John Passfield
HOW does an idea become a novel? What are the minute-by-minute decisions and discoveries that lead to the realization of an artistic vision? In this companion book to the novel Water Lane: The Pilgrimage of Christopher Marlowe, the reader of the novel is invited to look over the shoulder of the writer at the process whereby a cluster of related images evolves into a realized work of art, and at the on-going exploration of the techniques that will allow us to process the bombardment of images that is life as we experience it in the 21st Century.
John Passfield was born in St. Thomas, Ontario, Canada, and continues to reside in Southern Ontario, at Cayuga, with his family. He has taught and studied literature, creative writing and drama, and is interested in the development of the novel as an art form. The Making of Water Lane is a companion book to the novel Water Lane, the story of the life and death of Christopher Marlowe. This journal is an attempt to record the process whereby a novel evolves from the original idea, through the planning, writing and polishing stages. It captures the drama of the gradually-shifting balance between what the artist knew and what the artist did not know at every moment in the writing process. www.johnpassfield.ca
Introduction
The Journal
In Search of Form and Meaning IV: The Making of Water Lane is a journal which records the writing of the novel, Water Lane: The Pilgrimage of Christopher Marlowe. Each note of the journal is a reflection on a chapter of the novel, written after that chapter had been completed, in an attempt to assess what had been accomplished by the writing of that chapter as a contribution to the concept of the novel, and to help in deciding what needed to be done next in order to move the writing of the novel forward. The journal is a day-by-day, decision-by-decision record of the complex process that a writer undergoes while crafting a work of art. It records the largest decisions, of structure and theme, and the smallest decisions, such as the choice of one word over another, and the constant interaction between the two.
In the writing of this journal, I set myself the task of recording, as faithfully as possible, what a writer thinks about his work during the time that he is creating it. I wanted to record my thoughts about the novel while it was in the process of evolving, from the initial idea of a literary shape which I saw in the historical situation, through decisions about the larger structure of cycles and chapters, the choice of language levels, the shaping of the smaller cycles within chapters and on through the writing process to the final polishing of the finished novel.
As these creative decisions were being made, I also recorded my understanding of the basic principles by which I was shaping the novel. This makes the journal a record of a writer’s reflection on the craft of novel-writing: an explanation, as far as I was able to understand them, of the sources, the influences, the personal connections, and the life-experiences that went into the making of this novel. I wanted to record my awareness of the level and intensity at which these concepts entered into the writing of a novel which would be, in turn, an artistic imprint -- a thumb print in clay -- of my inner-life.
Above all, I wanted to be courageous in recording my thoughts at the many levels of thinking -- personal and philosophical, satisfied and irritated, profound and petty -- at which they occurred to me. I was aware of the risks in doing so: of revealing the artifice behind the magic, of stepping out from behind the protective shield of author inscrutability, of inadvertently exposing the shallowness of my own thoughts about what I hoped and intended would be a serious and complex work of art, or of failing to present myself as exhibiting the charming authorial attitude -- a delicate balance of appropriate modesty at my abilities and justified confidence in my accomplishments -- that the situation seemed to call for.
Despite these risks, however, I decided to operate on the principal that if I recorded everything which I considered to be relevant about my thoughts on the novel, others might not only find the process interesting, but would go on to appreciate the novel beyond my own subjective and limited ability to explain its value. I assumed that readers of the novel would not conclude that all had now been said and that all possible interest in the novel had been exhausted by the reading of the journal; on the contrary, I assumed that readers would find the journal to be a springboard to discussion and a stimulus to the exploration of a novel which would offer a rich and complex literary experience.
The Project
This particular novel and journal form part of a literary project which now includes six novels and six journals. Three novels and three journals were written before the Water Lane project, and two of each were written afterwards, before the decision to make this novel and journal the first of the series to be published. The Making of Water Lane captures one segment in the evolution of that project: the writing of one novel in a series of novel-writing experiments which const
