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Tongue in my Ear:on writing and not writing Foreign Parts from The Review of Contemporary Fiction, Dalkey Archive press, Chicago, 1995

Shortly after writing about fifty pages of my second novel, I stopped.This happens periodically. I stop and wonder what the hell it is I think I'm doing. It's never useful: just saps time and energy that could be better used doing something else. I did it anyway. I stopped and wondered what I was doing.

I wondered why I was writing a novel set in France when I knew very little that I'd call authentic about the place and its culture, what passed for normalcy under Gallic skies. I wondered why I'd found two female characters who spoke French only poorly and why I'd stuck them in a car with little or no chance of meeting people or overhearing conversation. I wondered, moreover, why they were turning out to be women who weren't even speaking to each other, and even when they did, the other one wasn't listening. Thinking at cross-purposes, travelling in their own sealed chamber on the wrong side of the road, in a country that was not their own, these women were setting me up for horrible difficulties. And so they did. But wondering about it only made things worse.

The thing is, you can't choose what to write about.

As has been remarked before and will be again, you don't drive the material, the material drives you.

Deliberate tinkering with the politics or nature of characters which have arisen naturally out of the subconscious is, for me, not only a dishonest but a redundant exercise. Worse, a self-destructive avoidance tactic. Still, avoiding like hell, engaged in useless wondering, I was stuck with these two women for a year and a bit, facing deserts of blank pages.

Now I did do other things in that time, not the least of which was have a baby. This was good for a lot of obvious reasons and some less obvious ones as well. Caring for a baby does things for your priorities and your grasp of time's preciousness that cannot be underestimated. Also, the bit that thinks get forced to clear itself of anything other than ESSENTIALS if it wants to survive. So, when I finally, fitfully, got back to the book, what wanted to come out was free to surface in its own way: multiple isolations, unspoken feelings, repressions, restrictions and all. It was only by not wondering, by not putting self-consciousness first, I realised I was writing about.

It's hardly contentious to say that a significant number of Scottish novels are more notable for their preoccupation for what is not said rather than what is; with the struggle to find a 'voice'. This, of course, has much to do with my country's history as a colonised nation, our lack of real political clout, marginalisation and neglect by successive Westminster governments who can afford to be smug even when they acknowledge their awesome cultural ignorance of all territories north of Manchester. Such real psychological damage has been wrought by centuries of contempt for Scottish accents, syntax and expression that many Scots themselves caricature their mode of speech in a way that suggests they can only present it to the "outside world" as comic, slovenly, uncouth or simply tourist-trade twee. In the time-served tradition of colonised peoples, we have been keen to internalize ruling-class contempt and pass it on to our children. In my own time, teachers and parents have passed on their own sense of linguistic inferiority via a well-known number of maxims: "It's not aye, it's yes"; "You'll not get far with an accent that broad" and so on ad nauseam. And yes, I remember a child in my primary class at school being belted (ie hit over the hands with a leather belt weilded from shoulder height) for speaking in his natural idiom which the teacher chose to regard as "cheek". My own mother, a paragon of internalized contempt, condemned the accent she spoke in as "common" and often affected a Yorkshire accent when answering the phone - presumably in order to be thought better of at first hearing. Even in this class-ridden country, it was not the class connotations of her accent that embarrassed her so much as its Scottishness. She felt her way of speaking naturally to be unworthy and unworthwhile, best hidden or apologized for.

Now it isn't hard to see the connections here with Scottish writers finding a difficulty in trusting their own mouths. Questions of what language and even spelling to use crop up again and again, creating awkwardnesses that may well hobble many folk who would have been writers before they begin. That is also true, of course, of all disempowered, artificially silenced or maginalised groups. For the woman writer from a working-class Scottish background, the problem is trebly familiar. Rona and Cassie, the two women I'd abandoned in a foreign landscape with slim chance of making themselves comprehensible and only each other to fall back on, were not, then, anything to wonder about at all. They were no more and no less than home ground; complexly simple products of Scottish female experience. Terra entirely firma.

All this suggests problems. I hope it also suggests freedoms. For while loss of trust that what one has to say will be listened to is not good for developing a strong sense of acceptance, it is good for some other things. Learning, for example, to be fluent in several registers while knowing your own is no less a reality than anyone else's. Learning, for example, that new ways of rendering different truths, different meanings, different perspectives on what it might matter to write about are essential if you are going to write honestly. Learning, for example, that the way forward is to actively write outside the "rules", to talk with what is real to ourselves as center - not because, as an external power elite might have you believe, we canny talk right but precisely because we can. It is only then, through being true to what you feel to be real through the skin, the soles of your feet and the voice that issues from your mouth, being true to your emotional and linguistic place on the landscape, that there is the vaguest hope of reaching and touching other people.

Those two women taught me a lot about how I work, what I feel to be important.

I got back to them. And they spoke.