Sunday, May 13, 2012
The
Art of Writing No.37
Today, I have released a novella called Through a Mirror Clear: a Gothic Love Story
as an ebook on Amazon Kindle. I thought it might be worth a little detail on
how it came about.
I had made all the agreements with
printers, typesetters and illustrator to ensure that Azimuth the paperback
would come out on time and in reasonable nick, in fact a paperback with beauty
and weight. Whilst I was waiting for Azimuth
to be produced physically and before I began the long, hard road of marketing
it, I decided to write a novella. I wanted to try something different, testing
myself with a plot, characters and writing style far removed from the
historical imagination of Azimuth.
The idea came to me when I was being
introspective about my brain and my mind. Why was it that I experienced visions
of people, events and environments that I had never encountered before, in
daydreams? Where did they come from? Was my brain driving my mind to experience
these events for some undisclosed purpose? This was heightened when an unknown beautiful woman
reappeared a handful of times in my thoughts, I had the germ of a plot. The Cheshire Cat-like woman took me back to a poem I liked when young, Tennyson's The Lady of Shallot. In it there is a
mysterious, almost ghost-like woman who has probably inhabited my unconscious
ever since first encountering her.
I had no idea about plot line other than
finding a literary way of explaining her visitations. I invented a character –
or at least one leapt to the screen – whom I named, as soon as the story
permitted, William Jethro Blake.
Blake, as you may know, saw visions much as he saw other forms of reality. The
Jethro element referred to Jethro Tull, the gardener.
My first ten or so chapters came off my
keys in a strange, dislocated, haphazard fashion, rather as the visions did, themselves.
In fact, iteratively, I had William (or he had me) musing on exactly this lack
of cohesivness to the narrative:
The consequence
was that he found himself interrogating his notebook’s words and phrases for a
pattern of meaning but they would not cohere and make sentences and paragraphs.
They remained obstinately asynchronous, discrete, islands unto themselves. The
experience defied that essential human capacity to make sense out of partial
information. He had run writing classes and given people exactly the kind of
hotchpotch he was now staring at and they would come up with a wonderful
variety of story threads, combining them all as if the words were polarized
magnets and could twist and turn to clump together. No, here they were
repelling each other and refusing any attempt at union.
I moved on to the second half of the
novella, intent on drawing all this disparate information into one flow of
sense, giving the story a punch-line such as I described in the last blog. It
came to me. The ending and the reason why the first ten chapters were written the
way they were. Alchemy took place in my unconscious and I opened a portal and let it out. Have trust in the imagination. Ah
the brain and the mind, they are our tools but may become our straitjackets, if
we treat them as servants.
Through
a Mirror Clear: a Gothic Love Story by Eric le
Sange on Kindle Amazon
Azimuth
by Jack Sanger, in three separate volumes on Kindle
Amazon
Azimuth, the trilogy, in beautifully produced paperback (and PDF) www.azmuthtrilogy.com
Labels: Writiung: dominoes of logic
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