Characters – Nastasya Parker

Lost Darlings

This Week’s Bit of String: The adventures of Bugs and Daffy

Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck have it easy these days. They lie about in a languid knot near the pillows of my kid’s empty bed. In years past, they were subjected to all sorts of wrestling matches. They even had a go at cheese rolling; after a family outing to this inimitable Gloucestershire tradition, our Bear was inspired to throw a Baby Bel cheese down the stairs, and toss stuffed animals such as Bugs and Daffy after it, keeping score of who got closest.

When Bear started secondary school, and we reorganised their bedroom, I asked if we should thin out the crowd of stuffies huddling at the foot of their bed. “But they’re my friends!” objected Bear.

This didn’t last forever of course, and for the latter teen years, there were only three stuffies on the bed. Bugs, Daffy, and an old one of mine, Barney T. Moose (the T stands for “the,” of course). When Bear moved across the ocean, Barney went with them. Bugs and Daffy are holding down the fort, so to speak, and the other “friends” are in a very close-knit, backroom box-dwelling community.

*Boxed up! Treasure trunk in a charity shop window.*

Great emotional upheaval precedes a clear-out. I don’t know if it’s actual grief for previous incarnations of my little Bear, or if it’s the anxiety that grief will come. But I always end up so busy that after each massive overhaul, whatever I’ve boxed up does not prey on my mind. I don’t step into their vacant room and mourn the fact that Brown Puppy and Big Baby aren’t still on the bed. Not most days. I accept that life moves on.

Ruthless

These are the sorts of things I tell myself when another editing session looms. Bits I’m fond of will get boxed away. I’ll feel anxious as I cut and paste lines I like from my manuscript into my Rejected Quotes file.

But when I go into this file, I see segments pared from the last edited piece, a year or two ago. I’ve never developed them further. I forgot they existed. Yes, they’re good lines, but by now the story’s already made it into a magazine or anthology without them.

For me, preserving cut lines doesn’t actually benefit future work. It just enables me to feel ok about removing them from the current one. It’s like a little security teddy to cling to while I do the scary revision.

Have you ever turned cut lines or ideas from one story into a whole new project? Maybe I’m just not organised enough.

We are told to “kill our darlings” when editing. Don’t get too attached to passages you crafted, because they might not turn out to be relevant to your story’s core. Simply being well-written and liked by the author doesn’t justify being in a story. I’ve written recently about making writing fun, about throwing things in like a library scene or a favourite snack or song… those things can help keep us writing, but we can’t necessarily keep them in our writing. Sometimes temporary aids or fixes are an essential but impermanent part of the work.

It’s like growing up, isn’t it? The threadbare stuffed animals, the books read down to raggedness, the forays into sports or music. For a while we think we couldn’t live without them, but they may be less vital as we discover who we ultimately are.

Balance

I’m currently editing my manuscript for The Gospel of Eve. It’s hard to put a number on the edits because there are certain parts that I’ve gone over and adjusted countless times. As a whole, it’s the fourth comprehensive, planned revision.

*This statue in Malmo, Sweden is called “Mother.”*

Usually with my first big edit, I have an eye on the word count. I can’t help it. I get so worried about excess weight, I’m seeing what I can cut. With the second, I firm up characters’ trajectories. Then I have to go through again and see if it makes sense, given everything I’ve trimmed out. This time, I am again checking it coalesces around a theme.

I seem to swing from trying to cut, then needing to add… And all the while I’m wishing someone would tell me what’s right. Am I overexplaining, or being too cryptic? Introducing too many characters too fast in my rush to kick off the action? It can be so lonely, trying to get it right with no guide.

Rather like parenting. Not that books are where near as important as people, but the creation process has its similarities to parenting. How much do we push and lead, how much do we let our kids take their time and figure things out on their own? This happens to be a central issue of my book. Eve, as the first mother with only a sometimes-terrifying God as parental model, tries to discern how much freedom to allow her children, unsure how much she really has herself.

How do you go about editing, and capturing nothing more or less than the most important part of the story?

The Value of Ordinary

This Week’s Bit of String: A blue dress in an empty village

We take somewhat unconventional holidays. They’re often centred around seeing family, since no one lives near us, or else we’ll make it to another city or even country but only find affordable accommodation in the outskirts. Most recently, we combined both these by visiting Malmo, Sweden, where our son had travelled from the US for a gaming event.

We stayed in a hotel a few miles south of the lovely old town and castle. When we hiked there, or to the sea, we passed apartment blocks. Some older, used by immigrant communities, with Ukrainian flags or halal pizzerias. Some with separate car parking space and bike lockup for each flat. We passed allotments for veggie gardens, quadrants of circles carved out of parkland. There was a whole, mid-city village of “summer houses,” too: painted huts with little shared gardens, hammocks, berry bushes, barbecue grills, all vacant for now. Some had small glassed-in porches; I saw a pretty, short-sleeved blue dress hanging in one. Waiting for a party?

*Horse-drawn cleaning cart for the high-rise outbuildings. Hyllie, Malmo, Sweden*

It might be nice to stay in luxurious resorts or in city centres where you can just step out and go to the theatre or something. But I maintain that no vacation is complete without a day when you’ve walked at least ten miles, and seeing a dress in an empty summer house window or passing a preschool blasting out Moana while rosy-cheeked, blond kids in full snowsuits sniffle and shove at each other are every bit as fascinating to me as a museum or a palace.

Checking Out the History

Not to say that I don’t enjoy cathedrals and castles and all that. They’re intriguing glimpses into history, and more and more they try to reflect the wider experiences of citizens. We visited Malmo Castle, and learned about the strife between Denmark and Sweden in the 17th century, reading about the people caught up in it, military and civilian, from both sides. There was also a very creepy recreation of a plague town from the early 1700s, complete with sound effects of children whimpering, because some people believed if you buried a child alive, the whole village would be saved from disease.

And there were horrific tales of torture and execution from the 1800s when the place served as a prison. There was an outline on the floor where a boy would have been beheaded, and child executions trigger me worst of all. Such a horrific lack of empathy.

On a slightly more hopeful note, the building later served as a shelter for refugees after World War II, and we saw one of the Swedish “white buses” which rescued thousands of people from concentration camps before the war ended, made possible by an agreement with Himmler—behind Hitler’s back.

I think travel, even when it’s not glamorous, serves to remind us of stories happening all around, at every echelon of society. It pricks my curiosity for how others live their lives, whether in a castle or in a high-rise apartment.

The Everyday Moments

The ordinary is worth noticing, not just in the places we visit, but in moments we spend with each other. While abroad, we ate most of our dinners at the shopping centre across from our hotel, treating our kiddo as well. In turn, we were given guest passes to the event so we could watch the game our Bear was streaming. It was a fun setup—arcade games, swinging chairs, soft serve ice cream. We cheered and readily made fools of ourselves as fans.

*City view through a window of the Castle’s cannon tower*

Later on, other gamers recognised my husband and I, saying how great that we’d come. It made me wonder, don’t their parents at least tune in virtually for their events? But a lot of people dismiss videogaming. I’ve never had time (or coordination, if I’m being honest) to do it myself, but I always tried my best to listen to the play-by-play accounts from my kid, so I could share in the successes and frustrations of one of my very favourite people. And look where it got Bear, having a blast in a city overseas, a break from the day job. It saddens me thinking how lonely some gamers must be at their families’ indifference, and how much their parents miss out. If people can’t summon the will to listen to their own kids’ interests, what hope for human empathy is there?

Now that I am separated from my child, living on opposite sides of the Atlantic, I miss quick conversations after work, the opportunity to provide a cup of tea or sandwich or cookie and be repaid with a smile and cuddle. I miss Bear popping down while I’m cooking or washing up. They would stand with one foot propped up behind the other knee like a stork, telling me about this or that game, how they might arrange the music, which gamer friend runs it, what time they hope to achieve speed running.

C.S. Lewis, in his memoir A Grief Observed, mentioned how he missed the “heartbreaking commonplace,” and that line has always stuck with me. The ordinary is so important. It’s the stuff we learn from, long for, and it’s vital for empathy, because when we talk about walking a mile in someone’s shoes, we don’t just mean their Sunday best.

Have you gained insight into people’s everyday lives from travel? Has it been useful for your writing or art?

Character Interrogations

This Week’s Bit of String: Practising Descriptions

It’s a cover lesson for our neediest Year 10 English class, and on a Friday afternoon no less. They’re supposed to practise personification and metaphors, and build descriptive skills. By the very end, I manage to wrangle a dictation out of one of the boys at the back for a paragraph describing a beautiful woman.

Me: “What’s she wearing?”

Student: “Uh, she was wearing a thin layer of duvet.”

Me: “…You do know what a duvet is?”

Student: “Yeah, like a thing women put on when they get out of bed.”

Me, suspecting he means negligee or some such but not really wanting to get into it: “Okay, erm, so what are her clothes doing? Do they flow when she moves? What do they flow like?”

Student: “Like a, like a bowling ball.”

*Could the sun be rising on a beautiful friendship with your characters?*

So we have a beautiful lady wearing a heavy quilt that flows like a bowling ball. At least she was clothed. Another boy kept begging me, “Can’t she just be nude?” Nope!

It’s not easy introducing characters: describing them, engaging readers with them, not oversharing. But when you’re just coming up with them, before you have to make them presentable to anyone else—that’s quite fun, don’t you think?

Starting Points

I used to start my project planning by delving into the most dramatic details of the protagonists’ backgrounds. I would use a three-pronged Harry Potter-based method: Boggarts, Dementors, and Patronuses. In other words, what was the character’s deepest fear, their worst memory, and their most happy memory.

Very important things to know. But as pivotal as those things are, they don’t control every waking moment of our lives. We’re a lot more than whatever traumatises us or even whatever gives us hope. Of course we add in interests, goals, family ties… But I think too, what reveals a lot about a character is their Default Setting.

What do they think about when they have nothing to do? Is there a daydream world they go to? Do they get caught up obsessing over past mistakes, or planning the rest of their day down to the minute? Do they play music for themselves in their minds, or play back favourite stories? That’s quite relevant to how a character presents themselves.

Rounding It Out

Thinking about it, a woman rolling out of bed dragging her duvet and it feeling like a bowling ball is pretty darn relatable. I might tune out if my student started droning on about a fabulous woman in an evening gown. When we’re creating characters, quirks count for a lot. A flaw can be so much more interesting than heroism.

Since I’ve been indulging in pages of possible character backstories and tastes and foibles lately, I keep thinking of two things. Firstly, there’s a wonderful speech in American Gods by Neil Gaiman, in which a young woman reels off a random list of things she believes, from firm opinions to preferences to faiths (full quote here). Secondly, and very differently, the quirky mini-bios created by Hercule, a Pet Portrait artist on Facebook. I know that sounds weird. But trust me, have a look and have a laugh.

*I wonder what Hercule would have made of these floofy potatoes.*

How do your characters like their herring? Hercule often makes sure we know whether the pets he sketches prefer their herring Goth or elasticated (?!). What can your characters absolutely not stop themselves from doing when the opportunity arises? What beliefs resonate with the deepest fibres of their beings?

Planning for a potential long project like a novel, it helps if I really like my characters. Or at least, if I find them fascinating. We’re going to be spending a lot of time together; I want to make it as enjoyable and motivating as I can. Yes, my characters will go through hard times and at some point, inevitably, disappoint each other or themselves. But if I’m going to list the random things I believe in, my characters had better be included.

So, if we’re trying to make our writing fun, I suggest treating your characters like friends. Sit them down and ask questions that might not have anything to do with your plot, but could have everything to do with your relationship, and your passion for continued writing.

What would their favourite childhood books have been? The songs or artists that helped them survive their teen years, the movies or shows that recharge them in adulthood? What’s the kindest thing someone ever did for them, and the cruelest thing? What’s their favourite way to eat cheese, and how do they like their chocolate? Do they have a favourite thunderstorm memory? A favourite seaside one? Who would be their ideal animal sidekick, what would they most like to be famous for?

I hope you have a great time with your characters this week!

Make Writing Fun Again

This Week’s Bit of String: A library getaway

A couple of weeks ago, a Sixth Form student I’d been working with not only passed her English GCSE re-sit—she aced it. It was a marvellous hullabaloo; the whole school was thrilled.

Now that I’m not accompanying her to re-take lessons with obstreperous peers, or helping her hunt down alliterations and pathetic fallacy, we can spend her supported study periods preparing for independent life, and pursuing her own creative interests.

One of these is writing. She is determinedly working on a novel about a teen with superpowers.

Last week she said, “I know what will happen next. They’ll escape to a library that’s full of magic spell books.” She leaned in with a little smile. “I’ve always wanted to write a story set in a library.”

I had a little, goshdarn-it-why-didn’t-I-think-of-that moment. Should we be thinking in these terms more frequently, focusing on what we’d really love to write about?

Love What You Write

Maybe you already do that. Hopefully you do. I fumble around in the chaos of daily life for my little bits of string and try to judge which ones might be the most publishable, the most profitable. Maybe that’s not the best measure of what I should be working on.

Often I seize on a concept, a what if… what if I became intangible and my hands had no impact when I tried to clean or shape or touch, what if eye contact between humans was literally hazardous? I write notes on these and compile images, but find myself disengaged when I start my process with mere ideas.

I’ve noted this before, but need reminding. We have to write what we like. Otherwise, the slog will be evident. And of course, this is supposed to be fun. It’s necessary to our beings to create, but it’s also supposed to feel good, at least after a fashion.

I’m a bit jealous of poets; I feel as if they’re allowed to take a particularly striking tree, or a memorable event or cherished location and craft with it, run with its imagery and emotion, unfettered by plot. It’s not that I think poetry is simple. You have to imbue it with rhythm and beauty yet make it look effortless… Admit it though, finding a beginning, middle, and end for prose can be a wrench. I’m not convinced every idea is MEANT to be plotted.

A Bucket List for Writing

Or if we could be ancient Greek astronomers, designing constellations, grasping at our favourite stars and assigning shapes to them. I know, trying to make a story out of some random thing that interests us can be as far-fetched as dragging out a concept that doesn’t grip our soul. But it can’t hurt to play around with such things a bit, and see what ends up working.

I’m coming up with a bucket list I want to write about. People (literal-minded characters feeling at odds with their own time period), settings (the sea, a couch cushion den, fairy castle tree stumps with moss-lined turrets and mushroom spiral staircases), props (lilacs, root beer, doll collections…)

I’m not going to force a single story to revolve around these like a jukebox musical. But they could make good starting points, or exciting background details to add when I’m feeling stuck.

In a sense, we can incorporate poems, odes to what we love, into the scenery of our stories. What sort of character might love the things we love? Or, what could some of these images mean to someone who’s experienced them completely differently–to someone suffering acute grief, or addiction, or whose perception would be different due to sensory impairment?

I’ve just started another rewrite of my Eve novel. I love those characters and that world, but it’s brutal going through again, making my sentences fear for their lives. I’m also finishing a draft of a short story, and always doing my daily scribbles and fiddling with other ideas.

Watching my student discover the creation process, though, makes me pine for that fresh taste. So I’ve been taking notes on a cast of characters for a new, long project. Pages of family history, sense memories, likes and dislikes, beliefs. It’s such fun, like when you start a relationship that’s all your own and you don’t have to worry what anyone else thinks because they’re all yours; you haven’t introduced them to anybody yet. What a luxury!

Do you relish the creation stage? What would be on your writing bucket list?

Hitherto Unsung

This Week’s Bit of String: Bin day

I like to do an extra long hike early on Friday mornings before work. It amplifies the feeling of accomplishment for the week. Friday is Five Miler Day, but it’s also Bin Day, when the rubbish or recycling gets collected. Particularly now that it’s so dark and dreary, for stretches at a time it’s just me and the wheelie bins out there.

Sunrises and hoarfrosts aren’t exactly enhanced by eau de sanitation truck, or windblown cardboard recyclables. But flashing lorry lights reflected in dark windows, and the vehicle’s clanks and sighs, the passive-aggressive thumps of the bins back onto the pavement, say Friday to me. So I embrace the whole.

Sometimes I see a former student jogging alongside the bin lorry in his neon vest, grabbing the bins and lining them up to be emptied, and we exchange a wave. He had a great sense of humour in school and liked art and music. I hope that the other sanitation workers are a nice fellowship for him, and that his early waste collection shifts leave him time for creative pursuits. I worry that his duties might feel quite demoralising, though. I’m not sure I could handle it.

Hail the Workers

Perhaps inspired by this young man, I decided to write about a sanitation worker while experimenting in a workshop this week. Sarah Tinsley’s virtual Scribbles workshops are a fun hour of mixed exercises and sharing. We were looking at different ways of communicating what’s going on in a scene–different viewpoints, dialects… I tried a couple sentences in the voice of a young bin man, then a couple in the voice of an elderly man watching from his window.

Then, I had a go at narrating the scene in Homeric fashion, referencing “the rose-fingered dawn” that Homer so liked to mention in The Odyssey. I enjoyed this, so carried on with it. I feel we could enhance a lot of professional profiles by narrating them like ancient Greek epics. There are so many people in this world who go unsung.

“A rose-fingered dawn casts its light upon Ithaca Street, sentried on this fortuitous morn with firmly aligned ranks of fleet-wheeled waste receptacles…

“Sing, o Muse, of one who went valiantly forth and did battle on the field of GCSEs, was bested, and yea, battled them twice more in accordance with the law of the land…

“Sing how with utmost dexterity he wields the malodorous foes. One by one, before each dwelling place, he captures the rejected parcels and upends them into the belly of his vast, clanking barge. He leaves not a single receptacle correctly aligned, fearlessly conveying defiance to the very gods.”

Changing Voices

I think I’ll do more of this. It’s fun. One weekend at university, a bunch of us went on a conference and I decided to narrate the trip there. It was a good laugh. I’d narrated myself sometimes when I was younger, and once found that piping up, “Little did they know, but the girl was dying for some attention” was surprisingly effective.

With social media now, we kind of narrate ourselves all the time. Remember when Facebook was young and naive and people put their statuses in third-person? Then it moved on to angsty first-person adolescence narration.

I think we should borrow styles more often. Try a bit of Dickensian impersonation, or David Attenborough. Brighten things up by narrating as Bob Ross. My kiddo just dressed up as him for Halloween. I threw in a brief bit of Shakespeare on election day: “Get thee to a voting booth, go!” Another example is sports commentator Andrew Cotter’s viral videos from lockdown, when he narrated his dogs as if they were engaged in sport.

So, as we head into another busy week, let’s have a bit of fun sometimes and make each other feel epic. Lift up an unexpected character, who doesn’t usually get to play the hero; try on a different style. See what happens!

Humming to Snails

This Week’s Bit of String: Summer camp workshops

It’s humid in New Hampshire, and the grass is wet from last night’s thunderstorms. Twelve kids sit around me on coloured interlocking foam mats. I have armed them with clipboards, paper, pencils in all different shapes including dragons and flamingos and drumsticks, stickers, and mystery keys.

A trio of boys are doing Mad Libs together, mainly supplying each gap with some form of “cat” or “farting.” They like cats, and of course farts are the pinnacle of wit at this stage. The group’s counsellor is lying on his back, clipboard in the air, blissfully writing a poem. Other kids are writing stories about where their key might unlock, or comics about bunnies or bananamen.

One of the mats has a little slug curled on a corner. I remark on it, and an 8-year-old boy approaches me earnestly.

“You know snails? If you find one, and it’s deep inside the shell and wants to stay hiding, you can hum to it. Then it will poke out.”

“That’s interesting, how did you learn that? Did you try it yourself?”

He nods. I’m picturing him crouching on the damp ground, snailshell in his palm, leaning down to hum and watching in wonder as a squidgy creature emerges, antennae first.

Permission to Imagine

I haven’t done much like this before. Working in secondary British education, creative writing is not a curriculum priority at all. When I had an opportunity to work with the kids, ages 6-11, at the day camp where my son works, I didn’t set a rigid outcome for us but came up with a lot of different activities we might try, independently or all together, to have a little romp through our imaginations.

I got some wonderful suggestions and encouragement from other writers on Twitter. One of the most fruitful was getting vintage-style keys, which you can buy in packs as party favours. Kids pick one up, examine it, and write (or dictate, or draw) what the key might lead to.

The campers loved the keys, and they knew exactly how to put on little pleading faces to take one home. I gave away quite a few. There were stories about pirates who got scared by the key and threw it into lava, stories about locked doors guarded by snakes, and even one where it turned out the key went to a porta-potty.

I revelled in this variety. I’d used Mad Libs as a starter, having the kids volunteer adjectives and nouns and verbs as required to fill in the story’s blanks, and then reading the funny results out so they knew right away they were allowed to be silly and break rules. One group liked that so much, several of them wrote their own Mad Libs—quite good little stories where they left words out, brought them to me, and I supplied the most random ones I could think of.

Your Words Change Things

The other reason I wanted to start with Mad Libs was because I wanted to let them know, a story doesn’t have to ALL come from you. In fact, I would argue we often borrow certain elements. But once we put our own point of view, our own language and especially follow our own what-if questions, the story becomes ours.

I had brought four hats: three were for the adjectives, nouns, and verbs for Mad Libs in case some groups were too young for parts of speech or wanted to take suggestions. The other had what-ifs in case anyone wanted to use an idea for a story. What if a shark appeared in the lake across the street? What if your teacher was a Russian spy? What if you had a million dollars? What if Cinderella’s fairy godmother had poor fashion sense?

Asking what if changes a path, using a randomly selected noun will change a sentence… our words change things. In one of my younger groups, we did a group story. This was also my last group, and I’d recognised that kids, especially older ones, didn’t want to use suggestions or try picking words out of a hat, because they felt so compelled to ensure their work was their own. But sometimes they got stuck. So with this group, I offered hats right away to choose words for Mad Libs, and they liked it a lot. Everyone wanted to pick a word from a straw hat, or a feathered pirate one, or a beret.

When we’d finished the Mad Lib, we did a couple of group stories, penning them on the paper I’d rigged up across the chainlink fence. We’d pick a noun from a hat, like spaceship, then describe that and give it some detail as we chose. Next we drew another noun to see what our noun would interact with, then a couple of verbs for extra suggestions what they might do. Thus we ended up with a farmyard on Mercury, with big fans to keep cool and three-eyed alien animals that said Oom instead of Moo, discovered by a nice family that visits space every first Sunday of the month.

I so enjoyed meeting the kids and hearing their ideas, but I’d also had fun while working hard to prepare. It made me happy thinking of exciting words and questions to put in the hats. What if I used them in my own writing? What if we got a little crazier with our ideas?

It’s like holding up a snail shell, wondering how we can see and befriend the creature inside. Unless we try humming to it, we won’t know what works.

Never One Thing at a Time

This Week’s Bit of String: The ultimate tear-jerker

Our GCSE students (aged 16) had their last exam this week and took their leave. For the ones we’d worked closely with, we threw a little party with balloons and refreshments. A couple of us got cards and prosecco in return.

“No one got me anything,” joked one of my fellow teaching assistants. “I’m going to cry. I will!” But she couldn’t muster the promised waterworks with us watching.

A last lingering Year 11 girl, the most reluctant to leave, offered this: “I know what will make you cry. It always works: when someone asks, ‘Are you okay?’”

This student is one of the most perceptive people I’ve ever met, let alone one of the most perceptive teens. She was spot on. We’ve all been there, haven’t we, when we’re muddling on in a lonely blur and then someone stops and asks how we are, with genuine interest.

And there go the floodgates.

The key to these gates will vary, depending on the magnitude and current of what’s behind them. This is not just a female thing, either; guys are equally likely to get triggered by something seemingly small.

When I first immigrated, I was so alone and the British townspeople were so preoccupied and indifferent, a rare Hello from a stranger had me fighting tears. Since then, I got somewhat inured to being away, able to bumble along preoccupied myself. But when my son moved to America a few weeks ago, leaving me separated from both my best little buddy and my whole family, that changed things.

Colleagues know better than to ask if I’m ok. They ask how he’s getting on instead, and the news is generally good. They say, you must miss him so much, which saves me from having to say it. Much of the time, therefore, I maintain equilibrium. There’s a constant ache, a horrifically deep emptiness, dulled by almost-daily messages he and I exchange and by my relentless counting down until I can go see him (5 weeks and 2 days). In some moments it has been piercing, like when I put clean sheets on his bed and wondered if I should keep the pillows how he likes them or stack them tall. Or when I went to send a care package and the post office got grouchy over the extra barcode on the customs sticker.

Triggers are necessary because they give us a choice: Hey, you know that deluge you’re hiding behind the dam? Can we try channeling it, please, before it starts to leak? Sometimes we feel we have to keep refusing, and other times maybe we can’t put it off any longer.

Literary Triggers

At a Retreat West workshop a couple weeks ago, we learned about the importance of having your book’s “inciting incident” right at the beginning, to hook readers in. This is different from the climactic showdown or the big reveal. Often, it’s one small thing that kicks everything else out of inaction.

Rather than the writer throwing a wrench into the protagonist’s works, usually the writer is nudging the protagonist into the uncomfortable realisation that their way of life isn’t really working.

Great examples of this are Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine, or Piranesi. Eleanor would have kept on refusing any company apart from the Glen’s vodka from Tesco if she hadn’t been sent to that charity concert and developed an ill-advised crush on a singer. Piranesi would have kept wandering the statued halls of The House, recording tide times, if signs of visitors hadn’t begun to appear.

Even when a story begins with a main character choosing to make a change, they often don’t fathom how badly that change is needed or where it will take them. This has been true of literature for as long as storytelling has existed: Chaucer’s pilgrims wouldn’t have realised how much they’d learn on their journey; Romeo had no idea how far he’d go for love when he went to the party to see Rosaline.

When we write stories, we’re not attacking our characters with suffering for the fun of it. Our imaginations have found someone who needs liberation, and we’re plotting a way to spring them free.

For Our Own Protection

In real life, incidents don’t spiral in an orderly manner. It’s not a series of clues and incremental escalation, sometimes it’s everything at once and sometimes it’s like, “Ooh maybe things are about to settle down,” and then bam, another thing hits you. Meet a friend for a catch-up, and as you recount the last couple of months you’ll be thinking, This sequence of events would not fly in fiction. Readers would be too confused.

*18 years ago.* *You never know how things will end up.*

Honestly, I’m kind of glad it’s that way. Imagine if our lives progressed more rhythmically. If we were characters in a book and something went wrong, we’d have to ask ourselves, is this trying to teach me a lesson? Is this merely foreshadowing a massive climactic battle later on?

As it is, I can pour myself into work, helping students cope with their own stress and trauma, and I can write my grief into my novel instead of feeling it as my own. I need to edit this story of Eve so she more quickly learns to use her voice; learns that it is her own even if one of her ribs is not. For that to happen, stuff’s got to go wrong, to force her to wonder how she put up with everything, years after being exiled from Eden and then losing her first two sons.

While I work, and work on writing, I can ride it out, 5 weeks and 2 days. It’s already 7 weeks of separation, and there have been plenty of mini-crises to interrupt the trajectory of contemplating my new life: exams and Supreme Court decisions, viruses and injuries, something scurrying in the roofspace when we try to go to sleep. Who knows what else will come up, whether they will keep distracting me from loneliness or force me to confront it. I suspect the former; I’m grateful not to have to slow down.

What about you? Are YOU okay?

Imagining What Can Save Us

This Week’s Bit of String: Miners and runaways

A hundred million years ago, according to geologists, the Southwestern region of the UK was underwater, populated by sea urchins and other such creatures. As the seas dried, the remains of those little shelled beings were compressed through extreme heat into our incredible coastal cliffs.

The same coast which Roman soldiers breached a couple thousand years ago, undoubtedly bringing with them enslaved persons from various corners of their territory. They discovered the cliffs near Beer, now a lovely seaside village in Devon, and began to quarry the stone, building arches underground to access it.

From Roman times to the 1500s, the method of extracting Beer’s pale, chalky limestone didn’t evolve much. Workers picked clear the top of a chamber, a crawlspace about 3 feet high, then climbed in and, in the cold darkness for up to 14 hours daily six days per week, they picked downward to carve blocks, 4 tonnes at a time.

When the Church ran the quarry, in the Middle Ages, they even forced miners to buy their own candles. And if a block had flint or a crack in it, the miner didn’t get paid for that day.

These blocks, made of ancient crumbled seashells and dug out by men in harshest conditions, have been used in more than half of Britain’s cathedrals, and around the world.

I learned about Beer’s miners on a quarry tour last weekend. I wondered, how on earth could people keep living with such a laborious, unrewarding existence?

One answer, apparently, is that the miners drank lots of rough cider. And probably they were pretty friendly with each other even while deafening one another from the echo of their picks. Maybe they had nice families waiting for them at home.

But they must also have been picturing themselves somewhere else. It’s hard to imagine a life without imagining, isn’t it?

Of course, we are lucky now to access books, travel, music, and things that clue us in to alternative existences. Before all those, there still would have been storytelling and songs, there would have been starry skies and vast seas and the people who sail them. Even medieval people might have had something to distract them as they worked. Did they know about the Romans before them, and imagine proving themselves in a gladiatorial ring, marching into a hot ancient city to a hero’s welcome?

Descents of Fancy

The day after visiting Beer and its caves, we went toward Lyme Regis and looked for fossils. There’s a whole beach where the Jurassic layer has shifted from under the cliffs, creating the “Ammonite Pavement.” Vast slabs with prehistoric squid shells perfectly visible.

I used a short thin stone to pry loose part of a clay underlayer, with lots of little scallopy fossils. As I pounded the edges of my chosen rock, I imagined I was a miner with my pickaxe, providing cathedral material.

*I can picture this tree lifting its roots and just shimmying down the cliff*

Do other creative people sometimes imagine a tougher existence rather than a rosier one? It’s like when I was little and my sister and I pretended we were running away from a Dickensian workhouse or a slave plantation every time we packed for an overnight at Grandma’s.
By picturing ourselves in those situations, we weren’t trying to claim the suffering others went through, or minimise it. Maybe we were a little callous to inject this sort of peril to make our lives more exciting. But also, I think that spending mental time in such stories helped make us more empathetic as we grew up. Possibly, hopefully, it makes us a little less dramatic about the trials we have in our own lives.

When I chisel a fossil free, I’m just taking it home so I can glance at it occasionally, and smile remembering a sunny little adventure. It’s not going to form the grand arch of a cathedral or the dungeon stairs in the Tower of London. Those Beer miners, for all their struggles, at least were part of something great and I’m so glad their contributions are now recognised, in the Quarry tour and in our imaginations.

Building Great Things

When I think about people like those miners, or when I stand in a Remembrance Service and listen to the names read out of terrified young soldiers who died in battle, I concentrate really hard on who they might have been as humans. This is probably silly, even delusional, but I hope the waves of my empathy somehow make it back to those people. So that, for an instant, they sense they’re not forgotten.

*More imagination fuel–this rose must have some magical power, right?*

Obviously it’s not enough to just imagine what people’s lives were like in the past; there are people struggling now and we need to donate, amplify, and vote in ways which benefit them. I think imagining is a strong motivator though.

Our ability to imagine, and then to empathise, may set us apart as a species (although, have you ever watched a cat slink around outside? I think our feline friends have some extremely melodramatic fantasies…) but at our core we are self-interested. In order to care about someone else’s plight, it helps to picture ourselves in their stead.

In the aftermath of 2001’s terrorist attacks in New York City and Washington, D.C. John Lennon’s song “Imagine” was banned from radio stations. Because if people are using their imaginations, that might not be so good for the weapons industry’s profits.

Of course, running alternate scenarios in our heads also just makes things more interesting. When I have to sit quietly with my students in their exams, I can pretend I’m actually in the Great Hall at Hogwarts taking O.W.L.S. tests. If stress is keeping me awake at night, I play a comforting memory of my Grammy’s voice. And I probably won’t use the miners of Beer in a story, because their reality feels so extreme I don’t think I could do it justice. But it’s inspiring to contemplate the many layers of history that have unfolded on the very earth beneath our feet.

What daydreams have you embarked on lately?

Filling Spaces

This Week’s Bit of String: Dragons and evacuees and musicals, oh my…

Confession the First: In second grade I had to write a complete story for school, and I sort of stole it from a computer game. I didn’t know how to invent whole new ideas, and my family had been working through Sierra Entertainment’s King’s Quest games 1 and 2. They were monochromatic with blippy music, but loads of fun. I couldn’t get them out of my mind.

In turn, the games themselves borrowed fairy tale elements, so while I felt as if I should have come up with something original, I also figured borrowing stuff was allowed.

*A story starts out as a bunch of objects. Why not begin with whatever ones we want?*

I was already skilled at pastiche. Before even starting school, I’d assign my stuffed animals roles based on Narnia characters or von Trapp children from Sound of Music, to enact and sometimes remix my favourite tales. Less than a decade later, I devised a series of novels set during the holocaust. I had a plot but didn’t know enough people to inform strong characterisations (particularly of the male variety; middle school does not offer a rich seam of girl-boy friendships).

So, once again, I borrowed. I had characters based on Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Anne McCaffrey’s Dragonriders of Pern, and other books I liked. I’ve mentioned this before. They weren’t pristine or even recognisable copies, since I was putting them in different circumstances with different companions. But it helped me to carry on creating when I had a picture in my mind.

Just for the Moment…

In the first King’s Quest game, released in 1980, if you tried to turn your character a certain way in certain frames, or if you generally attempted something not in the programming, a message would pop up on the screen: “You can’t do that—at least not now!”

Sometimes, writing is like that. We have some of the ingredients for a full story, but are missing others. And you have to just put something in as a stopgap, in order to keep going.

At work I’m helping students prepare for exams. Every Year 11 in the country has to take the same subject exams, regardless of special needs or life circumstances. If they don’t pass at age 16 they must keep taking them each year. (I could pour my hatred of this system into several blog posts, ranging in temperature from grouchy to scathing, but I won’t trouble you with it now.) Most of my students have processing issues and biological literacy challenges that impair their ability to even understand the questions, which are set to trip students up anyway.

Still, we tell them to try. If it’s a Maths paper, put down whatever calculations you do and write something for the answer, even if it’s a guess. For the English papers, write as much as you can think of. Just put something down in those blank pages, to increase your chances of a pass.

In standard writing practice, we do something similar. A common exercise to get thoughts and words flowing is to free write for 5-15 minutes. You must keep writing the whole time, and you’re instructed, if you can’t think of something to write, to keep your pencil moving anyway. You can write “I don’t know, I don’t know, I don’t know,” or “blah blah blah,” but keep writing. Fill in the blanks.

Purloined Persons

Confession the Second: I haven’t written new fiction in almost a year. I have written hundreds of pages, scribbling about my daily life and the odd fleeting idea. I’ve done blog posts. But I haven’t created, I haven’t added building blocks to a story. Lack of time, headspace, energy, you know how it is.

*All kinds of building blocks to make this wall.*

With the Easter holidays beginning, I decided to give it a go. After all, the longer you wait to do something, the more you believe you’re doomed to fail. Have you found that?

I unearthed a pretty decent story opening. I don’t entirely know what’s meant to happen in it. I’ve not been able to pull advances out of thin air. Why not borrow something, then? What if I take someone I know a little bit about, unpick the thread of a distinguishing characteristic or background detail, and then weave those into some gaps in my story?

It sounds kind of ruthless. Callous, perhaps, to borrow a person’s attributes. I don’t usually consciously do this. But sometimes you just have to fill in the blanks, and once you add to the ingredients you’ve already got, it’s all going to change anyway.

Sometimes a song or a picture will unlock a key element we need for our work. Other times we need a stronger nudge. Having come up with this plan, I managed to write 700 new words in just an hour and a half, even while frequently running off to check on dinner cooking. It’s still my own story, I just needed a bridge from reality into my long-unaccessed imagination. Already, now she’s got some words behind her, the character is finding her voice to tell me all sorts of things distinguishing her from her inspiration. And a story gets reworked so many times, characters evolve drastically.

What tricks do you have for filling gaps? Have there been things you loved so much, they may have shown up in your work, one way or another?

Closing the Distance

This Week’s Bit of String: The meaning of far away

When our son was very young my husband and I had to live on different sides of the ocean. I missed him badly but couldn’t dwell on it, so when our little Bear asked about his dad, I would say, “Daddy’s far away.”

During a quick visit when Bear was two and a half, he climbed all over his dad and asked him, “Are you Far Away?”

It sounds obvious, but in my own loneliness and the frantic rush of being a single working mum, I hadn’t considered that my toddler would not understand intangible concepts such as distance. My explanation was totally inaccessible to him.

As writers, we are engaged in shrinking things. A written word is a miniature representation of its real-life counterpart; a book is a flattened, condensed episode from a collision of lives. The paradox we deal with is how to reduce things without losing a sense of their magnitude, and as readers, we know it’s possible to do just that.

Amazing, really.

With Great Power…

It’s daunting too, isn’t it? Our job is to serve up bite-sized fragments of potentially suffocating reality, to pinpoint the fleeting, and to bring distant concepts near. We greet an idea after its long flight and take it home and nestle it into bed, letting it in from the cold.

We may feel, when the world is so vast and problem-ridden, when many of us share similar lockdown woes, that our words don’t matter. Isn’t everyone thinking the same things already? Doesn’t it reduce an issue to confine it to the page?

But we are vain as humans. We like to see our reflection. We also like to shrink things a bit so we can come to grips with it. If we find the words to resize something small enough that lots of people can access it, we’ve ended up multiplying it. A bit like if we take a trillion dollar relief package and divide it between millions of people.

Creating the Magic

To effectively do this, we have to acknowledge, within ourselves, the enormity of what we want to convey. There have to be moments when our message, when our feeling for our characters and what they’ve been through, bring us to our knees. This may take the form of us crying over our laptops, or wandering in a shell-shocked haze through our day jobs and household routines. It may be sleepless nights or nightmares. Even our for-fun stories will consume us—another paradox of writing is that by trying to portray one aspect of reality, we distance ourselves from our current one.

*Magic. Part of the Window Wanderland display in Wotton-Under-Edge*

Then we negotiate. We try different terms and exchanges and sequences, see which ones are most succinct yet impactful. Lay out everything you want people to know, then chisel it to a sharp point.

Part of this carving out will include an examination from every angle: have we smoothed a surface that should remain rough and challenging? Are there facets we have left too splintery? This is the part of the process where we bring in new sets of eyes to look at our work, and we check that the representation of humanity we’re offering doesn’t inadvertently exclude or minimise any marginalised groups.

It’s a tricky process but each step is essential, and when it comes together, it’s so worth it.

Ready for the Close-Up

During one long period when my husband was Far Away, we did a webcam call. Our son’s face lit up when he saw his father’s appear on the screen of my chunky monitor. “THERE’S Daddy,” he cried, as if finally things made sense. Daddy may not be where he was expected to be, but he was at last visible.

That’s the sort of recognition we want our stories to bring. Not an exact replica of a particular human being, but a sudden proximity if not familiarity. We want to stop people in their tracks, momentarily, with a Eureka moment where everything fits together and the distant becomes immediate.

In this time of prolonged isolation and separation, have you used your writing to draw closer to the far away?