Being brave enough to show some ankle – Part Three

Carrying an unfinished trilogy in one’s head is rather… frustrating (I am already doing that with Twenty Years Later, and don’t have room to carry this too) so this is the third and last part of the tale.

I thought about all kinds of things to put here, details, vignettes, but it seems that I’m not in the mood for that. Perhaps this part of the story is too recent, and that freshness paradoxically makes it stale for me. I find no excitement in telling it all now – it hasn’t acquired that sense of the mythical that other parts of the story have acquired. So, I will reduce this part to some very key moments.

So, I was in a desert, miles from a cup of prose, when a map was sent to me entirely out of the blue by my closest friend. It was a book called The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron. Whilst I was somewhat uncomfortable with the spiritual aspects, the exercises and prose started to deconstruct the block. I have no idea where I would be if that book hadn’t been sent to me, an institution of some kind perhaps. I didn’t do the whole course, I didn’t do all the exercises, but I did start to write again.

Fast forward through three years of me writing utter crap. I really mean total crap, but at least I was writing. No other soul will ever read the products of that time. Half-finished stories, random scenes from three different novels, all clichéd and lifeless. I wonder if I was catching up on the years I had lost – that my writer brain had been starved of development so I was still writing at the level I reached and stopped at as a teenager. I read / heard someone saying that happens with drawing – an adult’s ability to draw is determined by the age they stopped drawing regularly as a child. It makes sense to me.

How ‘Twenty Years Later’ came about is an odd tale, and not one I am ready to tell either. But suffice to say I carried it around with me for a significant period of time, desperate to write it down but not being able to find a way into the story. Like a puzzle box – I knew there was a way to get inside, but I just couldn’t find the point to begin.

I went to France for a holiday, my Dad has a house there. I was a teacher at the time, of A-level Psychology (that’s what my degree is in). I wasn’t trying to write anything, just relaxing. Then I woke up one morning and my narrator was there, right there in my head, fully formed. I could see how he looked and even hear his voice. He started to speak and I literally leapt out of bed, ran downstairs and turned the computer on. Half an hour later the prologue was written, and whilst it has been edited extensively since then, the tone and feel and most of the first paragraph have remained intact.

After 26 days the first draft was complete. I felt like a woman possessed – it just poured out of me. I wrote somewhere around 3,000 words a day, and that was whilst working full time! I snatched break times, lunchtimes, free periods, any spare moment to get the words out. I had to write a chapter every day just to satisfy that urge to get the story out of my head. My husband became a writing widow – if I needed to complete what I had started in the day, I would be barely able to converse until it was done.

It was glorious.

It was one of the best times in my life to date. I had never felt so satisfied, so fulfilled, so in tune with this thing in me that drives me to write. Somehow, all of the walls between us had dissolved and it was just playing the story out like a film, and all I had to do was describe what was happening. No struggle, no agonising. Just… bliss.

The lovely Havi has been talking about the importance of people believing in you. Well, one person’s belief in what I had written played another key role in my life. Her name is Sally and she was the librarian of the school in which I taught.

Before I go any further, I want to make sure you have the right mental image of her, because Hollywood and TV has been very unfair to librarians. Sally was one of the trendiest individuals I have ever had the pleasure of knowing. She always wore such great clothes, one of those women who is effortlessly stylish. She had a blonde bobbed haircut, a remarkable collection of personal anecdotes and she read each chapter of my book every day, literally hot from the printer.

She loved it.

That meant a lot to me, as she had read every single book in the school library. I trusted her taste – she had been recommending books for me to read on the commute in and out of London for years and a lot of them were young adult fiction. She knew books. And she said mine was good enough to publish. Sally recommended the small Chicken House imprint and the journey diverged down another winding path, to this little clearing that we find ourselves in now.

If it hadn’t been for her, I never would have dreamt of trying to get it out there. For me back then, it was all I needed to be able to physically hold it in my hand, to finally have started, and completed, a whole novel.

I think that’s the last detail I’d like to tell you for now. ‘Twenty Years Later’ has changed a lot since that first draft. I have been wondering whether to re-submit to Chicken House as they nearly picked it up on the second draft (after I had made revisions in line with their comments to rewrite). But that’s another post.

So what’s all this about showing ankles? Well, when I was thinking about being horribly blocked and not writing, it reminded me of a Victorian woman laced up tight in corsetry and bussle. Constricted, uncomfortable and too concerned about what other people think, and wanting to be seen as beautiful, to loosen that lacing. When I am in the grip of the Fear about others seeing into me through the window of my words, I think of how appalling the Victorians thought it was for a woman to show even just an ankle. How frightening yet thrilling it might have been for one woman to have revealed a bit of leg in public. Whilst there isn’t the sexual undertone in letting others see my writing, there is that sense of danger, that fear of reprisal and potential rejection. Hence the ankle.

I look back over this trilogy and think about those amazing people. My primary school teacher. My English teacher. Sally, the trendiest librarian in London. They were my champions when I couldn’t champion myself.

I am the luckiest person in the world.

Tagged as: twenty years later, young adult fiction