The Mysteries week one of the first draft
This week I began writing the first draft of my new novel. As I explained in my last post, writing the first draft from the plan I’ve worked up is, for me, the most exciting and enjoyable part of the process of creating a novel. With a blueprint to follow that covers all the main elements of the plot and characters, this is the time when I sit down every day and hammer out the narrative. Surprising and unexpected things happen. My weekly word target at this stage is about twenty thousand words, so around four thousand a day. To achieve that kind of
output I have to write quickly, the scenes and character have to start coming to life. Details and nuances I couldn’t possibly have planned for appear as I tap into a creative well that must exist in my subconscious mind. Time passes very quickly and by the time I’ve hit my daily target about five hours after I begin, I feel slightly exhilarated and a bit wrung out. I read once that the brain burns more calories than you would if you were pounding a treadmill. If that’s true I must be completing a half marathon every day.
The story begins with Leyla who is nineteen years old and lives in Waltham Forest in London. She has spent her entire life in England, though her parents brought her there from Iran when she was a baby, along with her brother, Ray, who is a year older. In the opening paragraph she knocks on his bedroom door. Though he doesn’t know it, Leyla is about to leave home. She has decided to run away, although she’s aware that nineteen year old girls don’t have to run away. It’s what it feels like though, because she can’t tell anyone what she’s planning.
This is the culmination of years of pressure from Leyla’s parents. They’ve tried to make her conform to a code of behaviour that is based on Iranian culture and beliefs. It’s a culture that Leyla stopped identifying with the day she started going to school in England. She feels as if she’s led a double life, having to pretend to be the person her parents want her to be when she’s with them, and only able to be who she actually is when she’s at school or with her friends. What made it bearable was her brother, because he understood everything she was going through even if it wasn’t so bad for him because he was a boy. All her life, Ray has been her best friend, the one person she could tell everything. They have supported each other. But then Ray began to change, though Leyla didn’t know why. They drifted apart. He began to side with their parents, became interested in their culture, which was suddenly his culture. When Leyla goes into his room where she hasn’t been for a long time, she finds the walls are bare, stripped of the posters depicting the indie rock bands he used to love. It emphasises how different he has become from the brother she once loved and relied on, who has now become her oppressor, or would like to be. It makes her angry, and all the hurt and resentment she feels at his betrayal of her wells to the surface.
Leyla ends up living in a flat in Oxford, borrowed from her boyfriend’s aunt. The flat is part of a large house owned by Thomas Yardley, a man she hardly ever sees except for glimpses of him at an upstairs window when she’s outside in the garden each evening. He’s an old man who never appears to have visitors and rarely leaves the house. He plays classical musical that drifts on the evening air, and as Leyla relaxes with a few tokes from a joint, she’s entranced by this music, which is unfamiliar to her. Inevitably they meet, and Leyla finds Thomas to be cold and distant. He’s scathing of youth culture and disapproves of her smoking dope. She discovers that he was once a professor at the university where he taught History. His house is crammed with things he picked up in his travels. When he was younger he spent his summers pursuing his interest in archaeology. Since Leyla is looking for a summer job, he hires her to catalogue his effects and she’s intrigued to discover that there is nothing amongst them all to suggest that he has ever been married or even had a lover or friends. The remnants of his life tell her nothing about him. Then one day she discovers a photograph album and a journal written by his wife in the seventies, almost forty years ago.
From this point, the point I’ve reached, two stories will develop and converge. One concerns Leyla and the other is about what happened to Thomas’s wife Sophie on a Greek island forty years ago, and eventually the two stories will merge and hopefully illuminate each other.
Twenty thousand words down, eighty to go.
