Offcuts

Never try to tidy up your desk. I am sitting on the floor of my study, surrounded by an ocean of unfinished novels and stories that I have written over a lifetime.

Here are a few pages from an unfinished thriller that I had forgotten I even started. I read them and think, ‘Well, that was never going to work, you need a touch of ice in you to write a thriller.’

And here’s part of a novel set in Ancient Rome. ‘Now that had more potential - maybe it still does?’ as I notice how Mark Antony makes an entrance in an early chapter, ever so sexily.

And here’s part of a children’s book. And here’s a story I don’t even remember writing, with a description part way down the page of a baby sleeping by a single light in a darkened room. (‘Her forehead was glossy. Her eyelids were like mother-of-pearl. Her earlobes were shiny silver. The toenails on each naked foot were pale pink fragments buried deep in the flesh of the toes. On the top of each foot was a wedge of flesh that gave it the shape of a triangle. The feet were especially delightful.’)

I must have written that when one of my children was tiny. Having babies made me want to write and write - whilst ensuring that I had absolutely no time to do so.

My whole life is here on these pages. Clear as anything I can see the different ‘me’s’ floating across them. Here is me at twenty five when I first started trying to write a novel, still reeling from my strange childhood. And here is me at thirty, happily living with a man but with a lot of ex-boyfriends whom I am borrowing to put into my unpublishable novels, because what else did you do with your exes?). And here is me at 35 and 40, with two small children. They released something inside me. They made my writing better

There is no sign in this ocean of paper of the novel that I actually got published - it was called ‘Ella and the Mothers’ and was published by the Sceptre list at Hodder and they even made a telly series out of it. There is also no sign of what came next, but that’s because - in writing terms - it was nothing. I don’t know whether I left writing or writing left me. Certainly I realised that you can’t have children and not give them a roof over their heads - well, you can but it’s not advisable - and so I started going out to work to help pay the mortgage. I thought, That’s it. Why would I ever want to write again?

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And yet the urge to do so never leaves you. And so (after ‘The Museum Makers’ that came out a few years ago) another one is coming this October and it’s not a thriller nor a historical novel nor a children’s book but it’s own thing, the strange, true history of the Elizabethan magus, John Dee, his wife and children, told as vividly and as atmospherically as I can, and with short stories embedded within it, capturing the (otherwise untold) stories of the women and children.

And does my John Dee book owe something to all the books I never finished nor got published? Almost certainly. The ocean of pages that surrounds me constitutes a writer’s journey, the story of my writing life, a narrative told in scraps, an up-down story, part triumph, part disaster, a story of learning-how-to-write-and-what-to-write, of the books that worked and the books that didn’t.

What about you? Do you have a writing memoir ready to be told in scraps and offcuts?

(And the picture? That’s a beautiful Spanish tile from Seville. I look at it and think of John Dee’s many small children, playing out in the garden where John Dee lived in Mortlake, not far from Tudor London.)