Helen Payton Author

I freely admit it; I’ve been struggling. It’s not so much that I’ve got writer’s block as I have been writing most days. However, I haven’t been writing chronologically. Instead, I’ve been working on key incidents that I know are going to happen in the novel; pivot points I suppose you could call them. There’s a reason for that. It’s because I can’t write the opening of the new novel. Why is that, I hear you ask?

Well, the problem is that I’ve been grappling with the structure of the sequel that, as yet, has no title. It was different with ‘Bread and Buttermilk’ as the structure had a logic. The book was structured into thirteen chapters, each one covering a month from April 1923 to April 1924. That period was, in part, governed by the environment, the seasonal rhythms of farming life. The novel opens with the discovery of a body and the narrative is driven forward through the solving of the mystery surrounding that discovery.

The opening paragraph wrote itself in my head before any other ideas occurred to me. I always knew the book was going to open with the finding of Gwyn Parry’s body and that the mystery would be solved by the end. Basically, I knew where I was beginning and where I was going.

The difference with the sequel is that I know where I’m going but I don’t know where to start. It’s a bit like that joke where a tourist asks a local for directions and gets the reply, ‘I can tell you how to get there but I wouldn’t start from here!’

I’ve been hoping for weeks that I would get a Eureka moment, becoming more and more despondent as time goes by. The more I thought about it the more the answer seemed to slip away. Then this morning when I was half awake, dozing in a warm bed, the solution came from nowhere. Relief was quickly followed by irritation because the answer was so obvious.

Apologies for the shortness of this blog but I have to go. I have an opening page to write …