I’ve been gone, but hopefully not completely forgotten. Deep
in the dense forest of my imaginative processes, I’ve been opening up the path
of my story with an editor’s sharpened machete.
And now, at long last, I actually have an office of my own.
It’s a tricky balance – when to push yourself just to get
those words down, when to gaze into the distance and visualise a scene and
contemplate the ‘what ifs’. When to dump your blog, because it's just too darn distracting...
Word count deadlines are like a whip in the
corner of a racehorse’s eye as he reaches the final furlong, they may not make
you go any faster, but they stop you from slowing down and losing sight of the
finishing line.
I aimed to get 'book two' done by the end of May, but unlike
the creative flurry that burst forth in 'book one', this one requires far more
thought. There are so many more threads to attend to, so many lives, time
periods and time-lines to consider, with an eye both on the previous volume and
the future one. It's tricky when you only have a few hours a week.
The research becomes ever more seductive. I sink into the
details of 17th Century literacy and reading habits, the slang of
the criminal underclass – making lists of insults for men, insults for women.
The latter being, of course, various permutations of ‘prostitute’.
Drunk on authenticity, it is all too tempting to saturate a
story with jargon and dialect and end up alienating a reader you have tried so
hard to woo into spending their precious time reading your stuff. So, between
making my Jamaicans sound like Jamaicans rather than Dickensian urchins and formalising my dialogue enough to
get a ‘feel’ of 17th Century spoken English, I am plagued with
worries that readers will skip the Afro-Jam (just how far should I spell it
phonetically?) and laugh at the heartfelt insults thrown in anger by the
offended characters.
It's a tough call, though. Terms such as ‘gentry mort’ and ‘draggle tail’ which are
akin to the ‘posh totty’ and ‘dirty slag’ of today, just don’t carry the same
sense of sauciness or contempt, picturesque though they are. As for the specificity of a ‘dell’ (a young, buxom wench
prone to venery, yet still a virgin), or a ‘dergen’ (a very short man or
woman), it’s probably best not to go there unless aiming for a full-on pastiche
of a Restoration comedy.
As a word geek, it's fascinating to see which words and phrases were bandied about as much 300 years ago as today, and whether they actually meant the same. 'Elbow grease' for example simply meant 'sweat', 'balderdash' was what you'd call an awful concoction of wine and ale. Rather than 'take the bull by the horns' you might take 'the bear by the tooth' and 'frippery' was not trivia, but old clothes. 'Flush', then as it does now, meant having plenty of money, and though we often speak of someone skilful being a 'dab hand' at something, a couple of centuries ago a 'dab' was indeed 'an expert'.
However, there are some aphorisms, so colourful that they
simply beg to pop up in the right context: ‘as full of roguery as an egg is
full of meat’; ‘everything has an end, and a pudding has two’, are my current
favourites.
Who knew a pudding had two ends? We often hear of stories
that do, until the author/director finally decides which one will do best (and then film directors stick the other option on the DVD special features).
Which brings me back to my topiary of tale-telling – how to trim it to grow in
the right direction to achieve the most satisfying result? Right now the vines
are trailing, it’s lush and verdant with possibility. I hesitate, though, like
a movie bomb-disposal expert crouched over a ticking device – which wire to
cut? Blue or green? Blue or green?
So it’s back to my boxes to figure out just where those
antagonistic forces need to reveal themselves, just when my heroes need to
empower themselves into warriors. Or how, indeed, to sort the gentry-coves and boon-companions from the whip-jacks and buckfitches.
