The Peak District - for those who have (like me until last week) never been there - is extremely fab. I’m not sure I’ve ever been to an area of British countryside which I liked more. In the southern part (or White Peak) where the Other Half and I were staying there is a dizzying combination of limestone uplands and escarpments, wide valleys green with pasture and steeply wooded river valleys. You can walk for a day and be surrounded by different kinds of landscape each hour if you plan your route carefully. And Buxton! Previously I knew it only as a bottled water; now I discover that it is an elegant Regency spa town with beautiful gardens (grade 1 listed no less) and an opera house. Opera House! Not to mention 5000 students from the university of Derby which has a campus in the town.
The weather – for once – was better in the north than in the south. In a week when it rained in Canterbury every day, we had only one day’s rain. Hooray!
I don’t know how other people do their walking but the OH and I tend to favour the companionable silence, often going half an hour at a time without uttering more than an ‘interesting white butterfly’ or ‘God, I swear these stiles are getting narrower!’ So, tramping the hills and looking at the wildlife left a part of my brain free to wander and think.
And what I thought about, amongst other things, was the work in progress. My thoughts were these:
It’s very different from Testament – will people who liked that book be disappointed?
It depends what they liked about Testament. If all they liked was the medieval setting then yes, they will find the nineteenth century angle of the wip very different. If they liked the fictitious city, Salster, they’ll find rural West Wales very dissimilar. If they enjoyed the academic politics and were looking for more of that they’ll have to make an adjustment to the nationalist politics in the new book. But if they appreciated the characters and they way they interacted with the situations they found themselves in, if they enjoyed being presented with a set of circumstances which is not most British people’s everyday experience then they’ll find a lot to like in the wip.
Should I, anyway, be trying to write books which resemble each other, like writing a series without writing actually writing a series?
I wouldn’t have thought so. How dull to keep writing (or reading) the same book over and over again. It also misses the essential ingredient of the good series – seeing the characters grow and develop through the circumstances they encounter.
How much of a contract does a first published novel make with a readership about what it can expect of subsequent books?
Thinking of novelists whom I read with the greatest pleasure I can see that they all share one central element – characters whom I believe in and engage with (not necessarily identify with) whose progress through the vicissitudes of the novel I am spellbound by. They don’t have to be dramatic, thriller-type vicissitudes. In fact, they mostly aren’t. I’ve just read The Other Side of the Bridge by Mary Lawson and a less thriller-type book it’s hard to imagine; we are firmly in the territory of family interactions here. I have seldom been as gripped by a book. Another book I read on holiday – Patrick Gale’s wonderful Notes from an Exhibition – is another which lays bare a family’s interactions; I loved it.
I would hope that I’m not breaking the contract I made with readers of Testament. The wip is another book which has characters caught up in and trying to make their way within political situations not of their own making but which they can, in some way, influence for the better or fight against, as in Testament. That the characters also have their own demons to fight and their own stories to reveal to us keeps another part of the promise which I was trying to make with Testament – to have both a defineable plot and characters who are real, and developing, people.
The holiday was also a great time in which to allow my brain to relax away from the wip which I have been working on, in one form or another, for over a year. It gave me the chance to step back from the book and to accept that it has a very different identity, that it is not ‘son of Testament’. I hope I’m moving on as a writer, developing, learning from what has gone before, what I now feel I’d like to change about Testament.
As I write this, I’m very aware that I’m about to go back to the wip. Half of me is apprehensive – what will I think of the last couple of chapters which I rattled off at a furious pace before we left for Derbyshire? The other half of me is looking forward to getting back to it, to immersing myself in that other world, those other ways of thinking.
I’ll let you know about those chapters…
The weather – for once – was better in the north than in the south. In a week when it rained in Canterbury every day, we had only one day’s rain. Hooray!
I don’t know how other people do their walking but the OH and I tend to favour the companionable silence, often going half an hour at a time without uttering more than an ‘interesting white butterfly’ or ‘God, I swear these stiles are getting narrower!’ So, tramping the hills and looking at the wildlife left a part of my brain free to wander and think.
And what I thought about, amongst other things, was the work in progress. My thoughts were these:
It’s very different from Testament – will people who liked that book be disappointed?
It depends what they liked about Testament. If all they liked was the medieval setting then yes, they will find the nineteenth century angle of the wip very different. If they liked the fictitious city, Salster, they’ll find rural West Wales very dissimilar. If they enjoyed the academic politics and were looking for more of that they’ll have to make an adjustment to the nationalist politics in the new book. But if they appreciated the characters and they way they interacted with the situations they found themselves in, if they enjoyed being presented with a set of circumstances which is not most British people’s everyday experience then they’ll find a lot to like in the wip.
Should I, anyway, be trying to write books which resemble each other, like writing a series without writing actually writing a series?
I wouldn’t have thought so. How dull to keep writing (or reading) the same book over and over again. It also misses the essential ingredient of the good series – seeing the characters grow and develop through the circumstances they encounter.
How much of a contract does a first published novel make with a readership about what it can expect of subsequent books?
Thinking of novelists whom I read with the greatest pleasure I can see that they all share one central element – characters whom I believe in and engage with (not necessarily identify with) whose progress through the vicissitudes of the novel I am spellbound by. They don’t have to be dramatic, thriller-type vicissitudes. In fact, they mostly aren’t. I’ve just read The Other Side of the Bridge by Mary Lawson and a less thriller-type book it’s hard to imagine; we are firmly in the territory of family interactions here. I have seldom been as gripped by a book. Another book I read on holiday – Patrick Gale’s wonderful Notes from an Exhibition – is another which lays bare a family’s interactions; I loved it.
I would hope that I’m not breaking the contract I made with readers of Testament. The wip is another book which has characters caught up in and trying to make their way within political situations not of their own making but which they can, in some way, influence for the better or fight against, as in Testament. That the characters also have their own demons to fight and their own stories to reveal to us keeps another part of the promise which I was trying to make with Testament – to have both a defineable plot and characters who are real, and developing, people.
The holiday was also a great time in which to allow my brain to relax away from the wip which I have been working on, in one form or another, for over a year. It gave me the chance to step back from the book and to accept that it has a very different identity, that it is not ‘son of Testament’. I hope I’m moving on as a writer, developing, learning from what has gone before, what I now feel I’d like to change about Testament.
As I write this, I’m very aware that I’m about to go back to the wip. Half of me is apprehensive – what will I think of the last couple of chapters which I rattled off at a furious pace before we left for Derbyshire? The other half of me is looking forward to getting back to it, to immersing myself in that other world, those other ways of thinking.
I’ll let you know about those chapters…
