The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Writer #5

It is finished ... not

It took me six years to finish the first draft.  I’d set myself a target of completing it in time for my father’s 80^th birthday.  I made it, but only by dint of writing non-stop during a family holiday.

Among the early questions posted was one about Writer’s Block.  Well, I never had it as such, although there was a massive obstacle I had to confront.  The heart of the book was the events leading up to, during and immediately after the Holocaust.  I was, perhaps understandably, nervous about doing this.  There would be many opportunities to go badly wrong.

But I had always assumed that the book had to be written chronologically.  I was wrong in this, and got some inspiration from a pretty obscure source.  One of my favourite books is a Proust-length novel by the French Nobel Laureate, Romain Rolland.  Jean-Christophe is the life of a fictitious composer.  Rolland’s own biographer, the wonderful Stefan Zweig explained that he wrote this 10-volume novel (if memory serves) episodically, rather than linearly.

This was a real breakthrough.  It meant I could write around the central section and then come back to it, rather than await inspiration before progressing.  This liberated me to write episodes from his later life while they were fresh in my mind without waiting for ‘their time’, so to speak.  So the last – most challenging – part, the epicentre of the storm that befell my hero, was actually written during a blazing Mediterranean summer.

But of course it wasn’t finished.  Yes, I got a printed draft wrapped up in ribbon for my dad but that was, in many ways, a mirage, a cruel deception, of completion

Because the haunting then began.  I’d lie there thinking about the book generally.  Sometimes, gaping holes appeared in the narrative.  On other occasions, new avenues of possibility opened up that made sense psychologically or chronologically.

In short, what I found was that that Churchill’s famous quote about El Alamein (“Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning”) rang with great carillons of truth.

And then began the biggest question of all.  What the hell do I do now?

Ian Phillips is a freelance writer for businesses whose first novel, Grosse Fugue, will be published by Alliance Publishing Press on April 3^rd.  He’s tweeting developments @Ian_at_theWord.