I am going slightly backwards to the very start of the writing process, when in the last blog post I had progressed to characterisation. That’s because over Christmas I fell upon a more solid idea for my next book, which came to me in the form of an image. Just as novelists sometimes find the start of a new project through a title or an opening line, I dreamed up a memory, and saw it clearly in my mind, and that memory seemed to encapsulate everything I had been attempting and failing to pull together over the past months; it concretised an idea that had been fragmentary and diffuse, but paradoxically, it also pushed the bounds of what had felt quite literal up until then, and expanded it into metaphor.

This image became the inciting incident I’d been waiting for, that which Dante explores in his Canto, ‘Midway upon the journey of our life/I found myself within a forest dark/For the straightforward pathway had been lost.’ The incident was grounded in reality and yet it held the significance of so much more, the alchemical process of the mundane transformed to the sublime.  The me who existed within the moment of the memory, married still, some ten years ago, and on holiday with my family, witnessed something that was to symbolise this transformation, and that threw me into the ether of my longing. It was a moment when my unconscious made clear to me that change was coming, only I did not yet know which paths would open up to me and which one I would take.

And so I reflect now on the importance of images in good writing, and that this is something I come up against a lot in my teaching memoir, when writers believe it is enough to write a monologue on how they are feeling, neglecting the external, the action of that feeling. How that feeling articulates itself. We often think in images, and as readers it is often text that is rich in symbol and metaphor that imprints itself on our minds. Symbol then acts as a language to express the ineffable.

This is perhaps what differentiates memoir from self-expression; something literary, or publishable from writing for one’s own wellbeing. Virginia Woolf wrote about how after a depressive episode her returning health would be shown in her ‘power to make images; the suggestive power of every sight and word is enormously increased.’ Having the power to create images comes from a certain distance, and a peace of mind. In my case, I am not sure I would have had this revelation had I been busy working, or stressed, or flapping from place to place, as I so often am. Instead, it came from a place of repose. It was the morning after I had attended a Christmas classical music concert, in a grand vaulted church, where I had sat on a back row in the shadows, warm in my scarf and coat, my arms wrapped safely around my chest, able to meditate solemnly, responding only to what I heard. Those ideas untethered had drifted through my mind, resisting my attempts to pull them straight – I had let them dance and breathe. It was the next morning, when sleeping in, that the memory popped into my mind, all the disparate associations threading together in an aesthetically coherent weave.

So first we find words for experience, then an image, but it is the quality of that image that matters, and its ability to hold meaning. Not simply experience into language, but experience transmuted into art. The artfulness comes with the symbolism and meaning, and the authors awareness of that.

What do I learn from this? That we must create that safe space for ourselves, clear our lives of unnecessary clutter. Give ourselves the privilege of alone time, moving forwards through this demanding world.