Huh? Some mark the start of paths that never got followed: “Go see the bronze dragons in the Forbidden City take Schiller along.” Why? Others now seem like fingerposts pointing in the right direction: “Dreamtracks and trespass rites of way and rights of way.” “Each path to be told as a story, each story a path, leave cairns in the language as you go.” Some are barely recognisable (“Dew ponds, ash frails, thin trails”), and others plain weird (“sunset as spillage junk light of dusk”). Tracking back to the earliest entries for what became The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot, from 2006, I find hundreds of these “pebbles”. “All I know is that at the very early stage of a book’s development”, wrote Vladimir Nabokov, “I get this urge to gather bits of straw and fluff, and eat pebbles.” Like Nabokov, I’m a pebble-eater and a straw-gatherer: my books begin as gleaned images, fragment-phrases and half-thoughts, scribbled on to file-cards or jotted in journals. The author of The Old Ways discusses some of the problems for any walker-writer such as how to spring surprises along the way, and how not to give your reader blisters.įirst published in the Guardian Book Club, 1 August 2014
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |