Due to the large number of public holidays we’ve had in recent weeks, I ended up with more afternoons and evenings off than I usually have. So in true Indiana Jones style, I’ve been raiding my own lost ark... Sorry, archive of DVDs.

There’s nothing quite like settling down on the couch with a large bowl of popcorn, a litre of iced tea and a good movie. I like my popcorn mixed with Jelly Tots, and I drink my iced tea from a dark blue goblet that catches the light and makes me feel extra special. Some of you probably think that’s a bit sad, but let’s remember that this is MY way of indulging and you’re welcome to mock me, imitate me or follow your own paths of quirkiness.

So what’s been on my DVD menu? Obviously the first three Indiana Jones movies – I’ve always been a huge fan of watching a youthful, toned and sexy Harrison Ford win the day against all odds. Watched on three separate nights with all the bonus materials on the nights in between, that was a feast which kept me going for a week and provided a lot more nourishment for the soul than the courses dished up to Kate Capshaw’s poor character at the banquet in the second movie.

Other nights saw me enjoying A Fish Called Wanda, A Good Year, A Room With A View, Becoming Jane, Bend It Like Beckham and Bride and Prejudice. Yes, my favourite movies are stored in alphabetical order right after the box sets, and the shelf with A and B just happens to be at eye level. Isn’t that how all obsessive compulsives store their movies?

Anyway, by last weekend I had worked my way through to the shelf with H so I watched How To Steal A Million. This was good timing because the 4th of May would have been Audrey Hepburn’s birthday.

As a writer I feel the need to justify any indulgent time-wasting by passing it off as a writing exercise. Every time I watch a movie I hope that something about the story structure or characters will strike a chord. So what was my Eureka moment in this recent burst of movie-watching? It happened while browsing the Internet reading titbits about the movies I’d enjoyed. I found a quote on IMDb by Hepburn’s How To Steal A Million co-star, Peter O’Toole, in which he talks about the best roles to act: “The good parts are the people who don’t make do. They’re the interesting people. Lear doesn’t make do.”

I’ve often thought that writing a character involves the same process as acting one. Both require research into what makes that character tick; an exploration of the motivations behind his or her actions and reactions; and an understanding of why the conflicts in the plot cause that character’s goals to evolve in that particular way between the start and finish. O’Toole is right – Lear doesn’t make do, and neither does Indiana Jones. Or Wanda and Otto, or Lucy Honeychurch, or the British girls who play football, or any of the heroes and heroines who make our movie-viewing special.

When I look at the single biggest reason why my first two trunk novels have remained in the trunk, it’s because all the characters in them made do. They settled for less. In fact, it now looks as if they shrugged at me when I wrote them, and said: “Okay, the trunk is where we’ll stay because that’s all we’re good for.” If those characters are ever to get out of that trunk, they need to be re-invented and become driven, three dimensional people who refuse to make do with what life (and their author) throws at them.

This in turn means that the author – er, that would be me – needs to rework those plots in order to give the characters as much conflict to overcome as possible, so that you – the reader – can get more enjoyment and entertainment from characters who refuse to make do with something just because it made the writer comfortable.

This could take a while but – as I always say – watch this space...

My writing seems to have taken a back seat to knitting at the moment, but I’m happy to report that my blanket is now past its 43rd square out of 70, and going according to plan despite the crooked finger (see previous blog below). The fingers are not the only things activated by the knitting; the brain has been mulling things over too. While waiting for feedback from reading friends on my current WIP, I have been thinking about the next novel. Or in this case, a previous novel.

My very first novel (long ago relegated to a trunk and destined never to see the light of day in that particular incarnation) started out ten years ago as a family history – my own. My great-great-grandparents came to Africa in 1880, from Manchester, with a small settler party destined for the farm Willowfountain, outside Pietermaritzburg. The Willowfountain Settler Scheme was a disaster from inception to final failure, but fascinating to me, particularly since it involved my family and gave me some insight into what my ancestors must have been like. 

At the time when I began to write about them, I searched the files of the Killie Campbell Museum and the Pietermaritzburg archives, but there was only so far I could go with the actual facts. Before long my imagination filled in the blanks and I created a frame story set in the modern day to encapsulate it all. This was to be an exciting romance between an actor and a writer who are adapting the historic story into a film.

Sadly, in reaction to my previous academic writing, my fiction writing style of ten years ago turned it into a turgid, wallowing epic. The narrative head-hopped between all the characters and I’m ashamed to admit to some rather embarrassing purple prose. The plot jumped about all over the place with no real focus and in no particular direction. Eventually it all got too much, too big, too long and very definitely too boring, hence its relegation to the figurative trunk in the attic of my computer’s hard drive.

I must confess, however, that every now and then something triggers in me the desire to tell that story properly; to take a few elements and give it my best shot now that I have more writing experience. Perhaps it’s guilt about a niggling duty to my ancestors, but I feel that there is still a story there that is worth telling, and it’s up to me to find it. I don't know any other descendants of this particular settler party who are ever likely to write about them and, even if they did, it would be their story, whereas this particular story is mine. Write the story that only YOU can write, as the saying goes.

Some years back – just after I had finished doing Michael Green's creative writing course at UKZN – I began to re-work my epic family saga about Willowfountain but, following the advice of a journalist friend, I took my newly acquired skills and started another project instead. That became my Greek novel The Epidaurus Inheritance and since then I have continued to apply myself to only new projects. 

The other day, I came across the file on my computer in which I had stored the re-worked first 6 chapters of the Willowfountain epic. I started to read the first page with great trepidation but four chapters in I realised to my surprise that – well, this wasn't too bad! Consequently I have been thinking that this might be my next writing project. Treating my original manuscript as nothing more than an idea, I will do a total rewrite from page one, but this time with a properly plotted outline.

First I will have to re-think my going-nowhere story and re-invent those flat, pathetic modern-day characters, but at least there is nothing wishy-washy about the setting. Nothing from the past nor present can alter the fact that the original farm of Willowfountain was the worst possible place to dump a party of English settlers. The facts concerning the hard life of those settlers speak for themselves, giving me a harsh, cruel and very real setting for my soon-to-be vibrant and tormented characters. 

Watch this space...!