Housekeeping
How is everyone? To say it's been busy here is a bit of an understatement. In the last month the pilot has mostly been away (North America, South America and now Australia). Meanwhile the kids are at school, and I'm crossing over between two books, 7am - 1pm checking the proofs of 'The Beauty Chorus' and at night after they are asleep, I'm in the early stages of writing the next one. Oh, and the MA has started again - so I'm reading and critiquing a novel a week for that too. The photo sums it up - you have the visual 'story' of the new book on the pinboard, the last three books from two suitcases full of reference material, and the print out of 'The Beauty Chorus'. I still love the company of my 'girls' as I've come to think of them, and take it as a good sign that though I've read the manuscript a hundred times, I haven't tired of their story. It's ridiculously exciting seeing your work laid out like A Proper Book ... let alone the fact that there are bound proofs going out into the world.
A quick piece of advice for anyone writing for publication - do not include numerous quotes from copyrighted songs. Nightmare. Maybe you get used to being able to do whatever you want with blogging - sampling music and photos - but not with books. With any luck I'm in the final stages of negotiating permission to quote 'I'll Be Seeing You' - with two separate companies who hold 50% rights. I've had to cut the other quotes because either the rights holders haven't responded or they've wanted £100s to quote two or three words. So in celebration of (fingers crossed) being able to include that wonderful song in a crucial part of 'The Beauty Chorus', in today's clip we have Francoise Hardy singing with Iggy Pop for Jazz at Saint Germain.
Meanwhile as one book is taking on a solid, final state, the other one is running wild in pages and pages of notes, files of photographs, maps, archive documents ... characters are chattering, mutating, clamouring to be heard. It makes me think of that brilliant Annie Dillard image - approaching a feral manuscript with a chair and whip yelling 'down Simba!'.
The research for this book has just floored me - when we lived in Valencia, I always wondered why no one would talk about the Spanish Civil War. Now I know. I'm doing a brilliant writers' workshop here at Bloomsbury Publishing led by the Sudanese writer Leila Aboulela, and some of the exercises inspired by good old Dorothea Brande have shown just how deeply affecting this material is. All the improvised stuff I'm coming out with is Spain, Spain, Spain ... it's just devastating what went on, and few people know about it. A guy asked me the other day what I'm writing next ... 'Spanish Civil War? I didn't know they had one ...' he said.
We've talked a lot about Julia Cameron's work in the past - one of the best pieces of advice she gives is the need to fill your creative well. I don't know if I've been running on empty, or have been overflowing. One of the best things for a writer is to be emotionally permeable - I think if you don't feel your story, your material, no one will. However, in spite of the intensity of everything I've learnt in the last few months, something was missing. So, the pilot suggested a break. We went to Dubai, (it felt like Vegas after here ...), which was great, but I still couldn't crack it. Then we went here - just up the road:
The new cultural village (so new, there's still piles of gilded tesserae lying around the mosque where the craftsmen are finishing the mosaic), held the answer. Thousands of miles away and nearly a century after they were taken, I went to see the Capa Spanish Civil War photographs in a dazzling Magnum exhibition. They sparked something. A long night chasing up leads later ... I found a photograph, the missing piece of the story, the catalyst that's pulled all the elements together. Now, I can write:
TODAY'S PROMPT: During the first week of the Bloomsbury workshop, Leila encouraged us to try out Brande's exercise of keeping a notebook by the bed. Each morning before you get up, before you talk to anyone - write. It's a very quick way to access what I think (from memory) Brande called 'the artistic trance'. Why not give it a go? My early morning scrawls were full of bullrings and refugees, but yours may be about raindrops and roses and whiskers on kittens ... see how you get on. Maybe you'll find that key, the missing part of the puzzle that you've been looking for ... x
