Truth And Fiction Like Two Hands Clasping…

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 Early Days

When the majority of my books – around 15 - came to life my only contribution was to take an intense  year to research and write each novel and deliver my completed manuscript to my publisher on  November 30 ( the date agreed in the commissions). I dealt with two major publishers - Hodder & Stoughton and then Headline – now Hachette.

I posted my  precious manuscript – which some writers may tell you becomes like a baby in your life – to my talented editors, Anne Williams and later Harriet Evans  (now a successful novelist herself). I would get it back from them by Christmas. complete with some changes inspired by their  insightful comments.

Interestingly enough Anne always insisted that they were suggestions, not instructions. Through time I had great advice from both Anne and Harriet which has entered my permanent writing process.

After that I returned the amended manuscript  to my editor  who entered it into  post- editing production involving formatting and cover design processes. I don't think I was aware then that it takes more than a  village to raise a novel. Since I have started going it alone I am very aware of that.

The production safely  in process, I would then begin to  prowl around my shelves, my growing pile of heavily scored notebooks - and  in the busy universe of my mind - to ponder an  arena of  people, life and history that would be the basis for my next novel. This was - and is still - my professional habit and routine through a many years.

By the time the novel appeared in the Spring I would be writing again, always voyaging into very different territory. In the meantime my  publisher's marketing department took care of the (rather limited - I wasn't famous after all...) promotion process. 

The novels were well reviewed - mostly in provincial presses across England and in  some magazines, although they never reached the magisterial heights of the literary broadsheets. I was from the North, after all and I had come from a working, rather than the literary background. I notice that this issue of being ‘from the working class’ is quite a trend nowadays. When I was first writing  I was distinctly pre-trend: there were no literary festivals therefore no platforms for my kind of writing. There was no Internet and no metropolitan networking - this  was strictly for already established writers. I had no contacts – my novels were published, as it were, out of the blue by Headline in its earliest days. I have my then editor Anne Williams and later Harriet Evans to thank for that.

As each book came out I would write some articles about the ideas underlying it,  I would do a few presentations.  But really I was free to get on with writing the next - very different - novel. This was, of course,  as well as working at my full-time job, as well as being a companion for my hard-working husband and nurturing my two children. Of course they are very big people now. Bonjour  @lickedspoon 

When i became a professional writer, the writing of popular novels was a virtual cottage industry before it became corporatised and monetised, with - it seems to me - increasing distance from the intense personal creative activity which had been all about dreaming up  stories and writing them down. In had became clearer that my thriving career  could not survive, based as it was on  instinct and a powerful storytelling imperative, rather than the somewhat rigid and perhaps stereotyped perceptions of The Market.  

 Going It Alone?

I had always made a living alongside my profession but never expected to make a fortune through my writing. (I think people tend to hope this nowadays…). The professional and artistic satisfaction for me was always the possibility of seeing the novels out there being read, and hearing readers response to my stories.

And this is why and how – my children grown and flown - I began to explore ways in which I could still write my novels and shepherd them into the market myself. So I started to write novels for myself, creating a very tiny imprint called Damselfly Books in order to locate them. 

So I proceeded to  publish Paulie’s Web – a novel emerging from my seminal experience as writer in residence in a women’s prison. I wrote The Pathfinder – a novel exploring my inner fascination with my Celtic roots which keep re-emerging in my philosophies and ideas - and in my novels. This always seem to me to be begging for some fictional expression. I went on to write the novel called The Bad Child, focusing on my work as an educator and the fact that middle children – (I myself was one and I was observing my niece, also a middle child, as another) – could be independent, rebellious and self-activating – rather different from their siblings. This is how my very special  Demelza came to life in this novel.

Becoming Alice emerged from my increasing professional interest in the complex connections between what appears to be pure fiction and what seems to be true memoir. This novel was to be the first of three novels set in the arc of public and private life between 1941 and the Millennium. It is no accident that this time-span just happens to be the arc of my own life fully realised in the life experience of a girl called Alice. At the moment the second and third novels in this trilogy are just at the brainstorming/note-writing/plot-planning stage now.

I was now realising just how much the focus throughout my writing life had been  - rooted in my own life experience - transformed through fiction  - eventually appeared on the page. But I realised that my life experience was not unidirectional or set in a neat narrative; rather it was fragmentary – incoherent shards and fragments which took different shapes depending on how I cast my story-net. This, I thought, was rather like the toy kaliedescope that has sat on my mantelpiece for more than twenty years. Now I had my title! This was when I began to write and publish some short stories which reflected this concept more directly.

The Workshops

So it was that  last Spring -  one year ago - I presented a series of workshops on the connection between memoir and fiction. The participants were both enthusiastic and inspiring. That was when, in serious earnest, I began to pull together my stories and to write new ones which would illustrate an  original fusion of objective truth and pure fiction. This was why and how I wrote the stories one by one over this last year. And then laid them out and then I surveyed them to see just what I had created.

And now I turned to Damselfly to publish this new collection to be called Kaleidoscope - Stories from the Frontier.  This subtitle – like the nature of these short stories – was inspired by a good deal of reading, especially the work of Diana Athill and Jean Rhys. I was particularly engaged by Diana Athill’s insightful comment on the late work of Jean Rhys, with whom she worked in the last 15 years of Rhys’s long life. Athill remarked on Rhys’s writing ‘from the ‘frontiers of old age’ as being of her very best. So I had my sub-title.  

In my publishing process I’ve used the services of Word-2.Kindle   to ensure the technical standard of the text. This company were both patient and helpful, which is just what I needed as I was going it alone.  Inspired by the Kaliedoscope on my mantelpiece. For the cover design I joined forces with my artistic, literary friend Avril Joy and we designed the cover together.

The blurb on the cover of Kaliedoscope took some thinking about. It has so many functions for any new reader. Referring to oneself in the third person is truly odd. Anyway this is what I ended up with:

In this collection of short stories Wendy Robertson acquaints us with the life of career writer Ruthie Evans - rooted in the North, travelling from Ireland to Singapore and Soviet Russia, featuring characters who reflect their Twentieth Century times. In the stories Ruthie emerges triumphant – complex, highly intelligent, conflicted and full of joy: a unique and special memoir, exploring the relationship between memoir and the short story.‘…truth and fiction like two hands clasping… A rare glimpse of what it’s like to be inside the process of writing… ‘Kathleen Jones: biographer‘More than just a memoir… a masterclass in the writing process.’ Sharon Griffiths: Columnist & Author‘A powerful writer.’ Mail on Sunday.

I truly hope you enjoy reading Kaliedosope. If you like the idea of this adventurous combination of memoir and fiction you might be inspired to write a story yourself - a story which could leap out the truth of your own experience. And then another. And another.

It seems to me now that this present lock-down situation could be perfect for anyone, writer or not, to embark on such a self-enhancing and satisfying project.

Buy?     Click Here

Also read two earlier posts  where I discuss  the complex relationship betweem Memoir and Fiction.

Here
https://lifetwicetasted.blogspot.com/search?q=memoir+and+fiction

 and here 

https://lifetwicetasted.blogspot.com/search?q=Kaleidoscope.+A+creative+view+of+the+literary+connection+between+memoir+and+fiction.

If all this has made you curious about the stories. Here for you is the contents list:

Kaleidoscope: The  Stories

Keong Sak.................................................................... 1
‘I do enjoy Singapore, very much.’ Tim Rice
Watching and Feeling............................................... 18
‘Blake said the body was the soul’s prison
unless the five senses are fully developed andopen.’ Jim Morrison.
Masculinity............................................................... 27
‘Prithee, peace/ I dare do all that maybecome a man; / Who dares do more is none.’Shakespeare.

This Working Life...................................................... 44
‘Nothing will work unless you do.’ Maya
Angelou

Patchouli...................................................................  53
‘There is nothing automatic about political
change, about liberation.’ Gloria Steinem.
Bandages................................................................... 63
‘No one ever told me that grief felt so like
fear.’ C S Lewis
Ruthie’s Rant............................................................. 74
‘Even though I was shy, I found I would get
onstage of I had a new identity.’ David Bowie.
Rudder and Bridle..................................................... 79
‘The faculty of the imagination is both the
rudder and the bridle of the senses.’ Simone
de Beauvoir.

Brown Velvet............................................................. 83
‘I think writers are, at best, outsiders to the
society they inhabit.’ John Irving.]
The Woman Who Loved Jesus.................................. 95
‘Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth.

Educating Tegger..................................................... 104
‘The only person who is educated is the one who has learned how to learn …and change.’Carl Rogers

Governess............................................................... 118
‘.… it is the duty of the poet to obtain
citizenship for an increasing horde of nameless emotions.’ Ágnes Nemes Nagy
Going By Train......................................................... 152
‘I have learned how faces fall to bone/how under the eyelids terror lurks…’ Anna
Akhmatova, 1957

The Fox House......................................................... 165
‘Only connect the prose and the passion, and
both will be exalted, and human love will beseen at its height. Live in fragments no longer.’EM Forster

Story Teller’s Apprentice......................................... 179
‘My daughter is one of my greatest
inspirations. Every day she surprises me andteaches me something.’ Patti Smith.

White Frost on Grass - Parts One, Two & Three.....185
‘The first lie in fiction is that the author givessome order to the chaos of life.’ Isabel Allende.

Big Issue.................................................................. 212
‘Now I know what a ghost is. Unfinishedbusiness, that’s what.’ Salman Rushdie.

Tiananmen.............................................................. 231
‘Life is like riding a bicycle. To keep your
balance you must keep moving.’ Albert
Einstein. 

x

Remembering and Writing.

      –

Recently I had the pleasure of delivering the first of four workshops on the relationship between writing, the nature of memoir, and the role that memories play in the creation of fictional work.

Memories bedded down deep in our subconscious are the raw material we draw on in creating characters, locations and the imperatives of narrative when we write fiction. Therein lies the essential truth of fiction – the element which allows a wide range of readers to identify with what might at first sight seem to be outside their personal experience.

Everyone has a story because everyone has a life – however dramatic, romantic, banal or exciting it might have seemed at the time. Or may seem so, even now.

As I asserted earlier – whether they are conscious of it are not – all writers interrogate their own lives to feed their fiction. In the first novels I think I did this intuitively. But now having been writing novels for more than 20 years but now in retrospect I am beginning to realise the degree to which I have done this. I can see that elements of my own life have found their place in the novels in terms of place, event, story, unique causes and unique consequences.

I was thinking that in some ways it’s as though experiences in my own life and quite complex experience   in terms of breadth and depth have been thrown up into the air and arrive back on the page in a unique shape which is original, sometimes unlooked for and offers even me fresh insight into those lived experiences.

In preparing for these workshop it has dawned on me that these reflections express the very relevant to the connection between memoir and the writing of fiction: within our own lives we have the sturdy clues to universal experiences which will strike a chord in readers across cultural boundaries and - These sturdy clues are the foundation of the universality of great fiction. Examples of this emerge throughout fiction. I was thinking of the work, for instance of Virginia Woolf, John le Carre, Catherine Cookson et al.

Reflections on the Sturdy CluesTo be human and to live in what might approximate to a family even under adverse conditions or within different cultures generates certain common experiences and emotions. Fiction and fictionalised memoirs can allow us to explore positives and negatives of personality which encapsulate an identity. (You find this in all kinds of fiction including thrillers, detective stories, mysteries, fantasy.)

We might refer to these as Rites Of Passage or Cycles of Life

 –for example

Birth. (As one of four children including two girls I only learned about the nature of childbirth when I was 14 years old and read Emile Zola’s Germinal in French,)

Childhood. (e.g Winnie the Pooh. Swallows and Amazons, James and The Giant Peach and many, fictions.)

Parenting. (All kinds of fiction) – especially now, with the rising popularity of so-called misery-memoirs. I also started to think about John Mortimer’s Clinging to the Wreckage – a very touching memoir of his father.

Friendship, Bonding , School, Life In Care, Life In Prison, Life In The Army  (Brideshead Revisited, Tom Brown’s Schooldays, Catch 22. Etc, etc.

Sexuality: - the inner experience of this universal drive can range from Romance to Pornography in fiction. See Diana Athill’s exquisite volumes of memoir for an honest and beautifully stated expression of this. ¶

Marriage, Close Partnerships across genders:  odysseys of success and failure. See Nora Ephron’s Heartburn

Death. The ritual significance of death and the funeral in all cultures. It is interesting how many short stories or novels begin with a funeral.

It is worth noting that we add such fictions – whether presented to us and experienced in story, lyric, or on screen – to our own emotional insight. They contribute to our sense of self in our daily life; they contribute to the way we learn who we are. In in this way we develop our own unique way of understanding what it is to be human as expressed in our community and incorporate this into our unique self. Such fictions help us filter our own lived experience and recognise the universal emotions which help us to process them: experiences such as love, fear, belonging, desire, loss, envy, hope, hate and revenge - the silver cord that runs through all good fiction and all good memoir.

All this is at the very forefront of my mind at the moment – not just because of the workshops although they are proving to be very exciting.  The fact is that I am working on the second novel in my Lifespan Trilogy  which began with my novel Becoming Alice.(Now On Amazon Kindle and in Paperback)

The Lifespan referred to is my own lifespan from 1941  and rounding up to the millennium. The second novel  in Lifespan begins in 1963 – not coincidentally a very important phase in my own life. However. Alice and her family are not me and my family, although the truths buried in these three novels are keyed into my own multilayered experiences  in those years. Alice and Ruth  are quite separate from me and are  distinct and whole. They are themselves.  

As a writer my task is to walk the line between truth and fiction. It's a bit like knitting  cobwebs - to create a  very beautiful thing with truth at its heart .

#fiction #memoir.

Kaleidoscope. A creative view of the literary connection between memoir and fiction.

The final version – a certain kind of writer’s magic!

I have just printed off the final master copy of my new short story collection Kaleidoscope – inspired by a series of well received workshops I offered last spring on the crucial connection between memoir and the short story.  This master copy will go to my third highly informed and insightful reader whose views I will welcome.

The title – Kaleidoscope – Stories From The Frontier – and also the nature of these short stories – was inspired by a good deal of reading, especially the work of Diana Athill and Jean Rhys.

I was particularly engaged by Diana Athill’s insightful comment on the late work of Jean Rhys, with whom she worked in the last 15 years of Rhys’s long life. Athill remarked on Rhys’s writing ‘from the ‘frontiers of old age’ as being of her very best,

I realised recently the degree to which my mind and imagination is a storehouse of experiences of my whole life – perceptions, sensual reactions, pleasures and pains. These elements are like the tiny bits of glitter in a kaleidoscope – each bit existing in its own right. Each time I shake my kaleidoscope I make a unique pattern, a unique story, reflecting of elements my life in different times and different places.

After much thought I have come to the conclusion that all memory is best transmuted through fiction and that all fiction is a vehicle for memoir. My Kaleidoscope collection here echoes these ideas and, I hope, reflects the intimate literary relationship between memoir, fiction and the short story,

Kaleidoscope will be published in the spring. I’m looking forward to that. My life is there on the page. I hope Kaleidoscope will resonate with a wide range of writers and readers interested in this complex connection between memoir and fiction.    

My heartfelt hope is that Kaleidoscope will resonate with a wide range of writers and readers interested in this complex and intriguing connection between memoir and fiction.

Ah! Titles! 

The titles of the short stories here are part of the essential truth of the life they reflect – the meat on the bones, as it were...

Kaleidoscope – Stories from the Frontier

 Keong Sak. ‘

I do enjoy Singapore, very much.’   Tim Rice

 Watching and Feeling. ‘Blake said the body was the soul’s prison unless the five senses are fully developed and open.’ Jim Morrison.

Masculinity. ‘Prithee, peace/ I dare do all that may become a man; / Who dares do more is none. Shakespeare: Macbeth

‘

This Working Life. Nothing will work unless you do. Maya Angelou

‘The door is inscribed in gold Gothic lettering. Miss Hogarth: Principal…’ R.E

Patchouli. There is nothing automatic about political change, about liberation.   Gloria Steinem.

1963. ‘So, how’s your love life?’ Amanda’s small, round face examines me, top to toe, her eyes shrewd…’ R.E

Bandages. No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear. C S Lewis

‘The man, his coxcomb of silver hair bobbing, walks with a spring in his step down the hospital corridor …’ R.E

 Ruthie’s Rant. Even though I was shy, I found I would get onstage of I had a new identity. David Bowie.

 Brown Velvet.

I think  writers are, at best, outsiders to the society they inhabit.   John Irving.

Educating Tegger

The only person who is educated is the one who has learned how to learn …and change.  Carl Rogers

Governess… it is the duty of the poet to obtain citizenship for an increasing horde of nameless emotions…Ágnes Nemes Nagy

Going By Train.

‘I have learned how faces fall to bone,

how under the eyelids terror lurks…Anna Akhmatova, 1957

The Fox House.

 Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its height. Live in fragments no longer. EM Forster

Story Teller’s Apprentice.  My daughter is one of my greatest inspirations… Every day she surprises me and teaches my something. Patti Smith.

White Frost on Grass .Parts One, Two &7 Three

 The first lie in fiction is that the author gives some order to the chaos of life. Isabel Allende.

Big Issue; Esme’s Story.

Now I know what a ghost is. Unfinished business, that's what.’

Salman Rushdie.  

Tiananmen. Life is like riding a bicycle. To keep your balance you must keep moving. Albert Einstein.

The Paradox of Researching for fiction

  Researching a substantial novel set in a certain time means reading, checking out,  exploring the unavoidable facts of those times - a world war for instance, or  the eruption of a volcano. Unless you're writing parody. These substantial and real events have to be right,  fixed and immovable. To ignore them, exaggerate them or fantasise with them or create fantasies from them requires a different process. Perhaps an a-historical process  

But what about the more fluid cultural social and sensual world which existed around these immovable moments of historical fact? These are elements which will make your historical account or your historical novel unique and at the same time universal to your reader.

If I were making a story about say Pompeii I'd be referring to myth and song as well as to to the destruction of a stone built environment. I did this with The Pathfinder my  novel about post-Roman Celtic Britain. To build a real world where people lived and breathed I had to take note of poetry, song and myth and the many artefacts and articles that characterised  those times 

I hope I succeeded.

But in more recent times the monuments of fact and history are embedded in our meta-world of fiction story speculation personification poetry and the personal fiction of diary memoir and now film and expansive, often exaggerated, press content.  

I like to access  the perceptions and the sensibilities of a certain time is through its art and – a favourite of mine – it's popular fiction.

As my present novel Lifespan  takes place from 1941 to the year 2000 I have a multiplicity of twentieth century sources in terms of pure fiction and biography and autobiography. It has been said many times that biography and autobiography - being selections from lives - are in their own way categories of fiction. It can  be said that they are also categories of history and in that carry a certain kind of truth. So the selectivity and possible bias in such sources as biography and autobiography and even diaries make a kind of meta-fiction which is still important to my kind of research

Of course this means for people like me the piles of books to be read and noted  grows day by day. Add to that key Internet sites and this adds up to a lot of research to absorb in order to imagine and freely write historical novels that have the ring of truth about them.

Such books and sources a allow the researcher to access the distinctive subtleties of social context and the sensibilities, the assumptions and attitudes of the varied characters she is imagining and growing within the narrative.

Julian McLaren Ross

 In some places the line between fact and fiction blurs rather satisfactorily,  leaving an historical trail from fact to fiction. I have just discovered that Julian McLaren Ross, whose book  - Memoirs of the 40s - I am reading alongside his  biography  Fear  and Loathing in Fitzrovia by Paul Willetts – this is the man who was  -  in terms of distinctive, louche manners and mannerisms - mimicked by  Olivia Manning  for her dissolute character Prince Yakimov in her Fortunes of War Trilogy. This means, of course that I have to re-read these books...The jury is out as to whether this is a true portrait rather than a caricature.

Olivia Manning

Even so it does demonstrate  how that the true nature of unique characters has impact  on the imagined characters in the literature  of their contemporary world.  This can happen with fiction writers writing in and of their own time like Rosamond Lehman, Graham Greene, Elizabeth Jane Howard, Elizabeth David, Elizabeth Bowen and many more can give us clues to contemporaneous habits, standards, speech modes and values  of a time even if our own invented characters  emerge from a different inspirational source. 

Rosamund Lehmann

In this lies the imaginative freedom of historical fiction which allows present-day readers with their own modern  habits, standards and values, access to the minds of and lives of people in earlier times. So they enjoy reading fiction in a different way from the way they enjoy reading history. 

Reflections on Memoir Workshop Three

Last Saturday was dominated for me by the third of four memoir workshops at Bishop Auckland Town Hall¶.

All kinds of writers. 

The twenty writers are all very keen and bring with them a range of experiences and writing from family history, lifestyle, memories of specific incidents and writing projects ranging from life-cycle, specific memories, science fiction, dystopian worlds, filmic perceptions and -  of course the experience of growing up in a family.

The forms these writers favour include the long and short story, film type treatments, ghost stories and family anecdote. All these writers are aiming to develop their writing and produce good work. My aim is to support and encourage these writers introduce and develop principles of writing and creativity to all their forms and projects. 

Very focused.

Occasionally this feels to me like juggling with butterflies. But still I feel that this diverse group of writers embrace the new dimensions of the writing process and pluck from the ideas inspiration which applies to their own writing projects.

In each of these workshops my strategy is to communicate the principles that have emerged for me during thirty years of writing with an open mind and an engaged imagination. This has produced 20 odd published novels and short stories as well as newspaper articles and the more ephemeral and possibly newly engaging writing of posts such as this here on Lifetwicetasted.

I think  in my case all this has kind of worked. My hope with these workshops that such openness, imagination and inspiration Will lead these writers into new fields, develop their already existing writing skills, and help them find a form of memoir, or fiction based on memoir, which is true to their own experience.

The attention and feedback from this great range of writers continues to be rewarding. One writer came into this third workshop saying ‘I’ve been writing every day since last time. I’m inspired.’ And since the workshop I have an email from another writer saying, … after the session I floated down you gate Street buoyed up by the creativity I had absorbed.’

Super.

These Memoir Workshops have been hard work - complex both to prepare and present. But so much worth it – it has restored my faith in determined and talented writers.

A Palimpsest of Continuing Inspiration,
This one referring to wild swimming for
my novel The Bad Child.

Postscript 1: You might be interested to know that one part of our discussion on Week Three was about keeping relevant images before you as you write. This involves the creation of a palimpsest*of writing inspiration, pinned and pasted up on white boards, black boards, kitchen walls, or toilet walls to act as subliminal inspiration for the writing project, feeding the conscious and subconscious mind between writing sessions and keeping the ideas buzzing ready for the next writing session.

Postscript 2: We also discussed the use of the short story form to develop a longer series of linked stories to create a memoir. An interesting construct.

Postscript 3: We also discussed how to use concentric circles to develop more lateral thinking in terms of creating memoir and fiction related memoir. I will describe this in detail on my next post here on Lifetwiceasted.

In Workshop Four – the last in the series we will be thinking about –

Ø Creating links between elements of the longer story/memoir.

Ø Exploring the protocols for syntax and layout of your work for strange-readers.This will include agents and editors, your best friends and neighbours. It’s like sending your children out for an examination in their best clothes with their shoes polished.

* PALIMPSEST: something reused or altered but still bearing visible traces of its earlier form.