Unravelling

My mum and one of my sisters have been proof-reading A Good Death this week and giving valuable encouragement. They asked me how I went about writing a book; they are lovingly incredulous. They could see where I had drawn on my own experiences: an incident involving binoculars on a family holiday in the Pyrenees for example. But where, they wanted to know, did the rest come from?

I found it very hard to explain where the story, the characters and the settings come from. The simplest explanation is that they are made up, like a story we might have been asked to write at school. They come from my imagination. But that doesn’t satisfy me. It may sound absurd, but very quickly in the process of writing a book, it doesn’t seem made up anymore.

A friend recently sent me a link to a lecture given by Elizabeth Gilbert, the author of Eat, Pray, Love.  She talks about the need for a psychological device to distance a writer from the creative process, so that it doesn’t drive them mad. Gilbert suggests consideration of the Ancient Greek ‘daemons’ or Roman ‘genius’, spirits that communicate creativity. I can relate to this idea to an extent. There are times when I read my manuscript back and I’m surprised by what I’ve written. I wonder where it came from. But there are also times when I am painfully conscious of the process of making up the story.

Although there are parts of the process of writing a book that I can describe, I can no more explain how it happens that I can explain the making of our baby. I am aware of how her conception came about. But from that point on, my conscious involvement in her growth has been limited to trying to eat the right food, take appropriate vitamins and avoid harmful substances. I might be able to describe some of the biological and chemical processes involved, but as a whole her formation remains mysterious and wonderful.

In both cases, the best I can say is that they start from something very small. The baby started from a once-in-history combination of DNA. A Good Death started from a family looking glum in a burger restaurant. From each of those beginnings everything else has seemed to unravel of its own accord.