 |
 |
|
 |
|
 |
|
 |
|
 |
|
 |
|
 |
|
 |
|
 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
East Fortune – inspiration
People often ask writers where they get their ideas from but this is a difficult question to answer. You read a lot of books, talk to interesting people and ask them impertinent personal questions about their lives. You visit interesting places, keep a notebook, write down your dreams, imagine scenarios involving friends and enemies, and you go slightly mad. All of these things might help start things off, but it’s often very hard to distinguish between good ideas that look as if they might be worth pursuing and bad ideas that are either naff, a waste of time, or have been done before. Often you just have to try things out; you have to start writing and see what happens, always knowing that you might have to give up the whole thing half way through. Writing is often more about stamina than anything else.
East Fortune begins by imagining the consequences of a single dramatic event, a story I was told about a man, a boy, and a car: the kind of starting point Henry James described as a “donnée” or germ of an idea - a gift.
But writing has to be more than the extension of a real life anecdote. I needed to think about fictionalising the type of characters who might be involved in the opening incident and imagine other connected lives: people who were not necessarily present in the first scene but who would need to be told; characters who would be radically changed by what had happened; a mother, Iona; a lover, Krystyna. I tried to think what kind of tensions and conflicted loyalties might emerge. Who might these people be? What would make the story stronger and give it universal meaning?
Henry James urges the following:
‘To take what there is, and use it, without waiting forever in vain for the preconceived — to dig deep into the actual and get something out of that — this doubtless is the right way to live…’
I started to think about guilt, chance and the very few incidents in a life that matter or which have lasting significance; the choice of love, the birth of children, a job taken or lost, the death of a parent. What happens at these turning points and how long a shadow do they cast? How do people cope with adversity?
I think novels have to begin at a point of change.
I’m also a great believer in finding a strong setting, a real world in which imaginary characters can live and breathe. If you start a book on a road then you probably want it to be an expansive, dramatic road that stretches ahead with big skies and landscape on either side; the kind of road you find in the countryside, in Scotland, for example, or in the mid-west of America. You want the setting of the novel to be a character in its own right. It has to be more than just background. It has to help define the action, it has to change with time and weather, and the road that is part of that setting has to lead either from safety to jeopardy - or the other way around - or both.
I chose East Fortune because I liked the name and because the county in which it is located has great vaulting skies, the Lammermuir Hills, the proximity of sea, and a terrifying white mist, the haar, which can descend with incredible density and speed, even in the middle of summer. Buildings appear and disappear as if they are part of a dream or a ghost story, and the farms and homesteads that emerge from the mist offer both reassurance and unease. It is a place of mystery and moral ambiguity, of history and secrecy.
Within this landscape I began to imagine a family home; a resonant central location, filled with memory, to which people of all ages might return for weekends and celebrations, out of guilt and necessity, for high days and holidays, birthdays and bereavements. I wanted to think about the idea of “home” and what it can come to mean. Do our parents always regard us as children, no matter how old we are? And will we visit the same foibles on our own children that our parents visited on us? Can we ever escape our families? What kind of thoughts and dramas take place in a family home; around the table, in front of the television and then, finally, behind the bedroom doors? And how much time do visiting relations spend wishing they were somewhere else? Where would they rather be?
The home described in ‘East Fortune’ is not this specific building, in this particular photograph, but it occupies a similar solitary position in the landscape; a place that seems remote and yet stands out. At night you can probably see the lights from a distance, as if you were a traveller in a Thomas Hardy novel. It immediately suggests a return, a meeting, a re-union or a confrontation. It is where the novel is rooted.
Once I had these starting points (the event, the road, the beginnings of character, landscape, and the family home), I could then move on to think of other settings, other people, and other places. In small communities this means a pub, a shop, sometimes a school, and crucially for my purposes, a Church – a place where people congregate and where key rites of passage are marked- the ritual ceremonies of christenings, weddings and funerals. I can’t imagine writing a novel that does not feature love and death.
The village of Humbie lies near East Fortune and my friends the Balfours live there. It’s a fantastic location, set apart from the village on the side of a hill that leads down to Humbie water. The graves nestle in the landscape, and you can see them all from above - past lives laid out before the visitor in the valley below.
Some of the names are indistinguishable, worn away by time and weather, with moss and lichen growing between the letters. After it has rained, and when it freezes, the surfaces of the table tombs look like abstract paintings by Anselm Keifer or Gerhard Richter. On a winter afternoon you can watch everything dissolve and decay at a different rate; the ice, the vegetation, the stone.
After thinking, and walking around these places, day dreaming and imagining lives, continually making notes, it was finally time to begin writing. As I wrote I kept returning to these places. It became an obsession. But there was little alternative and no cause for complaint. No one was forcing me to do this. No one was asking for yet another novel. Writing is, ultimately, an act of vanity. Henry James has an author in his short story ‘The Middle Years” explain: ‘We work in the dark - we do what we can - we give what we have. Our doubt is our passion and our passion is our task. The rest is the madness of art.’
Writing a novel is a way of imposing yourself on a page, on a story, and eventually, one hopes, on the world. It’s a parallel universe that is both a distraction from reality and the beginning of a definition. The writing matters more than anything else and yet, at the same time, the end result is still only a book, something that may seem lasting but which is, ultimately, as ephemeral as life itself – or frozen water on a gravestone.