Story-Writing Similes (What DID I do to that plant?)

If someone asked you to give them a sense of what it is like to write a story, what would you say? How would you describe the creative process? If you were to use an allegory, what would it be?

As you will know if you've read this blog more than once, there are many idle questions bumbling in and out of my brain, but this is a recurring one (I don't quite know why. Navel-gazing, maybe? Writers are good at that) so I think they deserve a post. Here are a few of my own ideas:


Writing a story is like making a sculpture from a block of stone. You have a mass of ideas in your head, perhaps even on paper in the form of a chaotic first draft. This equates to the rugged block of marble with which Michelangelo stands face to face first thing on a Monday morning. He takes up his chisel; you take up your ballpoint pen. He chips, smooths and twizzles away at the rock until David materializes. You chip, smooth and twizzle away at your lump of words until your story stands revealed in all its splendour.

Writing a story is like embarking on an archaeological dig There are protuberances in the landscape of your mind that make you suspect there's a buried story there. You've even found the odd clue: characters, scenes and conversations have cropped up in your head the way coins, axe-heads and Anglo-Saxon belt-buckles sometimes do in lowly stretches of English farmland. You start digging, sifting and making sense of things. You dream that your story will be the literary equivalent of Sutton Hoo.

Writing a story is like growing a plant Just like a plant, a story needs to be nurtured over time; it can't be forced in the space of a few days. You need to let it take root in your mind and nourish it with lots of thought and reading. As someone who has inadvertently killed many plants and stories in her time, my advice would be to try and tread the thin line between excessive cherishing and vile neglect. A story that just won't come right, and seems to get worse the more you tinker and polish and fret, is as doomed as an over-watered pot of basil. Likewise, the story you can't really be bothered to write will end up friable, parched, moulting and brownish in colour. 

Writing a story is like getting to know someone Unless you're lucky enough to experience love at first sight, you and your story will probably start off as polite acquaintances. You might progress to friendship, you might not. You might decide that you really don't like each other and you never want to meet again, in which case you should scan the room for a new narrative plan (ooh yes, what about that one over by the bar, the one that looks like a cross between Mr. Rochester and Sherlock Holmes?) and move on. Once you've made your move and had a few coffees together it is to be hoped that you will fall in love. You may enjoy a calm, happy kind of relationship. You may experience periods of euphoria punctuated by the most appalling quarrels. Just as long as you're in love I'm not sure that it matters.

If anyone else has ways of thinking about what it's like to write a novel, please let me know. It's years since I had a collection (and my Worldwide Stamp Album was a bit of a non-starter anyway, what with my most far-flung correspondent living in Suffolk), so it would be nice to make one now. A Collection of Story Writing Similes. All donations welcome.

A Sense of Place (and some)

If you are looking for a masterclass in creating a sense of place, please can I strongly recommend Hannah Kent's debut novel, Burial Rites. (The only downside to this book is the look you get when someone says, "Ooh, what are you reading?" and you reply, "Oh..er...it's called Burial Rites." They shrink away with a funny expression and assume you're up to your ears in a gore-fest. But that's by the by.)

As a writer, it's taken me a while to grasp the importance of creating a strong sense of place. I've been through phases of thinking that a tight plot is what matters most, or flow, or theme, or characterisation, but for a long time 'sense of place' came low on my list.* I think I worried that it meant writing the kind of long, boring, descriptive passage that can be airlifted out of chapter three and dropped into the middle of chapter 56 without affecting the story one way or another. Is there anything more tedious than a book which begins :"The manufacturing town of X lay in a long valley in the county of Y, twelve miles from the city of Z with which it was connected by a road and a railway. In the year in which our story opens, the population exceeded twenty thousand...."?  Is there anything more mind-numbing than an exhaustive description of the layout of a house, which will probably be crucial to the plot (because if you're not 100% sure that the library is the second room on the left as you come down the stairs and therefore adjacent to the dining room and opposite the parlour, then how can you possibly visualise Cecily hiding behind the door in the music room with a perfect view of the hall mirror, in which she will witness Albert and Gertrude kiss/conspire/cudgel one another?), but which you just can't (be bothered to) picture in your mind's eye.  

Hannah Kent does not indulge in this kind of information-dump-disguised-as-descriptive-passage. The place where she has set her fact-based novel - 1820s Iceland - is not an add-on to be hurried through in an opening chapter before the actual story can begin. (The opening sentence is, "They said I must die", which a lot more arresting and novelistic than any topographical fact, even one that concerns a country as exciting as Iceland.) Sense of Place weaves in and out of Burial Rites like a black thread in a sombre tapestry. Sometimes Hannah Kent's Iceland becomes the story; sometimes it is a character in its own right; always it sets the grim, haunting and oddly humane tone. It is never inert; never a flat backdrop. Without the mists, the snows, the howling winds, the smell of the sea, and the crouching farm buildings, the progress of the seasons and the rituals of the farming year, there wouldn't be a novel.

I wish I could create such a strong and pervasive fictional place. This is a truly inspirational book. Here's a taste:

     "I'm not sure why I opened the door to look outside. I suppose I was curious. But some strange compulsion took me and I unlocked the latch to peek out at the weather.
     It was an evil sight. Dark clouds bore down upon the mountain range and under their smoky-blackness, a grey swarm of snow swirled as far as you could see. The wind was fierce, and a great icy gust of it suddenly blew against the door so hard that it knocked me off my feet. The candle on the corridor wall went out in an instant, and from within the croft Bjorn shouted what the Devil I thought I was doing, letting the blizzard into his home.
     I heaved against the door to shut it, but the wind was too strong. My hands stiffened with the cold rush of air. It was as though the wind was some form of ghoul demanding to enter. Then, all of a sudden, the wind dropped, and the door slammed shut. As though the spirit had finally entered and closed the door behind it."

  

* As for whether it's intelligent to think of such things in terms of hierarchies, that's another question, to which I'm pretty certain the answer is 'No'.

'Why I do what I do' Blog Tour

It's always a good idea to stop what you're doing from time to time and ask yourself why on earth you're doing it, so I'm really grateful to Heidi Chandler for inviting me on this blog tour. Heidi is a busy mother and writer, whose first book, Holding Avery: A Memoir was published by MP Publishing in 2014. Please take a look at her fabulous website here:  http://heidichandler.com/



So why do I do what I do?

(i.e. for the purposes of this blog tour, write). I was mulling it over from behind a pile of clean laundry this afternoon and got so absorbed by possible answers that I practically welded a tea towel to the ironing board. This is a boundless question. If I gave my inner-narcissist free reign I could spend the rest of my life musing about why I write, but for the sake of everyone's sanity, not least my own, I will try to be concise.



Hmm....Where was I?

I write to escape...

When I was a kid I loved reading books because they provided me with places to run away, hide and have adventures. When Lucy opens the wardrobe door onto Narnia, it always seems to me that symbolically she is opening the front cover of a story book. When you open up a book you are opening a door onto another world, and when you step inside you do so knowing that anything might happen. If that's what a book is - a door into another world - then how could I not want to write one?

By the way, when I say that as a kid I wanted to 'run away' and 'hide' I don't mean that I was unhappy in the real world. Not at all - I grew up in a wonderful family and I had a wonderful childhood. But I was very shy, and interacting with the real world was sometimes an effort, especially during my teens. That's where fictional characters came into their own for me: I could love them, hate them, know them, be them, through and through, even if I could only raise a unsmiling little mumble in my dealings with actual flesh-and-blood people. I bet a lot of writers were once introverted children in need of sanctuary, who became addicted to the kind of companionship that only fictional characters can provide.


But I also write to communicate...

Yes, okay, it's fine for a shy child to seek refuge in her imagination. But if being a writer means spending your entire life in flight from reality, isn't that...well...a bit sad?

Ah, but you see, the moment I start turning my internal world into prose, it means I want to connect with other people. I may not necessarily realise that that's what I want, but it is. Fourteen year old Elizabeth may think that she would die a thousand deaths before she ever, ever, ever let anyone read her diary, but if that's really true then why is she writing it? Doesn't she actually fantasise about a kindred spirit discovering it, and reading it, and understanding her like nobody's ever understood her before...?

When I talk about exploring other worlds, I don't necessarily mean Fantasy Worlds with a capital F and a capital W.  All stories take you to a new world, even if they're set in your own home town among the kind of people you meet every day. The mind of a made-up character is as much another world as Narnia or Hogwarts, and fictional minds are the only kind of minds a writer can explore unreservedly, without fear that she might be trespassing or looking at things the wrong way. I couldn't turn a real person's mind inside out and shake it all about - it wouldn't feasible or morally right - but I can do it to a fictional character.

In other words, when I write I want to engage with my fictional creations at as a deep a level as possible, and then communicate what I find to other people. For me, that sums up the thrill of writing, and I hope it explains why I do what I do. It's a start, anyway.

Or, to put it more succinctly...

The psychologist D.W. Winnacott wrote that there is a conflict in most writers between two needs:

"The urgent desire to communicate, and the still more urgent need not to be found."

Now it's my turn to pass the baton on, and I would like to nominate Marguerite Madden to write about why she does what she does. Please take a look at her fantastic (musical!) website here: http://margueritemarkiemadden.simplesite.com/411391806

Marguerite Madden (Markie to friends and family) was born on August 19, 1975, in Midland, Texas. She married in 1994, and has two daughters.

In 2012, Markie published her first book, Once Upon a Western Way for e-reader platforms such as Nook, iPhone and Kobo.

The following year Markie was diagnosed with leukemia (AML), and was hospitalized far from home for treatment. During this time, she reconnected with Denise (Mercer) Blackwell, an old friend from high school who is also a published author who convinced her to publish in print and for Kindle e-readers through a web-based service called Create Space. Her book, Keeping a Backyard Horse, went live for print on September 1, 2014.

Markie is currently a member of an online writer's group called Scribophile, a group of writers dedicated to helping one another to improve their work.

The Work in Progress (WIP) Blog Tour

I'm delighted to have been invited to join the "Work in Progress" blog tour by my friend and fellow author, Colleen Story. Colleen is a prize-winning author of novels, poems, short-stories, and she also writes articles and research-papers specializing in health and wellness. Colleen writes speculative fiction in both the young adult and adult literary genres. Her fantasy novel, Rise of the Sidenah, is forthcoming in 2014 from Jupiter Gardens Press (under the pen name “C. Shay Ryander”) and her literary novel, Loreena’s Gift, is forthcoming from Dzanc Books in August 2015. She is also the founder of Writing and Wellness, a robust informational blog with author features and articles on topics like staying healthy while writing, finding your own voice, and managing the ups and downs of a writer’s life. You can read her WIP post (including some good advice on self-belief from Rocky III) here:
http://www.writingandwellness.com/2014/09/16/facing-the-truth-about-your-wip-advice-from-rocky-iii/

The rules of the WIP blog tour are as follows: provide the link back to the post by the person who nominated you, write a little about and give the first sentences of the first three chapters of your current WIP, then nominate four other writers to do the same.

So, here we go: The Weir House was supposed to be a short story but it grew into an historical/time-slip novel for adults and the current draft stands at about 80,000 words. The Weir House is the story of two Victorian sisters as they struggle to break free from their father's oppressive household, and the woman who is haunted by their story over a century later. The two parts of the novel - Victorian melodrama and twentieth-century ghost story - weave in and out of one another throughout the book.

Here are the first sentences from the first three chapters:

Chapter 1: The front door slammed shut with such violence that the frame quivered, and the whole house with it. Maria lifted her face to the rain, astounded by her own resolve.

Chapter 2: It was just like Bea to take the heat-wave personally. It might have consoled her to know that the rest of England was suffering too, but Bea never bothered with TV and she didn't think of it like that.

Chapter 3: Mrs. Betsy Fleet arrived at the Weir House by stealth. She sent the driver to the front door with her luggage, while she stole up the cobbled lane, between high walls and lime trees, to the garden gate.

I'm nominating the following amazing writers to reveal their WIPs:

Kerri Cuevas http://www.kerricuevasbooks.com/
Heidi Chandler http://heidichandler.com/
Aviva Orr http://www.avivaorr.com/
Rakie Keig http://rakiekeig.blogspot.com/

Please take some time to look at their websites, blogs and books!

 

Two and a half days in Berlin (July 30th-August 2nd, 2014)

If someone challenged me to set a novel in an unfamiliar city of my choice, and then paid for me to live in said city for a year or two while I conducted my research (a less than likely scenario, but such is the aspiring-writer's fantasy life), then I might well choose Berlin. You don't need to be there for many hours, or delve too deeply, to be aware of the bruising it's had from the hands of history - twentieth century history in particular. Look, for example, at the books available in English at the Berlin Historiale Museum shop: Goodbye to Berlin by Christopher Isherwood, Alone in Berlin by Hans Fallada, A Woman in Berlin April-June 1945 by an anonymous diarist, The Spy Who Came In From The Cold by John le Carré, A biography of Eva Braun, several accounts of Hitler's final days...all very different books, I know, but you must admit they have a certain hard-boiled quality in common. There's a definite lack of rom-com.

On our first afternoon we went on an open top bus tour round all the classic sights: the Reichstag, the Brandenburg gate, Checkpoint Charlie etc. We'd been negotiating airports since six o'clock, which is why I kept nodding off and jolting awake as the bus trundled with a soporific sort of sway through the July streets. As a result my initial impressions were broad-brush, rather startled and almost entirely lacking in factual information. "My impressions of the city after being here four hours or so," I reported dozily to my diary later on. "Heavy & megalithic rather than charming or pretty, still a strong sense of Damage despite (or because of) all the new, shiny buildings. Painfully steeped in history, so many resonant names (Potsdamer Platz, Unter den Linden, Spandau, Wannsee...), resonant buildings, resonant gaps between buildings, resonant ruins. There was a clap of thunder at one point. The bells in the bomb-damaged Gedächtniskirche rang at half-five sounding deep and mournful (I was going to say resonant again but think I need a new word)."

Queen Sophie Charlotte and her interesting chin

When we visited the Charlottenburg palace a couple of days later it was a relief to leave the twentieth century for a while. (I don't suppose the eighteenth century felt particularly innocent for the people who lived in it but it looks that way from a 2014 perspective, for obvious reasons). As a fan of stories and a foe of Information Boards, I do like to have a good audio-guide pressed to my ear when I'm traipsing round a palace, and the Charlottenburg palace audio-guides were really, really engaging. I've just consulted my diary to see what choice pieces of historical information I might share as a result but, aside from a long gush about the quality of the audio-guide, the only pertinent reflection I seem to have made is this: "Queen Sophie Charlotte was considered a great beauty in her day and she does in fact have a pleasant and kindly face, but she also has a big, fat double-chin. Isn't it funny (as in 'interesting') that a chubby face was considered the height of beauty in the 1700s?"

Our Isherwood-esque sitting-room

I am not usually organised enough to read location-specific books when I'm on holiday, but on this occasion I bought a copy of Goodbye to Berlin at the aforementioned museum shop. I had difficulty choosing between that and A Woman in Berlin, but after running my eye over the contents page I plumped for Isherwood because his protagonist's journey from Berlin to Ruegen Island mirrored, rather eerily, our own plans. And it wasn't just the chapter headings that chimed with our holiday. Goodbye to Berlin opens with a description of the narrator's lodgings in an apartment block on a "deep, solemn, massive street," rather like the one we'd rented above a bakery on Windscheidstrasse. We too had a "tall tiled stove, gorgeously coloured, like an altar" in the corner of our bedroom. I kept looking up from the page and feeling a frisson along my spine at the thought that this room had existed (and probably looked much the same) in Christopher Isherwood's day, and inevitably this led me to wonder who had lived here over the last hundred years or so, while Berlin was the epicentre of world history, and what they'd seen and done and undergone.

I'm glad we stayed in that characterful flat and not a could-be-anywhere-in-the-world hotel. It was kitted out with all sorts of odds and ends of furniture - some antique, some plain, some just strange (the non-functioning Bakelite television). Its proportions were big-going-on-majestic compared to most modern flats, as were the double doors that led from room to room, and the ornate mouldings on the ceiling, but there was a vertiginous flight of stairs inside the bathroom door, which made me a bit uneasy about nocturnal trips to the loo, and the walls were papered with woodchip.

The Toothpick

We had both children with us, aged 7 and 10, so while I may have given the impression that I wandered round Berlin ruminating about the eighteenth century feminine ideal and existential questions arising from the Cold War, I spent much more time nagging the kids to eat up their bratwurst and go to the toilet even if they don't feel like it because there won't be any toilets on the bus. My memory of the first full day, which official records state was spent at the Berlin Historiale museum, the Friederichshain park and the DDR museum, was actually spent luring our ten year old out of a very bad mood. First thing in the morning, you see, we'd persuaded her not to squander 18 Euros of her limited pocket money on a whoppingly over-priced  I love Berlin T-Shirt. "We will find a cheaper one somewhere else," we told her, "and you will thank us then". For the next five hours or so (until, at long last, we were vindicated) Berlin passed her by in a dismal blur as the desirability of that relinquished T-Shirt swelled to mythological proportions.Why even try to have fun when you're lumbered for life with bossy, spendthrift, kill-joy parents? Meanwhile the seven year old had forked out 9 Euros on a toy tram and was desperate to get back to the flat so he could run it around on the floor.
Me: Look, that's the television tower, the tallest structure in Germany!
S: Mmm. Can we go back now?
Me: 368 metres high. Wow. It's nicknamed 'the Toothpick.'
S: You do still have my tram safe in your handbag, don't you? Can I just look at it for a teensy second?

The Dead Hand of Recommendation

In my last post I concluded by raving about Michelle Paver's Dark Matter, and that got me thinking about the problems that come with recommending books. What problems? I hear you say - probably because you have a life to lead and don't allow yourself to get unduly disturbed by life's lesser paradoxes.

Nevertheless, I can't be the only person in the world to have noticed that a gushing book recommendation nearly always results in disappointment. Even if the book in question is good, a teensy bit of frustration seems all-but-inevitable, especially if you're a gullible type who's liable to take other people's effusions very literally. "Your life will never be the same after reading this book", affirms the Arts & Books section of the Saturday paper, so I go to extraordinary lengths to obtain said book and turn to page one with palpitating heart, bidding a fond farewell to my old life as I do so, only to emerge two hundred and forty seven pages later feeling a little flat and thinking "...oh."

On the other hand, being in love with a book is like being in love with a person: cautious language feels pathetic and cold and altogether inadequate. You don't want to say "Hmm..." when you're really thinking, "Yes! Yes! Yes!" so you don't - can't - hold back in your praise. Phrases like "eye-poppingly, mind-bogglingly stupendous" suddenly seem quite tame, and as a result your inflamed listener goes to extraordinary lengths to obtain said book and turns to page one with palpitating heart, bidding a fond farewell to their old lives as they do so, only to emerge two hundred and forty seven pages later feeling a little flat and thinking "...oh."

I suppose there are worse things to lie awake fretting over.

Of Ghoulies and Ghosties

It's not really the time of year for ghost stories, but I was given a couple of spine-tinglers for my birthday and hadn't the patience to wait for the requisite long winter nights and crackling fires. Anyway, I need to read ghost stories for 'research purposes', because I am in the middle of writing one.

'Research' is such a pompous word to describe something as fun as reading ghost stories that I almost (almost) feel like a fraud for deploying it. Therefore, just to prove that I have actually been working extremely hard, even when it looked as though I was lying on a picnic rug in a semi-comatose state with a paperback over my face, I hereby present my findings:

The first of the two was This House is Haunted by John Boyne, which is a traditional ghost story set in the nineteenth century, involving all the creepy Victorian fandangles you could possibly desire, including a big, sinister house and some small, sinister children. Personally I would have gone for a more enigmatic title if I was John Boyne, but then again you can't accuse this book of failing to do exactly what it says on the tin. Once our plucky heroine (the new governess, naturellement) has reached Gaudlin Hall, barely a page is allowed to go by without one supernatural shock or another: locked windows fly open, possessed dogs rampage, yokels dispense dire warnings right, left and centre, and ghostly hands try in vain to shove our heroine underneath various forms of moving vehicle, from steam trains to horse-drawn milk floats. I kept imagining a manic, over-caffeinated editor waving the manuscript in the author's face and screeching, "I want to see more action, John! More cliché!You can't have enough cliché!"

In all fairness, the story itself was strong and the whole thing rollicked along pleasurably enough. You will recall, however, that I was not reading it for pleasure but for serious research purposes, and this being the case I feel duty-bound to report the following observations:

a) For the sake of Atmosphere, Flash-Bang-Wallop should be applied sparingly. The best (most menacing) chapter of This House is Haunted was the first one, where newspapers rustled at a gloomy breakfast-table in London and fog swirled abundantly, but nothing awful actually happened.

b) Cliché is a big, big problem for ghostly fiction because, for once, the zero-tolerance approach doesn't work. There must be darkness and a place (yes, it's usually going to be an old, large house) where bad things have happened, and there has to be a protagonist who starts out as an innocent rationalist and ends up changed (i.e.a complete nervous wreck, or dead). There have to be bumps in the night and things half-seen and half-heard...otherwise it's not a ghost story. But how do you stop these fundamentals tipping over into pastiche? (It's a genuine question; I'm not writing as one-who-knows.)There's not much middle-ground between chilling and funny. Take a typical passage from This House is Haunted, and see if you can read it without coming over all Hammer Horror:

"'I'm sure I'll be back often,' I told her.'I'm the new governess at Gaudlin Hall so I expect I will be in and out of the village on a regular basis.'
The moment I said this, the tea cup slipped out of her hands and fell to the floor, smashing into a dozen or more pieces.
'Oh dear,' I said, looking down at it. 'I hope it wasn't valuable.'
Molly, however, was not looking at the broken cup but staring at me instead with a ghastly expression on her face."

In a funny sort of way I love it, but funny is the operative word and it means I'm not scared.

I cannot over-emphasise how enjoyably menaced I was by the second item in my 'research programme', however. I didn't chortle my way through this one, I can tell you. Aside from two snoring kids and a couple of guinea-pigs, I was alone in the house on the night I started reading, and the atmospherics all got a bit much - I had to put it down and read something frivolous instead.

Dark Matter, by Michelle Paver, is set in the 1930s during a long, arctic winter on the island of Svalbard. It's a pretty straightforward story about a scientific researcher enduring months of total darkness on his own after his colleagues abandon him, one after the other, for sinister-yet-plausible reasons. I could outline the entire plot for you in one, short paragraph (don't worry, I wouldn't be such a spoil-sport), but I find it much harder to analyse than the John Boyne novel partly, I suppose, because it's easier to be snide about clunky writing than to understand the workings of something seamlessly brilliant. Anyway, for what they're worth, here are a few thoughts:

a) Dark Matter manages to be classic and original in the same breathe. All the essential components of the ghost story are present and correct, and yet they're given a twist - so for example the creaky haunted house becomes the research station on the bay at Longyearbyen, and the requisite dark palette is provided (in spades) by the arctic winter itself.

b) Atmosphere reigns supreme. Hints are dropped, suspicions are formed, things are glimpsed, but nothing definite happens for quite a long time. It's all about ratcheting up the tension to the nth degree.

c) Place and story are inextricably woven together, so that terror of the ghost and terror of the arctic landscape merge and become the same thing. Michelle Paver's ghost isn't some eccentric apparition wandering around an old house and saying 'Boo' for it's own amusement, it is an integral - even a metaphorical - part of the remorseless winter that Jack endures. I think that's what gives this book such depth. As the days on Svalbard got shorter and shorter, and the darkness started closing in on Jack, I wasn't sure whether I felt claustrophobic for supernatural or non-supernatural reasons (or, indeed, whether that distinction makes much sense. Is it rational or irrational to fear darkness and solitude?)

I'm going to end this post by quoting a passage from Dark Matter, in which Jack records seeing the sun for the very last time before the winter sets in for good:

"Twilight. Behind the bird cliffs, the red glow of dawn, but to the west it was night: the cold glimmer of stars. The black bones of the mountains jutted through the snow. On the shore, the whale ribs glinted with frost, and the rocks sloping down to the sea were white and smooth. The water was dark purple, vivid and strange.
Because of the cliffs, we couldn't see much. We saw the sky turn bloody and inflamed as the sun struggled to rise. We saw a sliver of fire. An abortive dawn. The sun sank back, defeated.
Gone."

Right I'm off to find some more 'research'. Gosh, I'm such a grafter, it can't be healthy. I ought put my feet up for a bit instead and relax with a good book.



A Cross-Cultural Exchange

Just now, whilst writing one of the Victorian chapters of my novel, I had an odd experience. I had just positioned my hero in an arm chair, his would-be lady-love standing beside him, when I found myself writing the following sentence: He wrapped his arm around her as he spoke, so that she couldn't move her legs to reach the carafe.

As I read the sentence over I felt a frisson of absolutely genuine horror and thought to myself, Good heavens! What kind of a book is this? You can't go mentioning a woman's...lower limbs...just like that! It's positively obscene! A moment later I came to myself and remembered that twenty-first century folk are used to the idea of women having legs, even to the point of accepting that nineteenth century women had them too, and that my lewd reference was unlikely to cause widespread offence.

I waver between two possible conclusions. On the one hand I may, deep down, be much more seriously repressed than anyone ever knew. On the other hand (and this is obviously my preferred option) maybe, for approximately two seconds of my life, I was mysteriously transmogrified into an actual, real-life Victorian writer with an actual, real-life horror of...you know...female perambulatory equipment.

June 19th - I had only got as far as the top of the stairs when...

Alexis Smith as Marian in The Woman in White, 1948

I've been thinking about diaries again: fictional ones, real ones and the ones the fall somewhere in between.

It's partly because I'm at the very, very, earliest stage of a new novel - the vaguely planning to plan a vague plan stage* - and I'm wondering whether to do it (or part of it) in diary form.

I can think of plenty of upsides to writing a fictionalised diary. There's the intimacy of looking over the narrator's shoulder as she sits there, hunched up in bed in her pyjamas, scribbling away. There's the excitement of feeling that the story is happening now; that the narrator is never more than a couple of steps ahead of the reader. There's the way the diarist's perspective is severely limited to the here, the now and the personal - i.e. you can't use retrospective or omniscient wisdom to colour in character and events - which seems to me like a helpful discipline when you're looking to tell a story economically and well.

The main downside of the fictionalised diary (that I can think of) is its artificiality, especially if it's part of a very plot-driven novel. Whilst writing this post I've been flipping through my old copy of The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins. I have such fond memories of reading it aged 15, and in particular the severe diary-envy I suffered whilst reading the melodramatic section that is Marian Halcombe's journal. How come Marian's journal had such a strong narrative drive? How come mine just drifted about from non-event to non-event?  Here is one of Marian's typical daily offerings:

June 19th - I had only got as far as the top of the stairs when the locking of Laura's door suggested to me the precaution of also locking my own door, and keeping the key safely about me while I was out of the room. My journal was already secured with other papers in the table drawer, but my writing materials were left out. These included a seal, bearing the common device of two doves drinking out of the same cup, and some sheets of blotting paper, which had the impression on them of the closing lines of my writing in these pages traced during the past night. Distorted by the suspicion which had now become a part of myself, even such trifles as these looked too dangerous to be trusted without a guard....  

 

As diaries go, it's a far cry from Got up, had breakfast... I was convinced that the fault lay with me and my capacity for writing the wrong bits of life down. Only later on did it dawn on me that Marian Halcombe's diary is A Literary Device.

 

In times of great crisis - when, say, you're urgently trying to work out how to rescue your sister from a lunatic asylum where she's been consigned by her evil husband, having been forced to swap identities with a dead woman to whom she bears an uncanny but as yet unexplained resemblance - are you likely to sit down at regular intervals to write a detailed literary account of everything that's going on, including verbatim accounts of lengthy conversations that will, though you don't know it yet, turn out to be profoundly significant? Are you going to be able to select the details that are relevant to your story and edit out those that aren't, even as they're happening? How do you know that the fact Sir Percival paced uneasily round the drawing room after breakfast is highly suspicious, but the fact he had an extra glass of wine last night is not worth mentioning?

So that's the artificiality problem. But does it matter? It doesn't spoil The Woman in White for me, not even now I'm grown-up and more attuned to such things.

Yes, but just because you can shrug it off in a Victorian novel doesn't mean it wouldn't irritate in a twenty-first century one...

Then again, all fiction is selective and artificial by definition, so why should a melodramatic diary be particularly problematic?

I don't (in case you hadn't guessed) know. But it's the sort of thing I have fun thinking about.


*I love that stage of planning, when absolutely anything is an option and maybe, just maybe, this novel is going to be the next War and Peace. Well, why not? It isn't until I start getting tangible words down onto tangible bits of paper that I come back down to earth with a bump.

Gorgeous George Gissing

My latest pin-up.

I think I've found him: the male Victorian novelist who can write female heroines. It's such a relief. I've had a Dickens-shaped bee in my bonnet ever since writing that post on 6th February (The Visible Woman). I hope I'm not an essentially unforgiving person, but I find it difficult to overlook Dickens's saintly child-women on the grounds that he was a terrific story-teller, humanitarian, Genius...etc, etc. I mean, can any of that actually excuse the existence of Agnes Wakefield, "ever pointing upward...ever leading me to something better; ever directing me to higher things"? Ever making me wish I'd never got up today. Ever making me reach for the bottle. And if that's what a woman ought to be, according to the most incisive chronicler of the age...

Then along comes George Gissing and single-handedly rehabilitates Nineteenth Century Man. Well done, George. Granted he was forty-five years younger than Dickens, but he died in 1903 which makes him a bona fide Victorian gent in my book. Please, if you haven't already, read The Odd Women (how can you could resist the title?) and New Grub Street and the zillion others I haven't got round to reading yet. Gissing's women are wonderful. They can defy their fathers, abandon their husbands, even declare themselves as out-and-out feminists, and still retain moral complexity. Yes! I know! Can you imagine how Dickens would have dealt with a woman who leaves her husband for financial reasons and then (once he's dead) pilfers her own cousin's fiancé? Or an unashamedly intellectual single woman, bitterly opposed to the institution of marriage, who falls in love with but ultimately turns down our handsome hero? They'd be cardboard cut-outs, and as readers we would be expected to unite with Dickens in amused disapproval. Disapproval doesn't come into it for Gorgeous George, he just presents his readers with ordinary, complicated people and stands back without comment. I like that kind of modesty in a novelist.

By the by, his biography (or the little I've gleaned of it from Wikipedia) suggests to me he was a loveable chap. Maybe my criteria for lovability are a bit skewed, but this paragraph in particular made me want to hug him. See what you think:

"Gissing's academic career ended in disgrace when he fell in love with a young orphan prostitute, Marianne Helen Harrison, known as Nell. He gave her money in an attempt to keep her off the streets and when funds ran short he stole from his fellow students. The college hired a detective to investigate the thefts, and Gissing was prosecuted, found guilty, expelled, and sentenced to a month's hard labour in Belle Vue Gaol, Manchester in 1876."

Oh George.

What to Read when the Weather's Draughty-Dampish

Castletown (IoM) gets a hammering at New Year

I find it funny, and a little bit sad, how my attitude to stormy weather has diluted over the years. When I was a teenager, storms were pure Romance. My bedroom was in the attic (very nearly a genuine artist's garret, if only my parents hadn't been so prosaic as to insist upon central heating and a wall-to-wall carpet) and there was nothing I liked better than a good gale thrashing through the garden, whistling round the eaves and chucking rain at my Velux window. It never crossed my mind to worry about storm damage; that was mum and dad's problem. I was too busy feeling snug under my duvet and channelling the spirit of Emily Bronte.

But now, when the wind is sweeping off the Irish sea of a February night, it isn't Heathcliff and Cathy who spring to mind so much as the wheelie bin (what if it takes flight, lands in the middle of the road and causes a major pile up?); the garden fence (ditto); the roof (will it even be there in the morning?) and so on. So far we've been lucky: a fence panel fell over and three tiles blew off the roof, but nobody died and the house is still standing. It must be frightening and deeply depressing to have your home flooded or otherwise wrecked, and my heart goes out to people living in the Somerset levels and elsewhere, who are experiencing just that. Any lingering feeling for the allure of stormy weather would be extinguished forever, I should imagine, in the heart of anyone who's watched their prized possessions floating round the sitting room in a stinky, brown soup. Heathcliff himself would be yearning for a getaway break to the Med.

So I feel slightly embarrassed to be gushing about this beautiful Ted Hughes poem, Wind, which I discovered in an anthology the other day. The glamour of a gale is perhaps better appreciated when your chimney stack is not flinging itself across the garden. But I'm going to copy it out anyway. If the thought of celebrating bad weather is just too grating, and you can't afford a foreign holiday, can I recommend you read The Enchanted April by Elizabeth von Arnim instead? It's one of the most cheering books ever written. That moment when Lottie Wilkins opens the shutters on her first morning in Italy...I defy you not to feel real, live sunshine on your skin. It's much less hassle than a holiday, and you can read it in your wellies.

Anyway. That Ted Hughes poem...

Wind by Ted Hughes

This house has been far out at sea all night,
The woods crashing through darkness, the booming hills,
Winds stampeding the fields under the window
Floundering black astride and blinding wet

Till day rose; then under an orange sky
The hills had new places, and wind wielded
Blade-light, luminous black and emerald,
Flexing like the lens of a mad eye.

At noon I scaled along the house-side as far as
The coal-house door. Once I looked up -
Through the brunt wind that dented the balls of my eyes
The tent of the hills drummed and strained its guyrope,

The fields quivering, the skyline a grimace,
At any second to bang and vanish with a flap;
The wind flung a magpie away and a black-
Back gull bent like an iron bar slowly. The house

Rang like some fine green goblet in the note
That any second would shatter it. Now deep
In chairs, in front of the great fire, we grip
Our hearts and cannot entertain book, thought,

Or each other. We watch the fire blazing,
And feel the roots of the house move, but sit on,
Seeing the window tremble to come in,
Hearing the stones cry out under the horizons.

The Visible Woman

The reason I blogged about Nobles Park last month was because I was thinking about the relationship between walking and writing, and the reason I was thinking about the relationship between walking and writing was because I'd just finished reading Charles Dickens and the Great Theatre of the World, which is a novelishly good biography of the great man by Simon Callow. (It might also explain why I've started writing interminably long sentences, containing interminable numbers of clauses, which is a dubious tendency even if you do happen to be Charles Dickens.) Anyway, the point is that Dickens not only wrote a lot; he also walked a lot. And I don't mean half hour rambles. 'Going for a walk' in Dickens-speak means pounding the streets of London for a minimum of three hours a day at an average pace of 4mph. And he did it because it nourished his writing. "It was," writes Simon Callow, "one of Dickens's maxims that a given amount of mental exertion should be counteracted by a commensurate amount of bodily fatigue...As he marched through the great metropolis, he drew energy from its energy and his absorption of its life replenished him."

The divine Mary Hogarth

Which is all well and good, only as I read I couldn't help wishing that Dickens had done a little less walking and put in a bit more time with his wife. I know you shouldn't judge other people's marriages, and I know Victorian women didn't lead the most dynamic lives at the best of times, but Catherine Dickens does seem to have put up with one hell of a lot. Not least bearing ten children to a man whose ideal woman was a virginal adolescent with angel's wings more or less sprouting from her shoulder-blades. As if such a generalised ideal weren't tiresome enough, Dickens had a specific tendresse for Catherine's very own younger sister, Mary Hogarth, who died aged seventeen, "the age at which for him a woman was at her most perfect: she never grew fat, dull, tired, tedious." Mary appeared in novel after novel (think Agnes Wicklow in David Copperfield, Rose Maylie in Oliver Twist, Amy Dorrit in Little Dorrit): ever youthful, attractive, gentle, pure...ever aggravating.



Catherine Dickens in 1852

So there's Catherine, in futile competition with one dead sister and another live one (Georgy, who came to live with the Dickenses at the age of sixteen, when Catherine was a mother of four heading into her thirties...) Dickens's genius - as generous and imaginative as it was in its effects on society at large - monopolised the lives of his family, especially his wife. Everything he did - from walking, to writing, to campaigning on behalf of the disadvantaged, to fathering children - he did with a sort of manic excess. No doubt he was an exhilarating friend, acquaintance or patron but he must have made an oppressive husband. I felt depressed on Catherine's behalf as she trudged stoically through life in his wake, putting up with his eccentricities and his massive popularity whilst bearing children right, left and centre. Finally, after twenty-two years of marriage, Dickens abandoned her in favour of eighteen year old Ellen Ternan.

Catherine doesn't seem to have interested biographers or historical novelists*, any more than she interested her husband. I suppose the bare bones of her story - from pretty and loved to old and unloved - is not exactly rom-com material. I see there's a new film about Ellen Ternan called The Invisible Woman, based on the biography by Claire Tomalin. I'm sure it will be fascinating - of course it will, the clue's in the title. Much better (in film and literature, if not in life) to be The Invisible Woman. All that sexy mystique. But you have to feel for Catherine. After all, somebody had to play the thankless role of Dickens's All-Too-Visible-Wife. I hope someone writes a sympathetic account of her life some time soon, if only on the basis that visible lives are every bit as mysterious as invisible ones.  

* With the exception of Lillian Nayder. The Other Dickens : a life of Catherine Hogarth was the only item of Catherine Dickens literature I could find.

A Walk in the Park

"I prefer winter and Fall, when you feel the bone structure of the landscape — the loneliness of it, the dead feeling of winter. Something waits beneath it, the whole story doesn't show." ~Andrew Wyeth

I don't suppose Nobles Park in Douglas would make it onto anybody's list of Most Inspirational Manx Walks; not with all those glens and coastal paths to compete with. Nevertheless, it's only a couple of minutes away from school and I often amble round before collecting the children at half three. For all it's municipal feel, I love it, especially in winter. In winter it has that expectant feel that Andrew Wyeth is talking about; it makes me feel as though I'm on the brink of writing something brilliant. (Plus it gets busy in summer and you can't stare into space with the same lack of self-consciousness for fear of tripping over a toddler or a bevy of bikers.)

If I'm lucky I've been writing for several hours just before I arrive, so perhaps that explains things. The muddle that is my plot; the gothic tower of St. Ninian's church; the hissy-breath of the sea; a sun that's as good as given up for the day; biro leak on my fingers (wish I'd brought gloves); bare trees like etchings; an old man with a Jack Russell on a lead; high school kids in their blue and red strip trudging off the football pitch; the tragic elder sister in my story (she ought to wear glasses! Of course!).... it's all a happy jumble in my head.