Opening The Door

I’ve not made any secret of the fact that, after a particularly purple patch for writing between 1995–97, I didn’t write anything again until 2016. It just something I felt compelled to do, too occupied, I guess, with becoming a husband and father, and allowing work to get in the way.

And then, in 2016, I got an idea for a novel. I didn’t feel like I was in a position to write anything then but I made lots of notes. And then, in my head, the novel turned into a trilogy. And so, I made more notes.

I had to remind myself that I had been a writer before, and had achieved moderate success, though it felt like it was in a different lifetime. I began remembering how much I had enjoyed writing and made a declaration to the universe, or to those who read my Facebook timeline anyway, that I wanted to start writing again. Many of those people, who I know only through social media, knew nothing of the writing I had done twenty years before but, to be honest, the post wasn’t for anyone else but myself anyway.

Once I’d made the statement, made clear my intentions to write again, something magical happened: a door opened.

In her book Big Magic, Elizabeth Gilbert suggests that millions of ideas are constantly floating around waiting to latch onto the right person to take them up and carry them forward.

In the same way, once I had opened the door and welcomed the idea of writing in to my life once again, so stories came. Wiping their feet on the mat, sitting down with me for tea, they had found where they wanted to be and were well and truly making themselves comfortable.

It was an open house.

I never know when a new story will come along, or when a character, that I had previously only given a few seconds thought to, would enter my head and introduce themselves, tell me about themselves and begin to give me the information that I needed to write more of their story.

One of the first short stories that I came up with, at this time, became a short story I called Chasing Pavements. From the idea first coming to me to the day I finished the first draft, typed it up, edited it and edited it again, took around 18 months and by the end the two leading characters felt like mates. Typing that final full stop, was an emotional relief not only because I had completed my first fiction in twenty years or because it turned into a 12,000+ word epic, but because I had given my characters life and made them happy. My new mates were happy.

As other writers say all the time, ideas come not when you are sitting at a keyboard or trying to force the words to run through a pen into a notebook, they come when you least expect them, when your mind is clear. Most of the ideas I’ve had in the last couple of years have come to me when walking, or travelling on buses or trains; always when I’m alone, as if the characters don’t want to reveal themselves to anyone else when they visit me.

The novel, I’m currently editing, came to me as I relaxed on a sunbed on holiday three years ago. It hit me completely out of the blue and from nowhere, yet within half an hour, in my head, I had expanded it further. A couple of days later, the main male character visited me as I lay on the sun bed again, the female lead came forward the next day.

I wrote notes as soon as I could, not wanting to let these characters or the plot be forgotten. He came to see me again while I slept a few nights ago, revealing more about himself and giving me the opening few paragraphs of the story.

It was all very exciting.

The characters flew back to England with me and for several months I really got to know them. We went for daily walks together, down by the sea. Sometimes it would be just one of them talking to me, other times, they’d both come and jointly telling me their story.

It was such a thrill to get their story finished, to realise that, thanks to me, other people may one day be able to read about them. And even today, after months of editing and re-editing, they still sit with me, surprising me with new revelations, ideas for prequels and sequels.

Other times they let different people talk to me, tell me their stories and one day, I’ll write them down as well.

Hopefully that door will stay open for a long time to come because writing is definitely what makes me happiest.

(A variation of this post first appeared on my website at martinrowsell.com in 2018.)