With her new novel Blood From Stone about to hit the shops, Frances Fyfield tells all about the literary life
It all depends. Telling stories in writing is my living and my vocation, but it doesn’t follow that it’s always my favourite occupation. I’d rather be out, eating, drinking, talking and looking at paintings, but if I don’t write, I’m unhappy. I’m damned if I do and damned if I don’t. It’s a constant tug of war between need and resistance. I’ll even go on a treadmill, wash my hair to check what colour it really is, or find something anally retentive to do about the house. I keep a very clean house by way of work displacement activity: also clean teeth, etc. Basically, a lot of time is spent not writing, thinking about it, avoiding it and the method, if you could call it that, is all about dealing with an overload of contradictory impulses without actually grinding my teeth.
Here’s the secret on the method. There isn’t one. I am always losing the plot. The first thing to arrive in any novel is a scene or a place where something happens. I’m a very visual writer, so that’s the starting point: second, a small cast of characters I don’t yet know until I actually start writing them. The grand plan is to battle through to the central scenes and that involves an awful lot of people getting on and off buses and opening doors on the way. In the meantime, there’s a helluva lot of yellow post-its hanging around the pictures on the walls, bathroom, kitchen etc, saying meaningful things, like What If?
I’m a loner and social animal combined, so it follows that the best time to write is first thing in the morning, i.e., too early for phone calls. Then, I look at all the gathered post-its pinned round the computer as well as yesterday’s lines, and think, No. Then I think, maybe. Then I carry on, taking it wherever it goes for a few hours, promising myself that if I do this until noon, I can go out for a bacon sandwich. (In all ways, a little hunger helps.) So, how I write is, by assembling coffee, cigarettes, pens etc, for those unsociable hours when I have run out of excuses and, at the end of each stint, remember to leave something unfinished, (as well as that bottle of wine,) because it makes it easier to start again.
Try and remember there’s a plot in there. Really.
Posted 03/03/2008 15:16:36 by Frances Fyfield with 0 comments.
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