The lockdown accounts for the greater number of books read this year.

I read all of Robin Steven’s ‘Murder Most Unladylike’ series, partly to inform my own writing for children and partly because the books gave me the same feeling as I had when I was a child and got lost in a series. I’ve only asterisked the first one but take that as a recommendation for the whole series.

Joan Bodger’s ‘How the Heather Looks’ was a charity shop buy but its a charming account of her family’s tour around the UK in the 1950s, visiting the places that inspired classics of children’s literature.

Anyway click here for the more or less finished thing: Andrew in the Maze

I may do something more with it, perhaps take some photographs as illustrations. We’ll see.

I don’t know exactly where to place them in the text, but that’s my next job. And then I’m finished, more or less.

Looking at the final bit I’ve reworked it to replace the twins idea, which was just a bit too peculiar for its own good I think. Apart from that it’s substantially the same.

I think there needs to be one or two more paragraphs One is Andrew and Viv as a middle aged couple, walking in the same park where Andrew played with their daughter when she was young. I think it needs it for balance, to be a measure of the length of his successful relationship with Viv, and to establish that Megan grows up and leaves home. But it needs to go quite early on in the text.

Then I could have something about Viv’s death but I’m not sure if that is necessary and it might just make it a bit too gloomy.

I also need to make a decision about the end. This is my original ending: Andrew's Story - unsatisfactory ending. But I don’t think it works. It feels self consciously quirky rather than actually making sense. So that’s my last job, to sort out an ending. And to think of a title!

Reading through them again there seems to be too many instances of clocks striking three. It could get a bit obvious if that happens in too many sections. Or perhaps it should happen in every section, so it becomes a life put together from moments that happen at 3pm, a bit like One Day. But my instinct is that that would become a bit clonky and monotonous, since the moments are all just a paragraph long. So I’ll either edit 3pm out of one of these, or maybe insert another section in between.

When it isn’t linear you come up against the question of what to include and what not to include. Of course the same question occurs when you’re writing something linear, you still have to decide what’s important. But then you can just write from beginning to end and then cut out things that are superfluous: the structure is predetermined. Here I’m having to decide what to include and what to leave out as I write, because I’m creating the structure as I go. It’s also a question of how much work I want the reader to have to do. I hope it’s going to be fairly clear what order the events happen in, even if the reader encounters them in a non chronological way. I don’t want it to be just confusing.

The previous section with the older Andrew gave me a sense of what to do next. It’s not a linear story, or at least I choose not to make it one. I could, I suppose, have stayed with older Andrew but instead I decide to ping around his life a bit, linking different moments with clocks striking three, or things happening at three o’clock, and images of flight.

So here are the next few bits. Part 3 of Andrew's Story They seem to be getting less naturalistic as they go, but that’s the way Andrew thinks about things rather than being the literal reality of his world.

So its becoming a collage of a life…

I didn’t know what it was I was writing. A short story? A piece of free writing? Bicycling at night with only two lights really happened. Me and my friend Kevin did that when we were teenagers. You pillage your own life for detail.

There seemed to be some evocative images in the first bit of writing: the clock striking, the feeling of flying. In the end I wrote a second piece in response to the first. Part Two of Andrew's story.

So instead of answering my questions I hust build them into the next bit of writing! I’m still not sure where this is heading but maybe that’s the point of this exercise. I don’t have to know what this is. Most of the time I write something and I know what it is: it’s either a story or an essay or a script or a novel. But I don’t have to do that here. It can be anything.

But freedom is double edged. you can end up with nothing because you don’t know where you’re heading. But that’s OK too…

This was the envelope I selected. I wanted to do some writing so I jotted down my thoughts about the quote.

I wrote a paragraph in response started with the highlighted phrase. You can read by clicking here: First bit of writing. I’m not sure if it’s a story yet, or what it is.