Assalamu alaikum everyone.
Fourteen months (or so) after I wrote the manuscript, the postie has delivered it back to me in book form!
- The book, in hand
I thought this might be an appropriate time to outline, in part, the story of the story, if you follow me.
I’d toyed with a few ideas for a manuscript for a while, and even begun writing a couple of things, only to abort the mission in both cases. The main reason for this was that my opportunities to write were more snatches of time than sustained periods of quiet contemplation about the storyline; what would be required to get from A to B; the nature of the characters, and so on.
When the chance to write is limited to half an hour here or an hour there, and especially if these windows of opportunity are opened sporadically and do not occur soon after one another, it becomes increasingly difficult to maintain any momentum or to feel like you really know your characters or your direction at all. I was constantly haunted by the inevitability of having left something glaringly incongruous somewhere in the script; quite apparent to every reader but invisible to the beleaguered writer.
So it was that, in the Easter (school) holiday last year, I went to sleep with an idea in my head and woke up in the morning still feeling good about it. I didn’t know where it would end up at that stage, and I won’t (in this post at least) go into the many influences from which the idea was conceived. In any event, I sat down at my computer and wrote the first chapter, much of which remains in its original form in the finished work (notwithstanding the invaluable contribution of a meticulous editor by the name of Yosef, who threw out a whole load of ‘t’s and found much better things to do with the ‘i’s than merely dotting them!)
Since my mother always taught me the importance of keeping the lady in your life happy, I showed the fruits of my labour to my wife, who was quite impressed. This was actually crucial in terms of what happened next, because she was just as keen for me to pursue the project as I was! Accordingly, she engineered a lot more time (than she’d probably hoped at the beginning of the holiday) for the children to be busy with things that didn’t involve their daddy, which meant that I often had two/three hour chunks of time in which to work away on the script. Add that to some sessions burning more than a little of the midnight oil, and by the end of the week we were looking at a completed manuscript…
(To be continued…)
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