I have a story which I started several years ago, yes another – and the inspiration arrived in a dream. It was so vivid that I wrote down what I remembered and from this came several chapters, which I wrote simultaneously to another story which i finished,, edited and published! This other story just poddled along with no particular place to go as yet, and in fact the main character didn’t even acquire a name! I just couldn’t get a name which right for her, but she was a woman in her early fifties, divorced from Gerry, with two children called Clare and Daniel. She had many friends, who all had names, partners, children and active lives.
It became quite a challenge to write the story around this anonymous woman and in the third person. It isn’t at all like the heroine of ‘Rebecca’ who is known as Mrs de Winter, but has no first name, and I didn’t start writing it with that intention. However, it became an interesting exercise to continue with her story – her children called her ‘Mum’, her husband didn’t use her name at all, her students and also a man she went out with from time to time called her Mrs plus her surname, which I confess I don’t remember off hand, another man she is having an unexpected fling with is too shy to call her anything… None of these ways around the name dilemma were deliberate, somehow I just wrote it like that.
If I go back to it, the nameless book with the nameless first main character, and continue, I may very well find it becomes much more of a juggling act to write!
Lois Elsden 