Bird of Passage - My Homage to Wuthering Heights.

 

Over the years of my writing career to date, there were two or three novels that I always thought of as the 'ones that got away'. 

Until I took the decision to publish it myself, Bird of Passage had always been my orphan child, the book that a few people read and enjoyed and were moved by, but that nobody in the industry wanted. Unlike The Amber Heart, that kept being turned down with fulsome praise, because 'nobody is interested in Poland', no agent or publisher would even read Bird of Passage, in spite of its Scottish setting and Irish background, and in spite of the fact that it tackles some harrowing issues that are still very much current. In short, it was turned down unseen. 

My big mistake, I came to realise, was in pointing out that it was something of a homage to Wuthering Heights.

Wuthering Heights would be my desert island book. My 'inheritance' novel because my mother and my aunt loved it too, so it was a part of my childhood. It was the novel I read when I was in my teens and I've never stopped loving it. I reread it almost every year,  generally at this time of year. Vitally, it was the inspiration behind Bird of Passage. 

This is a reblogging of an old and popular post with some revisions. Because whenever I reread WH, I find something new and intriguing. This year it was narrator Ellen Dean's reference to Joseph, even doggedly religious Joseph, leaving his cake and cheese out 'for the fairies' on Christmas Eve. Which made me think of my Yorkshire grandfather and his great fondness for fruit cake and crumbly Wensleydale cheese. Then I wondered whether our habit of leaving a mince pie and a glass of sherry out for Father Christmas owes something to that much older custom. 

I'm a Yorkshire lass, although one with a rich Polish and a rich Irish heritage as well. We lived in Leeds until I was twelve years old. You can read more about my family background in a book called A Proper Person to be Detained (Saraband 2019), part personal memoir, part family history. In that book, you'll find a little speculation about whether Emily may have conceived Heathcliff as a dark Irish child, with his 'gibberish that nobody could understand'. This may have been his native Gaelic, given that Liverpool was full of migrant Irish fleeing famine, including my own forebears, at the time when Emily was writing the novel in 1845. Emily's father was from County Down in Northern Ireland and the sisters would have been well aware of the anti-Irish prejudice that accompanied the influx of migrants. 

I was named for the heroine of Wuthering Heights, a doubtful compliment some might say, and I was trundled over the moors in my push-chair to Top Withens, the setting for the Heights in the novel, if not for the house itself. As soon as I was old enough to read and begin to understand the novel, I adored it, although I soon realised that it was a powerful and absorbing evocation of obsessive love, packed with repeated images of cruelty and sadism, with very little of conventional romance about it. 

Top Withens

Many years later, when I became an experienced radio dramatist, with 100+ hours of radio drama to my name, I would plead with the BBC to let me dramatise the novel. They commissioned me to dramatise many classics, from Kidnapped and Catriona to The Hunchback of Notre Dame, but for some reason, they never let me tackle Emily's masterpiece. Which was a pity, since so many dramatisations - in my well informed opinion - fell far short of the mark. 

 

Cue forward some years, and after a spell of writing for the stage, I began to focus almost wholly on fiction, with occasional ventures into historical non-fiction. Much of my work at that time was published by Saraband, but I still kept going back to Bird of Passage. Most writers have ‘bottom drawer’ novels. I have several, and most of them should never see the light of day. 

Bird of Passage always felt different. 

It felt like irritatingly unfinished business. I kept going back to it. Tinkering. Thinking about it. It haunted my dreams. It was as though these characters wanted desperately to tell their story. Interestingly, I knew that one of the characters had a secret, but even I didn't know what that secret was till the very end of the writing process. I woke up in the early hours, thinking 'That's what it was. That's what he needed to remember.' But I had to write the book and edit the book many times over to find out.

Back then, I still had an agent but they seemed to be repelled by anything with a Wuthering Heights connection, even though I would insist that it was only 'inspired by' and not some crass rehashing of the story. Later, no publisher would touch it, in spite of some glowing reader recommendations. 

I've often wondered about their wholly and sometimes virulently negative response. Given how many women I know who - like me - love Wuthering Heights, what was their motivation? It wasn't as though they had read it and found it wanting in some way. That would have been excusable. They wouldn't read it at all. Wouldn't you think at least one of them might have thought that they could find a way of marketing it?  

Anyway - Bird of Passage languished on the far recesses of my PC. Nobody wanted to know. Nobody had the time to read it. Nobody cared except me. I cared. 

I couldn't get Finn and Kirsty out of my mind, so when I took the decision to combine some self publishing with my traditional publishing, this was one of several novels that I felt deserved another life beyond the confines of my computer, my own imagination and the doubtful curation of other people. 

That was when I tackled it in a big way, with all the benefit of half a lifetime's experience of writing and editing. When it was finally published, one of my reviewers, Susan Price, pointed out that it is not a retelling. It is a 'reimagining' of Wuthering Heights at a different time and in a different place.' 

Bird of Passage wasn't the only trigger, but it was a significant milestone. I think it was then that I knew that the way ahead for me lay in publishing my own books, under my own imprint, albeit with some excellent professional assistance. I needed to be in control.

The evocative cover image by my artist husband, Alan Lees, is exactly what I wanted. It's a very grown up and often desperately sad story set mostly in the Scottish countryside, exploring the kind of mutual passion that is attractive in theory but ultimately destructive. It's a novel with occasional, albeit very subtle, supernatural elements. It's a book about the nature of obsessive love and the terrible, irreparable damage of childhood trauma.

If you love Wuthering Heights (or even if you don't) and if this sounds like your kind of novel, it's available as an eBook and in a nice, fat paperback as well. 

The eBook of Bird of Passage will be on special offer at the bargain price of 99p from 11th till 17th December.  

Ten Things to Think About If You're Planning a Writing Career

 

1 - Do you want to 'be a writer' or do you want to write? If you find yourself saying that you want to 'be a writer' but haven't actually written much, while making excuses to yourself and your friends - I don't have the time, I don't have the space, I don't have a computer - then you may need to have a rethink.

2 - Getting an agent doesn't mean that you'll get a publishing deal. Even if you win the query letter lottery, ten to one you'll be asked to rewrite. Many times.  And even when you've done those rewrites, you still may not get a publishing deal. At some point, you may realise that you've wasted the time you should have spent writing another book on rehashing the previous book. 

3 - Very few people make a living out of their writing, and this situation has only got worse. Are you prepared to diversify and do other things to earn actual money? The average 'advance' - if you get one, which is debatable - is tiny. £1000 or £500 is not unusual for a book that has taken a year or two to research and write. Lots of jam tomorrow in the publishing world. 

4 - If you have written fiction, you'll be told that nobody is reading fiction. If you have written non-fiction, nobody is buying that either. If you write popular fiction, it's not literary enough. If you write literary fiction, it's not popular enough. I was once told that my work was 'too literary to be popular but too popular to be literary.' It's the equivalent of the indrawn breath when you are trying to sell a car. Nobody wants that particular model, although they absolutely do want the model they are trying to sell you. The Long Tail seems to be an unknown concept. (Read the book. It's a revelation.) 

5 - For most small to medium sized publishers, editing is not what it was. A good editor will ask all the right questions and in answering them you will make the book better. But most are now freelance, and many publishers simply can't afford them. 

6 - Are you prepared to do almost all publicity and promotion yourself? You will be expected to contact libraries and local venues. You will probably have to organise your book launch yourself, and many bookstores won't be keen to host you unless you can guarantee sales. All of this genuinely (as opposed to point 1, above) eats into good writing time. And yet you feel compelled to do it for fear of missing out on sales.

7 - The physical quality of your precious baby - aka the book - may not be nearly as good as it was even a few years ago. In fact it may involve paper like Soviet Era Polish bog roll. (Of which I have some experience.)

8 -  Once you get a modicum of traction, with a reasonably popular subject, you may be asked to talk about your book. Many commercial organisations will expect you to do this for nothing. My maddest moment was realising that I had hauled myself across the country, done a ten minute talk for a big chain bookstore, (there were four other participants I didn't know about and a tiny audience) paid for an overnight stay in a horrible room, and trekked back home. All at my own expense. 

9 - There are, of course, some organisations that may invite you to speak, give you a good meal and somewhere nice to stay and buy copies of your book as well. It has happened to me and I was incredibly grateful. But it's rare and getting rarer all the time. 

10 - Given all of the above, you may want to consider going it alone. You won't be alone. You can get help along the way. But it isn't a simple solution either. These are shark infested waters, and you need to be careful and committed. Nevertheless, it strikes me that the reverted and new titles I'm now publishing myself under my own imprint are good quality. Good physical quality as well, with beautiful covers, and nice paper. I'm the same writer I ever was, albeit with many more years of experience. And you know what? When it comes to the reading public, that long, long tail of people who like books, nobody cares who published them. 

They never even notice.

How Not To Be A Writer - Part Twelve: Happy Days In Fife

The upper flat here was my home for almost two years.

 For a couple of years, in the late 70s, I worked for an organisation called The Arts In Fife, as a 'community writer'. I was part of a small group of writers and artists working in the community to 'facilitate' various creative events - writing groups, art projects etc. Fife is a big place and I needed to be able to drive, so I took my test in a hurry. Those were the dear dead days when you didn't have to wait years for a test. It was the most nerve-racking exam I've ever taken. Twice the same dog trotted over the road in front of me. It was the only time the stern examiner said anything apart from test related stuff. 'Suicidal dog,' he said. But I didn't run the dog over, and I must have looked in the mirror, because I passed first time. Then with my parents' help, I acquired a very elderly green Morris Minor, the only car I've ever truly loved. 

After a couple of months spent lodging with the kind parents of one of my old flatmates in Broughty Ferry (a home from home for a while) and commuting to Cupar where we were based, I managed to rent an upper flat in an old cottage in Kingskettle. It was pretty and comfortable but as so many houses back then, without central heating. As far as I remember there was a coal fire in the living room, and I carted a couple of electric fires back from Ayrshire. 

The job was huge fun.

Two incidents from that time stick in my mind. One was when my boss suggested that it would be a good idea if I put a notice up at RAF Leuchars, to see if any of the Air Force wives in particular might be interested in coming along to a daytime writing group. A little while later, I had a visit from Special Branch in the shape of a polite young man in a white mac, who had been told to 'investigate' me. 

It was the name that did it, of course. Although why any spy worth her salt would use such an obviously central European surname, I don't know. Surely Blunt or Philby would have been better.

On another occasion, myself and the community artist, Rozanne, pottered down to the East Neuk in my wee green Morris, to visit a National Trust property, at their request, to see if there was anything we could do for them. We were, as far as I remember, given coffee. But throughout the meeting, we were driven mad by the appetising scent of cooking. Eventually, we were shown out, politely enough. They were expecting a visit from the high heidyins in Edinburgh. As we ate fish and chips in Anstruther, we reflected that lowly artists and writers didn't merit such lunch invitations. They were only for 'those and such as those' - a status which I have seldom if ever achieved. 

Most writers will have tales of being decanted into the night in a strange town or city, having given a talk or similar, and heading back to some hotel or B&B to eat a packet of M&S sandwiches (if lucky) and drink one of those grim miniature bottles of wine, if you've remembered to buy one in advance. The very worst was an unpaid event for a big bookshop that hadn't even given me expenses, and being wished a cheerful goodnight, as I headed back to a horrible economy room in a hall of residence, with a narrow bed, a desk, a chair and a spider in the corner. 'Never again,' you say. Until the next time. 

I loved Fife and I still do - a beautiful place with friendly people. The job, as it was intended to do, left me some time to write. I was working on short fiction and poetry, as well as the occasional freelance piece for the Scotsman. I visited St Kilda, by helicopter, to write a piece about the island, and later drove to Fort William to interview one of the last people to leave the island. He still had his St Kilda spinning wheel, and showed me how to use it. Then I drove all the way back to Kingskettle, because I was working in Fife the next day.

Mostly though, my own work at that time involved radio plays, first with the late, much missed Marilyn Imrie, and following that with the equally missed Hamish Wilson. Of which more soon. 

When the job came to an end, I was on the verge of moving to Huddersfield, where I had just been accepted for a writer in residence post but was yet to make up my mind about it. Then an Ayrshire based friend decided to stop off in Kingskettle on his way to a fencing tournament. He never got to the tournament, and soon after that, I moved back to Ayrshire, got married and became a more or less full time writer. 

An Unexpected Use for AI

 

Image, courtesy of hotpot.ai/art-generator 

 He's rather nice, isn't he? 

I have to admit, up front, that I'm not a big fan of AI. I never use it for writing (I can do that all by myself.), I don't like the way it harvests the work of genuine creatives, and I keep seeing these appalling AI images drifting past my eyes on social media, most of them ridiculous or inaccurate or both. 

My book covers so far - the ones I source myself - are supplied by my artist husband, Alan Lees, my own collection of very old photographs, or more recently, some spectacularly beautiful photographs by our friend Michal Piasecki  licenced only for this single use. The cover designs are made from these images by Lumphanan Press who also format the books for me.

But here's a thing. Like many writers, when I'm working on a book, whether it's fiction or non-fiction, I do like to surround myself with images of all kinds. They can be photographs, postcards, paintings, landscapes, houses, maps, and characters that reflect whoever or whatever I'm writing about - a whole miscellany of images that will never appear in the book as themselves, but will feed into the inspiration behind it. It's one of the pleasures of creating. My work-space becomes a kind of mega mood board. 

I do the same thing on Pinterest as well, making a board for each project. 

My latest project is going to be a trilogy. I've written two books in the series, and hope to publish them either before Christmas, or soon after: Hera's Orchard and Bitter Oranges. I'll be tackling the third in 2025. The books are set mostly on the Canary Isles, and they are about the challenges and joys of a cross cultural relationship. 

I'm going back to an old project here that has had several incarnations, including a radio play, a short story, and a novel that was so skewed by my then publisher that it bore only a faint resemblance to the book I had written. 'You wrote a sensitive exploration of a marriage and we turned it into a beach bonk buster' said my editor, regretfully, many years later. She wasn't wrong. What I really wanted to do was get back to my original idea, and see where it took me.

I wrote the first book, published it briefly on Amazon as Orange Blossoms, unpublished it quite quickly, because I wasn't happy with it, and then revised it drastically, while working flat out on the sequel. It has taken a while, but I'm finalising edits of both books. 

My husband used to be a charter yacht skipper, so we spent a couple of winters in the Canaries, aboard a 50 foot catamaran. It was probably where my love of all things Spanish began. I'm looking at some of my old photographs as I type this, as well as maps, and a little heap of reference books. 

So - where does AI come in? Well, in an idle moment, last night, I found a site called hotpot.ai, and even more idly typed into the little box the simple line  'handsome Spanish man sitting under an orange tree.' Within a couple of seconds, the site had generated the picture at the top of this post. I was surprised. I mean, not only is he handsome, but he genuinely looks Spanish. (Where was this 'harvested' from, I wonder?) The oranges are a bit OTT  in the way of so much AI, but for a book called Hera's Orchard in which the oranges themselves take on a kind of magical quality, it's fine by me.

Today, I had another go, because my 'hero' for want of a better word, plays the guitar. But it has to be a Spanish guitar. And so it is. Not sure about the beard, but it's still a pretty good image. 

As I say, I won't be using this in any commercial sense. My husband has already supplied me with three lovely cover images. But many writers like to play about with visual images as additional sources of inspiration ...  which these are. Thanks, hotpot!

Guitarrista - hotpot.ai/art-generator

A True Tale For Hallowe'en

 

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

I don't know quite what to make of this story 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 do 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. 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, the murdered man's sister, Mary, 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 as a paviour. He built roads and pavements. 

From the accounts of those who knew him, 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 working class household,  but it was warm, clean and comfortable. Nobody went hungry. 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.

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, 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. 'Take care, madam,' he said. He was Irish. Not Northern Irish, as so many visitors to this part of south west 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. I never saw him go up the steps.

I had one of those sudden intimations of something odd. 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've never met one since. 

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 31st October, for five days. 

How Not To Be A Writer - Part Eleven: A Cautionary Tale

David Rintoul and Paul Young as David Balfour and Alan Breck
in my radio dramatisation of Kidnapped and Catriona - a happy production!

Once upon a time when most of my writing involved plays, especially radio plays, rather than fiction, I was a member of a UK union for professional writers, focusing on drama. I had been a fully paid up member for some years. 

Membership involved a banding system, paying a percentage of one's earnings, which had to be declared. I think the same applies now, although when I had a look at the required payments recently they seem more reasonable than they did back then. Nevertheless, I was happy to pay, and membership meant that the BBC had to pay me the agreed rates for my radio drama, which constituted the bulk of my paid work back then. 

Even so (and possibly more so now) the 'agreed rates' for small independent theatres - for example - always seemed unrealistically high for those of us outside London. Funded though regional theatres might be, the vast majority of tiny companies simply couldn't afford these high rates. Most of us managed to hammer out agreements that seemed fair, especially when nobody else connected with the production was earning a fortune.

I think we were always uneasily aware that there seemed to be a focus on London and on the few 'big names' who were working in film and TV and earning what were - for the rest of us - vast sums. 

Some years into my membership, I had my own annus horribilis. It involved family illness and bereavement, house problems and the cancellation of projects I'd budgeted for. In short, our entire income had fallen drastically. We were struggling, mentally and financially.

I wrote to my union, explaining as far as possible what had happened, and asking if a payment holiday might be possible. 

The reply, when it came, fairly took my breath away. The (salaried) General Secretary had written to me personally. If I wanted to spend my money on 'make-up and lunches rather than supporting young writers', that was up to me, he wrote. This at a time when I - only in my mid 40s - was spending my money on food, lighting and heating and buying my clothes in charity shops. 

When I picked my jaw off the floor, I wrote to them, resigning and explaining why. 

I got an apologetic letter from the very starry president, but I didn't rejoin. I've often thought that - as with the theatrical disaster described in a previous post - if it happened now, I would go very public. Back then, there seemed no way of doing it, so I simply soldiered on. Meanwhile, the uneasy perception remains that any man who could even consider sending that letter to a female member was a rank misogynist. There's a lot of it about. Why was nobody aware of it? Or were they aware of it and had decided to ignore it? 

 

Plotters and Pantsers Revisited.

This is a revised version of a post from 2022, because the question of different writing processes has arisen again, this time on Facebook. The other night, we were debating whether children should be made to plan out their writing in advance - or just work it out as they went along. Opinion was, of course, divided. 

A friend inspired that original post and I'm grateful to her. She observed that she had been taken by surprise by the ending of one of my novels called Ice Dancing and my immediate thought was 'so was I!' I had no idea how it was going to end, until I started writing the last couple of chapters, and suddenly saw what should have been staring me in the face at the same time as the narrator herself discovered it. The odd thing was that it didn't involve any manipulation of the story. No careful plotting. No subtle planting of clues. No planning at all. When I looked back, the clues were all there. I just realised what had been happening at the same time as my narrator. 

Which in turn led me to think about a couple of other novels where the ending had taken me by surprise. Without any spoilers, in Bird of Passage, I discovered the trauma that the 'hero' (if he can be called that) Finn was trying to remember at about the same time that he realised it himself. Until that moment, all I knew was that there was something that he was struggling to remember, a memory that - as an act of self preservation - he had buried deep inside. As I wrote what turned out to be a pretty long book, I didn't have a clue what it was. It's a precarious position to find yourself in - but it's exciting. 

Then, towards the end of the process, I literally woke up in the middle of the night saying 'So that was what happened!' But I had never, not once, plotted it. 

Similarly, in The Physic Garden, I knew that the ending involved a shocking betrayal because that's how it begins. The narrator mentions it, without going into detail, so we, the readers, don't know what it is. Again, I realised the nature of that betrayal and its consequence much later on in the story. This time, the narrator knew what it was, but had been reluctant to write about it until he was ready to confront it, and in some sense heal the memory. 

I am what is known as a 'pantser'.. I write by the seat of my pants. I write to find out. I always know the beginning, and I sometimes have a very vague idea of the ending, sometimes as little as the last few lines - but I never know how to get there. 

If I did plot everything out in advance, I would get so bored that I would never finish writing the book at all. And it's no use telling me that 'lots of people do'. I know they do. But I don't. 

Outlines were always anathema to me, because I could write them (with difficulty) while knowing full well that the finished book or play would be nothing like the outline. How could it be when I just didn't know? Plotters need to know. They plan everything out meticulously, including detailed character sketches. I never do that either, because I've only just met these people so how can I? It doesn't feel precarious. It feels uncannily as though the story is already there, waiting to be uncovered.

All the same, for many writers, plotting works well. I don't write crime fiction or the kind of thrillers that depend upon intricate plots that must fit together but I know that they do need to be pretty well plotted in advance. Otherwise you might find yourself desperately trying to tie up too many loose ends in the last chapter. 

The problems arise when we try to enforce one method on people for whom it doesn't come naturally. There is no right or wrong way - only the way that works well for you. The trick, as with so much creative writing, is to find out what suits you best.

The Facebook debate was originally about children. It's certainly helpful to teach them about the basic structure of an essay (or 'composition' as it used to be called, in the olden days) and how to plan it out. I spent four years as Royal Literary Fund Writing Fellow in a university, helping students to do just that: how to structure their academic writing, how to follow a line through an essay, how to frame an argument.

But where creative writing is concerned - stories, making things up, fiction  - I don't think it's nearly so important. In fact for children, it may inhibit them. 

Many years ago, I was asked to judge a local schools creative writing competition. When the prize-giving came around, it became clear that I had chosen the 'wrong' child. He had written a chaotic but gloriously imaginative tale that no teacher or parent had ever had a hand in. He was surprised and delighted to win but I sensed an air of disapproval in the room. The parents of the usual suspects, the kids who always win prizes, were not amused. The following year, I was presented with a small pre-selected set of pedestrian, perfectly planned and phrased stories, littered with unnecessary adjectives, fronted adverbials* and all.

I said I couldn't possibly judge them under these circumstances.

Later, when I was working as Royal Literary Fund Fellow, a student asked me to look at a drama script. This was unusual, because most of my work involved helping with academic essays and dissertations. It was a good piece of work. I pointed out a few things and then told her to 'go away and play with it.' She looked at me in dismay and said 'But we're not supposed to play with it. We're supposed to get it right!' 

It encapsulated everything that I find troubling about Creative Writing as an academic subject. No writer ever really believes they have got something right. The most you can hope for is 'good enough'. Or 'I'd better stop now'! The real joy of writing involves playing with the material, exploring, finding out, experimenting, drafting and polishing and cutting and polishing again, until the piece - more or less - says what you want it to say. 

If planning it out helps you, go for it. If it doesn't, don't worry about it. You don't have to 'get it right'. Only as good as you think it can be. 

* I have an honours degree in English Language and Literature, with a fair amount of Linguistics in the mix. I taught English as a Foreign Language for three years. I have never, not once, come across the term Fronted Adverbial. I still don't know what it is. Did Michael Gove make it up? 

Please Don't Kill Our Darlings

 

David Suchet as Hercule Poirot, courtesy ITV

I have a confession to make. I have never, not once, watched those 'final episodes' of long running series where the main character dies. I was thinking about this earlier this week when I switched on the TV in the kitchen, as I often do to alleviate the sheer boredom of cooking, only to find that it was showing the Remorseful Day, in which Morse pops his clogs. I've never watched it and I never will.

I feel the same about that appalling episode where Hercule Poirot dies. Not only have I never watched that, but I avoid those episodes where he ages, episodes that I notice tend to be accompanied by doom laden background music. Poirot is the original cosy crime series. Christie herself may have been fed up of being lumbered with her wildly successful creation, but in his David Suchet incarnation at least, I love him. I don't care if he's a perjink little man. I don't care if his denouement speeches might be unbearable in real life. This is patently not real life, and I love him to bits. In my mind, he goes on forever, and I'm never ever going to be persuaded to watch his final moments.

I should perhaps also confess that I've killed off more than enough darlings of my own. And mourned them too, mourned with those who are left behind. But that's different, because I'm not writing cosy crime. Sometimes I'm writing grown up love stories, literary fiction, explorations of real life, whether historical or contemporary. And for the writer, in an odd sort of way, even though you may have killed them off, those characters live on in your internal world. I'm thinking of two novels in particular: Bird of Passage and The Amber Heart. Without going into much detail, in case you haven't read them and want to, some darlings didn't quite make it. But don't worry. They're here, living their best lives in my head and heart. 

That phrase 'killing your darlings' was attributed to William Faulkner, but was used earlier by Arthur Quiller-Couch who wrote of murdering one's darlings. Essentially it means that as a writer, you may well find yourself having to delete the passages that you love best, the parts of a book that don't really advance the story. I used to think they were right. Now, as I'm reading swathes of tremendous classic fiction where people didn't feel the need to edit out all the best bits, I suspect they were probably wrong anyway. Imagine Dickens or Emily Bronte killing their darlings. Well, of course, she did. But just imagine (as I did here in this blog post!) if she had had an editor who told her to make radical changes. 

But I digress. Along with a sizeable chunk of the older female population, I loved Mamma Mia. We didn't get to see the sequel in the cinema so my husband bought the DVD for me. I got only a little way into it to realise that - horrors- they had killed off Donna. (Presumably because Streep didn't want to do it.) 

I donated the video to somebody who wanted it, but I still feel cheated. I wish somebody had warned me beforehand. The songs may have been great but it meant that the whole thing shifted from being a joyful film about wonderful middle aged men and women to focusing yet again upon the young. Not only that, but removing that brilliant central character was like chopping down a mast on a sailing boat. It took a whole lot of rigging with it, and crippled the vessel. 

The point of these ongoing characters is that in our minds, they don't die. They just are. Which is, now that I think about it, very like the way writers feel about their characters, even if we may have killed them off. They don't die. They are still there, popping up from time to time to remind us of their existence.

Can you imagine a grown up William Brown, struggling with mortgage payments and divorce? Can you imagine him ill and lonely? William - whom I love quite as much as Poirot - changed with the changing times, but he never grew old. That wasn't a tragedy. Peter Pan this isn't. Richmal Crompton created a world into which we all, from time to time, need to escape - hilariously funny, wise, wicked, badly behaved (he'd definitely have been hit with an ASBO now) and completely outside time and its sorrows. That's why I still feel the need to read those stories all over again from time to time, and why I still, all these years later, take so much pleasure from them. 

Bird of Passage is available on Kindle at the bargain price of 99p until 31st July.

How Not To Be A Writer - Part Eight: High Hopes

During the late 1970s, and after the death of my first radio drama producer, Gordon Emslie, I was introduced to another fine producer/director: Marilyn Imrie. It would be the start of a long and productive professional relationship and friendship during which we would work on a string of original radio plays, as well as a number of major dramatisations, for the much missed Classic Serial slot. 

Those were wonderful radio days, with a wealth of talent - acting, production, technical. This was talent that the BBC would deliberately throw away some years later, in pursuit of cost cutting at the expense of quality, and by imposing an 'internal market' strategy that successful creative industries were already realising didn't work. To quote just one minor example: when I first wrote for radio, well before digital was a thing, there was a record library for background sound effects, staffed by knowledgeable people. Later, the internal market dictated that the production budget had to cover a significant fee for this service - in effect, the BBC paying itself for a service it was already providing. It was, of course, much cheaper to pop along the road and buy whatever CD you needed, which was what most producers did back then. 

All the same, I would learn so much from so many people, over the following 25 years. 

Much as I loved Finland, I had decided that the work was never going to pay me enough to live on and besides, some of my writing was beginning to be successful. I spent some time at home in Ayrshire with my parents, writing, submitting work here there and everywhere, and wondering what to do next to make some money. 

Several things had happened over that decade that gave me hope that I might be able to forge a successful career as a writer. The radio commissions continued to trickle in and I just loved working on them, loved the whole experience of being in the studio, sometimes rewriting on the hoof, because time was always of the essence, working collaboratively with groups of committed people. 

A meeting with Robert Love of STV led to commissions for three short television plays: Ugly Sisters, the Showground Collection and the Shore Skipper. From this distance in time, I remember nothing about the first two, but I certainly remember the last one, because much later, I used it as the basis, albeit very loosely, for a successful stage play called The Price of a Fish Supper. 

Television - even regional television - was well paid. All the same it struck me that it might not be my favourite medium. In radio, writers are an essential part of the process, expected to attend at least some rehearsals and parts of the production. In television, with one or two glowing exceptions of which more later, I always got the sense that they preferred the writer to hand in a script, shut up and keep away. 

It was also becoming clear that I needed something a little less precarious from a financial point of view. I therefore applied for a position at Wroclaw University, to teach English Conversation to senior students. It was sponsored by the British Council. Poland was still under Soviet rule, although there were cracks appearing in that troubled relationship. 

An induction day in London for those heading beyond the Iron Curtain told us what to expect. I would be paid in zloties in Poland and in sterling back home in the UK - because Polish currency couldn't be exported. I would have to give up my passport while I was there. There would be a KGB informant in every classroom. We must avoid contentious subjects, especially political subjects. Our phones would probably be tapped. (Mine certainly was.) I seem to remember signing the Official Secrets Act. Could that really have happened? Well, maybe. 

With a mixture of trepidation and excitement, I packed my bags and headed for beautiful Wroclaw. 

How Not To Be A Writer - Part Seven: Finland

Teaching in Finland. I'm at the back, in red,
with short dark hair in the fashionable 'Purdie' cut.
Photograph by our fellow tutor, Wladyslaw Cieplinski

There I was, in the mid-seventies, back home in Ayrshire, with two degrees in - let's face it - pretty useless subjects where the job market was concerned and the urgent need to earn a living.  Don't get me wrong. Everything I've ever studied has been invaluable for my writing. I've used all of it, and still do. But was it ever going to help me to earn a living? Well, in a way, it did.

I'd been given a New Writing Award from the old Scottish Arts Council, more approachable and committed to the arts than its subsequent incarnation, Creative Scotland, but it wasn't enough to live on. I was always welcome at home, and I loved it there, but I was used to living independently. I'd published a poetry collection called a Book of Men, had a few radio plays under my belt, published some short stories here and there in literary magazines, and had written the occasional book review or freelance article, but none of these things paid very well, or at all. I needed a job that would bring in some income and allow me to write as well.

I did a summer school in teaching English as a Foreign Language, applied for and got a job at a private language school in Tampere in Finland and headed off to Turku, by cargo ship from Hull: much cheaper than flying, back then, and an experience in itself. 

I spent two tremendously happy years in central Finland. I loved it. The work was hard, with long hours and a not particularly high salary in a country where everyday living was expensive - but it was worth it. I taught adults, sometimes one to one lessons and sometimes groups. I travelled by bus to paper mills to teach executives and PAs there. I remember one very senior executive who had already rejected two teachers in quick succession. I was my boss's third and last attempt and I was nervous. As it turned out, his English was already very good. What he needed was recommendations for reading, books and newspapers, and a teacher who could discuss that reading with him. Thanks to my English Lit degree, we got along just fine.

It wasn't easy to begin with. Finnish people turned out to be warm and welcoming, but extremely shy and self contained. They were fine in one to one sessions, but groups were incredibly difficult. I soon discovered that the only way to cope was to make a fool of myself by - essentially - leaping about and making them laugh with daft examples. It worked. They soon relaxed and began to chat. This was an experience that would later prove invaluable when running writing groups where people may be understandably nervous of exposing their writing to other people. I've heard far too many tales of experienced writers humiliating beginners including people who were put off for years, before going on to ultimate success themselves. It's fine to make a fool of yourself - but never, ever of other people. 

Teaching in factories also taught me a lesson about the egalitarian nature of Scandinavian society. One of the CEOs I taught would turn up in his tracksuit, having cycled to work, and we'd have coffee in the staff canteen before starting. He knew everyone by name and there was no 'executive' dining room at all. This was back in the 1970s when the divisions between the workers and management in British companies was marked, and for all I know still is in some industries. 

I was invited out by my unmarried engineering students for meals, to ice hockey games, to try cross country ski-ing, or to watch car racing on frozen lakes. I learned how to walk on icy ground without falling over and admired the amazing skill of bus drivers who knew just when to put on the brakes, so that the bus would slide to a gentle stop at the head of the queue. I acquired lots of warm underwear, boots and hats. In Finland, at parties, a room is generally set aside not just for coats and hats and scarves but for the ladies to take off their obligatory woolly knickers. One or two of my older lady students took me under their wing and treated me to saunas and lake bathing, at their summer cottages. Another of my students flew me over the city in his little Cessna. In short, I had a ball. 

I also wrote. A lot.

In spite of working full time, I managed to finish a novel called Snow Baby, and a whole heap of poems. Most of the poems were published subsequently, and you can find them again in my new retrospective collection, Midnight Sun. The novel languishes in a bottom drawer, where perhaps it should stay, but I do occasionally look at it and think 'Hmm. Not half bad.' 

Celebrating Stella Gibbons and Avoiding Presentism.

I'm reading a novel called Enbury Heath, by Stella Gibbons. I'm working my way through the many excellent but largely neglected books that she wrote after Cold Comfort Farm, although I recently took a break to read some necessary political stuff, Marina Hyde in particular, to remind myself of just what shenanigans the government had got up to over the past few years.

Enbury Heath is a semi-autobiographical novel, published in 1935. It's an engrossing story about three young siblings in the early 30s, trying to come to terms with their troubled past, trying to make their way in the world as adults. As so often with Gibbons, I find myself engrossed in a book that paints a picture of everyday life at that time. A rarity, I realise. So much (but of course not all) fiction about that time is written from a present day perspective. It often focuses on the wars, concentrates heavily on the dramatic, the big events and how they affect the lives of those experiencing them. Enbury Heath, only 'historical' because we are reading it from a perspective of now, with all our knowledge of what will come next, is essentially about how family background affects future life and how individual, even loving, siblings will respond quite differently to the influence of that background. . 

It's also, in a more general sense, a novel about life in pre-war London - acutely observed as ever, and with the author's ability to creep inside the minds of her characters, observing their joys and sorrows, bringing them vividly to life for the reader. It's not 'dramatic' in the current cliffhanger sense, but it's certainly absorbing. 

1934, when this book was written, was ninety years ago. The author was writing about the world as she experienced it. Sometimes we may find attitudes disturbing. But just as, as writers, we shouldn't make our characters think thoughts they could never have thought, we probably should try hard not to project our own mindsets back onto books that are very much of their time - and criticise them for it. Who knows what readers in 2114 will make of our current attitudes and preoccupations? What will it be, I wonder, that will need 'trigger warnings' or suggested cancellations? 

The curse of presentism doesn't only make our own fiction unreal and anachronistic - it prevents us from learning more about the past.

At one point, in Enbury Heath, one of the characters waves in a satirical manner. It is an imitation of the Nazi salute, but one that is deliberately mocked, deprived of its menace. The author observes - in a book written in the early 1930s -  that this mockery of  Hitler, with a version of this gesture, had spread among young people throughout the UK and the US like wildfire. Much like goose stepping that was subject to the same treatment. I remember my father doing it to make his little daughter laugh, back in the fifties. But it was also, I now realise, a pleasure for him, a mockery, a way of reducing the very real monsters of the Nazi regime, monsters he had experienced for himself, to something banal and foolish. 

When I read that casual passage about the salute, light dawned. I suddenly thought of the picture of the young princesses, Elizabeth and Margaret as children, supposedly 'giving the Nazi salute'. It was pounced upon by the tabloid press a few years ago, and spread far and wide on social media. What they were probably doing was using the gesture that - as Gibbons observes - had spread far and wide among young people. A gesture that deliberately mocked a perceived populist monster. She had probably used it herself.

There were plenty of Nazis in the upper echelons of British society - read about Edward and Mrs Simpson, read the Remains of the Day, to find out more. But I don't think the princesses or their parents were among them. 

There are populist monsters who walk among us today. To go back to where I started, read Gibbons to be entertained and enlightened. Read Marina Hyde when you find yourself trying to cope with statements like this: 'Britain would be in a far better state today had we taken Hitler up on his offer of neutrality, but oh no, Britain’s warped mindset values weird notions of international morality rather than looking after its own people.'

Predictably, this mindboggling statement comes from a Reform Candidate. Who wants his country back, but - like so many - seems blissfully unaware that he got it back in 2016, and hasn't known what the hell to do with it since. 

How Not To Be A Writer - Part Six: Back to Leeds

A Moonlit Lane by John Atkinson Grimshaw

Leeds was a very different place from the city I had left aged twelve but it still felt strangely like home. I had managed to secure a room in a student house at the end of Wood Lane, the same long, dark lane where I had gone for my piano lessons at Leeds College of Music, all those years ago. 

My teacher back then was Miss Ingram. She was nice enough, but I was a little afraid of her. She wore a black velvet jacket and massaged her hands with Nivea Cream. The scent of it still reminds me of her. I remember the head of the school remarking to my parents that she had 'an iron hand in a velvet glove' . I was seven when I began lessons and even though I dimly perceived that he didn't mean it literally, there was some part of me that wondered about her hands. Especially since - although she wore no velvet gloves - there was that velvet coat ...

I remember little about the student flat apart from the fact that I wasn't in it very often, due to the nature of the course, which involved research elsewhere. I do remember that on our first night, we went into the shared kitchen to be met with a great commotion as what seemed like an army of mice scattered from the cooker. Investigation proved that it had not been cleaned for years, not even over the summer vacation when the authorities knew that the rooms were to be re-let. It was covered in deeply embedded fat. The previous tenants had been male students, and we blamed them vociferously, although the truth was probably that females would have been just as bad at cleaning up. 

Because the lane was long and dark, with high stone walls enclosing the gardens of large houses - exactly like the atmospheric painting by J A Grimshaw, above - we tried to make sure that if we were coming home at night we didn't have to walk alone. There was one occasion, however, a midwinter evening, when I got off the bus and realised that I would have to negotiate the lane all by myself. Reader, adrenalin kicked in, I slung my bag across my body, took to my heels and ran, not stopping to draw breath till I reached the front door. Years later, I realised that Peter Sutcliffe had frequented that area. His earliest attack was in 1969. I was in Leeds in the early 70s. Sutcliffe murdered a student, Jacqueline Hill, in November 1980, as she walked home from her bus stop at around 9.15 at night. He attacked her in Alma Road, which runs parallel to Wood Lane, presumably another lonely lane. Which still gives me a frisson of disquiet, whenever I think about it.

What possessed university authorities to house female students at the end of dark lanes? A recent question, asking women what they would do if there were no men in the world for 24 hours, was revealing. A large percentage of us would go walking at night, without fear. I can do that in the small Scottish village where I live. Women - especially older women - can often do the same in city centres with significant camera coverage. But I think most men have no notion of the ways in which most women police and prepare themselves, thinking the unthinkable, judging distances, walking briskly, keys in hand, middle of the pavement, seeking the light. And just occasionally, when instinct takes over, running like the wind from the monster behind us. Not all men are predators, but most sexual predators are male. 

I loved my time in Leeds. We were taught by Stewart Sanderson and by a fine lecturer called Tony Green. Among much else I wrote a poem about him called Sudden Man. It was published back then by Akros publications in a collection called A Book of Men, and I included it in my own more recent collection, Midnight Sun. The title is - I'm both moved and honoured to say - on Tony's headstone. I didn't meet him throughout all the years after graduation, but somehow, the poem stayed with his family and after he died, his wife contacted me to ask if she could use it at his funeral. She explained how vividly it seemed to characterise him. And yet - even though I appreciated his teaching very much indeed - I would never have claimed to know him well. 

Like most writers, I was a keen observer, deeply interested in people, in what made them tick, in how it might feel to be them. Interested in what fired my own imagination. I still am. So perhaps I am a writer after all! A piece of advice I was given very early in my career still holds good. 'The way to be a writer is to write.' 

This is not something people want to hear. I doubt if I did, back then, although I certainly loved to write. People often want the magic formula that will transform them. There isn't one. And it certainly isn't AI. We learn by doing, not by being. As Miss Ingram with her iron hand in her velvet glove would have said 'Practise, Catherine. You must do your practice.'  

Where writing is concerned, I have. I still do. Every day without fail. 

How Not To Be A Writer - Part Four: Money Matters

 

This is a small diversion from the chronology of  previous 'How Not To' posts.  Whenever writers get together, we don't talk about what we're writing. We moan about money. 

It's worth pointing out yet again that, with a few starry exceptions, writers are at the bottom of the heap as far as payment goes. Full time professional writers earn, on average, £7000 a year. That means that vast numbers earn considerably less and payments are falling all the time. I wrote my last big project on a £500 advance. It took 2 years to research and write. 

If you look this up on Google, you'll be presented with wholly unrealistic salaries in the £35,000 plus range. Some deluded websites claim a staggering £45 - £55000. I don't know anyone who earns anything approaching this from their writing, even those you would think of as successful. Those who do, earn it from writing related work, such as teaching creative writing in universities, so that they can encourage more people to be poor. Or writing for television. (Lucrative, but also hard to get into.) Or specialised writing, such as technical writing, for large companies. Those who write for children can earn a living of sorts by doing schools visits and talks, but again, these are a diminishing resource. And as another writer friend pointed out recently, these are payments for actual work undertaken in the school or college, not for the books themselves.

As far as large publishing companies are concerned, creative writing and publishing is a massive pyramid scheme, with the writers beavering away for peanuts at the bottom, and literally everyone else being paid more than the people without whom there would be nothing to publish or produce. 

There is no real solution to this. The big corporations will always pay their top executives handsomely and the astronomical advances will always go to celebrities, who probably haven't even written the damn books themselves.  Those organisations that are supposed to represent writers can do little about the imbalance. Small or medium sized publishers struggle constantly with rising prices of resources like paper, which means rising prices of books, and a corresponding fall in quality of the end product.

Almost everyone who writes, and most of those running small publishing companies, have to find other means of earning a living. I have colleagues who lecture, who teach in schools, who are alternative therapy practitioners, who follow quite different full time careers and write on the side. Creativity will find a way. I deal in antique textiles and toys from an Etsy store called the 200 Year Old House. 

And now, I self publish on Amazon under my own Dyrock Publishing imprint, eBooks and paperbacks, with some excellent professional design and formatting help from a company called Lumphanan Press. I make no fortunes, but there's always the faint possibility that something will take off and bring in some real income.

I'll leave you with three things to think about. 

Getting an agent doesn't automatically mean that you will get a publishing deal these days. Don't waste years of good writing time submitting endless query letters to agencies and waiting for them to respond.

Most books don't earn out their advances. The system is designed that way. It's perfectly possible for a publisher to profit from a book while the author, even from a mass market success, is paid sixpence a copy, as part of the deal. It's going to take a long long time to earn out even a modest advance at those rates. 

When people tell you that there is 'no money in the budget' to pay the creatives, what they mean is that there is, in fact, a budget. They just expect that you'll work for nothing. I still do sometimes work for nothing, but these days it's only for local organisations, small charities, good causes. Places where I can sell my own books. And seldom in winter, when I hibernate. But for big media corporations? Book chains owned by US Hedge Companies? I don't think so. Not any more.

Old Titles, New eBooks, Gorgeous New Covers

 

Late last year, I received some welcome rights reversions from my publisher, Saraband, mostly of my fiction titles. At present, The Physic Garden, The Curiosity Cabinet and The Posy Ring are reverted in all formats, with the Jewel only reverted in eBook form. Saraband still has my two non-fiction titles, A Proper Person to be Detained and The Last Lancer, as well as the Jewel in paperback. However, these things take time, as you can imagine, while the publisher runs down previous stock as far as possible, so with the exception of The Posy Ring, the paperbacks are still available in their previous incarnation.

Over the past few years, I've published a number of  my older fiction titles under my own Dyrock Publishing imprint, so - among other things - I'm hoping to re-release all my reverted novels under the same Dyrock imprint before the end of the year. 

For now, I've published the above named four novels in eBook form, on Amazon, with the excellent assistance of Lumphanan Press in Aberdeenshire. I know this is something you may be able to do yourself - but like everything else in this world, it makes sense to use a skilled professional when you can. 

Although Saraband has kindly allowed me to use the old covers, it struck me that, for a couple of the novels at least, I wanted a change. It also struck me that The Posy Ring  - if not exactly a sequel to The Curiosity Cabinet - is certainly a companion novel, inhabiting the same small island world, with a similar structure, and with some of the same characters. I needed to 'brand' them together. 

Enter a Polish photographer friend called Michał Piasecki. This is one talented family! His wife, Iwona, had been incredibly generous and helpful with my research for The Last Lancer, doing some sensitive translation of family documents and letters, but she's a talented artist as well. Their son, Tom, drafted out complicated family trees for me, for the same book. When publication day came around last year, a dreich February day with no acknowledgment of the occasion, except from my lovely husband, not so much as a 'well done' postcard from anywhere else, Iwona and Michał arrived at the door with flowers and chocolates and we opened a bottle of 'bubbles' and had our own Polish celebration. 

Michał has his own Facebook page as Keen Photographer, and I had noticed how skilful and imaginative his landscape and night sky photographs were, but also realised just how good they might be as book covers. 

Here are two of them - perfect for pairing two titles that belong together. Read The Curiosity Cabinet first, and move on to The Posy Ring, to see what happens to some of the characters next, and to meet a whole new set of people. I love both these images, and for me, they seem to reflect something of the quality of both novels: dual time novels, where nobody goes back in time, but where in some strange way, the present reflects the past within this small Scottish island world. 

Michał created the perfect magical images, while Duncan at Lumphanan made them into gorgeous covers. 

We're not done yet. I'm about to publish a collection of my own poetry, Midnight Sun, spanning many years. This will be in paperback form with another Piasecki cover image. (I began my writing career as a poet, and carried on, intermittently, writing poetry.) And a little later this year, I'll be changing the cover of an older novel, using another perfect landscape image by Michał - just because I couldn't resist it. More as and when it happens! 

How Not To Be A Writer - Part Two: School Days

 

Here's me, somewhere in the Galloway Hills, playing at Wuthering Heights. My companion's name was Andy and he was a gem of a dog, a Sheltie Border Collie cross who, fortunately, combined collie intelligence with sheltie good nature. He lived to be eighteen, and was one of the most loveable creatures I've ever known. 

We moved to Ayrshire when I was twelve, and dad - a research scientist by then - got a position at the Hannah Dairy Research Institute just outside Ayr, I spent most of my secondary school years here, first at Queen Margaret's School in Ayr and then travelling to St Michael's in Kilwinning for my two senior years. We spent a little while in 'digs' rented out by a peculiarly unpleasant elderly lady. I had a bedroom, but mum and dad had a sofa bed in the living room. The landlady had to come through this room to get to her kitchen, where she would cook her habitual meals of boiled fish. Looking back, I suppose she was strapped for cash and hated having to rent out rooms, but instead of knocking on the living room door, she would say 'knock knock' and come in. Dad swore that one day he would be stark naked when she did this. Unable to stand the smell of boiled fish any longer, we moved to a small caravan park outside town while my parents waited for completion on a house they were buying off plan. 

I made a couple of friends who lived nearby, which was just as well, because school was a different matter. I was an ungainly adolescent with the wrong accent. Everyone seemed to have known each other for years - which they had. The school had burned down just before we came north (I was yet to become familiar with the West of Scotland habit of burning down schools and any other inconvenient buildings) and half our classes were in portacabins. I didn't know that when the teacher asked a question, you were supposed to shut up and pretend you didn't know the answer. Which made me quite popular with some teachers, but not at all popular with my classmates. I also didn't know that when people asked you which school you went to, they wanted to know if you were a Catholic. All these years later this still happens. The response is always a sort of loaded silence. 

The other shock was how often teachers used the 'tawse' or 'belt' as we called it - a leather strap. I don't think I had ever seen corporal punishment administered till we moved to Scotland. At my primary school, we knew that the formidable head teacher had a cane in her office, and the 'big boys' might be sent there for terrible transgressions. At my girls' secondary school, it wasn't used at all. I recently came across early 20th century instructions from the Education Department in Leeds about the use of corporal punishment that seemed particularly enlightened - to be used sparingly, if at all. 

Nobody had told Scotland. The vast majority of teachers belted pupils every day, sometimes whole classes, and often for the most spurious of reasons, such as wrong answers or lack of understanding. I encountered more sadists in those few years than I've ever encountered since, skipping up and down with glee as they wielded the tawse. It did no good. The lads who were belted most often were proud of themselves, their hands grown horny so that they felt very little. 

I can still remember the awful sensation of approaching breaktimes when we would be turfed out into the playground, and I would either find myself alone or grudgingly absorbed into some group or other. Listen to Janis Ian's 'At Seventeen' and you'll know exactly what I mean, although thankfully, by the time I myself hit seventeen I had escaped to university and a whole new group of genuine friends. Occasionally, talking to people who were my classmates back then, I find that their memories are quite different from mine. They have no memory of the little digs, the jibes, the rolled eyes, the giggles. I was an incomer. Would I have behaved any differently in their shoes? Well, perhaps not. 

Once again, I escaped into my imagination. When we moved to our new house in Castlehill, I would walk out to Burns Cottage on spring and summer Saturdays and daydream about the poet. We were an adventurous little family. Dad had acquired an elderly car by this time, and we drove out into the countryside, went hillwalking, went on camping holidays, visited castles and stone circles and all kinds of places, perfect for feeding the fantasies of somebody like me who still wanted to be a writer. 

I read avidly and I wrote terrible adjective laden poetry and short stories. I was in love with the Beatles, especially John, and wrote fan-fiction before anyone had invented the concept. I discovered Tolkien, via my father, who found old copies of the books in Ayr's Carnegie Library long before they became so popular. I read and loved Alan Garner's novels and wrote a fan-girl letter to him, but made the unforgiveable mistake of mentioning Tolkien which elicited a dusty answer. He didn't like the comparison at all. I was mortified. It didn't quite put me off his books, but it taught me the valuable lesson that not all successful male writers are prepared to be patient with eager aspiring females, even very young ones.

For me, I think it was the beginning of the perception of just how many people will confidently tell you what you ought to be writing and how you ought to do it, although it would be many years and many disasters before I was confident enough to act on that perception. 

We all need to learn. The very best editors - and I've had some - will question you closely about your work. In finding the answers to those often very challenging questions, you'll make the work better - but it will still be yours. The worst editors and directors  - and I've had plenty - will confidently demand the kind of changes they think you ought to make, unaware that they are trying to shape you in their own image, trying to force you to write the book or play they would have written - if they had the time.

Years later, somebody I had worked with on a couple of projects said to me 'you know - you were far too compliant. You should have argued more.' He was right, but why he didn't tell me this at the time I will never know. That's how not to be a writer as well. You learn your craft by reading and writing and polishing over and over again. Not by blindly following advice from people's whose credentials you're unsure of. If you don't believe me, read Stephen King's brilliant On Writing. That's more or less what he says too. 

How Not To Be A Writer - Part One: Childhood

 

Here's me with my plaits. My hair was so long that I could sit on it. Mum plaited it every day - I must have been one of the few kids in my school that didn't get head lice, probably because they couldn't get any purchase on the tight braids. 

I don't remember learning how to read and write. My school was a small Roman Catholic state primary, not particularly close to where we lived in Leeds. There were always books in our house, including a set of old Wonder Books that had belonged to my Aunt Nora, beautifully illustrated extracts from the classics, poems and short stories by the Brothers Grimm and Hans Christian Andersen. I loved them, but I don't remember when I moved smoothly from having them read to me (along with little Noddy and The Faraway Tree) and being able to read them for myself.

We had a good, kindly infant teacher called Winifred Burgess, one of the very few teachers I remember with real affection, but I would always rather be at home than at school. The 'big girls' bullied us every playtime, pretending to balance us on the school wall, but in reality threatening to topple us over. Ever since my school days, I've marvelled at the naivety of adults about children and schools and the low key nastiness that went on, and I'm sure still does go on. 

My wish to be at home was granted in terms of a constant stream of childhood illnesses, interspersed with serious asthma, so I spent a lot of time at home, mostly in my nana and grandad's house, at 32 Whitehall Road, sitting on the rag rug in front of their fire, listening to their wireless, and reading. My parents started their married life in a tiny two roomed flat above their adjacent small shops - a sweet and tobacconist and my grandad's fishing tackle shop. When I was well enough, I would take myself along to his shop and sit with him in there, bothering him with questions that he never minded answering. He called me his little queen, in the old Yorkshire - nay, the old English - way. His 'little woman'.  I was very much loved and wanted for nothing, except perhaps a pair of patent leather ankle strap shoes, and I'm pretty sure I got those as well. Mum and dad took me to the 'pictures' - the Gainsborough in Holbeck - to see Seven Brides for Seven Brothers. Afterwards, I made the whole family reenact it, alongside all my toys, with myself in the starring role, of course. An early venture into theatre.

I don't remember learning how to read and write, but somehow I could and did. I listened to the wireless - Listen With Mother, then Children's Hour, and the terrifying excitement of Journey Into Space. I have another memory of what must have been an early dramatisation of Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca and its haunting opening lines 'last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again' - so vivid that I can still see it in my mind's eye. We had no television, nor would have for years, so the words had created the pictures long before I was old enough to read the book. 

At some point, I must have thought 'I could do that'.  

I was right. I could and, some fifteen years later, I did. On the whole, it was a mistake. It was a wonderful medium, but once television came on the scene, BBC radio drama was the poor relation. The cheap option. Of which much more later in this story. The talent they had accumulated was prodigious, but they neither knew nor cared just how extraordinary. It did, however, teach me how to write dialogue, and how to visualise things when I wanted to write about them, how to orchestrate. For some years, it would earn me a living of sorts, and even a couple of awards. All that, though, was far in the future.

When I was twelve, we moved to Ayrshire in Scotland. I was an incomer. An interlowper. I was an awkward adolescent and my accent was all wrong. Good experience for a writer-in-training, but not very comfortable at the time. No wonder I retreated into my head. It was a time that I still think of as 'bullying and Burns'. Great experience for a would-be writer though.