Day 2
The second day has been as productive as the first and would have tumbled out faster but my pick struck an early doubt about my chosen location for the story. I had decided to locate the novel in
But although I know the landscape pretty well I started to doubt whether I know it well enough. It made me realise how much I need a definitive, concrete land or space to shape the character and mentality of the people who inhabit it. I've often thought that sometimes stories are portable: you can simply relocate if you need to. Today I'm not so sure about that.
I seem to spend a lot of time in the writing process in fighting back the abstract interior. The more that I can externalise the happier I can feel that I'm saying what I want. The land broods, breathes, blesses, relaxes, talks. Landscape can speak for your characters in all kinds of way, and is more poetically understood - intuitively - by the reader than some abstract introspective formulations designed to reveal interior psychology. Says I.
So I faltered.
Early in the process of making a novel you encounter a whole thicket of objections. Wrong choice of setting, wrong time-period, wrong bloody silly idea altogether. But I've been doing this long enough to know that this is the ventriloquial voice of the rational anti-demon that just doesn't want you to write anything, ever. The writer is a great self-saboteur. My own way of dealing with it is to just quack back at it all. You know: shaddup!
"Who you talking to up there?" (I work in a converted attic.) "Oh just the usual thicket of objections. I'll be alright in a minute."
I thought about recourse to Warwickshire, which I know best, and would do well. But no, it has to be a borderland, I decided at last, and so persisted with the gorgeous
Word-crank on the second day says: 2227
