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Inspirations
TRACY CHEVALIER
FIRST DRAFT: Opening a novel
A published author compares a segment of her book in relation to an earlier draft, discussing how – and why – she made her editing choices.
DRAFT
The first time Jem and Maggie saw each other – across a garden at Hercules Buildings in Lambeth – they were each spying on someone else and, as with the best spying experiences, seeing something they weren’t meant to. That they found each other was a bonus neither appreciated until much later.
The back gardens of Hercules Buildings’ houses were narrow – only 18 feet across – but they made up for this deficiency in length. Miss Pelham’s garden at no.12 Hercules Buildings was 100 feet long. She made the most of this length by dividing it into three squares, with a central ornament gracing each: a white lilac in the square closest to the house, a stone birdbath in the central square, and a laburnum in the back square. Miniature hedges, gravelled paths and raised beds planted with roses created regular patterns that had nothing to do with nature but everything to do with order.
Though she never said so directly, Miss Pelham made it plain that she did not want Jem Kellaway hanging about in her garden. Whenever it wasn’t raining, she liked to take a teacup full of broth – its dull, meaty smell visiting the Kellaways upstairs every morning and evening like a persistent suitor – and sit with it on a stone bench that faced sideways halfway along the garden. She would remain there for a half an hour in the morning, and half an hour in the early evening until it got dark. Jem watched her sometimes from their windows upstairs, or round the side of the privy.
Miss Pelham rarely drank from the cup. When she got up to go inside again she would dump the remains over a grape vine growing up the wall next to the bench. She believed the broth would make the vine grow faster and more robust than that of her neighbour, Mr Blake. “He never prunes his vine, and that is a mistake, for all vines need a good pruning or the fruit will be small and sour,” Miss Pelham confided early on to Jem’s mother, before she discovered that Anne Kellaway was not one for confidences.
PUBLISHED VERSION
There was something humiliating about waiting in a cart on a busy London street with all of your possessions stacked around you, on show to the curious public. Jem Kellaway sat by a tower of Windsor chairs his father had made for the family years ago, and watched aghast as passersby openly inspected the cart’s contents. He was not used to seeing so many strangers at once – the appearance of one in their Dorsetshire village would be an event discussed for days after – and to being so exposed to their attention and scrutiny. He hunkered back among the family belongings, trying to make himself less conspicuous. A wiry boy with a narrow face, deep-set blue eyes and sandy fair hair that curled below his ears, Jem was not one to draw attention to himself, and people peered more often at his family’s belongings than at him. A couple even stopped and handled items as if they were at a barrow squeezing pears to see which was ripest – the woman fingering the hem of a night-dress that poked out of a split bag, the man picking up one of Thomas Kellaway’s saws and testing its teeth for sharpness. He took his time setting it down again when Jem shouted “Hey!”
Apart from the chairs, much of the cart was filled with the tools of Jem’s father’s trade: wooden hoops used to bend wood for the arms and backs of the Windsor chairs he specialised in, a dismantled lathe for turning chair legs, and a selection of saws, axes, chisels and augers. Indeed, Thomas Kellaway’s chair-making tools took up so much room that the Kellaways had had to take turns walking alongside the cart for the week it took to get from Piddletrenthide to London.
The cart they had travelled in, driven by Mr Smart, a local Piddle Valley man with an unexpected sense of adventure, was halted in front of Astley’s Amphitheatre. Thomas Kellaway had had only a vague notion of where to find Philip Astley, and no idea of how big London really was, thinking he could stand in the middle of it and see the circus, the way he might back in Dorchester. Luckily for them, Astley’s Circus was well known in London, and they were quickly directed to the large building at the end of Westminster Bridge, with its round, peaked wooden roof and front entrance adorned with four columns.
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New Writing
From Issue 33 ◊ Apr/May/Jun 2007
THE WORK
The novel is about William Blake, but because there are so many different facets of his personality and of his work, I decided to approach him from the point of view of his 12-year-old neighbours, Jem and Maggie, so I could ground him in a more personal reality. The kids’ coming of age, their move from innocence to experience, coincides with Blake writing Songs of Experience.
I knew I wanted to start with the neighbours, so I started – more or less at random – with a description of Jem’s landlady Miss Pelham. But when I read through the first draft – I usually write a novel straight through from beginning to end – the opening didn’t feel right. One of my editors pointed out that ‘Miss Pelham is not that crucial to the book and yet you start with her.’ I realised that I started with her household in order to get a handle on it for myself; that didn’t necessarily mean that that was where the story, the real story, began. I think it’s a very common mistake that writers make, starting a story in the wrong place. Often what happens is that you don’t always know the ins and outs of a story until you’ve written it. Once you’ve got the whole thing down you can look at it and say, ‘Actually, the dramatic arc begins here,’ two months earlier, or even five years later, and you realise you need to change the beginning.
I had this family, Jem’s family, who had just moved from the countryside to London. Why not start from their arrival instead of starting, as I had done, after they’ve already been in the city for a couple of weeks?
So that’s how I ended up changing to the final draft – with this cart piled high with the family’s possessions who have just made this week-long journey from Dorset to London. They’re sitting on the street, trying to find a place to stay: the father’s gone off to look for the one person he knows in London, and the rest of the family is waiting, with all these Londoners streaming around the cart, and they are horrified because they have no defences yet. They are country bumpkins with no way of coping with the onslaught that is 18th Century London. It’s a much better way of jumping in, and also it starts the book with Jem Kellaway who in many ways is the character the reader follows the most. I think the character who knows the least and ends up learning the most is the character we usually follow throughout, and I think it’s pretty important for a reader to have someone to shadow and run with. Jem is that person. So it made a lot more sense dramatically, and also for reader satisfaction.’
Photo © Sven Arnstein
