How to finish (writing) a book ( part 1)
Susan Wicks says it’s like making pastry, you just keep adding flour and water till you get the consistency right. She was speaking at the Bloodaxe launch of her amazing recent book Dear Crane along with Tiffany Atkinson, Aoife Lyall and Fleur Adcock also launching fabulous new work. Tiffany Atkinson was modest about her own process yet her stunning new book Lumen shows how much work and craft has gone in to it. Everyone agreed each book you write is different.
Certainly you have to push through your own doubts – oscillating between despair (no one will want to read this, it’s the worst rubbish I’ve ever written!) and ecstasy (this is brilliant, it’s my best work ever!) in varying proportions.
In the past finishing for me meant collecting together what I’d been writing and sorting everything into ‘keep’ ‘maybe’ and ‘whaaat?/noooo!’ piles (again strangely interchangeable) and then a search for order and relationship between the poems – curating as everything is called these days. Poems can be linked by theme, form, tone, imagery, sound etc. Do you group similars together for a cumulative effect or do you separate them, sprinkling in a leitmotif throughout? Often it’s an intuitive process.
But my last two books have both had clear overarching structures. Which meant writing towards something. Right from the start of At the Library of Memories, published by Waterloo Press, I had an idea of the entire book. Although the flesh of it changed over the years (sic) of writing it, the bare bones never did. All along I had in mind an imaginary building which the reader/someone would enter at the beginning, wander through and then leave at the end – or perhaps they’d never leave at all. I knew there would be rooms containing shelves, forgotten items, questions. Initially there were more staff working in this library but as the memories themselves grew in numbers of characters (mostly human, adults and children, but also some animals such as the wolves or the jackal) the staff – or guides – faded away. But there was always a beginning, a middle and an end, even if I wasn’t completely sure what would fill them. Ultimately it divided into eight areas with the Foyer at the very start, the Room of Dying as the penultimate section, FAQ, rooms of Coughing, Smells, An Interior Garden in between and so on.
At different stages I showed the new work to trusted readers. When they all agreed and when their feedback resonated with my own feelings about what needed doing it was bliss. When they didn’t I plunged into indecisiveness and despaired of ever finishing the book. Everything took longer than I thought. Luckily I know some fantastic fellow poets and mentors without whom I don’t see how I’d ever finish anything.
Even then some themes only become apparent after publication. In At the Library for instance I only realised as I was doing readings from it how central the notion of breath was.
The True Story of Cowboy Hat and Ingénue, published by Liquorice Fish/ Cinnamon Press, also very soon grew into an entire book length concept or in fact poem. Unlike other collections its characters were completely fictional and they had their own narrative which provided the foundations for the book. Again I knew the ending from the very start. There wasn’t an overall frame as with At the Library but there was an underlying story – and countless backstories – which provided the drive behind everything.
You can see I am mixing metaphors without a care here! We started with pastry and I have moved from flesh and bones into architecture and now some kind of engine – clearly I find my own process impossible to pin down.
During the writing, I travelled and many of the landscapes and places I visited found their way into the writing. Roughly speaking in the book Ingénue enters a community of outcasts and falls in love with Cowboy Hat. Both women go on a quest to find Cowboy Hat’s daughter but their story is interwoven with the stories of many other characters (also with their own stories) some their contemporaries, some not, (drag queen, children, a nun, brothel keeper, soldiers, Bearded Lady, bear etc). Most are refugees of some kind, fleeing war and oppression. I didn’t write the book in a linear way, though I had storylines in the back of my mind. When it came to piece it together the structure was not linear either, darting back and forth through time and space – fitting together more like patchwork (sorry!) although it is a ‘journey’ or quest book. A cross between an epic and a spaghetti Western as a friend described it…
And now it’s my great pleasure to tell you I have a new book coming out from Waterloo Press this year called Small Odysseys. As someone who grew up between cultures borders have always fascinated me. Reading back, the theme of journeys, whether inwards or outwards, is clearly there in all my work. In that respect this new book then is no different. But its process – and content – has been entirely different. More about that in another, later post…
