A Long Hibernation

2005 seems a long way away now. I’d seen Identity, a film starring John Cusack, a few years before and it had inspired me to write a novel about a character with a fragmented personality. I thought I’d have a crack at writing a story from a number of perspectives, that would only slowly reveal the truth: that the different characters were all aspects of the one mind.
That was the idea. That was 2005. It didn’t, however, work out that way. I got off to a good enough start with a novella-length story about a wild youth enthralled by knives and samurai swords and Bruce Lee films. It was a fantasy piece really and it would later form the basis of the first chapter of my novel, some fifteen years later. But I don’t want to get ahead of myself. So, there I was: with the first character under my belt and an idea for the 2nd chapter. I took a minor character from the first chapter (an old lady who lives in the same institution as the wild youth) and wrote her story. As a stand-alone story it was fine. The problem was it didn’t seem at all connected to the first story. And the style was so different that I couldn’t see how I could make a connection as the novel progressed. With the third story, about a security guard in a lab with preserved body parts in large jars filled with formalin, my grand enterprise ran aground and stuttered to a halt. I just abandoned the whole idea of the novel.
And that, I thought, would be that. O, I’d occasionally over the years look at that first story and still think I was on to something there. But from 2005 onwards I got heavily involved writing film scripts and making short films. In 2012, I wrote, produced, and directed a low budget feature with some independent capital and a bit of my own money. And I was also acting on TV and in a few low budget features. When the HBO series Game of Thrones hit Northern Ireland like a tornado, I got the part of Stiv in Series One, episode 6. Those were good times -another highlight around the same time as GOT was having a scene with Julie Walters and Gary Lewes in the biopic of Mo Mowlam (Mo).
Then along came COVID. The film work and the screenwriting just seemed to dry up almost overnight. To be honest, I’d been struggling for quite some time to get the backing for a WWII script and I was almost happy to down tools and take a rest. Too often looking for funding for films is like hitting your head against a concrete wall. You just have to stop for the sake of your health and sanity.
I stopped. But if you’re a writer, you’ll know that we seldom stop for long. Nature abhors a vacuum…so into the COVID-induced vacuum of my artistic life popped that long short story about the wild youth. I read it again and considered it one of the best things I’d ever written. Heck, I was going to go out on a limb and publish the thing myself in a local press. That’s exactly what I did and it made a handsome slim volume which I titled Noboguchi (after the spurious name of a Japanese sword maker I invented for the story).
I’ve still got the bulk of those slim booklets. But I did something for which I shall be ever thankful. I gave two very good friends a copy each of Noboguchi and hoped that they would like my writing. I was prepared for casual insults and put downs. But their responses were extremely favourable, with the result that I was encouraged to take the story of the corybantic youth further. And the weirdest thing to me -to me as a writer- was that I was able to pick the thread of the story up after a gap of fifteen years and find within the text a story that had always been there. But I wouldn’t have been able to write it in 2005. I know for certain that the years since 2005 have given me much to reflect upon in terms of life lessons and writing technique. I guess a long hibernation allows a story to unfold, to grow, and gain depth and resonance.

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