Why now? Why get serious about fiction writing at this stage in your life? Why not wait till your child is older and less demanding on your time? Believe me when I say I have asked myself this and yet I can’t shake the impetus within me to finally get ‘Of Social Standing’ down on paper.
Will there be a better time in my life to write this series? Possibly…. but is that reason enough to shirk the overwhelming sense of immediacy that has come upon me? You see it is just that… a sense of immediacy.
Truth be told, the bare bones of this book series began some years ago now…… over twenty in fact. It was around the time I started getting piano lessons and instead of diligently practicing the scales, my homework, I was whiling away the time listening to the classical excerpts on the electronic keyboard’s library. You know the ones…. Beethoven, Mozart, Bach, and a bit of Chopin if you had a fancy piece of equipment. I can actually say with certainty that from those little sound bites grew not only a love of classical music but the beginnings of the plot formation for ‘Of Social Standing: Lady Dixon’s Niece’, the first installment in the book series. Listening to the lively ‘allegretto’ tempo of Mozart’s Turkish March, I suddenly found myself imagining what it would have been like to attend balls and dances like those mentioned in Jane Austen’s classics. Surely it would be exciting? Surely it would be nerve-wracking if say the character actually didn’t belong in that world….say they were lower middle-class or even a peasant. How might they have come to be dancing with a duke? …. Several replays of the highly charged march and I had a plot.
The compulsion to write as I call it came upon me as a teenager. So compelled to write down what had now become more than just a few ball scenes, I took to typing it up on a word file on the family’s personal computer and carrying it around with me on a floppy disk, lest the Millennium Bug would steal it away from me.
That floppy disk came to university with me… yes, that’s how old I am… floppy’s were still a thing! The story sat on that dusty disk, and later on a USB, untouched for years. It didn’t mean the story left me. In fact I often found myself propelling the story forward in my head during a long bus ride. Strangely enough I didn’t have the passion for it when I was working in print journalism. I put it down to spending my long working days writing and staring at screens and obsessing over punctuation and speech marks and the like. There was also that small obstacle called progressing with life to blame for my lack of time and commitment to it; building a career, setting up home, getting married, re-training, furthering academia, having a child…. the list is endless.
Anyway …skip on a few years and suddenly I’m overwhelmed with that compulsion to write again. It grabbed me and wouldn’t let go. I knew I had to get that story out of my head and onto paper. I dug out that USB key and rolled my eyes at the terrible prose, dodgy sentence construction, and overused adjectives, and began an overhaul ….. scratch that… I started again!
What I found was absolute contentment. It has been therapeutic in a time when the world is in chaos. It has offered total escapism. It kept me sane during maternity leave and brings me hours of enjoyment. If nothing else comes out of this experience then I’ve already won!
I’ve read that there has been a huge increase in the number of people writing during the pandemic. It’s not surprising. Human’s suddenly have less distractions and find themselves reflecting much more too. So it seems that it’s not just the coronavirus spreading…. the ‘writing bug’ is also catching. I won’t go as far as saying I have hypergraphia, a behavioural condition characterized by the intense desire to write or draw, but I certainly have succumbed to the ‘writing bug’ and I don’t think it’s planning on going away any time soon.
Chele Crawley 