Friday, June 01, 2012
The Art of Writing No. 47
“It came straight
through my brain without touching the sides” is my common response to questions
about how I wrote Azimuth. Ten years
may see forever even for a big novel but then life seems forever until suddenly
your candle starts to flicker and then gutter. The psychology of spending a
decade on a book, albeit in three volumes, seems to me akin to writing a diary;
not the trivial, passing thoughts concerning events which you might find in
ninety percent of Twitter or Facebook posts: “”I am standing in the crowd
waiting for the Olympic torch to race by, drinking a Café Nero cappuccino”,
more the serious log of someone at the heart of a struggle for
independence, a riot, famine or
natural disaster. In my case it was like looking through a wormhole at two
points in the distant past, one post-Mohammed and one pre-Buddha. I peeped, I
saw, I recorded what passed before my eyes. I have said before in these blogs
how characters seem to control your pen and this is precisely how it felt.
“The moving finger writes: and having writ, moves on,” declared Omar
Khayyam. Just so. I couldn’t go back and head the characters off at the gulch,
nor could I steer them one iota from the course to which they seemed committed.
I was more like a commentator than an inventor, being complimented on my
writing style rather like a TV guide to some social happening. This experience
of being a conduit has happened to many other writers. You feel almost
embarrassed when people say nice things. “Aw shucks! don’t flatter me, sing
praises instead to the vital, mysterious source of my prose which gave vent to
the divine effluvia that produced it.
Anyway, as I said, it
is like being a medium, even if, in my case, a flawed one. What came out was
not a perfect, glittering gem like Kublai
Khan but required a deal of post-editing to sharpen it up. The experience
felt Jungian, as though I was tapping into the universal unconscious and it
feels like this should be taking the plaudits, not me!
Download Azimuth by
Jack Sanger on Kindle Amazon or as a paperback and PDF at
www.azimuthtrilogy.com
All my work can be
found at www.chronometerpublications.me
Labels: Writing: the Jungian experience
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