Goat Notes

"For a word to be spoken," Ged answered slowly, "there must be silence. Before, and after."
- A Wizard of Earthsea, Ursula K Le Guin.

"Joy is in the ears that hear, not in the mouth that speaks."
- Saltheart Foamfollower in Lord Foul's Bane, Stephen R Donaldson.

I've written about the pervasive and paradoxical uses of silence in art before. Those who find Le Guin excessively mystical, will probably feel the same about that posting of mine. But today I want to explore one particular and fundamental silence, a silence that for me comes before any serious project of revision: the space of silent regard that a creator owes their own creation, when it has become a thing of its own at last.

When I started Three Katherines of Allingdale, I didn't mean to write anything like it - I didn't even mean for there to ever be any such story. It never came into existence until I'd embarked upon the second and, as it proved, by far the longer part of it: Killer-Kate and Luke Lackland, which I've just now finished. Killer-Kate, too, is a novel very different in every way from the novella I once thought I was beginning. The early chapters are not part of exactly the same story as the middle ones, nor they the same as the final.

Less obviously, what I meant in the final chapters doesn't have ultimate authority either. Now that I have written, and there is a rough unpolished story before me, it is no longer something that I am speaking. Just as the author is dead in some sense to a work that has been released upon the world, I feel I must bring myself alive to the tale that is standing here before me, and die in some sense to all the myriad things that it might have been, or ought to have been, or that I meant it to have been, but at the last word it was not.

And so the first part of my work is not to work on the tale at all, but only to fall silent before it, not even yet engaging with more of a re-read than absolutely necessary, and plainly wait to see: what will the tale say, now I have shut up for two minutes together? What does it really sound like?

To put this on the most mundane and explicit level possible: this is a response to one of my perennial writing issues, my repeated incapacity successfully to make large revisions upon previous works. Polishing has often worked, where nothing more was wanted: major change has not. And to me, looking at the way this has repeatedly fallen out, there's a pattern in this, which can be avoided. That pattern is a failure to respect the story which was actually told, and a disposition to try to overwrite it with the better story I ought to have written instead.

But one can't step into the same river twice. If I have written Snow White Mark I, and then deal with its problems by going back and writing Snow White Mark II, that is not only an exercise tedious and full of snares in itself, but it is also not in the least guaranteed to be the better story I ought to be writing now. That is far more likely to be something like Doc Nano, or Brow White and Blade Red, or Camilla Kinnison's Dance for all I know of it. My job is not that at all. My job is to raise up the first story - not as I might wish it, but as it is - until it is ready to go into the world for itself. And to do that, like a proud parent, what I first and last need to do is put my own ambitions aside for a moment, and get out of its face, and listen.  I can turn to Doc or Cleyse or Camilla or whoever, as and when I have time for them.

Father mine and mother, my name is Three Katherines of Allingdale: thou hast made me. Hear my song!

Little book, what are you?  Little book, what are you singing?  Sing, little book!

Joy is in the ears that hear.