Bleaker House
Page 20
I open a new notebook on the first page and gaze at it. It looks like all the other blank pages I’ve confronted in my life and eventually filled. On this one I write, “Things I Learned on Bleaker Island.”
· You have to try really hard;
· But sometimes trying really hard is the least effective thing to do.
· Hunger is not good discipline.
· Discipline is writing a new book when the previous one fails.
· Discipline is the opposite of loneliness.
I like to think I am not the kind of person who has epiphanies on an island. I did not go to Bleaker to bring back an illuminating dispatch from the South Atlantic. I just wanted to write a book. I’d been trying, in various ways, to write books my whole life, and this was another attempt. And in the end, isn’t it true that I did what I set out to do? I did write a book. Not the book I had planned, but a book, all the same, which came together quickly and decidedly, in the space of a few days about a year after I got home. I curled up on my sofa with my knees to my chest and my laptop on my feet, the frantic soundtrack from the film Whiplash playing in the background, and I took all the things I did and thought and dreamed and remembered and imagined on Bleaker Island, all those diary entries and panicked scraps of writing, and I put them together, side by side. I joined them up and smoothed them out and cut down the number of times I complained about the Internet, and then I gave it the title of the novel that never quite came to be.
The punchline is that I did leave the island with a book.
· Solitude is the contented twin of loneliness.
· Variety is a kind of company.
· Everything is a kind of work.
· Do not look into your own heart and write, but do not be surprised if you end up there all the same.
· Despite what you might think—despite what Ted Hughes might lead you to believe—there is no such thing as effortless concentration.
—
The list of things I learned grows: bullet points listing the point of it all. And it isn’t over yet. It keeps happening. When I wake up alone in my flat on a Saturday morning, and slide into yet another blank page, which I spend the whole day filling, and then, after hours by myself, I go out to meet friends, to eat and drink and talk, it feels so obvious now that it is possible, necessary even, to be alone and not alone all in the space of a day. When I send the manuscript of my memoir out to agents, I find someone who understands not just what the book is, but also what I am under the impression that it is, and knows how to bridge the gap between the two. When I concentrate, it is not effortlessly, but with great effort. When, at a party, someone asks me what I do, I say, “I’m a writer,” without hesitation or blushing or feeling that I am lying. I am a writer. So this is the point, I think, in meetings with editors; jotting down ideas for stories on the Tube; when I wake from a dream about riots in the centre of the bed. All of it is, but specifically: this.
Acknowledgements
Leslie Epstein showed me what a writer is, in writing and in life. Sigrid Nunez and Ha Jin taught me more about telling stories in one year than I had gleaned from the previous twenty-six put together. The support of Maureen Freely has been invaluable. Louise Tondeur helped me at just the right time.
Robert Hildreth established the Global Fellowship programme at Boston University and in doing so made my journey to the Falklands—and the existence of this book—possible. I am grateful, too, for the Marcia Trimble Fellowship and the Florence Engel Randall Award, which supported me during my MFA.
I am indebted to the people in the Falklands, and on Bleaker Island in particular, who hosted me during my stay. I was, and continue to be, inspired by their warmth, strength and good humour.
My classmates at BU shared honest criticism and abundant ideas over the course of many hours in Room 222. In particular, Cara Bayles and Chris Amenta deserve thanks for their clear vision, brutal edits and big hearts.
Without Laura Marris, nothing I write would ever have a title, and everything would be worse.
Amanda Walker, Claudia Gray and Grace Shortland have thrilled, humoured, challenged, supported, laughed at and laughed with me since our very first class together in the art block: full enjoy.
Gabrielle Mearns remembers the events described in this book far better than I do, and offered humour, perspective and love through them all.
Camilla Hornby took a chance on a wandering twenty-three-year-old.
Hannah Griffiths was generous and wise.
A phenomenal trio of editors brought this book to life. Sophie Jonathan, Kris Puopolo and Lynn Henry were inventive, insightful, patient, and visionary as they cajoled my manuscript into shape.
Rebecca Carter, my agent at Janklow & Nesbit, knows what I want to say long before I’ve found a way to say it. She transformed a series of anecdotes into the book I had imagined but didn’t know how to write. Emma Parry at Janklow & Nesbit’s American office told me I was a real writer now, and was instrumental in making that the case.
If I had not made a project of copying Simon Stevens from a young age, I would have much less to say.
My parents, Margaret and Richard, read not only bedtime stories but daytime ones, and made everything possible. Thank you.
Without Brendan Hare this book would not exist.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Nell Stevens has a degree in English and creative writing from the University of Warwick, an MFA in Fiction from Boston University and a Ph.D. in Victorian literature from King’s College London. She was a finalist in the 2011 Elle Talent Contest and the 2014 Mslexia Memoir Competition, and was shortlisted for the 2015 Mslexia Short Story Prize.
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