Yesterday morning, over tea and seemingly out of the blue, my mother asked when am I going to write another novel.
“I think you miss it. I think I even miss it myself. So, when are you writing a new one?”
Which is, I’ll admit, a very good question. I have published three novels in Italy, and written a few more – but that was several years ago. Then I went back to my first writing love – theatre, and never looked back.
I love the constant quest for maximum effectiveness, the need to convey everything through dialogue and action, the effort of compressing a world, a century, an epoch in just the way people speak. I love to work with a company and write around their needs – likely the best way to learn what will or won’t work onstage. And most of all, I love to see my writing come to life on a stage, to be surprised at the new colours it acquires through other people’s interpretation of it, to sit in the dark house or backstage, and feel the audience react… Yes – writing for the stage is a complex form of happiness.
And yet…
And yet it may be that Mother is right. It may be that I miss novel-writing. The long and painstaking research, the complex planning and plotting, the long-term engagement with characters and setting, the broader scope, the large population, the room for character study, multiple plots and slow change… 
Writing a play is like opening a window. Writing a short story is jewellery-making. Writing a novel means to build a world – and it may be that I miss building worlds. Actually, the last few times I tried, it didn’t go entirely well. I have three half-finished first draft and one complete sleeping somewhere in my hard-disk. One of them I ransacked for the glimmering bits, which I then made into a monologue – a really good one, if I say so myself. I’ts unlikely that I’ll ever pick it up again. The other two, though… They are stories I like, with characters I like – and what I have written isn’t bad. Both still need a good deal of work, and each was set aside in favour of a play. On the face of it, my playwright self has swallowed the novelist whole…
And yet. I really, really do love playwriting to distraction – but lately I’ve been feeling a sort of homesickness for novel-writing. I want to try again. I miss the peculiar set of joys and sorrows of a novel-in-progress.
Isn’t it annoying, the way mothers tend to be always right?
There is this thing in Shakespeare’s Coriolanus – Act 3, Scene 2 – where the eponymous hero is dragged home by his friends after wrecking his campaign for Consulship.
This has little to do with history, books or theatre – though it is, in its own way, a story. I might stretch it, and say it has to do with communication – but the fact is, it’s a story without and ending (yet) and it baffles me. Now, you see, my mother is in her early seventies, quite smart, and in full possession of all her marbles. Also, she used to love technology and innovation, and grew up in a household of enthusiastic engineers and tinkerers.
