When I start a new book I usually have a burst of energy for the first chapter then find the next several chapters, up until about the middle of the book, very hard going. It’s always the same. No matter how well I think I know my characters, it’s not until I’ve written them out for a while that their idiosyncracies, hopes, dreams of the heart, etc. are revealed to me. As their voice, to my readers, I find this intensely frustrating. Intensely.
Another thing I find frustrating in my day-to-day life is pouring tea from my teapot. I know this sounds like it has nothing to do with writing, but it occurred to me the other day that my writing is very much like pouring a cup of tea. There’s that initial spurt as it rushes out the spout, and I would really like it to keep pouring at that rate. After all, my goal is to be drinking that perfectly brewed blend of Earl Grey as soon as possible. For some people, first thing, it’s coffee–for me it’s tea. But if I keep the tea pouring fast, it starts to dribble around the lid of the pot and then onto my kitchen bench, always leaving me with a mess to clean up.
I actually thought it was a fault with the teapot. That maybe the beautiful white and blue and lavender Noritake teapot that was given to me by a friend 16 years ago was destined to become a plant holder or somesuch–after all, the spout has been chipped and reshaped a little over the years and the little filter thing inside is stained with tannin and is very resistant to being restored to it’s original pristine whiteness. But then I learned to back off–to tip the teapot back a bit, to allow the tea to flow in its own good time.
And that’s how it is with my work. If I try to rush it. To force the words to flow faster, as I did earlier this week, all it leaves me with is a mess on the paper–and worse, a hiccup in my flow of writing because I have to stop and ‘clean up the bench’ for want of a better phrase. I’d been pushing myself to write and ended up having to cut a good deal of words because they just weren’t right. Because they weren’t right, I couldn’t go any further.
So, interesting that it’s taken me 16 years to figure out the foibles of my teapot (and you’re probably all thinking I’m a crackpot right about now, and maybe you’d be right 
) but I’m glad I can settle into the writing, knowing that even when it’s slow at the beginning–it’s MY process. It’s how I work. And I will meet that 24 July 2009 deadline, even though I’m only just over a third of the way through the book.
