Living in the vaporising circle

Risk in novel writing

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Living in the Vaporising Circle

“Many years ago I realized that a book, a novel, is a dream that asks itself to be written in the same way we fall in love with someone; the dream becomes impossible to resist, there's nothing you can do about it, you finally give in and succumb even if your instincts tell you to run the other way because this could be, in the end, a dangerous game—someone will get hurt.”

– Bret Easton Ellis

Every novel is a grand passion. It changes you and either breaks or mends your heart, or, in the best cases, both. I say this as the author. Only if it has done this to you can it have a chance of touching a reader.

Recently with friends I talked about some key scenes in Larchfield and Ocean which were devastating to write, and how I became depressed after writing them. Thankfully, my friends did not think me mad when I told them about this, but were curious about how I could be affected in this way. After all the author is in charge of the characters. It’s not real.

Of course that’s true. But every novel, for me, is an attempt to find an answer to a deep personal problem of my own. I genuinely do not have that answer when I begin. Sometimes the question is not even properly formulated. But only when the problem is pressing enough does the story begin to take shape. So, in this sense, it is painfully real. The stakes are very high. I get very anxious at these times, anticipating the risk.

As Larchfield is our Monday Night Read, it’s a great example to start with. Also, Larchfield was my debut, and I learned about this kind of risk for the first time in writing it.

A little over a decade ago I was living in a remote part of Scotland – in the vaporising circle of Faslane and Britain’s nuclear arsenal** – and I was writing my way out of the predicament in which I found myself: that is, isolated, far from friends and family, with a young child.

Inside my endless, everyday loneliness, two characters began to form. Dora, a new mother isolated in the seaside town of Helensburgh, and WH Auden, who really did live in Helensburgh 1930-1932. Both characters are desperately struggling with the roles pressed upon them. Both are longing for friendship and solace.

The two characters are trapped in their own time and circumstances and for a long time I could not see how they could meet. But my problem demanded that they must. On and on my writing went, two separate narratives, linked only by place and longing.

At last, Wystan writes a message, puts it in a bottle and throws in into the sea. Dora, in her time, desperately lonely and socially ostracised, her little baby in tow, finds it. She dials the number in the message on her mobile phone, and connects to Larchfield school in 1930.

I was not just happy when Dora and Wystan met. I was ecstatic. It told me that solace and friendship can take many forms, that they can cross boundaries of time and space, real and not real, fiction and fact. That miracles can happen, when you need them most. The story began to gallop, the characters to come alive. Inside my real-world loneliness, I was filled with hope.

But of course that miracle happens half-way through the novel. There’s lots more story to unfold. Answers, in life and in novels, are not so easy.

And indeed another level to the problem was revealed. For to sustain her real friendship with Wystan, an unreal presence, Dora must sacrifice her sanity, perhaps even, ultimately her life. Tantalisingly, Wystan is a real figure (both in book and in life) – but sadly in the wrong time and dimension.

Dora’s attachment to Wystan changed my view of madness and I began to see it as a form of solace in the face of great pain. As time passes in the story, Dora’s choice becomes increasingly pressing. Also, it seemed, increasingly reasonable. If presented with the choice of escaping the painful real world through madness (even death) to a place of solace with your greatest friend… or staying in the painful real world, with those you love… what would Dora choose? What would I choose?