Waiting for rain, waiting for a baby, waiting for the right words for a novel. Writer Rym Kechacha asks what makes us want to grow a novel? And what do we do when the conditions are far less than perfect?

They’re saying it might be the worst drought for centuries and my garden is certainly suffering. The grass is dead, the leaves of my sapling fruit trees permanently wilted. The herbs and salad leaves long bolted, the tomatoes placidly green on the vine. I’m heavily pregnant with my second baby and people are sympathetic, ask me how I’m coping with the heat. I thank them and tell them that I’m fine, really; I’d rather talk about my garden. Or my novel in progress, which has been failing to progress at all for some months now.

I’m tending the garden the same way that I’m tending the half-finished manuscript of my novel, barely keeping it alive with the meagre resources I have. I fill exactly one watering can and make it last for the whole potato bed; I open my manuscript and read through all the bits I don’t like without so much as moving a comma in the text.

Every day I tell myself that I’ll save what I can, abandon what I can’t and start again in the autumn, after the baby’s come, after it rains. It’s natural, I tell myself, to have fallow periods. No soil yields all year round, everything needs a winter to retreat underground. I read and read and read and I like to think of myself like a patch of exhausted ground being sown with clover, all that goodness ready to be dug in and nourish the next crop.

The drought though, that feels unnatural. To feel the heat slam into your face when you leave the house, to see the horizon shimmering, to smell rotting rubbish and baked pavement and car exhaust in the still air makes my skin crawl with wrongness. The baby moves under my skin and I silently fear for the world she’s making her way into.

The summer wears on and there is apocalyptic heat but no rain. No writing either, but that feels less important. The summer wears on and the baby grows, restless in the early morning and late evening. The summer wears on and I get foggier and foggier, only just able to stumble through the most basic of tasks. Listlessly, I fill the watering can and empty it onto the few favoured plants. I will be able to write in the autumn, I keep telling myself. I will be able to think after the baby’s born. After it rains.

I don’t know why the rain feels tied to my creative life. I’ve read too much Jung, too many books about Tarot. I’m too pregnant, too exhausted of carrying all that slightly salty water inside me. Too sick of looking at the dead things in my garden, too tired of looking at my weather app, too worried about the news from elsewhere. The metaphors are obvious. But everything feels tied together, knots of a huge net that keeps me on one side, staring at life as I used to know it on the other.

On the night the baby’s born, it rains. I promise you, I lie on the bed with a tiny being in my arms, listening to the unfamiliar patter of water on the window, thinking that now, everything will be alright. The next morning, I stagger out of the hospital to a grey, drizzling sky and the smell of petrichor. August slinks out the door, perhaps knowing we’re all glad to see it go, and September breezes in all dense clouds and crunchy horse chestnut leaves.

The baby grows, her flesh stretching under her skin and the baby moves, wriggling as I change her nappy and gently splash her in the bath; and it rains at last. Long drenching storms that I listen to at night while the baby’s suckling. I don’t write. I cook and I load the washing machine and I hang out tiny clothes to dry. Mostly I walk to and from my toddler’s nursery with the baby in the sling and the air crisping around me and wonder if there is even any point at all in continuing with my manuscript when who knows what winter will bring and another menacing summer looming. Two small children, a perpetually stuffed laundry basket, a house that refuses to clean itself. A nation in disarray, a world mourning its losses with water, air and fire and me, stubbornly refusing to give up something that will make not a blind bit of difference.

It rains and rains and the metaphor shifts; now the world seems in the last flush of fertility before everything goes irrevocably wrong. First the leaves perk up, no longer drooping forlornly. Then the grass grows back, tiny emerald shoots peeking out above the dessicated deadness of the summer. One of my roses decides to have a last shot at the season and flowers again, the pink little buds dewy in the morning.

And I decide it’s time to write again, even though I still don’t know what the point of it all is. I put the baby in the sling, turn the to-do list over and shut the kitchen door on the humming of the washing machine. I open my manuscript. I see problems right away; I delete and highlight and make notes and I scroll down to where I left off all those parched months ago and I read the last sentences again. I hardly recognise them. The person who wrote them was someone else, the world I called them into was a different world. If I’m to carry on making this thing, I will need to stitch these old words to the new words welling in me and make the seam neat, as though the me of the thirsty times and the me of the wet, drizzly autumn have always been only one person.

On my chest, the baby snuffles in the sling. Outside, a jay rummages in the damp soil of the flowerbed. I turn my eyes to the screen and I start to type.

Bio

Rym Kechacha is a writer and teacher living in Norwich. Her debut novel, DARK RIVER was published in 2020 and shortlisted for two British Fantasy awards. Her second novel, TO CATCH A MOON, was published in 2022. You can find her on twitter @RymKechacha or at her website.

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