New Story, Old Story

Tuesday 21st July

I have just about finished “The Philanthropist”, my latest book.  I have had two re-writes and a final read-through and I am more or less happy with it.  Well to tell the truth you are never really happy with any creation, be it painting, poem or book.  You always feel that a bit more work may have produced something better, but I am no Harper Lee, and my Mockingbird is Killed (literary joke there).  So, I have to now think of a new story.

I once went to the South Bank for a talk by Kazuo Ishiguru, who I consider a truly great writer.  One of the questions asked was if he ever suffered from writer’s block and how to deal with it.  He said that yes, indeed he did have times when no inspiration would come.  He also said that many things he had written didn’t quite work and he filed them away.  Sometimes he would take them out, read them again and realize that some of it worked; maybe it needed to be in a slightly different format, a different time, a changed narrator perhaps – and you never knew.  In essence he was saying that nothing was wasted, whether published, finished or a work in progress.

After Catherine I attended a writing class for maybe two years.  It wasn’t that brilliant, but I was writing a new book for the class, and the discipline of needing to present something each week drove me on.  I am a bit stubborn, I am sure you would be the first to agree, and even though I knew the story wasn’t really working I carried on with it, and rather than taking the criticism as helpful I was sure I was right.  Well, I was wrong and the book was poor, though it did have some good passages in it.  So I have decided to try to re-write it.  One of the mistakes I made was that the original story was told by four characters, and you had to guess by the style who was talking.  So I have decided this time to write it in the third person.  We will see.  So a new story which is really an old one.  As Kazuo said nothing is wasted.