Monday 18 March 2024

Rising like the phoenix

 Recovery from surgery takes time, and I've used this as excuse to spend much of this last month simply researching pieces for my patreon account, Writing the Magic, rather than writing any new fiction. I feel a bit like I've been given a second chance at life, and to celebrate, this is a post all about the magical phoenix, one of my favourite mythical creatures.


According to legend, the phoenix comes from Arabia, where it lives alone in a sacred wood, surviving on nothing but pure air. There is only ever one phoenix alive in the world at any one time, though their lifespan is very long. The earliest mention of the bird is attributed to the Greek poet Hesiod, writing in the 8th century BC. In this extract, the centaur Chiron is instructing the young Achilles:

A chattering crow lives now nine generations of aged men,
but a stag's life is four time a crow's,
and a raven's life makes three stags old,
while the phoenix outlives nine ravens...

Depending on how old you reckon an 'aged man' is, this makes the phoenix's life span very long indeed (my maths isn't good enough to work it out) - though a later 5th century BC account (from Greek historian Herodotus) makes it a mere 500 years:

[The Egyptians] have also another sacred bird called the phoenix which I myself have never seen, except in pictures. Indeed it is a great rarity, even in Egypt, only coming there (according to the accounts of the people of Heliopolis) once in five hundred years, when the old phoenix dies. 


As big as an eagle, and far more graceful, the phoenix is reputed to have glittering purple feathers (the word 'phoenix' translates from ancient Greek as 'purple') with a golden band around its neck. Other writers have variously described it as having red, blue and gold feathers. This is Herodotus's description:

Its size and appearance, if it is like the pictures, are as follows: The plumage is partly red, partly golden, while the general make and size are almost exactly that of the eagle. 

In alchemy, the phoenix corresponds to the colour red, symbolising the regeneration of universal life, and the successful completion of a process. Whatever its true colour, phoenix feathers are said to have the magical property of healing any wound they touch. 

When the phoenix reaches the end of its life, it collects myrrh, laudanum, nard, cassia and cinnamon in its wings, and flies to Phoenicia. Once there, the bird selects the tallest palm tree (interestingly, an alternative translation of 'phoenix' is 'palm tree') and builds a nest from the ingredients it's collected. Settling itself into the nest, the phoenix sings its final, hauntingly beautiful song, until the rising sun sets the nest alight and burns the bird to ashes.


However, as we know, this can never be the end of the phoenix, which is an immortal bird. A tiny grub creeps from the ashes, and grows into a young phoenix. The reborn phoenix then takes the ashes of its previous incarnation and pushes them into a ball of myrrh. Carrying the ball in its beak, it flies to Heliopolis in Egypt, the city of the sun, where it places it on an altar. Having completed this task, the fledgling flies back the sacred wood for the cycle to begin again.

Unlike the phoenix, I won't get to enjoy a new 500 year lifespan - but it's probably time to step out of the ashes and start writing that next book...


Lu Hersey

Patreon: Writing the Magic

Twitter/X: @LuWrites

Threads: @luwrites


Friday 15 March 2024

Writing process health warning: Here Be Metaphors – by Rowena House






Metaphors. They’re great, right? Our first port of call when grappling with complexity.

Soz, but seriously...

How can we describe something as multifaceted as our writing processes without resorting to metaphor? My favourite: writing techniques are tools in a toolbox (Stephen King) which we select at need; as we develop as writers, we build up our available toolkit.

Brilliant. However...

This past month I’ve been looking back at my own process/es and found King’s confident, positive toolbox metaphor more of a comfort blanket than a guiding light [soz, again] since the idea we can confidently grasp the right tool at the right moment demands a) total recall and b) an extraordinary level of objectivity about our own creative practice.

For example, the lens that focussed my debut novel more than any other was defining a binary question to create a spine for the story and keep it on track. (No more apologies, okay, I’m just gonna let the mixing rip.) For The Good Road, that question was: ‘Will Angelique save the family farm for her brother, yes/no?’ At the end of every scene, ‘saving the farm’ was more or less likely. The yes/no question = a perfect guiding light, maintaining coherence and linearity throughout 80K words.

[Apologies to whichever writing guru came up with this binary question storytelling technique. Your name is lost in time to me, but the idea is very much appreciated.]

With the seventeenth-century witch trial work-in-progress, however, I wasted months trying to define such a question and years worrying that I couldn’t – did I have an actual story or nothing more than a dreaded situation? The horror! – then, this week, HUZZAH, a get out of gaol card was delivered by George Saunders straight into my inbox.

As it’s free advice from his public ‘Office Hours’ emails, I’ll quote it freely, too. FYI, I think it will be well worth subscribing to his full Substack and plan to do so when cash is less strapped. [How is cash strapped?] Link below.

Anyway, here he is. How to get out of the self-imposed prison of one's own writing process:

‘Sometimes my ideas about my writing don’t work for me either and have to be scrapped or re-understood. And I really mean that. No matter how confidently I talk about some writing-related concept, they’re all just metaphors.

‘Likewise, when someone offers up a writing metaphor, even if it’s a good one, and rings a bell for us – it’s not the thing itself. It’s not the state one is actually in, when revising well... Reality is reality and concepts are concepts: inadequate word-wrappings, generated out of need, always insufficient.’

If the current method isn’t working, move on, he says. Writing techniques must serve the work; if you’re stuck, if the work isn’t working, then maybe you’ve become a slave to your own – or someone else’s – technique.

‘Part of our job as artists is to always be asking: “Is the metaphor (method) I’m currently using still actually helping me?”

‘How do we know?

‘Well, I try to ask myself, now and then (openly, honestly): “Am I making progress? (Is the work, roughly speaking, longer and better than it was three months ago? Or, even: is it, though shorter than it was three months ago, is it better?)”

What fabulous, practical advice. Thank you, Mr Saunders. 

As I’m pushed for time [?] again, I’ll stop now, but here’s the link to subscribe to George Saunders’ Story Club. It’s £40 pa or £5 a month for full access, with a free option for his regular public posts.

https://georgesaunders.substack.com/subscribe?utm_source=email&utm_campaign=email-subscribe&r=j482m&next=https%3A%2F%2Fgeorgesaunders.substack.com%2Fp%2Foffice-hours-a9c&utm_medium=email



@HouseRowena X/Twitter

Rowena House Author on FB

Lots about The Goose Road on rowenahouse.wordpress.com





Thursday 14 March 2024

Hope in a Garden by Lynne Benton

 In the spring we start to look for signs of new growth, better weather, new hope.  And where better to look than in a garden?  At the moment in England it’s a treat to see snowdrops, crocuses and daffodils pushing their way into the light, giving us hope that somehow things in this increasingly difficult world might improve.


And in each of the three books I want to mention today it is a garden which signifies hope for the child who finds it.

In the first book, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, written in 1865 By Lewis Carroll, Alice has fallen down a rabbit-hole into a strange and rather scary world.  It’s only when she opens a tiny door and sees through it a wonderful garden that she wants more than anything to go through into it.  Unfortunately at that moment she is way too big to go through the door, but she spends the rest of the book trying to make herself the right size to get into the garden.  In her mind it signifies somewhere safe that she can understand.


In the next book, The Secret Garden, written in 1911 by Frances Hodgson Burnett, newly-orphaned Mary Lennox is sent away from her home in the sunshine of India to stay in a big house in Yorkshire with a strange uncle and his formidable housekeeper.  She resents this and is angry and rude, until she discovers a peaceful hidden garden.  It's only then that she begins to realise there could be some hope of a better life here after all.  And when she meets Dickon and her bedridden cousin Colin things definitely start to improve for her, all thanks to the secret garden.


The third book, Tom’s Midnight Garden, written in 1958 by Philippa Pearce, is another story of a child sent away from all that is familiar to a strange place.  Tom resents being sent to stay with an aunt and uncle while his brother has measles, especially when he discovers that his aunt and uncle live in a small flat with no garden, but a tiny back yard where there is nothing to play with and nothing to do.  Then one night, when he hears the grandfather clock in the hall strike thirteen, Tom opens the back door and discovers that the ugly yard has turned into a wonderful garden, and better still there is a girl there to play with.  Her name, she says, is Hatty.  Next morning the garden has disappeared, but the following night when the clock strikes thirteen again, the lovely garden is back, and Hatty is there again, only a little older this time.  And so his stay continues, giving Tom hope that all will be well, for Hatty as well as for himself.


Although there is nearly a hundred years between the first and last of these three books, they all show the lasting fascination a garden can hold for a child, especially one in need of a little hope.

Website: lynnebenton.com

 


Wednesday 13 March 2024

Playing with our Sindies by Sheena Wilkinson

Sometimes, like many writers, I get so bogged down in publishing industry STUFF that I forget about the pure joy of making things. Keren David, in her gorgeous recent post about collages, reminded me of some non-writing creative fun I'd had lately. 

My friend Susanne and I say, when we're making up stories, that it's like 'playing with our Sindies'. I never came across Barbie as a child; it was her slightly more demure English cousin Sindy who captured my heart. Susanne and I didn't know each other as children, but both loved investing our dolls with personalities and taking them on adventures. It was an early version of story-making and we both experienced frustration with other children who didn't know how to 'make it up'. 

Frieda all kitted out

Recently, I decided to try to rekindle some of that joy by finding an old Sindy doll to give Susanne as a gift. I bid for several dolls, cursing the day I got rid of my own, some four decades ago (yes, I did play with them into my teens: what of it?) and finally secured a fair-haired doll of, to my mind, particularly sweet expression. 


with her books and chocolate 

But she was dressed in the tackiest, most ghastly 1980s outfit you've ever seen. I blushed for her. I would have to give her a new outfit. It wasn't hard to decide on the perfect one -- a Chalet School uniform. We're both fans of the Chalet School and I knew Susanne would love it. From the beginning I thought of this doll as Frieda, one of the Chalet School's first pupils, a peace-loving Austrian girl.

I made the tunic first, which involved knitting for the first time since I was a child. I didn't think I would remember how, but in fact my muscles and brain settled into the rhythm quite easily. As a child I used to knit lots of dolls' clothes and I have never, child or adult, been able to follow patterns, so it was very much a case of making it up as I went along. 


stockings, not tights, for that authentic 1920s touch

Then she needed a blouse. An old pair of white knickers provided most of that, with an Irish linen tray cloth providing the collar (and, eventually, for decency, underwear). A blazer. A beret. Oh -- and what about shoes and stockings? The latter were easy to make out of old tights, but the former -- I used the faux-suede jacket she had arrived in, were as tricky as the most recalcitrant plot I have ever tried to wrestle into shape. 

the shoes caused me actual pain

She looked the part now, but a schoolgirl needs a schoolbag. And books. I decided that it was the late 1920s so her books were by Angela Brazil and Elsie Oxenham. And pencils and notebooks -- oh, and she might get peckish. What about a bar of chocolate? 1920s-style of course. 


I had the most fun with the accessories. 

Yes... like a haiku that decides it wants to be an epic, the Sindy project grew until the doll I gave Susanne was better kitted out than I am myself. 

It was the greatest, greatest fun. It was so wonderful to be creating, but not to worry about deadlines, or the market, or reviews. Yes, there was a lot of nostalgia involved, both in entering the beloved Chalet School world and in just handling a doll whose contours and details were  were once so familiar to me. Susanne loved her, and as soon as she saw her, said, 'That's Frieda!'

It was so much fun I'm planning to kit out another one. Only not quite yet. There are stories to write first, and other Sindies, less tangible to play with. 



Saturday 9 March 2024

"These bits don't matter" (Anne Rooney)

 I loved Keren's post yesterday on making collage and how it reflects aspects of her narrative-making. I don't make actual collages (though I would love to, if it were safe to leave scissors, glue and cut up things around in a house with a toddler). Instead I make cartoons in PhotoShop based on old images and transposing my current problems and issues into them. This week I have a problem with the window installers, and spent most of Friday morning committing it to PhotoShop. (I've doctored this one to de-identify the company involved to avoid legal problems. It's just a van from the Internet, so please if anyone owns this van, it's not aimed at you!)

I use medieval images a lot for this as I was originally a medievalist and find it comforting to slip back a few decades/centuries. It puts things in perspective, somehow. These problems that trouble me now have troubled people in a different form just about forever. Will my house fall down? Probably not. People have occupied far worse-maintained houses than mine over the centuries. Is a problem with workmen new? Absolutely not. There were probably similar disputes over pyramid-building 'You've left a gap big enough for cockroaches to get in and eat all the grain he will need in the afterlife!' It's all the same-old same-old.

Like Keren, I can see how this uses the same kind of techniques as my writing, which is largely non-fiction. I find things people have already discovered and repurpose them, making them appropriate for a new audience, adding a light touch or humour, getting readers to see them in a new way, making unexpected connections and juxtapositions.

It's much more satisfying and relaxing than ranting about frustrations. And if it all goes horribly wrong and my house falls down, I can post the undoctored cartoon on TwiX.

 

Anne Rooney

website 

Out now: Story of Science, November 2023; illustrated by Paula Zamudio

 



Friday 8 March 2024

Chaos and collage by Keren David

 Well! Months have gone by and I have failed you. I have thought and thought, what can I write -  what can I say -  and then the chance goes whooshing past and this blog is sadly silent on the eighth of the month.

I apologise. Times are hard. I have never known such difficult days, and I am supporting a lot of people through it. It is draining and distressing, 

I am not going to write about the state of the world, because it's all too much. But I did think I'd say something about my new hobby of collage (still LOVING it) and how it fits my philosophy of life. And how that fits with creative writing. 

Here it is: life is chaos. And much of what we do (or what I do anyway) is about bringing order to chaos.


I started out as a news reporter. I was 18 years old. I thought I was discovering the truth, writing the 'first draft of history'. But later I began to think that what we think of as news, or journalism, is just a way of fitting messy life into neat boxes. How much easier is it to deal with the enormity of war or murder or disease if you can issue a brisk instruction '400 words, make it snappy.' I loved being a news editor. Life is less scary if you pack it into columns topped with headlines. 

Writing books was a way of freeing myself -  the joy of fiction, the freedom to make stuff up, breaking free of word counts and headlines and working out 'what's the news line'? But with success came a realisation -  a narrative, a plot, is sort of pretty much like news. It's another way of stirring the pot. It's taking elements and snippets and stitching them together. Making patterns, wrapping things together. Finding a start and a finish. How reassuring to think that life can be contained between the covers of a book. How satisfying to make my very own ordered way from start to finish, from once upon a time, to they lived happily ever after.
 And now, I have found comfort and escape in a more abstract form of art -  but still one which takes bits and pieces and puts them together to make some sort of satisfying whole. Having pictures and shapes and colour and texture to play with offers me something new -  and yet somehow it's not new at all. Somehow it's all about the same thing. Order from chaos. Beauty from mess. 
I guess my hope now is that somehow, somewhere there's order to be found in the chaos of the universe. That the darkest of patterns baked into history can be transformed and healed. 
 And if not, that our little patterns and pictures and stories can bring light to the darkness, pinpricks of stars in the night, a patchwork of meaning from the scraps of existence.  



Wednesday 6 March 2024

Death and the Carnegie Medal by Paul May


Death has always been a presence in Carnegie Medal winning books. The third winner, Noel Streatfeild's The Circus is Coming begins like this: "Peter and Sarah were orphans. When they were babies their father and mother were killed in a railway accident, so they came to live with their aunt." This is an extreme example of how children's authors get rid of the parents to allow the children some agency. Roald Dahl did a very similar thing in James and the Giant Peach although he waited until the second paragraph to dispatch James's parents by means of an angry rhinoceros.

Both Streatfeild and Dahl are just clearing the ground before they start their stories, cutting the protagonists free from those pesky parents. Books like The Lantern Bearers and Tulku do the same thing in a more organic way, but although people die in both these books, death is not central to the stories. There are other winners with high body-counts, like Ronald Welch's Knight Crusader or Garfield and Blishen's The God Beneath the Sea, and there are books like Philip Pullman's Northern Lights or Susan Price's The Ghost Drum (now available in a shiny new edition by the way!) where visits are made to the worlds of the dead, but in none of these does death take centre stage the way it does in Siobhan Dowd's Bog Child or in Neil Gaiman's The Graveyard Book, the winners of the Carnegie in 2008 and 2009. Both these books are about living and dying and although they are very different they are both outstanding examples of what is possible in a children's book.

(Spoilers!) Bog Child starts with the discovery of the body of a young woman buried in the peat on a mountainside. She is small, and at first those who examine her think she's a child, perhaps recently killed and buried. It turns out she was buried nearly 2000 years before and has been preserved by the bog.

This is a story about death as sacrifice. We hear the story of the girl in the bog (the protagonist, Fergus, names her Mel) through the dreams of Fergus. If indeed  they are dreams. The device is very effective. It is essentially a parallel story to the one told in the present but a kind of supernatural empathy across 2000 years enables Fergus to experience it. This kind of thing is hard to pull off, because if you think about it for two seconds you know it's nonsense, but Siobhan Dowd makes it work, partly because the modern-day story is so strong that it carries you along, and partly because archaeologists always speculate about what might have happened—make up stories in other words.

This is Northern Ireland in the 1980s and Republican prisoners in Long Kesh are on hunger strike. The IRA bombing campaign is at its height. Fergus's dad is an IRA sympathiser though not, as far as we know, an active member. Sacrifice is very much in Fergus's mind because his brother has joined the hunger strike, willing to sacrifice his life for the cause of . . .  well, here's how Joe explains it to Fergus and his mum:

"See, Mam, it's like this. I'm not a common criminal. What I did was fight for freedom. (I don't think we ever know why Joe has been sentenced to 10 years in prison) I'd rather die free in my own head than live like the dregs of the earth. And that's how they treat us in here, I swear to God.'

Earlier, before they've learned that Joe has joined the hunger strike,  we've seen the McCann family around the kitchen table, eating a 'fry' and discussing the body Fergus has found, and the hunger strikers:

'Thank God Joe's not part of it,' Mam said.

Da nodded. 'It's an odd thing when you thank God for your son not having to make a sacrifice like that.'

Mam grunted. 'Sacrifice? Some sacrifice.' She reached over to Cath and forked a grilled tomato from the plate's edge towards the centre. 'Eat up, Cath.'

And then: 'Sacrifice is what Jesus did. He saved us all. Who did Bobby Sands save?'

Back in AD80 food is scarce and Mel's father, it later turns out, is starving himself to save his family. You could have called this book Hunger and it would have made perfect sense. Fergus agrees with his mam about sacrifice, but none of Fergus's arguments have any effect on Joe when Fergus and Mam visit him in prison. 2000 years earlier Mel also sacrifices herself, but she sacrifices herself to save her family. 

We also see that Joe is the protegé of Uncle Tully, and Uncle Tully is revealed to be a bomb-maker. His bombs kill innocent people, including the young British soldier who has become Fergus's friend, though Tully would regard the soldier as a 'legitimate target.' So is that what Joe is sacrificing himself for? There is a lot to think about here.

Even the short extracts I've quoted demonstrate that this is a rich and complex text, this despite being written in plain, economical language. There's not room to do it justice here but it's a remarkable book that I'd urge anyone to read, adult or child. There's also plenty of in-depth academic style discussion of the book that you can find on the internet. I was very curious to know how the book is perceived in Northern Ireland so I resorted to Google and discovered that the then Ulster Unionist leader, James Nesbitt, had called for it to be banned in schools. You may remember that Melvin Burgess was amazed that many of the critics of Junk hadn't bothered to read the book, so I was amused to find this:

"Let me be clear, this is not an attack on the book,” said Mr Nesbitt. “I have not read Bog Child, so have no opinion on its value as a piece of literature. But I have read the teaching notes, as endorsed by the Department of Education and I am stunned by what I  read,” he added.



The Graveyard Book begins with a brutal murder. The killer murders a mother, a father, and a child, but an eighteen-month-old toddler escapes. The toddler enters a graveyard where he's taken under the protection of its inhabitants, dead and undead. 

I'm a fan of toddler bids for freedom and I've witnessed quite a few in real life. I was cycling along a busy country road in Norfolk on a summer's day in 1977 when I saw a two-year-old on one of those tricycles you propel with your feet approaching me on the other side of the road. I could see the entrance to a small housing estate a couple of hundred metres ahead so I turned the toddler around and ushered him back along the road (there was no pavement). Moments later a distraught-looking dad emerged from between the houses and swept his son away. He'd only turned his back for a few moments, he said, and the boy was gone.

Anyway, Neil Gaiman's toddler is named Bod, short for Nobody. The mysterious Silas agrees to be his guardian. Silas is neither dead nor alive and doesn't venture out in daylight, so the informed adult and no doubt many children know what Silas is (though it turns out he is reformed). And Bod is fostered by a Mistress and Mr Owens, who have been dead for several hundred years. One of the joys of this book, and there are several, is Neil Gaiman's knack of creating fully rounded and engaging characters with a few well-chosen words. I nearly said he brings them alive, but most of them are dead.

There is a proper plot in this story, that involves a secret organisation of killers rather like the historical Order of Assassins, or like the mysterious underworld organisation in the John Wick movies. They call themselves the Jacks of all Trades. The existence of Bod is a threat to the very existence of this organisation, and that's why his family have been targeted. Bod survives a number of dangers, including a trip to the underworld of the ghouls, but he is remarkably brave and resourceful, even while making very human mistakes. The book is dark and funny, and even has a bit of romance thrown in, and at the end, and this isn't really a spoiler, a teenage Bod walks off into the rest of his life in much the same way as Fergus does in Bog Child.

Both books have great endings, and I do love a great ending. 

Siobhan Dowd died far too young in 2007, before Bog Child was published. The Siobhan Dowd Trust was set up in her memory and there's a link below to its website, but I see that the site hasn't been updated since about 2017.

Siobhan Dowd Trust

Paul May's blog/website. I repost all these Carnegie posts on my blog so that anyone who's interested can find them easily and in chronological order.

 



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