(not so) novel ideas

It was with a mixture of relief and regret that I realised I was writing the wrong book.

Reading back over my blog entries from earlier this year, that seems glaringly obvious; but I guess (almost) everything is obvious with hindsight.

The novel was set in London and had a strongly autobiographical theme all dressed up in a vaguely Gabriel Garcia Marquez worldscape. And it went nowhere. Until one day, I found myself walking the streets of Kruununhaka; streets that I must have walked down numerous times before but had obviously never really seen. My hometown was a surprise to me. I goggled like a tourist.

Push and pull. This isn’t a novel of arrival, it’s a novel of departure. I shouldn’t be examining London, it’s Helsinki that needs to go under the microscope – or the autopsy knife. Which yet remains to be seen.

And so here I am, starting (almost) from square one. A new outline is taking shape. As so many have done before.

‘There are no new ideas,’ said Audre Lorde. ‘Only new ways of making them felt.’

I seem to have been seeking that special something all my life. And now I fear the moment when my outline is complete. In fact, the moment when anything I produce is ‘done’. For it’s always the moment when I, once again, realise that that spark is missing.

And it will be back to (almost) square one. But I am tiring of a life that always requires the insertion of (almost).