In Body, In Mind Origin Story
Origin Story
The genesis of this book was wine. Way too much of it. It was 1989. We were living just north of Perth at the time, and one night, over dinner with a good friend, we drank wine and talked books and philosophy and writing. We waxed lyrical about ideas for novels and journal articles and plays and film scripts, with no genuine intentions for their realisation. And then I went back to work, and the conversation receded. But strangely, a day or two later, I wrote a page, an embarrassingly naïve outline for a spectacularly unwritable book. But that unimposing scrap of paper was the start of this novel, even though the book that was eventually published bears almost no resemblance at all to the original outline.
Only a month or two later, I was describing the project to another good friend, and his response gave me hope. “The world needs more philosophical fiction,” he said. “You should write this book. Even if no one else reads it, I will.”
However, for the next twenty years there wasn’t much writing. Instead, I was reading, listening, taking notes, watching, and thinking. It was all good practice, and it let me fool myself that I was writing a novel. But it wasn’t focused, it wasn’t coherent, and it wasn’t going anywhere. And that’s why it took twenty years to achieve very little.
Then in 2010 I decided I had to make a choice. Of twenty planned chapters, I had written three. I had a folder full of random notes, a hazy plot outline which bore almost no resemblance to the original plan, and a title. That was it. I’d lost confidence in what I thought I was trying to say, and lost sight of why I thought I should say it. There was a very strong temptation to put it all away in a drawer and forget about it.
Then, out of the blue came an invitation to join a closed LinkedIn group of writers interested in the art of literary fiction. And in the course of participating in that group, my confidence returned. When someone asked me to describe the project I was working on, I had to order my thoughts to make my project sound like it had at least half a chance to see the light of day as a book. I was suddenly back on track. Or more accurately, on track for the first time.
I began to write more systematically, initially one full day a month, then a day a week, and then a day plus three 5 o’clock mornings a week, plus whatever other time I could squeeze in around family and working and travel and maintaining a home.
And after almost seven years of focused writing, in April 2016, the final seventeen chapters were written, and I’d typed the last word to complete my manuscript.