I often feel a bit antsy, setting out on my daily walk. Probably because I know I’m supposed to be thinking about serious writerly stuff–plot, narrative, characterisation, dialogue–and not, as I was this morning, about what best to do with some quinces I’d just poached (in vanilla and rosewater, along with a few cloves and peppercorns).

I usually give myself until St George’s Parade and then, as the rule stands, I have to try and meditate. (I love rules. I imagine most writers do. Structure. Lecture. Stern tone to self in head.) I have to try and empty my nattering mind of everything superfluous, quinces included, and focus instead on the guts of things. Joy. Grief. Love. Hate. Fear. Hope.

Often, I get so caught up in these larger reflections, I’m halfway home before I know it. Amazed at how different I feel. How settled. How blank. Even my pulse seems stilled. It’s often at that point, that I find myself struck, as this morning, by an unlooked-for  thought, idea, vision for the new book. In this case, an entire ending. A whole novel, resolved in the blink of an eye. A rare gift. How does the mind work? What is it, with those little synapses? Why, having set aside Quinces (custard? crumble? tart?), in favour of Suffering, do I find Revelation?

Meditation is the best tool I know, for writing. It seems perverse, that, to write, you need a healthy ego–after all, you wouldn’t go to the often exquisite trouble if you didn’t have something to say, or want someone to hear it. And yet, all good writing, is, in essence, egoless. The clarity, simplicity, beauty, truth of each and every word, bereft of its creator’s hopes, fears and foibles. Of course finding a way to fool or side-step your ego, if even for a little while, is no small thing.

In the book I’m working on, The Name of the Crime, I’m trying to explore the idea of ‘guilt’ and ‘innocence’.  The title comes from a line by the poet Rilke, from one of his Letters to Live Poets: “It’s often the name of the crime upon which a life shatters, rather than the nameless and personal act itself.”  The novel (something of a Gothic lesbian bodice-ripper) deals with whaling at the turn of the century, and the violent death of a child. For most, the history of whaling makes for harrowing reading, never mind for one who can hardly bring herself to spear a fish finger. Reading about the wholesale slaughter of whales, I’m in turn appalled, enraged, and moved to tears. And have to remind myself (repeatedly) that whaling wasn’t always an anathema. But a courageous, honourable, if somewhat dangerous and bloody occupation, considered vital to human progress and prosperity.

How things change. How quickly, in the human context, virtue can become a vice. And vice versa. Homosexuality, suicide, abortion, all once punishable crimes, now almost universally acknowledged as failures of human empathy and imagination. Almost universally.

Perhaps, with The Name of the Crime, I’ve thrown down a gauntlet to myself. Not to give
substance and meaning, as I tried to in Flock, to ephemera such as wallpaper, but to discover how far my imagination and compassion can actually stretch. Whether I can find it in myself, not just to forgive the near-unforgiveable, but to truly comprehend it. Or, then again, perhaps I’m merely stuck on the ‘W’s’.

And as for those quinces–reckon it’d be hard to go past a quince frangipane tart, with a goodly dollop of double cream.