On Writing The Cup Of The World
I was in a garden at night. A woman was sitting there. Her hair was dark
and so were her clothes, but her face was very clear. A tall man stepped up
behind her and said something. She looked up at him and answered. She had been
expecting him and was pleased that he was there. I jumped out, angry. I fought
with the man and he nearly killed me. I woke, bump.
Dreams like that don't let you slide peacefully back into sleep again. They take you by the throat and shake you. They make you think of your death. My way of dealing with it, as I lay in the darkness and got my breath back, was to work out the rest of the story. By dawn, I had it.
But it was only twenty years later, when I set out to
write it down, that I realised that the most interesting part in the story
belonged to the woman. That is why The Cup of the World is told from
Phaedra's point of view.
The process of writing makes you discover things. Timeless, powerful ideas -
the Faust and Arthur stories - crept into the narrative and shaped it in ways I
had not expected. The real villain emerged late and had to be created from
scratch. Even the scene I dreamed is changed. I put someone else into the part I
played, and the entries and exits do not happen as I dreamed them but in ways
that work with the story. But it is still there, early on in the novel: the seed
from which it all grew.
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