Inside the Writing

Trying to be real

It was after one of our trips that I first got the idea of writing. Initially it was about foreigners travelling and having adventures in France but it didn’t feel immersive enough.

I didn’t want to write another ‘We moved to France’ book but I did want to record what I’d experienced, learned and loved about France and the French. 

Having been the Administrator for a complicated and long-tailed family estate, I became fascinated with the secrets and stories thrown up by the end of an era. I tied the two ideas together in a story about French people living and working in France after the death of someone who touched all their lives for better or worse. The voices began talking to me, telling me the story, a whisper, a hint, a suggestion of mystery, intrigue, secrets and deceptions.

Narrator

After writing snippets of conversations and confessions, one voice began to emerge over all the others, Jean-Pierre Couran. A narrator who was flawed, foolish, a spendthrift and emerging from a disastrous mid-life crisis. A man with a disrespect for a system in which he could have been an insider if he hadn’t thrown away his chances.

Distracted by a pretty face but laser focused on getting to the truth and finishing the job, he is gifted with the common touch, a keen sense of observation and huge moral courage. However, he resents instructions and has no idea of when to stop digging.

Process

I’ve started four books and finished two so far. I let the narrator flow freely for the first ten chapters or so with no plotting. Then I see what they are saying and start to pull it into an overall shape. My engineering training leads me to use spreadsheets for characters, locations and, most important, listing scenes. I swap scenes from start to middle and end to start and keep swapping until it reveals an outline plot. I might have an idea of where the eventual plot will land but the path of how to get there is up to the narrator and the other voices.