Sending my novel out to agents feels a curious thing. I have finished at last. I breathe a sigh of relief. I am proud of what I have achieved. But I also find myself stepping back from it. It is its own thing, launched into the inboxes of strangers.
I can’t imagine how is perceived by others, and I think, ‘Did I really create that?’, ‘Where did it come from?’
It feels a bit like labour; the exhaustion and then the elation and it’s such hard work but then there is this thing that you have created. You get to meet your child for the first time and it is surprising. There is a new being, entirely apart from you.
When my first son was born, and as he grew, I naively thought we would be able to pin each part of him down; ‘You get that from your father, that from me,’ ‘We thought you’d be like this.’ But he was utterly different, utterly surprising. I guess that’s how I feel about the novel, it is a thing that I gave birth to, but it is a thing set apart from me.
On some of the agent’s submission pages, I had to explain why I wrote the novel, how it filled a gap in the market, and what I could compare it to, but I was a little stumped at these questions. I don’t write to fill a gap, or because I feel I am knowledgeable about a certain thing; I write because it comes up out of me. I didn’t set out to write about a particular topic, but my writing naturally circled around these areas and themes. This novel that I have produced is not part of me, like an arm or a leg, it is not an extension of my thoughts on life, though some of them sneak in there, but it is its own thing, its own world.
I suppose there is a mixture of things that go into the creation of a work. It is, in some way a culmination of interests, of curiosity from my childhood, strange tales from my father, an attempt to make sense of those things that don’t make sense, especially in the mind of a child. I remember a piece of writing that I was really pleased with at secondary school. It was a description of my Grandmother’s garden, the tumbledown sheds, the willow that you could hide yourself in and it stayed with me, the mystery of that place. It seemed like something I could write about. There are layers and layers of memories in that garden; tasting juicy apples straight from the tree, learning to roll the old rusty barrel under my feet, my uncle pulling an armchair out onto the lawn in the blazing sun. And these layers have settled down over time to create a rich source of material, of feeling and memory, of detail which comes back when I start to dig.
And there are other influences too; who I am now, and also the mystery of creativity, the life force of the work itself which tugs and pulls your story in ways that you were not expecting. And when this starts to happen, when my own writing surprises me, if feels as if I am finally getting somewhere.
This is an excerpt from Circles which you can get in my Etsy shop here.
elisabeth pike 