As a kind of postscript to my last entry, “Trust me” there were a couple of bits in a long profile of Diane Setterfield, who has become an unexpected bestselling author in the US, that caught my attention.
The first was this:
“But it took five years of rewrites and wrestling with the plot – complete with a genuinely hard to predict denouement – before it came together. ‘After about three years, I had index cards all over the living-room floor, and my husband used to come home and find me sobbing over the index cards,” Setterfield recalls. “But actually index cards aren’t the way forward. I did learn that. You have to relax, write what you write. It sounds easy but it’s really, really hard. One of the things it took me longest to learn was to trust the writing process.'”
The second this:
“The crowning twist in her plot dawned on her three years into the writing. ‘And yet when I came to look at everything I’d already written, I found everything that was needed for that [twist] was already in place’ – an instance, she says, of ‘the writing being more intelligent than the writer’. She pauses. ‘Although when I say that, I’m aware that people might think I’m a scribe, that all you’re doing is taking dictation. Which is to vastly underestimate just how damned hard it is.'”