"It is so good to have your life reduced to forty second intervals of effort while somebody shouts motivating imperatives at you."
Samantha Harvey
Samantha Havery's debut The Wilderness was winner of the Betty Trask Prize and shortlisted for the Orange Prize and the Guardian First Book Award. She spends a week pondering her critics, celebrating her champions, and writing her next book while revisiting the last.
Monday
Ponderous is the word that keeps coming up.
1. Lumbering and laborious in movement. 2. Without liveliness or wit. 3. Disproportionately thick or heavy.
Looking this word up today has been a revelation. I'd thought it meant thoughtful - maybe, sometimes a little too thoughtful. But lumbering? Witless! I sat down to work and constantly in my mind was How Not To Be Ponderous. I wrote as dynamic an action scene as I could, which did admittedly end with my two main characters once again in the living room talking quietly. In the evening I went to my usual Monday night circuit training, where we do press ups and squat thrusts to dance remixes of 80s love ballads. This is one of my favourite hours of the week. It is so good to have your life reduced to forty second intervals of effort while somebody shouts motivating imperatives at you.
There were two press reviews of my novel yesterday, one from The Independent, which said the writing was, yes, ponderous in places, and one from The Observer, which said it was - hear this - captivating. No dilemma, then, about which one to keep. Before bed I stuck The Observer one into my scrapbook. I see this as a process of truth engineering. When I look back at my reviews in 50 years time I'll think nothing bad was ever said against my writing, and in my conviction, this will become, for me, the truth.
Tuesday
I overcame my entire plan-repellent being today and mapped out in detail the last few scenes of my current novel. Now that I know exactly what I have to do, and how close the end is, I'm paralysed. Writing, for me, is a hapless process of discovery of my own characters and plot, and once the mystery is gone it becomes more of a technical exercise. I spent a lot of time investigating the view from my window (not my window, I borrow a room in a friend's house to write in). It's an epic view, with Bath falling away beneath and the Somerset countryside opening out hill upon hill. I looked from the view, back to my screen, back to the view and at some car shenanigans on the street below. At crucial points in the writing process there's always the desire to do anything but write. How can watching cars parallel park be more fascinating than a world I've spent the last year creating? I put my attention back to the screen. The end is in sight. I have to push on.
Wednesday
I worked, I had raspberry jam on toast, I worked, I had coffee. Actually the writing-to-a-plan approach isn't as bad as I anticipated, now that the first throes of horror and then paralysis are easing. At lunchtime I walked into town and bought an £18 bottle of wine for my partner's birthday present, and, as I flinched, wondered if I'd reached a turning point: Maybe this is adulthood at last? If life's progress can be charted by the amount we're prepared to spend on a bottle of wine, doesn't it reflect a fairly true picture of things? An exponential progression until about fifty, and then a twenty year plateau before a final slip into regress? I can no longer buy and drink a bottle of £3 fortified wine from Kwik Save; I could no more do that than I could reverse time itself. There is something of physical law about it, utterly inexorable.
Wednesday evenings are for sculpting. This week I'm finishing off a head; we get the clay from the recycled clay bin outside, which is a cold, slimy metre-deep trench of the unknown. You put your hand in, fill up your bucket and hope for the best. Out comes a mix of old clay, rainwater, plaster, cement insects, newspaper - and by some alchemy, it forms new, rich, silky clay that has its own life. The whole process of sculpting is utterly brilliant and absorbing. My head is now finished; it didn't end up resembling the model much at all - just glimpses here and there, an essence sort of pushing through.
(So, if you are somebody who ponders ('thinks about something carefully over a period of time') are you ponderous? That seems a little unfair. Your careful thoughts might be luminously profound. When does one become the other? Is it inevitable?)
Thursday
The clearest and bluest of mornings. I read in bed briefly before getting up -it's The Following Story by Cees Nooteboom at the moment. A tiny volume, about 100 pages, and written in that deeply reflective character-driven way that only European novels seem able to get away with. As somebody who is deeply interested - almost obsessed - with the idea of how to make a novel philosophical without making it irritating, I'm reading him as a form of education. I'd read a review that said his philosophical musings are never heavy-handed, but sneak up on you 'breathtakingly, like angels hidden in abandoned cupboards.' Wow. So I'll read on keenly. The angels I'm not sure about. But this morning he gave a very impressive, and quite long, description of a beetle eating a rat and feeding the regurgitated rat balls to its young.
At lunchtime I did a telephone interview with a magazine; it's an increasingly odd exercise to do publicity for a novel I finished writing over two years ago. Was it Ian McEwan who said that it's like being employed by a former self? And it seems to be a strange truth that the more times you are asked a particular question, the less you know the answer. The less you know what an answer would even look like. I'm so sorry, I want to say. I really don't know. Ask me something else; ask me who William Herschel is, ask me how Easter is calculated, I still know those things.
Meanwhile, today I embarked on a pruning exercise on my novel; as I did so I felt like I was making sleek something fat and unfit. And then afterwards I had the sinking feeling that I'd accidentally deleted all the important content and left something a little malnourished, and so understated that it communicates only to those with awareness of the subsonic. Thankfully I'd saved the deleted parts in a separate file and maybe I'll revisit them, maybe. Confused, a little disgruntled, I packed up work for the day. The most beautiful sunset out of the window, a blazing strip of orange along the horizon, then every gradation of colour through the coppers and greens, ending in a dome of royal blue, punched with stars. Impossible to feel despondent at the sight of that.
Friday
No work today. I baked a birthday cake. I went for a walk over the fields near my house, and to a meeting for the charity for which I'm a trustee. In the evening we had twelve friends to our house and played 'peasant wolf', which consisted of us shouting at each other for four hours while drinking Amaretto and eating lactose-free snacks.
Saturday
A slow motion day, consisting of a walk out in the fields and hills (an endearing encounter with some Gloucester Old Spot piglets, some meaningful eye contact with a horse and the sighting of an unfamiliar breed of horned cattle), some contemplative sitting, some focussed eating. Somebody I've never met phoned me to ask about what it was like to be a real writer. Not as good, I imagine, as it would be to be an unreal writer - but it is pretty wonderful even so. An early night, a deep, tired sleep.
Sunday
Every couple of months I meet up with my writing group, which formed five years ago when I was doing the Creative Writing MA here in Bath. For five whole years we've stayed intact, the seven of us. We met today in Bristol and workshopped some pieces of writing from our novels in progress. Workshop is the word that's always used for these feedback sessions, and it might seem absurd I suppose, bringing to mind as it does something that involves dremmels and hammers and angle grinders. But maybe that's what makes it the right word; trying to build a novel is a bit like trying to nail together a piece of furniture. It has to support itself, it has to hold weight, it has to be rightly structured and rightly proportioned. In this vein we go at each other's work; after five years together we've grown candid with one another. Yes, I've had entire paragraphs of my work struck through with something like, Nice paragraph - what does it mean? written against it, or simply, BORING. Today, anyhow, it was all good and fruitful, and we departed and went our separate ways with our spirits renewed, with the feeling that all things are still possible.
This evening at home I went through the few pages of my novel that I'd submitted to the workshop, to see what comments people had written. 'You make me sick and giddy with pleasure' someone had written. She's the one person in the group who endorses every word I write, always vehemently enthusiastic. 'I always hope you are writing,' she's scrawled along the margin. 'I see your fingers trembling over the keys, a lipbitten expression and straining ear: what? What? The last time I thought of you I was on the train passing Bath. "Bless," I said to the main sitting next to me. "Bless her."'
Well, ok, she isn't exactly a representative view, but who can complain? Everybody needs a friend like this. All charges of ponderousness collapse, at least for now, into nothing. I fold the work away with a smile, and with that another week closes.
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The Wilderness is published by Vintage.
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Thursday, 25 February, 2010
In My week
- Samantha Harvey
- Paul Murray
- Marcus Chown
- Charlotte Grimshaw
- Susan Hill
- Ed Hollis
- Ali Sethi
- Wells Tower
- Con Coughlin
- Dirk Wittenborn
- Kathleen Kent
- Daniel Everett
- Mark Crick
- Glyn Maxwell
- Rabih Alameddine
- Nicholas Hogg
- Charles Boyle
- Mohammed Hanif
- Sarah Hall
Buy books
The Wilderness
The Following Story (Harvill Panther)
Books are purchased through Amazon UK. Link opens in a new window.
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