-post. Please stop reading now if that's going to irritate you.)

I am thirty.** I have published five books, had seven accepted, written ten. I have had emails from people I don't know and probably won't ever know, telling me that my books have made a difference to them. I have played Juliet, Antigone, the Duchess of Malfi, Cordelia and Margaret Thatcher. I was once accosted in the street after a show by a member of the audience who wanted to shake my hand. (It was in Elephant and Castle and for a second I thought she was going to mug me.) I have walked from Le Puy to Santiago with only a few bus journeys in the middle. I can make vinaigrette, harissa and roast chicken without a recipe. I can throw a pot, replace a zip, speak French - all after a fashion - and I can ride a bike, run a mile, keep honest counsel and mar a curious tale in the telling of it. I have a scar on my forehead that I got in a dagger fight. At drama school I was given a chocolate bar by a teacher because I was the only person to walk past when he was teaching a class and considerately not let the door slam. I once sent a clipping to the News Quiz and they read it out***, which is something I am genuinely proud of.

So much for achievements. It seems quite a short list.

I have written some quite bad plays, some quite bad essays, and some quite cringe-worthy poetry. I can't hold a harmony or whistle a tune or touch the floor with my hands while keeping my legs straight. At drama school I was held up as an example to the others of how a backbone should not behave. I was a terrible Kvashnya in The Lower Depths. I have done some truly awful auditions, most of which I can now laugh at. I don't know how to change a fuse or make a Word document into a pdf file. I once made garlic soup which stayed in the plate when I turned it upside down over my head. I have never earned more than £10,000 in a year. At infants' school I dropped a guinea pig, and it still haunts me.

What else?

I have 230 facebook friends. Some of those are really friends - including, I think, some of the ones I've never met. That's nice. Five people have declared love to me, a couple more have asked me out, no one has asked me to marry them. (Or not seriously, anyway.) I have been gloriously, blazingly in love once, and less euphorically and intensely in love six-ish times, of which at least two were unrequited. I have never slept with anyone and regretted it. I have regretted not sleeping with people. (You know who you are. Probably.) I have only ever deliberately put one ex-boyfriend into a book, and it ended up being a far more flattering - and much less exact - portrait than I originally had in mind.

I've never stolen an idea for a novel. Yet.

I have never broken a bone or spent the night in hospital (except when I was born). I have never been pregnant or taken any Class A drugs. Two of my teeth are fake. I had my first filling a few weeks ago. All my vaccinations are up to date. I've tried to give blood three times, and the last time I was so much trouble they had to drive me home in the blood van and took me off the donor register.

I have written some letters for Amnesty International, given a few quid here and there to the Red Cross, signed endless petitions for Avaaz and 38 Degrees, written to my MP more times than I remember, and helped wash up coffee cups after Quaker Meeting; I delete emails from Amnesty when they've been sitting in my inbox for longer than a few days, I buy cheap clothes even though I know they're probably made in sweatshops, I'd rather get a laugh than be universally kind, I can't always be bothered to rip the plastic windows out of envelopes so I can put them in the paper recycling, I once held up a love-letter someone sent me to invite ridicule from our mutual friends, and I've done a few other things which I'm not prepared to admit to on the Internet. Morally speaking I'm probably in the red, like most of us. (Then again, they say that when old or ill people are asked what they regret, the two commonest answers are, 'I wish I'd worked less' and 'I wish I'd been less virtuous'. So, given the above, and that I have never had a proper job, I guess I'm doing fairly well.)

So... I can't think of anything else. That's it. My life in a nutshell.

OK, so this has been a really self-indulgent post. But strangely enough, it's made me feel better.



* Although, now I come to think of it, I did do my tax return this week. But that was mainly so I could spend the money I'd put aside for my tax bill. (One of the few advantages of being totally poverty-stricken is that I can proudly say I am not funding David Cameron at all. Take that, Tory bastards!)

** I was going to work in a Tom-Lehrer style gag: 'It's people like that [Alma Mahler] who make you realise just how little you've achieved. For example, when Mozart was my age he had been dead for two years.' Then I looked it up and found, to my disappointment, that I am still too young for that joke...

*** It was the label off a jar of sweet peppers in oil, which said, 'Why not toss into a bowl of fresh green salad?'

New Year's Resolutions

1. Send back the silver salt-cellar and pepper-pot to King's College. I am not going to give indiscreet details about how they came into my possession; suffice it to say that they shouldn't have. And I have held on to them for long enough (i.e. more years than I care to remember).

They will be going in an anonymous, unlabelled parcel, of course. My instinct for righting wrongs is not infinite.

2. Get my M.A. As this consists entirely of writing a letter asking aforesaid King's College to graduate me in absentia, it's rather embarrassing that I haven't done it yet. But sometime in 2012 I will be B. R. Collins, M.A. (Cantab). Promise.

3. Do something at least once a week that I haven't done before.

4. Fall in love with someone single, available, fairly well-adjusted, fairly solvent and living within ten miles of Tunbridge Wells. (Which is where I live, rather than just some arbitrarily picked area.) How hard can it be?

Oh, and resist the temptation to blog about my love-life...

5. Edit Edward Leigh. Finish The School of Glass. Think up an idea for my next book for Bloomsbury and write that too.*

6. Keep writing. Stop giving myself a hard time about getting a proper job. If I decide I really need a proper job, just get one.

7. Have more sex. As before: how hard can it be?**

(Note to self: lower standards if necessary. Possibly also applicable to Resolution 4.***)

8. Answer all queries about laundry, washing up, tidying up, emptying the dishwasher, cooking etc. with, 'Sorry, I made a New Year's Resolution not to do that any more.'

9. Live adventurously.

10. Stop getting really, really angry about politics. Do whatever I can, and then swallow unnecessary fury and try to achieve serenity. (Ha!)

Also, hold people in the light more. Try to see the good in everyone, even wankers, arses, idiots and total shits... (Yes, well. Possibly this one might need some work.)

11. Stop overusing brackets, italics, smiley faces, asterisks and... ellipses.

12. Stop buying lottery tickets. Except metaphorical ones. Buy more metaphorical lottery tickets.


* If I put these all in one terse, unchatty resolution I'm hoping they'll seem like less work.

** Oo-er.

*** This is a joke. Probably. :)

Endings, real and imaginary

So. NaNoWriMo is over, and - as you might have guessed if you saw the Winner's Badge on the right - I DID it! 50,000 words in a month. Actually, it's probably not the most intensively I've ever written, but it's pretty damn' close. I finished a day early, after a weekend of really good, hard work, and since then I haven't even looked at the novel. You will be glad to know that I've taken nearly a week off.

And I feel... bad.

It's an interesting one. I should be feeling triumphant, I guess. I may not have written a whole novel (50,000 words? Ha! It's got to be at least 80,000, and at this rate it looks more like 100,000) but I've done well, by anyone's standards. My characters definitely hate each other, and now I can get down to the serious business of making them fall in love. The path is there, in front of me, and another month or two and I should get to the end.

And yet, and yet... Maybe it's the anticlimax of it - exhaustion, the slow realisation that self-imposed tasks only garner self-imposed rewards (i.e., not much), a vague crisis of faith in the novel... But also, I think, I was using the discipline and the absorption of the deadline to keep me going after King Lear finished. I didn't have post-show blues, because I was moving straight on to NaNoWriMo, I had something new to create, something new to get excited about... But it's like drinking to get over a hangover - it just hits you harder, the longer you put it off. Did I say recently that plays are always, for me, like love affairs? Now I feel... heartbroken.

So I am thinking about endings. Real ones. But I am also thinking about fictional endings, because - well, I may have mentioned that I have no idea where or how my novel is going to end. So that's... interesting.

And I was wondering whether fictional endings are a sort of way for us to confront the way things change in real life. Fictional endings, you notice, are incredibly final, in the sense that that's the last page, there is no possibility whatsoever that there's more to come. (Unless the author cheats and write a sequel. :) But the less said about that the better...) But at the same time, they're only final in the sense of a door closing - and you can make believe that behind the door, life is still going on. Think about the last lines of a novel you love. Here's a quick, random-ish selection from my bookshelves (extra points if you can name the book):

'"Hallo, you great turnip," said Tris La Chard.'
'...They are rebuilding Isca Dumoniorum."'
'Only the margin left to write on now. I love you, I love you, I love you.'
'Then out of the sea, like a ball of fire, the sun came hard and red.'

You see? The start of a conversation. A town being rebuilt. Sunrise. The absolute opposite of an ending.

I'm not, you'll be glad to know, going to quote my own last lines, more (I have to admit) because of spoilers than because it's embarrassingly bad form, although obviously it is... but they all, I think without exception, contain something that references the future, the beyond-book, as it were: 'tomorrow' or 'I had a long way to go' or 'I'm quite looking forward to it' or even just a verb in the future tense. The best endings, for me, are the ones that work against their own finality. They soften the blow. And I don't think that's me being squeamish, or sentimental. I really don't.

Because life, I think, is exactly the opposite. The end of something in real life - a production of a play, a love affair, whatever - isn't clean, in the way that a blank page is clean. But there's no comfort, either. You know you have to go on - Becket again*: 'you must go on, I can't go on, I'll go on' - but what you love is over, and you miss it. Sometimes you miss it... well, horribly. Which is exactly why we need novels to end the way they do - and partly why, I suspect, we feel so cheated by bad endings, or fudged endings, or meretricious cliff-hanger endings (mentioning no names, coughPatrickNesscough**). We get enough of that kind of sadness and frustration in real life. Art is there - yes - to confront that grief, to teach us how to cope with it - but if it were exactly the same as real life, it wouldn't be art. Real life is a character getting randomly written out halfway through a story. Art is when that means something: when it makes us, on some deep level, recognise the rightness of it. When we think, yes, OK, I see now why that had to happen. (And often in real life that's the biggest problem, when it just doesn't seem to make sense.) It's a consolation, of sorts. Understanding is a consolation. Narrative is a consolation. If only real life were more like books.

Then again... once the book is over, the characters are stuck. Even if the ending tries to evoke the future - it can't ever really give them more life. They don't grow or change or have any more adventures (see previous caveat re sequels), they don't fall in love again, they never have the opportunity to be glad that their story didn't end right there. There's a moment I love in revenge tragedies, after the orgy of fights and bloodshed and death at the end - which is often really macabrely funny - when suddenly there's silence. And you realise that for the characters... that's it. The party's over. The Great Climax has come and gone, and the poor sods will never have another one.

I'd like the drama and meaning and catharsis of a fictional ending. And sometimes, after something's finished, it would be great not to have to get up the next morning and live with the emptiness. But, in the end, I guess we'd (most of us) still choose real life. Because at least then you can take a deep breath and start something new.

Or, possibly, in my case, just stop moaning and get back to work. :)


* No, not 'But is it true love, in the rectum? That's what bothers me sometimes.' Although I will try to find an opportunity to shoehorn this one in somewhere next time. If that's the phrase I'm after... :)

** I have a friend who, seeing that Patrick Ness was my friend on facebook, said, 'P. Ness?! P. Ness?! This is a penis joke, right? He doesn't really exist...' 'Nuff said, I think.

Another play, another love affair...

Or not. Exactly.

I mentioned back in the summer, when I'd just finished doing What the Butler Saw (click here for a photo, I am the one who is not naked) how I always thought of plays - i.e. the process of being in one, from audition to last night - as being like love affairs. It's something I've been thinking about again recently, what with King Lear and all... and also, I guess, because I'm thinking about love affairs generally for my germinating slash novel. (I.e. the novel is germinating. I haven't just invented a new genre.)

I realise this might sound a little bit weird, or perverse, even though* I should point out that, for the record, I am not talking about actual love affairs with actual people. But bear with me, OK?

It may seem a little strange to think about an abstract process in terms of sex. One of the fairly universal assumptions about sexuality is that it has to have a direct object - whether that's a person or an animal or a high-heeled shoe... But, you know, I'm not convinced. I had a discussion with someone a while ago about how "appropriate" it was to exploit one's sexuality in the workplace, and she suggested that whenever anyone did anything that they loved, and did it wholeheartedly and well, that their sexuality was automatically engaged: that in a sense it was meaningless to try to demarcate the "appropriate" spheres for sexuality because it was there in everything. This isn't, I hasten to add, about fancying anything that moves. It's more the idea that what drives us is not clearly divisible into sexual and non-sexual, or even romantic and non-romantic. Desire is desire, whether it's for sex or an elegant solution to a problem or a really good bacon sandwich. The object is actually an indirect object - pretty much (OK, this is probably a bit contentious, but hey) incidental. What you want to achieve varies - but the feeling that motivates you is... the same.

And the process of being in a play has the same shape as a burgeoning love affair. You hear about the play and you're interested, you have that moment of connection (the audition), you walk out feeling hopeful but helpless - it's down to them whether they want to see you again - and then you get cast and you feel triumphant and attractive... And then in rehearsals you have fun, you laugh a lot, you have moments of wondering whether this is the best thing ever or if it's all a horrible mistake... you get a whole new group of ready-made friends with whom you have something in common... and all the time you're moving towards the Great Climax of the first night. And then you Do It. Again and again. Until suddenly it's over. Leaving you, at least in my case, invariably a little bit broken-hearted.

But it isn't just the specific emotions that make the simile work for me. Because, let's face it, I've been in plays where the rehearsal process has been painful, the other actors boring or irritating, the director tiresome - where, in short, I haven't enjoyed it much - and somehow, even in those cases, the metaphor still rings true. No, it's more to do with the way it makes you think about the future. Does that make sense? It's because of the balance of enjoyment and anticipation, certainty and uncertainty, pleasure and fear... And maybe it's something much more universal, something about all narratives, whether they're ones we live through or ones we read or watch or write. I think what I'm driving at is the way momentum and experience meet and interact, our relationship with the present vs. the future... (This is getting wanky, but bear with me.) When you're acting you have to be absolutely in the moment, focused on what's happening now, and there's a kind of happiness that comes from that, especially when you're doing something you love. But at the same time, rehearsals are only there because you're going to perform. That's the whole point. They only reach their full meaning retrospectively - when you get to the performance. If, when you rehearsed, you didn't believe that one day you'd perform, you wouldn't enjoy it - even if nothing about the actual experience was different. And it's the same for all narratives. You're driven by the desire to know what happens next - not right now, maybe, but soon. You have to enjoy the process of reading, but it only reaches its fulfilment when it finishes. That's why a brilliant book with a bad ending can be so frustrating. It's like great sex that breaks off when your partner goes to answer the door and doesn't come back.**

OK, so I didn't mean for this to get quite so Barthesian. To be honest I was really only thinking about how sad I'll be when King Lear is over. I'm not absolutely sure where this splurge of quasi-narrative theory came from... but it's probably better that way. (Possibly something to do with the fact that I'm delaying the moment when I have to do some real work.)

I am going to sign off now. Mainly because I just realised I could sum this post up in three sentences: "I like being in King Lear." And, "Last night we went to the pub after rehearsal. I had a very nice time."


* Or, possibly, especially because...
** I imagine. This has never happened to me.***
*** No, it really hasn't.