Researching Historical Fiction - a Sideways Look and a Spooky Experience!

I've been browsing eBay recently, in search of bits and pieces of research material for the sequel to The Amber Heart. The Winged Hussar will take the story of the family - and the house of Lisko -  into the twentieth century, and through WW2.  Unlike The Amber Heart, which was loosely inspired by several episodes from my remote family history, the central story of The Winged Hussar is based more closely on my grandfather's incredibly romantic and dramatic story. For me, as a writer, there's a difference. Because the events of The Amber Heart were reasonably remote in time, as well as in place, so long as I did my best to make the setting and background authentic, I felt free to manipulate the family stories at my disposal, which were, in any case, more like a series of small cameos. For example, I knew what the house may have looked like, there was a warlike forebear with many wives, there was a woman who had a relationship which the rest of the family frowned on.  All these were grist to my creative mill - but were changed in the telling, probably beyond all recognition.

As I've said before on this blog, I have come to appreciate the value of telling a good story and telling it well. Some of my best loved writers do this and they seem to do it as the birds sing, unselfconsciouly. Stevenson, for instance, (and although I would never compare myself with him) is the most unpretentious and accessible of Scottish writers but he has taught me so very much about the virtues of seeking to tell a good story which is 'true' in the wider sense. This is 'made up truth' as another fine writer, Bernard MacLaverty, describes it.

The Winged Hussar presents me with a a different set of problems from The Amber Heart. This is a story which is closer to me in all ways. I never met my grandfather, but I know a lot about him. The temptation (or should that be 'risk'?) will be to make this biographical when, in reality, I am still writing a novel. I need to be able to give myself permission to fictionalise, to manipulate events and characters in the service of the story. And that's always a bit more difficult when you are very familiar with some of the facts. But not impossible.

Research is important. But you have to treat your findings with a light touch. There's nothing worse than indigestible chunks of fact thrown into fiction, just to prove that the writer has done his or her homework. Once again, you are looking for some essential 'truth' rather than a cluster of facts. One of the ways of facilitating this process is to amass materials which allow you, the writer, to become immersed in the background to your story, materials which have a flavour of the time and place. Which is where eBay comes in handy!

I have a great deal of material already, if the truth be told: a few photographs, lots of notebooks and hand-written accounts and sketches from my father, pictures from an artist great uncle, dozens of books, leaflets, pamphlets and Lord knows what else. But browsing eBay, I also found a great many old postcards, which are a wonderful source of background detail, especially when they are real photographs.  I bought the above picture of Lwow or Lemberg (now Lviv in the Ukraine) online, along with several others, all depicting that most beautiful of cities. No wonder my grandmother loved it so much. It was where she was born, and she was never particularly contented with the countryside to which she moved after her marriage. In the event, she returned there in circumstances which were not particularly happy either - and these are part of the story of the novel. Looking at the above picture, from the early 1900s, I was enchanted to see the tramcar, the gaslamps, the attractive and peculiarly Eastern European buildings,  the leafy boulevards, and most of all, the people, not many of them, to be sure, but enough to give me a sense of life going on, a life which was about to be interrupted in every sense. Here's another, from around the same time, with more people. I'm especially taken with the man on horseback.

I think one way of handling this material, of allowing it to help rather than to hinder the fiction, will be to keep separate books/work diaries, with these pictures, other material and a bit of writing about my response to them - so that in some way I can keep track of my sources of inspiration, and at the same time allow myself to set them physically as well as mentally to one side, and carry on with the story itself, secure in the knowledge that 'nothing is really lost' along the way. I like the thought of that as a process, and it's one I've used in the past, albeit not quite so formally - my source material is usually pinned up all round the room and stuffed into miscellaneous folders.

I've another thought, though, and I still can't really explain it, but it's part of something that also feeds into the fiction. When I first saw it online, the top picture, St Sophie's Platz, almost leapt out of the screen at me. I knew I had to have it, and I would have paid more for it. Before my father died, sixteen years ago on 20th March, we had seen very few pictures of Lwow. We had none in the family. The only pictures he had managed to bring from Poland had been of the estate where he was born. Although we had talked at length about that place, he had told me very little about Lwow. The online revolution came after he died, so we had never browsed eBay together. Yet of all the picture postcards I found of Lwow - and there are plenty of them - it was this one that gave me a strange and disturbing frisson. It still does. Even now, I can scroll to the top of the page and look at it and feel a little buzz of nervous excitement. I've no idea what part of the city my family lived in, no idea where my grandmother lived, or whether this view, perhaps one of these houses or apartments had any significance for any of them. All I know is, of all the pictures I have looked at, it is this one that I find myself staring at with the most acute sense of familiarity. That's the only word to describe it. It is utterly and completely familiar to me and - in spite of the fact that I had never seen it before in my life  -I love it.  I can practically feel the air on my face. And I have an indefinable sense of something about to happen. As if somewhere in time, this precise place had some significance for me which I can't now remember, which is just out of reach, buried deep in my memory. Which is a spooky but by no means unpleasant experience.

A final thought - my agent's nice new website has just gone 'live' so if you want to read a bit more about me on there, do have a look. They are currently marketing all my fiction, so any professional enquiries should be addressed directly to the agency, here.

First Person / Third Person

After a little gap, during which I've sorted out a bit of paperwork, made a lot of lists, organised a few meetings, and generally faffed about, in a miserable sort of way, I've more or less got my head around the fact that I'm just going to have to wait and see what happens to The Amber Heart when my agent sends it out. But before I really get going on the sequel, the Winged Hussar, with all the research and writing and rewriting involved, there's another project I'm keen to do some work on and I want to do it now. I'm aware that the Winged Hussar, which is essentially my Polish grandfather's dramatic, deeply romantic and ultimately tragic story, will become so all absorbing for me over the next year that I won't want to write anything else or at least nothing very long or demanding. So I want to finish this first: another historical novel but this time with a Scottish setting.

I'm about to start changing a manuscript, one I 'made earlier', from the first person narrative in which it was written and extensively revised, into a third person narrative and this is no small task. First there are all the faintly boring technical changes, going through the whole thing and translating the perspective from a very personal single narration into a third person story. But that's quite a superficial series of changes. It's only then that the really interesting work can begin, because the purpose of the change is partly to allow me to tell the story in a more flexible way, and partly to allow me to get inside the heads of a couple of other major characters. Hardly anyone has seen this new novel yet. It's set mostly in very early nineteenth century Glasgow - but any criticisms I was given of it from the few people who have read it, were all to do with the 'voice' in which it was written. Although it was a voice I had grown very fond of, to the point that I sometimes seemed to be channelling this man - and maybe I was, since he's based on a real character - I could see how the story might be better told from a different perspective. Or from multiple perspectives.

All the same, I do think this earlier first person draft was a stage which I - and the book - had to go through. It's quite a powerful story, but one that the first person form of narration doesn't allow to emerge in any fully rounded way. I can see that now, but it's taken a longish period of the manuscript lying 'fallow' on my PC for me to realise it. Changing narrative stance is something I occasionally suggest (blithely) to students if I feel they need another perspective on what they are writing. It's invariably an interesting exercise, but in this case I get the feeling it's a necessity rather than an experiment!

Pruning Your Darlings

A little while ago, I wrote a longish post about not killing your darlings, i.e. just because something seems well written, just because you have fallen in love with a piece of your own prose, there's no reason for you to believe that it isn't good, and that it has to go! It's all to do with perspective. You could be right. It could be really good. In which case, you'd be mad to press that delete button.
However (there always is one, isn't there?) over the weekend, my agent sent me the manuscript of The Amber Heart, for my final approval on a few minor edits. These were almost wholly to do with punctuation, and concerned my rather loose (and disconcerting, at this stage in a long career) knowledge of exactly where commas ought to be used and where they can be left out. I thought I knew. And certainly, when I'm writing non-fiction, I don't seem to have much trouble. But I think all these years as a playwright, when I've used commas as an indication of slight pauses in the text for the actor, have made my use of commas in works of fiction just a little - erratic?
Incidentally, I pointed this out to a group of writers, a few months ago, and noticed the collective shudder that went through the room. Did you know that potential agents might make their initial sift of the hundreds of manuscripts which are dumped on their desks every week, on the strength of your knowledge of how to use the comma? So those among you who submit somewhat slapdash copy, in the belief that your wonderful writing will shine through, are plain wrong. Sorry about that. (And please don't point out errors of punctuation in my blog. I know, I know.)
Anyway, to get back to the story for those that want to read it: my new novel, the Amber Heart, is set in what is now Western Ukraine in a place that was - at the time that the story is set, i.e. the mid to late nineteenth century - part of Poland, a sort of rugged and dangerous Wild East of Poland, to be sure. The novel was inspired by some fascinating episodes from my own turbulent family history - about which I'll probably be blogging in due course.  I've been working on this one for a long, long time. It's a tale that is very close to my heart. And it has had various more or less unsatisfactory incarnations, over the years. But now, with this draft, I know that I'm telling a big story and I think I'm telling it well.
However, when I scanned the final draft, in among those commas and a few minor suggestions about the odd word usage - there was the suggestion that I cut the last few paragraphs of the whole book, because it seemed much more poignant to end it a little sooner.
And you know what? He's absolutely right.
I had become very, very fond of those last few paragraphs. I could see the scene in my mind. And I won't throw them away just yet. But when I hit the 'accept changes' button, and looked at the ending of the book, I was a bit surprised to find that it was definitely more poignant and more moving to finish it just a little earlier than I had intended and leave the very obvious ending hanging in the air. The reader is certain what has happened. As certain as I am, having written it. So certain that he or she doesn't need to be told.
It is this kind of thing that makes a very good editor and a good editor is beyond price.
Fingers and toes crossed that soon, this much loved brainchild - and I do find myself loving this story more and more - will find a publisher.

Plays. What Constitutes a Script? A Few Dramatic Insights.

Just finished judging a drama competition for a writers' group. There were plenty of entries, considering that this is a fairly specialised area of writing and one not everyone wishes to venture on - and the level of competence was high. This is a very good group! But working with these scripts and trying to find ways to help people improve, reminded me of a few issues  - not necessarily from this particular set of entries, but from many others which I have read over the years - problems and provisos which I felt might be worth sharing with other people who might also be starting out on writing drama.

The first issue is that writers so often submit a script to a 'general' drama competition without being in any way specific as to what medium they are writing for. To anyone with any experience of the various dramatic media this seems almost unbelievable but when you look at it from the perspective of somebody just starting out, it is perfectly understandable. I think we underestimate how few people realise that a television script is, for example, quite a different animal from a stage play. This is not the time or the place to go into the many differences - but if you're planning to write drama, and especially if you're planning to write a piece of drama for a competition - you'd be wise to do your research first, get hold of some scripts, visit some websites, read some books - and set out to write your script for a particular medium and only for that medium.

Related to this, is the realisation that beginning writers so often conflate four, five or six individual scenes into one big scene - showing a complete lack of awareness of the practical processes involved. A character will get out of bed, go down the stairs, go into the kitchen, come back out, open the front door, go out into the street, walk down the street and get onto a bus, without any indication of just how this is going to be orchestrated for television or film, how long this might take and/or whether or not we really need to see them do all these things anyway. It's only possible to do it this way for radio, and even then it might be inadvisable to let the listener hear the whole process!

As far as stage plays are concerned, writers sometimes specify large casts (fine if you're aiming for amateur dramatics, but not for professional theatre, where budgets are very tight) and lots of different and highly complicated sets. If you are going to set your play in a simple, generic space which represents various spaces or places in a simple way, then that’s fine. I've done it myself, most notably in a play called Wormwood, about Chernobyl. But you can’t describe a series of very specific and complicated stage sets and have your characters moving between them very quickly within the space of a few pages, without running into real production problems.

People also seem blithely unaware of the way - for example - stage plays work in real time. So a character may go off fully clothed to take a bath and re-appear fifteen seconds later, primped and powdered, in their jammies and dressing gown, ready for bed - a tour de force of undressing and make-up that is probably beyond all but a contortionist.

Most of these problems can be remedied by people remembering that they are writing something which is by its very nature, visual and immediate. As dramatists and playwrights, we are not telling a story of something that ‘happened’ once upon a time. We are showing the audience something as it happens, and if necessary, shaping it, so that it draws the audience in. Even when characters are telling the audience something that did happen, the playwright still has to be dramatising it in some way for the audience, bringing it to life for them in the present. If one of your characters spends pages and pages telling another character all about something that happened to them once upon a time, you can bet you're committing the cardinal sin of telling rather than showing. Go back and find a way to dramatise it.  A dead giveaway is when - as so often happens with writers who are starting out - the stage directions lapse into the past tense. 'He sat down on the bench and looked into the distance.' If you ever find yourself doing that, you can be sure that you've stopped writing a play and started writing a story. You are no longer in the 'now' of the drama. You have to see it happen as you are writing it. You have to be there. You, yourself, have to be in the immediate present of your play. That is one of the joys of writing drama!

If any writer has any other useful hints and tips, I'll gladly add add them to this post.

Threads of Feeling, Textiles and Writing

Wasn't sure whether to post this on my writing blog or my textiles blog so will probably put something about it on both! It's an online exhibition called Threads of Feeling. It was flagged up by the excellent Amanda Vickery, on Twitter and I find it moving and beautiful. It could be the source of a million stories.

I have always found textiles inspirational for my writing. It's not just that I love researching costume history and finding out exactly what people would have worn. I've acquired dozens and dozens of books about textiles, costume and so on over the years - many of them from charity shops or (more inexplicably) from academic library sales where I have managed to buy quite rare books for a song, volumes which I now treasure and refer to all the time.

Getting the details right is important, (although there's a fine line between getting the details right and feeling the need to fling all your research into the story, just because you know about it!)  But I also find that textiles of all kinds inspire the actual subject matter and content of my novels and plays. Many writers, but I suspect especially female writers, are fascinated by these 'made' items which are so closely related to how we live our lives, so necessary for us. There is some interlinking between beauty and utility that we love to write and to read about.

I don't think men quite 'get' this fascination but I'm willing to be proved wrong.  I'm sometimes asked to talk about the textiles I write about and whenever I take - for example - pieces of Ayrshire Whitework, and allow people to handle them and look at them while they hear about their history, I do find the men become as fascinated as the women, although they may have come along to the session somewhat reluctantly, dragged there by the women in their lives!

We all know that there is something uniquely personal about items of clothing. Shoes take on the personality of the wearer. Sorting out clothes after a bereavement is always sad, but it can also be obscurely comforting. In fact I wrote about just this feeling in my novel The Curiosity Cabinet, albeit in a historical context. I'm writing about antique textiles and needlework again in a new novel called The Physic Garden where a piece of embroidery is an integral part of the story. And costume, dress, items of clothing, all figure largely in my new Polish historical novel, The Amber Heart. Researching this aspect of fiction and drama is always a pleasure for me. And because I collect antique and vintage textiles and sometimes deal in them, I find that the ideas come thick and fast. There's always something new waiting to be discovered. 

Killing Your Darlings?

David Armstrong, in his excellent book about writing: 'How Not To Write a Novel' declares that he doesn't subscribe to the 'kill your darlings' school of literary advice, and I'm increasingly inclined to agree with him. It's one of those glib generalisations - attributed to William Faulkner, so I'm told - and teachers of creative writing have been parroting it thoughtlessly ever since.
I know what they mean. There are times when we all become enchanted by the beauty of our own prose, to the point where it becomes self indulent, and we have to be very aware of that as a pitfall. But there are also times when we know that something is exactly right, is strong, well written, valuable and a vital part of the whole novel, story or play. To discard such a piece of writing on the principle that if you think it's good, you're wrong, seems like madness to me!
It's been on my mind, recently, since I received a piece of rather sweeping editorial advice to which my first response was rage, my second response was to remember the 'kill your darlings' maxim and wonder if he wasn't right after all, and my third and final response was to do some judicious pruning which the advice had highlighted, and for which I'm grateful, but to leave most of my 'darlings' firmly in place.
I'm reminded of the differences between men and women when it comes to gardening. On the whole (and I'm not talking about professionals here - I'm sure Alan Titchmarsh is a model of restraint!) men tend to hack and chop while women prune, carefully and thoughtfully, with due regard for the nature of the tree or shrub. Probably the only time I ever saw my late mum and dad - a very loving couple - arguing, was when my dad had 'done some pruning' in the garden. I remember her chasing him round the garden, shears in hand, yelling at him. Perhaps men take the same approach to manuscripts - who knows? 
This is by no means an argument against revisions and editing. Most beginning writers need to learn the virtues of rewriting, over and over again. And there are a number of extremely experienced writers who - by the time they get to novel number ten or eleven or twelve - no names no pack drill - might benefit from the services of a good editor, but by that stage are too powerful to be edited. But there comes a point when you have to have a certain confidence in your own voice, in your own work. We walk a tightrope, most of us, too close to our own work to be able to see it clearly, but perhaps not quite confident enough to hold out for what we believe in. Treat your darlings like any other piece of writing. Fairly. Thoughtfully. Carefully. But as for killing them? I don't think so.

The Importance of Story

Because I had flu just after Christmas - the flu jab I had, back in October, didn't seem to have any effect on this bug, but perhaps, as friends said, it would have been even worse without it - I spent a great deal of time huddled up on the sofa with a blanket, a hot water bottle, a succession of cups of weak tea and numerous old movies. These included Gigi, Oliver, Singin' in the Rain, The Sound of Music and The Railway Children. I enjoyed all of them, cried at all but Singin' in the Rain, in fact cried buckets at The Railway Children (it's the 'daddy, my daddy' moment - does it to me every single time) and took the opportunity to consider current and future writing projects, in a vague, fluey, conceptual sort of way.
My agent now has a new novel from me, The Amber Heart. I've blogged about that and also about the proposed sequel, The Winged Hussar, here on Wordarts. I thought the Amber Heart was finished in November, but then it came back with suggested edits. Some were invaluable and some made me cross. But even the ones that made me cross were also very valuable, because when I calmed down, I could see that the person who had read it definitely had a point. All of it sent me back to the manuscript with a fresh eye. I didn't take everything on board, but I made a number of changes. In some cases he had put his finger very accurately on issues that had troubled me, but which I had pushed to the back of my mind - in one case it was a plot point that had niggled at me because I sensed that the character wouldn't have behaved like that. I needed her to behave 'like that' for the sake of the story but it didn't ring true. The comments from this particular editor, although not quite addressing that point,  allowed me to ask myself 'what if' something different happened. And suddenly, things became much clearer. So now, my agent has a newly tweaked  draft, (I finally hauled myself off my couch of pain to type up the edits) and I'm keeping my fingers crossed that it's either ready to go - or almost ready to go! But I'm grateful to the agency for spending time and trouble on this. There's no point in sending something out unless it's as good as you can possibly make it, no matter how much those rewrites make you want to tear your hair out.
As I lay and watched those old movies, another thought occurred to me. As I've matured as a writer, I've become more and more aware of the value of story. A few years ago, in spite of a good deal of success as a playwright, with awards won, and with a track record in all kinds of published non-fiction, as well as short stories and even poetry, I realised that I wanted to write novels. Not only 'wanted to' - always a dodgy thing to say. The world and her husband 'want to write' a novel and at least some of them think that if they tell you their fascinating tale, you will do it for them! But I digress.
I had written a number of novels and just about all of them were weighing down my shelves in manscript form, because that was as far as I had got with them. I didn't want to abandon drama altogether, but the balance was certainly shifting. The hitch was that so much of the feedback I was getting from professionals was pointing out that these novels were 'extremely well written - but a bit too quiet.' While I was struggling with this judgement, a successful writer told me that publishers are always looking for the holy grail of the 'beautifully written, stonking great story'. Sometimes they find it. 'But' - she went on - 'if they can't have that, then they will settle for the stonking great story every time.' That single comment - a lightbulb moment -changed the way I think about my writing. It also prompted me to get my head down and work on a couple of major projects, to plan a lot more and eventually to find an agent who would market me as a novelist rather than a playwright.
At Christmas, it struck me that all those movies washing over me in a great wave of entertainment were stonking great stories. I know film is different from literature. I know many people hate musicals. I don't care if you loathe The Sound Of Music (and I have lots of good friends who would say as much!) - but there are millions out there who adore it, and one of the reasons why they love it so much, and can watch it again and again, is because it is the kind of archetypal story that human beings the world over enjoy. It's like being a kid again. When you wanted that book read to you yet again, and woe betide your mum or dad if they skipped your favourite passage!
If anything, it's even more obvious with The Railway Children. Can there be any woman who has lost a much-loved father, who doesn't watch that scene on the station platform, towards the end of the Railway Children, and who doesn't shed a tear? (I'm told Field of Dreams has the same effect on many men, for obvious reasons.) Can there be anyone - however much he or she dislikes musicals - who isn't moved by the inevitability of poor Nancy's fate at the end of Oliver?  Well, possibly, but I think a percentage even of them may be resisting something deep inside themselves!
As a writer, it only surprises me that it has taken me so long to acknowledge the importance of story. I wonder if it's because I read English at university. Academia isn't too hot on stories although since I specialised in Mediaeval Studies, (full of stonking great stories, if you ask me) I wasn't your average English graduate. But then, of course, I started out with poetry and plays. And then, when I did start writing novels, I thought of the story as 'plot'. And it seemed difficult. I wasn't sure I could do it. And when I did do it, no matter how fine the writing, it all seemed a bit 'quiet.'  It was only when I stopped thinking about plot and started thinking about story that I felt myself on surer ground. I had stories to tell and some of them were far from quiet. So I wonder, if we stopped advising beginning writers to consider character and plot and point of view, and started advising them to try to tell their story, as beautifully, as entrancingly, as stylishly as they possibly can - but for all that, to tell us a story - they might find it just a little easier to discover their own voices. What do you think?

A Rant In Defence of Video Games

I am sick and tired of listening to people who ought to know better casually dismissing computer games as trash, and lumping them together, as though they were all exactly the same, much as one might say 'books induce violence and anti-social behaviour in the young ' - see how daft it sounds? Although I'm sure people used to say it, especially about 'novels' which in Jane Austen's time were dismissed as the source of so much evil!
Talk to these people and they will tell you that 'no, they have never played a video game, not once, not ever.' They seem quite proud of the fact, in the same way that people seem to be inexplicably proud of the fact that they 'can't do maths to save themselves' but would be ashamed to confess to being illiterate.
I confess that I have a personal interest here. My maths graduate son aims to work in the industry, has already spent two years working on Quality Assurance (i.e. testing) for the industry, has his name on a couple of major titles, and is now studying for a Professional Masters in Computer Game Development at prestigious Abertay University, in Dundee. This course - he's enjoying every minute of it - involves a cross-section of people coming from various backgrounds, including art and programming, but my son is one of only a very small number of people who aim to fill the - also much misunderstood - role of 'designer' within the industry.
When I told people that he had spent most of his Christmas vacation finishing off a number of academic essays and presentations about the industry, most people looked puzzled and then asked 'But what on earth can anyone find to write about on Video Games?'
Having had a look at the many thousands of sophisticated and interesting words he has written about these same games, about the psychology behind them, about innovations in the industry, I could have made some attempt to answer them, but where to start?
Part of the problem is, I think, that for people of a certain age, the term Video Games conjures up visions of  Pacman, or Pong or Space Invaders, early incarnations of extreme simplicity. It's a little as though the term 'television' only invoked those tiny, blurred, black and white pictures set in the middle of massively clunky sets, without taking into account any of the developments of the last fifty years.
Another part of the problem, though, is wilful ignorance. Even among media commentators and researchers who ought to know better, the whole industry is seen as some amorphous mass. The closest I can come to describing it, is - again - to make the analogy with television. Would you judge a contemporary cutting edge drama, a mass market reality show and a children's cartoon, by exactly the same set of narrow criteria? I doubt it! So why do people do this when commenting on Video Games? Don't they realise that times, and the industry, have moved on. That there is a breathtaking spectrum of work out there, everything from multi-million dollar mass-market titles, to small downloads, with everything in between, including games which teach, and games which might well be classed as 'art.' 
Moreover, the tabloid media image of the troubled 'loner' playing in his room, could hardly be further from the truth. This happens, of course, but then didn't it always happen? Didn't some kids always prefer to be alone with their trainsets or their airfix models? They certainly did when I was young! The truth is that with the new games, people of all ages often prefer to indulge in their hobby in the company of other people. Sometimes they will play in groups (either within families or with groups of friends) and often they will play online games, in contact with people from around the world. There is nothing sinister about this. If anything, it makes the world a smaller place, and the effect seems to be very positive indeed.
I have blogged before about a fabulous game called Flower, introduced to me by my son and designed by Jenova Chen. This isn't so much a game as an experience and I have to say that it gives me much the same sensation as I experience when I am deeply involved with a piece of writing, or listening to a piece of music, or experiencing some magical artwork or film. Time passes, I'm not aware of it, but I emerge tired but strangely refreshed at the other end. The world evoked by this extraordinary game, with its accompanying music, has stayed with me, giving me the kind of 'emotion recollected in tranquillity' that is all too hard to achieve. My world would be the poorer if I hadn't experienced it. This isn't a game that appeals to everyone. In fact, I would say that it is a game which probably doesn't appeal at all to the young, male, gamer demographic. They probably don't see the point of it, any more than they would yet see the point of the art, music or literature which I love (although they might come to it eventually). But it's a big market out there, and it's growing all the time.
And what of the role of 'designer'. Well, that's much debated, even in the world of professional video games development. It's easy enough to see where programmers and artists and even producers slot in, but a 'designer'. Too many young people seem to have the perception that the designer sits in a room and comes up with a brilliant design document, which he or she hands over to a bunch of people who then do as they are told and create the game. From the designer's mind to your console or phone, in one easy leap. Of course it isn't like this. Not at all. But when my son was casting about for an analogy himself, I could give him one. Because as a playwright, it seemed fairly obvious to me. The role of designer seems to me to be very much like the role of artistic director, in the theatre. A director could, of course, tell everyone what to do. But it would be pretty disastrous, people would get angry and nothing much would happen. The job of director is, in many ways, as facilitator. He or she has to be able to allow all these talented people to get on with what they do best, while keeping the whole project creatively in mind, and having the courage of his or her vision to be able to make certain decisions - yes, that will work, no, don't think that's quite right, maybe, try that out and see what happens. The buck stops with the designer just as it stops with an artistic director. It is a difficult role, a challenging one - but when it works well, there is probably nothing more rewarding. So all I can do is wish my creative son all the luck in the world. Keep at it. You'll get there in the end!

Love and Romance

My first failure of 2011 was to get some 50 pages into a novel deemed to be a classic of its kind, and to dislike it so much that I had to give up on it. I used to persevere with books on principle, but now I think 'so many books to enjoy - why bother with the ones you can't stand?' - I give them 50 or 60 pages and if they haven't hooked me by that time, I mostly give up on them. Of course I'm not passionate about everything I read. That would be too much to ask. But if you start reading something and are (a) deeply bored or (b) profoundly irritated, there's seems little point in carrying on. It's one reason why I don't belong to a book group. I rather like being challenged by a book, and am quite happy to tackle supposedly 'difficult' books. I've done it often enough when reviewing. But I don't think I could bring myself to soldier on with a book I truly disliked, just because somebody else had chosen it for me. The only good reason for doing that would be because somebody else was paying me!

But I digress. For me, one of the most irritating features of this particular book was a plethora of descriptions of  women with 'voluptuously swelling breasts' and 'curved thighs'. Didn't seem to matter which character's pov we were with, his (they were all men) perception of women was the same. The women he was describing weren't real women at all. They were a part of his fantasy life. About as real, come to think of it, as Jessica Rabbit. Now I'm not saying that this author isn't with the majority here. Why wouldn't he be?  And, of course, women writers do something similar when they fall in love with the heroes they create and model them a little on, for instance, Richard Armitage, Rufus Sewell, David Tennant - to pluck a few examples out of the contemporary air!

But what makes me very angry indeed is that when a man taps into his fantasy in this way, he will almost certainly not be judged for it, for the simple reason that it will not even be noticed by male critics. He may still be deemed to be writing a powerful classic novel, whereas no matter how elegant the prose, how epic the tale, how excellent the characterisation, how deep the insights, a woman's love story can still be dismissed as 'romantic nonsense' or - God help us - a 'guilty pleasure.' According to so much critical appraisal, young men write powerful coming of age stories about the male experience while young women write about relationships. Men write searing insights into emotional problems. Women write about love. Men write about the state of the world. Women write about the narrowly domestic.  It's a bit, come to think of it, like that old joke about the man who says that his wife handles all the trivial things, like where they live and where the kids go to school and how they spend their money, while he decides the big important things like the state of the nation and the economy and whether we'll ever achieve world peace...


Romance is, of course, a term with a long and distinguished history and a multitude of meanings. Some of my best friends - fine writers too - write 'romance'.  But it has become a sort of critical shorthand for everything from beautifully constructed but lighthearted commercial fiction, (I'm absolutely certain that the critics who dismiss it so scathingly wouldn't be able to do it to save themselves) to epic and densely constructed tales of relationships in a difficult political climate - and everything in between. This allows the reviewer or literary commentator to trivialise or dismiss the novel, story or play which centres on the female experience in a way that I think almost never happens with a male writer. It shouldn't still be happening. But I'm afraid in all too many cases, it is.

Stained Glass - A Village Ghost Story

This ghost story was first published many years ago, in a magazine called Ayrshire Life, by Kenneth Roy, now - among much else - editor of The Scottish Review, to which I contribute from time to time. It's a story with a springtime setting - just to cheer us all up - but as a very spooky tale, it might also give you a wee frisson for Christmas!

The renovation had taken time, effort and money but now it was almost complete. Jack had bought the stone cottage in the long village street because he wanted somewhere of his own, a place on which he could lavish a little affection. Originally, the house had been part of a terrace. On the right it was still attached to the row of old weaver’s houses, but on the left there was a neat gap where another cottage had long since been demolished. ‘Room for possible extension’ the estate agent’s schedule had said.


Jack had also acquired the demolished cottage’s wilderness of a garden as part of his own, though as yet he had scarcely done any gardening. He had been much too busy on the house. His neighbour on the right hand side was an elderly widow who lived alone. A friendly pub was within walking distance and for the first time since the sudden death of his wife, a couple of years earlier, he found himself achieving a kind of contentment. He had worked steadily through the winter and now, with the coming of spring, he could look with pleasure on newly sanded and waxed floors, a restored stone fireplace, a white tiled bathroom and a kitchen in fumed oak. He had resisted the temptation to buy an Aga. That had been his wife’s dream, not his, and besides, funds were getting low.

Like all old houses, the cottage had objected to the disturbance, throwing a hundred problems at him. There had been a certain satisfaction in finding solutions. In his more imaginative moments, he thought that he and the house had sized each other up, and grown used to each other. All its nightly noises were familiar now: the creak and rustle of cooling wood, the tap, tap of hot water in the pipes, the occasional mousy scuttering from the loft. There were idiosycrasies too: the spare bedroom door that would not stay shut, but swung open without warning; the cool spot at the bend in the stairs. But none of them worried him, although his occasional visitors - friends from the city - commented on them. But there was a consistency about them that was reassuring. Now he could begin to think about getting the garden into shape. He anticipated the work involved with real pleasure.

He was a young man and had taken the loss of his wife very badly. They had planned children, later. Now he was torn between sorrow over what might have been and relief that he hadn’t been left alone to cope with a family. Unable to bear the pain of so many associations in the city where they had been together since graduation, he had asked for a transfer and come to work in a nearby town where there was a smaller, quieter branch of his company. He didn’t care so much for promotion any more. All his hopes for the future had been shared with Debbie. Now she was gone, he was content to spend all his free time on the house.

“He hasn’t an idle bone in his body” they said of him in the village and that was praise indeed, for they were slow to accept strangers. But they had begun to like him.

The house, however, lacked one finishing touch and at first he was at a loss how to remedy it. At the bend in the stairs and quite high up, there was a round stained glass window, like a small porthole. Or rather there had once been such a window but what was left of it was so cracked and splintered that he had had to seal it with hardboard to keep out the winter draughts until he should decide what to do about it. He was very much afraid that he was going to have to fill the space with clear glass but for some reason the idea disappointed him. He was conscientious about such things, liking the unusual features that characterised the place.

Jack had been discussing the problem one night in the pub with a friend who had come down from the city to admire the work on the cottage. Billy, the landlord, happened to overhear their conversation, or it may have been that he was listening. At any rate, later on in the evening, he approached Jack.

‘About that stained glass…’

‘Yes?’

‘I could let you have a window. I didn’t know yours was broken. This one’s just the same.’

Jack was mystified. ‘You could?’

‘Aye. It came from the cottage next door to yours, just before it was demolished. That was before my time, but they took out the glass. So my father said. I suppose someone thought it was too nice to throw away. It’s been up in our loft for years. You’re welcome to it if you can use it.’

‘Why was the other cottage demolished?’ asked Jack’s friend.

‘I wouldn’t know.’ Billy shrugged. ‘It lay empty for years. Eventually the dry rot and the wet rot and the woodworm got to it. The way it nearly got to yours.’ He mopped at the bar with a cloth. ‘They were always a pair those two houses. Built at the same time. But houses in this village weren’t fetching the prices they are today and nobody could be bothered with it.’

‘It’s given me a nice bit of extra land,’ said Jack. ‘I’m going to have my vegetable garden there.’

‘You’re really into all this self sufficiency stuff, aren’t you?’ said his friend, draining his glass.

‘Not really. But I’ve always wanted to grow veggies.’

‘Tatties’ said Billy.

‘What?’

‘Potatoes, that’s what you have to grow in the first year. Cleans the ground. You’ll need seed potatoes.’

‘Will I?‘

‘You will. And since you’ve got the land you may as well have the window.”




Billy brought it round the next day. It was wrapped neatly in yellowing newspaper. Jack took it out and set it carefully on the floor, sidetracked for a moment by the old advertisements for corsetry and tricycles. He folded the newspaper carefully. Worth keeping, he thought. He could see that the window was a fine piece of work. The glass was clear red with an intricate little chain of flowers and leaves as a border. Afraid of damaging it, he contracted a local glazier to set it in and was pleased to notice how the afternoon sun cast a rosy glow through the red glass, shedding a beam of light over his stairs.

The window fascinated him. Every time he passed through his hallway, he found himself pausing to admire it. The morning after its installation, a fine spring Sunday, he took a bowl of warm water up to his landing, stood on a stepladder, and began to clean the old glass, carefully sponging away the dirt of years, and the traces of putty left by the glazier. Presently, however, he found his attention focussed on the patch of garden he could see outside. The stone walls of his house were very thick and blinkered his view. Also the glass itself had a flaw in it that slightly blurred his vision but, leaning a little to the left of his window, he found that he was looking down at what seemed to be a small cherry tree. He could just make out a blur of blossom, as well as a patch of grass with scattered petals beneath. Somebody was sitting there. The warp in the glass prevented him from seeing clearly but it seemed to be a young woman, dressed in light clothing, her head bent over her lap. She might be reading, or even sewing. He screwed up his eyes. It occurred to him that he must be looking into next door’s garden: the one to the right of his own house. The window must have somehow funnelled his vision.

The old lady had visitors; a grand-daughter perhaps. There was a suggestion of long dark hair, a slim frame beneath. He stopped in his work of cleaning, his hand poised over the glass. A young man had come up and slipped his arms around the girl from behind. Jack saw a pale shirt, pink in the light from the glass, though he guessed it must be white. A loose shirt, dark trousers. The girl reached up her hands to grasp his. The man bent over and kissed the top of her head. Then she half rose, and they were in each others arms, embracing passionately in the sunlight.

Jack was embarrassed. He felt himself beginning to blush. It was as though he had intruded on their sudden moment of intimacy, although they could not know it. He took himself downstairs so that he shouldn’t be tempted to spy on the couple from the bedroom window. He was a good natured young man, and felt as though it wasn’t quite honest to watch them like this.

But the stained glass held its own attraction. The morning wore on towards lunch time. Whenever he had reason to pass through the hall, going out to the shop for the Sunday papers, or carrying a mug of coffee from kitchen to sitting room, he found his eyes straying towards it. It made him uncomfortable.

At last, he went out into the garden, on the pretext of making some plans for new borders and his vegetable patch. To his right, the old hedge between his own land and his neighbour’s garden next door was high and thick, a tangle of rosa rugosa and privet and juniper. Much further down the garden it thinned out a bit and it was there that he usually looked over it, and held friendly conversations with the old lady, as she pottered about among her roses. He had given her his phone number. ‘If you need anything, just give me a call’ he had told her, promising to come through and do some weeding for her later in the spring.

But he could see nothing from this end, close to the house. He stood outside his back door for a long time, listening, but he could hear only birdsong, and the usual Sunday village sounds: a distant lawnmower, an occasional car, the excited mooing of cows let out to grass at last, the lazy drone of a small plane, practising aerobatics, high above. Nothing else. No voices at all. Were they still kissing?

Unable to withstand his own gnawing curiosity he went back upstairs to the window, stood on the ladder, and peered out again. He felt extraordinarily furtive, seeing without being seen. The couple were still together. There was a desperation about their caresses that he found both moving and distressing. Thoroughly ashamed of himself, he was about to descend and leave them to it, when he noticed a sudden quick movement, just at the edge of the glass.

A third figure had come within the compass of his vision, another man he thought, from the general size and bearing. The newcomer was standing just behind the tree trunk, in an attitude uncomfortably suggestive of extreme tension. Indeed the figure seemed at once furtive and yet poised as if ready to spring. As Jack watched, he saw the man raise a hand, a whole arm. But it was too long, too strong. He was holding something. What was it? A stick? Worse, an axe? He was stretching it up and out with a terrible tension about all his movements, a prelude to violence. It was the only interpretation Jack could place upon the gesture.

In an instant he had jumped from the ladder, and was running down the stairs, out of the back door and into his own garden, shouting ‘Hey!’ foolishly. ‘Hey! Stop that! Stop that!’
But even before he reached the part of his garden where the hedge ran low enough to see over, he felt that something was wrong. Feeling foolish, he parted the leaves and peered back along the length of the old lady’s garden. It was quite empty. A well tended lawn gave way to a newly dug vegetable patch. Jack remembered that she had told him her son was coming round to do it for her. There was a little group of apple trees bunched up at the far end. It was as he had remembered. She had no cherry tree. No other trees at all.

He turned slowly back to his own garden, looking towards his cottage seeking some explanation, but it too was basking innocently in the spring sunshine.

‘How stupid to live in a place for six months and not to remember,’ he thought, confused. His gaze slid across neglected flowerbeds to the rotting stumps of the old fence posts that had once marked the border between the two gardens, his own, and the demolished cottage on the other side. There was no cherry tree in the garden of his own cottage. The cherry stood fair and square in the middle of what had once been the lawn of the house next door. He could see it now, quite far away, with a pool of pink petals shed on the lengthening grass beneath. He glanced up to his little round window. Not easy to see that garden from up there. Particularly if you were standing to the left of it. Impossible to see the cherry tree. Completely impossible. The words dinned into his mind. His legs moved reluctantly as he retraced his steps back up to the window and peered out. The patch of grass beneath the cherry tree was quite empty now, the red glass turning the shed petals a vivid shade of crimson.




He had the window removed, the very next day. He gave it back to Billy with his thanks, explaining that it made his hallway too dark.

“I’ll just get some plain glass” he said.

With what may be considered a remarkable lack of curiosity, Jack made no enquiries at all in the village as to the history of the demolished house next door to his own. He liked his cottage far too much for that. Better not to know what had happened. When that year’s flowering was over he had the cherry tree chopped down. “It only covers the lawn with dead petals” he said, by way of explanation. Some of the villagers thought it was a shame. Others, older people for the most part, did not.

Catherine Czerkawska



Something Spooky for Christmas.

I do love a good ghost story, for Christmas, don't you?  Looking through this week's Radio Times (the BBC's definitive UK magazine for television listings) I was excited to see that there was to be a new dramatisation of M.R.James' classic ghost story: O Whistle and I'll  Come to You. I won't spoil the denouement of this by relating the ending, but if you haven't read it, this is a tale about a loner, a university professor who, holidaying beside a remote stretch of English coastline, discovers an ancient whistle, tucked away among old ruins. The whistle has a Latin inscription which translates as 'who is this who is coming?' And yes - he blows the whistle. Even typing these words gives me a little frisson of pleasurable fright. By the end of the story he discovers who, or what, comes in answer to that whistle. And no - it isn't very nice!
Back in the late sixties, there was an excellent dramatisation of this same story, directed by Jonathan Miller, with Michael Hordern as the professor. The above picture is a still from that production. It was peculiarly atmospheric - deftly done - evoking the dreadful sense of nightmare that James so successfully creates in the original story. But reading about the new production, in the Radio Times, I was astonished to see that they seem to have decided not just to 'update it' which might have worked, but also to do away with the whistle. And as anyone who has read the tale knows, the whistle is the key. The whistle, with all that it implies in terms of history, belief, and reasons why, is absolutely central. To change that is to change the whole story, and that being the case, why not have the courage of your own ideas and write a completely new spooky drama? While I'm reluctant to pre-judge any drama without seeing it first, I don't think I'll be watching this one. Too afraid of spoiling it for myself. Instead, I'll give myself a Christmas treat and go back to the original story.
But it does bear out something I've noticed about dramatisations. They tend to fall into two sorts: first there are those where the scriptwriter clearly loves and understands the original, knows that changes must be made to recreate a story in a completely different medium, but never makes those changes just for their own sake. Emma Thompson's screenplay for Sense and Sensibility is as fine an example as any - not a word or image out of place, truly filmic, but also entirely true to the original.
Then - sadly - there are the dramatisations  where the scriptwriter  believes that he or she (and it so often seems to be a 'he'!) could make a much better job of it than the original writer, and proceeds to demonstrate that he or she can't. Into this category falls just about every attempted dramatisation of Wuthering Heights! I don't know about this version of Whistle, but I have my suspicions.
Back to Christmas spooks. If you want to terrify yourself, you could do worse that get hold of the collected ghost stories of M. R. James - read Whistle, and The Treasure of Abbot Thomas, and Casting the Runes (some excellent film versions of that, over the years)  or the ghost stories of E.F. Benson. These were much overshadowed by his wonderful Lucia, but still fine stories. Or tell some real tales on Christmas Eve. Like the time I was walking down our village street, at twilight, and crossed over to speak to the old man on the other side - only to find that he disappeared, as instantly as though somebody had switched off a television picture. Later on, my husband said, 'That'll have been Jock. He always used to walk about the village in the evening.'
Jock was the village handyman, chimney sweep, blacksmith, who knew everything about everything. His picture is currently hanging in our village shop, which was once his workshop, keeping a keen eye on things. And there are those who believe he might still be around. Me too.

A Life Like Other People's

Been reading and relishing Alan Bennett's funny, moving autobiographical book: A Life Like Other People's, not least because - although I knew that Bennett had lived in Leeds - I hadn't realised where he had lived, and how close his house had been to the place where - albeit some years later -  I spent the first few years of my life. There is something uniquely satisfying about recognising a place with which you are intimately familiar, in the work of a fine writer - although I'm not sure quite why this should be! But when Bennett describes Tong Road, and Green Lane, Bruce Street and Wellington Road, I am back there again, walking hand in hand with my mother, up Hall Lane, on the way to my little primary school: Holy Family. To get there, we had to pass close to the massive, looming presence of Armley Gaol, and in those days I hardly knew what it was, thinking it some magical, sooty castle.  Even more moving, though, are his depictions of his family, his  'aunties' and their attempts at glamour, their thwarted ambitions and unexplored talents, and these too have echoes in certain members of my own family, now long gone.  The picture above shows my own 'aunty' looking a mite sultry, my handsome Uncle George - and my little gymslipped mum, standing in Whitehall Road, Leeds, some time in the thirties, I think.

Moomins: Tove Jansson's Genius

Given the state of the weather in Scotland at present, I posted on Facebook that I wanted to 'fill my tummy full of pine needles' and hibernate for the rest of the winter. To my surprise, many of my friends had no idea what I was talking about, and had never read Tove Jansson's 'Moomin' books. I can understand the reluctance to try them, because if you don't know about Moomins, and have never read the books, you may well assume that they are the usual twee anthropomorphism and leave it at that.
Nothing could be further from the truth.
I read my first Moomin book - like so many books that I later came to love - because my father discovered  and enthused about them. My family were great readers. My mum's side of the family (Leeds, Irish, working class) gave me a series of old and magical  'Wonder Books' full of fairy tales and extracts from the classics. They also gave me Noddy and the Famous Five and the Secret Seven and the Faraway Tree. I was pretty obsessive about Noddy, much to my aunt's chagrin. She had to read them to me over and over again, thinking, so she told me when I grew up, what a selfish little pig he was!
Blyton was followed by Just William, The Alice books, the Wind in the Willows and then - later on - Wuthering Heights, Rebecca and an abiding love of Dickens. My Polish scientist dad gave me quirkier reads - well, quirky for the time: The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, long before they became popular, the Narnia books, Three Men in a Boat, 1066 and All That - and the Moomins. But of all of them, I think it is the Moomin books that I love most.
It is almost impossible to categorise these books, which means they probably wouldn't have a hope in hell of being published nowadays - a sobering thought. The earlier books in the series, Finn Family Moomintroll, Comet in Moominland and so on, are lighthearted, funny, poetic, imaginative but always with a little thread of what I can only describe as wisdom running through them. No heavy handed life lessons here - just a profoundly reassuring but unsentimental understanding of the power of love and the value of kindness. When Moomintroll wears the magical and dangerous Hobgoblin's hat, and has his entire appearance changed by it, when all his friends don't recognise him, and mock him, and tell him to go away, it is his mother, Moominmamma, who looks into his eyes for a long while, and says 'yes, you are my Moomintroll.'
When he was little, this was my son's very favourite book. His battered copy still falls open at an illustration of a  bridge over a stream, with young Moomintroll and his free-spirited friend Snufkin contentedly dangling their legs over it. I don't know quite why this image exerted such power over him, but I understand it very well. Many of us, I think, like to live our literature if we can!
The books though, do become more reflective and - eventually - somewhat darker. Moominland Midwinter, in which Moomintroll finds that he wakes up from hibernation much too soon and has to learn to adjust to winter, is not only entertaining but an exploration of other ways of living and our tolerance of them. We have all known - and secretly admired - a Little My (brave, difficult, rude, edgy, impulsive) a shy Misabel, an obsessively tidy Fillyjonk. The energetic Hemulen, who desperately tries to organise everyone and make them participate in winter sports whether they want to or not,  is a creation at once so comic, so recognisable, and so ultimately poignant that it's no wonder Philip Pullman calls Jansson a 'genius'.
By the time we get to Moominvalley in November (in which the moomins don't really figure at all) and Moominpappa at Sea, which are both about the acceptance of change and loss and other profoundly adult emotions, as well as beautifully simple and imaginative 'reads' Jansson is displaying awe-inspiring skills.
I dramatised her short adult novel, The Summer Book, a gentle story about the relationship between a little girl and her grandmother, for BBC Radio 4. It was directed by Marilyn Imrie and starred Phyllida Law and Sophie Thompson. I had more letters about that production than almost anything else I ever dramatised for radio.
Jansson was a Swedish Finn, an artist as well as a writer, certainly a philosopher. The illustrations are part of the unique charm of these books. But it wasn't till I visited Finland itself, and worked there as a teacher of English for a couple of years, that I realised just how very 'Finnish' these books are, how the changing seasons are so important in the lives of the Finnish people, and just how many of my lovely students seemed to display all kinds of traits to be found in the books themselves. It wasn't necessary but it certainly added another dimension of understanding. I adored Jansson's work before I went to Finland. I admired it even more by the time I came back.