I remember reading that if you want to carve a sculpture of someone, start with a block of marble, and chip away everything that doesn’t look like the person. It might have been an elephant, I can’t remember. It seems to me about as useful as saying that if you want to write a best-seller, start with a dictionary and rearrange the words into a best-seller. Well it’s a process, I guess.
After the high of the Dartmouth Book Festival, I find myself wallowing, a third of the way through book five. I’m having difficulty linking the history part with either the crime fiction thread or the theme. So, I’m feeling a little low. I jet-washed the front paving, cut the lawn, and chopped up some pruned branches. After that I found myself saying, trust the process. The recent exhibition I attended at the Weston Library was titled “Write, Cut, Re-write”. When great writers like John Le Carré (David Cornwell) spend four weeks writing and re-writing the first scene, that demonstrates what it takes, what the process is.
Therefore I’m not going to let it get me down. I’m going to plough on “getting my shit down”. I’m going to get through the historical sections and weave the crime story through it. One of the great advantages to writing in Scrivener is that you can easily move scenes around. I shall focus on how to weave the themes of favouritism and the parent-child relationship through the story fabric.
Nobody ever said it was easy to write a best-seller, no one ever said it would be this hard. That’s the scientist coming out in me, apologies to Coldplay, but it’s true. I’m just going to have to trust the process. As I’ve started borrowing analogies I might as well say that I’m writing all the right words, but not necessarily in the right order, sorry Eric.