While I’m in the in-between state of ‘writer-hiatus’ (with thanks to Alex Josephy for the term) I’m letting my mind mull on the next book in the trilogy. I wrote recently about how new material often comes from dreams or from the trance-like state that walking can induce, but yesterday it came from looking the other way – simply not trying to think about the characters, how they would fit together, what parts of their stories need to be captured or how the overall narrative should be structured.
Instead, I was preparing for a Cinnamon Press reading at our local bookshop, the wonderful Hen Bost. Afterwards there was to be a ‘tapas and drinks’ get together for 12 people round our kitchen table so the whole day was spent cooking, accompanied by Lana del Rey and Leonard Cohen.
Somewhere in the midst of making Spanish tortilla, chilli prawns, garlic mushrooms, humus, crab cakes, ratatouille and bean stew, tomato and feta salad and spiced roast nuts, the structure of the next book, For Hope is Always Born, crept up on me and quietly revealed itself. It’s still fragile, but it reminded me that we must stop and do something completely different sometimes in order to let creativity breath.
One of the writing prompt tools I often use for journalling (and which I also used to inspire the poems in the pamphlet Turn/Return) is Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt’s Oblique Strategies card. They were developed as quirky ways out of an impasse, particularly creative impasses or team projects. On my way to catch a train today I picked out a card that said, ‘Do we need holes?’ Yes! We need holes in our schedule, spaces to look the other way, to walk or dream or cook for a whole day. We need space to change environment for ten minutes or half an hour or a day or more in order to make ourselves look the other way and find that, when we turn our gaze back again, the perspective has already changed.
Kafka famously had a sign over his desk that simply said, ‘Wait’. It’s not advice that writers often want to hear. We’re more liable to be keen to get on, keen to finish, keen to find a publisher, keen to … We don’t live in a patient world, but a slow writing movement might be as timely as the slow food movement. Waiting, sending the manuscript off to be commented on and positively critiqued, or just putting the file away for a period of time, has all kinds of benefits. It ensures that the glitches are more likely to be caught and the final draft will be one that is as polished as possible. And it pulls us out of the trance so that the next time we encounter the manuscript we’re not so emotionally involved with the characters whose lives had started to invade our dreams.
At this stage, some of it starts to form. Maybe you write a timeline. Perhaps you write chapter summaries. You might be someone who writes detailed character sketches or even has a list of questions to ask each character. For me, it’s all about research at this stage. I look up the weather of the time and place I’m writing about. I research the politics, the social climate, the architecture of the streets, the landscape, the local food, historical characters who might turn up in the novel. Before beginning to write This is the End of the Story I read several academic tomes on Don Quixote and several novels that has a Quixotic structure. For the current novel, A Remedy for All Things, I read everything I can find about Attila and all of his poetry that’s in English translation. I also unearthed several interviews with Attila’s family members and with the sculptor who made the most famous statue of him. Then I read several books about the 1956 Hungarian Uprising and as much as I could find about Budapest in the early 90s. From these copious notes some rough sketches of actual story began to be written and the opening, which had been in my head since the first dreams of my new protagonist, Selene.
Travelling there made a real difference, thanks to a generous grant from ACE, but even that would have been less effective without some key conversations with people who are part of the place. Conversations at the Hungarian House of Photography, and at the Attila József Museum were crucial. Similarly, meeting Lászlo Kunos, Director of Corvina Press, not only gave me a much more nuanced perspective on life in both 1950s and 1990s Budapest (something I wouldn’t have picked up from books or even from visiting merely as a tourist) but also helped me make key decisions about how my character, Catherine, thinks about Attila József’s final days and state of mind. And meeting the novelist and poet, Gábor Schein, again enriched my perspective on this remarkable city, which has been through so much, and yet is a relatively young city, with Pest in particular becoming populace only at the end of the nineteenth century.
But during her time there, her sense of confused identity comes back to haunt her. Having worked to establish her perception of reality as linear and quotidian, she begins to dream the life of a young woman imprisoned after the Hungarian Uprising of 1956. Moreover, in alternate chapters, this woman, Selene Solweig Virág, dreams Catherine’s life. Selene’s life is further complicated by a relationship she has on only one day in each of six successive years, a day when she slips through time to find herself with Attila József. (Whether the dreams — either Catherine’s or Selene’s — are ‘real’ and whether Selene (if she exists) actually moves into another time period or only imagines it as part of a stress breakdown in her life is of less concern than the interweaving of periods of political turmoil and personal perspectives on reality.)