what she wants

Some days I find it hard to get inside my main character's head. Not because I don't know what she's thinking or what she's planning to do next, but because she doesn't know.

If you write about someone who's suffering an identity crisis, perhaps you begin to suffer it with them. But I set out to write a novel where the characters rather than the words themselves do the hard work for you - i.e., drawing the reader into their world - and this sense of dislocation may be an effect of that. In any novel, words are a struggle. Finding the right ones, I mean. Not just good words, acceptable words, but the most accurate, the most apposite. In an erotic novel though, words begin to strain against the fabric of language. They can no longer hold their integrity, they become over-used, debased, tired. So in an attempt to combat that sense of fatigue I wanted to write a book where the actual characterisation is doing the work of the language.

Putting it another way, though not necessarily meaning exactly the same thing, I wanted the work to be inherently erotic rather than have the erotica layered over it afterwards by the language, the choice of words - hot, wet, panting, thick, rigid, slippery, erect - like a sheen, a glossy patina, distracting the reader from what's going on underneath the text. So the erotic element needs to come from somewhere other than the language. Which only leaves characterisation and the tension between characters, those gaps in the text where a reader's imagination leaps across like electricity, making connections between people. Physical connections, in this case.

I'm well into the last third of the novel now; the end is in sight. I wrote three and half thousand words yesterday. Today, none. That's the way it's been with this novel, all the way through. Either a feast-day or a famine. My usual method is to decide on a daily word count - say, one thousand - and stick to it regardless. But this novel is stubborn, it's recalcitrant, it's not sure that it wants to be finished. My bank account is sure but the novel isn't. Like the main character, it's not really sure what it wants at all.