I’m not sure if this is the same for all writers, but I have to really feel what I write. I suppose it probably is the same for all the best writing, otherwise fiction is just churned out soullessly. That’s kind of how I felt reading Truman Capote’s The Grass Harp. It’s well-written, no doubt, but I didn’t really get any feeling from it, like he didn’t feel anything when he wrote it. If I don’t feel anything when I write, my writing becomes lifeless, and lately I haven’t been feeling anything.

You might recall the work I posted recently, An Unfamiliar Girl (extract from my current work). That seems to have halted production at around the twelve-thousand-word mark, and I still feel I’ve barely begun it. I’m quite sure there’s enough material in it for a novel, but it’s just writing the novel that’s the tricky part. And this one seems to have become tricky because it is based so much on feelings, rather than plot.

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Stories aren’t emotions, aren’t ideas, aren’t people and places: stories are just a series of words on a page, placed in a certain order, separated by various grammatical signposts we call punctuation. Less than that, they are a jumble of twenty-six different abstract shapes we call letters, jammed together into discrete bundles. It’s amazing therefore how certain words in a particular order can elicit a strong emotional respons, how a good story becomes so much more than the sum of its parts. Tom’s Midnight Garden is a good story. I supposed it must have been since I remembered significant portions of it from a single reading in my childhood, but these were only fragmentary and vague, and it was not until I finished it for the second time last night, maybe a decade after my first reading, that I realised how good it is, how nearly perfect even, it is.

Superficially, Tom’s Midnight Garden is a story about a boy, Tom, who is forced by his brother’s outbreak of measles at the start of the summer holiday, to stay with his aunt and uncle in their small city flat. Philippa Pearce wrote the book in 1958, and it is set around about then though, like all the best books, it is timeless. The only reason a reader would know the book was set in the late fifties / early sixties rather than at any other time, if they did not know when it was written, is from certain events near its end, and from Tom in the second line on the first page being said to have “looked his good-bye at the garden, and raged that he had to leave it.” Obviously this is a time when children were more inclined to play outside, to ‘make their own fun’; a time before videogames, or even widespread television, when being shut up inside a small flat for hours on end was torture rather than a preference.

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As usual I’m getting sloppy with updates again, but then, since my second-to-last post (my last one being something of a cop-out anyway), I’ve started uni again, and apparently this year they actually expect us to do work. A little at least. It’s not too bad: I’m doing a 50% dissertation, which means that 50% of my final degree comes for a 10,000 word essay I have until April to complete, and the other half comes from an 8,000 word prose project, of which I’ve already written the first 4,000 words of the first draft (more on that in a minute).

I’d be lying if I said I’d been devoting myself entirely to uni work and that’s the reason I haven’t updated, at least partially. Other primary influences are, to a small extent my job, which remains amazing, because a) there’s very few customers, and, unless they ask for wine recommendations, are generally low maintenance and b) I work with some pretty cool people who I have both opportunity and inclination to converse with at length.

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Lately I’ve been reading Marcel Proust’s Rembrance of Things Past (aka. A la recherche du temps perdu, In Search of Lost Time), which I supposed would be quite an undertaking, but am actually finding quite readable. I get the impression, and had the impression myself, that Remembrance of Things Past, like The Odyssey, is another of those classic novels that scares people away because they think it’s too difficult to read. Admittedly the sentences are often quite long, as is commonly the style with Victorian novels, but I think the main reason people are put off reading the novel is its length: I thought Ulysses was long at over nine-hundred pages, but the complete Remembrance of Things Past is about three-thousand pages long (which is practically inconceivable to me, whose longest work currently stands at about 120 pages). Daunting, certainly, but not so much when you consider it is split into seven volumes.

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