The Airing Cupboard Diaries: A Novel in Progress

Last month I presented my novel in an exhibition at Stephen Lawrence Gallery, entitled Fireside Tales and Poolside Memoirs. The exhibition explored the materiality of building narratives and included photographic work, film, performance writing and projections.

I created an installation which presented both the fictional narrative of the Airing Cupboard Diaries, and the narrative of writing the book so far. An incomplete bound copy of the novel was juxtaposed with earlier hand written drafts written in notebooks and journals. In addition, research material and methodologies were laid bare, the focus spanning personal, social, historical and political contexts.

The whole experience was exposing and it was tempting to withold some of the less than accomplished drafts from the installation, but I resisted. My installation asked viewers to spend a some time absorbing the range of materials presented and I was worried that people would not sit and read within in a gallery context. I am happy to say that a lot of them did - they seemed to understand that if they invested in the piece it would pay off and they would be able to link and unpack the different layers of the work.

Even though I have yet to write the final chapter of the book (I did plan to have a finished draft in time for the exhibition, but hey ho, I didn't meet the deadline), binding what I had written so far, as if it was the finished product, has been incredibly helpful to the writing process. Reading the text in a beautiful serif font printed on unblemished book paper created a signifincant distance between me and what I was writing. Now I want to rewrite the whole thing. Not drastically, not like a mad obssesive who will never finish (at least I hope not), but finessing the cadence of the speech sentence by sentence so it sounds more like Kaye and less like me putting on a voice. When I look at a page of text in the bound book, I can grasp what is wrong with it and what I can do to fix it. The process will involve rewriting large passages from the bound book back into a diary, the type of diary I imagine Kaye using and then adding these reswritten segments into the manuscript. This will no doubt feel time consuming and tedious, but what I am starting to discover is that much of the writing process involves sitting in a room on my own, spending hour upon hour sweating over a single paragraph, with only the ocassional breakthrough to make me feel like I am not completely wasting my time.