Writing fiction

[For Teresa Davey: below this sentence is a photo from my home of stylised artificial flowers made of iridescent plastic stuff that reflects the light in rainbow colours. They're in a greenish glass vase with a wide base and narrow neck, in front of a dark wall, reflecting sunlight slanting in from the window]

 

I'm not sure how other people write books; though there may be patterns and similarities, I imagine each writer is different. It must be a very individual thing.

My husband is also writing a novel. I don't want to know anything about it because this much is certain — if you tell anyone the details of the story then the story is told. You won't write it. So in the morning when we meet up for our prayers, he tells me only if it's going well and how many words he wrote the day before. 

When I am writing, I can't read any fiction — I can't let my husband read me what he's written so far, because the other person's voice (authorial voice, I mean) gets into my imagination and muddles up with my own, throws me off my stroke. But that doesn't happen to my husband. I read him whatever chunk I wrote yesterday, usually about 2000 words, and he enjoys listening to it without it interfering with his own work in progress. 

I recently bought as a cheap deal on Amazon the whole set of PG Wodehouse's Jeeves books, which I've not read in decades. They're all lined up on my shelf looking at me, and I dare not start them until I've finished the book I'm writing. I've promised myself that in the summer I'll sit outside on the terrace in the sunshine, or down on the beach by the sea, and read them all, and that will be how I get all the Vitamin D I need, through my skin, without paying for it.

My husband speaks about deciding whether to develop a character, about narratives he's blending — choices in crafting his work. Three of my children write fiction, they've written whole books, and I do wish they'd publish them, they're really good — and my daughter Alice told me recently she'd read somewhere the advice to start a book with a question. So instead of five characters are going to have adventures in storyland, you start by asking yourself what they were are looking for in storyland. Something like that.

However, when I write fiction, it's not like this exactly. In the first place, I don't believe in fiction as a concept — I don't think anything is fiction, not even lies. I think fiction is revelatory, all of it, of aspects of truth. Even lies reveal the truth of the liar's nature. And I think fiction in the normal sense — novels and short stories — are truth as it exists in potential, as it is found in a person's imagination. When I write a story, I'm not spinning a yarn, I'm telling you the truth. And I think my characters are real. I can't really estimate in what sense they are real, but I think they are.

So when I want to write a book, it's because of a personal need to enter a real world, and find the real people who live there, and really spend time with them: be there, not here, for a while.

And often it starts with what one might call a clue. This book I'm writing now began with the idea of a time that is different from the context in which it's set — a time of temporary grace; a chance to make things different. That gave me the title and the sprouting germ. But then very quickly there was added a central image; the only thing was that I could perceive no connection between the image and the title/idea, or see how they fitted together at all. The only thing I could do is follow the clue, see where it leads, watch the characters interacting and write down what they say and do, until I began to see the connections as it all unfolds. I've been puzzling over this for about two years! People have given up asking me how it's coming along.

I'm about halfway through writing this book, and it's become apparent to me only now what is happening, what it is saying, and why it's of relevance to the times we are presently living in, in this world here as distinct from that world I go into looking for truth. Because that's important; surely nobody wants to write an irrelevant book — though that is how a sophisticated critic in the Church Times once described my work. She was reviewing my book Into the Heart of Advent, about spending time with Jesus.

Anyway, never mind her — back to what I was telling you. It's as though the book was waiting for me as a living thing, not a two-dimensional narrative but something alive that meets me and welcomes me in, so that I can come back and bring you its story, and let its truth meet your truth so that it all joins up and truth everywhere is strengthened and becomes light.

It's like mining, but not dark or scary. It's a vivid world, full of light and hope.