interruptions and fictional vengeances

[smellingbottle]

I had today earmarked for a short, sharp half-day of current chapter rewrites, followed by a bath with lavender oil and a new novel (Sarah Hall’s The Carhullan Army), before meeting for dinner a friend who has again emerged from a psychiatric hospital, and seems admirably sanguine about life. But I. is currently hiding out at home with his phone

Comments

[helixaspersa]

Goodness, this almost makes me want to write fiction myself. (Something I have never had the least desire to do, possibly partly as a reaction to the tedious assumption year on year that naturally I must. My fantasy writing projects run instead to things like elegant, but factually rigorous, popular accounts of the life-cycles involved in the creation of plant galls. Or poetry, which I sensibly don't write either, since it would almost certainly end up being concerned with roughly the same things, and be hard going even by the standards of earnest academic verse.)

[smellingbottle]

Well, your account of your own childhood fantasy games suggests you're a natural world-builder - does the idea of fantasy, or historical fiction, appeal at all? Not that writing a novel should be thought of as in any way compulsory - though I quite like the notion of some first-time novelist being interviewed and saying 'Nah, never fancied it, really, I'm in it for the fictional revenge. Everyone who ever gave me a Chinese burn in the playground gets ritually sacrificed by chapter six.'

[helixaspersa]

I enjoy reading some kinds of fantasy and science fiction, but no, no desire to write it at all - I would enjoy working out all the geeky details, you're right, but lose interest in my supposed characters almost instantly, I imagine. At some v. basic level, I just don't feel that prose (especially fiction) "counts" compared to poetry. But that's always been the case: poetry came first for me before even the fantasy games: my earliest memories are partly poems. I suppose my honest feeling is that fiction is an enjoyable, but ultimately inevitably unsatisfying (for me) attempt to combine the two distinct things that matter (to me, at least): that is, poetry and the enormous pleasure of *facts* (both these categories understood rather broadly in a Renaissance fashion . . . ). Although it's surprising that I feel this, as I actually read more fiction than almost anyone else I know, and much of it with great enjoyment. (I can feel you thinking: thank god this woman doesn't teach anything (much) after 1700! And I accept that much if not all

[richenda]

>> the kind of woman who watches the cutting of every cake with her forehead already creased with shrill, pre-emptive self-assertion because if she doesn't stand up for herself, she will have to spend her whole life knowing that someone else got her slice of Bakewell tart.

Lawrie Marlow!

[smellingbottle]

Only Lawrie is also goofy and (sometimes) appealing along with her outrage that someone's borrowed her horse without asking, or is letting her actually carry her suitcase from the station - maybe it's that part of it emerges from being the youngest of a large family where sharing and handing on is compulsory. Whereas my former acquaintance was unspeakable...

[richenda]

Agreed that Lawrie has charm - but aren't there several occasions when she squeals about turns and "fair" at the table - rather like the Bakewell thing?

[old_black]

"...It contains ...definitely recognisable ...portraits ..."
Hmmm. I'm reminded of a book written by a former friend of ours. He included a character who carried remarkable parallels with my partner. She is an engineer and so was this (female) character and there were other characteristics that I immediately recognised.

In the book, the fictional engineer was described as "ugly". Our relationship with the author has never been quite the same.

[smellingbottle]

Not to softpedal the situation - which must have been hurtful, and I'm not surprised you're not on the terms you were - but it is entirely possible that he borrowed elements of your partner, like her profession, and stuck them together with physical characteristics from someone entirely different (or, of course, invented - let's allow novelists some actual fiction). I know I gave elements of my closest friend's appearance to a dogmatic, precise character in another old project which didn't get off the ground, and I've recognised a couple of merged portraits of that kind (characteristics borrowed from more than one person and given to a character who had nothing to do with either real individual, or the author's relationship to them) in the last novel of another writer I know. But you're right to remind it can hurt, though I hold to my belief that the parents and in-laws are past belief, and that the SCR can deal with being parodied.

[liseuse]

I don’t suppose Woolf figured in armed guards into her ideas about the necessity for a room of one’s own…

They would come in so handy. I considered, once, buying a tape machine and recording myself barking the word "WORKING" just so I could hit play when people started interrupting me.

[smellingbottle]

I think I've got to the stage where people don't even need to be interrupting me, just breathing in a different room. Which I suppose makes me the Uncle Quentin of this bit of North London...