The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Student

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Bag packed the night before, I wake up early. I am up, dressed and ready on time. The open dishwasher displays its clean load – I’d better do my duty.  I empty it, dash out and hear the bus. I run down the road. The driver  waits a moment then pulls away when my throat and lungs have got to their full scraped soreness. Blast.

I want to cry. I want to tell teasing bus drivers what I think of them. I want to beg strangers to give me a lift.

Ho hum. I wait. Schoolkids turn up. I wonder if I could jump off at the Sports Centre, run round to the Bus Station and still catch the Midhurst bus. The next Wittering bus is late. I will stay chilled. I will not worry. I will not look at my watch as we pass every telegraph pole, hoping we still might make it.

No chance:  Stockbridge roundabout and then the gates are down on the railway crossing. Pah.

I high-tail it up towards the Cathedral. Maybe I could get to the bank?  Get the cheque in I’ve been carrying round since August? I check the clock on the Cross – I’d be pushing it and it’s not good to be late on your first day. I give in and wait beneath the gargoyle.

I wait. I look at the brown and white pigeon, the corbels, the hole in the centre of the rose window, the wonky bits of the Cathedral. Quarter to strikes. No bus. I talk to an expectant mum waiting for another bus after mine. It comes. She goes. The hour sounds across the precinct. A child cyclist wobbles past. The heroine of my work-in-progress climbs the parapet of her school and finds she is locked out. The bus does not come. Quarter past and then the rumble. Not my bus. This one stops at the same shelter.

Ah, but mine is behind it. I wave as if it is a long-lost friend. The driver must stop, must see me. I now do everything very quickly as though it will make any difference to my utter failure at time-keeping.

An hour late I clump into the Old Library. Walking boots are not quiet on parquet – no sneaking in for me. The only things I learn from the Introduction and Address is that West Dean offers a Phd and that there will be a Christmas Costume party.

Probably enough to begin with.

More moaning from Mrs Maungy

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What do people want?

Last year’s SBWI conference, I submit my weird and wonderful work in progress for a one-to-one. I get a lovely agent: young, enthusiastic and knowledgeable. I have more butterflies in my stomach than Tropical World at Roundhay Park, Leeds. I almost run away. She is clearly a girl of taste: she says I can really, really write, but has some problems with the commercial saleability of the central idea. Okey dokey.

I read around. A lot. I learn lots more about ‘show not tell’, ‘killing my darlings’ and generally writing in, shall we say, a more conventional manner. My ‘voice’ is now not so thick with regionalism that you need translation.  I have a contemporary setting. I have a hero whose gender is very, very clear. I edit for consistent point of view, I cull my own adverbs and read every last one of the 30k+ words aloud.

Out with the fey and in with the action.

Off a sample goes. Hoorah. She wants to see the rest. My heart is a party balloon.

I push the hope down inside me, trying not to let it slip out, trying to keep calm and carry on. I tell myself whatever happens, I’ve learnt a lot and I’ve nothing to loose. I tell myself she’s bound to reject it and not to get too Tiggerish.

 She’ll probably ask me to come back after the MA – that would be something. The dreams, the hope persecute me.

It’s not for her. 

She was kind enough to say she really liked the  strangeness of the earlier piece – she  found that rather appealing. And thoughtful enough to say ‘The Thirteenth Pharaoh’ has lots of great action.

But what do I do now?

Write self indulgent bizarreness that I fear no modern kid/agent/publisher would ever like?

There’s no point writing something so strange it’ll never get published – but on the other hand, I am strange. In the Venn diagram of normal, I’m not in any subset.  I like ghost ships and sea witches and Vikings and hobs and dragons and selkies and pirates and smugglers and weird underwater creatures. I know far too many fairytales, remember too much  folklore and definitely know far too much about Middle Earth. I have to write peculiar and children appreciate it better than adults.

Or get over myself, learn to please, learn what kids/agents/publishers want and deliver the goods?

I try to fit in. Honest. But oddball is as oddball does. I can’t write what most normal children want any more than I could belong to the school hockey team. ( I was rather good at cutting up oranges, though.)

I feel as though I’m learning how to steer a narrowboat – veering from crashing into one bank to denting the other. In slow but inevitable motion.  I’m careering from the freakish to the  frankly dull.

Eventually I might learn enough to get somewhere?

We don’t care if…

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… it’s raining and the sky is inky black (Quentin Blake – The Duck Song from ‘All Join In’ – completely brilliant to read aloud)

In praise of rain.

Whilst I was a teacher, I remember a rather dated textbook in which one of the exercises was to write a poem against trees. My colleagues and I had steam coming outof our ears at the very idea. We changed the task to poems in praise of..  something photo by yaaaay on Flickrunexpected.

You will be relieved to know that I will not inflict you with poor scansion or cloth-eared rhymes.

But I will speak up for rain.

Coming from the frozen North,  I am well acquainted with rain, and her cousins drizzle and  mizzle. Walking to and from school, I particularly loved the colours in the sandstone flags that the rain darkened and intensified. Swirls of caramel, toffee and burnt sugar brown rose in the slightly dished surface of the worn causeway.

In a real good downpour, siling down as we say, the sets in roads would run with ripples of water like a snakeskin pulsating.

Some places still had proper granite gutters, and you could race the twigs that  canoed down the glittery channels. On the way home, damming streams was good fun, with water now the colour of milky coffee spurting out of the stones and branches and disintegrating mud. Wading through puddles was always good, and doing your own  “Singing in the Rain” routine out loud because everyone else has gone home can’t be beaten.

  Drizzle sPhoto by withrow on flickrtands on your woollies in  globules like the juice of on the leaves of a sundew or is held in the creased palms of Lady’s Mantle. It loads cobwebs with fancy chandelier drops and makes Yorkshire Fog  sag in silvery swathes.  You can leave an explorer’s trail in the long grass, and sometimes watch moss on the wall twist and swell in relief after a dry spell.

We also say’ teeming ‘ for really drenching rain. To ‘teem’ is to strain by using the lid of a pan or suchlike, a very apt image  when the heavens open.  I loved running home to real fire, chanting “hot chocolate, drinking chocolate” to keep up the pace, then towelling my hair into a silly frizz  and being so  glad to be inside when the weather was kept outside. Grand.

Or perhaps, the storm would go, having cleaned the sky to a blue more suited to Hawaii than the Pennines. The damp-blackened twigs would glint with unfallen drops darting to sparkle down if you touched them. I would hear the last movement of  Beethoven’s ‘Pastoral’ in my head  – or “Drip, drip, drip little April showers’  from ‘Bambi’ . And the scents: patchouli -like leafmould, garlicky ransoms and the sharpness of pines tingling in the nose.

There would be the hiss and shush of tyres spraying up any standing water  and the chuckle of torrents glugged down by the drains. Corrugated plastic sheeting really plocked, and then channelled the  rain into a spattering fringe. Really deep water  slowed and quietened the traffic.

Even down here, in the sunny South coast, the ducks rejoice to see their pond resurrected from crazed green mud. Right now, blackberries shine in jewelled clusters and the turning leaf colours glow without the dust. The ditches or rifes run again, saving the frogs and toads. Our pond fish seen to like it, and the pondweed doesn’t  which cheers my heat. Our rain butts are replenished and the courgettes flourish. I don’t have to stand like some fat  bored fountain nymph watering  the runner beans and our local cafes do good business.

And the best, the very best of all, is being snuggled up with a good book as the sound of sleet splatters against the dark windows.

 Now who says I’m too daft to come in out of the rain? by t0msk on flickr

This week’s whingeing

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So why did what should have been a brilliant day for any normal person leave me in tears?

Lovely weather and a barbecue on the beach with a tripod cooking apparatus by Heath Robinson out of Bewitched! Delightful people: Anita Loughrey, Kathryn Evans and Candy Gourlay and then Hanna the Hungarian, plus a batch of assorted great kids. Even a bit of a splosh in the rather refreshing sea. Couldn’t fault it. So how come I felt so low?

The usual suspects: my innate sense of inadequacy and general patheticness. ( Told you you’d want to slap me.)

These are real people persons – oozing genuine warmth and affection for their children. Something of a contrast to my parenting skills. Gorgeous high-achieving but unspoiled offspring. I try to brazen it out about my lot – not an  ‘A’ level among them and me a teacher. Ho ho ho. No one is amused.

 I’m also shaken by their general talent and interestingness:

  • Candy – superb photographer, website designer and published author

  • Kathryn – brilliant blogger, belly dancing  beauty and funny farmer -with an agent

  •  Anita – witty, pretty and much published – I’ve even used her resources, for goodness’ sake…

Me. Mmmm. I have life on a plate and I still can’t get my act together.

I feel at sea with people  – I don’t get out very often. I try to tell a tale in ordinary conversation  but it falls away. People talk about something else because I’m boring. Or I miss the moment and an anecdote that might have been relevant becomes pointless. I try to be assertive: I just sound rude and pushy. What chance have I got at self-promotion in a hostile or indifferent marketplace when I can’t manage to get myself across in such a supportive environment?

Let me be quite clear I am not fishing for compliments, dear friends who read this. (Though, if you insist…) I’m just attempting to be honest in the faint hopes it might help

  1. me
  2. others who feel the same
  3. normal people to  understand us oddballs

‘The proper study of mankind is man’, Alexander Pope wrote. Well,  I think I might just have  a CSE in it.  Not brilliant when character is all important to a fiction writer. I expect I must be somewhere on the Asperger’s continuum – and so must Eeeyore and Puddleglum.

Reproduction of an original picture of Puddleglum by Illustrator Pauline Baynes

“Speaking as an outsider, what do you make of the human race?” as  our Dawn, my best friend, put it.

Sex and Swearing for Seven-year-olds

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This week the BBC reported the flooding of YouTube with pornographic films.  ‘Flonty’ of 4Chan explained the raid as a protest. Revealing that this 21 year old and his colleagues would splice sexually explicit material into Hannah Montana and Jonas Brothers videos – they were clearly targeting pre-pubescent girls who are not exactly in charge of the music download industry.

I was particularly interested by the subsequent comments. Some felt that it was no big deal because “kids need to learn how they get here” whereas others felt censorship was necessary to protect children. Now as a writer, and as a human being, I have a problem with censorship. I’m not happy about state or other control BUT just because you can doesn’t mean that you should. I’m an idealist I know, but I like more self-restraint, more discernment. There are better ways of explaining procreation.

As a true daughter of Seventies feminism (there, that’s me out of that particular closet) I  detest the exploitation of women’s bodies in porn. Teenage girls in the West seem to have won the right to look like tarts. It’s pure commercialisation and I loathe it: I have some sympathy with my Moslem compatriots.

So I’m not likely to write a sex-and-shopping bestseller  then. 

Back to the fecking swearing. I get annoyed, frustrated and eventually dissuaded from participating by inane comments on YouTube and anywhere else full of swearwords. I don’t want to see foul language printed on t-shirts stretched across some beer belly or on some moronic greetings card, never mind the kids. When did it become acceptable to eff and blind in front of people in the street? It’s the same in print on display.

 I know people have always done it. I was that teenager who thought it was cool and grown-up to let fly – but I’ve grown out of that now. Mostly. As for writing it, yes,  I had that adolescent idea that you should be realistic and it’s what people say and it’s OK.

Well, it isn’t.

As more and more coarseness becomes acceptable, it becomes necessary to go further to rebel. Then we seem to move the boundaries back, and our civilisation becomes debased. ‘Snob’ – that’s the accusation I have to answer. I was taught, and I still believe, that there are more creative ways of getting your message across, that resorting to swearing shows a paucity of vocabulary  and wit.

Now to children’s books. As a primary  teacher for well over a decade, I was often asked to recommend reading, in particular for able children. There was then and still is now , a dearth of books for young  children of very high reading ability. It’s no good putting them on older children’s books – they are not emotionally ready. I could not in all conscience recommend ‘Angus, Thongs and Full Frontal Snogging’ to a six year old no matter how advanced her vocabulary. There comes a point where they’ve read all the relevant classics – then what? Our lovely Mr Pratchett was handy for some – but with a lot of other material I’d have parents going ballistic. What a shame.

So finally, what I’m saying is that including swear words and explicit sex in children’s books can be a cheap way to ‘relate to the kids’. There are better ways to engage with your readership than writing like a MTV pop promo.

Though I reserve the right to swear like a squaddie on a Saturday night in Catterick if I trap my finger in the car door.

New plots for old

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The first of an occasional series of writing ideas . These are stories which I don’t think I could do justice to – so I hope someone reading will. Please feel free to use and adapt them as you see fit.

1 A  Seal in our Stream  Based on a real event http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/8469537.stm

Elements to play with: the storm where the pup is separated from its mother, getting lost from  Belgium, being found in the stream by a family and their dog, fattening up and release. In my mind, I see a semi-factual picture book.

2  Shoes in her basket

A very elegant lady on York Railway Station, in a smart French navy suit wearing the palest pink kid gloves. Her glossy high heels were in a wicker basket  and  she clutched this to her side.

One stockinged foot was poised on the floor as though ready to run off at any moment. Who was she waiting for, why would she need to run?

3  Chalky and the Wax Crayon

Three elderly gentlemen discussing how to loosen a tank turret. 

“What’ll sort it then?” one asks, indignant his ideas don’t meet with general approval.

“Brute force and ignorance,” number two friend says.

 ‘If it comes to it, a dirty great lump hammer,” the third man says with great glee.

They talk with big gestures but use their fingers very precisely when demonstrating technique. There’s lots of sketching with a stubby pencil on the pack of stapled-together computer print outs. ‘Chalky’ has a triangular piece of green chalk in his breast-pocket. Apparently, his friend’s yellow wax crayon is used for counting track links.

What if it were not a restoration project for display-but for real? What uses might someone put their grandfather’s tank to!

4  My Special Day

A couple wed after being partners for twenty years. One has inherited a great deal of money and decides to blow it all on this  wedding. They have an expensive list at John Lewis, a trumpeter in the church, the bridesmaids have to  match down to their designer hand bags. Guests have their own corsages removed and replaced by co-ordinated ones for the photographs. J0 the bride is normally a bobbed redhead of a tomboy. She has had hair extensions, bleaching and curls. She is unrecognisable as this  meringue of a bride. Is it her? Why has she changed so much? What if it were one of your parents?

5 Overheard – imagination in overdrive

“He’s not a child. He knew what he was doing. ”

“So he is always been like it, then?”

She nods.

“But where did he get all that self doubt from?”

She shrugs then says, “It’s a good job she’s as laid-back as what she is. I couldn’t stand it!”

All art aspires …

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… to the condition of music.

I have been puzzling over the Walter Pater quotation, and my take is that music speaks direct to the soul rather than needing explanation. There is craft, skill and interpretation in relaying music to the audience but finally, it communicates with your spirit, not your mind. Likewise with Turner’s ‘Fighting Temeraire’ or the nave of Durham Cathedral.

This led me on to considering writing in the same light. If our writing is too clever, too full of ornamentation- it may thrill the brain, the intellect – but it won’t reach deep inside. We need to write so cunningly our craft all but disappears.  What a strange craft to work so hard to remove all traces of its maker. “Ars est celare artem” – as Ovid put it – the art is to conceal art.

My old art teacher (Mrs. Wyles, God bless her, of WEGHS)  said that the second rate artists were good at the ruffles, the jewels, the things that people had about them but the best artists showed what was inside. That must be the same for writers.. at our best, we convey the essence of things in the way, for example, that the opening allegro non troppo of Beethoven’s Pastoral evokes awakening of cheerful feelings upon arriving in the country -” Gefühle bei der Ankunft auf dem Lande”. It isn’t a prettified Dresden shepherdess sort of of countryside he describes, but a consciousness. There would be no lambs gambolling with satin ribbons round their necks, if it were a poem.

Not that I aspire to the Old Radical’s level.

Yet think of the best craftwork you have ever seen; the humble Windsor chair as a f’rinstance.

It does the job, but, with such elegance and simplicity it is a thing of beauty. The best stories are like that: no fancy mouldings, drawing attention to themselves and poking you in the back, but smoothed and satisfying with a sense of rightness.

 I think this is really what is meant by the oft disparaged remark ; ” I don’t know much about Art but I know what I like “. What people respond to (unless they are taught to despise their own sensibilities) is Art which reaches them unmediated. I don’t need anyone to explain Andy Goldsworthy’s icicles any more than I need anyone to tell me what John Tavener’s ‘Protecting Veil’ means, or the point of Michael Morpurgo’s ‘War Horse’.

I  might find criticism and glosses interesting – but they are not necessary.

“All deep things are song.  It seems somehow the very central essence of us, song; as if all the rest were but wrappages and hulls.”  ~Thomas Carlyle

MA Confidential

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Oh dear, what have I done?   

I met some of the other MA students on Saturday 24th July – perfectly polite, normal people. Friendly actress Helen with her charmingly shy daughter, Mabel: Anita full of cat-like grace: Dana, so sophisticated yet warm; Olivia, elegant and outgoing, and quiet, thoughtful Davy. 
Nothing to be frightened of there. 
Ah, but now the emails have begun. 
Beneath those pleasant exteriors are scarily clever people. They know what a nested story structure is, they are not scared by ‘achrony’ and ‘psycho narration’ and they write with ‘cogency and force‘. 
Help. 

  

I can barely remember anything about ‘On Chesil Beach‘ (though I know geographically it‘s where ‘Moonfleet’ takes place and I liked that much better) and I thought Sarah Water‘s ‘Night Watch‘ might be about Rembrandt. It isn’t.  
The not very hidden hippy in me really rather likes” The Artist’s Way” but I suspect these urbane and erudite types are not impressed. In fact I know jolly well Helen sees it on a prop for resting actors to pretend they’re not unemployed. I‘ve swallowed it hook, line and sinker:gung ho and naive as per usual. Doing my morning pages, having an artist date, all that New Agey stuff.  

 

I think ‘The Seven Basic Plots’ looks more like a thing you’d stand on to reach the top shelf than something you’d want to read. Crumbs.   

I like the look of the ‘tec stores – nice and short. And Tanglewood Tales was written for children. Hoorah.    

Oopsy – you need a dictionary just for that, I found.   

Seems I  haven’t done enough swotting to be teacher‘s pet, looks like I’ll have to be class clown instead.Someone has to be Alan Davies.   

It never rains but …

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  Sunday morning- aah, the long lovely lie-in. Spuggies tweeting in the hedges,  sea whispering through the shingle and all’s right with the world.
But not this Sunday.
Splatter, whoosh and burble – what’s that about? I jump out of bed and make my undignified dressing-gown clad way to the cubby hole in the eaves. Which is gurgling. Like a geyser before it’s about to blow.
I yank the door off its magnetic catches, drop it on my foot and swear. A lot.
The clear plastic box which houses the water-softener is swirling with water like the Corryvreckan Whirlpool. And there’s cascade in the roof. As in the Chatsworth Cascade.
Best beloved shows up. He finds the correct tap to switch off. I, of course, had twiddled every one but.
Splat, splat, splat sounds come from down below.
I venture downstairs.
No electricity and an indoor water feature in the laundry that I hadn’t planned.
Water bounces off the lid of the chest freezer and joins the padddling pool that was my kitchen floor. I get the mop.
Best beloved fetches the Pond Vac. It’s noisy and needs power so he has to have it. He drags a cable from the garage to the relative dryness of the hall. I carry on mopping and tipping.
He switches the machine on. It gives a few asthmatic sucks and stops. He tries in deeper waters – perhaps it doesn’t like the shallows. On itgoes again – its sounds like Shrek with a straw and a particularly unpleasant milkshake. It manages one mopload and gives up. I carry on mopping. Note self – cheap mops break your back.
We use every towel in the house: dog grade, posh guest, bath sheets and teatowels printed with Playgroup self portraits. They drip in the glorified carport causing a further inundation. It is, of course, drizzly, threatening with rain outside.
I even get the sump emptied that is the bottom of the airing cupboard.
Time for a cuppa.
Ah. No power.
But wait – the extension cable from the garage.!

We jury-rig something from a Health and Safety executive’s worst nightmare. Milk. Fridge off. And both freezers. More adaptors, extension cables and trip hazards. Phut. A trip switch has, well, tripped. Regroup. Forget trying to reset the clocks – let’em flash, I say.
At last a cup of char. Well, it could have been worse, we agree.
At least we didn’t go to Yorkshire for the weekend.

Brand New

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or How to Get Noticed.

“…a prepossessing personality in an author is a great asset… “How to Get An Agent” by Philippa Milnes-Smith in  2010 A& C Black.

OK seems a good idea. I’d better get one. Let’s start off with interesting interests.

  1. Take up Belly Dancing like the  lovely Kathryn Evans. I suspect in my case the video would make people think of school blancmange and the little ditty beginning ‘Jelly on the plate…”
  2. Develop a musical talent – pace Jon Mayhew and his mandolin. I’m not sure three notes on the descant recorder’s really going to hack it on YouTube.
  3. Get clever with a puppet. Oh to work with the wonderful Woofy like Sue Eves. My poor old teddy has a squished nose where I used to stand on him to get at the book shelves. I don’t think he’s up to it.

Righto – how about developing a distinctive appearance?

  1. Grow a splendiferous beard like the lovely Mr Philip Ardagh. I do have the precedent of a fine hirsute lady relative but I lack the gravitas to pull it off, I fear.
  2. Sport magnificent and intriguing tattoos such as embellish Saviour Pirotta. Perhaps not. I never even liked peeling off the backing on the transfers as a child  – and it took me till I was 21 to get my ears pierced. Once.
  3. Become an all-round style icon like Sarah McIntyre of the Funky Glasses. Touch tricky for an unconstructed hippy, although I am quite good at dressing up. That’s if you count making a small tot cry when dressed up as a witch or having my picture labelled as a hobbit in the local paper when I thought I was Arwen Evenstar.

What about me? Perhaps I need to have a remarkable background.

  1.  Start at an interesting point in your life. Catherine Webb was only14 when first published ( I’m not sure that the ‘A Wet Windy Day in Wakefield’ featured in the Wakefield Express at 11 counts) and Mary Wesley started at 71.  I am 49 – ‘neither nowt nor summat ‘- as they say where I come from.
  2. Come from an intriguing culture. Candy Gourlay, that  fascinating Filipina, uses hers wonderfully in’ Tall Story’. Miriam Halahmy (what a cool name) has an Iraqi husband and all manner of family to call upon. Me – Wakefield in the Rhubarb Triangle of Yorkshire. Not the same, is it?

Oh dear. Perhaps I could hide behind other enticements?

  1. Bring out marketing goodies – let me see – a plush cuddly Giant Moray Eel? A wind-up Dave the Disastrous Diver: guaranteed to ruin any bathtime? Model of the Sinai Emperor – watch as it breaks up and sinks! Just not going to go with a Happy Meal.
  2. Feature really cool concepts. Oh dear,  I can’t nick off with  Sarwat Chadda’s kick-ass heroines and Templars or Nick Cross’s zombies. They wouldn’t all fit on my dive boat. Certainly not together.
  3. Promote Important Messages. Somehow “Don’t steal Ancient Egyptian artefacts, it will all end in tears” hasn’t got the moral integrityand pithyness of say The Lorax. Maybe ‘Be nice to fishes’. I could wear a badge. A very big badge.

I give up. I’ll just have to take a leaf out of all these brilliant people’s books  – and just write really, really well. And be myself.