Building

The other day I received an e mail from the folks from Brittany with some photos that depicted the progress on the house they are building. They have added an extension to the back but have kept all the stone and are slowly rebuilding the outer stone casing of the house. They seem to have moved along so much since I saw it over three weeks ago. Or was it a month? Never mind, the point is that as I closed the photos I wished that writing a book was like that house, so that I would know when it was finished. It was one of those analogies that I instantly began to see lots of faults in. A book is not like a house, you don’t lay the last word and say: “Right, now it’s finished.”

But today as I came back laden with Private Eye and The Word for the train and when I’m too tired to read ‘How to be Good’, and a dress and t-shirt that somehow asked me to buy them (when I was actually on my way to the tabac), I looked into a flat that was being remodelled and I wondered if the analogy didn’t work after all.

See maybe the foundations are the ideas and whispers in your ear that draw you to pick up your pen or your keyboard. Then the walls and the rooms and windows are the storyline, the characters, what makes the story flow. And then decorating is like an edit to make things just so. Adding your furniture and things is like the final tweaking. But every now and again, maybe you just have to redecorate because it just wasn’t right in the first place.

And then the wreck of the house that that couple have rebuilt. Well, maybe that’s something that has lain dormant for a long time, and the bones and some of the words are there, but it’s refusing to die. It’s just waiting for the right words to come along to build it whole again.

I’ll go and ponder on this some more next week, but meanwhile if you have reached this bit, I’m off (deep sigh of discontent) camping. Apparently it’s going to rain most of the week (bliss, cos I do so love camping). There are some other aspects that make this trip less than ideal, but the up side is the sailing, white water rafting, kayaking, climbing (maybe I’ll skip the wind surfing). So please could you feed Tibo if you get here. He’s at the bottom of the side bar. He doesn’t do much apart from purr and hop about a bit and he’s very partial to raw steak. He’s here to keep Endelyn company, but ...uh hum, it seems that Endelyn prefers the calm of the words that surround her up here, she likes to let it all soak in so that she can growl it back to me later on. So until Tibo is a bit better trained he’s staying down there with the music and flowers.