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Right now, I’m editing my new novel Shame, for the billionth time, and I notice – as I always do when I’m editing – that I’m cutting.

As a writer, you get seduced by words. You want to describe a thing, you want to make people feel it, see it, know it. So you pile on the words. Adjectives, similes, metaphors, adverbs, words upon words. You see what I mean?

And then you come back to read what you’ve written and it becomes obvious. There are too many words. Sure, an adjective, a simile, here and there is nice. What would Shakespeare be without decoration? “When I first saw my Juliet, I thought she was cute.”

It’s like when you get dressed up for a party, and you think (well, this is what I do, anyway), oh, this scarf will look nice, and I’ll just add a bracelet, and that sparkly necklace, or maybe a belt… And then you look in the mirror and you just know you’ve overdone it. They don’t call elegance simple for nothing.

Goodbye, beautiful words. I loved you once, then I killed you!

Spring comes ugly to the pinoaks in Canberra, Australia. Walking my sister’s little dog down the street – stopping every three houses so she can pee and scratch in the fallen leaves – I pass under their tattered canopy, rust-brown leaves dripping like beggar’s rags from their old man branches. It’s October – spring here, fall on the other side of the sphere. By November the first green shoots push through last year’s corpses; the elderly dog has a new prance in her step. And finally, in December, the trees burst into their brief heyday… it’s too hot to walk the dog.

And on to March, and autumn. Fall, as they call it up-top. Now, finally, the pinoaks have their late splendor, red-gold like kings at a coronation, now they burn and dazzle…and then they wither again, preparing for snows that never fall, and neither do they.

Perhaps I’m a pinoak. Blooming too late, a long fade into obscurity. Never learning what to let go, and when.

I’ve been wondering for a while if I should stop writing, being a writer. After all, there’s the garden to be tended, the children to be worried about – the books to be read! Other people’s books, so much finer than mine will ever be. Maybe like the pinoaks I had my summer, so fast I barely noticed it, and on to winter without a pause, browning off into old age. Writing – sometimes I feel I can’t do it, like someone who dreams of being an actress and ends up serving coffee in the studio cafeteria. What’s the use of writing, when you can’t write – and if I can’t write, what’s the use of me?

But then I finish the heavy thriller I’ve been working on – writing, not reading – and autumn in all its blazing enthusiasm rushes upon me. Ideas for novels hang fire on my limbs – daring, bold ideas that I must make real now or else I’ll be afraid of them. I’m in the mood to finish things I started years ago in my bleak spring and hazy summer, I’m in the mood for things that trip and bounce off my pen, I’m in the mood to be serious – what the heck don’t care if you like it or hate it serious – I’m in the mood to burn you right up!

But I must be quick. Winter is coming.

Barbara Kingsolver gets up at 4am to pen her bestsellers. J.K.Rowling wrote hers while juggling a takeaway coffee and an infant. Countless aspiring writers set themselves targets of 2000 – or 10000 – words a day, and join NaNoWriMo to prove it.

But insofar as I can call myself a Real Writer (and that’s a whole other discussion) I find that life beckons. Sometimes it does more than that – it screeches HAROLD!!! HAROLD!!!

I find myself thinking, is there any more intrinsic value in writing than in, say, lying in the sun listening to the birds? Is it really so important to get out of bed right now? Don’t my children need me more than my readers do? I happen to live on acreage, so there’s things to be sprayed, netted, fenced, chopped…. And of course, there’s Facebook (though that’ s not a huge temptation – does anyone else find FB…yawn…really boring?).

For me, it all hinges on whether I’ve got anything to say. To paraphrase what everyone’s mum told them, “When you haven’t got anything meaningful to say, shut the fuck up!’ And yet….and yet…

Research!

Some people revel in it. Good on them. Research makes me yawn, even when it’s something I’m really interested in – like Justinian’s Constantinople. I just don’t like details!

Just for the fun of it, I’m writing a novel set in the sixth century AD in the fabled provinces of the Eastern Roman Empire. You know, where they invented the word Byzantine? When I think Byzantine, I see people with big almond-shaped eyes and long noses. I see chariot races, and horridly complicated public punishments, and shifty looking people lurking in the dim corners of the palace plotting their next move in the Game of Empires…

It was an extraordinarily interesting period (yawn). For instance, Justinian’s uncle was a horny-handed peasant, and his wife used to be a prostitute. According to a contemporary chronicler, the royal couple used to scuttle about the palace at night transformed into giant rats….

Interesting factoid…some historians reckon Justinian created the first pandemic!

And then there’s the Ayia Sofia – Justinian’s greatest work (well, technically, other people built it, he just paid) – and the Code of Justinian – the foundation of the modern legal system. Hate lawyers? Blame Justinian. In those days Byzantines were obsessed with two things – horse racing and religion. Who now knows the difference between a Monophysite and an Arian, and cares whether Jesus’ foreskin was divine or, erm, human and therefore subject to decay? But back then, people came to blows over it….wonder if some future civilisation will be equally mystified by Republicans and Democrats?

Anyway that’s all fascinating (yawn) but what I’m concerned with is the adventurous career of Clodia, famed (retired) courtesan of Constantinople, as she traverses the provinces in search of her ex-lover’s annoying teenage bride. It sounds easy – lots of sex, swashbuckling and dead bodies – but there’s no getting away from the damn research! What did she travel in? (clue – not a chariot) What did she travel on? (a Roman road, yes, but which one?) What did she wear? (for preference, a gauzy tunica, but even courtesans have to make concessions to the weather sometimes). And so on and so forth…

Pity I can’t just go there!

Anyone have the same trouble?

As a writer I’m always tempted to try something new. The easiest thing for me is to sit down and write straight fantasy – something like Lady Charlotte’s Dilemma or even the Like Flies trilogy (although when I’m done I find myself spending the next three months trying to untie the plot knots I got myself into!). It’s fun.

But then I get restless. Which is why, one day, I decided to write a thriller. The idea was simple enough. Two sisters go to an idyllic coastal town to investigate a death. The coroner says it was an accident. The victim’s ex-husband says that her boyfriend did it. But as time goes on, the town seems less and less idyllic.

That was the idea. But once I started, the book began to write itself in an entirely different direction. The sisters began to take on a life of their own, with complex and dark back stories. The bad guy insisted he wasn’t so bad after all, and the good guy began to look distinctly evil. And finally, the book insisted it wasn’t about murder, but about something much less dramatic – shame. The kind of shame you feel when you do something awful and no-one knows (but you do). The shame you feel when you’ve successfully projected an image to the world, and now you’re about to be exposed as someone much less delightful. The shame you feel when someone’s treated you as if you’re worthless, and now you think you must be.

Anyway, Shame will be published in a few months. Meanwhile, here’s an excerpt.

Ps…I haven’t had the cover designed yet. But the beach photo is by Photoholgic on Unsplash.