I suppose everyone’s had periods when you seem to lose track of why life is worth living. You’ve still got faith (if you’re lucky) that a reason exists, but for the moment, it’s gone missing, and you’ve forgotten how to find it.
You’ve all probably got different solutions for getting out of this pickle.
Mine has always been writing.
A couple of years ago, when I realised I needed to seriously start looking for what had definitely disappeared, I hadn’t written anything in a committed way for ages. But I knew straight away what I wanted – what I needed – to write about.
My own amnesia, for one thing; my own careless forgetting of how life can be wonderful. But more: all the other people I’ve ever witnessed having to struggle with a similar kind of forgetting. Looking back, there seemed to be quite a lot of them. And quite a lot of them, as well, seemed to be very young.
Our society really isn’t kind to children. We’ve collectively allowed all kinds of pressures to descend on them: some of them well intentioned (however wrong-headed), some of them outright predatory. (The state education system and the cynical commoditisation of teenage girls by social media companies are two that spring to mind.) If you look, statistics on juvenile mental health are frightening. The trends, to our discredit, are uniformly down.
So when I recognised my subject – the subject for a novel, because I knew it was going to take something fairly long to do it justice – the name of a character came to me immediately.
Martha.
And I also knew that this character’s name was itself a pseudonym.
Martha Mud.
Because my protagonist was going to call herself something slightly goofy, and slightly self-deprecatory; but also, something that by the end of the book would turn out surprisingly meaningful.
I also knew straight away that Martha was going to begin her journey by choosing to end it. If I wanted to truly grapple with all her problems – and grapple with mine, too – then I had to go straight to the heart of the matter; because how can we talk meaningfully about living unless we talk about dying?
After that, the details of Martha’s particular difficulties came to me thick and fast; and also, ideas about what she might find when she jumped off Suicide Bridge. But by now, I’d started writing – I’d started actually filling blank pages with words – and in my own experience at least, once the process begins, it seems to be self-generating. In a very strange way, the story tells itself.
The one thing I wasn’t expecting was the appearance of Martha’s counsellor. Although I’d mentioned her in the very first paragraph, when she insisted on presenting herself in person a couple of chapters later, everything suddenly started making sense. Of course! She’s the one listening to Martha’s improbable story. She’s the reason Cloud Pictures has been written in the first place.
Novels and life are sublimely connected. Are we writing them, or are they being written for us?
In Martha’s own words:
“I only really started living after I’d died; and then, I found life was constantly surprising me.”