An Old Flame*

Are you the same person that you were ten years ago? I mean, obviously in a lot of ways you are (name, memories, NI number and so on). In some other less obvious ways you... maybe... aren't. Those pink corduroy flares that you thought were a good idea? That evaporated milk habit? That - ew, squick! - that boyfriend?**

If you're wondering why I'm asking, it's because I'm editing my first novel. I wrote it nearly ten years ago, and it's an odd experience coming back to it. I hadn't even read it for years, and so in some ways it was rather exciting. There are lots of adverbs (sadly) but also some rather fun scenes, and some plot twists I genuinely hadn't remembered. It needs work but I think it could be quite good, if I do the right things to it. And the right things aren't the opaque, totally mysterious impossibilities that they are for my most recent magnum opus, thank God, they are actual definite changes that I can do. This is all good. 

But - as I say - it's odd. It's odd because my writing voice has changed, and I'm trying to work out how much I should go with my old one and how much I've got better. It's odd because the sort of book I write now isn't the sort of book I wrote then, but that doesn't mean I don't want to write that sort of book. It's odd because I recognise myself and I recognise the differences, the way I've developed as a writer and as a person.

It's oddest of all, I think, because it's a love story.*** It was my first love story. 

People talk about how first novels are autobiographical (and then often go on to say that they're rubbish because they're autobiographical). That's not true, obviously, because loads of people write novels without ever writing anything recognisably autobiographical. But in a way it is true: your first novel is the one you've waited your whole life to write. It's the one, I think, where the purest expression of yourself comes out. You're less guarded, less ambitious, less driven by career moves or vanity. Not to mention that every time you write a book, you narrow down the possibilities for your next one - so the first, the first... It's not the best. But sometimes it's the most yours. 

And so... my love story. It's making me feel the way I did ten years ago. I was in love with my character then, and I'm still in love with him. I have to be, or I couldn't write the book. But now... I don't know. It makes me feel... off-balance. Haunted. Maybe slightly unfaithful. Like a perfect lover from the past has walked in and expects me to love him as much as ever. And I do.  

We'll see. But right now, I'm enjoying it. To be fair, I'm only four chapters in. But I can't help thinking, maybe I've cracked it. Maybe that's the trick of happy editing: leave the book for a decade.   

* I love this metaphor. Especially as the character in question is called Ash. 

** This is a joke. I didn't have a boyfriend ten years ago. And not having a boyfriend is never a bad choice.

*** Slashy?! Of course it's slashy. 

Quaker Meeting, Quaker Ministry

This is a slightly different post to the sort of thing I normally write. Feel free to stop reading right now, because it's not about writing or my life as a writer, and only tangentially about words. But it was such an odd and extraordinary thing for me that I wanted to try and write about it - even knowing that I'm almost certainly going to fail to convey what I mean.

I've been going to Quaker Meeting for several (3? 4?) years now. For anyone who doesn't know much about Quakerism (or, more properly, the Religious Society of Friends), I should say that Quaker Meetings, or at any rate the sort of British unprogrammed Quaker Meeting I go to, take place almost entirely in silence. You sit there for an hour or so, and wait in case the spirit moves you to stand up and speak. Which it rarely does - at least in our Meeting. In our Meeting, the spirit definitely bloweth where it listeth, and we spend the majority of our Meetings in silence. I think most of the Quakers I've spoken to have ministered a few times in their religious lives, if ever.

The thing is, you see, that you don't - no one does - ever just decide to speak. A lot of people, I think, imagine a Quaker Meeting to be a sort of religiously-themed free-for-all. It isn't. Nor is it a discussion. Nor is it even a place for people to give considered, economically-phrased mini-sermons. You don't get up because you think you have something valuable to contribute, or because someone else's ministry could be improved upon, or because there's something that you've been thinking about all week. You get up because you have to. That's it.

Now. As I say, I've been going to Meeting for years now, and I've read things here and there about Meeting, and Quakers generally, and ministry*. I'd read about the impulse to stand up and minister. (One of my favourite stories is about two Friends sitting next to each other in a Meeting. There's a silence and one of them fidgets and shuffles about in his chair for a long time. Then, finally, the other one gets up and ministers. When he sits down he leans across to the other Friend and says, 'Next time, say it yourself.') I'd sat in several Meetings and thought, hmmm, I can think of something I could say at this juncture... but I won't. I was used to that.

But on Sunday something else happened to me.

It was... odd. Extraordinary. I keep coming back to those words.

There'd been a couple of ministries already - which, as I say, is quite rare for us - and one of the things that had come up was a bit from the Advices and Queries** which says, 'Attend to what love requires of you.' I sat there and thought about it, and about how it was particularly resonant for me at the moment. I thought in words, which isn't always the case. I thought of a metaphor for how I felt. I thought, hmm, that's an interesting thought. I could say that. But I won't.

Then... This is the hard bit to explain.

My heart started pounding. I started to find it hard to breathe. It was as though I was terrified. I have never felt such extreme physical stress without any kind of outside stimulus. I suppose I was quite scared, because it was like having some kind of attack, and I thought I might faint or black out or my heart would actually stop because it was beating so hard and so fast. I moved a bit in my chair and tried to take deep breaths, but I couldn't. I tried to say to myself that I could calm down a bit and then decide whether I should minister or not. I tried to tell myself that there was no urgency and I should deal with what was happening to me physically before I thought about ministering. I really didn't want to stand up. But nothing I did was any good and I somehow knew that I would either have to stand up or run out of the room, and even if I did that I wasn't sure that it would be any good.

So I stood up. And I said something fairly lucid, not exactly profound, something that didn't encapsulate exactly what I meant but was sort of in the right area... and then I sat down and had to struggle not to burst into tears. Not because of what I'd said or the experience of saying it, but because of the intensity of what had made me say it.

I suppose this is hard to write about because it isn't the words, the ministry itself, that stays with me - although I think that ministry was for me as much as for anyone, as though it was a way to make myself listen and take seriously something that would otherwise have been a passing thought. No, it was the absolutely irrational, unpredictable, mysterious physical phenomenon. It felt as though I'd been in the grip of - of what? I don't know. Something Else. I wasn't afraid of standing up in Meeting to speak (I'm an actor, I do school visits, blah blah, that really doesn't bother me). I wasn't worried about what people would think. I didn't have any of those trivial, comprehensible, personal fears.*** It was something entirely other. I'm not sure I want to say that it came from outside myself. Maybe it did, maybe not. I'm not sure if that matters.  

I have never felt physically compelled to do something. It was not about desire, or obligation, or decision, it was... physical necessity. It was frightening. Really.

But later, when I was walking home, and thinking about what had happened, that it occurred to me: there was no way I could say to myself, well, you idiot, why didn't you just stay sitting down? Because I couldn't have done. I literally had no choice.**** (Apart from leaving the room. As I say.)

And for someone like me, who thinks and rethinks and analyses and edits, who always wants to go back and say it better or differently... or indeed for everyone... that's a blessing. I said the right thing. I did the right thing.

I must have done, because I couldn't have done anything else.


* Incidentally I should point out that one of the joys of Quakerism is that there is no central authority who decides what is or isn't true. Which means pretty much all the generalisations I make here are debatable. Sorry.

** The closest Friends get to a statement of belief. (You have to love a religious movement where the closest we/they get to formal commandments is advising and querying.)

*** Later I did. Of course. (See the next paragraph for details.) I don't want to imply that I'm above all that. Nothing could be further from the case. It was just - in that moment...

**** Before you think I am using the word "literally" to prop up an exaggeration, I would like to say that I am doing my damnedest to write the exact truth as I experienced it. As you can imagine, it's difficult for me. But the whole point is that I'm trying not to exaggerate at all.

Oh, and another thing...

Honestly. You wait months for a blog post and then two come along at once.

I discovered this song a few days ago (it's the hidden track on Rose, by Rose) and have been listening to it continuously. Or, as I suppose I should say, en boucle.

It's got a lovely obsessive walls-closing-in-on-you feeling - next time I'm heartbroken I will no doubt appreciate it even more, but right now I really love it despite being quite happy, thank you.

So anyway. Enjoy.

Stories, truth and ourselves.

I've been thinking a lot recently about truth, and honesty, and reality, and the relationships between them. I like to think of it as a Truth Detox. Not that I want to be honest all the time, you understand (I'm not quite ready for that yet, and I'm not sure if I ever will be) - it's more about being aware of the ways I lie and elude and fudge things to myself. One of the things that has dawned on me over the last few months is that lying to other people is morally grey, in the sense that you can judge each lie on a case-by-case basis, dependent on context: but lying to yourself is always, always wrong, because it means you automatically pass that on to other people. Once you stop being honest with yourself, there's no choice involved.

That is one of those things that when you write it down looks about a hundred times less profound than when you thought of it. Phooey.

But aaaaanyway. Thinking about truth is particularly interesting if the way you earn your living is all about fiction. Because, at its best, fiction is truthful. It's the big Defense of Poesie, isn't it, that by creating something that isn't real you can find a space to say something that is enlightening and recognisable and, well, you know... spot on. We've all had those moments, when you read a novel and think: yes. Yes, absolutely yes. The best moments in reading are when you come across something - a thought, a feeling, a way of looking at things - that you'd thought special, particular to you. And here it is, set down by someone else, a person you've never met, maybe even someone long dead. And it's as if a hand has come out and taken yours. Yes, the past does come back and haunt us exactly the way it does in The Ghost of Thomas Kempe. Yes, misery does make me lean against walls for no apparent reason, like in I Capture The Castle; yes, memory does run the risk of driving us mad, like in Funes, His Memory. And yes, the important thing in this life is not aunts but the courage with which you face them.*

But it's not that simple. The big problem a lot of people have with trashy writing (mentioning no naTwilightmes, of course) is that it just doesn't ring true. Or worse, it provides people with a narrative that is simultaneously dishonest and seductive - which means that not only is it not edifying (and I use that in the deepest, most liberal sense, which is nothing to do with "improving" literature) it is actually really problematic. Like it or not, books rehearse the world for us: they teach us how to think about ourselves, our relationships, our bodies. They work in the same way that advertising does. We need to think carefully about the narratives we give people, because narratives are powerful.

Which is not to say that there isn't a place for trashy books, in the same way that there is sometimes a place for conscious lying - or self-indulgent dreaming, or any kind of activity which takes us out of ourselves. Actually - yes, that's a good phrase. Things that take us out of ourselves are fine - good, in fact - as long as we can put ourselves back afterwards. Lying - or buying into someone else's lie - is defensible as long as you know it's a lie.

What makes this more interesting is that it's not only bad writing that helps us lie to ourselves. I originally started thinking about this post because of something I remembered from a long time ago, when I was in a messy love-triangle-relationship-thingy, and happened to go and see the film of The End of the Affair. I still remember, very clearly, walking out of the cinema, feeling suddenly very passionate about my lover. Not because of anything about him, you understand, but because the story had resonated with me, because the tragedy and romance of it made me think of my own situation - in the same way that seeing an advert for a perfume you already wear can, briefly, make you feel more glamorous than just wearing the perfume does. This, I said to myself, is my story. Like those characters, I am having an affair. Therefore, like those characters, I am tragic and lovable and romantic... It's dangerous. And yet, the ability of narratives to validate our own experience is part of its wonder. It just has to be confronted honestly.

Not sure what point, if any, I am trying to make here. Maybe that, when it comes down to it, real people are more important than fictional characters. Life is more important than art. Lying can be good as long as it's done knowingly, in the context of the truth.

Not, perhaps, terribly profound. (OK, that "perhaps" is there to salve my pride. But I'm going to leave it there anyway.) But - I like to think - for a writer, it's a good thing to get clear in my head.


* Jokes, of course, have to pinpoint something that's simultaneously an exaggeration and absolutely true, otherwise they're not funny.

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.

NaNoWriMo, Dialogue, Falling In Love...

So. Well, sorry I haven't updated this for a while - as you've probably gathered, I'm doing NaNoWriMo, and I got behind at the weekend due to a monumental hangover, and am only just now back on target. Although, as I'm writing this blog rather than my novel, and haven't finished my quota for today, this positive state of affairs might not last...

Anyway. The novel is going as well as can be expected, in the sense that I haven't yet run out of plot (I'm fairly sure I will at some point, but I'm refusing to think about that right now). And I haven't reread any of it, which probably helps with my morale. No doubt I will finish it, thinking it's wonderful, and then go back and be horrified by what absolute tripe it is. Maybe that's the point of NaNoWriMo, though. It might be shit, but at least I'll have 50,000 words of it...

But it has been making me think. Which I suppose is a good thing. (Well, I hope so. You never know with thinking, it's a dangerous business.)

My novel, by the way, is called The School of Glass, and, as I've mentioned before, it's slash fiction. (Not fanfiction, but original slash - for more thoughts on slash versus fanfic, see my previous blog...) Which means it's basically a love story. With other elements, obviously, but the emotional thing is much more foregrounded than in any of my other novels. (Except possibly bits of Tyme's End, I guess. And The Broken Road. And Come The Revolution... hmmm. Looks like I write a lot about emotions, now that I think about it. And have a tendency to make sweeping generalisations about my own work which are just wrong. Oh well.)

Anyway, at the moment my protagonists hate each other. And I'm really enjoying writing them into a situation where they can be nastier and nastier, while trying to keep my options open for later, when the reader will have to start rooting for them to get together. It's intriguing. Right now I'm working up to some actual physical damage... and not in a good way. (Or rather, it isn't good for the characters. I'm hoping there will be a certain... frisson... for the reader.)* And the long downhill slope - from first dislike to visceral detestation - is quite easy, really. Hatred, once it's mutual, is surprisingly logical. And satisfying to write.

But it does make me think about what happens on the other side, when they have to start fancying each other. It raises all sorts of questions about why and how you (well, I, I suppose) fall in love with people. Not to mention the knotty problem of how that's expressed in words...

In a way it's really the same old issue of writing about emotion. You can approach it with the classic tactic of avoiding the label, and going instead for the physical and mental experience of what that state is like. In the way that, as a rule of thumb, you can't say, 'I felt angry', you have to say, 'I felt sick. How could he have done this to me?'. Or, rather than 'I felt happy', you might say 'the fresh air went to my head like champagne'. (Those examples are purely to explain the principle. Please don't judge me...) To make emotion immediate, it has to come to the reader in a vivid, non-abstract image. So, when you're in love with someone, you look at them and your stomach flips over, your heart races, your - well. You get the idea. Probably best not to go into too much detail... :)

And that works, up to a point. But, even in life, the symptoms aren't everything. There is something else, clearly. But I'm damned if I can say what it is.

Or rather - and more to the point - if I can write it. This is partly to do with the fact that we will never, let's face it, care about a character as much as we care about ourselves. Obviously. So romance in books is already at a major disadvantage, in much the same way that watching your friends snog has very little of the same effect as actually snogging someone yourself. Romance has to be better, much better, than it is in the real world. Someone in a book says, 'I love you,' and it just doesn't... well, it doesn't make your heart beat faster, or make you shiver or catch your breath. People have said things to me that have gone to my head like a drug, that I've actually felt in my chest like a shot of adrenalin... things which have turned me on like a light switch... and yet if I typed them here they'd make you wince. At best. (Don't worry, I'm not going to.) A character saying, 'You know I love you. I absolutely love you,' just doesn't cut it. Even though in real life it sometimes, actually, does.

So you have to try to create the intensity of it all, when you're hampered by a) the fact that you have to use words and b) the fact that it's fiction. It's well nigh impossible. Or at least it looks it, from this end of the book. Maybe by the time I actually get to the soppy section it'll seem much easier. (Then again... should I draw any conclusions from my use of the word "soppy" to refer to anything associated with romance?)

I should point out, at this point, that while I have identified these problems I have absolutely no words of wisdom to offer as an answer. I'm just letting you in on my preoccupations.

So there we go. My characters will blunder on for the moment, hating each other, and sooner or later they will have to start the long slow U-turn that will lead them to True Love. Or something. It'll be an interesting journey - for me, at least... From profound enmity to romantic passion... or, as a friend of mine said in a (fairly) similar context, from "fuck off" to "fuck me".

Then again... maybe that's a perfect beginning for a relationship.


*OK, this sounds kinkier than it was meant to. But I still can't bring myself to delete it.