Our first guest blog post comes from Linda Gillard, one of my favourite new discoveries last year. Star Gazing is her third book, and earlier this year it was short-listed for the Romantic Novel of the Year award.
Readers at author events tend to ask the same two questions: How long does it take you to write a book? and Where do you get your ideas from?
The answer to the first is, it varies enormously. If I had to, I could write a book in less than a year, but I’d prefer to take two. The answer to the second question is more interesting. Ideas can come from anywhere and quite odd things can set off a train of thought that will lead to the conception of a novel. Usually it’s a combination of ideas, ingredients that will make a good complex mix, which is what you need for a novel.
STAR GAZING, my third novel owes its existence in part to my son’s facetious comments about my writing, which he refers to as “playing with my imaginary friends”. This is a running joke in my family and fair comment, since at times my characters seem more real to me than friends and family. I don’t plan my novels very much and when someone asks me how a book is going to end, I say, “I don’t know. They haven’t told me yet.”
My son got me thinking about imaginary friends, then imaginary heroes. I wondered, would it be possible to have an imaginary hero? Or a hero who might be imaginary? Could you write a book where the reader wasn’t actually sure if the hero existed?…
Ord
While I was mulling this over, I was also thinking about writing a book set on the Isle of Skye, where I lived. Living somewhere as beautiful as Skye and trying to write about it is daunting. What can you say that hasn’t already been said? How can you translate the grandeur of a mountain range into words? How do you avoid descending into travelogue cliché?
But I wanted to try. I’d enjoyed writing about the remote Hebridean island of North Uist in my first novel, EMOTIONAL GEOLOGY and readers had written to say they’d enjoyed the evocation of the bleak landscape, so I decided I would tackle the challenge of writing about Skye.
Then both my ideas came together and the seed of STAR GAZING was sown. It occurred to me that if you’re blind, the existence of other people is confirmed by voice, touch and the corroboration of others. But you only touch people you know well… And a voice could be something you’d imagined… And if no one else sees the man you can hear… Well, you might have an imaginary hero.
Then it occurred to me, I could duck the whole issue of writing about the visual splendour of landscape. I could write about my island, but from a very unusual point of view, or rather no point of view. I could make my heroine blind – and not just blind, but congenitally blind. She would therefore have no visual frame of reference at all. Never one to do things by halves, I thought I might as well write in the first person, from my blind heroine’s “point of view”.
Could it be done? I’d no idea. I wasn’t blind or visually impaired. I didn’t even know anyone who was, but I thought it might be fascinating to write about landscape from a non-visual angle. Even if I failed, it would surely enrich and develop my writing in a new direction. (Western culture is so visually fixated. We aren’t so aware of our other senses and writers don’t employ them nearly as often in their work.) So I embarked on STAR GAZING in the spirit of an experiment.
It was certainly tricky to begin with. I kept dropping into “sighted-speak”. I had no idea how much our language favours the sighted: I see what you mean… Now look, here… The way I see it… Reading between the lines… I didn’t see that coming!… It depends on your point of view… You get the picture?
Once I got into the swing of it though, I actually found it quite easy (and so much more interesting) to write from a blind “point of view”. I did research of course, but mostly I relied on my imagination, shutting my eyes a lot and noticing how, when I did so, all my other senses immediately came into play. There were some positive writing advantages. It was a sensuous experience having to create a hero by describing how he sounded, felt and smelt! Ordinary situations became much more interesting and of course challenging when described from a blind “point of view”. Getting lost in the snow, alone and many miles from help, would be alarming for anyone. When it happens to Marianne, my blind heroine, it’s a life-or-death situation.
Portree Bay
In STAR GAZING the hero, Keir, takes blind Marianne to Skye to “show” her the island, in particular the stars in the winter night sky. He finds ways to do this and Marianne is able to experience the beauty of the island. It seems readers too have felt they’ve “experienced” Skye, and in an intense way.
I’ve discovered that my experiment has actually changed the way I write. I don’t focus so much on visuals now and I feel my writing has been enriched by the restrictions of such an unusual angle. Having inhabited – in my imagination – the world of the blind, I suspect shall never look at things in quite the same way again.
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Linda lived on the Isle of Skye for six years in a house overlooking the Cuillin mountain range, featured in her first novel, EMOTIONAL GEOLOGY (short-listed for the 2006 Waverton Good Read Award.) Linda now lives near Glasgow.
Her second novel, A LIFETIME BURNING was published by Transita in 2006 and STAR GAZING, set partly on Skye, was published by Piatkus in 2008.
