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…'

Dead People Walking

Currently I am thinking quite intensely about ghosts. My Auntie Lily was a medium - you know, one of those ladies who would stand in a church hall and bring messages from the dead to anxious people. She was a dramatic women, remarkable in some of her perceptions.

I have seen a few ghosts in my time and some of them have crept into my stories. Then there is the seeing through time, which happens now and then on ancient pathways and in old buildings.

There was the woman who wandered about my house for a few years before fading from sight and sense. She had large bosoms and folded her hands together across her stomach. She seemed to offer no harm. My sceptical friend B, who used to come for a glass of wine after our pottery class, saw this woman and thereafter never went on the back corridor by the toilet which seemed to be her territory.

Then there was the child standing mournfully at the end of the bed in the rented cottage. And even more dramatically there was the column of bright light at the end of another bed in an hotel by Lake Maggiore in Italy. I felt certain that this amazing light was an angel of some kind. I blinked my eyes hard and flapped my hands but the thing stayed far too long. Then there were boys from another age playing in the street where B was born. And there was my mother, two years dead, standing at the top of the staircase, arms open wide.

More generally, there are the shadowy presences in buildings, lurking at the edge of my eyeline, or hiding behind the shadows of the afternoon. This haunted feeling has pursued me in recent years even to the deep south west of France where sighting and feelings have come on very strong and buildings kept vanishing.

Talking with my writer friend P today we speculated whether all novelists, whether they know it or not, develop these gifts of seeing through time and intuiting dead people walking. When I think of Auntie Lily I sometimes wonder if it's all in the blood and bound up with stories. They were great storytellers too, Lily and her sisters. I do find that many of my odd visions can creep into my stories and inhabit my characters - even though I've never dealt with these ghostly themes 'front on'.

But now I'm thinking that it's time to do just this. I've decided to test these feelings to the limit and I'm off in May all the way to the Languedoc to write a story that has been brewing inside my head for more than two years. It will be called, I think, At The Villa d'Estella.

I already have some sketches. Here's one:

'...Now I see old men about their canal business in those times, steering loads of coal and steel, bales of cloth, racks of wine. And now they fade and there is only the limpid beauty of the water, silver green, slate grey, alternating between ladder shadows of the straight trees slicing into the bright blue sky,

One hour into the journey I notice the boy, orange haired and eyes too bright for life. He's leaning backward gazing up at the sky, his long hair dropping towards the water like strands of fire. Beside him sits a tall young man in a crew necked sweater; no shirt. He's reading a worn black book. Occasionally he puts out a hand to stop the boy falling.

They are an odd pair. Father and son? No. Brothers? I have to settle for brothers. Even so, there is no resemblance. None. The younger is fair and freckle faced, the older heavier set and dark, his narrow face sardonic.

I have this prickle of unease...

Can't wait to get there and get on with it...

Wendy