
Water always runs to the deepest point, to where the land is lowest. For me, the same is true of writing. The words fall into the places that lie deep beneath. I think of them as the 2am places. The ones you usually hide with conversation and movement. The voice in your head that you hear because the only other sound is the hum of the fridge and your own quiet footsteps through a sleeping house.
For me this place is no aquifer. Words do not gush out onto the page. It is just a thin seam of honesty that can occasionally be mined for words.
Sometimes I dream in words, in loops and strands across a page. My own handwriting in blue ink. But by morning, like dew, the words have gone.
The process of drilling down into the place where the words lie, though always hard and sometimes even painful, is also occasionally illuminating. If the events that are written about are not autobiographical, the emotions surrounding them most certainly are.
The passage in my novel where Frank describes his grandfather's love of horses is, in some ways, the most revealingly autobiographical:
For me this place is no aquifer. Words do not gush out onto the page. It is just a thin seam of honesty that can occasionally be mined for words.
Sometimes I dream in words, in loops and strands across a page. My own handwriting in blue ink. But by morning, like dew, the words have gone.
The process of drilling down into the place where the words lie, though always hard and sometimes even painful, is also occasionally illuminating. If the events that are written about are not autobiographical, the emotions surrounding them most certainly are.
The passage in my novel where Frank describes his grandfather's love of horses is, in some ways, the most revealingly autobiographical: