How will it all end?

The hospital bags are packed, the Moses basket is ready and waiting, David is on standby at work. All we need now is for the baby to decide that she’s ready to arrive. The question of when she will arrive is constant background noise to our life at the moment. Friends, family and David’s colleagues are ready to swing into action when the time comes – and with the kindest of intentions they regularly remind us that it could be any time now.

The anticipation of others is nothing to the tense expectation in our house. While the main question for others is when, for David and me there are even more questions: where will we be when it begins, which of the many possible challenges will we face, who will be caring for us in hospital, how long will it take, how will we cope? We have worked our way through the long months of pregnancy and we are almost there, but what has always mattered most is what happens at the end.

This week the question of what will happen at the end of A New World has also been exercising my mind. The plot is sketched out with a degree of certainty and the characters are beginning to make themselves known. The landscapes of Cornwall and the sea are knitting themselves together into settings for the first two thirds of the story. But how it will all come to an end is unknown.

The book will have a happy ending, or at least a satisfying one. But how to achieve this is a challenge. The heroine of the story craves adventure and independence, but how much can I reasonably give to a fifteen year old girl in 1800? It is relatively straightforward to get my characters into exciting scenarios; it is harder to get them out of them in interesting and believable ways. I also have plans for my heroine after this novel is finished, so I am trying to come up with a way to conclude the book without finishing her story.

For both the book and the birth, the ending is important. For both, the ending will mark the start of the next big adventure.

Passive vs. Active

As I continue research and planning for A New World, I have been reacquainted with a familiar sensation – that I am a passive observer in the story’s creation. I like this feeling; it stops me from asking myself the question ‘what happens next?’ Instead, as I’ve mentioned before, it feels like the story is unfolding as I think about it. Planning and writing at this stage feels to me as though I’m telling a story that already exists.

William James, a sociologist of religion, characterised religious experiences as being ineffable, noetic, transient and passive. In other words, that they are hard for the subject to describe, some knowledge or understanding is communicated, they are fleeting and they happen without being prompted. I am not suggesting that writing is a religious experience. But I am often reminded of William James when I try to explain the way I experience the first creative stage of writing. Although it is me that is sitting down and doing the work, it does feel very much as though it’s happening to me.

If the writing process feels passive, carrying a baby is even more so. Clearly, just as with writing, David and I can’t separate ourselves entirely from the creation of a baby. But from the moment I discovered I was pregnant, it has felt as though I have done almost nothing to make that tiny bundle of DNA grow into the sizeable baby that is now trying to punch out a window between my ribs.  

Of course, the baby has grown inside my body; she has been nourished by the food I’ve eaten, kept safely in place by the hormones that I’ve produced and been formed, in part, by my own DNA. However, I have little conception of my body being in charge.

We have made it into the final month of my pregnancy. Our daughter could arrive at any point in the next four weeks. As we wait, we are even more convinced of our passive role. It will be her who decides that she is ready. The ability to choose to sit down and get on with work (between baby-enforced naps) makes the passive creativity of writing is a welcome distraction.