The escaped book

And yet it all seemed to be going so well up until yesterday: the first chapter could only lead into the second, its baby brothers, chapters two and three, were born last weekend, with chapter three being drafted in a quarter of the time that chapter two had taken... Characters I had not expected but was happy to meet were rearing their heads... The rules according to which one chapter would sequence into the next had been established...

And then this morning I realised that I didn't know what I was doing with this book; in fact what a laughable idea, to think that I might make a book out of this material.

It felt as if the story had suddenly morphed into some unrecognisable and very squishy being with a logic alien to anything I had conceived of, and retreated into a very dark cavern in the back of my head. I couldn't see it anymore, but I could hear it laughing at me - and it was a most unpleasant laugh.

Paranoia flowed...

Now I'm waiting to find time to plunge into the slime, embrace the beast and wrestle it back out of the cavern so that I can listen to what, if anything, it's saying to me.

It all sounds rather like something out of H. P. Lovecraft. Writing is a terrifying business.

Fresco versus charcoal

There is something inevitable about writing a story. 

The feeling comes when I hit that point at which it feels as if the story already exists, like a myth, and could not possibly have been anything else. On good days, at that point I know I'm on the right track (on bad days, I wonder if it just means my story is a cliché). 

However, despite this pre-ordained feel to the final story, the process by which the final (is it ever truly final?) version is attained is one of recurrent metamorphosis, although I tend to forget the extent of the rewrites almost as soon as I have stopped rewriting.

It happens like this: starting a story feels like creating a fresco. The plaster is fresh, the paint is ready, the idea imperatively needs to be imprinted on the wall. There is a sense of urgency about getting it down before it escapes, or is no longer possible to grasp - it has to be done before the plaster dries.

This is particularly the case when the story (particularly a short story) presents itself as an image, rather than a first sentence or a voice. With an image, everything seems to coalesce very quickly, and almost invariably the story practically writes itself. Because an image like this is not dissimilar to a dream, the urgency of the need to fix it (in the photographic sense) is particularly keen.  

However, once this initial urgency has been satisfied, writing a story is actually far more like drawing on a pavement with chalk, or on paper with charcoal: designed to be erased and redrawn. I can hear someone shouting "palimpsest!", but that is not strictly what I mean, because these earlier drawings are not really destined to survive. Even when the initial image - the genesis of the text - seems set in stone, by the time the story has been redrafted a few times, that vital image may well have become irrelevant and been discarded. 

There is a pleasure in all of this, but a sort of bitterness too. Those first characters you envisioned may metamorphose into other people; that fresh, ethereal idea, that sticks in your mind like a beautiful handcrafted object, has become worn and chalky at best. At worst, the act of writing it down has proved how impossible it is to write it down. 

It reminds me of the first time I visited Istanbul. I arrived there with a pre-conceived vision of the city: narrow streets twisting about the flanks of vast sunbaked sandstone walls, windows concealed behind intricately carved wooden screens, a sense of golden birds and Byzantium. The reality was a modern, tourist-infested city, as fascinating in its own idiosyncratic way, but bearing no relation to, the fabulous place that still floats behind my eyelids.

Perhaps, on the principle of Hemingway’s iceberg, the original image is indeed present beneath the surface of the final story (I hear that someone shouting "palimpsest!" again); and in fact, the story does ultimately resemble a fresco, drying into a form in which you no longer want to alter more than a word here, a phrase or inconsistency there. 

Perhaps writing a short story is neither like a fresco nor a charcoal drawing, and perhaps there is no need to mourn the unattainability of that fabulous initial dream: perhaps it was always destined to become the skull beneath the story's skin.