Process (vol 17, ch 3)
Feb. 7th, 2011 11:57 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
desperanceOy. Spent an hour and a half this morning being photographed, and we know how much I love that not; but we did it right here in the Silence Room, and we finished an hour ago, and, y'know. I'm still footling. When I should be striving madly to catch up. Bleah. *is all disrupted*
But someone was saying over the weekend how they completely didn't understand how I can write a book the way I do, all unprepared. Which is okay, I don't understand it either; but it strikes me, where I am right now, it's a perfect snapshot of how the process works.
These two people have just had an overnight adventure, and they're slipping back to where they ought to be; and I thought probably something should happen en route, or the journey is not justified, it doesn't earn its pages. It's v early, so obviously they should meet someone as unexpected as they are themselves. At this stage in the book, I don't want to be introducing someone new: so who've we met before? Aha! Herr Braun, the German Jewish refugee! He's charmingly ambiguous already, so here's another opportunity for an ambivalent encounter. He's a tailor, he'll have a kettle handy for steaming cloth; he can offer them a cup of tea. He can have a nice teapot, something that he's brought from home. She's a young war widow; maybe she knows a little about porcelain, maybe she was learning from her mother-in-law before war and death interrupted them. She recognises that the pot is, what, Meissen: something good that came from Germany. She's not sure about Herr Braun, whether he's good or not. What's the Meissen mark? Crossed swords...
And suddenly we're off on a riff about crossing swords with this man, because the image opens up the possibility; and that's how it works. Nothing is pricked out in advance, but one thing leads to another and everything's connected. Every happy happenstance - crossed swords! which is, as it happens, the only German pottery mark I know - gets sewn in as though it were deliberate, so that you might think the point of the journey was to bring us to the tailor and his teapot and this image, where in fact he just happened to step out of his door as we were passing, because somebody needed to and he's the one I thought of.
And now he's shown up twice, and the third time pays for all. But that's to come.
But someone was saying over the weekend how they completely didn't understand how I can write a book the way I do, all unprepared. Which is okay, I don't understand it either; but it strikes me, where I am right now, it's a perfect snapshot of how the process works.
These two people have just had an overnight adventure, and they're slipping back to where they ought to be; and I thought probably something should happen en route, or the journey is not justified, it doesn't earn its pages. It's v early, so obviously they should meet someone as unexpected as they are themselves. At this stage in the book, I don't want to be introducing someone new: so who've we met before? Aha! Herr Braun, the German Jewish refugee! He's charmingly ambiguous already, so here's another opportunity for an ambivalent encounter. He's a tailor, he'll have a kettle handy for steaming cloth; he can offer them a cup of tea. He can have a nice teapot, something that he's brought from home. She's a young war widow; maybe she knows a little about porcelain, maybe she was learning from her mother-in-law before war and death interrupted them. She recognises that the pot is, what, Meissen: something good that came from Germany. She's not sure about Herr Braun, whether he's good or not. What's the Meissen mark? Crossed swords...
And suddenly we're off on a riff about crossing swords with this man, because the image opens up the possibility; and that's how it works. Nothing is pricked out in advance, but one thing leads to another and everything's connected. Every happy happenstance - crossed swords! which is, as it happens, the only German pottery mark I know - gets sewn in as though it were deliberate, so that you might think the point of the journey was to bring us to the tailor and his teapot and this image, where in fact he just happened to step out of his door as we were passing, because somebody needed to and he's the one I thought of.
And now he's shown up twice, and the third time pays for all. But that's to come.