Four for Forty: 1990s
So, how are you this morning? I was up late researching, so yes I would like another coffee, thank you. It's hard to think in a straight line during the school summer holidays - this first paragraph has been interrupted by: 'Mum, if I bought a parachute would you let me jump out of the window?' and 'Mum, can I have a squirrel monkey for my birthday'. Late night working it is.
There's an amazing moment with writing novels when they suddenly rise up and become real to you. Have you had that feeling? It would be interesting to know if it's the same for other artists - actors and musicians. That amazing moment when everything clicks into place, the characters round out and the world you've been building floods with colour and sound. It's like falling through the back of the wardrobe into Narnia.
This new book is a story I really want to write, but the research has been like pushing a boulder uphill. The hero - an all-American 'enigma wrapped up in a puzzle and tied with a mystery' as he described himself, has been hard to get a handle on. The book started with me wondering why on earth someone as unlikely as him would be that heroic. One of his biographers said in the myths there were times when men became gods - maybe it's that. When he landed a contract to write his autobiography, he complained 'it's impossible! It's a cast of hundreds - it's worse than WAR and PEACE!'
I was beginning to agree with him, then yesterday I had some big breakthroughs. I tracked down a rare DVD from a filmaker in Munich of the house where it's going to be set, and out of print catalogues from dealers in Paris and New York. Then, through my wonderful ex-tutor at the Courtauld Institute, I've been put in touch with a woman who was there - the last survivor of this amazing, heroic chapter during WW2. It was one of those days when you feel like you've got an angel sitting on your shoulder making everything come right. We even had a new one - my daughter came through and told me to turn *my* music down when I was celebrating.
So, in terms of 'process' this is where I wanted to be before doing the copy edit on the Spanish novel, (it is that point where you are scribbling notes on the backs of envelopes - ideas are coming hard and fast). In a funny way, it's like I'm coming full circle back to the beginning of the nineties, because this book brings in all the academic study, all the art ... The nineties are a strange decade aren't they? Not as easy to pigeon-hole as the previous decades. What were they characterised by? Grunge? To paraphrase my mother's: 'it may have been the Sixties but nothing was swinging for me, dear,' I kind of missed the whole grunge thing. How about you? Answers in the comments box, please.
My 90s began here - I rocked up in Durham to study Philosophy, with a cinema size Betty Blue poster, a couple of pairs of jeans, and a head full of questions. I wanted answers - I wanted to understand the world, (instead, I just found more questions, and I was missing Art so I transferred to the Courtauld Insitute in London). But Durham was beautiful - my favourite walk was from the Cathedral along the river bank at twilight, Prebends bridge lit up by old streetlamps. It was - and is magical. Not least because I met the pilot there.
TODAY'S PROMPT: What were the nineties to you? After a few months in Durham, I spent the whole decade in London. It was: studying, walking back to our first flat over Westminster Bridge at twilight. It was a crazy year as an Administrator for a performing arts festival, taking care of VIPs and performers. It was my first career - as an art consultant working out of a gallery in Chelsea with a group of people who became like a second family. It was buying art at auction in Paris, curating jobs in embassies and palaces of breathtaking extravagance - and then coming back to the half renovated flat we were doing up, and getting on with hanging tiles and plastering walls. What about you - what was your soundtrack of the decade? The films you loved? The places that shaped you? Why not free write and see if you can define a decade that seems to lack an easy 'tag' - use what you get to write a short story about the pre-Millennium, or to feed in to a character's background. Enjoy x
