I decide to hand-write the new draft.

I’m getting quite distracted these days - can’t sit still too long, and my mind seems to jump around. But maybe I always was this way - as a child I used to write constantly to give those thoughts some room. The first job I had that stuck was as news sub-editor at
The Times. You had to focus or fail. Distraction did not enter my mind.

As I begin hand-writing the new draft, my thoughts slow to meet the pace. I realise that in making the first version of The Party from my notebook, I was a sub-editor: every unnecessary word sliced. I drafted for meaning. Order. Logic. But this is a story, not that kind of writing, and it won’t give up its meaning in that way.

I remember the child who sat alone listening in the silence, who wrote.

Self-portrait writing in my diary (Nan Goldin)

On the paper, I like shaping each word. It suits me. I can be emotional. If I am sad, I can write slowly, as with paint. Shaping each letter like a child who is learning to write. There is time to cry while you put the letters down. This page demands nothing, lets me be.

I use an HB pencil, which changes as you go on.

I can hear the melody and rhythm of each phrase. When
I finish I am peaceful and feel that despite the pace a lot got done.

Writing by hand connects me to the original experience as I recorded it in my notebook in Alamar. I am writing the same words, the same way I did back then.

This way I can breathe; I can move as I work. Writing is a visceral act, not an intellectual one. It is presence on the page. Nothing should come between us, no intermediary machine.

I write early in the morning, in a fluid, half-conscious state. I don’t think much about what I’m doing and the work seems to make itself. It’s like being that child again.

I’m feeling today like I might disappear. Silent and remote. An image comes into my head - I look for it before I start. It’s a photograph of the actress Cookie Mueller, lying sick on her bed, being nursed through her final illness by ex-lover Sharon. On the wall is a picture of Cookie gettting married - to the man she left Sharon for, and who pre-deceased her of Aids.

Sharon nursing Cookie on her bed (Nan Goldin)

I look at this for a while. It gives me the right feeling, one I can not yet give words.

I start by hand-writing out chunks of text from my notebook: bits that leap off the page. These give me the emotional key to the story: ‘I sleep on the street if I have to … There were too many drunk people shouting, and Spanish exhausted me … At 3am I woke up and he was putting on his shoes saying: “We’re going. We’re leaving, going back to Havana” … I am not hungry. I want to go. I don’t want to eat anything else; no more meat. I just can’t eat any more. I won’t.’

I waver over some bits: how far into the personal should I go? I’m mining for the emotional truth but it’s fiction, not a journal. I reject passages that seem intimate but trivial, or too reflective. What I want is interior, but story - filtered through my narrator’s heart.

In the current draft of The Party, my Cuban friend Charo cries when the guests leave without eating the meat his cousin has bought. But my notebook tells a different story. There was a whole tussle between us - and only then did he cry: ‘I said I wanted to go back to Nelida’s and Charo got annoyed. I tried to explain how tired I was but he said that here in Cuba when you got to a party it’s for all night. Then I heard him telling Sandra we needed a taxi to Vedado so I finally got up and went into the bedroom and told her we were staying. I said Charo had drunk too much and Sandra said he’d told them this place wasn’t comfortable enough for me. So I said this wasn’t true and she dragged Charo into the bedroom to speak to him. He denied he’d said it and started to cry.’

'Here in Cuba, when you go to a party, it's for all the night.' (Claire Elliot)

The party was a drunken chaos. This comes across clearly from the notebook, whereas the final draft has only a few discrete references to ‘drinking rum’. My original words betray my confusion: ‘Lazaro grabbed me and motioned to Charo with two fingers next to each other. A question: “I need a girlfriend”. He leered at me, his eyes red and bloodshot. Earlier, his grace while dancing was lovely. Now he made me sick.’ I want the language of The Party, the narrator’s fractured report of what is going on, to mirror her dismay.

I begin to hear my story’s voice. I think of Jane Bowles, of How to Breathe Under Water - first-person, intimate work where the narrator has the courage to show who she is. I can get that close - why not? You always worry how much the reader will think a first-person narrator is ‘you’. But this is what the story needs.

So now I have two parallel versions of The Party: my current draft, and the mined bits from the notebook of the time. I type both out, then cut them into scenes, which I lay out on the floor, slotting the versions together. I do this quickly. At this point it’s not words; it’s a shape.
I make a shape. It’s all in the right place now.

I realise that the feeling Nan Goldin’s picture evoked, the one that resonated within me, was of self-effacement. Humility and courage. This is how the Cubans lived.

I realise that what resonates within you is the story waiting to be born. Before the story, comes its feeling, which you can not distinguish from your own.

I am going to start with The Party. This is the first short story that I ever wrote. Living in a small, dark room in Havana, I decided to write. I read Becoming a Writer, by Dorothea Brande, and she said that anyone could write stories, so long as they paid attention to their life, and didn’t get too fancy. And I saw her point. I didn’t understand how anyone could invent anything. The core story, the emotional one, is always true of its author’s life. It’s always their voice, small or unheard, one they may never dare express, embodied in the work.

Bakery in Vedado, Havana. The words read: Por la dignidad de la patria, movilizacion cederista - For the dignity of the homeland, local mobilisation

I am disappointed with The Party. It reads as if I took the best, raw, bits of writing from the notebooks at the time, and polished them into what I thought a short story was supposed to be. I wanted to remove myself from the work, but in doing so threw baby out with bathwater, so that the story had no point of view - or a ghostly narrator about whose feelings we know little, with whom we can not emotionally engage.

What I thought when I re-read source material in my notebooks for The Party. They contained much that was left out of the final draft

I need to go back to the source material and experience that party again. I was a stranger there - overwhelmed and bewildered in Alamar, a Havana suburb, with no other foreigner for miles around. Nothing made any sense and I was writing to escape from overwhelming claustrophobia in a poor town where I understood little, and could not make myself understood. Each point of reference dissolved. Cross-purposes, my broken Spanish, the order of the day. This is the core of the story, and I realise that so far, I have lied: The Party is serene and the ‘I’ who narrates a calm and happy woman, unaffected by events. For honesty’s sake, I must get the dissonance back in.

Just back from New York, I go upstairs to the spare room and retrieve a huge dusty rucksack that contains all the notebooks from my Cuban project*. Plus a fireproof box. Before going away, I got really scared my house might burn down and tried to scan them all. Realising it was a losing battle, with 48 hours to go before the flight, and 24 packed handwritten books, I did second best: stashed some in the rucksack, and crammed as many as possible into an Argos fireproof box.

So I take my notebook - the large A3 one that I’m charting the process of this collection in - and get back to the project, which has been on hold for a month since I submitted my Arts Council grant application and went away. This large one is the master-notebook. I have so much material from those six years to fashion into stories, half-made, or just dreamed, that I can no longer see their shapes. I need an overview.

And, time has passed. The original material is vivid - lived. The stories have percolated, though, and they come out better now. I’m distilling fiction from real life.

After I’ve written a bit, I sit here in my kitchen and think, which story is the next? How am I going to know?

Tomorrow, I will thread my way back - from 24 to one - and find out where it is.

* I am writing a collection of short stories set in Cuba, where I spent time between 1999 and 2006. Nii Parkes, of Flipped Eye, is my publisher and editor - we’re preparing the book for print later this year.

I went round to Leila Segal’s for afternoon tea to talk about her contribution as a guest booker.

Leila's tea pot has the air of a rare find on Antiques Road Show. I think it really might be worth a thousand pounds. She bought it for next to nothing in a charity shop. We drank black Earl Grey and looked through her notebooks.

Leila and I met a few years ago when she came to a workshop I was facilitating. She was writing these fascinating stories about living in Cuba and I was captivated by them. We worked together on them for a while and now she has a publishing deal and is writing some new stories and editing old ones.

Leila’s going to take us through the process of editing one story over two weeks in February. In the meantime she’ll be reading through all the notebooks from that period. She said that she now wants to go back to some of the original notes she had, as that’s where the freshest, most impactful writing resides. Five years down the line she feels she knows more about creating stories and has the perspective to structure the material.

Her guest blogging may look something like this.

I’m excited to see how the editing/recasting process pans out and am glad she’ll be examining it here. It has a sense of coming full circle but ending up in a slightly different spot.