The Night

I love the night, I always did. I never was afraid of the dark, not even as a small child: on the contrary I relished in its mystery. As the night falls, the frontier between imagination and reality becomes blurred: familiar surroundings become distorted by the play of shadows, by the touch of milky moonlight, by our own, altered perception. By our fears, by our dreams. Distances, proportions waver and change: gone are the rules and the logic of daylight. 

 

 

Warm summer nights, gazing at the stars. Seeking in their midst worlds beyond our imagining. A shooting star, a fleeting wish. The song of crickets in the background. Hushed stillness as the heat of the day lingers on. Bats swooping up and down, chasing moths. Above the dense foliage of trees, the Milky Way.

Autumn nights, smelling of fallen leaves and frost to come. Of woodsmoke, of roasted chestnuts. Shorter days, colder dusks. Glorious sunsets, dipped in golden light. Lengthening shadows, creeping over the land. A pale crescent, looming over the horizon, greets winter with a smile.

Winter nights, looking at the darkness outside from a brightly lit room. Hoping for magic, hoping for snow. Opening the window to breath in the cutting cold, to watch the lights of villages afar, to get a glimpse of what the stars reveal. Remaining by the hearth as the ambers slowly glow and die and let the darkness creep in and the night take over the house.

Spring nights throbbing with renewed life. Hundreds of frogs croak their song of seduction and love. An owl shrieks as it leaves its nest, and the brood within, for a solitary hunt. The first stars appear in a cobalt sky, pale and hesitant, glimmering shyly. A blackbird sings the day away.  

 

 

To be alone, awake, at night, is to be, for a moment, the only human in the world. In a world of secrets, where we do not quite belong. In a world when time itself, slows down, quickens, stands still, stops, mocking the regular ticking and the timid chime of the old grandfather clock in the corridor. 

When comes dawn, pale and grey, the night retreats, reluctantly, loath to relinquish its hold on the world it made its own. Chased by a chirping bird. Leaving as a parting gift spattered pearls of dew tangled in a cobweb. 

 

 

"I should have a compensation"

 

The blank page

The blank page syndrome. Feared by writers of fiction and non-fiction alike. Being in front of an empty page, or computer screen, and thinking that it is fated to remain that way for ever and ever… Searching for inspiration, or for ideas that will not come. Not managing to write a single interesting, or even coherent, sentence. 

This often happens to me when I want to write short stories. I love to read short stories. I’d love to be able to write incisive, gripping, short stories. I even have ideas for short stories, but when I try to write one… I am met by a blank page. I have only ever completed a couple of short stories since I started to write and I’m beginning to think that the short format does not suit me that well. I need 160,000 words to express myself… 

Yet it does not mean that I escape the blank page when I write my novel(s). Inspiration and ideas are like a flowing river, running, running, and then, suddenly, sometimes without warning, or without any apparent reason, it dries out. And I’m stuck in the middle of, say, Chapter 5, realizing that the story has become stagnant, and that the characters are going round in circles, and that though I know what happens to them next, I do not know how to get them out of the situation they’re in, whatever it is. And I stop writing, and I look at the messy pile of paper (hundreds of loose sheets, some numbered, some not, loosely held together) that is my first draft and I wonder: why on earth did I waste so much time writing this? It’s going nowhere! 

When that happens, the trick is to go on writing, anything, even something very silly. And there is a magical thought I find very helpful, because it is so liberating: “this can always be edited later” (aka “write all the nonsense you like, writing is the fun part, why bother about the boring one – grammar, syntax, a coherent plot – today when you can do so on another day?”). This usually work and I plod on with my writing, even if it is something of a battle. Or, if I’m really, really stuck, I let my story rest for a few days, weeks (or more…), leaving it to mature (like cheese!), until I have a new idea, or I come to understand that some of the characters aren’t really as I thought they were, and that this is why I’m stuck. 

I had blank page moments when writing As Winter Came and Went. I did manage to fight them off and actually completed my novel!

Yet is a blank page necessarily something negative, to be feared and avoided? A blank page is a blank canvas. A blank page is a world to be discovered. No, it is a world to be created. Yes, it is daunting, but also inspiring. A blank page is the freedom to create, the freedom to express yourself. There are two sides to it. On one is the absence of ideas. On the other an opportunity for them to emerge. Duality. Complementarity, maybe. A test for writers. A challenge, to accept, not avoid. 

And you can also see the blank page as the only means your novel has to tell you you’re not going in the right direction. Is there always a reason for the blank page? I think it is the case for me. If I can’t go on with my writing, it’s that something is wrong with it, that the direction I want to take isn’t the right one. The blank page that stares at me then forces me to stop and think. So perhaps writers should learn to love blank pages for the lessons they teach them. 

"If it was that easy"

 

According to some writers, their characters appear to them, fully formed, ready to tell their stories and come to life on the page. I'm afraid it's not the case for me... Sometimes I think being a writer would be much easier if it happened that way! 

Mistakes!

Ah, mistakes… Spelling mistakes, grammar mistakes, historical mistakes… They are a writer’s nightmare. They are my nightmare, haunting me as I write this very post. Because I make a lot of mistakes, especially spelling mistakes. It’s not that I can’t spell. I can spell. It’s just that I’m a scatter-brain and that I hate rereading what I write so I tend to leave a trail of mistakes in my paragraphs (I do try to make an effort though and I apologise if you stumble upon a few as you read my posts). Tiny mistakes (and bigger ones), stupid mistakes. Mistakes I could have avoided and that make me cringe when I discover them later (for instance when I go through the first draft of a novel: this is what I tried to show in this cartoon).  

I hate these little mistakes that weave their way into my prose, almost as if of their own accord. Sometimes I could swear they do, that the letters and the words twist themselves out of shape on purpose, and that it is not the doing of my slow, lazy brain, or of my fingers which are typing too quickly on the keyboard.

I hunt those mistakes down as I edit, and read my manuscript again and again, but feedback from first-readers shows me that in spite of everything, mistakes, even the most obvious and stupidest of obvious and stupid mistakes, remain. But there are mistakes more embarrassing than typos: for instance mistakes in a word I have taken a fancy to and use throughout the novel but cannot actually spell (usually because I can pronounce it and write it sort of phonetically). It’s like when you discover a nice, new, long word in a book and use it later in casual conversation and the look on the other person’s face makes you realise you pronounce it all wrong… And this is where I say thank you to Word and its red, wiggly lines.

There are the typos, there are the real spelling mistakes, there are the grammar mistakes and there are, when you are writing historical fiction, historical mistake. Those are the worse… For they are insidious. They are treacherous. They are at the core of historical fiction. Well, maybe not, but I wonder if there is a single historical novel which has not at least one historical mistake. After all, none of us historical fiction writers has managed to travel in the past and to have a first-hand account of what we’re depicting, so…

Part of me (the historian in me, the person who delights in pointing out that “this film got it ALL wrong, because a knight wouldn’t be riding a Friesian horse in the 13th century!”) is obsessively concerned about them. Another part of me has a more relaxed attitude: it’s fiction! It’s just a pack of lies. I made it all up, and who’s going to check if the 25th of February 1820 was indeed a Wednesday? Or if it was snowing on Christmas 1821? But actually, those are mistakes no one cares about. More troublesome are mistakes about the food (i.e. if you make 15th century people eat tomatoes), dress, conventions, etc. … And even if you do your research well, there will be mistakes, because so much is open to interpretation.

Yet there is another side to all those mistakes: they reveal a lot about the people who make them. This struck me as I was doing research earlier this year for my master’s degree in medieval history. I studied a manuscript, written in middle French. The manuscript itself was a translation of the original Latin text, so I didn’t know anything about the scribe whose writing I painstakingly deciphered. And in a way, he was not important as what mattered was the gist of the text. Yet his choice of spelling (the spelling of middle French words is…haphazard at best, and since there is no fixed spelling, there are no spelling mistakes so to speak) could have reflected his accent, or his regional origin. And he made mistakes in the manuscript: for instance he repeated one word twice, which could show that he had stopped copying for a moment (to go to the toilet? To have a drink? To pray, if he was a monk? Or simply to daydream?) before going back to his task. And those mistakes made him come alive. He wasn’t just an anonymous scribe. He was a real person, human, with failings, with dreams, with a personality. And those mistakes are what made him become human to me.

So now I try to stop hating my mistakes. Not to the point of embracing them, not to the point of not minding if some are left in my manuscript, but I try to see the funny side of them. After all, we wouldn’t be human if we didn’t make mistakes from time to time! And they symbolize, more than anything else, the rawness of a first draft, this material that writers shape and sculpt, and the mixture of malleability and fixity that is at the core of the written word.

"Searching for a publisher"

That's how I felt, once I had completed my novel and started to wonder if I should take the traditional publishing route. There are so many publishers and agents. Some do not accept submissions, some appear to only publish authors who are already famous, others seem more than a little shady... At least, if I self-publish, the fate of my novel will be in my own hands. 

As Winter Came and Went - Extract 1

I promised I would post extracts of my novel in progress, so here’s the first one! This is the incipit of As Winter Came and Went, a historical/literary fiction novel, set in 1820.

Please note that this is not necessarily the final version of the incipit, since I am still in the process of revising my manuscript.

Feel free to comment and let me know if you like or dislike it, what you think work or doesn’t work, and if this taster makes you want to read the rest of the book!

 

Incipit of As Winter Came and Went
 

…such a very long way away…yes…back there in Africa…so sad isn’t it…a savage country, savage and godforsaken…he didn’t say what happened...meant to be dead…a strange story… Here they are again, talking, always talking, and they think I can’t hear ‘em, they think I can’t see ‘em, they think I don’t know it’s me it’s all about. They think I lost my senses as well as my soul, back there in Africa, but they got it wrong, so wrong.
…so sad isn’t it…a disaster…yet I was told…gold in that city…a godforsaken land I tell you… What is it now? I don’t care…Nothing matters really, nothing anymore …lovely weather…soon arrive with that wind…very nice yes, very nice…I feel sick. No, not so much sick as empty… empty and meaningless...about to disappear into the wind, the sea, infinity.... If I could. 
A grotesque pantomime, I nod and smirk and hate myself for a hypocrite. It’s not a nice part I play; I smile with my mouth full of sand and rotting from the inside. With my mouth full of sand and the sea in my eyes, nameless I erred, in the immensity. Immensity of the desert, immensity of the sea and a screeching bird crosses the white white sky. I wander and wonder, doomed for ever to never know where I go. 
They wanted me to tell ‘em a story. What for? I spun stories with my legs crossed on the sand, I told tales and they were thrown back in my face. I told tales and asked for water and dates… Stories have to be paid for. Let me tell you one, all of ye who stare and talk over there. Let me tell you a story that starts bad and ends bad ‘cause happy endings are ever so rare. Damn you, why do ye stare at me, ye all under the mast? You talk and talk and never want to hear. Now the questions, then the whispered answers, the answers you think are right, and the pitiful glances …tragic, so tragic…savages, yes sir, savages…They got it all wrong. Pitiful glances, full of satisfaction…can you wonder…after what happened… But what happened?
Let me tell you a story that began one and twenty years ago. All the way to Timbuktu. Timbuktu which they never found, which I never reached and neither did I want to. I never, never wanted to, not if they had to find it too. I told them, you shouldn’t, and serves them right after all. They sold their souls to the devil and tried to make me follow them. All the way to Timbuktu… Timbuktu, my grandmother said, my ancestors and yours, they once dwelled there.
Something snapped that could not be mended. Something snapped and I held on, to the book, to the tales. To the ghostly memory of my name. Pearls tumbled out of the girl’s mouth and it was the fairies’ gift to her. But like everything that comes from ‘em, it was a curse, sorrow and greed. What was the fairies’ gift to me? The sea in my eyes and the desert in my heart. A curse. The green green shadows of the sea in my eyes… Oak trees round the house and a rose bush in winter and a single flower laced with frost. I fell and the camel winked at me, I fell under the blazing sky and the sun pierced my eyes.
I lost my compass on the way from Timbuktu but my chestnut horse went on and on, lowering his head against the wind, closing his eyes against the sand. The little pony trotted on the cobbled road and his hooves were so many bells on the long way to the church. I had to sit still and hated it but Victoria, she was watching me. Watching me with her neatly plaited hair tied back with blue ribbons the colour of her eyes. And James, he’d pull her braids and she’d squeal and once she hit him back with her hymn book. Littlest, youngest, smallest I was of all six of us. Littlest, youngest, smallest and they called me a changeling ‘cause I’m left-handed and the fairies poured the green shadows of the sea into my eyes.
The road to Timbuktu, all lined with palm trees that fluttered and sang in the wind. But they were out of tune. And there was no water. No water, no shade, no cool shadows. No trees under which to rest save those stringy palm trees that softly laughed at me. Then they were lost, behind the faded blue mountains and the wind rose thousands of sharp needles that tore my skin and choked my lungs. No escape, no end. No end to the story yet. The night came, again and again, and the stars sung their lullaby. I’d never seen so many stars. 
…delightful weather…isn’t it…nothing like the sea… I grew up with the sea on one side and the hills on the other. There, over the barren cliffs, the sea, and there was a forest of ancient gnarled trees, trees that whispered in the northern wind. I sat under an oak tree and leant my head against the trunk. The leaves could not shelter me from the rain and it fell fell fell, silver drops rolling from the branches and glistening on the mossy stones. 
It’s too hot on the deck. A white sky, a white land. Filling my eyes, my dark and sea green eyes with dreams I’d forgotten and memories I’d dreamt. …look at him…pale…isn’t he…malaria…terrible…can you wonder… Can you wonder? Stop talking, stop staring. To hell with that and the whole lot of ‘em… No one to give me a smile or a word of comfort. Alone under the oak tree as the rain fell down. Alone in the desert and the desert swallowed me. The Sahara, whose name is a song whispered by the southern wind. Palm trees and oak trees. Plant an apple tree over my head… over my grave... It’d be so easy to fall, in the deep blue sea. It is too hot on the deck but I’m doomed forever to be cold. A ghost. Crashing waves coming and going, battling against the hull of the ship. Tossing and rolling and swaying, swaying. There’s no end to it. Coming and going…