14/100, Surfacing

Or when voice won't work

Somehow, it’s been a long time since I’ve posted here. I don’t know if I even have any right to call this 14/100, since my daily posting fell away early March.

In late February, I committed in earnest to a project I’ve had in the back of my mind for three years. It’s a very different beast. It demands I teach myself new skills. A whole new lens, a new way of seeing writing, story, character. At first, it wasn’t too consuming, I spent a few days away from home alone in my friend’s flat to tunnel into it. I only saw one person when I was there, the rest of the time spent pacing, talking the story out, finding the right beats. I hope the neighbours across the street weren’t watching. I’ve never written anything historical before, or biography. I felt and feel, I have to honour the person I’m bringing to life. I can’t be there, writing over them.

I’ve since spent time in archives, have just packed for a week in Scotland where I’ll be getting the final pieces, or hopefully the final pieces. I sense there’s still a way to go. I know the story inside out now, it’s taken a while. When I say while, I mean three years. But finding the drama and the plot, that’s been a different thing.

But something was off.

I couldn’t get the voice right. When I first pitched this to a producer two years ago, they said they thought the story was important, but didn’t find the main character compelling enough. Call me a masochist, but I love rejection. I love working out why a no is a no. I learnt that just because I find something interesting, it doesn’t mean anyone else will. A year later, when I pitched it to other producers, they found the central character immediately compelling, because I’d worked to make her that way. Yes, she’s from a while ago, but she’s totally modern, ruined in a way by success. It’s a story a lot of us can understand, you do well in one area of life, something gives elsewhere. Story of my life at least.

But, as I became preoccupied with research and piecing this story together as well as working out how to tell it, everything else started to go wrong. Ironically. I always joke I’m a method writer. I couldn’t work on anything else. I couldn’t think about anything else. I couldn’t write anything else. Only the single, one thing. Which is not how it works when you’re a writer, when you have proofs to read and essays to write and other things to pitch. It’s also not how it works when you suddenly find yourself one lunchtime in the member’s bar of the Tate Modern looking for your bank card to pay for your daughter’s juice and you realise it’s in your hand, and you can’t work out why you’re spaced out as your temperature rises and the cough sets in and then the fever intensifies and my God, not covid, not again, and one by one each of the kids come down with it too, and you find yourself unable to go to your own birthday party and losing valuable work days to the virus, and there’s no easter lamb cooked, a paltry egg hunt, no point in chocolate when you can’t taste it, and the emails pile up and you look in the mirror one morning and wonder why it looks as if you’ve been punched hard under both eyes and then it’s the school holidays and you’re half assed, one eye on the kids, the other on work, doing neither well, and still, you’re reading her diaries, her memoir, her biography, her letters, stalking the dead and scraping scene after scene as the deadline looms, you go long walks along the seafront, you walk her childhood haunts, you walk without headphones to be open to it, to all of it, still nothing, all the dialogue becomes wrong, all the exposition ugly, all the tells cliché; in bed, still ruined by the virus you watch film after film, show after show, making notes, trying to see it, trying to hear her but still she will not reveal herself to you, you dream of her, you begin to think of giving up, you cover your wall with post its, on them you write variations of TALK TO ME, WHO ARE YOU, you hope no one goes in your study and then

Suddenly, when you’re least expecting it, not even thinking about her, she talks.

She’s there, in the room, she’s talking, you’re writing it down. Nothing works without voice. All my work, I now realise is voice driven. By realise I mean other people have told me. And she there, she’s finally there, with thirty minutes to spare before the school run but still, there she is. Tomorrow I will take a train to London and then on Saturday to Glasgow and then to Edinburgh and I will be in the archives, knowing that maybe, maybe there’s a chance I can do this, even if I feel like a total fraud asking archivists to do things for me. Even if I constantly am waiting to for my requests to be turned down. And they never are, something happens when you tell people you’re a writer, they believe you. I am constantly surprised by this. I wonder when it is I’ll feel like a real writer.

But finding her voice feels like surfacing. It feels like being back. It feels like relief.

(if you’re waiting for an email from me, I’m getting through them, I promise. Soon. Also, do watch Godland, it’s a feat. And Baby Reindeer, and The Dropout, so far, disappointed by Ripley although I don’t want to be.)