Saturday 30 July 2016

Of its time and place?

I have spent a lot of time this week searching through late nineteenth and early twentieth century texts relevant to various aspects of life in the areas of South Wales where my family were living and working then. I wanted to get a feeling for places and people as well as some additional factual information to inform my writing of the family story. It turned out to be an interesting experience in itself, however, getting to grips with the contemporary writing style! Pages of turgid prose, so earnestly expressed.

Perhaps you can judge a book
by its cover?!!

I must admit that I was tempted to give up on the "History Of The United Society Of Boilermakers And Iron And Steel Shipbuilders". But I'm so glad that I didn't - having waded through pages of what appeared of questionable interest to anyone, written with true Victorian gravity, I hit upon three paragraphs with direct relevance to my grandfather's trade union activity in a long-running industrial dispute of the early 1890s - information that then made perfect sense of subsequent events. Worth every minute I'd slogged through the book!

But it started me thinking about writing as so often being of its time and place and why some books are able to transcend those barriers, to interest and enthuse generations of readers in diverse locations and cultures. I thought of  - and indeed got out again - some of the classics I had read as a youngster. No way now would I read a contemporary book with such dense descriptive paragraphs as you find in Dickens' "A Tale Of Two Cities" - but how I loved that book in my teenage years. And the Robert Louis Stevenson adventures I had read as a child - very much of their time and place but transplantable certainly to the 1950s and 60s, and I hope beyond. In the 1990s my children were fascinated by C. S. Lewis and Tolkein - and the Narnia books still sell in their thousands despite their '40s style. So called "young adult" fiction of today is very different I know, but I would be very interested to see how much of it survives and still entrances in sixty years time!

Friday 22 July 2016

Assorted Writers

As writers I find it is all too easy for us to get stuck in our own little grooves, with a very blinkered perspective on what is going on in the rest of the creative world. So I always enjoy meeting other people who have different interests and approaches, who write in other genres, look at life through diverse lenses. I find that get-togethers such as Cirencester's monthly Writers In The Brewery are great opportunities to find out what other people are up to in the writing world; listening to writing programmes on the radio is another. And hosting yesterday's "The Writers' Room" for Corinium Radio was certainly an interesting experience.

Our producer Chris at work

We had three guests on yesterday's programme, all making very different contributions. The actor David Bailey had written two three-minute monologues which - needless to say - he performed beautifully. A skillful mix of memoir and fiction, they drew very poignant pictures of two men - one recalling a past love and one regretting a staid, unadventurous life but unable (or in truth perhaps, unwilling) to materially alter things. Pippa Roberts, a journalist, playwright and poet, then read a selection of her humorous verse, some for adults, some for children. I'm always envious of the skill to write for children and also to write humour - neither of which I possess!

Eugene Lambert

Our third guest was Eugene Lambert, reading an extract from his debut novel "The Sign Of One" published by Egmont earlier this year. For young adults "of all ages", the novel is a science fiction thriller, inspired in part by Eugene's experience of being an identical twin. He is a graduate of the MA programme at Bath Spa University in "Writing for Young People", a course which he found immensely useful in developing his chosen genre. The extract he read definitely whetted the appetite for more - and there will be two further books to complete the trilogy. Certainly an author to watch out for!

Saturday 16 July 2016

Living with your characters

Even when writing short stories, I have always felt the need to "round out" a character. I may not use all the detail I develop but the process fixes a person, both as a physical being and as a personality, in my mind. So I might list the contents of a woman's handbag, make notes on places a certain character might have holidayed at in their past, that sort of thing. Then, when they are "real" to me, I can put them in a time and place to live out the story I'm writing.

Novelists often talk about "living with" the characters they develop, probably over many months as their books are written; those characters become a real part of their everyday lives. Recently this situation has come about in my own life as I write about the lives of my forebears in the family chronicles (which are at last making considerable progress!). My characters of course are not fictional but, with sometimes limited factual information to rely on, I have to use a fair amount of conjecture and informed guess work to reconstruct their daily experience in the early to mid nineteenth century. I now find that shades of Victorian Britain are encroaching more and more into my twenty first century reality!

I have been researching and writing up the life of my great great grandmother, Martha Carter, who lived in rural Wiltshire, married to an agricultural worker and bringing up twenty (yes - twenty!) children in a tiny labourer's cottage. In writing her story I have tried to immerse myself completely in her world - and in doing so I have found her becoming increasingly real to me. I was dismayed when I found that after a life so circumscribed by her fertility she died alone, a pauper, in 1896. I found the chapel where her funeral was held and even the bier which bore the plain coffin to its unmarked resting place a hundred and twenty years ago. It was almost a tangible grief that I felt for her. A real living with one's character!

Writing Up Family History

To the music of memory a motley crew
congas through my dreams,
Cinderella skeletons
tangoing through time
for their night at the ball.
I must choreograph with care,
for to watch them dance
will be to hear them speak.

(Copyright Gill Garrett 2015)

Thursday 7 July 2016

"The Writer's Room"


I'm delighted to be hosting some of "The Writer's Room" programmes on Corinium Radio over the next couple of months, standing in for Rona Laycock. Each programme features three local writers who read pieces of their work and discuss their writing. I've very much enjoyed taking part in the programme in the past and it will be fun to be on the other microphone for a change!

Last year I was talking to Paul Dodgson, who writes extensively for radio, about his residency at a school in the south west where, on arrival, he found that the young people were totally unused to listening to spoken word on the radio - it was music or nothing as far as they were concerned. Knowing Paul's teaching ability, I'm sure that his encouragement must have ignited much interest and enthusiasm there, but I'm saddened to think that many other young people may not have that opportunity and consequently miss out on a lot. I've learned so much, and had great enjoyment, from listening to stories, plays and poetry over the years (and they have certainly taken my mind off cleaning, cooking, ironing, the general minutiae of everyday life!). On the long drive to school my children would listen to story tapes and can recall favourites almost verbatim twenty years later.

If you would like to listen in to "The Writer's Room" you'll find it on line at www.coriniumradio.co.uk; the programmes are broadcast at 14.00 on Monday, Wednesday and Friday one week, and then rebroadcast at 14.30 on Monday, Wednesday and Friday the following week. Hope you enjoy them!

Friday 1 July 2016

Sold down the river?


A lovely walk with the dog this evening down by the Wye - the river running as fast and high as people's feelings after the EU referendum! It's been such an anxious and disconcerting time all round; the only things that have made me laugh all week have been some of the political sketches in the newspapers. How clever some of the writers are, and what a wonderful, often quirky, take they have on things. I only wish that I could write in that vein!