Wendy’s NewsletterThe Writing Process
Newsletter 12
Thursday May 7th 2015
Hello again. Thank you for returning to my Newsletter.If this is your first time, welcome.
Another set of crucial decisions for you as a creative novelist
are those involving the issue of timing within your narrative. These decisions
need not be hard and fast: like the early creative stages, these too can have
an improvisational, intuitive element to them.
In the early stages you eventually come to know just when your novel begins, in terms of time. If you see your novel as contemporary - perhaps now or in the last fifty years = you need to be just as precise with your research as you would be with a novel set in – say - the time of the Tudors, or any part of Victoria’s reign or, the mid-Twentieth Century.
The cultural and political contexts
of the year 2000 are different to 2004, are different to 2006, and are
different to 2008 and so on. An election year is different to a non-election
year. An Olympic year is different to a non-Olympic year. A novel beginning on
July 7th in London in 2005 would
be qualitatively different from a novel beginning the month before. Even if you
don’t mention the bombings you need to know that this incident will be buried
somewhere in your characters’ minds ever after. Even if such events are not mentioned in your narrative, your own
essential awareness of them will filter through in your intuitive writing.
Although I lived through the 1960s I
re-researched those times for my 1960s novel Sandie Shaw and the Millionth Marvel Cooker. For this novel I reconsidered the very different
aspects of work and leisure, travel and fashion, student life and home life which
were part of the taken-for-granted life in those days.
I had not realised how I had embedded
in this novel the social and interactive role of smoking cigarettes until I
read one reviewer’s comment that, ‘I had forgotten how much we smoked in those
days.’ Such things can strengthen the authenticity of the world view of the characters
and the narrative set in a particular time.
I course, in researching the time-settings
of your novel, you will only ever get to a partial truth in historical terms. One
thing I tend to do, with fiction set in the Twentieth Century, is to build into
my historically based time-web threads of – knowledge about - contemporaneous
art. films, novels, radio, documentaries,
magazines, photographs and newspapers. Such sources are there for us to absorb
a fruitful time-based feeling sufficiently strong to write freely and
intuitively.
I am currently researching a World
War 2 novel. The conventional historical sources – so many of them – are easy
to access, fascinating to read. But as well as that I am reading post-war
memoirs of wartime exploits: William Moss’s Ill Met
By Moonlight the anecdotal memoir, the source of the eponymous, iconic film
about wartime exploits on Crete; I am also reading Abducting a General, Patrick Liegh Fermor’s more poetic , possibly
more informed, but equally gung-ho take on those same events. The fact that these two young men were bosom
buddies and shared these adventures makes it good to read them in tandem. As
well as this the biography outlining the post-war Fitzrovian life of Elizabeth
Frink is on my reading table.
As well as this I am reading Elizabeth Bowen’s novel. The Heat of the Day: a beautifully written, highly personal novel reflecting her own high octane experiences in wartime Britain.
Unexpected things can happen in this process of empathetic
research. Once, researching for another wartime novel I checked the documented
radio programming for 1941. Radio was crucial
during the war. I wondered what else my characters would be listening to, apart
from news from the war front.
On the pages of the Radio Times I discovered–
around the time when I myself was born - the very
first broadcast performance of J.M. Barrie’s Peter Pan. My own mother would
certainly have listened to that. The name Wendy
had not existed before J.M.Barrie invented it.
So, in my research for my novel Land of Your Possession - although she
never told me - I discovered the
reason why my mother decided on this odd name for me, her
third child. Lizza, the young pregnant mother in
the story, lives through the Blitz on Coventry and the novel follows her
adventures in surviving it. And Lizza, too, listens to the radio and hears the
play.
All well and good, we creative writers will say. One writer
friend, however, recently pointed out to me that there was a problem in using
such sources as a key to empathising with the world contemporary to one’s
novel. What, she said, if one looked at today’s art, novels, magazines and media
to absorb true feeling to write a story set on present times? Think about the
extravagant perfection of Interiors Magazines, the excesses and omissions of
News media both in newspapers and on the Net. Consider the cloud cuckoo-land of
celebrity magazines. Think of the rash of erotic novels, of slash moves. How
‘real’ is all this for some future writer who bases her novel on the year 2015?
Would such sources give a true
reflection of our age for a writer to build the time-web of her novel so she
can reflect her characters’ lives in 2015? And then I have the thought that we
need to remember that there would be a different time-web for each class, for
each region, for each year.
(One thought. Perhaps writing future fiction
- very popular now - is a much clearer, simpler project.)
Of course there comes a time when you must roar STOP! And go
and sit in a quiet place for a week or so to let all this stuff sink in to the
point of empathy and the level of intuition, before returning to the
free-flowing creative processes of
writing your fiction that I proposed in my earlier Newsletters.
