I Know Where I'm Going!
Two steps forwards, one step back
This week a friend said to me, “You’re so unlike anyone else, in such a clear way.”
I agree - I’m not sure how many other twenty-six-year-old women in 2023 are thinking about Colonel Blimp on long, lonely nights either.
Allow me to take a step back:
Last week, I had the absolute pleasure of watching I Know Where I’m Going! for the first time at the BFI as part of their Powell and Pressburger season.
Released in 1945, it tells the story of Joan Webster, a headstrong young woman who has always exactly known where she is going, making the tricky journey from Manchester to Kiloran, a fictitious island in the Hebrides to get married. Of course, fate and bad weather intervene, leaving Joan stranded on the Isle of Mull and pinned in the strong arms of a Laird as she watches a cèilidh.
It was then that I had this week’s profound realisation:
Wait - that wasn’t the realisation, it was a realisation.
The realisation actually came the following day as I was reading my book again, something I hadn’t done for maybe six weeks, so my eyes were nice and fresh.
For you see, Reader darling, much like Joan Webster, I thought I knew where I was going. I thought I would read my book, maybe notice a couple of rogue commas, but nothing earth-shattering that would bring into doubt what I had already sent to agents, and that I would feel very pleased with myself at my literary genius.
Unfortunately, I read the first few pages of my book, and I wasn’t particularly enamoured with them.
They weren’t bad pages, they were the opening pages I’d more or less had since I’d started writing the book last June, that had gotten me full manuscript requests, that I had watched a literary agent read in front of me before she said, “Oh, yes, you’ll get this published.”
But I found the beginning scene too static, too info-dumpy and too close to Catherine Cawood’s egregious opening monologue in Happy Valley for my liking. If anything, I much preferred the film’s beginning.
Wait, what film?
Allow me to take a step back:
I am often very tempted to write in my cover letter to agents that my book is ‘very cinematic’, not only because it is very inspired by certain films, which you can read about here and here, but because I also want to incentivise them with an easy 10% from optioning the rights.
For someone who loves film and has aspirations of writing for film one day (read: I have a Google Doc that I occasionally fill out with ideas for my upcoming screenplay, Blades of Glory 2: Cold War), it should go without saying that I have the film adaptation of my book planned in great detail.
I want Eva Husson to direct, Odessa Young to star, with Marion Barbeau, Anamaria Vartolomei, Benjamin Voisin and possibly Matt Smith bulking out the cast. I’ve even worked out mine and James Wilby’s cameos for good measure.
My three stipulations for the green light are that it has to be filmed on-location (for too much of Paris is Prague these days), the parts set in Paris have to be spoken in French and Keira Knightley has to be Mummy.
But it is one thing to dream about all these things, and it’s another thing to acknowledge that I am the most likely winner of the 2028 BAFTA for Best Adapted Screenplay and that I might as well get to work on making that happen now.
And so, in vaguely planning the screenplay, I gave the film a different opening to the book. The film started with a prologue set when my protagonist was a child (like Maurice) talking with an older man about marriage and the heteronormative expectations that have already been placed upon them (like Maurice) which took place on a beach (like Maurice). I guess, if pressed, I could maybe describe it as being a slight homage to Maurice.
But my work isn’t Maurice, it’s Margot. My prologue had no Mr Bucie drawing genitalia on the sand, but it did set up the key themes of the story, and when it cut to the narrative’s present day, it instantly raised the questions that the story is going to answer. Quite simply, it did everything my book’s current beginning did not.
And, whilst I love the actions of past me and her writing process, I do now wonder that if I felt I had to write a new beginning for a film that hasn’t been optioned because the book it is based on doesn’t exist as anything outside of a Google Doc, then maybe that said something about the quality of the beginning overall?
On every Submissions Guidelines page of every literary agency, the first guideline will always be, do not send us your work before it is ready!
My only justification was that I thought mine was. It had been ready, and it suddenly wasn’t. I’ve grown, I’ve changed as a writer and as a person. For example, I find Roger Livesey attractive now.
In an interview, award-winning literary agent, Nelle Andrew, said that authors seeking representation should send their novel out to ten agents at a time. If all their responses were negative, the writer should readjust their work before sending it to the next ten.
Well, I’d more or less sent my work to ten literary agents, so now was the time to make the change. And yes, I did realise I needed to change the beginning after I had sent my work to Nelle Andrew.
I could and probably should be embarrassed, but I’m not. Sometimes to go forward, one has to go back and retrace their steps until they get to an old fork in the road and take the other path, avoiding the temptation to plough on ahead and attempt a reckless crossing to Kiloran.
I rewrote the beginning of my book. I thought it would take days, but it took hours. It was easy, and I instinctively knew that it was easy because it was right.
When I sent the new introduction to my fantastic reader, Christina, I wrote, I almost wish it had been more difficult to write as that seems to suggest that the original was profoundly wrong.
Christina’s response was everything I needed and more:
Allow me to take a step forward:
And so, I continue writing, gently tweaking the rest of my book within the confines and contexts of its new beginning. Soon it will be finished, and then it will be off again to the next ten agents, and hopefully go further than the first round did.
And I will go on with it, taking two steps forward, one step back, and undoubtedly on to take another two forward.
And darling, don’t worry about me, I know where I’m going!