On the Village Going Back to School, Getting Back to Serious Writing, and Finally Making a Storyboard for the Novel — a writer’s diary entry, 2nd of September

La rentrée happened on Tuesday and the village changed overnight, the way it does every year and still surprises me. The school bus went past at ten to eight with a full load of cross children in new shoes. The campsite by the lake has emptied. The queue in the boulangerie has gone back to the six people who are always in it, and the woman ahead of me was talking about her knee again, at length, and I was so pleased to hear about that knee.

The mornings have gone cool at last. I am at the desk by half seven with the shutters open and the phone in the other room, face down, in a drawer, because I know exactly what I am like. Four hours before lunch. No looking at anything. It is the first proper writing I have done since the draft went in the drawer at the end of July, and the first fortnight of getting back in is always a matter of turning up rather than producing much worth keeping.

And then last Thursday I did something I have refused to do for about fifteen years, which is a storyboard. I have always told myself I am not a planner, that the book arrives as it arrives and diagrams are for people who write thrillers with maps in the front. That was pride, and it was costing me months. So I got a roll of brown paper, stuck it to the wall of the spare room, and put the whole novel on it on index cards. One scene a card. Sixty-two cards.

Well. You can see everything from four feet back. Within about ten minutes of standing there with a mug in my hand I could see that chapters eleven to fourteen are the same chapter four times over in different coats, all of them about her deciding to go and none of them about her going. I could see that one character vanishes for eighty pages and comes back as though nothing has happened. I could see the shape of the last third, which I have never once been able to hold in my head all at the same time.

Nobody warns you that structure is mostly a physical problem. Three colours of card for the three threads, and when you step back and one colour is missing from the whole middle band of the wall, that is not an opinion or a mood or a crisis of confidence. It is a gap in the wall. You can fix a gap in the wall. I have spent years treating things like that as evidence that I could not write, when they were simply information I had no way of seeing.

The spare room now looks like an incident room and my daughter would find it very funny. I moved four cards yesterday and the middle of the book fixed itself, which sounds glib and was actually about six hours of standing up and sitting down again.

The moon is coming up late and the colour of a peach over the cut sunflower fields, all those black heads left standing in rows waiting for the machine. Past the full, going down toward the half on Friday. I have nothing to say about it this week. I am busy.