A Novel in a Year by Louise Doughty

Author:Louise Doughty
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon and Schuster

WEEK 25

‘Alan Jones, whose real name was Joe Gouder, was having nightmares again, and this time Mr and Mrs Jackman decided they had had enough of being woken by his muffled sounds of panic. It was only six weeks since this strange secretive man had shown up at the Jackmans’ appropriately named Prince of Paupers public house, hidden away in the dingy backstreets behind Great Yarmouth’s plastic and neon Golden Mile, and offered to work behind the bar in return for a bed and board and a few pounds spending money.’

The writer who sent in this response to the waking-at-night exercise called him or herself David Cook, but I was a little suspicious–the name sounded too simple and the writing had a finished quality. There’s a lot of information packed into those first two sentences, a technique I sometimes find off-putting, but ‘David Cook’ gets away with it because he or she keeps their language simple and there’s a strong narrative hook. James Joyce used the same technique in his short stories. It comes down to a confidence of tone, a prose style that jumps straight into the story. It is always all right–better than all right–to use one of my exercises as a trampoline.

Many stuck to the brief more closely and those results were also pleasing–the quality of writing in this batch of responses was high. Many captured the fearfulness of being awake at night but also the beauty and excitement of it. ‘Early in my childhood I fell madly in love with the strange otherness of night. I loved words like twilight, dusk, midnight, starlight, moonlight. The word glimmer I especially loved because that’s what the stars did…’ wrote Drumboorian. Several wrote of that odd experience of dreaming of being awake. AJS captured the panic of it: ‘The dark would not release him. Then, suddenly, he was awake. A howlish moan was in his ears. It was coming from his own throat. He gulped air…He was unable to move.’ Dreams often took characters back to an unexplained past. Vivie wrote: ‘He dreamed again of his gestation. He had heard the tales, over and over. His mother had sheltered in the sottosuolo, the silent subterranean city, during pregnancy. When the bombing raids had become too dangerous, whole families had survived underground.’ The advantage of beginning a story with a dream is that you are often straight into a dramatic event, a crisis or catharsis in a character’s life.

Quite apart from the psychological uses of dreams, the very act of waking at night, when the world can often seem like a much more complex or threatening place, is a good way to open up narrative possibilities. Allyson Dowling had a character awoken by the sound of a toilet flushing. Leaving her partner asleep, the character stumbles blearily downstairs to put the kettle on. It is only as she is listening to the kettle boiling that she thinks to ask herself, but if my partner is still in bed, then who was flushing the toilet? The author Merri had another woman awakening to find her bed empty.

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