Kerry Hudson's Blog, page 16

It all started with Sylvia.

It all started with Sylvia.

1. The first draft of Tony Hogan on my work table in New...

1. The first draft of Tony Hogan on my work table in New Zealand. 

2. Before my meeting at Random House I met my partner for a coffee and tried to look calm. I'm really hoping I didn't pull this face too often during the actual meeting. 

3. The moment I got The Call. Listening to my agents voicemail while struggling out of my coat with a stupid grin on my face. Composed as ever. Again, I'd like to think that isn't a face I pull often. But it probably is.

4. I returned the contract on my way to work a few weeks later. 

5. The beginning of notes for Thirst (almost exactly this time last year). To the right of this shot my girlfriend is swimming the Serpentine in a wetsuit.

6. The view from my writing table at home in Hackney. I plan to finish Thirst here. Looking out at that view and thanking my East London lucky stars.  

This time last year

                                          

I love the Man Booker longlist announcement. Not because I have usually read many, if any, of the longlisted books (I don't usually read books that are newly out) and not because it kindles some long held dream (though who doesn't dream of that?) I love it because it marks the moment my life spun on its axis and I managed to find myself here. 

This time last year I was working a job I was miserable in. It was enormously high pressured to the point that I felt like I couldn't breathe. It was also the time my first novel Tony Hogan Bought Me an Ice-Cream Float Before He Stole My Ma went on submission. Going on submission is like bungee jumping; terrifying and thrilling and all you can hope is that after the ups and downs everything will turn out fine.

Around Man Booker longlist announcement time, last year, after a particularly gruelling string of meetings, project assessments and Gantt chart drafting's in the day job, I got an email from my agent saying that an editor was interested in Tony Hogan and was discussing it with her colleagues. The next day, a Friday, I got another email to say that a different publisher was doing the same. That evening my partner and I went to Shoreditch Park to watch the Philharmonic Orchestra and fireworks with a bottle of wine. As the music played and the fireworks whizz-banged, my mind was whirring; I couldn't believe I might be on the verge of having my dream come true. I'd written a book and signed with an amazing agent but the idea that my book might actually be published still seemed like, well yes, a dream.

One of those emails was from Chatto & Windus. Chatto had two books on the Man Booker longlist last year (Lisa Moore and Rose Tremain) and that summer I would go into bookshops, with their impressive Man Booker displays, walk the aisles, pick up beautiful books by Chatto, with their distinctive logo of two studious cherubs, then shake my head in disbelief and walk out.

I left that awful job soon after but before I'd signed with Chatto – an act of impulse that I've never regretted. Soon after those emails I met with the editors and publicity team from Chatto and Vintage and Tony Hogan will be published with them next year.

One year on I am on the second draft of my second novel Thirst. I've just returned from Russia which was made possible through an Arts Council England Grant and Chatto have another book on the Man Booker longlist (D.J. Taylor for Derby Day). Needless to say, I am still going into shops to look at their wonderful books and shaking my head but this time in happy disbelief that mine will be joining them…around this time next year actually.

Next: Photo-journey   

Home again, home again

And so I am home. I had a few very strange first days where I overworked myself, then had to take long daytime sleeps. I talked to my partner for hours solidly, a garbled rushing of words as though I was catching up on my usual chatter missed in the last month. After being so quiet, tongue-tied for so long, I wanted to make myself heard. 

I fell in love afresh with Hackney, its diversity and vibrancy, the sheer amount going on and the sense of community - though it is made of disparate parts it fits together with goodwill and tolerence (for the most part - shouty evangelists I'm looking at YOU). 

At the beginning of this week everything stopped feeling so strange, I developed a routine, got excited about all I could acheive in the next few months, got my sleep back to normal except one alarming dream when I dreamt my wardrobe was crammed with children hiding. So this week I have mainly been: 

Getting my first royalty statement. It has my name along with an 'author number' and it is on Random House letterhead. I love getting post.
Giving Thirst to my beta-reader (my wonderful partner) normally a beta reader's job is to tell you gently if you're on the right track or not, but instead we've been turning circles around the park, talking for hours about Dave, Alena and their tangled threads. I trust her implicitly and she knows what I want to write when I haven't quite written it that way. She's a thoughtful, honest reader which is the best kind.
Avoiding blogging. Sorry. I'd forgotten that actually very little of a writer's life is that interesting. Especially when the work is intensive. This list is a bit of a lazy form of blogging but it's better than the video of an Austrian man musically peeing into a variety of different sized buckets which I was going to post.*
Writing extra scenes. It seems that when I think I am close to finishing 'The End' shifts, mirage like, and I just keep on typing. I have dreams like that too but in them I'm naked in school corridors chasing after my dancing pyjamas. 
Making chocolate-chip shortbread, with black as coal Russian chocolate, to eat with blacker than coal Russian coffee. 
Coming up with the perfect structure (I think) for Thirst feeling that little flash of excitement in my fingertips and then the shock of nervousness about how I am actually going to make it happen. It's not what I'd planned and it's ambitious. 
Becoming the new writer in residence at the Avo Boutique Hotel in Dalston. We had a brilliant meeting and I'm really excited about what they're doing here in Hackney and pleased to be part of it. I'll tell more later.
Thinking about the launch of Tony Hogan and what I can do to help push it into the light somehow. So far my plan involves Scottish fish & chip shops. 

So that's it. I promise I'll come back with a shiny, not-list-like blog post in the next few days. In apology here is a picture of some wasps in a thistle. That is all. 

* Please don't Google this, it doesn't exist. It came out of my fertile if often disturbed imagination.  

Next: A post that isn't a list

In which I say goodbye to Russia

I find myself back in Moscow after a four day straight train journey (the funniest part of which was being summoned for a photo with the train crew because on hearing I was writing a book they assumed…well, I don't know what really but God knows what newsletter that's ending up in). Tomorrow I'll take the plane (via Zurich) back to London and so, I find myself at the end of my Russian journey having met hundreds of people, eaten around 87 beetroot salads and taken about 10 trains but for very long distances indeed.

I don't think I've mentioned before how magnificent the trains are here but they are - old and dignified with pleasingly kitsch buffet cars (think dollies, plastic flowers) and stern attendants who roam the aisles with miniature vacuum cleaners hunting errant crumbs. The train rocks you as you write or read or watch the endless ribbon of Siberia unfurl outside the window, Russian passengers offer their bread or teabags for a cup of tea and you sit opposite, chew and smile at one another in a companionable silence. The trains can be fearsomely hot though, and I am always on the upper berth, hunched over a notepad, sweating through my clothes and planning when I will next do the gymnastics it will require to get down to the samovar or toilet.

On my two day journey from Omsk to Irkutsk for various reasons we were only able to get off the train once for a few minutes. I stepped down onto the platform, feeling my bones and muscles stretch out, the breeze finally cooling me down. I bought a chocolate-chip ice-cream from the kiosk, listened to the hisses and cranks of our resting train, the chatter or the other passengers and watched the sun setting behind the mint green station. It was a perfect moment, and just at that perfect moment I looked down and there was a big shiny black horsefly on my calf, a purple bruise already spreading on the skin around it. I flicked the fly off and a large drop of blood ballooned from the centre of the discoloured skin. I finished my ice-cream (obviously) but the moment was gone – I was too busy worrying about whether it might have carried some sort of indigenous horsefly disease.

 

I tell this story because it is the best way I can describe the mixture of emotions I have experienced here on my journey from Moscow to Siberia, West to East and then the long, long journey West again. It has been a constant shift between hard then easy, enjoyable then shitty, life affirming then incredibly frustrating – it has been all of these things, often within hours of each other. But as my wise (and beautiful) partner said to me, enjoying it was hardly the point and of course, she was right.

I'll return home with a 2nd draft Thirst and knowledge of Russia without which it would have been impossible to complete the novel. I leave feeling confident I have everything I need either already on the page or bubbling away for future use. Thankfully Thirst is not a novel about Russia because if it were my journey would barely have scratched the surface of what I needed to know, but for Dave and Alena's journeys I have more than enough. I can return home and finish this novel and weave all I have seen and heard and experienced through its pages. I am so, so grateful for this journey, the good times, the difficult times and all the ice-cream cones in between. Now, I'm taking these travelling feet home to Hackney.  

 

Next: Home

Brought to you by the power of the tinterweb while I am on a...

Moscow


Kazan


Tomsk


Irkutsk


Lake Olkhon

Brought to you by the power of the tinterweb while I am on a train somewhere in the middle of Russia. 

Next: Homecoming

The Laundry and the Lake

I am on Olkhon Island in the middle Lake Baikal. It is a dusty, arid island populated with small wooden Heidi-esque cabins, skinny cows and their calves and yet more of those roguish stray dogs I'm growing attached to. Beyond that is the green and blue expanse of water that is Lake Baikal. This island, the lake, are stunning, they are a poem to Siberia, such an inhospitable often unchanging and, perhaps for that reason, unsettling landscape suddenly made beautiful.

I'm in the process of unscrambling all my work here now so I feel lucky to have arrived somewhere so peaceful. I feel overwhelmed by all I have seen and experienced over the last 20 days, as though all those notes, conversations, images are on a rag-bag jumble at the bottom of my bed - a tumble of tights and knickers and long sleeved jumpers that won't unravel themselves. But of course it my job to unravel. So I'm thinking of it as I would on a day to day basis, focus on one thing at a time and decide whether I need that knowledge or if I can discard it. Make choices. For writing is all about, perhaps mostly about, those choices - what I choose to put in, and even more so about what I choose to leave lying in a heap at the end of the bed.

I'm trying to think about it like this: when I'm walking down the street, I am dimly aware of the pavement slabs, the sound the leaves are making, how cold or warm the breeze is, the colour of cars passing, a child crying for something in the distance, how my feet feel in my shoes and…well, I think we see the point, the list could be infinite. But of course while we can function while processing all of this stimulus we would go mad if we tried to bring each and every part of the world around us into sharper focus. So instead I look at maybe one or two things at a time, a crisp bag dancing on the wind in the gutter, a chalk mark where someone has written a lopsided G, the dappling of the shadow of leaves next to it.

 

My job is to pull certain aspects of the material I've gathered here into sharper focus. To sort through them: a pile to keep and pile to be, not abandoned, but shelved for a later time. Sometimes I'll wrangle with myself over a specific thing but if I have to wrangle too much it means I'll be forcing it into the text and ultimately I (and the reader) will know there's artifice there, a bit of clever-clever, and there's nothing worse is there?

So, a big task ahead of me but I'm ready. And when my mind starts spinning as though I'm trying to pull everything into focus too quickly I will go and stare at that great lake, focus instead on that. Then I'll return to my pile at the end of the bed and hunt for the things to keep.

5 steps to arse on seat 1st drafts and Tomsk steals my heart

I greet you over a plate of pancakes from Tomsk. The cheapness and wide availability of pancakes is not why I have been so happy in Tomsk but I won't say it hasn't played a large part.

           

Tomsk is a beautiful university town, full of old wooden buildings, alongside the usual tower-blocks and squat government buildings, the sleepy but vast River Om runs through it. It feels far removed from any of the places I have visited so far on my journey through Russia. Long a home for political and creative dissidents (and the one time distribution hub for prisoners going to Gulags) Tomsk continues to be, to my observation, a cosmopolitan and intellectual town – young, vibrant and welcoming.

           

It is also a romantic city, in the night-times the streets fill with couples dressed in their finest, clutching roses as they promenade or maybe sit in each other's laps next to the fountain blasting out 90's music. Alongside the lovers, in their satin, heels and diamanté encrustations, are wolf-life waggish stray dogs, roaming the streets in lazy packs. My favourite six or seven lay sprawled each night in the evening sun outside the supermarket, occasionally flicking a tail to tell a sparrow-like bird to buzz off

        

I have loved Tomsk for all these reasons but mainly I have loved Tomsk because I have been so productive. I mentioned a few posts earlier than I was scheduling myself fairly tightly throughout Russia - redraft in the morning, research afternoon, write new scenes in the evening – in a bid to make the most of this time. Tomsk has been incredible for writing, I cannot say why this is, but just as I found in Vietnam when writing my first novel, occasionally on the road - you, a place and your writing are just meant to be.

This sudden spike in words and pages got me thinking about method. Had you asked me even a few months ago what my method was, for instance how I wrote Tony Hogan in six months, I would say 'Well I just sat down every day and wrote 1000 words and when I had a draft I sat down every day and redrafted a certain amount of pages and then I had a novel.' That is the whole truth to my method but of course it's not quite that simplistic. There are several things that make up this 'arse on seat 1st draft methodology' of mine:

1)                  I do not mythologise writing or overthink stories. Storytelling is as old as time itself and that's all writing, or certainly my writing, is - telling a story as I see it in my mind and imagination, fuelled by what interests me, my perspective of the world, what I feel passionate about. Every time I sit down I tell myself that the only thing I have to do is sit and tell a story. The women in my family have been doing this for generations long past, usually after a glass or two, and I am no different. Though my words might one day be printed and I tend to be less drunk during the telling.

2)                  I allow my mind, the creative unpredictable side, an entirely free reign when I write 1st drafts. I literally turn those typing hands over to my mind. I tell the story as I think it and see it. There will be time later to think about pace, characterisation, theme, conflict, climax but I'm always amazed by how much of this comes out intuitively if you really allow yourself to write uncensored. And occasionally the most wonderful details emerge from that blurry mess, things I wouldn't have known myself capable of thinking or communicating. Just occasionally, but it does happen.

3)                  You know when it is going well? The times when you cannot type past enough, when you finish and have to shake yourself back into the present, when you believe you could write all night and tell a whole world not just a single story within one? Well those are to be cherished but let's be straight, they are rare. More commonly the words need to be coaxed. I often sit and write brittle word after brittle word until I've written what I targeted for that day (usually 1000 words). Sometimes, part way through something will click and I'll finish in a sprint, my fingers racing to capture all that has just flooded into my mind. Sometimes not. Often not. But I keep typing anyway. You can fix the words you have later, you cannot do this if you have no words at all.

4)                  I treat my work with respect but not reverence. You are just telling a story. It is not a cure for cancer or the secret to world peace - well my words aren't anyway. Knowing this means I don't drown under the pressure of my own expectation unnecessarily, especially when it is just me, that 1st draft and the characters getting smoochy in a hot little room in Hackney.

5)                  Laugh at yourself frequently and allow others to do so on your behalf regularly. This isn't a 1st draft ethos but a lifetime one.

So there we have it. I leave for my 35 hour train to Irkutsk tonight and even further into Eastern Siberia. I'll spend some of that time writing some more 1st draft scenes to insert into what is rapidly becoming a 2nd draft Thirst. I'll eat cous-cous and tomatoes and drink tea and use sign-language to share my food and think a little more about the methodology of writing. Or maybe I won't, I think half the effort is leaving the beast undisturbed and dreaming like those wolf dogs outside the supermarket. I do hope I haven't already said too much.

Next: Irkutsk and writing on trains

Treasure in Omsk

I have spent over 45 hours on trains since 2am on Friday morning. I'm not grumbling, the trains here are iconic, my fellow passengers fascinating, generous and welcoming – I would love to share more but some good bits must be kept back for the book. The beds are comfy, the rock of the train soporific, the long hours are spent eating biscuits, drinking tea, reading about Russia or scribbling in my notebook and feeling I am living out my foolish romantic fantasies about travelling writers fully. The only thing I might have complained about was that, by necessity, I was made to visit Omsk for 10 hours.

Omsk reminded me a bit of a western frontier town though I can't say why - perhaps because it looked about ready for a brawl, or maybe a shoot-out. I say I wandered around but actually I walked up and down the long four lane stretch of road that constituted the 'city centre' or tsentr go-ra-da (best delivered with a big questioning smile and a semaphore like swinging of the arms). It was very, very hot and dusty in Omsk. I found two sad shopping malls, several bars, many, many more off-licences. As an aside, I wonder how it is possible to quell a nation's endemic alcoholism when a coffee costs £3 and a big bottle of vodka costs only £1.50. Anyway, I had ten hours to kill so I wandered on: past the Cinema with sad looking, neon flower garlanded ponies, 50 roubles a ride, and a half deflated bouncy castle.

 

As I walked I kept asking 'tsentr go-ra-da?' and the locals looked at me like I was a mad foreigner, smile and point to the ground. It would seem I was, really, actually, already there. It got hotter and I wandered into a park, a long stretch of grass with photos of medal bedecked war heroes lining the central walkway. Beyond that, at the edges of the park were crumbling tower blocks and at the foot of the park was a tall concrete tower, with statues of soldiers embedded within it, a memorial with a sheet of dried chrysanthemums at its feet.

I asked someone where I could get a coffee and she pointed to a low mirrored windowed building to the left of the memorial. Inside a burly, sulky looking man sat at the counter. I asked again where I could get a coffee and he jerked a thumb to a door next to him. Out of the sun, and ready for a seat, I congratulated myself on having found a place to while away a little of my Omsk time but through the door there were wall size pictures of two blonde twins, both in big hair, latex chaps and nothing else. Across the cafes walls were a whole series of them sucking each other's fingers, spreading each other's buttocks. Really? Really? This is where people come for a coffee after they lay their flowers on the memorial? Walk their dogs and their children?

Omsk is a 'Russian Bride' hotspot. A Google search for Russian Bride Omsk brings up 230,000 results. Many of these sites are about 'dating scammers' (people who rinse prospective suitors for cash over the internet) whether this is a woman pushing her luck or a beefy guy called Feodor is hardly the point. I find it hard to blame the 'scammer' though I'm sure many of the men they prey on are lonely, lost, genuinely blind to the economic nature and convenience of these 'relationships.' But had I had to spend more than 10 hours in somewhere like Omsk, I cannot honestly say what I might do myself to go anywhere else, believing it was a better.

Which brings me to Thirst and to Dave and Alena; both Dave and Alena make enormous mistakes, mistakes that are damaging to themselves and those around them. Even as I write their stories I wonder how forgiving a reader will be if I myself am judging them for the decisions they make, the paths they tread? But it is a moment like Omsk that allows me to see a depth to the characters I hadn't previously. Alena and Dave are both struggling and striving and, just about, surviving. They are flawed but I can understand why. My job is now to help the reader see why. Ask that reader, if they found themselves with their backs against the wall, would they too make mistakes, try to make them better, make bigger mistakes and still have the temerity to ask for more chances? My job is to do that so that the reader doesn't even know they are being asked. 

As I gratefully boarded my train to Tomsk, and the grandmother opposite me gave me half a tomato with a pinch of salt, I thanked my lucky stars for Omsk. Sometimes you don't know where you're going to find treasure. Usually it is in the most surprising, if bleak, of places.

Next: Going East

   

Stripping back and fierce eyebrows...

I am writing this on a faux leather armchair in a hostel lobby in Kazan. It was either that or the zebra print beanbag and once you get into those things…well, we all know the difficulty that can be had in trying to get back out of them.

This armchair, that beanbag, the stone washed jeans and white leather jackets, the showiness of wealth in Moscow, the food, the smoking, the drinking, the way women are expected to behave, the way men are expected to behave in return, the music, the TV, the lingerie, the lack of any environmental concern….I could go on but these things, and much more, are why Russia so far reminds me mostly of the 1980's. They still have frosted lipstick here and fag burns on the edge of toilet seats.

My journey across Russia (and back in time) now leads me to Kazan, capital of Tartastan. I rode the sleeper train to get here and it was wonderful; sharing a four berth with a young family, their 3 year old girl sitting next to be chattering away (though I couldn't understand) while she shared my food and we looked out at the forests, the full grey sky. When it was time for bed I unrolled the mattress and sunk into a sleep cradled by the rhythmic shunting of wheels against rails. That train ride offered the first peace I've had in seven days.

Seven days, because that is when I arrived in Moscow. That is when I effectively left myself behind in London. I find I become very different when I'm on the road because my experience is that travel strips you right back. Especially when travelling in a place where you cannot communicate the basics - I have attempted 4 times to buy milk (so far have gotten: cream, carbonated milk, soured cream and yogurt) still with no success - let alone articulate yourself. When you are travelling alone to boot; it can be easy to feel you are fading away completely. Here in Russia I am silent, and observant and to a certain extent far less aware of myself – while of course being excruciating self-conscious of my ignorance in so many things – and these are all great things for writing even if they can be uncomfortable.

This 'stripping back' is beneficial to writing because, for me, it quietens everything down, leads to a closer access to what is actually happening both around me and in the fictional world of Thirst. Travelling makes me that bit more innocent, certainly more vulnerable; it makes it essential for me to be alert, watchful. All of the noise that I have at home in London is quietened because all I have is myself, barely any words and that disappearing feeling that I hope will help me inhabit Dave and Alena's experiences more truthfully.

 

Travelling gives you nothing if not humility, and since I believe too much ego can be the enemy of good writing I can only embrace this 'disappearing feeling'. Thankfully it is only my ego that is being stripped back, because in modern Russia, as in 1980's Britain, I am pleased to report that there is no such thing as too much make-up and I am making use of my license for three coats of mascara and painting myself some fierce eyebrows.

Next: Omsk, Tomsk and other pleasing words.