Venturing into the Darkness of a New Novel
I am sitting before a page that refuses to write itself. If you’ve ever wondered what it’s like to start a new novel — Is it easy? How do you do it? — I guess there’s your answer.
So why do it at all? Most writers write because the process is engrossing and exciting. When it ends, it feels a little like falling off a cliff. It also feels like coming out of a very dense jungle into the light. Which brings me full circle, to the beginning.
In writing Bloodlines, I researched tropical rainforests. One day, at the end of a path accessible only by a four-wheel drive jeep, I found myself face to face with the dark and seemingly impenetrable surface of the Nkandla Forest in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa.
In front of me was a moist darkness filled to bursting with ferns and creepers, massive silent leaves and unfamiliar trees with root ridges as high as houses. Their vine-bound trunks extended to the forest ceiling so high and so thick that virtually no light penetrated to the ground, and their branches were interwoven into a lattice that even the wild pigs and monkeys had to dig under in order to pass. The ground—if there was any—was invisible, covered in rotting vegetation that might have been several feet thick. The decaying plants and the sounds of invisible animals, birds, snakes and huge flying insects combined to create a soup of sounds and smells that made me excited and curious, even as I was nauseous with fear.
That’s what it feels like to start working on a novel.
The only difference is that you can’t simply stand on the doormat and peer inside. You have to enter, pushing aside one leaf at a time, bending slowly beneath the first branch. You have to separate the two twined vines to make space first for a finger and then an arm, followed by a shoulder. When the vines recoil back to their original shape, trapping your chest, you must patiently squeeze between them until they release you. Then you turn to see whether you should give up and return to the light, only to find that you’ve succeeded in your goal, and you’re inside the beast. There’s only one way forward, and you have to find it.
The magic of the process is that you never know when you will cautiously move aside a vast fern to see a fawn sleeping in a small circle of sunlight; or, reveal a nest of pink and purple lemurs waiting for their mother to return; or hear a strange sound, look up into the face of an expressionless boa constrictor hanging from a branch at eye level. And just when you think you’ve learned to expect the unexpected, you come carefully around a tree to find yourself looking into the eyes of a gargantuan elephant with a 1956 Cadillac squashed in the coils of his trunk. Or, you may be invited to tea by a beautiful young maiden standing behind a growth of ferns, wearing nothing but her shining hair.
If you bull your way into the jungle slashing your machete through the vegetation, the snake will bite, the fawn will disappear into the shadows, and the magic will evade you at every turn.
But if you move slowly, working with the undergrowth and the vines as if they’re your friends, your plot will suddenly take form. Your characters will emerge slowly from the darkness until you look at them and realize with surprise that they are fully formed. Your narrative, which you can’t see looking ahead, will suddenly become visible when you turn around to see how far you’ve come.
It may be a long way out to the light at the end of the jungle, but, baby, you’re well into the journey, and there’s no turning back now.
Photo: Barn Images/Flickr 2.0 CC