Not Writing but Dreaming

To me, creative writing is rather like making wine. First, there is the gathering of ingredients; the succulent fruits of word and phrase, the sugared waters of the imagination. These must then be mixed together with thought for colour, taste and scent. Into this murky cordial is poured the yeast, the living heart of the vintage, without which there will be no wine. We also need those bubbles of transition to make our writing live. Technique alone is not enough. It’s no good pounding the keyboard, practicality will not serve. These bubbles rise only when the mind is still; in the dreamtime between waking and sleeping, or when our eyes are fixed on some far horizon. It is only in stillness that we find what is missing – the word that has eluded us, the change in syntax that puts the beat into the heart of our poems. Small changes or large ones, this is part of the creative process. As writers we have to listen to that inner voice. It tells us when the rhythm jars, when something is wrong. In my case, my finals were upon me and my submission was almost complete when that nagging voice began to tell me that my story, the first part of a novel, was not sufficiently grounded in the past. It was not direct enough. I didn’t want to listen, but I had to accept that there was a problem. I tried reworking the assignments, adding titbits of historical detail, but still my characters remained distant and I was running out of time. Then one day, when I was out walking the dog, watching him play in the stream and thinking of nothing very much, it came to me that the tense was wrong. The tense I was using put the story back in time, but my characters were not acting out their story in the past. They are in the here and now. The action needed the tension of the moment, something the past tense couldn’t provide. I decided to rewrite the whole thing again, in the present tense which would, I hoped, take the reader back to a different world, to 1804, when Napoleon was threatening to invade and my characters were in imminent danger. After days (and nights) of frantic writing, I felt I had achieved immediacy. I wanted to dive into the heads of my characters, know what they were thinking, feel the weight of their clothes and taste their food. I didn’t want to relate what it was like to live in 1804 but to live it, with all the pleasures and discomforts of the time. That moment by the stream changed my writing completely. It was a spark of enlightenment, but then this is the nature of creativity. It is transient and elusive and to find it we need to dream; to tune in to the subconscious and listen to that inner voice. It could be the whisper of the muse herself.

Character and clues

I have been continuing to tell the story of Lucy as she works in the Flag Loft of Chatham Dockyard. I have been trying to concentrate on her as a person and I think one of the best ways to show this is to follow her thought processes through to the resultant actions. In the section I am working on, Lucy is given a new task as the can't sew. This is to 'finish' the signal flags, adding toggles and lanyards. She also has to pack the flags into canvass sacks ready to go out to the ships. This is all explained to her by one of the ladies, Mary, who is only too happy to relinquish the job and get back to her sewing circle. But she is a motherly sort, kindly but a bit scatterbrained. She takes time to help Lucy, but she forgets to tell Lucy which knot to use to tie the neck of the sacks once they have been packed with a full set of flags. Towards the end of the day, Lucy makes up the sets of flags and puts them into the bags, tying the sacks in the way that she believes to be right. But when she goes to put the sacks away in the store room she sees that all Mary's sacks are tied with tight reef knots. She takes one of her own sacks to the supervisor to check that the slip knot she has used is, in fact, the right one. It is, but she doesn't mention that Mary has tied up dozens of sacks in a way that would make them difficult to undo, particularly at sea when the knots would tighten in the damp conditions. She decides to come back when it is quiet and retie all those on the shelves with the proper knot before anyone finds out - particularly Mary who would be very upset. She sees it as a job that can be done quickly and that there is no need to make a fuss. This seemingly minor incident shows something of Lucy's character. She is prepared to work extra time to cover up for a colleague. This shows her as kind, generous, observant and intelligent. It also moves the plot forward as the business of the knots is a clue which may eventually lead to the villan of the piece who, at this stage, is still hiding in the shadows.