I have begun working on a new novel. Don’t tell anyone. Because they say that the moment you start talking about it you stop writing about it, and to some extent that’s true. When my students ask me how to get published, I say “finish writing something good,” and I am not being facetious. What I mean is that while most would-be JK Rowlings stand little chance of making a living as a novelist – they have no chance at all if they don’t finish writing something good. It’s sort of like my sister said to me when my marriage failed. “You might not ever fall in love and be happy in the future – but at least now you have a chance to fall in love and be happy in the future!” She was right. You have to be in it to win it. And the same with writing. But where does the inspiration come from? If Woolf and Mansfield used their diaries as “practice grounds” for their fiction, what do others use? For me, an image comes first – right now it is the image of the life guard shack at Long Beach New York, slamming into the boardwalk during hurricane Irene last summer. I had been to that beach the day before with my family, and was due to go to a wedding at a hotel on the boardwalk the night of the hurricane. The hotel flooded, the wedding was postponed and thereby seeds of a novel were sown. How they will grow, I have no idea, yet. Or I should say I have lots of ideas, still. And I should be writing them down now instead of telling them all to you. Maybe this blog is becoming my Woolfian ‘practice ground.’
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