The thought is as old as reasoned thought itself: the older one becomes, the more contemplative and deliberate one becomes. It’s both a truism (since there are those odd and sympathetic souls who somehow drift through their lives without learning a thing) and a truth. It has certainly been a truth for me in my writing pursuits.
I would classify my attitude to writing fiction even ten years ago as ‘impetuous’. Once I got an idea, it was rarely more than 24 hours before my fingers began striking the keys. Sometimes that was okay, but sometimes it meant a good story came out mangled beyond redemption – there is one in my TRUNK folder, ‘Recipe For Nostalgia’, that I just can’t make work no matter what I do. The protagonist’s motivations simply aren’t believable, and if it’s ever to see publication, I will probably have to rewrite it from scratch one day.
Had I taken the time to think more about ‘Recipe For Nostalgia’ beforehand, it might not have ended up stillborn. If the 37-year-old writer known as Kris Ashton is superior to the 27-year-old version in any way (and there are plenty of ways, but they’re irrelevant to this discussion), it is in patience.
Earlier this year, I stayed at the Fairmont Resort in the Blue Mountains with my wife and baby daughter. Our room overlooked an enormous pond, and my wife and I sipped champagne on the balcony while our daughter slept. As I gazed at the pond, a bow wave appeared in the middle of it. I wondered what the hell could be making such a disturbance – an eel perhaps? Then I noticed the unmistakable orange and white markings of a carp. But what if it hadn’t been a carp? What if it had been something else?
The incident left such an impression on me that I wanted to turn it into a story somehow. I rolled it around in my head for a few days and put it under a working title of ‘The Pond at Hampton Resort’. It was to be a sort of mild, atmospheric horror story. But no matter how I tried, I couldn’t get past the first sentence.
I tried it as a first-person confessional. Failure. I switched it around to third-person. Nothing doing. Discouraged, I left it alone for several weeks and put down some more words on a romance novel I had started. My mind, however, refused to let the idea alone. During a quiet period at work, I began to jot things down in a notebook, a process that sometimes helps me find a story’s true form. I came up with the possibility of a shifting perspective narrative, which had worked well for me in a horror piece called ‘The Devils of Cain Island’. But even that petered out after a promising start. I had a very clear theme in my head – so why wouldn’t the story get off the blocks?
Then finally it came to me: the story didn’t want to be horror. It wanted to be crime/mystery. My subconscious had been whispering this to me from the very beginning – in every scenario, my protagonist had been a private eye or a detective (or in the case of the first-person narrative, a man being interviewed by a detective). Once I saw the idea from that new angle, it relieved the narrative constipation and everything began to flow. So much so, that I suspect my short story could be a novella or even a novel. Which kind of sucks, because I still have that romance novel to finish and a concept for my first ever screenplay, and an idea for a series of book reviews, and not nearly enough hours in the day to devote to such major projects.
But at least I didn’t rush at it (like a bull at a gate, as my grandmother used to say), and try to mash a crime peg into a horror hole. ‘The Pond at Hampton Court’, if it ever gets written, will be what it wanted to be, not what my horror-happy brain thought it should be. Such fruits of patience are a not inconsiderable compensation for my mildly depressing descent towards middle age.