A Place of Greater Safety

I've had a tummy bug over the last few days and have been feeling under the weather - boo hoo - but it has meant that I can go hurtling through A Place of Greater Safety, Hilary Mantel's epic novel about the French Revolution.  It's an extraordinary kaleidoscope of a story, made up of vivid shards of narrative, shaped by meticulous research and brought to rip-roaring life by as fallible, likeable, and dangerous a crew of characters as ever stood a regime upon its head (and then cut that head off!)

Quite apart from helping me to while away the hours of feeling poorly, reading APOGS has been an extremely efficacious experience. I've been having a bout of the re-writing blues during this funny no man's land between Christmas and New Year.  I've done about a quarter of the work I need to do in order to burnish my narrative so that it is as good as it possibly can be.  There is still quite a mountain to climb and deconstructing a book can be a confounding experience: you are nose to nose with the story's shortcomings just at the point when you need most verve and grit to put them right. It's a  fiddly, time-consuming, intricate task. Working away at the seams, snipping and hemming and stitching can all feel rather thankless until that final moment when you turn your novel right side out again and see how it looks.

I'm taking heart from the fact that Ms Mantel apparently filed APOGS away  for several years, until a call from a journalist researching an article about books in bottom drawers prompted her to fish it out again. She spent a significant amount of time tweaking it until Ta Da! - a nine hundred page masterpiece was delivered.

Which makes me think that something worth having doesn't necessarily come easily, or, for that matter quickly.  That you have to shape and reshape it; that you have to be patient, and open hearted, and full of faith and undeflectable.  It's a tall order, but that old adage that writing is ten percent inspiration and ninety percent perspiration feels particularly true, just now.  I also know that writing is elating and absorbing and challenging and takes you to the limits of yourself - a place of greater safety it is not.