Three Elements of Place For the Artisan Writer

I woke up with the thought that there are three aspects of place that are significant in the writing life.

Editing in My Garden

Element One is the place where we write. A good artisan writer should be able to write anywhere – on planes and trains, in the garden, bedroom, bathroom or kitchen, inside, outside, in bars and hospital waiting rooms. And of course, (if you find one open) libraries. I suppose now we must add cyberspace to our writing locations.


The instinct and the ideal, though, is to make a special interior space in which to write: a temple dedicated to your vocation.

I did this even when I was very young, I lived then in a tiny two up and two down house with my my mother, sister and two brothers. In the bedroom which I shared with my sister and mother I set up a long collapsible pasting table by the window. This was was my private space. Here I did my homework and here I began to write seriously; I wrote at this table even when ice was etching snowflakes on the inside of the window.

After I married, in our second house there was a spare downstairs bedroom which I commandeered as a writing room. I got someone to build shelves all along one wall for my growing collection of books and bought a huge, battered office desk at an auction for £2. And there I did another kind of homework for my teaching job. And on that desk I wrote the first novels which were published.


Write Anywhere and Everywhere

 Occupying another house for many years now, I have a big study with a real fire mentioned by Avril in her post about our conversation with Richard Hardwick for The Writing Game. This is a generous space dominated by the same £2 desk which started it all and has shelves on all four walls, full of books. Lots of writing and talking stuff goes on in this space but the serious writing - the current novel, for instance - happens upstairs in the little writing room which I’ve written about before. This is where the real work happens. Here there is only room for one person – the writer. This is my place, My temple.



Stairway to Story

 Element Two the need to locate the characters and action in a place that adds to, that underpins, that shows rather than tells of the main themes of the novel. Think of the psychopathology of cities such as Dickens’ London and de Balzac’s Paris, of Martin Amis’s London and Ian Rankin’s Edinburgh.  Think of the drawing rooms of Jane Austen, the muddy nightmarish battle trenches of Pat Barker, the Gothic moorland of the Brontes!

These writers know how to use place as a substructure for the themes of the novel and to illuminate depth of the drama and the emotional pathology of the characters. The best of writers have always done this instinctively: the significance of place underpinning the pace and the active drama of their narrative.

I don’t know if there is some magic formula for this, except to read widely and deeply  the work of writers who do this well, until it is part of your own intuition of writing. And observe, observe, observe your own experience in life as you move around. Make lists of what you see and the feelings and wisdom it inspired. These days of course we can note place with a camera, of course, transforme it in our imagination and incorporate what we see into our fiction. But nothing in this process beats a sharp eye, a good ear, and a fat notebook.

Element three is doing it!

 Here's me...

Read and Write

AOR Work in progress

'… The courtyard is dominated on one side by a wall which is more like a black stone cliff. Lolette’s granddaughter Marie France. Aurelie’s cousin, tells us this wall is part of the medieval wall of the old village of St Thibery. Before we reached our destination - this tall house on the edge of the village - Aurelie had driven us through its narrow streets which seem to have no corners; they it coil around a mediaeval abbey whose ornate arched gateway is out of kilter with the dusty ordinariness of the village…

…  ‘Grand-mère is in the courtyard,’ announces Lola in her clear young voice. She leads us through a large kitchen lined with cupboards painted blue, set around a vast table covered with a gleaming green oilcloth. Then we are hustled  through double doors into the shady courtyard built into the wall of the old village. On the left is a long black stone trench filled with geraniums. In the middle a white umbrella offers shade a green plastic table and four chairs.  

Imagine and Transpose

At the far end, under a very old whiskery palm tree ,sits a very old lady with her leg up on a cushioned stool. Her hair ,  thin and whispy is pulled to the top of her head in a knot. She is wearing a yellow flowered crimpeline frock and slippers on her bare feet. I have to remind myself that she is the same age as Francine…'

Boody, Gaudi, and The Drowned Land

I was nine years old when I came to the North to live and it was like coming onto a different planet. People were hard to understand. It was not just the accent or dialect, it was attitudes and assumptions. People were difficult to read. The confusion must have been mutual because my older brother was beaten at school, harassed because of his ‘poncy’ southern accent, and sensibly reverted to the local lingo in weeks. I didn’t suffer because I was frozen with confusion and possibly dumb with grief at my father’s recent death. I spoke very little.

The domestic arrangements took some adjusting to. We stayed at first in my relative’s spotless house where the bath was tin and lived on a hook in the yard and the toilet was across the public back lane. I soon discovered that this toilet  was a place of escape, of silence. I could sit on the high throne and read, eat stolen sweets, or just muse about how terrible my life was.

One day I was sitting there and my eye moved upwards to a high shelf above the door. On it were two large, glass jam jars.  I clambered up to snatch ne so I could see it properly. Someone had filled it with shards of coloured glass,  bright stones, broken, patterned pottery, and seashells.   Holding it up in the beam of light streaming through a crack in the wooden door, I thought it was beautiful.

Later I asked my cousin what the jars were.

He looked annoyed. ‘Yeh shouldn’a looked,’ he said.

‘Why not?’ I said with unusual persistence.

‘’S’a secret.’

‘What is it for?’ I said.

‘It’s not for anything,’ he said scornfully. ‘It’s boody. It just is. And it’s a secret. It’s always secret. Yeh have ter hide it.’ He punched my arm. ‘Yeh tell nobody!’ Then he ran off to kick a hard leather ball with his friends.

The boody jars were a great resource for me in the following difficult months of adjustment. I would take them down and hold them up in the stream of light and feel comforted. I never questioned the name. Boody jars were boody jars.

Years later I started to reflect on them. The name, I decided, could come from two sources. Boody could be a childish name for beautiful. It also called up the notion of booty – war chest items seized by force or looting on land, or by piracy by sea. Come to think of it, that fits the tradition of secrecy - hiding the haul.

I think now that because the boody jars consoled me at a difficult time of my life the image  of them has stayed with me. I even have my own boody jar on a shelf in my upstairs, inside toilet. It’s not a jam jar, just an old glass vase that was hanging around.

When I was in Barcelona some years ago and saw the Gaudi wall in the Parc Gruell, I instantly thought of the boody jars. These gorgeous curving walls are faced with a mosaic of broken pottery tesselated into intricate, almost random, patterns. I was told that the workmen were given the pottery shards and they improvised the patterns, but I don’t know whether that it’s true. I like the idea of the democracy of artists and that explanation might explain the walls’ childlike appeal.

Then this June I visited the Abbaye de Valmagne in the Languedoc.  Between the twelfth and fourteenth centuries this Cistercian edifice was one of the richest abbeys in South of France. Here, as well as acquiring fine church artefacts and church based gold  the monks  grew plants to feed themselves, to cure illness and  flowers to decorate the altar of the Virgin Mary altar.

Then in 1875 the Huguenots sacked the abbey and killed the monks.  All the stained glass of the roses and clerestories were shattered.

The abbey was slowly restored, but after the Revolution in 1789  it was ransacked again, this time by revolutionaries. The last five monks fled and the church was sold off as a wine store.  Paradoxically  the huge vats that were lodged  the nave and side chapels, saved the fabric of this great building from destruction.  As in England, deserted abbeys were commonly used as stone quarries to build houses and more mundane buildings..

Fast forward  to 1988,   1998, 1999, 2002, 2003 and 2005 when there was serious flooding in the Gard and Hérault  regions of France. The French use the word inondation which has a very biblical feel about it.

Anyway, during these floods very fine fragments of  the Abbey’s first medieval shattered glass began to come to the surface. Over the years an artist collected them until he had sufficient to make this beautiful glass panel which, back lit, allows us to see through that same exquisite glass as did those early medieval monks.

And now I wonder if - through the years, as he slowly collected his bits of glass –  the artist kept them in boody jars, colour coded. 

"Everything has its beauty but not everyone sees it." -
                                                                  Confucius