Working it through

I have no wish to be considered sexist or anything, but if I deserve it, so be it. Men, it seems to me, have the ability to ‘think things through’ and I don’t. I would love to close my eyes and consider the consequences of every action of my protagonist, or every choice I, as author, make, and half an hour later return to this world with decisions made and a very clear picture of my story.

This is the reality for me. I have the gist – the story that can be told in a couple of lines which, by the time I’m finished, will be reduced to one line of the kind a deep-voiced American can intone to coax you all to the movie. ‘Two men and all that’s left of them is a bronze horse, a gold ring and a nation.’ That’s the back-of-the-envelope bit and I find it easy.

The first draft is sequential tale-telling. This happens, then this happens, then this happens and at the end… Oh phooey, I don’t know what happens at the end. Perhaps I’ll find out on the next draft.

And then it comes, the hard work, the real writing. On the story I’m working on right now, first draft got to Chapter Twenty. It was third person in my usual style. Then I thought, this would be a good story for the young’uns, so why not make it Young Adult? My YA version, in first person, gets to Chapter Fifteen. Then I thought, first person isn’t working, let’s start again. That version gets to Chapter 6. I’ve just started again, fairly settled now with my original idea of third person, usual style!! But I have to do the work to know how it will pan out. No sitting back in an armchair, feet up on a stool, puffing a pipe.

And then there are the step-by-step choices. The slave needs some disfigurement. In the first version, it’s a limp; by the third version, it’s a lump on the neck. All that has to be untangled eventually so that the poor fellow isn’t suffering more afflictions than the story requires.

The real horrors are the subtle choices of characteristics. My hero is a sceptic. My hero is religious. My hero despises rites. My hero consults Oracles. Saying he is a bit confused and doesn’t know his own mind, well, that works in real life but not in story, and these subtle things are harder to spot than lumps and limps. Each time he speaks, which is he, the sceptic or the believer? I have a great deal of sorting out to do (which is why I am here blogging instead of getting on with it) and I truly wish, in this respect, that I was a bloke who can think things through, because my method of groping through fog sure is not a recipe for contentment.

My equivalent to pipe-smoking and pure thought is trance. My current trance music is Ann Heymann’s Queen of Harps (Irish harps use metal strings and Ann’s idea that, in ancient times, these strings might have been silver and gold, has produced stunning results – she makes the harp sound like bells). If I put that on, it relaxes the brain, makes images flow, and when the heroine’s hair, which so far has been black but is now suddenly the colour of sunrise, then, well, I’ll sort that out later (and hire a good editor).

If the music doesn’t work, there’s always the chores. If my windows are looking clean, you know things aren’t going too well at the desk. A fellow author said over the garden fence, as I was weeding, ‘How’s it going?’ ‘Well how do you think?’ I replied tartly. ‘I mean, look at my garden all spick and span!’

Does anyone else have these problems with choices and whether to make them in the head or on the page? Am I right thinking it’s a female thing? I’d be very glad to hear from the boys on this.

The cartoon by Burton, by the way, was sent by a friend and I’ve no idea where it was published.

The Sound of Elephants Falling

Last year I gave a talk to an academic association in leafy north Oxford. As an honorarium, the £35 they gave me was derisory, but then, apparently, they are ‘poor’ (as any association will be which only charges £2 entry). As a book token, however, £35 seemed a lot to spend. I went today to browse in Oxford’s oldest and most famous bookstore, Blackwells, without quite knowing what I was going to spend it on. Some big art book, perhaps, or a leather-bound antiquity.

The sound hits you as you walk through the door, like there is a party going on. As you go upstairs, however, it begins to sound more like the school refectory. It is, of course, the coffee shop where classics used to be, where once you could sit and browse Loebs on the window seat untroubled by anyone. Now it’s a skinny latte shouting shop. Fine. Bookshops need to diversify, after all, like everybody. But the rearrangements confused and confounded me.

Here I put my hands up and admit I haven’t been in a bookshop for a couple of years. Cripes! Call yourself an author?? Yes, I do, and like most authors desperately broke, so I shop online. The thing is, I am not emotionally attached to bookshops. Too many memories of being rejected by stuffy staff, whether I was trying to get them to stock my books, buy my secondhand books, or consider a talk. Some, I have to say, have been really nice, those at Blackwells amongst them, but the overwhelming majority play authors as cats play mice, seeing how hard you bounce before you die. So I feel as if I don’t care if bookshops go down, although I expect I shall sob with nostalgia in an old folks’ home one day. But as I went through Blackwells today, it came to me that this institution will not – barring accidents – outlive me.

This is what I found. A literature department which could not point me to early Irish literature (but found it in the end under ‘languages’), where the titles I was after were not to be found; which could not understand why I should want a CD of Beowulf spoken in Old English; which had tables stocked with same-old-same-old. I’m not sure if all this reflected on Blackwells or on the University but it seems that studying Eng Lit here must be a very dull affair. I nearly fled at that point but decided to labour up another floor to classics and history. After all, I had £35 to spend. In the classics department I immediately found some titles I wanted to buy, slim books, not much more than pamphlets, in the Osprey series. Picture books, in effect, related to Celts and Romans who are my current area of interest. Fine! Good way to spend £35, even if you don’t get much to show for it. I took five titles from the carousel and went to sit in the window seat (hooray – it still exists, along with the Loebs!) to compare them and see if I wanted all and, if so, how much that was going to tot up to. I began examination…

Two of the five were smart and presentable and passed my ‘Must I Possess You?’ test, but three were just horrible. Cheap productions on cheap paper with muddy print not quite properly aligned on the page. I checked the publication page and found these were ‘print-on-demand’. I can’t see any excuse for p-o-d books to be so nasty. I decided – the gods of the Celestial Library forgive me – to buy the nice ones and come home and buy the others online for, get this, those cheap ‘n’ nasties were priced at £12 and £16 respectively and were both shop-damaged.

If publishing and bookselling are not to fall to the ground like dead elephants, causing the whole land to shake, they need to act quickly. We are a literate, savvy public and can see right past those glossy (or, indeed, matte) covers to the cheap, yellow paper within. If we are going to be diverted from the seductions of the eBook, we need our physical books to be beautiful and affordable (or at least, good value for money). The industry needs to be quick for the poachers are almost upon the herd.

Painting the Spirit

Samhain was the start of the Celtic new year, so November was a good moment to begin a new novel. Although my subject is still Renaissance, it is a very different one this time and the story is set in first century Britain. So we have a new appearance for this blog! Of course I shall always remain besotted by the Italian Renaissance and it’s sister. As I walked into the exhibition at the Queen’s Gallery on the Northern Renaissance, it was like arriving at a royal soiree only to discover the presence of a couple of old and much loved friends.  Durer and Erasmus, the presiding spirits of the first room, were both major characters in The Rebirth of Venus. Since the gallery is small and very intimate, the sense of being with them was intensified. Two pictures stood out. One was Durer’s portrait of Melanchthon, the other his portrait of Erasmus at his desk. The images here show nothing of the breathtaking fineness of the actual prints.

What the text on the engraving of Melanchthon says is, ‘Durer was able to draw Philipp’s face, but the learned hand could not paint his spirit.’

In that respect, perhaps writers have it easier than painters.

On the Scrivener programme I now use in preference to anything else for writing, I’ve been using the facility to make a visual gallery on the ‘cork board view’, like pinning up photos and notes as I used to do when I had walls (I now only have bookshelves). Last week I spent a hugely enjoyable period of displacement activity (i.e. not writing) by ‘casting’ my characters, browsing about amongst actors, celebrities, TV archaeologists, you name it, for some visuals. In my Renaissance novels I didn’t have to do this: almost every character had his or her portrait done by one of the leading artists of all time! So I made up my cork board of portraits of modern-day folk who more or less fitted the slightly ghostly images I had in mind for my Celts. (For the Romans, I have marble busts).

Now I’ve been writing about these characters intensely for a month, although they are still in that shape-shifting stage, forever fidgeting while I try and pin them down with words. Looking at images of very real faces made me uncomfortable and, when I went back to writing, it was the ghostly image that returned to mind, not the photographic portrait I had chosen. My hero’s sidekick may fit the description of Neil Oliver, but he is not going to be played by Neil Oliver and certainly doesn’t have a Scottish accent. He resists. Small, wiry, dark – it’s the best I can do when I can’t see him.

When I came upon this portrait – and others – of Erasmus in the exhibition, I realised I had never ‘seen’ him while I was writing about him. I heard him, fine and clear, but he did not perform like a puppet, this engraved image suddenly looking up from his own writing and giving me a wink.

Worried, I wrote to Lindsay Clarke and asked if he could see his characters. His reply was fascinating: ‘Though I’ve got a pretty strong eidetic imagination, I guess that my characters begin to fill out when I eavesdrop on them, so yes, I suppose I too begin with voices. Visually they sometimes remain surprisingly vague, though I could sketch them if I was pushed, and occasionally do.’

So I’m not alone in hearing rather than seeing my characters. What is your experience?

Next time I return to brainstorming a character on the cork board, I shall scan in some drawings I have made because I think, like Lindsay, I could draw them at a pinch, even though they would look somewhat ghostly and uncertain, for now at least, until I have finally captured them in words. But really, what it shows us is that the physical appearance doesn’t matter. Some authors get by without making any comment on how their characters look. As Durer attempted, so is it open to the writer to achieve, to paint the spirit. Laboured paragraphs about squinty eyes and bandy legs could be counter-productive when the word which sums the character up is ‘generosity’. But such a contradiction between appearance and spirit is exactly the problem which confronts me with the Emperor Claudius; that and him having been done to perfection by Robert Graves.

Obedience to the Muse 2

The first thing I noticed was the sheer joy of sitting in an armchair to write rather than at a desk. Yes, you could do that with a laptop, but somehow it doesn’t work, at least not for me. The beauty of the Neo is that you don’t have any games to lure you away, no emails, no internet. It’s just you and the words and, since editing comes later, you might as well do it with your eyes shut.

I sit with my feet up by the french doors watching the darkness lighten into dawn. By the time the sun’s up, I’m finished. It was on day 2 that I checked my word length, just to make sure that my instinct was right and that I’d done around 1700 words in about an hour and a half. The first session was 1869, the second 2016. I’m ahead!

Tempting though it is, I don’t allow myself to consult my notes. I’ve rather sprung this all on myself so there isn’t even a crib sheet. It’s just me, the Neo and the Muse. And, as always, the wonderful delight of what bubbles to the surface.

Because my characters are making this journey across southern Britain with only my memory to go on, it has become part of the story that they get lost. I did cheat yesterday and went to a map later in the day to see exactly where they are, and they are right on course, having taken in a landmark that wasn’t in my original scheme.

This is the magic of the Muse.

When the author is lost, so are the characters.

My ‘register’, the tone of the narration, is strange – simplified and formal. It seems I may be writing for the young. I don’t mind, if that’s what it’s to be.

And the real beauty of all this is not only that, at last, at last my novel is hatching, but that I have most of the day off! Time to make the piccalilli and quince jelly, time to prepare a talk for the Oxford Italian Association on Thursday, time to do a mailing for Godstow Press, time to hoover, time to write this blog. This is the life!

Will it last? I’m already getting up a bit later, going to the Neo a bit slower, convinced I have no idea what happens next, but then it all picks up again as soon as I press the ‘on’  button.

The count today, the fifth day, is 8657, 157 words ahead of target, and the name of the scheme is The National Novel Writing Month, known affectionaly as NaNoWriMo. Having looked at the site now, I’ve not signed up. I’m too busy to read pep-talk emails! And I still think there is far more to writing than word counts, but I notice that a) they talk about doing ‘the rough draft’ of a novel in a month, which is a relief and b) there are no prizes, which is also a relief. So it’s a good thing and it’s not too late to join in.

Obedience to the Muse 1

‘You’re a writer?’ they ask. ‘So how many words do you write a day?’ Well, I have no idea, because most days, nine out of ten days, I am re-writing, and it could be years since that first draft. I’ve been in a bit of a fix recently, researching, at first legitimately, and then as a displacement activity, Iron Age Britain. With the equinox I should have started writing but didn’t. I’ve been footling with my notes for a month.

Part of the cause was a fear that I’m past it. Writing historical fiction is so very, very hard. I can’t think of a harder form of writing: getting a good story and getting the facts right and not making mistakes. I made a few in A Gift for the Magus which, as ever, only become apparent after publication (I had three readers and two editors). So despair had set in, and I’d begun to think of alternative genres. Nature writing, memoir, biography, that kind of thing.  But two friends gave the same advice: ‘Stay true to the Muse, and don’t worry about your mental powers. The less you have of those, the better.’ Because, you see, the Muse does the work, and I’d forgotten that.

The Muse, when reading the words of her servant writers, does not notice mistakes or, if she does, doesn’t mention them.

In something of a revelation, I realised that none of these alternative genres required the presence of the Muse at all. Non-fiction is just a name for the writer being fully in control of the material. Fiction… Well, that’s the name for the deep well of imagination in which a writer may sink or swim.

So these were my thoughts at Halloween, and then came an email from Alphasmart, the people who make the Neo ‘writing machine’. I love my Neo but have only been using it recently to take and process notes, clicking away in the Sackler Classics Library on what looks for all the world like a typewriter. Here is a clip from youtube:

The email from Alphasmart said something about a BLOMOJODOBO or some such thing (I don’t understand these acronyms flying about that seem to be about and by writers), some kind of competition to write a novel in a month. I was just about to press the delete button when my eye happened to catch the text of the mail. Using the Neo, it said, it was perfectly possible to write 1700 words a day, which would add up to 50,000 and a novel by the end of the month. The month which was to begin on the next day. Well, why not, I thought. It’s better to do that than to keep footling with notes, rearranging them and indexing them.

So the next day I began.

To be continued tomorrow!

Humanity in Bronze

Thanks to a beautifully written post on The Idle Woman, I took myself off to the Royal Academy yesterday to see the exhibition ‘Bronze’. On the bus to the station, I was reading Philo the Jew, as you do. Well, no, no one normal does that (more’s the pity), but this was research. Having discussed courage in his book On Virtue, Philo goes on:

We must now proceed in due order to consider that virtue which is more nearly related to piety, being as it were a sister, a twin sister, namely, humanity, which the father of our laws (Moses) loved so much that I know not if any human being was ever more attached to it. (Philo, 1st century AD).

On the train, oh, the pleasures of Kindle, I turned to the newly purchased book by Francine Prose, Reading Like a Writer, and in one short hour rediscovered my love of literature. Yes, of course, all writers should read, but is it just me or do historical novelists end up reading far more history than fiction? Up to my eyes in Romans and Celts, not to mention Philo, I haven’t got time to read Katherine Mansfield or Virginia Woolf or anything ‘out of period’. But the aptly named Prose is a great writer and soon had me resolving to read completely out of period and get my sentences tuned up. She has many magnificent quotations from modern literature to study and analyse. One of them, from Philip Roth, whom I have never read, was this:

But who is set up for the impossible that is going to happen? Who is set up for tragedy and the incomprehensibility of suffering? Nobody. The tragedy of the man not set up for tragedy — that is every man’s tragedy. (Philip Roth: American Pastoral).

Clearly the theme for the day, established by 11am, was ‘humanity’. Humanity is, after all, what literature has to offer us. All those stories of all those human beings, meeting things we may meet, things we hope never to meet.

And so to the RA. What, people have been asking, can they possibly do to follow the David Hockney exhibition? Here’s the answer – a display of bronzes throughout time and culture. Almost at once I was baffled by the arrangement. Where was the usual tour beginning in misty antiquity, going through the classical world, medieval Europe, Renaissance, the Boring Age to our own denatured times? Everything was muddled up and arranged according to broad categories: Gods, Heads, Objects.

It was like the Pitt Rivers Museum here in Oxford, where you can find Eskimo lace next to Welsh Miner’s whalebone carvings. It’s completely creative to have all your anticipations deconstructed. You are freed to see anew and to spot the preposterous judgements in yourself even as they arise: ‘Good heavens, they could do this in the fourth millennium BC?’ (Naughty RA to succumb to the PC requirement that we rename our eras BCE and CE).

It soon becomes evident that we have been capable of great art since the beginning and, further, that there is almost nothing between ancient and modern. It is all the same brilliance and genius.

There is one difference however. When it comes to contemporary art, such as beer cans or a football in bronze, something changes. It’s as if all the spirit has been sucked out of art. What will they think of us when they look back on our secular materialist age? ‘They will marvel,’ said my companion, Darby Costello, who came up with the phrase ‘secular materialist’, ‘at all we have achieved without gods.’ Anyway such objects, from Remington’s cowboys to Koon’s football, did allow us to pass by and breathe a little, for almost everything else was utterly captivating.

Highlights:

The Chariot of the Sun, Trundholm, Denmark, 4th cent BC

The Greek head of a horse, 400 BC, which spent some of its long life in the garden of Lorenzo de’ Medici (why didn’t I know that?).

The Chimera from Arezzo, composed of a lion, with a gazelle growing out of its back being eaten by the snake which is its tail. I identified this as Romanesque or perhaps Byzantine. It turned out to be Etruscan. (This exhibition destroyed my opinion of myself as being rather good at dating and placing objects of art.)

Bronze cast copy of Cellini’s Perseus and Medusa from Florence. Huge and enthralling – even the shadows it casts on the wall are wonderful.

The Shadow of Evening, Etruscan from Volterra. This statuette had inspired a scene on shadows in Volterra in A Tabernacle for the Sun. The day I heard my first novel had been accepted for publication (by Allison and Busby), a friend advised me to go out and buy myself a present. I went to the Ashmolean and what should I find in the gift shop but a little figurine of Shadow. So wonderful to see it in its bronzey flesh again.

Uber Highlight:

Roman Parade Helmet, Cumbria, 1st century. OK, it’s my period, but more than that, it’s familiar, and my poor old memory section in the brain creaks into action and sends up sparks and the smell of burning flies as I try to remember why this is so special. And then I do. I’d seen it on Alice Roberts’s series ‘Digging for Britain’. When it was found – only two years ago – it went on sale at auction and was bought by a private collector. Roberts spoke mournfully to camera about how this precious thing had been lost and would never be seen by the public. Well, wrong. Here it is! (For the story, see Wikipedia)

Uber Uber Highlight:

A father with his three year old son on his shoulders. They are standing in front of il Porcellino, the great bronze boar from il Mercato Vecchio, Florence, its snout rubbed smooth by generations of superstitious hands. It sits – as I had never noticed before – in front of a pool made of a mirror, in a little bronze landscape of grasses and plants filled with creepy crawlies. Father and son were identifying snakes, toads, frogs. From a short distance, I watched the little boy engaging with art and knew I was seeing something truly magnificent that I cannot put into words.

On the way home I saw the headline ‘Now it is a murder hunt’ and my heart plunged like a lift whose cables have been cut in grief for that family suffering what must be so close to unendurable. Who is set up for tragedy and the incomprehensibility of suffering? Nobody. I got home expecting to hear that little April’s body has been found, but not so, they have just stopped looking for a living five year old and are looking under the earth rather than on top of it.

One of the more uncomfortable exhibits was Bernini’s The Damned Soul which features on the poster. A face contorted by the horror it must endure forever is not easy to look at.

Our Stiff Upper Lip

Ian Hislop’s programme on The Stiff Upper Lip – An Emotional History of Britain – began last evening and was very disappointing. After a run-through of history of the 18th Century (prior to which, apparently, we were all quite jolly), he finally alighted on the Duke of Wellington as ‘the cause’ of our famous stoicism. It struck me as a very superficial understanding of history and human psychology. No one causes anything.

The Iron Duke – the original stiff upper lip?

Princess Diana didn’t teach me how to cry, or tell me I was free to. The so-called ‘Queen of Hearts’ was completely neutral in the process of this nation learning to express its emotions (if that’s what that episode of mass hysteria was).

In his essay on history which Tolstoy appends to War and Peace, he likens Napoleon to the figurehead on a great ship. The figurehead may have the illusion of being a leader but it is merely being pushed by the ship, the people. To which I would add that the people are being pushed by the wind.

Analyzing national traits in historical personages is to ignore the concept of zeitgeist, the defining spirit or mood of an age. Who knows what it is, whence it bloweth and where it listeth.

I was going up to bed troubled until I remembered an occasion in my own life when I felt part of a mass, if not national, change.

It was 1967 and I was 17 coming on 18. I’d gone to Cornwall with my friend Sue. We were dressed as mods, believed we were mods, and were  in search of a bit of surfing action. One day, up on the rocks above Newquay Beach, we were listening to Radio Caroline on our transistor radio. The beach was full of people listening to trannies tuned to various stations. It was the usual cacophony we suffered before they invented headphones.

On our station came The Beatles and All You Need is Love. ‘All you need is love!’ we sang, ‘Tra la la la laaaa!’ And about 30% of the beach folk were also singing. Within the minute, everyone had retuned to Caroline and 100% were singing, ‘All you need is love! Tra la la la laa! All you need is love! Tra la la la laa. All you need is love, love, love is all you need.’

Everyone, hundreds and hundreds of people in one sandy bay singing the same song, with words so powerful that they did as they said. For that moment of palpable unity, me and Sue, we believed it. This was true. Love is all that is needed for there to be peace and well-being. Tra la la la laa!

We had gone to Cornwall as mods but we went home as hippies. Yes, we bought bells and necklaces to make this conversion obvious to others, but the real conversion had been within. Our feckless youth was behind us, frivolous sports a thing of the past. There was a world beyond Cornwall, beyond Britain, even, and suddenly we belonged to it. Did The Beatles cause the zeitgeist? No, they just put it into words and music.  It came to be called the Summer of Love, but we knew it as such in the moment on that beach at Newquay. I’m sure this is how national change takes place: in the hearts and minds of many, at once, without anyone orchestrating or influencing it.   Hislop, with his National Portrait Gallery view of history, is paddling in the shallows.

‘Critical mass’, that term taken from nuclear physics, in sociology means ‘a threshold value of the number of people needed to trigger a phenomenon by exchange of ideas.’ I find that a useful concept. We all feel the same but it’s mute and unformulated until the number of us is so large that our company includes someone who can speak out – or sing out – for the many. And then the balance tips.

I don’t know where our stiff upper lip came from but it would be far more fruitful to have a look at the Duke of Wellington’s schooling and his relationship to his father than his tomb in Westminster Abbey. Or to look at the social conditions for all classes around the time of the Napoleonic Wars, to find the misery which made us, acting as one, choose to keep calm and carry on.

Hislop’s programme is worth watching, because it’s thought provoking, but it left a nasty aftertaste of history education in the 1950s, which consisted of kings and dukes and a few rebels, as if, between them, they constituted history. They do not.  Who knows what does?

And the big question bothering us at the moment is whether the London Olympics changed the mood of the nation or was just a load of hype dressed up in disturbingly inverted symbolism and some pretty weird numerology. For which see the brilliant article by Richard Ramsbotham in the current issue of New View.