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| ‘Some writers, if they are in the middle of a novel, are possessed by it; it’s not like that for me’ … Tessa Hadley. Illustration by Alan Vest |
Tessa Hadley: ‘Some of my best ideas come in the bath’
The author on putting writing on hold for everyday life, and finding inspirationTessa Hadley
Saturday 14 January 2017
T
his is the time of year when I’ve forgotten I have a writing day. Not forgotten it intellectually, but forgotten it in my body, which has fallen into that other rhythm: of household things, family, children and grandchildren and parents, sociability, planning. My writing self waits – I really want to say, though it’s a cliche, in the wings. I like the picture the cliche conjures, of a sociable self performing noisily, exaggeratedly, on a pantomime stage with painted backdrop and familiar old props – Christmas tree, pile of presents, table heaped over and over again with papier-mache stage food, everyone wearing the same old paper hats they wore last year. And in the midst of all the noise and laughter and melodrama (the predictable fallings-out and weepy reconciliations) a glimpse of another silent self, hanging about backstage more or less patiently, a kind of phantom at the pantomime, waiting to get back to a different kind of work.
For long years, before I was published, when I was writing and writing and not managing to “breed one work that wakes” – to borrow Gerard Manley Hopkins’ wonderful, terrible words (“why must / Disappointment all I endeavour end?”) – that secret self waiting in the wings was a haunted, fugitive, shamed figure. I couldn’t do it, and I couldn’t not do it. Bizarrely and inexplicably, if I couldn’t write, then somehow my other life, the real one, wasn’t quite real either. The two selves – the performer and her shadow – turned out to be inseparable. Each needed, for her own real life, the reality of the other one.
I know some writers, if they are in the middle of a novel, think about it all the time, they’re seized and possessed by it, until it almost blots out for them their other, daily lives. But it’s not quite like that for me. Of course when I’m in the thick of writing, working on a novel or a story day after day, then I am thinking about it a lot, I’m absorbed in it. Some of my best ideas come in the bath, or in bed just after I’ve put the light out; I have to put the light on again, apologising, and get out of the bed to fetch my notebook. These aren’t usually ideas for sentences, or images; they’re more likely to be the shapes of things that could happen, or must happen, to my characters. There is a dreamy moment just before sleep carries me away, when imagination is especially good at foreseeing, feeling its way to the true next thing. What would he do, after that had happened? What would become of her, after she found out? How might that next scene unfold?
Once I’ve left the novel alone for a few days, however, I stop moving around inside its spaces of possibility. The unfinished novel feels like a room shut up inside me; going about the business of my other life I’m aware of it but don’t open the closed door to look inside, though I keep its key in my pocket, fingering it sometimes to remind myself. And then the day comes – unremarkable to anyone else, remarkable to me – when I sit down to my novel again at last. Huge trepidation. At first I can’t remember being the person who chose these words, this story; I can hardly remember what it was I wrote just before I left off. When I read the novel through, I may see from the cool distance that comes with separation that it’s all wrong: too prosy and dull, or too exposed and raw, or fake.
But let’s suppose it’s all right, it’s alive enough for me to begin again where I left off. I write at a little table in the bedroom: I’ve always feared that a dedicated study could overwhelm the spark which seems to depend on accident, a sideways approach, a kind of calculated carelessness. I might read a few sentences of something brilliantly good (Elizabeth Bowen, Alice Munro, Shirley Hazzard) to build a bridge across the threshold into writing. Then work begins. Such hard work, such a joyous freedom: welding the words together, bringing something new into being. A paradoxical mix of extreme strained effort with dreamy relinquishment. My real life can go and lie down for a while. My other real life has taken over.
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