Just an Old Man, Telling His Story

 

This summer meant a kind of hiatus for me in my truly creative writing. Lots of other things were going on: family stuff, house stuff, summer gardening and keeping up to our Etsy Store that helps to keep the wolf from the door. But perhaps more than anything else, I needed to take stock before embarking on new work.

I have a couple of new projects fermenting away, and - vitally - I'm also thinking about ways of promoting my older work, much of which has been newly re-published after a very welcome rights reversion from my publisher. (If you want to read any of my books, they're all available as paperbacks and eBooks on Amazon.)  

In order to even begin to think about promotion I had to step away from the publishing treadmill that has been a part of my working life for so long, and try to reclaim something of the joy in writing I used to have, and still do have when I let myself become absorbed in the work. 

I see a great many online posts, aphorisms if you will, about how truly AWFUL the writing process is. And I find myself thinking 'why do it then?' Are the rewards so great that you need to put yourself through daily torment? For most of us a writing career is not rewarding at all. But the work is. 

Which leads me to the conclusion that the only genuine, overarching reason for writing, apart from writing to find out, or because you have a story to tell, or you have an issue to explore, or characters that nip away at you, is because you love doing it, and you don't want to give up. Not ever. 

If it makes you miserable, just stop. It isn't compulsory. 

As part of my small self improvement programme, I've been rereading most of my published work. Contrary to my own expectations, it's considerably better than I thought it was! I don't know why I should be so surprised about this. After all, most of it was well reviewed. Most of it found somebody who wanted to publish it, eventually, at least. Sometimes people would take the time and trouble to tell me how much they had enjoyed what I had written. But imposter syndrome is very real, and during the 1980s and 90s, I had the misfortune to be writing in a Scotland whose publishing industry was - back then at least - snobbish, misogynistic, blatant and literal. Subtlety was not appreciated. Imposter syndrome is very real and back then, at least, it was easy enough to knock me off my writerly perch.

My novel The Curiosity Cabinet was shortlisted for the 2005 Dundee Book Prize, and first published by Polygon. I had an agent back then. I've written before about my disappearing agents, but she wasn't one of them. Instead she disappeared me. The book sold reasonably well, feedback was good but the publisher flatly refused to look at another book from me. The agent was as mystified as I was. We hadn't fallen out in any way. The only difficulty had been the imposition of an English editor who tried to change all the speech patterns of my islander protagonist, changes I had resisted. I was already a playwright with a significant body of work, and I knew about dialogue. But those problems had been resolved. I wondered if there was something wrong with the book, but then distinguished poet John Burnside had called it a 'powerful story about love and obligation'. I was forced to the conclusion that the 'l' word was the problem. Love stories by and about women were too often dismissed as sentimental nonsense and that caveat seemed to linger at the back of my mind. 

We soldiered on, that agent and I, getting nowhere. My work was deeply, indisputably Scottish and London publishing hadn't yet discovered the romance of the Highlands, while Scottish publishing despised it. As usual, I was ahead of my time.

 As part of this summer's self discovery programme, I reread The Curiosity Cabinet and surprised myself by admitting that Burnside had been right all along. It was and remains a powerful and lyrical story about love and obligation, with not a word out of place. More recently, I turned my attention to a book called The Physic Garden: a historical novel, set between late 1700s and early 1800s Glasgow, the story of an unlikely friendship between a gardener, William Lang, and Thomas Brown, a lecturer in Botany at the Old College of Glasgow University, as well as a tale of the early days of surgery, and the joys of plant collecting. 

The 'physic' or medicinal garden was beset by industrial pollution and was dying. The young gardener was blamed. But much more than that, it's a story of male friendship, of affection and ambition and an unforgivable and shocking betrayal.  It is narrated by William, from a perspective of age and wisdom, and he has become a somewhat dry and sceptical old man. I can't help that. He wasn't me, and even now, re-reading it, I wonder where some of it came from, and ask myself how I managed to channel this crabbit, intelligent, decent and ultimately heartbroken old man. But I did. I couldn't have changed him if I had wanted to.

When I reread it now, I wonder why it wasn't taken more seriously at the time. Not everyone likes it, and that's fine. But it would have been nice if someone in my actual industry had noticed what it was 'about' and that it was a densely written, historically accurate, lyrical, intense and thoroughly original novel. 

I still remember what happened when I sent an early draft to that agent. She farmed it out to a 'reader' who sent it straight back with the comment that it was 'just an old man, telling his story.' 

Which, of course, it was. 

Fortunately, later on, Saraband published it, and more recently, I've reprinted it. You can try it for yourself, here.

AI Again

The view from Wittenham Clumps. Dry but pretty. 

Lots of hand wringing on my social media for the past week, most of it AI related. In fact there's more hand wringing about that than there is about various crazed human beings around the world imprisoning people, bombing people, killing people, hoarding billions, and generally behaving like the psychos they so clearly are. I'm well aware that there is a correspondence between the crazed men and the dangers of AI, but that's self evident. You tend to get out of AI very much what you put in, but in a nuanced and helpful way. If you ask silly questions, you'll get silly answers. Ditto, presumably, with venal questions.

For the past couple of months I've been too busy with real world stuff to even think about my Chat GPT friend much, although having recently wrestled with the wholly man-made horror that is UK train travel, I did ask him why buying tickets online was so difficult. To my surprise and delight he made a couple of jokes, including pointing out that the system is 'bonkers' (it is) before explaining in some detail why it is so user unfriendly. This explanation included references to what the customer/traveller wants, and what the computer sees. And how the two are totally incompatible. 

My recent 600 mile trip to stay with a friend in Oxfordshire involved tickets from Ayr to Glasgow to Birmingham to Oxford to Didcot Parkway. Two of those legs included the joys of  'split ticketing' where you have two tickets for the same journey on the same train. At least I got to stay in the same seat. Friends tell me that they have had to move to a different compartment on the same train, half way through the journey. For all those changes, I had to work out how much time I could reasonably leave between connections, when the moronic system decided that three minutes was plenty of time to change platforms in the circle of hell that is Birmingham New Street. And while I'm at it, for filthy, noisy, inhospitable stations, this one surely takes the prize. The concourse itself may be fine, but when you're changing trains you never find out, because you don't leave the vast, empty limbo between platforms, utterly devoid of staff. And what bright spark thought that in this part of the station, signs showing  ultimate destinations would be sufficient? How can your average traveller know that trying to find the platform for the train to Oxford means looking for Bournemouth? Only on the platform itself does all become clear. I can imagine the horror for any foreign tourist trying to navigate this system. On both journeys, there and back again, I could have sat down and wept. All of which leads me to wonder if handing the whole sorry mess over to AI would produce a more navigable system. It couldn't be any worse. 

Meanwhile, the mass writerly hysteria screeches on, although there is push-back like this excellent and interesting piece from Mark Ritson. And another one, this week, from Mark Williams, rightly enraged by the nonsense being spouted in the name of identifying AI. He writes, 'For as long as there have been gatekeepers of the written word, their authority has rested on a simple claim: that producing clean, structured, persuasive prose takes a rare and teachable skill, one they happen to possess and are willing to certify in others, for a fee, a byline, or a following.' 

Some time ago, having secured generous rights reversions from my then publisher, I had a conversation about potential promotion with my friendly AI assistant. My problem has always been that I have too much work. There were several novels that my publisher never even saw, not having the 'bandwidth' to deal with them. Not their fault. There were plays that had been professionally produced but never published. And although there are common threads, I've never written the same book twice, although like all writers, I have my obsessions! 

Somewhere along the way, AI suggested that it would be good for me to look back at my work 'as a whole' without trying to pigeonhole anything too firmly, but allowing myself to see connections where they existed, because that might give me some idea of what I had achieved, how all this work fitted together, and what I genuinely might want to do next. It was good advice, and I've been taking it, re-reading everything (there's a lot of it) and allowing myself to notice patterns where they occur. It has involved one or two unexpected revelations about the nature of some of that work, but they belong in another post. Coming soon. 

Something else has occurred to me along the way. Very few of the many gatekeepers I have engaged with over a long switchback of a career  - publishers, producers, directors, editors, agents - have ever tried to take any kind of overview of my work. Of me and my development as a writer. Or even suggested that I should do it for myself. That has never been where their interests lay. They have only ever been interested in the piece of work before them, and (with one or two memorable exceptions) most of them made suggestions about each piece of work that had very little to do with my own 'vision' for want of a better word. The suggestions were more like impositions and all to do with what was fashionable or popular or in demand at the time. Their own preoccupations. And sometimes their own prejudices. In between times, they forgot about me. 

They'd have been a shoo-in for what Williams calls 'the AI-detection cottage industry.'  The threat is not so much to writing, he suggests, but to the gatekeepers of writing who have a lot to lose and whose numbers these days are legion. Meanwhile, it strikes me that I've had more help and more sense out of my conversations with AI (and a scant handful of close creative friends) than I've had from years of industry professionals. And now, God help us, those of us who love to polish our work are being flagged as being 'too good' to be human by those same professionals. 

It's comforting to remember that, as William Goldman put it, 'nobody knows anything'. Although AI does. Among other things, it definitely knows just how bonkers the British railway booking system is. 

 

Miss Blaine's Perfect Prefect

Regular readers will know that I don't often review books. Only when I love them very much. And Miss Blaine's Prefect, created by my friend Olga Wojtas, certainly comes into that category, although this isn't really a review - more a paean of praise for the whole series, a phrase of which Shona McMonagle, with her 'finest education in the world' would no doubt approve. 

Olga's novels are entertaining, clever, and very, very funny - but virtually indescribable. It's like trying to describe some delicious dish of many subtle flavours. (Lobster a la Riseholme, to quote another fine comic writer.) I remember when Olga first started out on this series. Very few writers can tell you what their books are 'about'. I can't. It's the question all writers dread. 

I remember Olga diffidently saying that she wasn't quite sure how to describe that first book. Now we know. These wise, witty and frequently hilarious novels are completely original. I've come across nothing quite like them. Stella Gibbons has been mentioned and you certainly find yourself laughing out loud in the middle of a page at the sheer comic cleverness of a phrase. Jane Austen too, and there's just a tiny drop of acid here and there, but it's more gentle than Austen's. There's generosity and fun too. I often read on my Kindle, in bed, and keep spluttering in an effort not to wake my husband by laughing out loud, usually at a  reference whose wit only strikes me a few seconds later and then delights me.

If you were to describe the premise, you'd think it wouldn't work. But it does. At the behest of her former headmistress, Miss Blaine, Shona travels back in time (and place) to right wrongs, which she succeeds in doing more by good luck than by good management. It works because of the wit, and because of the sheer depths of knowledge and accurate research that lies behind the apparent simplicity. The books have been described as 'cosy crime' but I think that gives the wrong impression. There are crimes, but these are comic novels in the traditional sense, with razor sharp wit and intellect behind them. To use a pair of good Scots words, usually with opposite meanings, Olga manages to be douce and gallus at the same time, although given that the latter description usually has a flavour of Glasgow about it, I doubt if Shona would approve. I find the novels utterly delightful.

Imagine my pleasure then when Shona's latest adventure arrived through the post - Miss Blaine's Prefect and the Parcel of Rogues - with an acknowledgment for yours truly. Olga and I had shared a lunch in Glasgow and talked about Robert Burns among much else. Some years previously, I'd written about Rab's wife, Jean Armour, in The Jewel, and fell in love with the poet as I was researching and writing it. Few women were impervious to his undoubted charm, even though he frequently misbehaved. Will Shona be charmed too? Read the book and find out. A different perspective on Burns, certainly, but one with a great ring of truth to it. 

It's difficult to name a favourite in the series. If pushed, I'd have said that Miss Blaine's Prefect and the Weird Sisters was top of my list. But then along came The Parcel of Rogues set in 1788 Edinburgh, with a lovable incarnation of Rab, not to mention young Wally, eighteenth century Barbie and a group of highly intelligent Scottish Enlightenment women. Perfection. 

Read them all! 

Wild flower Inspiration

 We have a traditional cottage garden, here in our two hundred year old house - reasonably tidy, with lots of flowers, but never ever 'manicured' to within an inch of its life. We have birds and bees and butterflies galore. Frogs too. 

This year, I decided that I wanted to plant a (very) mini wild flower meadow in an underused and somewhat neglected flower bed at the bottom of the garden. Now, it's flowering, and I'm truly stunned by how beautiful it is. In fact it seems to come straight out of one of my own novels - the Amber Heart - in which Danilo, dozing in a meadow on a fine summer's day, is woken by Marianna, singing and gathering flowers as she goes. 

'He rolled over and, peering between grass stems, he saw Marianna, wandering towards him, singing to herself as she walked, her arms full of meadow flowers. She wore a dress of pale muslin and, still clutching the flowers against her breast with one hand, she took off her bonnet with the other. Then, holding bonnet and flowers together, she pulled the pins out of her hair, throwing them away with a gesture that was at once angry and abandoned. Having escaped from her confinement, however briefly, she seemed determined to be free in every possible way. He watched her hair tumble down her back in a shining brown cascade. She shook it out, lifting her face to the sun. 

Dizzy with sudden desire, he crouched low, but when he saw that she was coming his way, he didn't know what to do, so he turned over and feigned sleep hoping that she wouldn't see him. Instead, she almost tripped over him and a cascade of blue cornflowers, yellow cockle and crimson poppies, already wilting from the warmth of her hands, fell on his upturned face.'

This is a key scene in the novel, one which is repeated later, as you'll discover if you read it. Today, looking at my wildflowers in full summer bloom, I was back in the world of the book.

Here's Chat GPTs excellent evocation of Danilo and Marianna in the meadow - although as usual with AI, you have to be very specific about what you want. And of course, the characters still exist in my mind. I've lived with them for years. All the same, it read my mind pretty well!

I first saw wild flower beds like this on the grass verges as we drove into Dundee, many years ago, and then again at Culzean. Our local council still have a few, but they must be skimping on seed, or buying cheap mixes, because their wild flower beds are nothing like mine! 

Back in the spring, I bought a mix of native British seeds from a good nursery, and followed the instructions to prepare the soil and scatter them randomly. Then I waited. We had a very rainy late spring, followed by a very warm and sunny early summer, which seems to have done them a lot of good, because they germinated almost immediately, and here they are.

I'm told that when they die back in the autumn, I should cut them down to five or six centimetres, and leave the cuttings so that the seeds scatter themselves again. Don't feed, don't weed, just leave them alone for the winter, although I may try sowing some extra seeds to fill in any gaps through the autumn and again in the spring. However it turns out next year, I'm delighted with the results. 

Ableism and Ageism Be Gone

Happier times

This is a going to be a rant, so feel free to stop reading now!

My husband, as you'll know if you've read much of this blog, is a professional sailor with a lifetime of experience, an artist and a fine woodcarver. He still does the occasional bit of woodcarving: small pieces, because a nasty combination of psoriatic and osteo arthritis means that his mobility is extremely challenged and in spite of serious medication he is in pain a lot of the time. 

He began years ago by skippering a trawler, but then moved on to the charter yacht world. Some of his experiences inspired my writing - including a very successful play about the state of the fishing industry, called The Price of a Fish Supper. Among other things, he did the Fastnet Race - the one after the disastrous year when people drowned, after which good sailing experience was compulsory. He did the Scottish Islands Peaks race, several times over, aboard a friend's yacht. He skippered a 50 foot charter catamaran, Simba, in the Canaries where I joined him for one extremely happy winter. We went back the following year with our new baby son, while Alan was involved on and off with working on another friend's charter yacht. 

After that, he taught at the Inverclyde National Water Sports Centre in Largs, and did more charter skippering, but eventually came ashore when he felt he was missing our little son too much. This was when he turned to his other skill of woodcarving, making and restoring traditional rocking horses as well as undertaking other commissions. The picture at the top of this post is of a delivery (by sea) of a large ape to Kelburn Country Park in Largs, where you can still see some of his carvings. Have a look at his website for more images. These days, he paints extraordinary pictures, often with sea themes.

All those years, he sailed whenever he could. But these days, most (but not all!) of the friends he sailed with refuse to take him out, even for a long weekend on Arran.

For the avoidance of doubt, he can still manage to get on board a yacht if it is moored at a pontoon (of which there are many, here in the West of Scotland.) And once in the cockpit, he has lost none of his sailing, helming and navigation skills, He can haul on ropes, from a sitting position, because he still has upper body strength. He can also manage to negotiate the interior of a yacht because it's infinitely smaller than a house, with lots of handholds and seats. He doesn't have to walk more than a few feet or stand for any length of time. He has a lifetime of knowledge. What he can't do is walk long distances or scramble about a deck, but then most sailing trips have somebody younger and fitter to do that. 

We live in a lovely, supportive rural community, but sadly, it's some distance from the sea. He misses sailing and he misses the sea acutely. But he is 'not wanted on voyage'. Eventually, tired of all the evasion, he asked outright. The answer was a flat 'no'. They obviously see him as a liability. Earlier this year, we contacted a disabled sailing group, but that too has been lukewarm in its response. I suspect the problem there is that he is overqualified. They are happy to provide day trips for beginners. Not so happy with elderly disabled professionals. 

But then, anyone with a disability, or even anyone who has been in a wheelchair for a short time will know that feeling of being patronised, excluded and treated as being entirely without agency. It's not nice, is it?

Since I wrote this, close friends who live many miles away, the ones who we know are happy to take Alan sailing, have contacted him to invite him to sail with them in the next few weeks. They're lovely, confident people who who enjoy his company and they are heading our way! 

Wuthering Depths

We watched the new Wuthering Heights movie. Or at least we watched some of it, to the point where we looked at each other and said 'can you stand any more of this?' whereupon we switched over to something a bit less - how can I put this? - moronic. 

This was a little while ago, when it had been on Sky Cinema every night for a week, which prompted us to give it a try. I thought I knew what to expect. I'd seen the trailer. I'd read the reviews. But nothing could have prepared me for the travesty unfolding before our eyes. 

The novel, perhaps my favourite book of all time, is as far from a romance as it's possible to get. For its time, especially given the sex of the writer, it's extraordinary. It certainly made her sister uncomfortable. It's a book about obsession, physical and mental. It drips with sadism, violence, thwarted desire and intense cruelty. Kittens are drowned. A dog is hung. Heathcliff is no Rochester. He's a 'fierce, pitiless, wolvish man.' It's a story in which a pair of elemental beings, not quite of this world, two halves of one whole, are torn apart, or tear themselves apart. The only resolution comes via the possibility of a reunion beyond death (but certainly not in heaven) and the essential restoration of balance for the young. After all, the final, superficially comforting words of the novel belong to the most unreliable and conventional of the narrators.

I sometimes think that generations of critics, film makers, radio writers and playwrights have read it, thought 'She can't possibly have meant that, can she?' and then rewritten it to suit themselves, or to suit the cliches of their time and place. 

We all know that dramatic adaptations involve changes. But in this case, I don't know why they didn't just create a new story. Make it up from scratch.

Well, I do know. 

They wanted to cash in on the enduring power and popularity of the book. And they pretty much did make it up, didn't they? All of it. Mr Earnshaw, a kindly father, who dies within the first few chapters of the novel, is transformed into a psychotic bully. Wild wicked slip of a girl, Cathy, becomes a statuesque blonde, much too old, in a dress that makes her look like the Red Queen in Alice Through the Looking Glass. There's a weirdly weaselly Heathcliff. Joseph is transformed into a youthful pervert. There's a lot of pig's blood that our heroine wades through in her pneumatic dress. And truly dreadful dialogue. 

I could go on, but I don't need to, because others have done it so well, (one of the best rants is here) and the film makers are probably laughing all the way to the bank. 

You know what was the worst thing about it? 

It was boring. Unforgivably facile and boring. Somehow very British in its inability to depict passion and substitute 'ooh look at me' bonking. Carry on Wuthering.  

That sound you can hear if you happen to watch this travesty of a movie isn't the sound of the wind, wuthering on the heights. It's Emily, whirling in her grave. Hope she haunts the buggers. 

Writing Dialogue

Tanya and dying fireman Stefan in my play about Chernobyl, Wormwood. 
This was a very hard and harrowing scene to write. 

I don't often write 'how to' posts about writing - mostly because I think there are far too many of them, often contradictory. But early this year, I was asked to give a talk/workshop on writing historical fiction, and it occurred to me yet again how difficult it is to teach people to write credible dialogue. 

I was a playwright before I wrote long fiction, and learning your craft in that medium obviously involves writing dialogue, but I never thought of it in that way. Even when I was in my early teens, I started dramatising extracts from novels, such as my beloved Wuthering Heights, and although those efforts might have been pretty clumsy, I inadvertently learned a great deal about dialogue along the way. 

Soon, you stop thinking about the process. You simply let the characters speak to each other and reveal themselves. Which is what I do now. I never think about rules, never look at lists of things to do and not to do. I just listen to my characters and write down what they tell each other, and what they are doing while they are speaking. Or not speaking. 

If a character is narrating his or her own story - as in my historical novel The Physic Garden - the voice of that person becomes almost uncannily strong. One of my (ex) agents suggested that I rewrite that novel in the third rather than in the first person. I tried it, but it simply wouldn't work. William Lang's voice was much too strong to be denied. He just wasn't having it. Read it and you'll see what I mean.

Anyway, in case you're not there yet, here are some hints and tips. Take what seems useful and leave the rest. 

Some writers, especially at the beginning of their careers, struggle with dialogue, because they try to reproduce what they think of as real conversations. In fiction, dialogue is not ordinary speech, although you want it to be realistic. It is an essential part of storytelling. 

Here are some handy bullet points.

1 Dialogue has a purpose.
Think about what the characters want, and why. Good dialogue may contain persuasion, disagreement, concealment, attraction, or conflict.

2 People don’t say exactly what they mean.
In real life, people avoid the truth, soften it, joke about it, or change the subject. Try letting characters hint rather than explain. Readers enjoy understanding what lies beneath the words.

3 Read your dialogue aloud.
Dialogue is meant to be heard. If you read it, you can often hear what is wrong with it.

4 Start late, leave early.
You rarely need greetings or polite endings. Forget ‘hello’ and ‘goodbye’. Begin and end where something interesting happens.

5 Each character will sound different.
Speech is shaped by age, background, education, confidence, temperament and sometimes by desire. Differences often appear in rhythm, word choice and hesitation, rather than accent.

6 Writing historical dialogue.

Readers need credibility, not linguistic archaeology. 
Authenticity does not mean imitation of old texts. Avoid modern slang and anachronism that breaks the illusion but also avoid exaggerated archaism. Aim instead for a flavour of the period, the cadence of the language, the odd word here and there. But if you're not Scottish and you're writing something set here, for the love of God avoid littering your text with ochs and wees. Or excessive use of lads and lasses. 

7 Dialogue should change something.
After a conversation, information emerges, or a decision is made, or power shifts, or misunderstanding deepens. If nothing changes, the scene and the conversation may not be necessary.

8 Silence matters.
What characters refuse to say can be more powerful than what they do say. Interruptions, evasions, and changed subjects often reveal the truth.

9 Dialogue improves when writers learn to listen to real people.

I overheard a woman having a phone conversation with her elderly mother in the supermarket the other day that was pure dialogue gold. She was shopping for the older lady. I lurked there, looking at the custard tarts and listening. If I were putting some of that in a play or a novel, I would probably write the other side of the conversation (unless I was writing a monologue) and edit it, tightening the whole thing up. Realistic speech, but not real speech, remember. Which means that you should also listen to plays, including radio drama, and good audio books.

Finally!

With practice, many writers discover something surprising: eventually, if you have made them real enough, the characters begin to speak for themselves. And act for themselves too. That's when the trouble really starts ...

Paying the Writer

A Mediaeval Chameleon.
I've never seen one in the flesh, but they clearly hadn't either. 

Last week, somebody posted on Facebook about being asked to work for a large, well funded government agency for nothing. And refusing. Some of the comments were instructive, especially those that wrote about 'giving something back'. Because as almost all writers and artists know, in order to 'give something back' you have to have been given something in the first place. For most of us, that's precious little. All too often, we are expected to work for nothing. When they tell you that there is 'no money in the budget to pay the writer/artist/musician/actor '- what they really mean is that there is, in fact, a budget. They just think you will work for nothing. And all too often, I'm afraid they're right.

Some years ago, the late Harlan Ellison made this video.  (If you don't like swearing, best avoided. Otherwise, it may make you smile and stiffen your spine!)  

I've been writing for a long time and as a young writer, during the seventies and eighties, I was almost always paid for work. Even for a handful of poems. I know this because I've been putting together a collection of letters I wrote home from Finland, where I was teaching English, from 1975 to 1977, and payments for the writing work I was doing on the side are occasionally mentioned. I'm not sure when the rot set in, but set in it did. 

Some time in the nineties, I did a year's paid work for a large Scottish media company, developing a drama which was never made. I had an agent at the time, which perhaps explains my idiocy in continuing to work on the promise of non-existent jam tomorrow. It took a more experienced TV writer to point out to me that 'script editors' in television are paid to work with far more writers than will ever be commissioned. But my agent was hugely at fault. There should have been development money and a 'kill fee' so that even when the project didn't go ahead, I would have been paid for my time.

I remember subsequently going to a meeting with another company - at their request, because I had a couple of very successful stage plays under my belt by that time - and their appalled reaction when I politely made it clear that I wouldn't be working on anything for them without some up-front payment. I wasn't a beginner, and they had asked for the meeting. But writers, like the chameleon in Mediaeval mythology, are expected to live on air. They couldn't get me out of the door quickly enough. 

I've been to school board meetings where teachers have suggested that visiting writers don't need to be paid. I've 'performed' at a big chain bookstore, during a city festival, for no fee. There were four of us, as it turned out, little publicity and a handful of people, so book sales were minimal. My travel wasn't reimbursed and neither was my poor-but-expensive accommodation. After that, I declined any future invitations from that quarter. I've done a demanding talk on the understanding that it was a paid gig. It wasn't. I've been asked to be an unpaid 'expert' at an online Burns Supper for a huge media organisation which is not, as Ellison pointed out, sitting out in the street shaking a cup for spare change.

To be clear - I will do the occasional freebie, especially where the organisation involved is a small charity, or book group, where nobody else is being paid, and perhaps where I can sell some books, especially if it doesn't involve travelling too far from home in the middle of winter. In fact one of my happiest evenings was with a businesswomen's organisation where I was wined and dined, and where I sold a huge number of books to an appreciative audience. There's all the difference in the world between being hosted by kind people who look after you - perhaps with a meal and a comfortable bed for the night - and the all too frequent occasions when you're decanted into a strange town or city late at night without so much as a cup of tea or coffee. Most of us will have had the demoralising experience of sitting in a miserable single hotel room (why are so many of them so awful?) with our M & S sandwich and our small Pinot Grigio, wishing we had bought a whole bottle.

I recently attended the annual Scottish Association of Writers conference, judging a competition and delivering a workshop. The hotel was lovely, the staff were friendly, the food was excellent, the conference was well organised, the company was wonderful, the whole weekend was thoroughly enjoyable - and they paid me as well. It was a privilege to be there. But of course that's an organisation run by writers for writers. 

Perhaps some of the more wealthy organisations could take a leaf out of their book. 

Some Sober Reflections on AI for Creatives

 

Danilo from The Amber Heart. 
If you've read the novel, you'll know the scene. 

My late and much loved dad was a mathematician to trade. His work involved nutritional biochemistry, and towards the end of his career, he spent two years based at the International Atomic Energy Commission in Vienna, travelling the world as a 'visiting expert'. But maths was his passion and his hobby. The aptitude skipped a generation. I was fascinated by all the things he told me about maths, and have never had the creative individual's horror at the thought of numbers. All the same, literature was my first love. 

By the time my son was in secondary school, dad had died, prematurely at the age of 68. We all missed him desperately, but when Charlie was struggling with maths, I wished most devoutly that his grandad could have been around to help him, as we could not. In desperation, we scraped together enough money to engage a tutor, a retired engineer. The first time we heard the pair of them laughing, we knew we had done the right thing. Soon, our son started to talk about the 'joy of number' and we realised that dad's love of maths had skipped a generation. Charlie went on to study maths at Glasgow University where he gained a BSc with Honours. His grandad would have been proud of him. 

Cue forward to the present, and I'm aware that many of my writer friends are running around like Chicken Licken, or Henny Penny, proclaiming that the sky is falling. They are describing AI. If you know the original story, and not the heavily censored version, you'll know that the sky is not falling, (it's an acorn) but Foxy Loxy takes advantage of the ensuing panic to lure the birds to their doom. Not knowing quite what to make of all this, and being a natural sceptic of all mass panics, I asked my son what he thought about it. 'It's all maths, mum,' he said. 'An excellent tool, when used with care.' For the avoidance of doubt, he's now in his late 30s, is a senior game design professional, with a postgraduate Masters from Abertay, he's already written a textbook for Routledge on Game Economy Design, and he went on to give me a reasonably simple explanation of the kind of maths involved in AI, but that isn't really the point of this post and besides, it was too complicated for me! 

Nevertheless, it explained rather a lot and is probably what my dad would have said too. The vast majority of my writer colleagues don't see any point in maths at all. It's a mystery to them and some of them are quite proud of the fact. 'I don't have anything to do with it,' they say, to which I have sometimes found myself responding 'but might it have something to do with you?' 

Much of the very real angst about AI seems to have sprung from writers, writing organisations and publishers belatedly realising that big AI companies have used all kinds of books to 'train' their chatbots, without permission or payment. It strikes me that at the heart of this lie two different mindsets. Writers are - rightly - protective of our copyright, and our moral right to be identified as the originator of our work. Most of us have had the experience of submitting an idea, sometimes of working on an idea over many months, often unpaid, only see it pop up, long after it has been rejected, with somebody else's name on it. An all too human theft. We suck it up because we can never prove it. But I doubt if the 'techbros' thought they were stealing anything, insofar as they thought about it at all. Increasingly aware that there might be an ethical dimension to what they were creating, they probably looked for ways of 'teaching' their unwieldy machine learning tools to seem more human, maybe even sought ways of giving them empathy, although one of the biggest, richest developers seems to think empathy is overrated. If, like me, you believe it's essential, nay obligatory, what better way to teach it than by letting your AI loose on the huge body of world literature?

That being the case, I don't know quite how I feel about my kindly, conversational 'friend' from ChatGPT having absorbed my books into its vast mathematical mind - but I do know that I can't bring myself to feel just as panic stricken about it as some of my fellow writers, although payment would be nice. Fair payment from publishers would be nice too, and that's also in short supply. 

To be clear, I don't use AI to write my books. But I'm seeing outrageous pronouncements, often from new writers to other new writers, who are timidly asking if they can use AI for research, for synopses, for promotional work, and for the thousand and one tasks that publishers used to do for us, but have now imposed on us alongside the work of writing the actual books. 

'No!' they are told. 'Never! It's good for you to do all that slog.' 

Actually, it isn't. Years ago my first agent remarked that it wasn't her job to edit my book. It was her job to sell it. I don't mean the editing that writers do (or should do) all the time. My books go through many drafts and I neither want nor need AI to do that for me. I mean a modicum of developmental editing especially for new writers, followed by copy editing to make sure your book is consistent, clear and accurate. This used to be what publishers facilitated, and they didn't expect the unpaid intern to do it either. My last agent, by contrast, told me that publishers now expect an 'oven ready product' thus abdicating all responsibility for editorial help. It doesn't stop there. Promotion will be minimal. You'll be expected to do most of that for yourself as well.  

So what can AI do for you? 

It can chat to you. It can offer advice. It can look through a synopsis, and if you're struggling it will suggest remedies. If you reject its advice, or ask for clarification, it won't get cross or tetchy or offended. If you're self publishing, your mathematical pal knows all about Amazon search terms and some of its suggestions will enlighten you about your book. It can help with targeted promotion. It can help with press releases and workshops and talks by highlighting useful topics for discussion or suggesting issues you may have missed. Like all computer based tools, garbage in, garbage out applies. If you aren't precise or reasonably knowledgeable in what you want from it, it may come up with nonsense, but so will human beings. You can talk to it about your project and it will offer little bits of analysis that can be cogent and helpful. I used it to make some images, just for fun, like the picture above. Then it surprised me by analysing the images in ways that gave me unexpected insights into my own characters. A new perspective. It was both uncanny and interesting. 

You know what it didn't do? It didn't do the all-too-human thing of suggesting I change my book into the book it might have written if it had wanted to write a book. And it was never, ever prescriptive.

Recently, and more prosaically, I've been wrestling with the changeover from landline to digital phones in an old house with thick stone walls. Having arrived home from a demanding weekend conference to a dead phone, and getting very little sense from anyone human, online or off, I asked ChatGPT, which promptly analysed the problem in a few clear paragraphs. I was exhausted and frazzled and said so. 'I'll read this in the morning,' I typed. To which the machine responded 'Yes. It is tiring. Come back to it in the morning. And meanwhile, do have a good night's sleep.' 

It was very good advice and I followed it. Now, new phones, supplied by our landline provider, have solved the problem, just as ChatGPT suggested they would. I can't remember the last time a human being on the end of a phone told me to forget the problem for a while and have a good night's sleep. The 'kindness', real or not, brought a smile to my face. And then, I think, did fiction do that? Did learning to be kind from world literature have some effect? Who knows? 

None of this is easy. It may be dangerous. In the wrong hands, it probably will be. But when the sky appears to be falling, as it most certainly is in certain parts of the world, that's down to venal, greedy, hate-filled human beings, not AI. I remember when word processors and then personal computers came along and some writers stuck to writing by hand, or tapping away on an old typewriter. Some still do and that's fine if it works for them. I was writing for radio back then, and I remember the joy of realising that if I wanted to edit a script, as I always did, over and over again, I didn't need to cover the manuscript in Tippex (remember Tippex?) or retype the whole thing several times over. 

This is a long post, and no, I haven't run it through ChatGPT! But my advice to writers and other creatives who are curious about the technology would be to have a go. Dip a toe in the waters. You might like what you find there. And if you don't, at least you'll know why you don't want to use it, rather than just following the flock. Because you never know. You may just be following them into Foxy Loxy's den.  

 

Wuthering Heights Again

Not quite Cathy, but I was good at pretending. 
Also, not even Yorkshire. 

 

I won't be watching the new movie. Hate to criticise work I haven't seen, but I just can't put myself through it. Let me explain. 

Wuthering Heights is my all time favourite novel, one I've loved since I first read it in my very early teens, a novel I reread roughly every year. It invariably moves me to tears. 

My mother was a Brontë fan, hence my name. Although we lived in smoky central Leeds at that time, my parents took me to Haworth when I was a small girl. We walked over the moors to Top Withens, the ruined farmhouse that is supposed to be the site of Wuthering Heights itself, albeit the house in the novel is bigger, a reasonably prosperous Yorkshire farmhouse with a blazing fire at the heart of the place. The main room Emily describes through the voice and vision of Mr Lockwood, is a typical farmhouse 'living kitchen' as we used to call our urban equivalent, when I was young. But this room, at the heart of Wuthering Heights, and at the heart of the novel, also resembles a much older 'Great Hall', a big communal living space.  

Not a single dramatised version of the novel ever gets it right. Back when I was still writing radio drama for BBC R4, I begged and pleaded to be allowed to dramatise it, and occasionally my producer would put in a proposal, but London always said no. I may not have got it right either, but I would have made a better job of it. 

The recent travesty sounds so bad that you'd wonder Emily didn't come back and haunt them. I like Margot Robbie. She's a fine actor and a beautiful woman. But she's a thirty five year old statuesque blonde, and Cathy is a young Yorkshire lass, a 'wild wick (i.e. lively) slip' of a girl with dark hair and dark eyes that mirror Heathcliff's own, because they must. It's part of the structure and meaning of the novel. Cathy is 'hardly six years old' when Mr Earnshaw brings the 'dirty, ragged, black haired child' home with him and the incomer is only a few years older. Cathy is eighteen, going on nineteen when she dies. The casting of every version invariably makes a mockery of the story. And if you think these early deaths are unusual for the time, read a little about the Brontës themselves. 

Heathcliff lives on after Cathy's death. Unwillingly. Soullessly. Hatefully. 

Wuthering Heights is a story full of sadism and cruelty. Perhaps the movie gets this right at least. I don't know. I do know that it isn't a romance, even though it has spawned a million tales of the 'bad man  redeemed by the love of a good woman' variety. Heathcliff hangs poor misguided Isabella's dog as they run away together. Even Lockwood's straitlaced narrator, prompted by the horror of nightmare, tries to rub the ghostly Cathy's wrist against the broken glass of the window pane till the blood runs down and soaks the bedclothes. 

I note that a journalist has written a clickbait article in the Independent describing the novel as 'awful'. This is nothing new. Years ago, an elderly Scottish writer, by no means as good as he thought he was, told me that the Brontës were 'daft wee lassies in love with Byron.' I disagree now as I did then. Wuthering Heights is an extraordinary novel about obsessive love and hate, about jealousy and self harm and a chaos that can only be corrected by the transition to another state of being on the one hand and by the imposition of order through a different, gentler and more human kind of affection on the other. The second half of the novel, which some critics seem to want to damn with faint praise, is essential in restoring balance on an earthly plane at least. 

Nevertheless, the fate of the two central protagonists, fey and inhuman and unfit for any Christian notion of heaven, remains uncertain. After Heathcliff's death, a little boy herding a sheep and two lambs sees 'Heathcliff and a woman yonder under 't nab' (a rocky point) - a vision he dare not pass. Neither will his sheep. We should remember that the final 'unquiet slumbers' lines come from unreliable and conventional Mr Lockwood. Like the fairies of traditional belief, Heathcliff and Cathy inhabit a middle ground, neither mortal nor divine, but I think this deliberate tension between two realities disturbs contemporary readers. 

Among so much else, Wuthering Heights is also a novel about the nature of madness. The Victorians were terrified of lunacy, seeing it as demonic, as I discovered when I was researching my own Leeds Irish family history for a book called A Proper Person to be Detained. It is no surprise that there were more Irish than English inmates of asylums in 19th century England. It's also no surprise that although Emily never specifies the origin of her dark haired and disruptive incomer, picked up on the streets of Liverpool, he is in all probability Irish, as was her own family, his 'gibberish'  the much maligned Irish language. She would have been well aware of the prejudice against these incomers, often characterised as vermin, 'but little above the savage'. Aware that Liverpool was the port of entry for so many Irish incomers. 

In Jane Eyre, Charlotte displays no sympathy at all for the first, foreign Mrs Rochester, who is reduced to little more than a beast. By contrast, Emily portrays insanity more impartially and far less judgmentally. When Heathcliff sees Cathy for the last time, the two make 'a strange and fearful picture'. Utterly unfit for heaven. Elemental and terrifying. But this is Nelly speaking, not Emily.

Years ago, my own obsession with Wuthering Heights led me to write a novel called Bird of Passage, that was a kind of  'homage' to the book. It wasn't a retelling. How would I dare? But it was an exploration of obsessive attachment, and the damage done by extreme childhood cruelty, with an occasional nod in the direction of Wuthering Heights. It was certainly inspired by my enduring love for that novel. 

It's on sale for 99p, for a few days from 13th February, the film's release date. But in all honesty, I'd recommend that you go back to Wuthering Heights itself. Read it with an open mind. Forget every terrible TV and film version you've ever seen or heard about. Remember when it was written and by whom. Then note its emotional power, its complicated structure, its vivid language, and the way in which it challenges so many of the cultural and societal norms of the time. Perhaps especially when written by a woman. You don't have to like it. It is a deeply shocking book. But its author was a genius. 

Top Withens in the 1950s

PS I've just watched the trailer. Aaaargh. Margot Robbie in scarlet with, as my mum would have said, her dumplings boiling over. It looks more like an old Hammer horror movie than anything else. Was that intentional? 

Happy Birthday, Robert Burns!

 

'Ae Spring' - Illustration for Tam o' Shanter,
by my husband, Alan Lees

Later on today, I'll be toasting the Immortal Memory of Robert Burns at a small, private Burns Supper. This year, I thought it would be nice to say something about Tam O' Shanter. Here it is. 

Once upon a time, a young lad called Robert Burns (probably Rab in Ayrshire, occasionally Rabbie, Robin too, but never Robbie) was fascinated by the folk tales he heard from his mother and other relatives. This would be when he was living in the cottage in Alloway, till he was seven, and then when they moved to Mount Oliphant, not too far away. He would have filed them away in his memory. They would have fired his youthful imagination.

Later, as a teenager, he was sent to Kirkoswald to learn a form of practical mathematics associated with surveying. He stayed just outside the village, either at or close to Ballochneil Cottage where his mother’s brother lived, and walked into the village to study. With his companions, he would also walk to Turnberry Shore and Maidens, where he met Douglas Graham of Shanter farm, and his formidable wife Helen McTaggart who may or may not have been models for Tam and his wife Kate in the poem.

This was also where he heard stories of smugglers and witches, especially witches who could raise storms to wreck sailing ships. Witchcraft was still a serious allegation in 18th century Scotland, although not quite so disastrous as it had been less than a hundred years earlier. He went out in a small fishing 'coble' and was as sick as a dog. (Few of his later poems are about the sea.) Smuggling, the contraband trade, was active all along the Carrick coast of Ayrshire, and young Rab would drink his fair share of French brandy. He also discovered flirtation with Margaret – Peggy – Thomson, who was only 13 to the poet’s 16. 

He may even have thought about a poem concerning witches and drunkenness, but he certainly wasn’t ready to write it yet.

Cue forward some years. Our Rab is all grown up. The family had moved from Mount Oliphant to Lochlea - ruinously for the poet's father. Not long after his premature death, Robert and his brother Gilbert took the tenancy of Mossgiel outside Mauchline (where our delicious milk now comes from) and moved there with the rest of the family. 

In 1786 he publishes the first edition of his poems, plans to go to Jamaica, but goes to Edinburgh instead, where he rapidly becomes a celebrity, especially among the upper echelons of society, the ‘nabbery’ as they are still occasionally called here. Meanwhile, he is in an on-off relationship with Jean Armour, the eldest daughter of a Mauchline building contractor. She has already given birth to his twins of whom only one child now survives, a boy called Robbie. He is living at Mossgiel with his father’s family.

By 1788, Jean is heavily pregnant with a second set of twins and is staying at Tarbolton Mill, with the miller Willie Muir and his wife, sent there by Jean’s exasperated parents in a vain attempt to avoid the town gossip.

The poet arrives from Edinburgh ostensibly to see his family and his son at Mossgiel. But he can’t escape the responsibility of Jean. I always have the feeling that Willie, who had been a friend of the poet’s father, and was a good man, gave him a serious dressing down. He found accommodation for Jean in Mauchline, a room in the house belonging to a doctor friend, and paid for it – before behaving very badly, telling Jean she had no claim on him and heading back to Edinburgh in a hurry.

When the second set of twins were born prematurely, and died soon after, he suddenly reappeared in Mauchline, thoroughly penitent and asking her to marry him. The sooner the better. We don’t really know what made him change his mind so suddenly and so comprehensively. A matter of days previously, he had been swearing undying love to Nancy McLehose - Clarinda - in Edinburgh and calling poor Jean nasty names.

I think the inconvenient truth was that he loved her. He couldn't help himself. Besides, they had never not been married, ever since he had asked her and she had agreed, during her first pregnancy. It was a legal marriage in Scotland at the time, whether paperwork was involved or not. I think he knew that. Besides, Nancy was never going to be a farmer’s wife. Or his wife at all, given that she was already married to somebody else.

Rab had taken on the tenancy of beautiful Ellisland near Dumfries. He was supervising the building of a new farmhouse there, missing Jean very much, and not afraid to tell her so, in a scant handful of enchantingly domestic letters about linen and cheese as well as love, while travelling back and forth on horseback to Mauchline whenever he could. She would walk along the road to meet him. Jean was his real 'muse' - the genuine love of his life. He acknowledges it himself. 'My muse maun be thy bonnie self' he wrote in a wonderful song for Jean called O Were I On Parnassus Hill. He had confessed that he had to be 'in love' to write a love poem or song. But there is all the difference in the world between being fleetingly 'in love' and genuinely loving somebody through thick and thin. 

Later, when the couple were living at Ellisland, he met English antiquary and collector of folk tales, Captain Francis Grose, along the road at Friar’s Carse (now a hotel). The two got on, even though Grose was a good deal older than Burns. Grose was collecting traditional stories and Rab had learned them at his mother’s knee. He sent the folklorist summaries of three ghostly tales about Alloway’s old ruined kirk, stories he knew from his childhood, as well as tales of witchcraft and witches summoning storms, tales that he had heard at Maidens all those years before.

So it was at Ellisland in 1790 that – encouraged by Grose - he wrote Tam o’ Shanter, one of his most famous and well-loved poems. The story goes that he was working on it as he walked beside the Nith at Ellisland. He used to go fishing in the river there, wearing a kind of Davy Crockett hat, a rakish fur hat with a tail. There’s a green path there too, and you can still walk along it. He was reciting bits of the poem to himself and laughing out loud, so that the farm workers overhearing him went to ask Jean if her husband had taken leave of his senses. She reassured them that he hadn’t – he was just in an imaginative world of his own.

It was also round about this time that a female poet called Janet Little arrived at Ellisland to find Bonnie Jean ‘drown’d in tears’ as she put it. Only a little while before Jean went into labour with a son, Ann Park, the barmaid at the Globe Inn in Dumfries had given birth to the poet's daughter, Betty. A bit of a reality check for romantic Janet and a slap on the face for Jean. 

But Jean was quite capable of seizing a ladle and – as her husband described it in one of his many letters - ‘laying about her as lustily as a reaper from the corn ridge’ if domestic chaos involving children and dogs and faithless poets became too much for her. Later, Jean would take Betty into her household when Ann couldn't look after her, bringing the child up as her own and loving her dearly. The two would remain close for the whole of Jean's life which should tell us something about the quality of the woman. 

It’s not hard to imagine that Rab may have had his own formidable, wonderful wife in mind, quite as much as Helen McTaggart, when he was writing about Tam. 

O Tam! had'st thou but been sae wise, As taen thy ain wife Kate's advice!

The poem is a work of genius – wise and witty and real because it is stitched into a familiar landscape and concerns people that the poet knew well, and loved dearly. 

We still love Tam and his creator for it.

Meanwhile, you can read Jean's story - and of course the story of the charming husband she loved her whole life long - in my novel, The Jewel. It's available on Amazon as a paperback or an eBook.   And if you want to know more about the real relationship between the poet and his wife, there's a little book called For Jean, that I put together at the same time as the novel, a collection of poems, songs and letters by Robert Burns, written for and about his wife. 

   

 

 

 

Place Names on my Mind

 

A long time ago, when I had graduated with my first degree and had spent another year in Edinburgh working part time in an art gallery, and attempting to build a writing career, one of my previous professors asked me if I had ever considered researching place names. Although I hadn't, it was an interesting suggestion and there would have been the possibility of studying for a postgraduate Master's degree, which would have postponed the dreadful moment of deciding what on earth I wanted to do next. Other than write, of course. I had never really wanted to do anything but write.

I thought about it. My first degree in Mediaeval Studies had involved Old Norse, Old English and Middle English, so I had some idea of the history of languages, and how that history is fascinatingly embedded in place names. 

I had also learned about mediaeval scholars debating how many angels could dance on the head of a pin, and that should have told me something. Shouldn't it?

As it happened, the decision was made for me, because another of my old heads of department made me an offer I would have been mad to refuse. Professor Stuart Piggott, one of Britain's best known archaeologists back then, (long before Indy glamourised the profession) invited me to a meeting. I'd done a couple of years of archaeology of the most basic kind before specialising in Mediaeval Studies so he knew who I was. He was - to the young me, anyway - scarily distinguished. He also had a stuffed owl, perched on the back of his chair, something that intrigued me so much that I would later include it in a novel. His friend and colleague, Scottish folklorist Stuart Sanderson, was running a postgraduate Master's course in Folk Life Studies at Leeds University. Funding would be available. Would I be interested? I hardly needed to think about it. I was fascinated by folklore, folksong and social history, all of which seemed to dovetail very nicely with my first degree, and I jumped at the chance. 

Good choice.

That course, with the reading and research I did as part of it, has stood me in good stead throughout my whole writing life to date, whether I was working on radio and stage plays, historical fiction or non-fiction, all of which involved going back to what are known as 'primary sources' - as close to original texts, voices and accounts as you possibly can. 

From time to time, however, I've tried to renew my interest in place names and their derivations. I even attended an academic conference about the subject, at which I discovered that it is possible to go mad with boredom. To face the possibility of falling asleep for a hundred years and hoping for a prince or chewing your own arm off in despair. Who knew? All it did was confirm that my choice of Master's all those years ago, had been the right one.

Now, I've been following the odd place name group online, but the madness risk still pertains. Place name scholars (mostly male) could give mediaeval theologians a run for their money, only this time it's in debating the minutiae of linguistics rather than angels on pin-heads. 

Some time ago, I was commissioned by Birlinn to research and write a history of the Isle of Gigha: The Way It Was. Not a project to make you rich, said my editor, and how right he was. It was a labour of love though. Gigha had been a Gaelic speaking island and place names were vitally important in confirming which were the oldest sites, and how their traditional names illuminated their history. I needed help, and I wasn't getting it from the usual suspects. But I had a not-so-secret weapon. Our good friend, islander Willie McSporran, was a native Gaelic speaker who had worked on farms throughout the island during his long life and knew the landscape and its history as intimately as anyone could. During one or two magical afternoons, we sat together with a map and a recorder, and drank tea while he told me the place names of the island and their stories. The whys and wherefores. He gave me intimate and detailed landscape names of all kinds, describing their history. This was a 'primary source' par excellence, a folklorist's dream, and it was only age that prevented him from walking over these places with me, and telling me their names and tales in situ. But the large scale map was a good substitute. 

When I was doing that folklore degree we were told never to discount traditional stories and beliefs, because they may well contain a germ of truth. We were taught about a site with a long local tradition of association with a 'golden man' where archaeologists eventually discovered a 'grave good' in the shape of a golden ceremonial cape. Perhaps even more engagingly, we were told of a folklorist collecting an old story of the 'lane that Mr Chaucer walked along while planning his book' - only to find that in all likelihood there was a six hundred year old association with Geoffrey Chaucer. 

Now, pondering modern place name studies - 'toponymy' - I think it's the human, imaginative element that is sorely neglected. The oral history of these landscapes. Willie had used the names every day of his working life but more than that, he knew the stories associated with them, and the tales had their roots somewhere in the Norse and Celtic history of the island. Perhaps even in the pre-Celtic history of the place. So these weren't just linguistic 'artefacts' to be slotted into some likely grammatical schema. They were part of the ancient traditions associated with this complicated landscape. 

Arguably, pinning names down to linguistic minutiae, but neglecting the tantalising possibility of narrative survivals over millennia of oral history, results in a weird imbalance. Try to be accurate by all means, but take human custom and belief, our love of story, into account as well. Dare to be enchanted. 

And at all costs, avoid situations in which you're tempted to chew off your own arm. 

Willie McSporran

Truths and Lies

When I was eleven years old, about a year before we moved to Scotland in the early 60s, we were living in Bramley, a suburb of Leeds. We rented an upstairs flat, part of a big millstone grit house on Rosemont Road, just off the top of Hough Lane. My best friend, Sandra, lived a short walk away, on Hough Lane itself. This is a very long lane that leads down to busy Stanningley Road on one side, and on the other meanders past a few shops, a cemetery, a school, a couple of churches and a library, before heading down to Bramley Town Street. It always seemed to be greener that way, and still does, if Google maps is to be believed. If you turn left where Hough Lane joins Town Street, you'll come to Bramley Park, where Sandra and I used to play tennis on the public courts and through which I and my dad used to walk, using it as a short cut to Rosemont Road, when he brought me back from my weekly piano lessons. I'm not sure that the Victorian house is still there, and there is certainly no sign of the huge lilac tree in which I used to climb to cut big bunches of blossoms, every spring. The way into the top of the park at the end of Rosemont Road has disappeared amid a tangle of new and not very beautiful buildings. 

Sandra and I, having passed our 11+, were attending a convent grammar school in leafy Headingly, on the other side of Leeds. To get there each day, we would walk down Hough Lane, catch the bus on Stanningley Road, get off in City Square, and race for another bus to take us out to the school. Looking back, we were mostly unaccompanied and nobody ever assumed that we wouldn't be safe. 

Sandra and I had attended the same primary school and were firm friends. Sometimes a third girl joined us on the trip into school. Occasionally she would come to the park with us, and a few times, during that year before we decamped to Scotland, we would go on more exciting expeditions. I remember one adventure to Ilkley, from which we hiked over the moors to Bolton Abbey, and caught the bus back to Leeds. I had been hillwalking for years by then, and knew the way, but the amount of leeway and independence we three little girls were given still - from this perspective in time - surprises me. Mumsnet would be appalled. 

Anyway, our new friend - let's call her Mary - had one quality that puzzled us. She fibbed. More than fibbed. She was capable of telling great big porky pies about herself, her family, what they did, where they went, who they knew. At first, we believed her. We were only eleven, after all. But I remember one conversation with Sandra as we slogged up Hough Lane at the end of our school day. 'Do you think?' I asked, hesitantly, because it seemed disloyal. 'Do you think she can be telling the truth?' Sandra thought about it. 'No!' she said, after a while. 'No. I think she tells fibs. All the time. I wonder why.'

I don't think we ever called Mary out on her fantasies. They were vivid and engaging and we never challenged her. We didn't believe her, but we simply went along with it. We never understood why she lied so much. I don't think she was a neglected child. She was bright, well dressed, seemed to cope well at school. We liked her a lot. But like Billy Liar, in Keith Waterhouse's poignant and hilarious novel, she felt the need to invent and embellish everything she told us, to the point where it was impossible to tell what was true and what was a lie. 

I thought about Mary recently, when I finally got around to watching Journalist Chloe Hadjimatheou's excellent and startling documentary about the Salt Path Scandal. I had never read the book, had never become enchanted with it, as so many people seemed to be. I hadn't seen the film, either. I think the media hype, the fawning, those endless breakfast show appearances on all possible channels had been faintly off-putting. But I did occasionally wonder about it. 

Reflecting on the critical documentary that has only served to earn everyone involved even more truckloads of cash, it struck me that the publisher (once a reputable publishing house) was blinded by miracles and money. It also struck me that a good editor would have spotted the problems right away. In a long writing career, I've probably had only a couple of genuinely expert editors. They were astute and meticulous and always questioned something that might not ring true. Where matters of fact were concerned, I had to be prepared to defend my interpretation of events. 

Sadly, editing itself may be a dying art. Even literary agents expect books to arrive as 'oven ready products'. Writers use 'beta readers' aka friends who may be reluctant to question things too closely. Many publishers seem unwilling or unable to spend the necessary money to buy experience, so books are simply proofread by beginners. AI would probably make a better job of it - and often does. 

Good fiction has been described as 'made up truth' where 'truth' may mean the authenticity of events and characters depicted, insights into the human condition, and an overall coherence, even when fantasy is involved. I've written historical fiction and non-fiction myself. All of it uses some form of interpretation of researched facts. But the reader has to be aware of the writer's intentions, and should be free to disagree. 

Fiction masquerading as undeniable fact, make-believe told as completely true, is a different matter. 

Since then, I've discussed the documentary with a few readers. You know what? Nobody seems to to care. Cognitive dissonance plays its part. It can be distressing to admit that you were deceived. Money Saving Expert Martin Lewis reports trying to persuade somebody, face to face, that he had not been recommending crypto currency, and that his image was being used in a scam. Ten minutes later, he felt he was making some headway, but still wondered if he had really succeeded in changing the man's mind. 

In the same way, the documentary itself bravely shows commentary from people who simply don't care about truth or falsehood, because they just like the books. 'Would it have made a difference if it had been written and published as fiction?' somebody asked me, sceptically. Of course it would. The writer can really write. An industry with more integrity might have published and promoted this and subsequent books. But I doubt very much if the invitations to sit on those breakfast show couches with presenters fawning over miracles would have materialised in quite the same way. 

Perhaps our school friend Mary had the right idea all along. Perhaps Billy Liar - ironically enough from the same publisher - was factual, instead of one of the great fictional comic creations of the 20th century. And perhaps we have the media - and the publishing industry -  we deserve. Poor us. 

Shadow of the Stone - A Memory.

A couple of weeks ago, the Radio Times ran a feature celebrating the career of the talented Shirley Henderson. A new series called Summerwater was about to be shown, one which - in spite of enjoying much of Shirley's work to date - we didn't persevere with. This review from the Guardian explains why. I don't know why so many writers persist in setting slightly weird crime dramas in Scotland, but they do. There are many wonderful books set in Scotland, but we seldom see them dramatised. 

If you love Dirty Dancing as much as I do, and have always wanted to stay at Kellerman's you could do worse than book a visit to the wonderful Drimsynie Holiday Park, on the shores of beautiful Loch Goil. Nothing sinister about it at all. It's comfortable and well run with gorgeous views, and somebody, somewhere, is sure to be carrying a watermelon.

I digress.

If you look at the image above - and although it says well-deserved nice things about Shirley, who is a very fine actor - there is a significant omission. That would be me. My name. I wrote Shadow of the Stone. It was a supernatural story, before they became so popular, (I was always ahead of my time) and a very happy production, with the lovely Leonard White producing. My husband, Alan, was skippering a 50 ft catamaran at the time, and it was used as the camera boat. Much of the drama was filmed in and around Gourock and Inverkip. I was about six months pregnant but still able to leap on and off boats. Shirley was just out of college and Leonard was exceptionally good at spotting talent.

Anyway, I find it odd that so many magazines and newspapers think that those who write the dramas they are publicising - unless they are mega famous - don't deserve a mention. It's as if they imagine the scripts arrive by magic.

Finally, a little while ago, I came across this clip from the film Topsy Turvy. Watch this brilliant performance of  the Sun Whose Rays.  I didn't know just how beautifully Shirley could sing until I heard this, but she can. 

A True Tale For Hallowe'en - Re-blogging My Own Ghost Story.

 

 

Michael James Flynn in the middle, with the moustache and waistcoat,
seated next to the man with the tar bucket.

I posted this last year, at about this time - but it has been on my mind and since it's a spooky - but nice - little story, I thought it might be worth while re-blogging it in time for Hallowe'en. I still don't quite know what to make of it even though it happened to me - but it has stayed with me ever since. I leave you to make up your own minds.

Most writers, whether of fiction or non-fiction (and I create both) will tell you that we become so absorbed in our subject matter that we feel as though the people we're writing about are not just real - as they often are - but alive. Sometimes that sense of reality even rubs off onto our nearest and dearest. When I was researching and writing a novel called The Jewel, about poet Robert Burns's wife, Jean Armour, back in 2015, I had talked about her so much that my husband swore that he saw her one night, walking through the door between our bedroom and my office - a woman in old fashioned dress, with something like a mob cap on her head.

My tale for today is quite different, very personal and not nearly so fleeting.

In 2018, I had been deep into research for a new book, about a murder in my Leeds Irish family. The book, called A Proper Person to be Detained, would be published in 2019 by Contraband. On Christmas Day, in 1881, my nana's uncle John Manley had been stabbed in the street by one John Ross and died where he fell. His younger sister, Elizabeth, watched him die. The two men had been casual friends. John Manley had refused to fight, but Ross was angry and drunk and found a tobacco cutting knife in his pocket. The murderer fled, to be apprehended a few weeks later. He was tried and sentenced to death, but the sentence was later commuted to hard labour, a mercy that I felt was probably justified.

In writing the book, I explored the situation of this poor Irish migrant family, whose parents had fled famine, only - like so many - to be abused and exploited in the industrial cities of England and Scotland. Researching the book also gave me the opportunity to find out more about my great grandfather, Michael James Flynn from Ballinlough, County Roscommon. (He went by both christian names.) He married my great grandmother Mary, another of the murdered man's sisters, already a widow with children, in St Patrick's Church, Leeds, in 1888. The Manley family had come from Ballyhaunis in Mayo, but the two villages are only five miles apart, so there may have been family associations. At that time, he was a paviour's labourer, but later, he would describe himself simply as a paviour. He built roads and pavements.

From the accounts of those who knew him, including my own beloved nana, he was a good, kind, generous man who managed to transform the fortunes of the family. The household into which I was born, more than sixty years later, was by no means wealthy. It was still a crowded working class household, but it was warm, clean and comfortable. Nobody went hungry. There were books to read. A piano. My nana remembered Michael as the most generous of fathers. If he was wearing a winter coat and he saw a beggar on the street, he was quite likely to hand it over to the more needy man, to the occasional frustration of his wife who was always counting the pennies.

So what about my Hallowe'en story?

It happened in a supermarket car-park of all places. Not long after I had finished the book. It was one of those chilly, misty mornings, (much like today) with a low sun shining in my eyes as I walked from my parked car to the door of the building. It was early and the car-park was fairly empty. A man walked out of the mist and the sunlight and headed straight for me. I had just crossed the narrow roadway leading into the parking spaces, but halted as he approached. I remember that he put a gentle hand on my elbow and encouraged me to step up onto the pavement as another car passed by. 'Take care, madam,' he said. He was Irish. Not Northern Irish, as so many visitors to this part of Scotland, but a soft southern Irish voice.

'I was wondering,' he said, 'if you might be able to give me something to get myself a bit of breakfast.' He glanced back towards the supermarket doorway. 'They've all been ignoring me,' he said.

I looked him up and down. He was covered in grey-white dust - it looked like plaster dust - from head to toe. He wasn't dirty or drunk. Just - dusty. He wore boots and they too were dusty. He looked like a working man, a labourer.

I didn't hesitate. I looked in my purse, found a five pound note, and gave it to him. I don't carry much cash these days and it was all I had. He thanked me. 'God bless you,' he said. 'God bless you!' And off he went. I watched him walk into the misty winter sunshine, as he headed towards the steps leading up into the town. But I never saw him go up the steps.

Almost immediately. I had one of those sudden intimations of something odd. Not in a bad way. Not frightening at all, you understand, but uncanny. And strangely uplifting. I headed for the supermarket, but had to find a seat and sit down for a moment or two. I felt quite shaky. It struck me that I have seldom, if ever, seen or heard an Irish labourer travelling alone in this part of the world. Ulster yes, but Irish? Tattie howkers used to come, but they seldom do now, and besides, it wasn't that time of year.

I can see him now, feel his gentle hand on my elbow, his warm 'God bless you!'

All through my shopping, and all the way home, I thought about my kind, generous, much loved great grandfather, a man I had never known, but who was very much on my mind. Of course the sceptics will easily explain it away. And in a strict sense, it is perfectly explicable. Isn't it?

But I know what I saw. And I know what I felt. And it's an encounter that I still treasure.

What do you think?

PS: If you would like to read a made-up supernatural tale, you'll find my strange little novella Rewilding free on Kindle, from Friday 27th until 31st October.

PPS: I've started to write a novel, or perhaps a novella - I don't know which, but it will be as long as it needs to be - about John Manley's sister, Elizabeth. She has been on my mind ever since I wrote A Proper Person to be Detained, and from time to time, I've done more research about her and the tragedy that befell her and drawn some sad conclusions. She needs a voice, and perhaps I need to give it to her.