Viva Brighton Issue #59 January 2018

COLUMN
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Lizzie Enfield
Notes from North Village
“Did you actually think that at the time? Or is
it something you made up afterwards to try to
sound clever?”
My son has caught the tail end of an interview I’ve
been doing to promote my new book. I was saying
something about the story being a metaphor for
life. Son is rolling his eyes but his question is fair,
damn him!
When I wrote the book, I was just writing a story. It
was only having finished that I began to reflect on
what it was really about. My intentions only became
clear with hindsight, which I realise is both an
oxymoronic and pretentious sentence.
I think most of us, when questioned about the paths
we’ve taken and decisions we’ve made, are able to
say with some clarity, after the event, why we did
this or decided that.
But if you’d been asked before, things would have
seemed less clear.
People ask: ‘When did you begin writing?’
And I reply that I’ve always written: that I wrote a
novel about a family abducted by dinosaurs when
I was eight, short stories all through my teens,
that I was diverted by journalism in my twenties
and journalism plus kids in my thirties but in my
forties I finally started writing the novels that were
always inside me just waiting to be hatched, like the
dinosaurs in the book I wrote when I was eight.
I make it sound like it was always a plan, that from
the age of eight I knew I wanted to be a writer and
that everything in between was a process of getting
there. But none of that is really true, or at least not
what I really thought at the time.
I did write a dinosaur book when I was eight but it
was more like an appointments diary with dinosaur
walk-on parts.
Wed. Went to the dentist. Brontosauruses in
waiting room.
Mon. Back to school. Pterodactyl in playground.
Not much imagination or any sign of early talent.
Really it was the talent of a colleague at the Sunday
Times who spurred me to write novels. His novel
was Sainsbury’s ‘Book of the Month’ and I had
to push past crowds looking at it when I went
shopping. I was jealous and when I tried to elicit
some sort of supportive comment from my husband
he just said: “If you never write your novel it will
never be published or be a book of the month.”
So I started. My first novel was sold in Tesco, with
a discount if you also bought cheese, the kind of
promotion I was after all along, or so I said in the
retelling of events.
My point is, when this mag’s editor said write about
plans, I know she wanted something about the year
ahead. But I always work backwards.
Wait till it’s over and I know what’s happened and
then I’ll make up something clever to say, as if that’s
what I planned all along.
Illustration by Joda (@joda_art)
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