Digging out a Metaphor (Cecilia Peartree)
One advantage of not having watched a lot of television during the busier spells of my life is that when things became a lot less frantic there were some really good programmes I had never seen at the time when they were first aired. That's my excuse for having viewed all three series of 'Detectorists' several times over the past year. In case anyone reading this hasn't heard of 'Detectorists', I should mention that it's a (very) British comedy series. So it came about that, whereas I had sometimes been tempted to see my writing process as like that of a sculptor working on a huge lump of marble or some appropriate geological formation, whittling or carving or hammering away until the original source material had become the chosen shape, I realised that it was actually more similar to the way metal detectorists worked. Bear with me while I try to explain my reasoning. First there is the faint signal from the depths of the earth - or my mind, as the case may...