Our first Spring in a new house

...and it occurs to me just how much that experience is like writing.

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We moved into our new home last August. Now, some seven months on, we have begun to learn how it behaves through Autumn and Winter - and are just about to find out how it responds to Spring. This is not solely about the bricks-and-mortar of the building itself given there is significant interest outside too: where, when and how the flowers bloom and look; how the large hedges grow; what state the lawn is in…though to be honest, it’s really poor!

And I am struck by how starting a writing project is just like living in a new house.

When I begin a new piece of writing, a fair proportion of the time I’ll know what I have in mind; but then sometimes I’ll be ‘going to with flow’ to see where it leads me. Interestingly - and perhaps counter-intuitively - I am usually more certain about the aim and destination of a poem than a piece of prose. Initially, anyway.

With longer-form fiction, I think that sometimes you need to ‘inhabit’ the piece just a little in order to understand it, to relate to the characters, become aware of its strengths and weaknesses, pick apart the nuances. Once you have some of that (in my case, usually around 5-10k words in) then you can plan it out a little more - make it ‘concrete’, if you like.

In that sense, it’s like moving into a new house. And, as with a house, when you find things that aren’t quite working or aren’t quite right, you try and fix them.

DIY = editing!

I have always found building a house a really good metaphor for writing something. Although what we really want to see is the finished product, we have to go through many stages to get there: foundation laying, building the external walls, putting the roof on, then the internal walls, the first fix of electrics and plumbing, the plastering, the second fix, the decoration. [And for thoughts on the critical nature of foundation-laying, see my articles on There’s no ‘right’ way to write.]

All too often writers want to jump to the end product without putting in the hard graft between foundations and second fix; unwittingly they can start ‘decorating’ without realising that what they have created will not stand up to any kind of scrutiny. A house made of straw, perhaps.

Which makes me wonder whether - to slip into the world of Fairy Tale - we shouldn’t assume the role of the wolf when examining the ‘house’ that we have built.

We should take our writing and ‘huff and puff’ to see if we can blow it down.

Perhaps a knock-on effect of our increasingly soundbite-driven culture, of the desire for instant gratification, the curse of social media, but these days there is, I fear, too much of a tendency to embrace the facade and forget the construction - perhaps eschewing editing more than anything else. And I’m entitled to make such an observation because on occasion I’m probably as guilty of rushing to the veneer as anyone else…

So, writing something may be a little like moving into - or building - a new home. Make it right and it will reward you for years and years.

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