Trusting the process

One of the comments in the recent critiques of my novel was about plot. Plots, the Reader said, should be allowed to develop organically so that they didn’t sound contrived. I understood that comment completely and realised that the problem in my case is one of trust. It’s quite something to let your novel write itself. Or anything, in fact. Not just novels. The same could be applied to life.

So, with that in mind, I’ve stopped trying to pull ideas for a new novel out of the ether and concentrated instead on developing (organically) the writing I already do. Namely, this blog.

I love blog-writing. Response is immediate and supportive, I’m in charge of the whole process (no publisher to interfere) and there’s no pressure for me to be anything other than myself. I write what I want, when I want. Writing this blog is helping me discover myself.

There’s one part of me however that doesn’t appear in the blog, except in brief hints, and that’s my deeper more troubled self, the one that appears when I have my migraines. At the end of each migraine however, after I’ve battled with pain, depression and demons, I come out with some new insight, some new understanding of life and my way forward.

This always makes me think of C S Lewis’s The Silver Chair (Book 6 of the Narnia series).

SPOILER ALERT Do not read this paragraph if you haven’t yet read the book and think you might do so. Each night a mysterious black knight is tied to a chair because each night he goes mad. The children are instructed that they should on no account untie him, however heart-rending his pleas. They do of course untie him and it turns out that he has been enchanted and imprisoned by a sorceress (why is it that all C S Lewis’s baddies are female?) and that the night-time prince is the real non-enchanted one.

In other words, the migraine me is the real real one, and perhaps if I let it out into my other life I won’t need to be ill any more.

But how do I do that? Do I write about it? Do I write about it in this blog? Do I start a whole other blog? Do I write it as if for a blog – because I like the format so much – but don’t yet post it?

With that in mind, I started a file called ‘My Secret Blog’ and planned what I wanted to say in the first post.

But before I could write it, I received this email from my sister’s partner P, a writer and editor himself as well as gardener, house-husband and all-round lovely person.

You should write a book about wild flowers. Write about them the way you do in your blog. All the old wives’ tales, folklore, natural healing properties, threats to their survival etc etc.

I sent back a lukewarm reply, thinking there were already far too many nature memoirs around, and he continued:

Walking and wild flowers through the changing seasons - like your blog - make it chatty and personal, with all your musings. You write so well - I love it when your blog is all about you and Frog and the dog and your walks, with your lovely photographs of the flowers too.

Hmm, I thought. Perhaps it would be a way to present some of my opinions to a wider audience, and how many nature memoirs are there by women anyway? I could only think of two:

And he’s the second person to have said that, the other being creative writing teacher Roselle Angwin, who’s kickstarted several of my writing projects.

So now, I have two ideas. And I wasn’t even looking for them.