The place for writing

Anchoring the creative process

How much time does a writer spend writing? The answer is unquantifiable. I may spend nine hours a day at my desk and produce no more than 200 words of worthwhile text, or two hours and achieve the best part of a chapter with little need for re-writing. The physical act of tapping the keyboard or putting pen to paper is such a small part of writing as to be almost insignificant in terms of the creative process. I walk in the countryside for several hours a day and frequently sit staring into space for long periods of time: it’s then that the real work gets done.

I have too many ideas. That has always been a problem in terms of choice, focus and the committal of time to development. Fragments of thought, germs of argument, single details of observation – everything has to be incubated, often for months. I found with writing fiction that a minimum of two months would elapse between each stage of the story getting onto paper, and a year is about the length of percolation I seem to need before starting out on the project at all. The processing only works smoothly when I am free inside my head.

Everything that happens fits in somewhere. Every conversation, every book, every TV programme, every trip in the car or to the supermarket gives me something back for future reference. Information is stacked in my brain higher and wider than any retail warehouse, even if sometimes less reliably labelled. I am pulling out and picking from more than fifty years of memories all the time. When I look back on how and why landscape has become so significant in my life, instantly up pops a car journey with my brother when I was 8 or 9, something I haven’t consciously thought of before but is clearly a seminal moment for my current preoccupations.

It was his first car and he had no better option for company than his youngest sister, generally regarded as a thorough nuisance. But I was fascinated by the journey, the sense of freedom on the road away from those terrible constrictions of our family life, the changing world outside the window. The great revelation, however, came from David’s knowledge about what we seeing. He knew about the boats in the dock, patterns of road development, the history of a town. Used to my father being the fount of all such information, it was a shock to realise that it was there to be acquired by anyone, even a teenager like my usually taciturn brother. If I wanted to, I could find things out and hold that precious power of knowledge. And my chosen subject was set there from that day: history in the landscape.

It is a very long way in years and geography to my life now in Brittany and all the many books and articles I have written about the past of this glorious land, with its complex strands of legends, magical manipulations and courageous struggles. But in fact, little has changed in my outlook, rather I have worked to fulfil my development. As a very young child I wanted to be a writer. I still have the first ‘book’ I wrote about the Greek islands, around the same time as that unexpected car journey. It is on lined paper, held together with string through the two holes designed for a file. I remember getting books from the local library, making notes, re-telling the story in my own words, experimenting with vocabulary and organisation of material even then. It makes me very happy to see that line of continuation to the present, even if it broke in one or two places over the decades.

I need quiet and focused space to function as a writer and as a human being. Once life is crowded with people, punctuated by mechanical noise or over-filled with the demands of everyday living, I’m over-loaded and frazzled in a way that can quickly lead to depression if not managed. As a child I was firmly taught that being highly sensitive was a BAD thing and to be stamped out at all costs. It saddens me now to see how my poor parents failed to grasp the essential me. They had no time to read the little magazine I valiantly produced for a few issues until lack of outside interest sent me back to reading, endless reading instead. But I had sown seeds that would grow into marvellously resilient plants.

Brittany has given me the ideal conditions in which to flourish, even at this other end of my life. Finistère is a large, relatively sparsely populated and often very beautiful place. My village has 1500 people. Houses have large gardens. There is no light pollution. We can live very close to nature if we choose. I spend a great part of my time in silence, feeding off the peace and calm of a cool, quiet living space, surrounded by deep forest and the paradise of the rocky-crested moors a short distance away.

To discover what we need to thrive and then stick like leaches to those conditions is not possible for everyone, but all writers must give attention to whatever opens up their internal world to expression on the page. Walking, seeing and thinking has been my methodology for many of my books and poems, a close connection with the landscape shaping understanding of the world I share with others through word pictures and the sound of Brittany’s ancestral heritage. When things go wrong and life is overwhelming, there is always the lifeline of that long, long thread stretching back to my childhood, still anchoring me in place.