I wrote a book some time ago which hasn’t been published, and doesn’t quite work. I’ve been pondering it, and I’ve also been walking along the canals in Birmingham, in the icy and snowy weather we had recently. Down there, I saw a group of boys – aged about 10 – run out onto ice that didn’t look thick enough to hold a duck. They tossed a few snowballs and ran back again, playing dares. Then I caught up with a family – they weren’t English, they sounded Russian, or possibly Polish. They too had a boy aged about 10 with them. The boy hopped down onto the ice and his mother walked alongside him, holding his arm tightly, as if to make sure if he went through, she’d be able to pull him out.
Leaving aside the obvious health and safety and downright dumb-ass stupidity issues here… I got some ideas about how to go on with the novel, or how to recast the novel, from that walk. It was something about how ten year old boys naturally behave, whe faced with ice, and snow, and a canal. There’s a railway track that runs parallel to it, as well. And there are tunnels, dripping, chilly, dark tunnels where rings in the canal water could be drops from the roof, or fish coming up to breathe. This water way and this iron road are roads into this story.
And I just listened to one of David Morley’s excellent pod casts, and he reminded me that you have to write a story several times to find out which structure is right for it. That’s obviously easy for him to say… he’s a poet. When you have to keep on re-writing a 40,000 word novel, that’s a bit more depressing. But nonetheless true.
I used to wonder how authors could take 10 years to come up with their second book… I don’t wonder any more.
