My heroine is feeling her way through woods at night. So am I.
She knows where she is. She knows where she needs to get to. The way is dark. She is groping with her fingers and toeing forward with bare feet. The path is muddy, stony, brambly. It leads downhill.
Her predicament is more interesting than mine. (I’ll tell you about hers another time.) But I too am feeling my way. I know how I got to this scene. I know why it’s important in the story. My problem is how to deliver it, and how the chain of scenes goes on from here.
Some weeks back I tossed that map of the new novel to the winds, shouted ‘Yee-hah!’ and charged off into writing it anyway. So how did that work? Well…
The first thing that happened, once I was round the corner and out of sight from the cheering crowds at the starting line, was that I sat down and tried to draw myself a bit more map. ‘Sure,’ I said to the fiery champing stallion of my creativity. ‘We’re going to charge. But this time, let’s just think exactly where you’ll be putting those feet of yours so that you can carry me flying to the finish in one glorious gallop. We don’t want to end up lost in the woods again, do we?’
‘Besides,’ (I thought) ‘you don’t look so much like a fiery champing stallion at the moment. You look more like a stray from the Donkey Sanctuary who’s only too glad of a bit of creative procrastination. So let me plan. Your time will come.’
The Planning Department said Not Fair. They’d done their bit and didn’t see why they had to do more. Strike action threatened.
Fiery steed said of course he could charge, if I really wanted, it was just that right now he didn’t particularly feel like it.
The Anti-Procrastination Police went to look for their whip.
Negotiations broke down, the Planning reps walked out and the APP found their whip in Lost Property. Self and Steed looked at each other: ‘Woods?’ ‘Yep. Woods.’
And here we are.
The going is slow and sticky. A small number of words get written each day. We leave mental square brackets around this passage or that, admitting we are not happy with them, maybe not even sure we need them. We’ll be back to sort them out later. In the meantime, what matters is to keep going.
As for that fiery steed – he’s not much use in the thickets. It’s not him carrying me, in here. It’s more the other way around.
Keep going. We’ve been here before.
We know that at some point these woods will give way. The path will clear and we will be running – yes, galloping – over the final pacey scenes towards the finish. We will write ‘The End.’ We will cheer and award ourselves homecoming treats.
And then we go back along the muddy trail we have left, cutting the corners, hammering in the signs, building the bridges, the street lighting, the paved highway along which readers will speed in joyous career, never guessing with how much labour and loss this route was first laid.
(Enough metaphor for one week. But all my writing happens like this, and every writer will know what I mean.)