Writing and thinking

 

I’m off, writing stuff longer than postcards for a while.

Toodle pip.

 

(BTW I just passed 600 blogposts. Phew.)

Writing: one-two-three

In conversation with my old English teacher from school, Gordon Braddy, we agreed that there are usually three distinct steps in the process of writing:

1.      Getting the idea.

2.      Doing a first draft.

3.      Polishing.

Of course, the first of these usually happens in an instant. For me it’s important to make a note of the idea at that time. Otherwise I sometimes have to wait weeks or even months for it to surface again.

The second is the hardest, the most daunting. Is the idea any good? What shape will it take?

The third is the one that occupies the most time. Endlessly improving communication and style. In fact, it can be a never-ending process, so at some stage it’s important to call a truce.

Robert Louis Stevenson and Count Nerli and Ernest Mehew

I had always thought of myself as a writer. But in truth all I had ever done in practice was to write some articles on marketing communications and innovation.

So, when we visited Samoa in pursuit of Robert Louis Stevenson in the mid-1990s, I was standing in the large main room of the house he built there, Vailima, when he appeared over my shoulder.

“This book you’ve been talking about,” he said, “how far have you got with it?”

“Well, to be honest,” I replied, “I haven’t started it”

“But you’ve been talking about it for a long time. Maybe you think it’s not worth doing?”

“No, I do think it’s worth doing.”

“Do you think someone else will write it?” he asked.

“No, if I don’t do it, I don’t think it will ever be done.”

“Well perhaps you’d better get started.”

At the height of his fame, author of Treasure Island, Kidnapped, Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and much else, Stevenson had died in that house in December 1894 aged just forty-four.

That evening, we retired to Aggie Grey’s Hotel in Apia. I got out a blank sheet of paper and started on the book which I’d been researching and thinking about over several years. It was published some eighteen months later as Robert Louis Stevenson and Count Nerli in Samoa: The Story of a Portrait.

I was cheeky enough to send an early draft to the leading Stevenson scholar in the world, Ernest Mehew. He thought it a worthwhile project and gave me several pages of handwritten notes containing suggestions of all kinds.

Dear Ernest died four weeks ago (on 24 October 2011) at the age of eighty-eight. RIP.

[Above, Portrait of Robert Louis Stevenson by GP Nerli, painted in Samoa in 1892, Scottish National Portrait Gallery, Edinburgh.]