sarah eve kelly

I have a good turn of phrase. It’s gotten me out of tight spots since primary school. I’ve told so many lies, and all eloquently; I’m a lucky girl. But if I hear one more word about The Muse, or characters following writers around while they do their shopping, I’m going to end it all.

‘Sarah is very gifted but does not meet her potential.’ That was on all my report cards. I would like to invent an Official History for myself in which I was a misunderstood straight-A student, but I wasn’t. I’m getting a doctoral degree from the best History faculty in the world, and in grade school I wasn’t even that good at Social Studies. I never tried because no one made me try - I wasn’t a huge achiever, but things weren’t bad.

This was the era during which I believed there was a Muse, a misty anthropomorphized entity who genuinely sat on my shoulder and whispered in my ear, because that’s how it felt when I wrote. When I wrote letters asking for extensions, when I flew on the euphoric currents of all-nighters to get papers done. The half-dozen novels on my hard drive - all approximately a page and a half long - are the result of the Muse.

But the Muse is a tease. The Muse makes you pay, eventually.

I spent years wittering on this blog that I was almost finished The Fidelity Trial, that if I just had a little time, if inspiration struck just once more… well, in July 2007, free of all distraction, I took an inventory of said ‘almost-finished’ novel and after one horrific day, realized that I had exactly 76 usable pages out of the 300-odd stinking up the document. In the document in front of me now, those 76 pages, too, are nowhere to be found.

The first time I tried to write, tried to make a day of it, a routine, the first time I had a job to complete: that was when I realized that the Muse is a sham. Some days are better than others: you can put that up to the Muse if you want to, but really it’s just you having a good day. You can similarly blame the bad days on the Muse, but that’s just you having a bad day. What you bring to the table is what you bring to the table, full stop: the summer of 2007 is when I saw, for the first time, that writing is sweated labour.

I’m not saying the creativity isn’t important; a writer hasn’t got a prayer without it (neither do most people). But discipline is the thing. Writing is self-directed. Most everybody has a few well-wishers, but writing is a sideline until you make it something else. Nobody’s ever going to care as much as you do, and if you can only be bothered to write when the Muse strikes, well, lucky you if that happens every day.

It was Margaret Atwood who first annoyed me with this, although I imagine most if not all of her stories are apocryphal. She related that she was walking through a field one day when she was quite young, and that God’s thumb suddenly bore down on her forehead, and then she was a poet. Just like that. But the thing about Margaret Atwood is that she’s a prolific, prodigious writer who obviously works very hard. Books are like sausages: no one wants to know how they were really made, and so here comes Margaret Atwood, master storyteller, to tell you a charming story about how from God’s thumb to her Selectric came ‘Variation on the Word Sleep’ and Life Before Man.

My own Origin Story hasn’t yet been solicited. That’s all well and good: I’m nobody. If I’m ever asked, I doubt I’ll tell the truth. But there’s a freedom in being nobody: right now, I can say that yes, it’s tremendousy difficult even if you do have the occasional inspiration and a reliably good turn of phrase. It’s probably impossible if you don’t.

It could be that I’m just jealous of people who claim to - or really do - have constant ideas jockeying for position in their heads. I have some ideas. If I’ve an urge to commit them to virtual paper it’s because I want to look back and say, ‘That was clever.’ But it’s the sweated labour that allows me - occasionally - to look back and say, ‘That was moving - that was important.’

I’m heading into two straight weeks of revisions before a trip to New York mid-month. It’s wonderful but I’m also bloody fucking terrified. During the summer of 2007, when I had enough money not to think about it, when Mike was at work, and there was nothing but me and the story, I dreaded sitting down at the dining room table in the morning and examining what I’d done the day before, wondering where today’s 1,500 words were going to come from. I didn’t feel like an artist; I didn’t feel like a vessel. I felt like a machinist whose hands weren’t sufficiently calloused. But after five years of pissing and moaning and only writing when the Muse struck (Lesson #1: try to write your book from beginning to end - the Muse always struck at some arbitrary point in the story) and having 76 semi-usable pages to show for it, the novel was complete in six months because I decided it would be, not because the Muse helped me out, not because Anne Boleyn followed me to bed every night and said, ‘Psst, I should throw a hairbrush at my brother tomorrow.’

It’s a wonderful feeling, trusting yourself, working to completion. Getting professional feedback told me that my work isn’t done, but I trust myself to finish it. Who was it who talked about hitching the unconscious to the writing arm? This is what I’ve finally done. I have to finish my revisions in two weeks, and I’m going to. Nothing beats that.

Everyone’s process is different, but there is no writer you admire who did not have to work and sweat and suffer for the craft. It’s a question of loving it enough to suffer for it (or loving the idea of posterity, at least) - that’s an old chestnut that’s got some real truth to it.

Till next time, &c &c.

I’m a coward, I admit it.

If you look at the vital stats of my life right now, you might not think so, but it’s true. Not only being unemployed, but having guaranteed unemployment for the next two years might seem brave. It isn’t really. A lot of people hide in grad school during a recession.

I’m a cautious reader, a cautious viewer, and a cautious writer. For a disorganized procrastinator (does anyone else think ‘procrastinate’ should be a noun, like ‘advocate’?), I’m very cagey about my time. I follow the same authors, the same actors, the same directors, and I will by no means follow them anywhere. This is why writers blow me away.

Yes, I’m going to ‘other’ writers for the moment, because Jesus, look at them. They’ll try anything.

Fantasy writers especially scare the shit out of me. In a good way, mind, for the most part. They are world-builders. Imagine building a world. Some of the more philosophical amongst you will say that all fiction writers build worlds, but these people actually build worlds. I can’t even build a bathroom shelf.

I write historical fiction, and tonight I experienced one of the singular joys of writing what I do: meeting someone you thought you knew, on as viable a social networking website as the online Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Tonight I met Eustace Chapuys, Imperial ambassador to the English court from 1529 to 1545, canon lawyer and renowned defender of Katherine of Aragon. His name is one that I’ve tripped past hundreds of times, but tonight I sat and actually read about him for the first time.

Chapuys is a minor character in The Fidelity Trial. It was enough, I thought once upon a time, to know where he came from, what he was doing, and what side he was on. Right now I’m doing battle with Structural Issues on about nine thousand fronts (by the way this post is going, I’m sure you’ll be staggered to know that my writing has structural problems), all patiently pointed out to me by my very kind agent and her very kind assistants. Today, in order to tackle them, I thought the best course was to learn a little something about hawking.

Yeah, I know.

In the course of my hunt-and-peck research about hawking, I learned the following things about Eustace Chapuys. First: I spent fifteen years thinking this dude was Spanish. Why? ‘Cause I never looked it up. Bad Sarah. The man is actually French (not French-French - 16th-century Savoy French). He enjoyed hawking. He doesn’t seem, in fact, ever to have lived in the Strand.

These facts helped me resolve a square half-dozen of my Structural Problems. Turns out looking up hawking was a good idea.

My point is this: you can do that in historical fiction. You can look things up in any genre, sure, but in historical fiction you’re not building a world; you’re recreating one from scraps. If the facts about Chapuys hadn’t been there, I’d like to think that I would have made them up, or something similar. But they were there, waiting for me on the trusty ODNB.

I didn’t come to historical fiction because it has corners. (I actually woke up one night with an image in my head of a woman with long, black hair who had fallen asleep at a desk on which a candle was about to gutter and go out. Conjuring that image, to date, has been the easiest part of this novel.) By ‘corners’ I mean rules, a governing system, dates and traits and silver plates that keep you on your path. A lot is still left to the brainbox, but the facts can give you ideas.

That Eustace Chapuys was a hawking enthusiast, for example, gave me a very good idea.

I’ve been stalled on this novel more times than I care to count. When I’m working on it full-time I have a score of tiny stalls in a day. I have to do everything that a novelist does - digging through characters, braiding subplots, perfecting prose, tension-on-every-goddamned-page - but I can’t help the feeling that I have a bit more help than others.

This is where I come back to the borrowed wisdom of a few posts back, because I’m very tempted to say that the work I’m doing on my PhD has more corners, even, than my novel. Facts are facts, after all, and when you’re researching a dissertation you can’t bend facts to make them more interesting (luckily, in my line of work, you rarely have to). I’ve now gotten the same advice from two different people on these two different things, The Fidelity Trial and my dissertation: embrace the anarchy; make things a little crazy. If you don’t have a bit of the crazy, what are you doing? Why are you bothering? Bring the chaos!

Still, you gotta know what you’re talking about if you want to put in a scene about hawking.

Anyway. I tip my top hat to fantasy writers, I really do. The more I read history books and the ODNB, the more I think, ‘You couldn’t make this shit up.’ And then I think, ‘No, you couldn’t, so it’s a good thing it happened.’ (Most of it, anyway.)

This ridiculous post is dedicated to the crazy folks at Absolute Write Water Cooler, who helped me stick my neck out and be a little less cowardly.

Back to it.

Till next time, &c &c.

It appears I arrived in London at precisely the wrong time. If I stay in my own sleepy neighbourhood perhaps I can escape it, but if I venture any further infield, I’m inundated with the apparently heart-stopping news that it’s been ten years since Diana Spencer’s death.

This is the one thing, for me, that turns England into (as Miss King put it) “this sceptr’d loony bin, this U.K. of Utter Kitsch”. Editorial pages are rife with complaints that London isn’t what it used to be, that English people are fat and stupid, that Red Ken (”London Was Made for Cycling”) is ruining everything, that telephone boxes are all that’s left, that the bowler hat is dead, replaced by iPod oblivion. Personally, I don’t see it. Perhaps it needs viewing through fresh eyes, which I certainly have, but London is still an old city, still looks the part. It’s still got game.

The one thing I don’t like about being here is the tendency towards bad American imitation, and that’s where Diana really hacks me off. Who needs a “people’s princess”, anyway? And is that really what she was? (A streeter on “Richard & Judy” said that Diana’s allure was and is all about physical attractiveness: “If she looked like the back end of a bus I don’t think anyone would be especially bothered.”) I can smell at least four more covers on People magazine coming from this, and it makes me especially glad not to be in North America, but I can only imagine what’s in store for me here.

A page from the BBC News website is full of the sort of phraseology that sends me grappling for my benzos: “The Windsors were greeted warmly by the Spencers” at the unveiling of the new memorial in Hyde Park in July 2004. I’m sure “the Windsors” were really relieved. Diana’s mother complained that the new fountain lacks sufficient grandeur. I should say so: it’s described as a “700-tonne memorial”.

700 seems to be a small number no matter which way you slice Diana: 700 guests for her ten-years-dead memorial service is considered “small” and “intimate”, and there is fury in the streets that “Mrs Parker-Bowles” is attending. There is no way for this woman to win. It reminds me of public treatment of Anne Boleyn, called “The Concubine”, “The Great Goggle-Eyed Whore”, and - most charitably - the Marquess of Pembroke, when she ought rightfully to have been referred to as the Queen. When Katherine of Aragon died, the public were horrified that Anne wore yellow, when in the event yellow was the Spanish colour of mourning. The only occasion on which Anne got any good press was three days before her execution, when Henry VIII’s ostentatious visits to Jane Seymour began an outcry against his bad taste.

It seems that the only thing Camilla can do to get people to like her is be supplanted by another woman.

According to the Daily Express 88% of Britons are outraged at the possibility of Camilla being crowned Queen. I can’t wait to become a Briton myself so that someone fucking well consults me. There wasn’t anything singular about Diana except her hysteria. Camilla has endured a set of circumstances largely beyond her control with a dignity that Diana wouldn’t have recognized if it jumped onto her yacht.

Queen Elizabeth has seven years left to go if she wants to break Queen Victoria’s record. Charles will break Prince Bertie’s record in the wings as Prince of Wales quite a bit sooner than that. But when the time comes, God save Queen Camilla. And poo to a twenty-years-dead memorial, with knobs on.