Title:
Love Letters to
Amanda
Word count:
93,380
Written:
December 2008 to August 2009
Story:
Set during the opening year of the First World War, Love Letters to Amanda tells the story
of three British soldiers, named Fitcher, Hamilton and Deacon, who serve
together in the same company on the Western Front. After Fitcher is killed in
action, Hamilton begins corresponding with his widow, Amanda, and the two
develop a close bond through their letters. When Hamilton is eventually
mortally wounded, he persuades Deacon that he must pretend to be the writer of
the letters when he returns to England, to save Amanda from the trauma of
losing another man whom she has come to love.
Opening:
“Jimmy!”
The man’s voice
carried clearly down the busy platform. He was walking quickly up to the
family, and might even have broken into a run had there been the space amongst
the crowds, but none of the three had paid any heed to his call. Not the man,
not the woman, and nor the little girl between them, who held each parent
tightly by the hand. They walked along three abreast, apparently oblivious to
the short, evidently excited man pushing and shuffling his way towards them as
the clouds of steam puffed out and rose up from the engine alongside.
People were scattering
this way and that; those just missing the train as it departed, and those, like
the family of three, who had just disembarked from the one opposite. Baggage
was being collected, colleagues were shaking hands, children were being called
for, and this man, in a black pinstripe suit and officious little bowler hat,
was walking briskly, now waving his rolled-up newspaper to try and draw the
attention of those he pursued.
“Jimmy!” he called
again. “Jimmy old chap!”
Finally, a little
out of breath, red-cheeked and perspiring lightly in the muggy summer heat, his
exertions were rewarded as he caught up with the family. He tapped the man
lightly on the shoulder with his paper, and the three of them stopped as one,
turning to look.
The husband and
father of the group was in his mid-thirties, although the first thing anyone
would notice about him was not his age or manner, but the scar across his left
eye, and the glass disc where once a window to the soul had sat. He had a
short, bristled moustache clipped off neatly, and oddly wore a single brown
leather glove, over his right hand.
“I’m sorry,” he
replied, pleasantly. “Were you talking to me?”
Background:
The story of the writing of Love Letters to Amanda is the story of two dinners, with two
different women.
The first of these dinners took place at a vegetarian
restaurant in Norwich in December 2008, after Christmas, and after the pair of
us had been to see the film Australia.
I was excitedly outlining to this friend of mine the idea for an epistolary novel
I had conceived called 26 Letters –
or possibly 26 Characters, I wasn’t
yet sure which to go for. Although I’d written large chunks of a couple of novels
I eventually abandoned for one reason or another in 2007 and 2008, I hadn’t at
this point finished a full novel since Forget Me Not, over two years previously. I am not quite sure why that is, but perhaps it is no coincidence that at the end of March 2008 I had the ridiculous good fortune to begin working for the BBC full-time, so by the end of 2008 I was feeling rather happier and more relaxed about life, and perhaps in a better state to do some writing.
The idea of this new novel would be that each chapter
would be told from the first-person perspective of a letter writer. There
would, as the title suggests, be 26 of these, one for each letter of the
alphabet, with each character’s name to begin with the letter of their chapter.
The story would take place across the decades, and there would be something in
each chapter that linked it to the preceding one, inspired to some degree by
David Mitchell’s Ghostwritten, which
I had read a few years beforehand at university.
I didn’t have every chapter conceived in any detail yet,
but one story I had come up with for one of them was set during the First World
War, and broadly speaking would involve the storyline of Love Letters to Amanda, as outlined above. I was so excited about
this story idea, someone having to go back home to England and pretend to be
the dead man who had written the letters, that while discussing it I was making
some sort of over-eager hand gesture and ended up spilling orange juice all
over myself.
My friend was amused, but also taken with the idea, and
insisted it was worth turning into a novel all of its own. I decided she was
right, there was more than enough story there to work into a full novel. So I
plunged myself into a few months of research and writing, investing in various
books about the First World War and bashing a first draft into some sort of
existence.
Some of the research material I bought while writing Love Letters to Amanda.
Then there was the second dinner.
This took place in a Vietnamese restaurant, somewhere in
East London, in late April 2009. My companion on this occasion was a different woman
with whom I was friends at the time.
She had been interested in Love Letters to Amanda since I had first mentioned it to her, had been
keen to see the finished result, and not long before this had read the first
draft, which I had finished sometime in March.
She thought it was all right, that it worked as a story,
but it needed more effort putting into it. Specifically, she didn’t think I had
really got across just how utterly, grotesquely awful the whole experience of
being in the trenches on the Western Front would have been. And also, I had severely
under-written the main female character, the eponymous Amanda, who needed a
much stronger personality.
She was a clever, perceptive woman, this lady, and she
was of course right on both counts.
So it was back to my writing, back to my research, and
for really the first time I gave a novel I had written a complete overhaul. The
second draft of Love Letters to Amanda,
finished in the summer, wasn’t simply a case of correcting typos and taking out
poor-quality sentences. Whole new sections appeared, others were excised, some
events were re-ordered and everywhere there were changes and, hopefully,
improvements.
Looking back:
I am very fond of Love
Letters to Amanda, and I think it represents an important step in my
development as a writer. The second draft was so much better than the first, so
inescapably superior, that it really made me realise for the first time how
much of the work can be in improving what you have.
I’d always thought beforehand that when you’d written the
first draft, that was pretty much your sculpture finished, bar the odd bit of
chipping and polishing. But during the course of (re)writing Love Letters to Amanda, I realised that
the first draft isn’t anywhere near that – it’s simply unloading your block of
marble off the back of the lorry.
Mind you, I do think that, in retrospect, I approached
the whole thing from the wrong angle. Instead of telling the story of what
happened during the war, the novel really ought to have been set a few years
later, perhaps during the 1920s, with someone investigating and discovering
what has happened, uncovering the family’s secret, with perhaps some flashbacks
to the war and excerpts from the correspondence.
I do tell myself that perhaps I will have another go at
it one day, writing it from this other angle. After all, I have the characters
and the story… simply moving the perspective ought to make the writing of a new
version all the easier, when you know what’s going to happen.
I’ve also been thinking about perhaps putting the novel
as it exists online, for free, as I did with The Wicket in the Rec after that failed to find a publisher. After
all, it would tie in with the centenary commemorations for the First World War coming
up over the next four years, so it would seem somehow fitting.
Submissions:
Although it was never taken up by any agents or
publishers, Love Letters to Amanda
did represent at least a small step forward, and another little boost in
confidence. I submitted it to the agent who had been so promising about my
previous few attempts, Laura Morris, and after seeing a synopsis and sample
chapters, she asked to see some more of it.
So I excitedly sent her another chunk of it, and although
she was very encouraging, she didn’t think it was quite good enough for her to
want to represent. Which was disappointing but, as I say, another step further
forward than I’d ever got before. Interestingly, Laura thought it was perhaps
too similar to Atonement, whereas I’d
been worried throughout the whole thing that it might come across as a poor man’s
Birdsong.
Alas, when I tried other agents and publishers after
this, it was pretty much back to square one, with nobody interested in seeing
anything further after I’d sent them a synopsis and sample chapters.
