Good vibes

I’m writing something new! And very different to what I’ve written before. It may work. Who knows? Part of the fun, and frustration, of writing, is figuring out if an idea is going to work. Sometimes the problem is that the idea is too thin. There isn’t enough there to build a novel on. For me, often the issue is that I’m trying to cram too much in. There are ideas on top of ideas and they swamp each other so that I lose sight of what the story should be. The novel I’m currently trying to write, an idea that I’ve been thinking about for a couple of years now, suffered from that problem. I’ve never been able to get past the 15,000 word mark because I’ve given myself too many options and I don’t know where to take the story. The solution: scrap everything and go back to the start.

I wanted to come back to the novel with fresh energy, as if I hadn’t spend months ripping my hair out over it! So I went back to the beginning. And I always start by reading. Usually fiction because what I’m looking for in the early stages is ‘vibe’. The books I choose don’t usually have a lot to do with what I’m writing plot-wise. They just need to capture some element of what I want a reader to experience when they read my novel much further down the line. With that in mind, last week I took a trip to the big Foyles on Charing Cross Road, with nothing in particular in mind, and chose four books purely by what grabbed my attention. Here are the four books and why I chose them:

Desperate Characters - Paula Fox

This was on a table and it was the title that grabbed me. It’s also set in the 1960s, which is the period I want to use for my novel and there’s a troubled marriage. I also like that the catalyst is a literal cat!

Otto and Sophie Bentwood live childless in a renovated Brooklyn brownstone. The complete works of Goethe line their bookshelf, their stainless steel kitchen is newly installed, and their Mercedes is parked outside. After Sophie is bitten on the hand while trying to feed a half-starved neighbourhood cat, a series of small and ominous disasters begin to plague their lives, revealing the faultlines and fractures in a marriage – and a society – wrenching itself apart.

Heatwave - Victor Jestin

This is a nasty little novella that I picked up because heat is going to be an underlying element of my novel. I pretty much read this on the afternoon I bought it, over a coffee. It’s almost a 21st century companion piece to Bonjour Tristesse but with a death at the beginning and the extra grossness of a teenage boy.

Leonard is an outsider, a seventeen-year-old uncomfortable in his own skin who is forced to endure a family camping holiday in the South of France. Tired of awkwardly creeping out of beach parties after only a couple of beers, he chooses to spend the final Friday night of the trip in bed. However, when he cannot sleep due to the sound of wild carousing outside his tent, he gets up and goes for a walk.

As he wanders among the dunes, he sees Oscar, one of the cooler kids, drunk in a playground, hanging by his neck from the ropes of a swing. Frozen into inaction, he watches Oscar struggle to breathe until finally his body comes loose and falls lifeless to the ground. Unable to think straight, he buries Oscar in the sand and returns to the campsite where, oppressed by the ferocious heat and the weight of what he did and did not do, he will try to spend the remaining hours of the holiday as if nothing had happened.

The Heat of the Day - Elizabeth Bowen

This is very ‘English’, and set in during WW2, so not entirely what I’m after. But I was intrigued by the themes of betrayal and of secrets. I’m reading this at the moment and it’s very focused on character which I like. It feels as though destruction is always very close, whether literal through the bombs that are falling on London, or personal, though the characters’ choices.

It is wartime London, and the carelessness of people with no future flows through the evening air. Stella discovers that her lover Robert is suspected of selling information to the enemy. Harrison, the British intelligence agent on his trail, wants to bargain, the price for his silence being Stella herself.

Caught between two men and unsure who she can trust, the flimsy structures of Stella's life begin to crumble.

Leaving the Atocha Station - Ben Lerner

I remember this being huge when it was first published. My novel isn’t set in Madrid, or in the same time period, but I thought that there might be some cultural stuff of interest. Is ‘American in Madrid’ now very different to ‘Englishman in Spain’ in the 1960s? I shall find out. I may hate this one but time will tell.

Adam Gordon is a brilliant, if highly unreliable, young American poet on a prestigious fellowship in Madrid. Fuelled by strong coffee and self-prescribed tranquillizers, every day is a fresh attempt to establish a sense of self and an attitude towards his art.

Not helped by his imperfect grasp of Spanish, Adam struggles with the underlying suspicion that his relationships, his reactions, even his entire personality are just as fraudulent as his poetry. Yet while his self-obsession runs riot he is at risk of missing the bigger and more urgent things that threaten to change the world around him in sudden and dramatic ways.

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There are only a few tickets left for Dorothy Koomson’s Thrillfest next Thursday 13th February. If you’re in London, we’d love to see you!

Featured writers: Louise Hare, Nadine Matheson, Saima Mir, Kia Abdullah, Lisa Jewell, Araminta Hall and, of course, Dorothy herself!