Writer's Note 5 : The charming, narcissistic Rosamund Lehmann

(One of an occasional series here about writers and writing, inspired by my correspondence with my friend Virginia Hiller...)

I've  just finished the biography of Rosamund Lehmann by Selena Hastings. Fascinating. A life more strange than fiction. - A beautiful, talented girl and woman who knew intimately

The shy, clever, seductive
intensely self-aware young beauty,,,

just everyone in the literary world of the mid twentieth century - from the Bloomsburies and Ian Fleming to Laurens Van Der Post; from Edith Sitwell to Carmen Callil,

On the downside she was narcissistic and stunningly passive aggressive. Possessing enormous  and seductive charm she looked for admiration and obsession from those around her -men and women - and was a terrible enemy to those who - as she saw it - rejected her. (Most famously Cecil Day Lewis.) She was case-book paronoid and obsessed with the emotions of the people with whom she was intimate.

She was incontinently disclosive in her desire to express her pain at the way people -0 as she saw it -  were treating her. As she grew older (scenes of things to come for some of us ...) she became something of a monstre sacre, ballooning because of her child like love of sweet things but still seeing the woman in the mirror as the beauty she had been. 

This biographer was one of those  who admired and loved her but witnessed this ultimate decay of a unique personality. Her critical assessment of the few novels is admiring but very sharp in its insight regarding  the inferred autobiographical nature of the characters and their doomed emotional journeys.

Reading biographies is a two edged pleasure. On the one hand it gives an illuminating

Still beautiful, seductive, clever,
 and intensely self-aware in old age.

access to uniquely talented personalities. On the other it can show you that your angels have feet of clay. 

This biography, however, has sent me back to Lehmann's novels - particularly Weather in The Streets. Nobody does better than Lehmann a woman's yearning to be loved and her desolation at being rejected. 

In the light of the contemporary  Women's Prize for Writing,  there is much discussion about  whether there is such a thing as 'Women's Writing'. Lehmann - much admired by men - disliked to be known as a women's writer but I feel  this biography shows her as just that. 

And being a bit that way myself, I found her ill-fated late-life obsession with life after death fascinating....

- a good read on a cold dark day!

Artistry and Playfulness Move Through The Fair

My friend Juliet became the fourteenth person -  alongside Avril Joy* and the knowledgeable Jack Haggerty of Glasgow - to offer me a new version of the eternal She Moved ThroughThe Fair - eulogised  here before

Juliet recommended Sandy Denny singing it with Fairport Convention. She has the ‘60s LP. I checked it online and found it at a sky high price in Vinyl far beyond my modest writer’s means. 

Then Juliet put me onto the re-engineered CD, well within my means. This features She Moved Through The Fair, sung by Sandy Denny - alongside great songs written and performed by the group and with the addition of iconic songs by Joni Mitchell (Eastern Rain) and Bob Dylan (I’ll Keep It With Mine).

I relished Sandy Denny‘s version of She Walks Through the Fair. Sung with elegant power and mystery, it is different again.  

Then on the tenth listen to this version I realise that in verse six Sandy is singing:

…I dreamt it last night that my dead love came in

So softly she entered her feet made no din

She came close beside me and this she did say …

Other versions I’ve heard render this as my dear love came in

This, of course reflects the dynamic nature of such traditional songs. Not only can they be re-interpreted, they can be re-worded.

But I very much prefer the dear love version

I did think the use of dead love  was a pity here. It’s easy to know from the more original versions is that it is a song of love and death, but in these the death part has to be inferred by the listener which increase the subtlety of the song, enhancing the enigma and the ancient significance of the words.

Still, Sandy Denny delivers the song superbly on this CD.

 Thank you Juliet.

But another great treat with this CD Album is the narrative in the booklet

It seems that in about 1968 Fairport Convention were playing a gig at Essex University. ‘We were given a classroom as a dressing room…some members, probably Sandy and Martin started to do a caricature (on the board) … it grew and grew … all the knobs on the amps, the names the voltage wires…’

They moved on, but later needing a cover for their new album they sent someone to photograph the board before the cartoon was rubbed off.

The artwork here reflects the  intuitive artistry and playfulness characterised the style and freedom of the music world in the '60s and '70s before the profiteering puppet-masters got the industry by the jugular.  Part of this was the playful, sometimes surreal, creative crossover between art and music, between music and lyrics, between art school students who explored their new freedoms in music and young audiences who recognised their own world and concerns in the new lyrics.

Words, Writing and Art have gone hand in hand in my own world since then.

From my collage: looking at me from the past.
She did move through the fair.

Though no great artist I do draw and paint and once had the privilege of teaching art in school.

I tend to use art analogies when trying to explain my writing process, talking of blocking in a large canvas before the start of a novel; adding colour and a depth field to a character.

I also work at the intricacy of my novel through building collages which spread across my study wall with a life of their own. And there is music. I describe myself as ‘on song’ when the writing is flowing and I am creating prose about the people, places and actions – living in a world that moves and lives before me.

In the case of my new novel my moving world is very ancient, plucked out of a non-recorded world where my collages drip with ancient maps and old cloth, with images of beautifully wrought objects handled by my people, with speculative images – some drawn my me – to feed my imagination.

I also feed that imagination with the ancient myths that came down to us through song and spoken story, trickling down from then to now.

One such song is She Moved Through The Fair.

*See Avril’s extraordinarily insightful writing blog at www.avriljoy.com

Songs Without Words - New Work in Progress.

West Britain 381 AD

' ... Lleu unpacks his harp in the sunlit door space of his mother's weaving hall. The women look up and smile, then duck their heads back down over their shuttles. His mother smiles to herself but keeps her eye on her own warp and weft. One woman winks at him and asks him if he wants her to weave her yarn through his harp strings.   

 He grins at her,  cradles his harp in his arm, and begins with  the first song of a repertoire acquired in the school across the water – always plucked and never voiced. As these songs without words float over them the weavers begin to feel in their bones the stories of the sun riding through the heavens by day and the moon quietly waxing and waning by night.  They celebrate the grace of the star goddesses who can tell the past, the present and the future. And they feel the world around them swirling and dissolving, then remaking itself in the magic power of water.

Lleu plays on and the plucked notes of his harp fall into rhythm with the clicking of the weights and the swinging of the shuttles. Soon the women start to hum along in sweet unison and the hall becomes a bee-hive, buzzing with voices that thicken and rise above the click and swish of  their weaving frames.

When the light fades and the women return to their own houses and families Lleu brings his harp closer to his mother and, now in words, he  sings the story  of her sister  Branwen the dark menace of  the great Arawn, who grasped her one day and towed her into his Underworld.'

Lleu’s words float up into the smoke blackened roof beams . His mother  joins her humming voice to his, her own song without words keening and full of sadness.
There is no doubt that Lleu is her favourite child: she sang to him from the day he was born and soon after gave him his first harp, strung with a single string for his little fingers to pluck...'

Note for you: Lleu is the son of a Welsh King and the brother of Elen who is at the centre of  my new novel.  For a writer this is a fine adventure - bringing people to life from seventeen hundred years ago. .. 

A Drive on the Wild Side

Last Thursday - in good company - I drove over the tops between Weardale and Teesdale, defying the weather which had of late been threatening and snow-laden. Up there, un-fogged by people and a crowd of concerns it is possible to clear oneself of the present feel the deep past

The Lumpy Land

Here are some lines from my notebook

Passing through this lumpy land,

rumpled hard by men who, in ancient times,

quarried marble to build cathedrals

and dug coals to heat the hearths

 of the great and the good

Up here I encounter the wild places

under my own skin: the layers of self

embedded in my genetic structure;

the honeycombs in my head filled with 

un-worded memory, originating

in the prickly wake of my conception

Icing sugar snowflakes sprinkle the tops

and lie like silk ribbons

in the creases of the brown land

celebrating the wedding of ancient and modern:

between ourselves and people who - like us -

led lives imbued with purpose

and thought with equivalent care

of their children and tomorrow’s dinner -

the millennia between us melting

like snow in Spring sunshine  

Like silk ribbons in the creases ...

 WX

The Eternal String of Pearls

One of the wonders of writing this idiosyncratic blog is the range of equally idiosyncratic responses that come to me across the ether, as comments on the page or by emails from everywhere - recently from as far away as the the very wise ‘60 going on 16’ in the West Country (I think) and the poet Ann Grenier in Rhode Island USA to John Haggerty in Glasgow.  

For me these connections with their inspired references are like an eternal string of pearls rippling down to me through time and across space.

 

This week, in his comment, the very informed John Haggerty from Glasgow tells me that the song  She Moves Through The Fair  reminds him of RL Stevenson’s poem   'Bright is the ring of words/ When the right man rings them/ Fair is the fall of songs/ When the singer sings them.'

I've copied the whole poem* below for your delight. It has been sent to music but I can’t find a version of it. I love the phrase Fair is the fall of songs and recognise the connection which John sees between these songs.

John also tells me that his brother who lived in Los Angeles for 35 years, would say of someone whose style he admires, 'She moves through the fair.'  Then he goes on to mention the autobiography of Rosamund Lehmann who took her title, 'The Swan in the Evening', from the ballad. In it she writes of her   daughter Sally, who died at the age of twenty three.

I love the work of Rosamund Lehman but have never read this one, so I have ordered it and will read it. A pearl on my string.

John also says that Sally’s husband, the distinguished poet and novelist PJ Kavanagh, describes her reaction in his extraordinary memoir 'The Perfect Stranger'  that title being  from a poem by Louis MacNeice.  Another pearl for my string.

And now my friend Sharon Griffiths, after commenting to me on She Moved Through The Fair , and knowing I'm currently researching a novel set in 382 AD (set in British Wales and the British North)  has sent me a uTube  link to   Rhydian and Dafydd Iwan singing what has become the anthem We Are Still Here.

 I have to tell you that their rendering of this modern anthem - referring back 1500 years to the place, time and people in my story - made my quarter-Welsh reddish hair stand on end; it also reassured me about the old truths embedded in the world I am imagining.  Two more pearls for my string. 

Thank you John and Sharon for these pearls of great price.   I hope some of them become pearls for other people's lifetime strings.

* Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-1894) ,
 no title, from Songs of Travel and other verses,
 no. 14, published 1896
 

Bright is the ring of words
When the right man rings them,
Fair the fall of songs
When the singer sings them,
Still are they carolled and said -
On wings they are carried -
After the singer is dead
And the maker buried.
Low as the singer lies
In the field of heather,
Songs of his fashion bring
The swains together.
And when the west is red
With the sunset embers,
The lover lingers and sings
And the maid remembers.

Listening to the Past and Moving Through The Fair

Much research for fiction involves listening to the past. It so happens that in Researching this new novel I am becoming absorbed in all things Bronze Iron Age and British-Roman. 

Then the ineffable Lola Borg drew my attentions on Twitter to the programme Soul  Music on Radio 4. Lola said,  "All about dreams and longings and unexpressed desires". If you just missed this on She Moved Through the Fair http://bbc.in/11Sywjv.
  
The programme  featured commentators and singers - most centrally Sinead O'Connor  -   trying to nail the peculiar magic of this song.

 It's a song sung on international stages by celebrities and in pubs and  hearth-gatherings of families and friends by un-lauded singers. Sinead tells a story on the programme that at the end of the  funeral after the early, unexpected death her partner Padraig they played a recording of him singing this song. As it's a story of the fragility of human experience and of obsessive love that lasts beyond the grave this was curiously appropriate. She said,  'My dear one had departed. He always had  a huge sympathy for people who were in trouble. He was an old soul and a very kind man... He 'sang' at his own funeral. I found it consoling.'  

Perfect circularity.     I listened and was  swept away.The song and its music have been whirling in my head ever since. Apparently the music is older than the song they are both lost in ancient times.

There are words here about worries rooted in the soul. There are strands of meaning here about collective memory and human history. The song and its music ask questions to which we can only invent an answer, Line by line the words are perfectly honed to pose the questions and offer answers in shades and revenents.

Every  lines (in full below) are worth quoting but  the I particularly like the lines -

Then she went her way homeward with one star awake/

As the swan in the evening moves over the lake 

- which are full of pain and with the keening sounds of the ancient music allow the singing of this pain. 

The Soul Music programme showcases several versions of the song including that of Sinaed O'Connor herself and Van Morrison and The Chieftains.  I have found many versions and everywhere the meaning of the words and the music transcends style and fashion. 

I liked this one by Loreena McKennit. 

Loreena McKennit singing She Moved Through The Fair 

-  Although the setting is rather grand for such an apparently simple song, she sings - very appropriately -  to the harp and she definitely looks the part,

(LATER) And the lovely blogger 60 Going on Sixteen (See comment below) recommended the purely exquisite 1941 version by the legendary John McCormack. I see he is accompanied bu Gerald Moore, the equally legendary  pianist. Give yourself a treat and listen to the past in two dimensions - World War 2 and The ancient past.

(EVEN LATER...) and this version by Van Morrison and The Chieftains appropriately sung - almost spoken  - by Van Morrison  shows the tragic young man at the centre of the story.

Listening to the past makes sense not just for writers but for all of us who are trying to solve the puzzle of what it is to be human and spiritual at the same time.

She Moved Through the Fair

Unknown

My young love said to me, my mother won´t mind 

And my father won´t slight you for your lack of kine, 

And she stepped away from me and this she did say, 

It will not be long love ´til our wedding day. 

She stepped away from me and she moved through the fair, 

And fondly I watched her move here and move there, 

Then she went her way homeward with one star awake, 

As the swan in the evening moves over the lake. 

The people were saying no two were e´er wed, 

But one has a sorrow that never was said, 

And I smiled as she passed with her goods and her gear, 

And that was the last that I saw of my dear. 

I dreamt it last night that my young love came in, 

So softly she entered her feet made no din, 

She came close beside me and this she did say, 

It will not be long love ´til our wedding day.

The Royal Society, Tommy H, and the Matter of the Hinternal Combustion Engine - second airing

Note from Wendy: I wrote this following post in 2010. It's still getting so much attention - - many page views from all over the world -  I thought I'd give it a 2013 airing. Hope you enjoy it. The stories are true and the issues are still outstanding.

‘So, Wendy,’ said A, arranging his six feet of lean muscle on my very inadequate chaise longue, ‘How do you teach someone to read?’

We had been listening to the first of five of Melvyn Bragg’s magnificent round table discussions on the foundation of the Royal Society.* A, among other things an embryonic scientist, listened with interest as the narrative unfolded of the foundation of systematic scientific enquiry in Britain.

Somehow our discussion leapt on to my own early days as a very young teacher (twenty going on twelve…) when – trained to teach art and history – I was faced with a class of eleven year olds in a sink secondary school. There were two streams, A and B. I was given the B stream, only fifty percent of whom could read or write at all adequately. The A stream – not much better - was taken my new friend Anne, an accomplished musician, who came at the same time and thought she was here just to teach music.
I loved these kids, They were funny, anarchic, bubbly, hard to contain. In a year I learned so much from them. They were very helpful. One day, when I showed my exasperation at the noise, ‘June ‘– round white face, black bobbed hair - told me, ‘You should do what our last teacher did, miss. Put Cellotape on their mouths.’

Young as I was, I learned very quickly that I cofuld survive by dint of hard work, a sense of humour, and by seeing these eleven year olds as individuals needing good feedback to make any progress. Liking them was half the battle. (In my teaching career i met quite a few of teachers who didn’t like children…)

Despite ‘June’s’ kind advice I managed without the Cellotape and gradually they got used to me. They listened, talked, and worked with stunned interest at the odd things I asked of them. One of these things was to sit quietly and listen as I read to them a whole range of stories. The other was what I called my Friday Lecture.

On Friday afternoons, when we were all exhausted, each week a member of the class took a turn to give us a lecture on anything they chose: it might be keeping rabbits or their favourite football team, a pop star they admired or the people who lived in their street. I often supplied them with visual aids and helped them of they stumbled a bit in their delivery .J

Now in this class was a charismatic boy called Tommy H. He had this large white elliptical face topped by hair sticking up like a yard brush. He was quite chunky and - this being a non-uniform school - he wore a tweed jacket that was a bit too small. He couldn’t read but he wrote very swiftly - pages of writing that would have been more at home on an Egyptian tomb than in an English schoolbook. I would call him over and ask him to read the pages to me. He read them fluently and they had syntax and meaning. Dyslexia had not been indentified in those days but he was prime example of this condition – often intelligent but non-reading. Then, he was just labelled as illiterate and of low ability.

When his turn came to give the lecture I asked him what his subject would be he said, ‘Well, miss, I’d like to talk about the Hinternal Combustion Engine.’ Tommy put aitches in front of most vowels.

‘Do you want any help, Tommy? With pictures or anything?’
‘No. Miss. I’ll manage.’

That lunchtime he came in early and drew on the blackboard, in coloured chalks, a picture of a car engine in perfect detail. In his lecture he patiently explained to all of us how an internal combustion engine worked. It was the first and only time anyone has ever explained to me , with any clarity, that arcane process .

The class enjoyed Tommy’s informative lecture and he was treated to a loud and long round of the applause. The head teacher popped his head around the door and asked, ‘Is everything all right, Miss Wetherill?’

It was. After the year most of those children left my class being able to read and write. Tommy made all kinds of progress and went on, I am sure, to be a successful adult. I survived.

I was still thinking about Tommy when A asked me this question about reading. ‘So,’ he said ‘How do you teach someone to read?
I took a deep breath and launched into the familiar mantra.

‘You need to know they can hear words in all their distinction – this needs lots of story and conversation. Lots of speaking and listening. They need to know how books work and what they are for. Some children arrive at school having experienced all this at home. Some children with this background almost teach themselves to read. But if this hasn’t happened at home then it needs to happen at school.
Most children recognise the shape of some words and know their meaning. Most children can readMcDonalds. They recognise the word and its meaning almost from their first hamburger. They recognised that it as a shape – like a chair has a shape. They collect lots – even hundreds - of words like this, through the shape. These shapes have sounds and meaning. They know that. Then you show them the magic! You help them begin to learn that they can build up any word in writing, de-code any word in reading, by understanding the range of sounds offered by each letter and blending them.
Magic! One day you can’t do it on your own. The next day you can.’

‘You’re right,’ says A. ‘It’s a kind of magic really.’

wx

*The Royal Society started as an "invisible college" of natural philosophers who began meeting in the mid-1640s to discuss the ideas of Francis Bacon. Its official foundation date is 28 November 1660, when 12 of them met at Gresham College after a lecture by Christopher Wren, the Gresham Professor of Astronomy, and decided to found 'a Colledge for the Promoting of Physico-Mathematicall Experimentall Learning'.

Knives, Short Stories and Supporting Your Libraries

 Rat-tat! Postman at the door with bulky parcel. I am delighted to see my copies of the Audiogo edition of my short story collection Knives.

This is the second edition, a  large print edition published by Audiogo. The book looks very smart - mainly white with touches of black. This is interesting, as the first edition, published by Iron Press, was mainly black with touches of white.

Audiogo Editiion

Both cover designs reflect the dramatic element of these stories.

In looking this collection again  I find myself surprised at  how much on the edge they seem: on the edge of society but also on the edge of darkness.

Some might say I have been influenced by three years working in prison with people who are on the margins and are consummate experts on the darker side of human experience. It’s not that simple.

Iron Press Edition

 The better truth is that I was drawn to work in prison because my own lifetime experience of living on the margins, of knowing my own edgy shadows.

Dark as these stories may appear they reflect my view of the shining recoverability of the human spirit and the qualities of stoicism, wit, humour and irony that aid survival and can bring about recovery and growth.

(I have written more extensively about this book  in 2009 here on myblog)

This new edition will also be available in libraries so please order it if you feel inspired. Using your library like this is one way to support this threatened resource.  The present day saying   ‘use it of lose it’ really does apply to libraries.  It applies to your own library. 

(I am pleased to see from the PLR record that all of my books ares still being borrowed from British libraries – last year 90,000 times. Like all writers I love my library readers out there across Britain...)

Enjoy your library

Happy reading.... W

Is Grammar a Building Block or a Stumbling Block for Writers?

When I was in my second year at grammar school, aged twelve, I handed in a composition (called now a piece of creative writing…)  called  The Fox. My English teacher - a magisterial, handsome figure of a man -  returned it to me with a high mark. I treasured this, having learned very quickly the high gold-standard currency of marks.

But much more important, in the margin he’d written in his flowing hand ‘Good Syntax!’

So, what was this thing I was  good at? I had to go to the big dictionary – one of the two big books in my little house. There I read:

syn·tax 

• The study of the rules whereby words or other elements of sentence structure are combined to form grammatical sentences
• The pattern of formation of sentences or phrases in a language
•  A systematic, orderly arrangement of words

I was very pleased by this revelation. I reckon that was the point where I actually decided to be a writer, even though I’d never met a writer and had actually never met anyone (except my teachers) who wore a white - not a blue - collar to work.

The rules of good syntax were only peripherally taught at that school; I really learned the nature of  syntax and grammar when I started learning French and German  I had to do this in order to get to grips with languages whose grammatical structures were different from (different to?) my own. I still remember the exotic feeling of getting to grips with the subjunctive form in French and realising that form exists in English..

So how did this little girl who lived in a small crowded house that had only two big books get be the mistress of very good syntax at twelve? 

Books on my shelves now

The way we all do. I’d been speaking this language since I was eleven months old  -  talking,  listening and arguing in a verbally oriented  family for twelve years.  Very importantly though, thanks to the library, I had also been reading it for eleven years and was now up to five books a week.  Reading voraciously when young  is the key to high literacy necessary in a writer.

Proper language is already there. I well remember a child in my class saying to me ‘You mean I already talk in grammar, miss?’

Early in my teaching career I remember reading that by the age of five a normal child will have incorporated all the rules of grammar of his own language into his brain structure They don’t have to learn it, they speak it. It may be useful for them to learn  the rules they already operate at some point  - for example when you learn a foreign language.

Or perhaps it is useful when you become a writer and have to edit your own work…

I know from my workshops that some writers get jumpy and defensive about grammar and syntax.. Either they’re hidebound by the memory of bad teaching or a clumsy editor. Or terrified of looking stupid. Or -  however good a storyteller they are -  they are innocent of grammatical conventions in written language and that very innocence could send their work flying onto some editor’s floor.

This is a pity -these natural storytellers can make very good fiction writers. They have the most important qualities  a feeling for the trajectory of a story, an ear for dialogue and a fresh world view.

Good, self-developing writers reach out for help where they can. A 2009  page on my blog , which has Semi-Colon in the title is still very much visited although it is also about my collection Knives and the writer RC HUtchinson

Syntax as a Valuable Building Block

The first crucial building block for a writer is the ability to create a world, to build a narrative, to have an extensive vocabulary (all that reading!) and a mind that sees the world afresh –dreaming dreams and having visions.

The second building block is to build on their innate comfort with the magic of  their own language and become comfortable with the value in knowing syntax and grammar when they starte editing their own work.

When my students begin to trust that I won’t laugh at their innocence they will ask crucial questions and these questions are the key to their further writing development,.

Just what is a sentence?

What is a paragraph?

What is the difference between dialogue told and dialogue said.

My very best advice is to read more, to look at how sentences, paragraphs and dialogue presents itself on the pages of modern novels and short stories.

These works must be modern because grammar is a dynamic force in prose; it changes through time.  It evolves.

For example page-long paragraphs – acceptable in nineteenth century and early twentieth century novels  - will give a modern novel a dated feel,  

One evolution is the way some writers (look at Roddy Doyle) have a very clean way to present dialogue which made the purists tut-tut when they came out. But modern writers can make a choice.

The rules on paragraphs can be ambiguous. I suggest that a paragraph is a whole idea, a piece of speech or an aspect of the whole setting, building up the  climax of the narrative within the chapter or the short story. It promotes the transparency of the narrative. It does not get between the reader and the narrative.

Top tip. When the idea, the speaker, the setting changes changes, try a new paragraph.

Look at the paragraphs  on the page. White space promotes clarity; it allows the reader to breathe his own way into your narrative.

When students are in doubt about technicalities, I recomment the plain, easy and accessible Elements of Style by Strunk and White.- a volume written (I heard) for American students coming to study at universities in England. There you will learn what since childhood you have known instinctively.

Once you end up knowing how the rules of syntax work then you can choose, if you want, to break them. But that will then be a knowing process. And you can comfort yourself in knowing that there are some individuals who know syntax up to their eyeballs but could never pen a good story in a hundred years.

Syntax as a Stumbling Block

This happens when you – perhaps from school or a clumsy and thoughtless editor – become frozen like a rabbit in headlights at the embarrassment of being seen as stupid when you don’t quite get the difference between verbal story telling and story telling on the page.

At one time editors would work with very promising writers who were not quite there. But nowadays they are very busy, exhausted with their corporate strategies and business models, so you have to do it yourself,

So don’t let it be a stumbling block. If you edit yourself with a clear knowledge of syntax the manuscript you present will not have laughable flaws that could blind the readers to a wonderful story.

This process of ultimate self editing is even more crucial in these days of indie publishing and eBooking. One of the biggest criticism of the flood of self published eBooks is the variable standard of editing without the filter of a publisher’s editor to catch the flaws.

In any case, syntax is intricate, it is relatively easy and - dare I say it? -  it is fun. Every writer should be the master of his or her own language. Grammar stands there alongside originality, vision, vocabulary, narrative skill as a crucial tool for the successful writer, whatever their approach to publishing.

And more books....

Happy writing. W

Picture This: Ways of Writing About Yourself.

It might be fair to say that all writers write about themselves. Even biographers tell us about themselves – their attitudes and values - as they are writing about quite another person.

Poets write about themselves - sometimes in a deeply codified fashion sometimes quite directly. They reveal themselves to you as long as you know the code.

Look at Philip Larkin:

Life is first boredom, then fear. 
Whether or not we use it, it goes, 
And leaves what something hidden from us chose, 
And age, and then the only end of age.

                                       From Dockery and Son.

…And Ted Hughes:

She had too much so with a smile you 
took some.
Of everything she had you had
Absolutely nothing, so you took some.
At first, just a little.

                                               From The Other

And novelists do this too, even if their subject matter is apparently distant from their own lives. When I was writing my writer’s memoir The Romancer (see sidebar) I was quite shocked, looking back over a dozen novels, to see  just how much of my own life is buried in there underneath the fiction, informing it and giving it a touchstone of reality,

In the Romancer I experimented with another approach to writing about myself  across the distance of years. This was a series of cameos called Picture This, where I wrote about this little girl and a  growing your woman (me) in the third person, ‘I’ becomes ‘she’.  This gave me a fictional distance but allows me to tell a truth.

And so I discovered that it’s a great way to write sketches which in later times can inspire and give life to further, longer fiction. A whole novel or a short story can grow out of a single 'Picture This'

Here is a new ‘Picture This’  just written:   

Picture This:

The girl was first a stranger, then a resident in this small town set in a necklace of dusty coal mines with a shiny new brooch of light industry on its lapel. In time she finds herself on a high corridor in a castle, in a room with a coal fire in an Adam fireplace and a bed in each corner where four nearly- grown girls sleep at night.

One of these girls kneels by her bed each night to say her prayers. Another has wonderful bright penny hair and skin like porridge, and tells tales of being punished by her father by being locked in a cupboard . The third, a very merry girl, is quite stout when clothed but looks better when she strips off, taking on the aspect of the prow of a sailing ship.

And then there is our girl under the covers with a torch, reading again and again a letter on yellow paper covered in small black writing: an academic hand. There are pathways in our lives and this might have been one of hers. That was one future that did not happen.

She didn’t cry when she left home to take a train and two buses to reach her castle. And she doesn’t cry when she feels lonely there and out of place. But after three months when she comes home for the first time and turns the corner onto her narrow street tears fall unbidden from her eyes.

 But when she opens her own door she wipes away her tears  with the back of her hand and says hello to her mother. They do not hug or kiss.


Who knows where this might lead?

Why not try a Picture This’ and become she or he in your writing?

Happy writing! W