Blog Archives

The “stolen head” novel and a fictional dilemma

30/5/2014

One of the literary agents who declined my request for representation did so on the basis that she didn’t like the first-person present-tense narration with which my novel opens. While I respected her capacity for clarity about her personal preferences, it did make me wonder about the plethora of good literature she was denying herself, not so much from wannabe novelists like me, but heavyweights like Nick Hornby and Margaret Atwood.

I was reminded of this when I came across the concept of the “stolen head” novel in a review by Toby Litt in last Saturday’s Guardian, defined as

a novel voiced on behalf of a person (for example, Holden Caulfield of The Catcher in the Rye) who the reader knows wouldn’t have the patience or self-discipline to write the structured, perfectly punctuated prose with which they are credited. The real writer has stolen the life experiences, the sensual perceptions, the vocabulary, of someone beneath or beyond the day-to-day deskishness of writing. Stolen head books are great for giving us very young, very angry or very damaged-first person narrators.

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The games we play: Boo Books anthology, Breaking the Rules

27/5/2014

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In terms of wacky ideas for a story, what’s your verdict on these?

Henry Merriweather falls in love with a playing card; Dan and Evelyn cannot shuffle off this mortal coil until they finish the card game they began on their wedding night in 1928. Lady Farrimond plays cards with a stranger and forfeits her most treasured possession.

Two brothers cannot agree even on the rules of a simple game like noughts and crosses; rioting has become a national sport with fixtures, policing, and the whole media circus; even Scrabble has become a dangerous game when the tiles spell out MURDER.

Breaking the Rules, a short story anthology edited by Alex Davis, is replete with such unlikely scenarios convincingly portrayed on the page. Published by Derby-based (very) small press Boo Books, this collection of thirteen stories buzzes with quirky creativity and eloquent prose. Unlike the editor, I’m not a particular fan of games, but I found myself entertained by the stories and in awe of the depth and breadth of creativity on show.

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The ingredients of a story ... but I won't follow a recipe

23/5/2014

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Following the super comments on a recent post, I’m still musing on the process of creating a story; not so much the nuts and bolts of tension, plot and character, but the medley of ideas that drives us to construct a tale. The weekly prompts I’m following, or choosing not to, for flash fiction and bite-sized memoir are bringing this into sharper focus. Normally, I don’t have to dig for ideas and it’s more a matter of waiting for the urge to grab me; now, the set topic gives these unconscious processes a less dominant role. Sometimes the constraint is an aid to creativity, sometimes not, but Wednesday’s challenge on the theme of surprise sparked my interest straightaway. While it was still a struggle to shoehorn my idea into those 99 words – and I’d very much welcome your feedback on how I’ve done it, especially as I’m considering extending it into a longer flash – I had no hesitation in choosing my subject. See what you think, and then I’ll tell you about the background influences of which I’m aware.

Tyres crunching on gravel snapped Mum out of her doze. “Oh, my!”
The grand house loomed ahead. “Do you recognise it?” said my sister.
I parked by the porticoed entrance. Beyond banks of rhododendrons, the lake shimmered. My sister hopped out and opened Mum’s door. “Bet you’re itching to explore.”
Mum stayed put.
“How about tea first?”
Mum didn’t budge.
My sister took her wrinkled hand. “It’s where you were evacuated, remember?” Mum’s tales of wartime escapades were embedded in our childhoods. “It’s a hotel now.” This mini-break, the perfect birthday treat.
Mum was almost retching. “No, please, no.”

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The big house in literary fiction: Black Lake by Johanna Lane

20/5/2014

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North Lees Hall AKA Thornfield in Jane Eyre

Grand houses loom large in literary fiction, from Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre to Alan Hollinghurst’s The Stranger’s Child. There’s a seductive mythology around country houses that seems attractive even to writers with no direct experience of living or working in one. They also, as Blake Morrison points out in an article for The Guardian a few years ago, provide a convenient bridge from book to film. I thought it would be fun to mark the launch day of Johanna Lane’s debut novel, Black Lake, by examining the book from the perspective of the seven factors identified by Morrison as characteristic of the country-house novel. (Note that I’ve amended a couple of the headings to make them more pertinent to this post.)

National identity:

Morrison’s article focuses on the English house in a selection of four English novels. But he acknowledges that other countries have an equal or greater claim to the big-house novel:

It's arguable that Irish country house literature surpasses ours, because the conflicts it dramatises – both political and religious – are on a larger scale.

Black Lake is about one such Irish country house, Dulough in County Donegal. Its history reflects that country’s tragedies: land sold cheaply after the Famine to a Scotsman when Ireland was still part of the British Empire; dispossessed tenants; a questionable involvement with the IRA. In composing a history of his ancestral home, John Campbell moves between pride and shame, fiction and truth, so that he can hardly tell one from the other.

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War and its repercussions: Tom Vowler’s That Dark Remembered Day

16/5/2014

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Stephen is in trouble, suspended from work after a violent outburst that’s left him shaken and his wife concerned for their shared future. She wants him to talk about his childhood; he is terrified of resurrecting the ghosts of the past. Yet when he gets a phone call telling him his mother is unwell, he decides it’s time to pay her a visit in the town where the events of a single day shattered so many lives.

You know you’re in safe hands with a writer who uses the word crescendo¹ correctly on the first page, and comes with an endorsement from Alison Moore. That Dark Remembered Day bubbles with elegant descriptions from the Cornish coast to the windswept Falklands as the past is uncovered layer by layer until the full horror of that day’s events are finally revealed.

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The stories we choose: high jinks and travel horrors

13/5/2014

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Well, the challenges are mounting: the prompts for 99-word flash fiction are announced on Wednesdays and bite-sized memoir every Friday afternoon. This week it’s travel horrors for flash and childhood jinks and japes for memoir – or is it the other way around? My secret¹ ambition is to write a piece that satisfies both simultaneously but, until I get there, I’m making do with incorporating my separate responses into the one post; it gives me another excuse for navel-gazing on the writing process from memory to memoir or not.

Time was when I loved to travel, although now I much prefer to stay at home. But I have lots of cherished memories; I even have a stack of travel diaries I could use to check my facts. Charli’s prompt sparked off a stream of reminiscence, of thrills and spills and moments of, if not quite terror, some pretty dodgy stuff. Were I better raconteur, my travels would make for some great dinner-table storytelling, but my adventures have made only a rare appearance in my fiction and, when they did, I got confused as to what was memory and what imagination. When it came to my 99-words I was overwhelmed with possibilities, yet none seemed strong enough to demand their moment on the screen.

Charli²: But it’s fiction, you’re allowed to make things up!

Annecdotist: Yeah, but somehow I don’t want to this time; I want a story that stays faithful to the things I’ve seen and done.

Lisa²: Ha ha, you’re being converted to memoir.

Annecdotist: Only for this particular topic.

In the end, an idea bubbled to the surface and I grabbed it before it could sink back down again and another take its place. I don’t know why it chose me, but here it is:

I was scared as you were, believe me, but I smothered my anxieties with thoughts of tulips, van Gogh and canals as we bedded down with the down-and-outs in a dusky recess of the shopping mall.

A perfect plan in daylight: a lift halfway to Amsterdam. We’d pass the early hours in the waiting room and catch the first train out. No-one mentioned that the station closed its doors at night.

The police beamed torchlight across our faces. I thought they might relax the rules for two sisters, strangers to the city, but they ushered us into the night.

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Friend fatale: female friendship gone sour in novels by Margaret Atwood, Colette McBeth and Paula Daly

10/5/2014

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I’ve been hanging out with some false friends lately; fortunately these were solely of the literary kind. Three novels by female writers featuring those duplicitous characters our mothers warned us, if we were lucky, to steer away from; not a great advert for women’s friendships but they do make intriguing companions on the page.

I first read Cat’s Eye by Margaret Atwood over twenty years ago, but a recent review from Vulpus Libris has had me itching to give it another airing. A middle-aged painter returns to her home turf to find herself haunted by childhood memories of unbearable betrayals and cruelties perpetuated by her supposed best friend and tormentor, Cordelia. As we’d expect from a writer as talented as Margaret Atwood, the relationship is brilliantly portrayed, both in terms of how the ten-year-old bully grooms and seduces her victim, and its impact on the adult personality of Elaine who, despite objective success in her chosen field, remains badly bruised by the experience.

Clara and Rachel, the ill-fated best friends in Precious Thing by Colette McBeth, first meet at fourteen, slap in the middle of messy adolescence. Inseparable until Clara mysteriously goes away at the end of their teens, when they meet up again in their late-20s, their roles are reversed: Clara, the previously charismatic one, is insecure, while Rachel, the dumpy awkward teen, seems to have it made with the boyfriend, smart flat and successful media career. What I liked about this novel was that, while it’s narrated primarily from Rachel’s point of view, the reader is left to read between the lines to make up her own mind of which of the two women is the most poisonous.

In Keep Your Friends Close by Paula Daly, the psychopathic Eve is certainly the villain of the piece, but Natty is no angel either, and is prepared to give as much as she gets. The two women met at university at the end of their teens and have kept in touch, despite living in different continents, for fifteen years before Eve seizes the opportunity of Natty’s temporary absence from the home to take over husband, house and life. The reader wonders just how far these women will go, as the author makes things progressively harder for her characters, until the surprise but satisfying ending, which neatly ties up several plot threads.

While both of these novels are page turners and, with one a debut and the other second novel, it would be unfair to expect them to be as faultless as Cat’s Eye, but in neither of these was I totally convinced that the women’s friendships would have endured the way they did. Although in Precious Thing the reason for the hiatus in, and re-establishment of, the friendship becomes clear towards the end, and reassessing the past is part of the plot, my scepticism did impinge on my enjoyment of the early chapters. In Keep Your Friends Close we are given a rationale for Eve’s extreme behaviour, yet I wasn’t altogether convinced. However, this may simply reflect my preference for novels with a stronger emphasis on character than plot. I also wondered if the difference in the ages at which the girls/women got together affected how credible the unbalanced relationships seemed; I know we can be duped at any age, but perhaps those early friendships are the most risky.

You can check out my own limitations in writing about female friendship among children in my short story Jessica’s Navel and among adults in my short story The Good News.

What’s your experience of dodgy female friendships in fiction and/or real life? I look forward to your comments.

Thanks to Headline Review for my copy of Precious Thing and Alison Barrow at Transworld books and Sonya from the blog A Lover of Books for my copy of Keep Your Friends Close.

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School at seven: Lisa’s bite-sized memoir challenge

7/5/2014

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For someone who considers herself averse to memoir, I’ve been edging perilously close to it of late. Memoir was what drew me into taking part in Charli’s flash fiction challenge although, like several other participants, I chose to produce a memoir for a fictional character rather than myself. Then I hosted a post from an actual published memoirist: a beautifully moving piece from Janet Watson on the process of rediscovering her teenage self in order to let it go. When Lisa Reiter launched her bite-sized memoir challenge, I didn’t think I’d be joining in. Yet School at Seven got me thinking about my first best friend, and he wouldn’t go away:

My First Best Friend

We sat side-by-side at the front of Mrs B’s classroom. Together we learnt cross-stitch and joined-up writing, drank stove-warmed milk from a squat glass bottle through a paper straw. Together we held out trembling hands as our teacher progressed from child to child, brandishing a wooden ruler. Together we progressed from Blue Book 1 all the way to Blue Book 6.

On Saturday afternoons I’d ride over to his house to watch Batman and Robin dispatch the villains of Gotham city on his black-and-white TV. On Sunday mornings we’d seek each other out at church.

I thought we’d be best friends forever, until the day he biked round to my house with another bunch of friends. Boys, every one of them. I stayed in my garden, watching till they rode away.

In the end, I enjoyed this exercise and was happy with what I produced. Yet where it’s been most helpful is not so much in converting me to memoir, but in nudging me a little further towards formulating my reservations about the form.

Good writing relies on specifics: a crimson tulip rather than a red flower; a curly-haired Bedlington Terrier rather than a medium-sized dog. In writing fiction, we can choose our details to fit with a picture in our head, to suit the rhythm of the prose or to mirror an underlying theme. In writing memoir, we’re supposed to stick with the facts. Janet Watson had her teenage diaries to guide her but, more than twenty years on, they wouldn’t tell her everything she needed to know to complete her book. Even in my short piece of under 150 words, I’m conscious of gaps in my memory, points where I may have strayed from the truth. I feel uneasy that I might be wrong about the year we learnt joined-up writing, and it’s only an assumption that back in 1965 my friend didn’t have a colour TV. I’m not even sure he was my first best friend. It could be I’m unsuited to memoir because I’m too uptight about these minor details, or too lazy to undertake the meticulous research needed to check them out.

Charli Mills wrote that a memory can send a writer down one of two paths: fiction or memoir. I’d love to know what makes some of us prefer one path to the other. On her blog, Writing My Novel, Teagan Kearney wrote recently on the virtues of fiction and mentioned her surprise at discovering that a friend couldn’t read novels because she was unable to suspend disbelief. I also have a good friend who doesn’t get fiction but the idea is so alien to me we’d been friends for around twenty years before I was aware of it. However this friend does enjoy memoir, which strengthens my belief that some people are more suited to one than the other.

I’m hoping to discover more about this preference for fact versus fiction as the memoir challenge continues, although I can’t guarantee I’ll join in next time.

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Of matters sartorial

4/5/2014

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No need to get dressed, no need to leave your bed

We’ve had some interesting chat about appearance on this blog recently: how much, as readers, do we want to know what characters look like and, as writers, whether it’s okay to allow our characters to check their appearance in the mirror.

This week, I’m continuing the theme from a different angle over on the Black Fox Literary Magazine blog. Do pop across and share your views on whether the clothes we wear to tap at our keyboards can impact on the fiction we produce.

Staying with matters sartorial, who can say they’ve never felt anxious about choosing the outfit for an important event? As I explore in my short story, A Dress for the Address, even prize-winning physicists aren’t immune.

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Going back: Janet Watson on writing her memoir Nothing Ever Happens in Wentbridge

1/5/2014

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HAVE you ever wondered what it would be like to go back to your teenage years? To your first love? Close friends? Not just as an idle thought, but to really immerse yourself in those years, actually talk to those people and see whether their memories match yours?

Dusty Springfield sang about Going Back – the song was played at her funeral – to “the things I learned so well, in my youth”. I carried my story with me for many years but what was it I learned back then? When I started writing notes for a memoir, I knew I too had to go back.

Moving away from home was something we all did after school. In the sixth form we were a close group of nine friends, sharing the boredom of school days, waiting for the excitement of the sort of nights everyone recalls from those vivid, growing-up years; high on the future, bonds strengthened by alcohol, and a new awareness of selves and sexual power.

Then it was university, new lives, friends, marriages, children. But I never forgot the feeling of belonging I had with those friends. Had they felt it too, those three girls and five boys? And when a tragic death ripped the heart out of the group, could we ever be together again and feel the same?

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