There’s nothing more exciting than starting to write a new story. Or at least that’s how it feels before I begin. In fact it’s the before-writing that is the exciting part, those weeks or days when the idea is still fresh in my mind but when I haven’t started trying to set it down yet. When the story is in fact nothing more than a sense of itself, a couple of pages or paragraphs of scribbled notes.
My longhand script is messy. It’s become worse since I abandoned longhand drafts and began writing straight into the computer. This scares me a bit – if I’ve given up on longhand, passionate lover of navy Quink ink and Parker pens and wide feint spiral bound notebooks that I am, does this mean that handwriting, like its cousin the postage stamp, is ultimately doomed? But then again I know writers younger than myself who still do all their first drafts in longhand, so perhaps we’re still OK on that one.
The messy longhand notes are crucial, though. I don’t always look at them again, but the act of putting them on paper releases something. It brings the life of a story into being. At this point, writing is a delight. The possibilities seem endless, profuse as daisies. I feel confident and fully alive. The new story is going to be the best I’ve yet written.
With the setting down of that first paragraph everything changes. I realise, as I’ve realised on every previous occasion, that not only do I not know precisely where this story should start, I’m not entirely clear on what it’s about, either. It’s like diving into the sea. Suddenly I’m in a new element, new actions are expected of me. The gulf between the mind and the page feels unbridgeable. Everything is more immediate and more obscure.
When I wrote ‘The Muse of Copenhagen,’ the story that is to appear in the Solaris anthology House of Fear later this year, I moved quickly from a state of elation to one of gritted-teeth despair. I started the story four times, jettisoning about 5,000 words in the process, and feared I might never finish it. On the fifth attempt I got it. From that moment on there’s nothing I can do but write, nail down the first draft as quickly as I can in case it gets away from me again.
For me, the process of writing a first draft is like trying to untangle a ball of wool. Not a new ball of wool, but one of those odd remnants you find at the bottom of your grandmother’s knitting basket, one that has been there so long it has worked itself into a Gordian knot, a tangle so dense and so rigid it appears to be a single solid mass. The colour is so right though, nothing else will do for what I want to make. So what I have to do is start unpicking. I work a fingernail between the strands, tugging gently to find the place of least resistance. Sometimes when I pull the skein tightens still further, so I stop what I’m doing in a hurry and try somewhere else. After a lot of trial and error I might manage to work loose the thread end, and at that point I have something to go on. Finally the wool unravels, sliding between my fingers. It’s always an intoxicating moment.
Over the past few days I’ve been making notes for the final story in my ‘Martin’ series, a loosely linked collection of stories about a man who’s in love with timepieces. I’ve just reached that point where I have to start writing something. I’m both excited and apprehensive, as I imagine a fencing master must feel before a duel.
I like that image. I’ll probably use it. But not now.