I saw this sign in 2013 while walking the Chemin de Saint Jacques and I sat on the grass and absorbed its simplicity and strength and the power of the image. It was a small moment which has stayed with me and which meant more than many a grander monument. In a small way it captured the essence of the pilgrimage.
As a virgin blogger and a virgin reader of blogs, I have been struck by the number of bloggers who state explicitly that blogging/writing/sharing has been a way of helping them get through difficult phases of their life and/or working through difficult personal issues; often these difficulties and issues are ongoing. There is a long history of writing as catharsis and my comment is pure cliché territory [nothing to see here, move along please]. Who doesn’t have an unpublished autobiographical novel lying in a drawer [or in drop box these days], some of us even have a pile of short stories of similar ilk. What has inspired me to comment today is how others’ experience of blogging may be linked to a comment made by an assessor on my novel-in-progress, referring to my main female character. I had written her as a strong, independent and badly damaged person seeking redemption; the assessor saw her as a manipulative, self-centred, needy and generally unlikeable person. Not at all what I intended! Close re-reading confirms that the assessor is correct. So, what is happening here? How do our characters ‘take over’ during the writing process? What is happening consciously and unconsciously? What cathartic processes were taking place without my knowing?
Of course all this may be the product of my poor writing, though the assessment of the manuscript overall was very positive.
On Sunday I did my first ‘long’ walk after my foot operation last October, some 32 km, and spent the time wrestling with the plot structure of my novel-in progress set on the Camino. After two weeks of scene shuffling, including deleting scenes which I liked but which I had to concede added nothing to the novel [‘kill your darlings’ as they term it] and adding a few new scenes, maybe, just maybe I have settled on a structure which works. Now back to another day of drafting and re-drafting in which, one hopes, the exhilaration of writing eventually outweighs the agony.
jottings and journeys 