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| The Flower Seller in Her Youth |
I am sitting here at my desk this morning in a state of mild distraction, not knowing quite what I am doing. I have been reduced to clearing out my overflowing ‘pending’ trays and I have just ordered a Christmas present over the internet.
Yesterday I was just as feverishly busy as I have been during any mornings of the last four months, bashing out the first draft of my first novel - Boraya. But all good things must come to an end and Boraya did, quite suddenly, around ten to one. I wasn’t quite expecting it, but it was a convenient time all the same to stop for lunch.
To be fair I knew I must be approaching the end because I had already written an epilogue and I knew that when the novel reached the point at which the epilogue began I should have to stop. But the epilogue, telling of the characters’ futures, seemed a rainbow’s end, forever dancing a tantalising 2,000 words before me.
And then all of a sudden, bump. I decided that readers could just imagine for themselves Vladimir’s historic visit to the Zurich chocolate factory which his great great grandfather had left with his Swiss wife in 1902 in order to found the Imperial Boraya Chocolate Factory in pre-revolutionary St Petersburg. Besides I had left Vladimir comfortably ensconced with Elizabeth, the diffident young Scots woman whose remarkable romantic and developmental journey the book is really about, in an enormous Swiss bateau lit; so to picture him in complex negotiations about the price and specification of chocolate seemed quite redundant. And Zurich in late April seemed as good a place as any to let the epilogue begin.
Nevertheless that wasn’t really the end because I had remembered that in her travels between Russia and Scotland Elizabeth had all the time been carrying an urn full of ashes, which she had promised to scatter over - or at least healthily beside - the cauliflowers and artichokes of the Breton countryside. Quite why Elizabeth should be carrying such an urn and a portfolio of certificates relating to it, I shall not immediately reveal, but I can say that she and Vladimir fly to Paris and then take the TGV down to Brittany, scatter the ashes in a little copse of trees, share one or two memories of the deceased and make it back to St Petersburg in 200 words, which must rank for something in the compression stakes.
And so, serendipitously, the scattering of the ashes, though occurring in the middle of the book, was the last bit of it I wrote. So now, having promised myself some days off before commencing the task of editing, I am at a loose end. The question that I asked myself ‘could I write a novel’ I have answered. It is done. Boraya exists.
In fact, not only is it done but its writing has proved far easier than ever I imagined. Indeed the mistake that I made at the beginning was to imagine at all. Because, in the short experience of this beginner, I discovered the truth in the assertion I first heard advanced by Graham Greene to the effect that an author has really very little idea of what he is going to write until he has written it.
Once my main characters and their setting were reasonably established; once, as it were, I had given them houseroom, they just took over and the manuscript wasn’t mine anymore but theirs. They acted out their stories and brought along their friends to help them, too. People I couldn’t dream of suddenly tumbled into the story, demanding their own share of plot: one little minx even ran off with a British Member of Parliament.
Indeed, I took myself to the laptop each morning as though I were reading a book rather than writing one. I wanted to know what would happen next and the words just appeared on the screen to tell me.
Of course, the characters did occasionally need my help. Vladimir became stuck in hospital and it took me a week to figure how to get him out convincingly; the transportation of the factory at the end of the book also took some time. Then, there was research - books to read and endless queries to look up on line. Friends chipped in to help here, too. But in the main, the characters did the work for me. I even found myself on one occasion borrowing one of my character’s mannerisms.
During the writing somebody said to me ‘you talk about your characters as though they are real people!’ But to me they are real people: lovers, heroes, villains, workers, dreamers, young and old, male and female. Even the old vodka-sodden woman who sells flowers salvaged from the florists’ dustbins in the snow on Nevsky Bridge is real to me. ‘A wilted rose brings luck,’ she says, unconvincingly, in a creaking voice that echoes a door opening slowly in an empty church.
And she is an echo. But then in Saint Petersburg the echoes of the past are all around. Echoes of the 900 day Siege of Leningrad blow through the story like an icy wind: heroism, resilience, the common good, self-sacrifice, the horror and inhumanity of war. The Boraya chocolate factory is not without its scars, or its secrets.
Now the less interesting part of the story has to begin, the re-writes. One thousand words is simple enough to edit - but one hundred thousand means that you have to edit not just for sentence and paragraph fluency but for consistency between material written months apart. Still that is for me to worry about. For the moment I just want to thank everyone who has supported me and encouraged me and helped me on this first stage of the journey.
The picture shows Alexei Alexeievich Harlamoff (Russian painter, c 1840–1925) The Flower Seller.
