A friend’s marital woes forced me to write my first novel

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/jan/03/linda-grant-marital-breakdown-forced-me-write

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In the early 1990s I was having lunch with a novelist friend whose marriage had just ended. It was my function in this conversation to provide a series of sympathetically nodding responses and expressions of shock and outrage to the list of the marital crimes and general personality disorders of the soon-to-be ex-husband who had left his wife for another woman.

Through three courses the checklist of horror proceeded until, when the multiple unforgivable failings had started to thin out a bit during dessert, we got to his career errors. For X had had a contract to write a biography and had done almost nothing about it. “The thing he doesn’t understand about writing books is that you just have to get on with it,” she said. This revelatory light-bulb moment, in retrospect even more banal than a Facebook motivational gif, hit me like a slap round the head.

Related: Linda Grant

I had thought you didn’t write a novel until the novel came to you, that the novel was in some way already formed, exterior, waiting for the writer to receive it. I was waiting and waiting for my novel to arrive inside my head, and nothing at all had turned up. I was too frightened to start, too frightened of failure if I was left on my own without some Greek collection of goddesses whose purpose was to help out artists by providing flashes of enlightenment. After lunch I went home and turned on my computer and resolved to do what X had not done and just get on with it. I had in my files a few pages of typescript, a description of Saigon from first-hand notes that I had submitted to the arts editor at a Sunday newspaper and that had been rejected on the grounds that it was “too vivid”.

Into the street scene I inserted a woman in her late-50s who said she would prefer to die in a hotel room so pets wouldn’t gnaw her undiscovered body. This was the single thing I knew about her. I had no idea of her name, identity, what she was doing in Saigon or how I was going to proceed once I ran out of notes. A character began to form in my mind, about whom I was intensely curious. I sent 5,000 words to my agent, who asked me to write another 10,000. His editorial responses to those pages led to a couple of months of revision, followed by a further 5,000 words. He submitted it to a publisher and a week later I had a contract for a novel, the idea of which was still not entirely clear to me.

This novel, The Cast Iron Shore, was published in 1996. It won an award and was shortlisted for another. After that I, who had never been on a creative writing course, was asked to come and talk to students about my “practices”. The only practice I really had was contained in the advice “just get on with it”. By turning on the computer every morning and writing, often rubbish that would be deleted by lunchtime, the number of pages began to build and if you kept going, by the end of it you had a whole book, good or bad. Zadie Smith wrote a useful essay, That Crafty Feeling, about two types of writers: the micro- and macro-managers. The latter type plans everything out ahead, whereas the former jumps out of the plane hoping the parachute will open, which is how writing feels to me.

Related: Upstairs at the Party by Linda Grant review – intriguing and evocative

Without knowing exactly what one is writing about, finding out from the writing itself what its subject is, the micro-manager just pushes on, blindly feeling forwards in the dark. It’s impossible to wait until one knows what one is doing; you just sit down, occasionally in excitement, mostly in numb fear, and get on with it.

The errant husband did eventually write his book. Perhaps the impediment was the marriage itself, rather than his dilatoriness. Oddly, I drifted away from my friendship with the wife, and came to appreciate the qualities of the husband I had so vigorously assented to condemn at that lunch. Nonetheless it is her, not him, who gave me this great unintended gift, the gift to carry on.

There’s a familiar grammatical formulation I hear when people hear I’m a writer. “I’d have loved to have written a book.” The tense indicates that what they want is the satisfaction of a completed work in bookshops, their name on the spine. And I say (harshly as it must sound), “Well, if you want to write a book, you’ll just have to get on with it.”

An unwelcome gift if ever there was one.