Driving, my meditation

So driving is my 'go to' place. I love it. My car is my little home. My car is cosy. My car is where I think. It is where most of all my ideas come from and it was whilst in my car, whilst driving that I thought of The Highwaygirl.

My train of thought was....history.....highwaymen.....highwaygirls.....ding! A highwaygirl! I'll write a book about a highwaygirl. Why not? What if there was one? What would have made her become one?

It came out of the blue.

I had only ever written a script and children's books and tried to think my highwaygirl story into a script but it just different feel right. It felt like a book. It felt like a movie in my head. A book in my hands and a movie in my head.

So that was it. 'I'll write a book,' I thought. A simple plan, right? Well yes. I had never imagined myself actually ever writing a book. Scripts, yes. Books, no. I had always left it to the academics, to the university goers, to the well connected, to the career elevated types. Not to a just a new Mum-make-it-up-as-I-go-along type. But hell, I felt excited about the story and the next day after having dropped my gorgeous little girl at play school I started writing. Well actually I started vomiting. Not literally of course but the story. I literally projectile vomited the story out of me, (apologies for the ugly imagery). I literally couldn't write fast enough. I felt like a mad woman.

Hardly stopping to drink or eat as I didn't want the ideas to stop flowing and/or to forget them. The only thing that did stop me was having to go pick up my littl'un.

The story unfolded before me. Plot, line and sinker. Hook, line and sinker I was caught up in the glorious world of make-believe, of writing and making up a story. No rules. I can make up this story. What freedom! Nobody could say to me “oh know you can't do this, you can't do that..... “ I was in charge of my story. And I never forgot the fact that it is a story! It is make-believe! People could not buy the book, people could not like the book but nobody could tell me how to write an invented story. It felt like rock and roll and I loved every second of it, I loved every second of writing it. It was fun and fast and driven. The liberating feeling of thinking Í can make up this story. I woke at 5am writing and went to bed at midnight writing. I felt like I was on a marathon, trying to keep up with myself.

And so two years later after having rewritten the book entirely from scratch for the second draft, and ten or twelve edited drafts later The Highwaygirl was finished. I was exhausted. But the exhilarated exhaustion of literally having run the marathon, of having done something you literally thought you couldn't do but actually did do. Yay!

As a little add on. My Dad was not a man of many words. A few thrown here and there. But what he always did say to me on such a regular basis over so many, many, years, was (which back then I used to think was strange.) “Write.” That was it. That's what he used to repeat, repeatedly.

“Write.” I used to think it a bit strange as if he knew something that I didn't. I was so busy being a ballerina and then a punk/rock bass player/singer, it felt too incongruous or too knowing to be real. But he was so steadfast in his singular choice of wording and so adamant in its singularity that I couldn't help but take notice of that one important word.

So whilst writing The Highwaygirl I thought of my Dad constantly. I could hear his low, gruff voice saying “write” as I was doing just that, only twenty five years later and after he had long passed away. I think he would have liked the story. I think he would have been proud of me. I think he is proud of me, wherever he floats around. I also thank him for having constantly said the word “write,” even if at the time I was hoping for a little bit more depth in our conversations. It was probably the best and most prophetic word he had ever said to me. Maybe it was the gypsy in him. I love you Dad, you mono syllable intuitive brute of a refined genius. I wrote this book not only for the love of writing, I wrote it for you.