July 2014 – Jude Higgins

Borrowing from George Borrow

One hundred and sixty years ago today, 27th July, the Victorian gentleman writer, George Borrow, set off with his wife and daughter to travel around Wales. ‘Wild Wales’ the travelogue he wrote about his journey, has a wonderfully intimate and chatty style which starts at chapter one. It’s a classic and I found a copy in its great 1950’s paper cover, in Wells market.

There is much to learn about voice in George Borrow’s writing. His strong preferences come across from the beginning and he is charmingly manipulative with his wife and daughter. (Yes somewhat sexist, but you have to forgive him because he is a man of his times).

Here’s the first paragraph from Chapter One.

“In the summer of the year 1854 myself, wife, and daughter determined upon going into Wales, to pass a few months there. We are country people of a corner of East Anglia, and, at the time of which I am speaking, had been residing so long on our own little estate, that we had become tired of the objects around us, and conceived that we should be all the better for changing the scene for a short period. We were undetermined for some time with respect to where we should go. I proposed Wales from the first, but my wife and daughter, who have always had rather a hankering after what is fashionable, said they thought it would be more advisable to go to Harrowgate, or Leamington. On my observing that those were terrible places for expense, they replied that, though the price of corn had of late been shamefully low, we had a spare hundred pounds or two in our pockets, and could afford to pay for a little insight into fashionable life. I told them that there was nothing I so much hated as fashionable life, but that, as I was anything but a selfish person, I would endeavour to stifle my abhorrence of it for a time, and attend them either to Leamington or Harrowgate. By this speech I obtained my wish, even as I knew I should, for my wife and daughter instantly observed, that, after all, they thought we had better go into Wales, which, though not so fashionable as either Leamington or Harrowgate, was a very nice picturesque country, where, they had no doubt, they should get on very well, more especially as I was acquainted with the Welsh language.”

It’s a good opening. I think it’s always worth trying out a modern day version of a classic/ You might include details or sentence structures you don’t normally use.

e.g. In the summer of 2014, my husband and I decided to go to Wales for a long weekend. We are city people, living in the country not too far from Bristol and at the time of which I am speaking, were tired of all the familiar distractions of our house, with its shelves of unread books, the washing up that always needed doing, the garden thick with weeds. We didn’t know where we would go to start with. I proposed Wales from the first, but my husband wanted to stay in Herefordshire and go to Hay on Wye. I said he’d spend too much money on books and he should be cutting down, it was like an addiction, but he said because we’d been eating vegetarian for the last month, we had money to spare. I then said I was being selfish – of course he should go to Hay. He might pick up something he really wanted with the spare cash. Of course, he backed down then and said he had too much to read already. Why didn’t we go to Aberystwyth and visit Nanteos Mansion where I used to live as a student…

Oh that was fun. I should carry on with that if only for the energy, copying an opening creates. And I might go to Wales, inspired by George Borrow.

How To Write Your Nonfiction Book

My neighbour is a fantastic story teller, his timing and pacing is good, he adds vivid detail and builds suspense. Everything you need to write a great short story. For his work, he’s travelled to many different countries – Uganda, Malawi, Rwanda, China, Mongolia, Bulgaria, Finland to name a few – to undertake geological mapping. I think he should write down the stories, he tells so well; the characters, the places, the scary and exciting situations. They form a fascinating insight into the politics and day to day life in these countries over a period of thirty years. I’m encouraging him to come to the workshop I’m organising with Alex for Writing Events Bath on writing creative non-fiction and start on a travel memoir. Read more about the workshop at Writing Events Bath. It’s at the wonderful Mr B’s Emporium of Books in Bath, our favourite bookshop, on Monday evening, 6th October led by author Trish Nicholson.

Trish’s book on ‘Writing Your Nonfiction Book: the complete guide to becoming an author”, is a comprehensive account of how to plan, research, publish and market your non-fiction work – anything from “brewing parsnip wine to particle physics”. Two hours with her at Mr B’s will get you going and give you a road map. It doesn’t matter if you haven’t written anything before. Everyone is welcome. Booking open on the writing events website.

Learning from prize anthologies and magazines

Today, the postie delivered not only the latest issue of The Stinging Fly – I’ve just subscribed–but also five copies of Fish Anthology 2014. I was so excited to see my runner-up flash fiction, ‘The Lottery’, in print that I ate six apricots one after the other. Both books have absorbed me most of the day and it’s been fascinating reading such a variety of sparkling prose and poetry.

I began writing Flash Fiction after the short story writer and Arvon Tutor, Tania Hershman led a session on Flash at Mr B’s Emporium, Bath a couple of years ago which we organised at Writing Events Bath. I learned that Flash stories are one thousand words maximum and fifty words, or sometimes less, minimum. There are many different names for the form –smoke fiction, short shorts, drabbles, prose poetry, to name a few. Carrie Etter, a poet and senior lecturer at Bath Spa University, writes prose poetry and teaches the form. Her new collection,’Imagined Sons’ is written as a sequence of prose poems. In a short conversation I had with her, she suggested that flash fiction works well if you write a scene with one or two characters with the action taking place over about ten minutes.

My story ‘The Lottery’, follows that structure, but it’s interesting to see that the winning fictions in the Fish anthology sometimes use longer time frames, and a variety of structures. Robert Grossmith in his story ‘First’ achieves this by the use of headings followed by short descriptions of events from a whole life. Roisin O’Donnell’s powerful story about a man who blew himself up, is in three numbered sections, each one from a different perspective – the mother, wife and child. The time frame ranges from immediate to an unspecified time in the future.

In The Stinging Fly magazine, the flash fictions are longer and more expansive as a consequence. Alison Fisher writes an historical tale set over several years and develops a strong lead character in under one thousand words. Danielle McLaughlin, in a similar number of words, writes a strongly evocative piece which encompasses a short time span, but successfully includes a flash- back sequence.

It’s been a great reading and learning day. I recommend buying both books.

Emerging Characters

I sometimes co-run ‘pop-up’ writing events in Hall and Woodhouse Cafe, Bath with my writing friend and co-founder of Writing Events Bath, Alex Wilson. We run similar sessions in four week blocks at Bath Central Library. Last week we ran a pop-up session, focussed on developing characters. These sessions are designed to get participants writing. We devise exercises and people write for five or ten minutes then share in pairs and often read out their pieces to the whole group. It’s always amazing to see what can be produced in such a short time.

During the session, we were considering how characters change and develop as you write and how it is necessary to show several aspects of a character in order for them to be interesting. Obvious stuff, but staying with the obvious is always important. Who likes a nicey-nicey character anyway?

I used to be a Gestalt Psychotherapist and one of the theoretical concepts from Gestalt Therapy suggests that we do not have a fixed ‘self’. The self is fluid and changes according to the environment or situation. For example, if you are talking to your MP at a local surgery, you will be different from when you are talking to your best friend in the Boston Tea Party. A different aspect of your self is called for. With the MP situation, you might surprise yourself if you have never been to a surgery before. If your MP is Jacob Rees-Mogg, like mine, you could suddenly discover a barely contained rageful self (or character). We won’t go into the finer distinctions between definitions of self and character here but I think the Gestalt Psychotherapist, Irving Polster, did say that the character is ‘the one who wears the boots.’

So as a writer, if you are not sure how to deepen your character, put them in a different situation and a different part of them will emerge. (Or a different aspect of you, the writer, will emerge?). The different situation can involve another, or it can be a different environment.

Colin Barrett and story beginnings

Colin Barrett recently won the 2014 Frank O’Connor prize for his collection ‘Young Skins’, first published by Stinging Fly in Ireland 2013 and by Jonathan Cape 2014 in the UK. These memorable stories show life in small town Ireland from the perspective of young men with few prospects, who become involved with crime, drinking and disastrous relationships. The stories are funny and moving and the characters are likeable even though some of them commit acts of violence.

The longest story in the collection, ‘Calm With Horses’, tells the story of Arm, former boxer, retired in his early twenties from fighting and employed as a hard man by a drug dealing gang fronted by his friend, Dympna. Arm has a young autistic son who is soothed by therapeutic horse-riding sessions but nothing can soothe Arm or offer him hope. When he kills alleged paedophile, Fannigan, to save him from a worse death at the hands of Dympna’s vengeful uncles, his own fate is sealed.

I interviewed Colin Barrett for the Bath Short Story website and he said this about writing a short story:

“Try to make something interesting happen as near to the opening as you can. Now this doesn’t have to be some showy eruption of plot or an aphoristic nugget of an opening line, though it may well be; it might just be the deployment of an unobvious adjective or unexpected detail seamed somewhere into your opening paragraphs. A nuanced little observation or moment, carefully placed. If you can get a small moment right near the start it sends a signal to the reader that you can trust me, you can keep reading. There’s nowhere to hide with short stories, if its five or ten pages long it’s got to start well, do well in the middle, and end well. No point saying it gets good half way through.”

Colin demonstrates this advice at the beginning of ‘Calm With Horses’ :

“Dympna told Arm to stay in the car while Dympna gave Fannigan a chance to plead his case. This wasn’t the way it usually went but Arm nodded okay. Arm watched Dympna stalk up the lawn and politely hammer on the front door of the council house Fannigan shared with his mother. Eventually Dympna was let inside.”

So why does this beginning work so well?

The names immediately suggest place and character. We can guess, if we didn’t know anything about the settings in advance, that we are in Ireland. The nickname, Arm, suggests a character who is known to swing his fists. Fannigan is clearly not a friend.

We are thrust into the action in the first sentence. There is a situation. Something bad has happened (Fannigan must plead his case) and we guess something bad is going to happen. Dympna is in charge; he ‘told’ Arm what to do. In the second sentence, we know Arm has been used as a heavy weight before and we can surmise from the tone this does not bother him – he nods okay and watches.

The third sentence emphasises the type of characters by the marvellous use of ‘politely hammer’ (More on this in point 5) The fact that Fannigan lives with his mother and we don’t exactly know what is happening inside the house makes the whole opening compelling and sinister. I definitely (with trepidation) want to know what happens next.

There is only one adverb (politely) and one adjective (council) in this paragraph and each earns its place. As I already said, ‘politely hammer’ is an evocative combination. To me, the odd juxtaposition suggests Dympna’s thought processes e.g.’ I will at least knock (instead of perhaps smashing down the door) out of respect for the mother and thus doing, absolve myself of anything bad.’ ‘Council’ house neatly sums up Fannigan, Dympna and Arm’s world. They probably do some sort of shady business in a large council estate. The verb ‘stalk’ shows how Dympna wants to appear menacing, but also gives him an air of self importance. ‘Stalk’ also suggests a prey.

.The sentence length is varied for effect. Long, short, long, short. I find the last short sentence chilling.

The action is summarised and the sparsity of detail increases the tension. The reported dialogue increases this tension too.

The title is interesting, because this opening is far from calm in tone. So there’s another hook here. Who or what is calm with horses?

I recommend reading the whole collection for both enjoyment of language, and great character and plot. At the moment ‘Stinging Fly’ may still have some signed copies of the book.