The Autobiography in your Book Shelves

There's only one Steve left now, doing the snagging - the ten thousand little jobs that need finishing off before the work is done.  It's a bit like copy editing your book: all your editor's notes have been minutely attended to and you think the whole thing's done and dusted, but then you have to trawl through it one more time (at least one more time) tidying up the punctuation, checking for consistency (eyes which started out as brown carry on that way and don't inadvertently become green or grey), checking your facts as well, in case something trips you up later.

So after all this slog, my house-shaped shed is looking less and less like a shed and more and more like a beautiful, writerly room in which to sit and work. I have a desk top...

....(I also appear to have a set of folding steps and a band saw, but not for long). Although the sight of it enthralls me and I yearn to be sitting there, gazing out of the window, thinking what to write next, I'm even more excited about the rows and rows of empty shelves waiting to be filled.

It's because the books I own are the intimate friends of my past life; we've been through things together, they're like travelling companions I haven't seen for ages and I'm longing to catch up with them.  Filling each shelf will be an exercise in autobiography -- I write the date in every book I buy so that I'll know what I was reading when (and by implication what I was doing and with whom). So it's not just a question of simply arranging them, it's a kind of navigation, charting memories and lost flights of imagination.

Books have siren voices, whispering pages; you turn one, and then you turn another, and before you know it, the whole day is done.

An Exercise in Autobiography

To a greater or lesser degree, most people draw upon their own experience of the world, when they are writing fiction.  No matter how much you refract and filter it, there's bound to be a few grains of your core thoughts and feelings lurking in your work, and it's not necessarily something to apologise for or to try and hide. You could even make a virtue out of it -- after all, it's the area where your work is likely to be strongest and most insightful.

In a bid to get a little bit more texture into the autobiographical aspects of your writing, to layer it so that it has depth and perspective, here's a little exercise to get your teeth into if you have time over the weekend.  Write a scene in which you introduce the person whom you think you are to the person you would like to be. Think carefully about when and where you set it as there may be significance to mine, and then  explore the affinities and seize on any  tension.  It may prove to be a slightly surreal experience, but it could just open up an interesting seam for you to exploit...