The “Right” Time to Write

I picked up a pen one night with the intention of jotting down some work-related notes and ended up writing a novel. Thankfully, it never saw the light of day and those pages, all 300, are packed away in a black plastic bag somewhere in my past. But that first novel, to give it some credit, was a learning curve that taught me many things, including the value of a disciplined writing regime.  

(How Birding Can Train a Writer's Attention.)

I rise early and write until four in the afternoon with a lunch and coffee break in between. After four, it’s time to catch up on emails, go for a walk, drop into my favorite café before preparing an evening meal. This routine doesn’t always go according to plan, of course, but in general, it does, and when it came to writing my latest novel, The Secret He Keeps, I’d no reason to believe that fate was planning to throw a spanner into my well-organized work ethic.

I’d spent a week on the beautiful sweep of the Dingle peninsula, walking quiet beaches and country lanes alive with hedgerows of fuchsia and the orange blaze of montbretia. My mind was swirling with ideas for my next book, which I intended to begin as soon as this annual family holiday ended.

In a crowded pub on the last night, everything changed. Music was playing. Someone was singing. I think it was Green Grow the Rashes O, that lovely Robbie Burns melody, but my memory is fragmented. My only clear recollection is the fear in my beloved husband’s voice when he said, "Something is happening to me. I’ve no feeling in my legs."

Thirty minutes later, we were being driven through the night in an ambulance to the nearest hospital. This was the beginning of a long-drawn out medical process that would eventually, when we were home again, diagnose his condition as a spinal cord stroke. To use the correct medical term, this was a "spinal cord infarction," which can result in permanent paralysis from the waist down. As less than one percent of stroke victims suffer this type  of attack, we’d nothing to guide us into the new world that had opened before us.

Our family gathered to discuss visiting rotas and possible modifications to our house that might be needed. As we adjusted to this changed reality, I knew that I, as well as my husband, needed some form of therapy to keep me stable.

Writing can be a powerful and valuable form of release: cathartic, liberating, redemptive, energizing, entertaining, and joyful. It has always been my passion but the joy I usually experienced when I opened my laptop had become a slimmed down companion. 

Hospital visits were regulated to certain hours, and I wrote compulsively until then. Some mornings I could barely look at what I’d produced the previous day yet, once I started writing, I experienced a feeling of calmness that I was able to bring to my husband’s bedside during the visiting period.

Those quiet hours at my laptop, and the bustle of the hospital became the backdrop to our lives; wheelchair walks through the grounds and coffee breaks in the café where he asked for the latest update on my novel and we discussed his ongoing progress in the hospital gym. Almost effortlessly, or so it seemed, our normality had assumed a different shape. We were cocooned within it, our worlds reduced to a writing space and a medical ward.

Weeks passed. I was used to working in an empty room but not an empty house. How often had I longed for silence when the daily hubbub of living disturbed my concentration? How often had I resented phone calls and unexpected interruptions when I was rushing a book towards its deadline? How often had I controlled a sigh of annoyance when my husband came into my room to discuss something and distracted me from my fictional world and its cast of characters, some of them so real to me that they even featured in my dreams? Selfishness and creativity, I often think, are inextricably linked.

I had that silence now. It was a heavy, waiting quietness that could be broken at any moment by a phone call with bad news. Writing into it demanded all my will power, yet once I settled into a rhythm, my thoughts calmed and it was possible to lose myself for a brief period in my evolving story.   

My books focus on the suspenseful and psychological stresses in family relationships. Affairs of the heart are usually an adjunct to the main narrative. On this occasion, however, love was pushing its way to the fore and fate, as whimsical as ever, was playing havoc with the hearts of my two protagonists.

Fate seemed equally determined to throw further spanners into my path. One evening, as I was driving along a main road, a driver emerged from a side turning and slammed into the side of my car. The force of the collision pinned me into the driver seat. I had to wait for what seemed like an eternity before I was freed. Thankfully, no one was seriously injured, and the driver took full responsibility. My car was a write-off—unlike me, who continued to write on…

I now had a knee injury that needed surgery but would be postponed until a later date. My husband was transferred to a rehabilitation center that specialized in spinal cord injuries. The center was an hour’s journey away and visiting coincided with peak evening traffic. On the drive to see him, I’d glance up at the overhead motorway gantries where warnings of congestion repeatedly slowed my new car to a walking pace. My mind was equally congested, yet my worries seemed insignificant once I set foot into the rehab hospital and witnessed the amazing resilience displayed by patients coping with life-changing injuries.

My husband was discharged by Christmas and walking again. I’d also finished my draft. The operation on my knee followed in January. Recovery took over two months. It was an enormous effort to even switch on my laptop, yet I knew there was a first draft demanding my attention.

I read it with a cold, clear-eyed gaze. I could have been reading words written by a stranger. Those summer walks when my mind was on fire and my ideas danced like mayflies on the wing seemed to belong to another work of fiction, yet I’d captured the essence of those fleeting thoughts and pinned them down.

My writing was raw, the characters half-formed, and the structure needed strengthening. I wasn’t worried. Experience and patience would bring order to this draft and the ones to follow. Love in all its complexities, struggles, and uncertainties had become the central theme—or, perhaps, I could call it the spinal cord—of my novel.

A case of art imitating life, perhaps, or was art reflecting those tumultuous months back at me? I was unable to tell. The only certainty I have about the writing of The Secret He Keeps is that inspirational ideas are ephemeral. They pass through us when we’re open to receiving them but never linger. I believe that that wonderful stream of consciousness I experienced as I walked my way into a new book would have been lost forever if I’d waited for the "right" time to begin writing my story.

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