I am not a lover of similes, homilies, courtesies. Metaphors are my thing. Metaphors and tragedies and magic. Not card tricks or scandalised women climbed into boxes who aren’t cut in half by saws or even swords. No, the magic of marvellous realism. The art of the impossibly strange invading the lustrous detail of the ordinary. And while I have read many of the translated Latin American works of this genre, I don’t set out to fumble with the surreal. Rather, the surreal emerges through my lack of ability to story as I struggle for a fitting end to an unravelling or a spoiling that will leave both the reader and the author pondering. Did that woman really just turn into a crow or was it simply an extended metaphor for her apogee?
Why metaphors and not similes? Perhaps it’s their assertive nature. Written on a yellow post-it pinned to my desk. Never use the word perhaps. ‘Love sieved out of me and I brushed it up with a pan.’ How much neater and more assured this is without the fuss of a like or an as. Why use a metaphor at all? I could write ‘I stopped loving him.’ But who would pause even for a moment to care about that? And, as a writer, why waste time on the anodyne?
I write because I can. Beyond that, I’m not sure. But I know how I like to write. It’s all about the craft. Crafting sentences, rhymes and alliterations. Subverting structures. Twirling words into the whimsy of the where-will-it-go wound-up toy. A contumacious of clichés. Spinning paragraphs like tops. (See what I did there?). Rhythm rhythm I cheat to its beat. I once had a best friend, a cinematographer and film maker, who insisted that he wasn’t a creative. What he achieved, he used to say, was simply a result of being diligent in his craft. He’d be even more insistent after two pints of Burnside and a packet of salt and vinegar. He’s dead now, his bowel cancer too canny for the finest of our white coats and my name is badges. But his words are survivors. And so am I.
I’ve had my share of grief. So I’d expected to write about it. But it doesn’t work like that. Instead, without conscious deliberation, I’ve turned my attention to repression, suppression, and auto-suggestion. I write resistance with a lower case r. Catriona plants seeds in a shed in a kingdom that has banned gardening. Samuel buys a clapping machine to save his family’s palms from the blistering of obligated applause. I write the absurd. Tetraplegic Maisie has a healthy leg removed from her pet dog Peg. Elderly Janet, having murdered her two brothers fifty years ago, buys a pet cloud and keeps it in her bathroom. I’m on episode 51 of that one.
I dig deep on motivation. Why did Jeremy become a flat earther after his brother died in a car crash? Why did ten year old Scaredy Mary participate in the vicious assault of her classmate Speccy Four Eyes? Silver filaments of mental illness vein through most of this geology. Lorna, who doesn’t speak after the break-up with her partner, is saved by a beaver resplendent in a red turban. Geoffrey, a Home Office Minister, is banished to a remote island in the Arctic Circle and is forced to shack up with his conscience, a walrus called Brenda.
If a stranger were to read all of these pieces, could they determine they were from the one author? Do I have an authoritative voice? That is for the reader to judge. I suspect I am more of a shapeshifter. A changeling with magpie gilt. I peck at whatever I’ve just read that beckons and glitters. I write in the first person or the third. I write in the past or the present. Sometimes I pour the words out with such breathlessness that a sentence ends up a paragraph long. At other times I use one-word sentences to haul the reader backwards into a juddering screeching full stop.
I read Ducks, Newbury Port (2019) and produce a piece called Marmalade, liberally flavoured with ‘the fact is.’ Cormac McCarthy sends me off on a moody filmic binge. Raymond Carver pares me down, scraping the flesh off until I get to the marble chill of the elementals. John Cheever has me spying on my neighbours. Tim Winton coaxes me into the characterisation of landscape. And Liz Lochhead, with her lyrical and lol Scots, brings me to my knees with ‘I wiggled tapselteerie, my heels were that peerie’ in Almost Miss Scotland (1991).
Covid_19 has closed my writing in and boxed it up into claustrophobic angst that rails against the state and seeks redemption in chrysalids, or crocus buds, or the dandelion softness of a young dunnock chick. The virus has also exploited and exposed the weaknesses in my writing. Where I must and can do better. I can murder a darling with the best of them. Edit out the superfluous without a twinge of dismay. I can spot a point of view inconsistency from thirty paces. What I cannot do, and this a pathological cannot, is complete a work that is more than around 4000 words.
Jeremy is 70,000 words in, but still on the ice-breaker, slicing through the Antarctic in search of The Edge. Geoffrey is 5000 words in, but still on the beach, waving at a boat that may or may not stop to rescue him. Sometimes my problem is plot in these longer pieces, but more often it is structure and my struggle to choose the most appropriate tense.
When writing in the past tense I loop endlessly between the simple past, the past perfect and the past perfect progressive if my story is not linear. That looping eventually results in a mid-air stall and I hang there, the blood rushing to my head, until I’m forced to pull down on the stick and coast back to safety. And abandonment. My obsessive attention to detail that doesn’t matter is to the detriment of detail that does. I write because I can never finish.
SANDERLINGS 