THINKING IN COLOURS
I think in colours. When I start a scene in a book, it has a wash of colour: perhaps deep reds burnt orange with a splash of turquoise or greens with cobalt blue. Some scenes are grey and slashed with charcoal. Words fill in the space beneath the colours.
Trying to create pictures in strangers' heads is an odd practise and one in which failure is inevitable. For each imagination is different. Each reader brings their own experience to your story, filling in the spaces between your words and their world. Writing is done in isolation, and yet it is a tender, collaborative experience. Giving the reader too much can be overwhelming. Giving them too little can be frustrating, but by giving them a palette to paint with, so they can create and explore, maybe you can touch the sweet spot. You will never know. Sometimes readers will write to you, but mostly reading is private. Intimate. The story is the thing. The writer creates the vessel in which the reader travels. What the explorers see along the way depends on who they are and where they are in their life.
In my first book, Under the Camelthorn Tree, a memoir, I played with time and space –moving between countries back and forth across the years– but colours played their part. Something multicoloured had been dropped. I saw fragments of geometric shapes, with sharp edges, chips of colour, slices of ceramic. Some splinters were hiding in the shadows. Where there was darkness, and I had to let in light. When I finished the book and started my favourite part of the journey, the carving and reshaping, I colour-washed each chapter. Too much dark, and I dropped in a yellow chapter to ease the way. Too much light, and I put in shadows. When inky black was needed, and a hard punch winded the reader, I slipped in a green oxygenating chapter so they could catch their breath and feel the space between the words.
The novel The Maternal Element was different: time moved easily, the colours were mulberry, cranberry, burnt umber, blood orange and smoke…frayed threads enclosed, unravelling and outside the lines, crisp, clean white stretched towards infinity, marked by urine stains and tracks leading away, always away.
Space was my challenge: This time it was space the reader needed; they spent so much time inside. I had to take them out – on a walk or carriage ride – by a river – in a forest – or looking out from windows into the outside world. When small lives are lived in space so vast it has no edges all the colours are enclosed in white. All the constraints of human senses are elementality exposed.
Amid the colours and the smells, I fit the words that tell the story. Choosing them carefully. Sharp, clean words painting pictures in strangers' heads. Strangers who will fill in the gaps between words with their experience.
I always wonder what they see.