Life Is A Boat

I’ve always wanted to be a writer. What stopped me will be familiar to anyone who’s ever been there: kids, relationships, work, life. During my twenties and thirties we’d travelled sporadically as a family, and moving around always seemed to unlock the words. I’d come back from each trip with a notebook full of jottings only to grind to a halt, again. I decided in the end to stop trying so hard.

If I didn’t write anything significant whilst my children were young then that would be ok. I’d have plenty of time once they left home, after all.

I didn’t wait quite that long in the end, and it wasn’t really a conscious decision. The children were getting older, my marriage was breaking up, and these were important factors. But I think the boat also played its part. Even as a child, I’d wanted to try out different experiences. I wanted a name that people had to ask how to spell, yearned for a background that was different to the other kids in my class. Moving onto a boat satisfied something very deeply held. I still love saying it. Yes, I live on a boat!

I’ve been living on-board for ten years now, long enough to kind of forget what it’s like to live in a house with stairs and spare rooms and attic space. My boat is roughly the length and width of the strip in the middle of a cricket pitch, so there’s enough space to stretch out but not enough to get lost in. What you don’t have is doors to close, so there’s also not much hiding away.

When I say all of us, I mean me, my two kids (when they’re home), the two dogs and the two cats. My eldest girl is away at university, but she’s also pretty good at sharing space and not slamming doors. There are some doors, of course: one at each end and one for the bathroom. Otherwise, it’s open plan, with the living space leading into the bedroom spaces. All of us are used to rubbing shoulders and getting along.

Does the environment affect how I work? Well, I can’t shut myself away in a study with all of my papers and research materials to hand. I have a table at the end of my bed which has the wall in front of it, and this is useful for working without getting distracted by the outside. I also have a standing desk by the side hatch with a view of the towpath and the fields beyond, so I can stop and watch leaves falling, or pigeons landing or people going past with their dogs as I try to work out how to make the next sentence work.

People often ask me if I move the boat around. I don’t, as it happens. The kids need to get to ballet and Scouts and all the other activities they do, and I have work and life in between my role as their chauffeur. Sailing on a canal is a slow business, and doesn’t leave a lot of room for the everyday comings and going of a family. But staying in one place doesn’t take away possibilities: if I did want to move on, all I’d have to do is untie the ropes and set off. I like to think that my writing process is the same: open to the prospect of change. I said at the start of this that life had the tendency to get in the way of me writing. Well, life in all of its busyness is still there, but it doesn’t seem to matter as much. I’m sure the boating mentality has played a part in that.

My debut novel, The Summer of Secrets, is set along the banks of the canal where I live, and I’m not sure if I could have written it anywhere else. When I wanted to describe, for example, the way the water looks on a calm and windless day, I could just go to the kitchen window and watch it move.

When I get to an impasse, or when the dogs have decided that I’ve been sitting down for long enough, we go for a walk along the tow-path. Walking is a sure-fire way to get the words moving, and I think it’s inevitable that the environment around me feeds in to what I’m thinking about.

More specifically, I’ve taken places as actual settings in the book. Not in a terribly accurate way: a cottage here, a curve in the bank there, add a couple of locks and have someone fall in… I have no compunction about moving the landscape around to suit the needs of my plot.

One of my local friends says she can spot places, but then another recognises aspects of the canal near to where she lives, which is in another part of the country entirely. One of my early reviews mentions the way the canal becomes a metaphor for the way we move through life, and that’s exactly what I wanted it to be.

In this novel, the characters live by the canal and, though a boat is involved, they don’t have much contact with boat life itself. In my next novel, the view will be from aboard, and I’m looking forward to taking off with my characters as they travel on the waterways.

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Sarah Jasmon lives on a boat on the Leeds to Liverpool canal with
her children and assorted pets.

Find out more about Sarah on her website  www.sarahjasmon.com

Follow her on Twitter @sarahontheboat.

You can buy her debut novel The Summer of Secrets HERE

Tags: featured, summer of secrets, women writers

Category: On Writing