Chelsea and The Accidental Gardener

The lower bank. If you leave this land alone at all
 then bluebells sprout up everywhere.
(More pictures below...)

Walk around my garden with me...

I spent some coffee times last week enjoying the elegant and perfectly coiffed perfections of the Chelsea Flower Show. Debora   was there, as was gardening friend   Gillian. My friend Avril  was going to go but did not quite make it.                                   

 I did not envy them, as for one thing I don't like crowds; for another I am merely an accidental gardener. Oh and there's this third thing - flower names do not drip off my tongue like honey. The only one I remember is Alchemilla Mollis because its name scans and because it holds drops of rain like tears in its exquisite leaves. And it thrives in shade and my garden has lots of that . Oh, and I know Forget-Me-Nots and Love-Lies-Bleeding from my childhood fascination with the names.

Many years ago I did plant and grow things fairly successfully but once  I plunged myself into the compelling career of writing it totally engulfed  my planting, growing and making instincts,my hot-housing  and propagating energies. I stopped sewing too.

More then thirty years ago we bought this house in the middle of a small market town,  Built in 1870, the land on which it was built was carved out of a bit of ancient woodland. So  apart from a useful  lawn, our garden is  mostly trees and a long lumpy  bank. And it cannot be tamed; it  can only be gardened by accident.

I have featured the house - in various guises - in several of my novels but only this year in my new novel has the garden appeared as a significant part of the story. To do this I had to imagine this plot of land 1600 years ago when this area was a forest. That was fun

Extract: (Elen) '... No wonder they call this Oak Place. I walk and walk and the trees open out making a green space on each side of a trickling spring which steadies itself in a pool then spouts down the hill to join the bigger stream that I’ve just crossed.  Around the pool is a low wall cunningly built without joining mortar  - a thing they do very well in these parts. In one place the wall widens into a shelf lined with golden stone. Here are wilting flowers crowded together and already smelling of decay;  three finely crafted clay jugs;  two glittering bronze bracelets and in the corner  a sheaf of barley. I add an offering from my mother for whom this pool holds happy girlhood memories: a silver pendant set with green glass. As I set out on this journey she told me she hoped Branwen would be here at the pool to meet me....'                                                  Work In Progress,

Walk around my garden with me ...

Last year we cut down this giant tree but left the base as natural scuplture.

These grow wild right at the bottom of the garden, beside the long wall.

Companion growing - bluebells and well behaved dandelions

Forget-me-nots tumble onto the curving path

Bluebells are promiscuous. They go with everything/

Bluebells against the long bottom wall. I think the deep blue says these come from seed through several years, not from old bulbs. Here and there we have white flowers which I think suggests ancient bulbs still flowering.

The bottom bank. There was an old apple tree here once, but we lost it,

Glorious greens with Love-Lies-Bleeding

Dandelions mingling with buttercups and bluebells.

Champion campions keep the bluebells company

Trees dominate the garden,

Forget-Me-Nots and bluebells near the bottom path.

And more trees 

Neighbours through the trellis in what is, after all, a town garden.

Faces and Fiction Your/My Novel and Work in Progress

Think how we refer to the face in our language: the term face is already loaded with metaphor and ulterior meaning.

Consider:
Putting a good face on it; facing someone down; facing it;  facing up to things; being two faced; facing the consequences

The physiology of the faces has its own message system:
Eye being the window to soul; hollow eyes; haunted eyes; shadowed eyes; bright eyes; folded lips; wide smile; rigid jaw

Movements of  the face are part of the action in our prose:

The Writer's Challenge:
There's no art to find
 the mind's construction
 in the face. Shakespeare.

 frowning, raising eyebrows; smiling widely; grinning,  winking, smirking, winking, leering, sneering, glowering, eyes narrowing. Every micro expression has meaning that you may use..

The face is work in progress. It tracks the passage of time:
Faces seem to seem  remain the same yet alter  through time: plain faces become handsome, distinguished with time;  pretty people become plain with the passage of years. 

Faces are the place where the act of living maps your experience:

He had the look of one who had drunk the cup of life and found a dead beetle at the bottom.  P G Wodehouse.

( A thought: A child's face  is hard to paint and hard to write, How do you paint or write a blank canvas? Even great painters have problems with children, Look at Van Gogh! We can portray children more through their emanations and actions, their wriggling and rolling, their screaming and chattering...) 



Returning to the grown-ups and how in our prose we use faces in our prose to indicate feeling, drama and action. 

 His eyes made a person think that
he heard things that no one else
 had ever heard, that he knew things
 no one had ever guessed before.
He did not seem quite human. 
Carson McCullars

Very strong genres do use direct description to establish the character so that we know very quickly the appearance of the hero/ine so we can  fit them into the shorthand stereotype of handsome hero, surly but good-looking  detective, beautiful maiden, sultry temptress, dark but handsome villain; or/burly but attractive action man. Guidelines for purely genre fiction assert quite rightly that we need to see our main characters  early  in the novel. Straight  description is very efficient for this.

My preferred way is to use the face in the process of the storytelling.I prefer not  to describe directly 
but to  allow the reader to  infer indirectly as the narrative grow. What happens in the face is part of the whole gradual package of the novel as we get to know the characters, their age and demeanour, their motivation, their transitory meaning as part of the ongoing narrative: 
What different things happens in their face as they speak to someone they love, they hate, they despise, they need? 
What happens when your character focusing on a particular task? eg the tip of my tongue shows when I am concentrating on drawing or writing.

My comforr is that old age,
that ill-layer up of beauty
can do more spoil upon my face
  Shakespeare.

More from Shakespeare:
-  Of course the face can tell lies. God has given you one face and you make yourself another.
- False face must hide what false heart must know
- I never see they face but I think on hellfire.


And one from JG Salinger
- She was not one for emptying her face of expression. 

Of course we don't have to make our characters gurning, grinning puppets but the use of  the mobility of the face to indicate character, drama and action is available to us and if we use it artfully and with restraint it will add vivid layers to our prose.

To illustrate: Work in Progress from my current novel :

... He spoke to them in the old tongue but both brothers answered in Latin. Kynan grinned at Magnus’s surprise. ‘Our father had us spend two seasons in the house of a merchant in Rome, an agent who sold our lead right across the great inland sea.’...

(In the context of the narrative the word 'grinned' has much more meaning here than the baring of teeth,..,,)

Books on The Writing Game

(Stop Press - Was invited by Norman Geras be profiled on his great weblog You might like to check it out Wx - http://normblog.typepad.com/normblog/2010/05/the-normblog-profile-346-wendy-robertson.html )         Now back to books…

One feature of my radio programme will be a focus on the delights of reading, and how writers can use their reading to inform their writing. In the May programme we featured:  Books of The Month - chosen by Gillian Wales (Chartered Librarian & Ex Arts Centre manager) and Glyn Wales (Historian, ex Head teacher & University Lecture ).Their criteria are – Plot, Place, Character & Style

Their choices this month choice were   Chris Mullin: A View From the Foothills. (Profile Books) ‘A political diary of a Labour MP from 1919 to May 2005. Reading it restores some of my (Glyn) faith in MPs for it shows a humanity, selflessness and humanity notably lacking in the present parliament. The book’s also witty and entertaining and throws light on the roles of a back bench MP, a home affairs committee member and Junior Foreign Office minister. Uniquely Mullin remained a minister despite his opposition to the Iraq war… A man of principle.’(Timely in this week where we are left with a hung parliament. W)
David Lodge Deaf Sentence (Penguin) Good on style and character. ‘Retired professor coping in a good humoured was with the vagaries of the post professional and eccentric family life Touches on themes of a recession his and an increasingly electronic world of 2009 2010 Britain, Recommended.’

William Boyd: Ordinary Thunderstorms. Chatto and Windus
‘Better in plot and place, we think, though perhaps not so good in style. A conspiracy novel – a sort of 39 Steps for the Naughties It is about a man’s loss of identity and flight from pursuers. The Thames from London to the sea mirrors the hero’s own journey into the depths. A good read.’
Margaret Forster Isa and May – Deals with the relevance of the grandmother in today’s society and the controversial question of nurture versus nature. Novel will keep you guessing right to the end, despite, we think, an occasional overload of information
Philip Pullman The Good Servant Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ. Pullman’s retelling of the gospels. Here Jesus and Christ are a pair of twins. Pullman destroys the gospel story and articulate his own disbelief in the myth of Jesus Christ Pullman believes in the democracy of reading and doesn’t think it’s the task of the author to tell the reader what the book means. He says he is in the “Once Upon A time business” not the “Message” business.’

And Some Books Mentioned during the Programme Avril Joy:     The Sweet Track: Flambard Publishing In her interview Avril talks about the significance of place in her writing – in this book, the Somerset Levels

Wendy’s Novels    I used my novel The Lavender House (Headline Book Publishing) to demonstrate the slender and exciting starting points when setting about writing a novel.

Notes on Long and Short Fiction

This Wednesday night, at the Hexham Book Festival I have agreed to give a talk about ‘The Long and The Short of It’. I will read from my novel Sandie Shaw and The Millionth Marvell Cooker, and from my short story collection Knives to illustrate the differing challenges of writing long and writing short. Rather conveniently both of these books are just out this week.

I have to admit that, in the main, the focus in my writing has been towards long fiction, (sometimes very long fiction). I love writing my novels. But I have always written - and from time to time published - short stories.

Among serious and aspiring writers the short story is now very fashionable. As well as being a distinguished, discrete literary form in itself, the short story can be a showcase for writing talent. Beda Higgins' success in the recent Mslexia Short Story competition, for instance, has led her into discussions with an agent and a major publisher. These conversations, I feel, will veer towards talk of a novel...

Up until a year ago I was co-director, with Gillian Wales, of a national writing competition which ran for ten years. Our first winner was Jonathan Tulloch whose clever story Season Ticket later exploded into a novel and was then made into a film called Purely Belter. Another success in one of our competitions was Beda Higgins herself. It was very nice to see Beda at the launch of Knives last week.

Such showcasing of talent is surely one reason for the increasing popularity of short story competitions. However I have found that in the competition stakes the novel surely loses out. In our national competition we alternated each year between short stories and three-chapter novel samples. It was always extremely difficult to judge a novel with so little access to its essential architecture and true outcomes. In the light of such difficulty, judging a short story was a gem of a task: a short story is a whole thing in itself, its language, architecture and outcomes were visible to the judges.

Herein lies the charm of the short story. Like a poem, it is a prime example of economy - the right word in the right place implying multiple layers of meaning. A short story may present a whole life in a coherent slice of it; or it may present an encounter which defines two lives and their intersecting energies; or it may present us with bright fragments that we readers must make into our own whole thing. A short story can bring people and places to life with a few strokes of a pen. It can show us tragedy, comedy, misery or irony with a single allusion or a clever metaphor. It may reflect our lives back to us or take us into strange new interior or exterior worlds.

Short stories are like those scrunched up Japanese paper flowers I loved as a child. Tight, rolled up nuggets when dry, when you put them into liquid they would open up into technicolour glory. For me, the reader's imagination is that liquid. We writers give the readers our tight flowers and they open up and blossom in unexpected and unique ways to deliver the story.

Perhaps, word for word, the short story has more screwed up power than the novel - that more languorous form which twists and turns in our minds like a great bolt of silk. A novel demands of the reader diligence, and a certain indulgence so that our story can unfold and take a proper shape. We invite our readers to live with us through time and space. We make them wait for our explanations, our outcomes, our illuminations. With them we celebrate our resolutions, our epiphanies.

Readers, of course, are quite capable of enjoying and responding to both our long and short writing. I only hope they don't just prejudge these two distinct forms as a fast read or a slow read. Each form brings with it, its own literary enjoyment.

As a writer and a fan of both literary forms I have more usually leaned towards the luxuriant expanse of the novel. I love playing with the multi-layers, inventing a large cast of players, and relishing the sheer literary manipulation of a large idea. But an equally pleasurable challenge is the encapsulation of a hot idea in the short story form. For certain inspirational notions the pure form of the short story is the only way to tell it.

So here you have it: ‘The Long and the Short of It’, two different but – I trust - equally exciting reading experiences for my readers. If you are one of them, I hope you enjoy both Sandie… and Knives, equally but in different ways.
What do you think?

Wendy <

Wendyx