Work-in-progress (article) by Frances Lynn on AuthorsDen

A book is never finished. I started writing Frantic in the early Seventies. I had always written, but this was my first serious attempt at working on a novel. First time authors usually write autobiographical books, and I was no exception. My then boyfriend was living in the basement of a famous artist's house in Notting Hill Gate. I moved in opposite - my barbaric, top floor studio flat was quiet except for the noisy pigeons that batted their wings against the attic window at all hours. In those days, I lived a precarious rise at dusk, sleep at dawn existence, and every night used to visit my boyfriend and hang out in the basement. Interesting creatures, including debauched rock stars and personalities from the fashion and art worlds were frequent visitors. I observed and when I returned to my flat each morning, religiously wrote about the evening. My effort wasn't a dairy. It was a fictionalised account of the shenanigans in the basement, fabricating names for the real life characters I wrote about. My boyfriend was the only person I showed my work-in-progress manuscript to, swearing him to secrecy. But, he was only interested in himself. 'I'm not like that,' he protested when reading about his thinly veiled character. My frantic existence as an aspiring novelist started to go wrong, when I got a day job working as a personal assistant to an American baboon in his Mayfair office. All I did was watch Wimbledon all day long on the office TV, but the job proved too much for me. I wasn't getting any rest - the sound of the pigeons' wings banging against my window was getting on my nerves. I was up all night partying and writing "Frantic" before reporting for duty at the crack of dawn. Going without sleep was making me feel so 'tired and emotional', that I impulsively threw my manuscript out of the window. My mother had chosen to visit me at this opportune moment, and when she saw my "Frantic" pages impaled on the railings realised that something was seriously wrong. She knew that writing my book was the most important thing in my life, more important then my boyfriend even. Luckily, she managed to retrieve most of the pages for me. After the baboon fired me for being late, and I had recovered from my nervous exhaustion, I dumped my boyfriend and moved back in with Mum, continuing to frenetically bash Frantic out on my manual typewriter. When I finished it, I showed it to a publisher contact who passed. I was so depressed, I shelved the book, without showing it to anyone else. "Frantic" was still on my mind though. When I became a journalist a couple of years later and worked as a gossip columnist, I was compelled to write another draft. I regularly got up at the crack of dawn, and wrote before going to work, using the salvaged remains of my original manuscript as a guideline. I finished the revised version of "Frantic" very quickly and showed it to all the literary agents in London. After I finished decorating my walls with their rejection slips, I showed my 'masterpiece' to Pete Townshend of The Who - he was moonlighting as a literary editor for 'Faber & Faber' at the time. After he informed me that he recognised everybody in the book, I understood that although Life imitates Art, Art shouldn't strictly imitate Life when it comes to writing about your friends. Again, I shelved "Frantic", but it was still lingering in my brain.�� Copyright: Frances Lynn 2006��
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