Eleanore Etienne

Sometimes the only thing to do, is to put the thing aside.

All those months (years!?) that have passed since I sent my novel out haven’t gone wasted.  At the time, an agent gave me some useful feedback.  I agreed with her points and I understood clearly what was needed.

But not how to do it.

Nine months (or so) of unsuccessful redrafting later, I put it down.  I went back to reading.  I read and read and read.  Anything.  Everything.  I took notes.  I wrote short stories.

And then, one novel had me turning pages as though it held all the answers.  The writing is the best kind of dream.  Samantha Harvey’s Dear Thief is a letter to an estranged friend, a woman who has betrayed the narrator.    I kept thinking – my novel already had some questions, directly addressed to the reader.  What if those were questions for the narrator’s sister?  What if I wrote the entire novel to her?

I’m redrafting again.

It’s early days, but I’m happier with it than I’ve been in a long while.  So, I’ll be reading a short extract from the current draft of The Exclusions of Love at Brixton BookJam.  I’m sure I won’t know how I feel about this draft, until I hear it out loud in a room full of people.

With thanks to Jacqueline Crooks and Richard Skinner, two fantastic writers I’m privileged to be reading alongside on the night.

…I wasn’t aware of it.

And it felt like madness.

My first novel started with a dream.  (A nightmare, actually.)  When I dream, I dream vivid.

A young boy in a hospital, terrorised by a fanged creature.  He’s been put there by his parents, who believe the wounds on his arms and legs are self-harm.  (In someone so young?)  He tells them that it’s the creature doing it.  No one believes him.  Only the old vagrant, who sees the creature come to the boy every night, even whilst in hospital, knows.  They won’t believe him either.

I woke up sharp.  My own voice repeating – the boy is me, the boy is me.

How could that be?  I’d seen no creature.  My arms and legs were without harm.  But, I knew it was true.  Something haunted me.  Had done for a while.  No one else knew.

He spoke to me, a voice in my head that wasn’t mine.  He was older than I’d dreamt.  I kept a notebook, wrote down everything he said, thought about him constantly, carried him with me always.  The things he told me took me away from my dream and into his world.  I gave him a name, Eliot.

I began writing.  I’d come home from work, pour wine while dinner got started and write.  Eat.  Then write, drink, write more.  Every night that I was home.  Conversations heard on the bus gave me dialogue, everything I read fed into my (his) story.  I’d put on make-up and see Eliot’s friend, Angeline, in the mirror, kohled eyes (hers, not mine – I don’t do my eyes that way).  Once I woke to feel Eliot lying on my bed, his shoes still on, hood up.  Then I saw him, sat outside the tube station, still in that parka, hood up, watching the ground.

By now, I’d been accepted on to the Certificate in Novel Writing at City University.  I shared work, read aloud to the room, and received feedback.  All the time, feeling like the odd one out.  Had anyone else been visited by their protagonist?  (No.)  Isn’t it annoying/amusing, that if you write in first person, people assume that it’s about you, in some way?  (Yes.)  (But I am writing about me…aren’t I?  But how can I be?)

There, I learnt where my writing was strongest, and where it was less successful.  (I have a tendency for vagueness and find lengthy descriptions frustrating.)  It was also the place I could bring my confusion.  Answer the question of what I was really writing about.  I strayed far from the synopsis I been encouraged to write.  Eliot was now a teenage boy, with an over-zealous mother, who can not communicate with him, unless through God’s words.  The creature, now more serpent-like than vampiric, was a symbol and a warning of Eliot’s true nature.  Perhaps real, perhaps not.  (Are those that see visions blessed or mentally ill?)

I found my truth in his story.  He wrote it, really.  Not me.  He seemed more real than I did.  I tried to convince myself that I was ready to allow Eliot into my world, the way he had for me.

I wrote the ending, when I had it.  Eliot as an adult, still living with his past.  Days later, I saw him.  I walked past him at a bus stop.  He put a hand out to touch me and said, ‘Hey lady!’  There are times when it’s perfectly valid to question your own sanity.  If I hadn’t before, I did then.

Yes, it felt like madness, alright.

For me, the need to write is matched only by the desire for the work to be good, and acknowledged as such.  (Can’t you hear my writer’s ego whispering ‘read-me read-me, like-me like-me’?)

The oft quoted, Agnes de Mille may have felt the same way:

I confessed that I had a burning desire to be excellent, but no faith that I could be. Martha said to me, very quietly: “There is a vitality, a life force, an energy, a quickening that is translated through you into action, and because there is only one of you in all of time, this expression is unique. And if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium and it will be lost. The world will not have it. It is not your business to determine how good it is nor how valuable nor how it compares with other expressions. It is your business to keep it yours clearly and directly, to keep the channel open. You do not even have to believe in yourself or your work. You have to keep yourself open and aware to the urges that motivate you. Keep the channel open. … No artist is pleased. [There is] no satisfaction whatever at any time. There is only a queer divine dissatisfaction, a blessed unrest that keeps us marching and makes us more alive than the others.

– de Mille, Agnes (1991) Martha: The Life and Work of Martha Graham.