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A journal published in eight parts in the 28b newsletter, by fictional author K.D.

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IN SEARCH OF A STORY
- a journal in eight parts by KD -

1. Author

My name is K, and I’m a novelist. Recently, I began writing a murder-mystery called Looking for Headless. It’s the first long piece of fiction I’ve ever written, and over the next few weeks I’d like to share the experience of what it felt like to become a novelist.
It all began with The Da Vinci Code. I was reading it on a flight back to Gibraltar, where I live. ‘You could do this’, I told myself.

‘You could write this stuff!’

I was at that stage in my life. Heading towards middle age, with a stable job. A good job, in fact, but one that wasn’t going to get dramatically better, however hard I worked. I wanted something more from life.

Sound familiar? I bet! And I guess a lot of people also dream of writing fiction. There’s just something special about saying ‘I’m a novelist’. The idea that you can earn a living telling stories has a unique attraction. Being a writer is like being slightly different from everyone else.

Well, now I am a writer, sort of. But I have decided to take a short break from writing Looking for Headless. It’s been a fast, scary ride, and I wanted to look at where I am with the novel, and to take stock. In other words, I want to know what I’ve let myself in for.

I read all sorts of things, from Paulo Coelho to James Ellroy, from Isabel Allende to Patricia Cornwell. When it came to writing something of my own, a murder-mystery seemed like the most fun. It’s not every day you get the chance to kill someone! Plus, I thought I could get bookshops in Gibraltar to sell it, and I’d sign copies for colleagues and friends. I’d call it Murder on the Rock. Of course, this was when I was still working, when things were still normal.

So I made a start. A murder-mystery sounds easy. It’s a genre we’re all familiar with, whether it’s from movies or books or TV. But familiarity doesn’t necessarily mean writing one is a cinch. That blank page is a lot more daunting than I had imagined.

First off, you need a murder and a murderer. That’s how I started, anyway. I’ll have more to say about that in the following installments of this writing memoir. But to begin with, I want to describe what happened when I became a writer. Because that’s how it was, a seismic shift in the way I thought about myself.

To begin with I struggled with plot, character, and above all with the setting for my novel. But there was also a thrill to it, a secret, almost erotic charge to the process of looking down at the next blank page (OK, I use a MacBook, but you get the idea). Suddenly I was a writer, complete with a ‘work in progress’. I even did a couple of readings, my first taste of life as KD the author.

Then something happened. One of those readings was announced on the internet, a press release about author KD reading from her ‘work in progress’. I saw it one afternoon at work. The company I was working for, Sovereign Trust, is an off-shore management company. They set up and administer off-shore companies around the world. I was a service manager with Sovereign, administering secret companies for their owners, who for whatever reason (normally tax) didn’t want to sign contracts and other company papers in their own name.

When I read the press release I felt uncomfortable: ‘KD is writing a murder-mystery exploring the dark side of global finance.’ It made me look like I was working under-cover at Sovereign. I mean, off-shore doesn’t have the best reputation, and the press release made it look like I was someone who’d got ‘inside’ and was now writing a book about her experiences.

The problem was, it could easily have been true. My job gave me the perfect opportunity to observe a really secretive world, and one associated not only with tax evasion, but also money laundering, crime syndicates, the whole underbelly of global finance. Just by writing Looking for Headless I was putting my job at risk, as well as the hundreds of secretive companies I administered.

I realized that if a client saw the press release on the internet they might panic. My work depended on trust. If people can’t trust us to administer their business discretely and anonymously, they’ll fly. Happens all the time.

Throughout all this, I was trying to write. But I wasn’t happy with the setting for the novel, which was basically Spain and Gibraltar. Then one day I had a sort of artistic vision. I was in a swimming pool, resting on the side, my body floating in front of me. It was an outdoor pool, right next to the sea. The weather wasn’t great, but it didn’t matter because the pool was heated. And the water was sea water.

It might not sound like much. But that changed the course of my life. I closed my eyes, listening to the sound of the waves crashing nearby, as my body floated in the warm salt water. And I told myself: I could be anywhere. My head was full of murders and mysteries and crazy, half-assed plots. And it struck me that my two worlds had just collided. In fiction your world is just that: made-up. And so is the world of off-shore companies: you decide where you want your company to be registered. But it’s not there, not really. It’s nowhere, anywhere.

By the time I’d showered and dressed, I’d decided to hand-in my notice. Call me an idiot, but that’s just what I did. After working for so long in the murky world of off-shore finance, where frontiers don’t exist and companies are created at the snap of your fingers, I’d come to understand that my whole career had been spent inside a completely fictive world, where names are devised from thin air and locations mean nothing but the words on a page. I had lived and worked in a fiction, and I was going to turn that fiction into a work of art.

Over the course of these short essays, I’ll tell you how I went about it.

TAGS

performance,  goldin-senneby,  28b,  2008,  plan-of-readings,  in-search-of-a-story,  fiction,  to-document,  kd.

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