Text , Sound and Cultural Taboos.

Putting your head above the parapet is often proscribed by powerful cultural taboos.  This is particularly so in the regions of the English working class from where I emerge. The old childhood maxim of not ‘making a show’ of yourself or drawing attention to yourself can bite deep into quite mature  personalities.

As a child and young woman I was achingly shy, didn’t like encountering strangers or being at a crowded gathering. In those early days, not ‘making a show’ of myself suited me fine. But it seems to me now that underneath the surface self of this watchful, tongue-tied girl, a raging exhibitionist was hiding.

It was hidden well. When I first went to college I lost my voice for a week before things normalised, But the inhibitions stayed. When I first started teaching I lost my voice for two weeks. I had this very boisterous class of twelve year olds in my first school. So I had to write QUIET!! in very large letters on the board quite a few times in those two weeks. They were great kids, though.

All that time,  though,  the exhibitionist was at work - writing articles, stories, mapping novels. It was a secret  nobody knew about. Writing was a perfect medium for this shy tongue-tied girl. She could say, imagine, invent what she liked without drawing attention to herself.

But the fact is that in teaching it only works if you do draw attention to yourself. Teaching children taught me not to hide behind my shyness, to let the exhibitionist inside have her airing.  She could be funny, daring, expressive. She could be herself. The children loved her, They didn’t know you shouldn’t put your head above the parapet or make a show of yourself so it was OK. That was a comfort.l

After that  working with adults in large groups was a very big leap for this shy girl, But she’d learned in school that there was something in her that could really teach people, really do this thing,  as long as she became her other, more exhibitionist self.

Then, when the books and stories began to be published it seemed that I was not just looking over the parapet , I’d leapt onto it. But now  I had the book to protect me. Or the books. It was not really me, it was them. They were the things  ‘making the show’. The shy, embarrassed  person that is still me was only holding them.

And now we have the crazy situation of the community radio programme. This voice that repeatedly let me down in the early days is put to work, up there to be judged.  I hear my voice on the tapes and think how strange it is, how thin and nervous I sound. But I’m pleased now that I’ve learned the basics of sound editing. Editing sound means that I can nip and tuck the excesses of the reluctant voice.  Just as I nip and tuck the texts of my novels and the stories, making them their best selves, I can begin to nip and tuck my voice so its becomes its best self for the programme. Which best self it expresses, the shy girl or the exhibitionist, I’m not quite sure.

I’m loving the creativity of putting The Writing Game together, and talking to and listening to these great writers and readers. Still though, the shy girl and the exhibitionist live on in me side by side and I have to deal with them.

The learning curve continues.

wx

The Joys of Cranking the Engine of a Novel

Recently, for the programme, I’ve been asking other writers how they start a novel and how they get on with completing it. I’ve also spoken specifically about how I was inspired to write my own novel The Lavender House. So, as I’m beginning a new novel, I thought I’d tell you how this process works in my case.

All writers work in their own way. I think I must be a seasonal writer. For years now, in late Winter/ early Spring I will be puzzling, speculating, making false starts, writing sketches (short scenes that may/might be in the novel) waiting for characters to walk onto my roughly prepared stage, into my dreamed landscape, demanding to be named and styled.

Notes, labels, names, sketches, images and maps start to litter the walls of my little room. My computer becomes petalled with notes and reminders. The novel grows first in a kind of impressionistic collage. The big table is stacked with opened books post-it-ed and ticker-taped with wild notes to myself.

In real Spring ( when the bluebells at the bottom of the garden are out) I feel impelled to start to write, to get into gear properly with this job . The story is bubbling up from the depths of my imagination, throwing up sentences and paragraphs like fire and gas from a volcano.The characters are elbowing their way out of the wings into the spotlight, moving from monologue to dialogue. Occasionally there are shrieks. Let me out! Let me out!

This is when I’ll write novel-stuff in my notebook wherever I am – car, cafes, hotels, park bench - taking pages like stored treasure back to the little room for the painstaking and rewarding process of transcription. Sometimes I’m amazed how brilliant the scribble is. Sometimes I can’t make it out, so perhaps it was too brilliant for this world… It's a mad, mad phase. I become more and more excited, and as the Summer moves into place I am buzzing away, writing every day, living the narrative and not noticing too much around me.

Sometimes at this midpoint there is a worrying haitus. Is it really a novel? Am I kidding myself? Am I deluded into thinking I can do this very hard thing? (Some people label this the Writer’s Block. I think it’s just the imagination muscle screaming for a rest.) So I take a good breather then I go back to the beginning and move more slowly forward again, editing and writing as I go.

With the coming of Autumn the days draw in and the growing darkness helps me to focus more closely on the way the narrative works. These latter stages are just as demanding and interesting but are as much intellectual as imaginative. This is the time when the firecrackers that I set away back in early Spring have to take their place in a coherent and interesting story. And in the end the form has to be right, The facts have to be right.

I don’t at all see this part of the process as a chore – it’s the final careful, creative act in making the novel work. It's like taking a garment you’ve just designed and made, and pressing it with care to make it fit and elegant for anyone who chooses to put it on.

By the beginning of December, with Winter set in, the novel is complete and ready to go on, on its own hopeful journey.

But now, with this lovely new novel (called so far XXX), I’m just at the beginning of this journey. I relish the familiar delight and and excited tension threading through my body. Writing like this is a visceral thing. Of all the things I do, my novel is where I am completely myself – travelling alone and enjoying it.

wx

(Pic tomorrow…)

On Air and In Shock

Well, the Writing Game went out last night on Bishop FM!!

It’s been the epitome of the cliché of a steep ‘learning curve’ in the last month, learning absolutely new skills and gathering together ideas and people to generate this one hour radio show for this community station.

The programme was now all on tape so a few of us gathered to listen to it in my sitting room over glasses of white wine. Writers Lisette Rebecca Grout and Geri Auton were there already to record their piece for a future programme, and Avril was there for moral support.

The programme before The Writing Game was a very jolly, chatty, drive-time music show presented by two lively guys who were obviously having a good time. Like me they are amateurs but they sound so much more confident and polished than I know I feel about all this.

Then my music (Dave Brubeck) and my show. It’s very scary. I do sound nervous but I think I get better during the hour. I hope I’ll get more laid back and natural with more experience. My commitment shows through, I think. The contributors – Avril, Eileen, Hilary, Debora, Gillian and Glyn – are all marvellous. Apart from Debora, it’s their first time too. I have to say I feel there’s good, interesting content in the programme for both readers and writers.

Despite the great efforts of the lovely James Burrage of Bishop FM the continuity is just a bit bumpy – all my fault and I know I’ll make it easier for James next time.

One thing that surprised me was the surge of the sound of the advertisements half way through – a big contrast to our restrained voices discussing books and things, I’d forgotten about the advertisements. But it was very reassuring in its own way.

It finally dawned on me that this was the real world. That my programme, my Writing Game was really out there. On the radio. On air. Crikey!

*****

People have been very kind – here are some reactions:

First from Station Manager Gillian Campbell

‘Oh, and the show was fabulous - thank you. I had a house full sitting
around the radio staring at it (that doesn't happen very often in my
house, trust me!)’

…and …

‘Fan mail already - wow, I'm very impressed - well done! ‘

From people who listened

• ‘Congratulations. The Writing Game was such a success - a brilliant new programme that will be a treat to look forward to each month.’
• ‘Congratulations! All your hard work paid off and The Writing Game comes across as well presented, interestingly structured and inspiring, The features were short enough to hold the listener’s interest and sufficiently varied as magazine-type programmes ought to be. Well done.’
• ‘Many congratulations on a good first programme.. Here's to many more.’

That’s it – here’s to some more. Crime next time. I’ll just go and put a cold compress on my head

wx

Finding The Right Place To Write

 

This is a tall street house with - as I have said here - its own history which I find engaging. But my main purpose in staying in this house is to write this novel which was inspired by earlier sojourns in this town.  But it has taken me nearly a week to find the right place here to work.

I have tried the enormous kitchen table which has space for prepping, cooking, reading, talking eating and drinking . but somehow it doesn’t work for writing, I’ve tried it. My mind wanders away from Stella/Star and her world to the more urgent and somehow easier  human dramas around me.

The table is very good for playing  around with my new  lap top.  I can write my blog. I can teach myself how to download my photos to illustrate what I say here. I can play music from the vast collection downloaded by Sean.  But I can’t get into Stella’s world. I can’t begin the new chapters.

I did try writing on the roof terrace   

 

But the distant view of the  hills of the high Languedoc hills is distracting. And it can get hot here in the afternoons when the best thing to do is to sit under the umbrella and drink whatever comes to hand. A glass of wine rather fits the bill.

 

I discover -  at last -  that  the best place to write about Stella  is my bedroom on the first floor (at one time, perhaps, the salon). It has a quarry tiled floor, floor-length windows with lace panels and a nice big square table now tumbling with notebooks.  The geraniums in the window box play host to a butterfly of a species I don’t recognise. As I write I can  hear the children playing below in the alley and see across to the house opposite  where  the builder is working on the renovations. He walks around a lot and smiles up at me, lifting his trowel in greeting. 

 

That’s better.  Other parts of the house have their purposes. This  table is where the novel will begin to show itself. This is where I’ll get into Stella/Star’s world. And, with luck. this is where the story will grow.

Fragile Manuscripts and the Charm of Skellig

Behind me, as I sit here at my desk, are two shelves full of manuscript notebooks. These are fragile, precious things. Manuscripts chart the conception, process and completion of this whole, strange, imagined thing called a novel.

All writers have their rituals. I buy three bound hardback A4 notebooks from Rymans. Nice paper. £6.99 a shot. When the time is right I choose one of three ink pens ,and begin to write in the first book. I move from scribbles and doodles, sketches and phrases, first person riffs and place poems - on and on to coherent paragraphs and chapters. In the end there will be three or four hundred pages of writing and there might just be a novel that works. Fingers are always crossed.

On the soft brown covers of the books I paste pictures, to break their pristine touch-me-not demeanour. With my new notebook for At The Maison d’Estella - more about this on later pages – I have pasted a copy of an 1877 painting of a lady in orange lying on grass, her head on a cushion, a book in her hands. Her body is languorous, her face is totally absorbed. The painting is by Winslow Homer and is called The New Novel. I cut this image from a birthday card given to me by my friend Gillian. She is very good at birthday cards - presents too. She has a unique gift for choosing just the right gift.

I only ever write on the right hand side of the paper – so soft and easy to write on. When I was at school I thought how horrible it was to write on the skinny left hand side of the page. All I wanted to do was write on the right, easy side. (Perhaps it’s our duty as grownups to reward the child still within ourselves, by fulfilling these simple childhood desires). Then, as I work on and begin to revise and edit my first draft, the originally blank left hand side becomes full of arrows and balloons , questions and answers, speculation and self criticism. Looking back at these pages I can trace the convoluted thought processes that went into any one of my novels.


Some years ago I used to run a very successful writing group in my town. (It’s still successful without me around). Anyway, one time we asked writer David Almond to come and give a workshop and talk to us about his work. I didn’t know him then – except for his fine reputation as an editor and a short story writer - but was blown away when he showed us two bound books which were the typescript of the novel he’d written that was then hitting the literary headlines. It was a book called Skellig. He went on to show us his workbooks - which flowed with writing, scribbles, doodles, crossings outs, fillings in - which were the starting points for this book that went on, on to win the Whitbread Prize. The writers loved the notebooks. They reminded me of some of my notebooks and disabused me of my illusion that I had invented this method.

There was this other time David gave up his time to come to the prison and give a workshop for the women writers I worked with. After getting the women to imagine and invent around a series of objects produced from a velvet bag (the pastry cutter was very inspirational…) he went on the show us the visual drafts of the art work for his new book The Savage –a collaboration between him and the artist Dave mcKean. The Savage has a kind of dark energy. It’s a powerful collaboration of two artists with extraordinary imaginations and is a work of art in itself. I wrote a report for the prison of this and other events that were part of our Litfest Inside, which we put on as part of the Durham Litfest of that year. In this report, I gave David Almond the title of The Magician.

All these thoughts came tumbling back into my mind the other night as I watched – with a faintly possessive pleasure - the film version of Skellig. Since we first saw the manuscript we have seen Skellig move to become a prizewinning novel, we saw it come to world-wide eminence ( I was once in Colorado Springs USA and saw a window full of David Almond’s books, an experience brought a lump to my throat). And then Skellig was transformed into a drama for the stage, an opera for which David himself wrote the libretto, and now it is a film.

Of course a film and a novel are different animals entirely; I think it was Harold Pinter who put it very well, when he said that his screenplay from John Fowles’ novel The French Lieutenant’s Woman was a metaphor for the novel, rather than an adaptation of it. I like that.

In this film, Tim Roth is spellbinding as Skellig – dark, threatening, pathetic, revolting, and glorious in turns. The boy Michael, to my relief, remains firmly at the centre of the story. I rather relished the filmic cross-references - to the unique film Kes (with the pantomime sports master) and to The Snowman (where Skellig scoops up Michael and flies with him). And I was pleased that the beautiful shots of the house, the shed, the country and the sea, and the luscious music, underpinned rather than subverted the original central story.


Of course there are precious elements in any novel that are impossible to render in terms of film. In the novel Skellig there is this wonderful discussion about shoulder blades and angel’s wings which was so perfect and fragile it couldn’t happen in a film. But I did love this film. For me the most wonderful surprise was Skellig’s wings – scratchy and workmanlike, more pterodactyl than angels’ wings: not so much nativity play as a visceral link with the age of dinosaurs.

Good stuff. If you get a chance, watch it.

Wendy

PS For some great stuff on gearing yourself up to starting a novel, look at Avril Joy's blog at http://www.avriljoy.com/