"Why I hate starting to write a book!"

Patricia Scanlan

Let me say straight away, that even after the twenty-three years that have passed since my first book, City Girl, was published, that I still love writing and am so happy to be working in a job I love. I have really enjoyed writing With All My Love, my seventeenth novel. However, I absolutely hate starting a book!
For me, starting a book is like being at a wedding I don’t want to be at. You know the feeling: your heart sinks when the invitation comes through the door….
‘Oh no! I don’t want to go. Do I have to?’
‘Yes you do.’
Now, you’re sitting at a table with all these other guests that you don’t know… feeling quite grumpy because you don’t want to know them. You’d far rather be lying on a lounger in the back garden if it’s a sunny day, or sprawled on the sofa in front of the fire, if it’s a horrible day, reading a book. You’re not in the mood to make polite conversation. Then gradually, you get talking, and you start to find out things about these strangers. Some you connect with more than others, while some are less talkative, more reticent, until you coax their story out of them. By the end of the night, you know these people very well; some of them even feel like family because you’re so comfortable with them.
And so it is with the characters in a new novel. These strangers, who you have to get to know and who are so different from the last wedding guests you engaged with, begin to muscle in and take over. Gradually, they make themselves indispensible to you. The more you get to know them, the more you want to be with them. Your new best friends are engaging all your energies, leaving room for no one else.
They are all very different. Some have hidden pasts that you ferret through, worming secrets out of them until you can say, ‘Aha, so that’s why they are the way they are!’ Some you can dance and have fun with. Some you’d like to take to bed (especially the lean, broad-shouldered, slim-hipped, handsome ones that have twinkly eyes). Others are guests you don’t particularly care for, but they too have their stories and it’s important to be polite and listen to them.
Sometimes they cause a scene and behave dreadfully. Uproar at the wedding. Wonderful when that happens…
Sometimes they get into a snit and ignore you. You sit twiddling your thumbs, wishing they would talk to you, while you comfort yourself with an extra slice of cake until they come back and all is forgiven.
Some make a brief but interesting appearance and then leave, but many stay until the end of the evening; when the wedding is over and they are gone from your life, they still linger in your mind for ages, and you miss them and wonder what’s happened to them…
And then another wedding invitation comes through the door and you don’t want to go because you think you’ll never find as interesting a group as you encountered at the last wedding. But you reluctantly put away the books you were enjoying, doll yourself up and set off again, a tad grumpy to be sure. And slowly, slowly, you get to know the guests you are seated with and they begin to engage you. And before you know it, it becomes the best wedding you were ever at.