Home
Photo credit: hugovk
As I close in on wrapping up draft number one, I’ve been looking back at the journey that brought me here over the past year.
Where did it all begin? The answer: with a song.
In this live recording, lead singer Margo Timmons introduced one song with an anecdote about how she had received a letter from a woman who wrote to say that To Love is to Bury was her wedding song. If you think the song is about living with your soul mate into old age it would be really lovely and romantic but, as it turns out, the song is about a murder-suicide. If you check out the lyrics it is, indeed, a pretty dark song.
But dark is good. So I wrote a scene that would eventually appear (in a very different incarnation) at the end of draft one. I’m sharing this really rough piece merely as an example of the writing process:
“It should never have ended this way. She sits between the rocky crag and the base of the tree, thinking of all the things that led to this point—all the things that went wrong over the course of the day. The idea that it could all add up to something so terrible, after a lifetime and yet just a few short years, is unendurable. In every way it’s everything she didn’t want to happen. If one of them was going to die before the other, she had always secretly hoped it would be her.
The full moon hangs in the air, shrouded by clouds. As a shiver of wind blows through the boughs of the chestnut tree, her silky black hair billows in the breeze like a flag of mourning. Now she stares at the mound of freshly dug up earth and the reality of the day’s events becomes too real. She’ll never feel his warm breath against her skin again, hear his coarse voice whisper her name again, smell the distinct perfume of his skin again.
With another shiver of a winter breeze, clouds pass in the sky to reveal a pallid moon. Then, the whole of the Loire Valley spreads out beneath her, the way their lives should have been: limitless. The thought of that—of losing something so enduring and yet ultimately so fragile—is too much. There’s a flash of silver from the ring that hangs on the chain around neck as she raises her pale face to look into the night sky. Her mouth twitches, fighting against the weakness of emotion. But her sad eyes, the colour of the midnight sky, are free of tears that can’t be shed.
Finally, she lets out a long and lonely howl of anguish that carries across the night.
And the she-wolf paces away from the unmarked grave on her long journey to track his killers down.”
At the time, I had no idea who was in the grave, but I knew I had a story to write that would take me from a then unknown starting point to that scene in the book. And that is how this whole thing started.
Since then much has changed including voice and point of view. Reading the original piece now I feel like it’s a little (or maybe way too) overwritten but the spark of an idea is wrapped up in there.
The lesson? Expose yourself to new things and sometimes you’ll find inspiration in the unlikeliest of places. Happy writing! In the meantime, here’s Trinity Revisited for your listening pleasure:
