Dissing Cinders

Why get annoyed about a fairy tale? It's not as if they haven't been thoroughly decoded, retold and reinterpreted by the likes of Angela Carter and Marina Warner. Surely I can't be annoyed by some old story, tried and tested and shining with Disneyfication?

Well, I can. And this is because I am an Actual Feminist. The story that is irritating me is Cinderella. It's not the only contender, of course. Pre-decoding, a lot of fairy stories presented Bad Role Models for Girls. In Sleeping Beauty, all you have to do is lie down in a scented heap and wait for the handsome prince to come and kiss you awake. (But not that awake - into a pleasant somnolence, I assume.) In Rumpelstiltskin, it's fine to marry a bullying control freak as long as he is the King. And in Snow White, youth and prettiness equate to niceness and goodness, while the ageing Queen represents evil and malevolence (and transforms herself into an ugly witch when she wants to do her worst).

Part of the problem is that everything has been prettied up. Earlier versions of fairy tales, collected by Perrault and the brothers Grimm, are harsher and more unforgiving than the sanitised and bowdlerized versions that we read today. And there are some archetypes which present a slightly less passive version of womanhood - the poor but clever girl who can talk her way out of trouble appears in several stories.

So why Cinderella? And why now? Firstly, obviously, because Looks Aren't Everything. This story is the archetype of many others which suggest that beauty is a fail safe route to love, happiness and good fortune. This is not only sexist, it is infantilizing.  Teenage girls are hyper-aware of their looks and of external appearance in general. But in my view, this limiting view of ourselves as women is something that we grow out of. My role models are Christine Legarde and Aretha Franklin, not Victoria Beckham and Beyonce. 

Affluence and consumerism have exacerbated this, so that now we try and buy youth and permanent beauty. Plastic surgery is becoming 'normal', botox is freezing the faces of younger and younger women and extreme make-overs litter TV schedules.

Which brings me to my second point. Cinderella is the grandmother of the makeover. What we are now - you and I - me typing, you reading - is inadequate, according to this mantra. We can and should improve on this. Although we could take exercise or eat less - perfectly sensible approaches to self improvement - this takes time. And Instant Transformation is central to the Cinderella myth.

As there are no fairy godmothers to hand, this can take the form of Extreme Detox, which usually involves spending a lot of money on packets of weird powder as well as No Dairy; or Extreme Dieting, which is basically a short cut to eating disorders, or Surgery, which  promises to fix not only our faces but everything else as well. The fairy godmother will suck the fat out of us, and liposuction will magic away all those years of self indulgence.

Why does this irritate me? Because the Cinderella myth fosters passive compliance. And passive compliance makes you unhappy. At the heart of this story is the idea of rescue. Someone will come and fix it for you. Someone will wave the wand. Someone will conjure the fairy coach. Someone will pick up the glass slipper and find you and marry you and you will live happily ever after, based on the searching courtship of dancing till midnight. Call me a killjoy, but this is a crap model for life. Tell me it's a harmless fantasy and I will point you in the direction of some rather worrying facets of the modern world.

1. The Bridezilla.

Bridezilla is so obsessed with her wedding that she falls out with everyone and almost doesn't marry the fuddled groom, who almost has a lucky escape. Soon after the wedding is over, Bridezilla is horrified to discover that she is married and living on a small housing estate and No One is Looking At Her. Divorce follows soon after, with the promise of another wedding on the horizon. Cinders factor: 10 out of 10 - obsessing about Your Big Day and forgetting about real life.

2. The Shopaholic

The Shopaholic is now slightly out of date due to the Global Financial Crisis, but this isn't going to stop her. She is seeking a transformation via the medium of shopping bags. She shops till she drops, she flexes the plastic, she is a girl on a mission. She never wears anything twice. (Or, ideally, once.) Perfection is a dress folded in tissue; imperfection is putting it on. Cinders factor - Nine out of ten. Confusing a Barclaycard with a Fairy Godmother.

3. The Daily Mail victim

The Daily Mail is a newspaper devoted to the subjugation of women. It does this in a number of devious ways, but the main tactic is Bikinis. Women must be 'bikini ready' for the beach, and those who are on the beach must be 'camera ready' for the prying lenses of the paparazzi. If your make over isn't sufficiently rigorous - and you are a famous woman - they will find you and they will punish you. The Mail usually has at least 10 photos of celebrity cellulite on any given day. (Cellulite only happens to women, apparently.) Cinders factor - Nine out of ten - the Daily Mail is a 21st century Ugly Sister.

Book of the month: Restoration

July seems like a good time to bring in a new idea, being as far as possible from January and therefore a Midyear Resolution. From now on I will be attempting to write about a historical novel every month.

No promises of topicality - I will just include whatever I happen to have read and liked. I won't review books I hate (and there are a few of these). Which means I won't be attempting anything worthy of the Hatchet Job of the Year Award In my experience, it is easier to enjoy a frisson of schadenfreude when reading terrible reviews if you aren't yourself in the business of producing work that could be given similar treatment.

My first review will look at Restoration, by Rose Tremain. It has been on my radar for years, asking to be read. I resisted because - like many people - I thought that historical fiction was a bit National Trusty, politely retrograde, irrelevant. I thought that characters in historical fiction were like pretty puppets, prancing about having bogus emotions. I can't stand clunking wish-fulfilment hist-fic, in which fancy dress and fancy stuff rules. I'm deliberately seeking out historical novels which offer something different.

But the best historical novels are filled with complex, believable characters. Restoration is one of these. Robert Merivel, the protagonist, is as eccentric and vividly realised any character in Dickens. He is an unheroic hero, absurdly comic and often wracked with emotion. At the start of the story he is an ambitious but slipshod physician who accidentally cures Charles II favourite spaniel. Overjoyed, the king makes him surgeon to all the royal dogs. When Merivel is established at Court, Charles arranges a marriage of convenience between Merivel and Celia Clemence, one of the royal mistresses. Celia's dowry includes Bidnold, a splendid house and estate in Norfolk. Part of the deal is that Merivel lives there alone, while Celia is installed in a house in Kew, where the king visits her secretly.

All this is fine, and enables Merivel to play at being a painter and great landowner. (Appearance, superficiality and deception are recurring themes in the book.) But everything unravels when Celia comes to live at Bidnold after irritating the king. Merivel is increasingly smitten by her and makes a drunken advance to her one night, with disastrous results.

Though Merivel is dazzled by Celia, his true love object is Charles II. Not that there is anything sexual in this - Merivel is rampantly heterosexual, like his rakish monarch. But it is Charles who inspires his truest and most painful devotion, and the highs and lows of his relationship with Charles provide the tension and plot structure for the novel. The counter-weight to his rather undignified devotion to the king is his close friendship with Pearce, a dour Quaker who is loyal to Merivel but highly critical of his foolishness.

Tremain has more interest in her male characters than her female creations -  the same is true of her later novel, Music and Silence. Merivel is flawed but endearing: vain, childish, excitable and selfish. But he is also sensitive, loyal, passionate (about people, his horse and Bidnold) and has a powerful sense of his own weakness and absurdity. (The word which most readily comes to mind is 'hapless'.)

Charles is also a complex, beguiling character - he is capricious, easily bored, impulsive and ultimately ruthless and distant. He seems to take delight in Merivel's company, but spies on him to make sure that Merivel is not sleeping with Celia, and treats him with cold disdain when he tries to seduce her. He has absolute belief in his dominance and preeminence as monarch, and his superiority to other human beings.

Celia is a cypher in comparison, cool and pretty and a continuing mystery to Merivel. Most of the other women are variously needy or raunchy sex interests, a bawdy backdrop. But this is Merivel's story, and on that basis the novel works brilliantly.

Tremain also evokes the seventeenth century setting with tremendous style and energy, from the bustling London streets to the quiet haven of a Quaker community, and from the elegance of Bidnold to Merivel's parents' little house, which is consumed by fire.

The novel's main flaw, I think, is that time is handled awkwardly. It's a first-person narrative which is not a journal, and not written in Merivel's old age, but close to the action; a day later, two days later, maybe more than this. The way this shifts around can make the tense and our relation to the action confusing and disorientating. It may be that Tremain intended to disorientate and unsettle the reader, but I found the device distracted me from the story.

However, this is a small issue in such a dramatic and emotionally satisfying novel. It's also a tremendous entertainment, a tour de force: a seventeenth century bromance with wigs and feather hats.

Where do you get your ideas from?

Among the various pressures on writers,  there is the awful feeling that you ought to be Saying Something Original. In a crowded bookshop, full of novels and short story collections, and celeb memoirs and cookbooks and all the rest, it is hard not to feel that all the ideas have already been collected, and pinned down like Victorian butterflies, and polished and edited and packaged to death, and there is no room for what is in your head. So much so that you don't even know what is in there, apart from a fizzy, panicky belief that you ought to be Doing Something about your writing ambitions.

So when A Writer is asked questions by The Public at an event like the Hay Festival (now in progress) one of the questions that they will almost certainly be asked is 'Where do you get your ideas from?' And the fact that it is a frequently asked question doesn't make it easy to answer.

But I'm going to have a bash.

1. Observation.
I recently saw Mike Leigh's Another Year for the first time, and though it was a masterpiece. Themes, cinematography, performances, dialogue, everything. Essentially, like the best of Mike Leigh's work, it is based on observation, by both the director and the actors. Lesley Manville, in particular, was brilliant. She was playing the desperate, chaotic Mary, and made a potentially irritating and depressing character so believable and vulnerable that I was rooting for her, hoping she could conjure some kind of happiness out of her wilful neediness and 'inappropriate' drinking. This is the sort of idea that comes from noticing things, small things, the details of life, and ferreting them away somewhere, and thinking about them. Small things encapsulate larger things, supposed truths of life.

2. The unconscious.
The surrealists were keen on this, of course, and so are many fiction writers. Julia Cameron has written about the importance of keeping a dream diary, writing first thing in the morning and getting down the quickly forgotten details of our dreams. Mary Shelley said she dreamt of Frankenstein after trying to write a ghost story with Shelley and Lord Byron - you can be fairly confident that the conversation and the challenge generated the dream, but the dream was essential, nonetheless.

3. Other stories.
Margaret Atwood says that in writing we are Negotiating with the Dead. One of the paradoxes of originality is that it is not a unique outpouring, or the fruit of solitary genius, but an informed and enriched perspective on common experience. (The writer might work in solitude, but their mind does not operate in solitude. Language itself is a collective summation of agreed communication and patterns of expression.) Originality in science is about the small breakthrough, built on the research of other scientists (whose work is something overlooked). The exact same thing is true of artistic endeavour, which is one of the reasons that creative writing students and anyone who takes their writing seriously should read compulsively and across a wide range of genres. Not only does this increase our fluency and repertoire as writers, it also helps us tap into the traditions and the shared stories that make up the collective unconscious of the Zeitgeist.  

4. Your obsessions.
If you had what seemed like a great idea, but find it is beginning to bore you, then the reason could be that it isn't something that you care about enough.  In order to generate an idea, you need to find a subject or a theme that will never bore you, because it is one of those niggling things that you cannot escape from. I wrote a novel about Shakespeare's Dark Lady, but it is also about my own experience of trying to be a writer, and my own intense feelings about my children. I can't ever get bored with this. (The fact that I then developed another obsession, with Early Modern London and the lives of the people in it was an added bonus.)

5. Writing itself.
And finally - ideas aren't in there, waiting to be mined like oil reserves. They become what they are in the process of being written down. Writing is not solely a mental activity, which requires the mechanical activity of your hands to become real. It is the combination of the brain and the body - which is one of the reasons that I think it's useful to write with a pen from time to time.

The thing itself...

The thing about writing is that it is very easy to evade/avoid. Why do we DO this? Not everyone loves their job. Not everyone leaps out of bed on Monday mornings filled with joy at the prospect of being - for example - a dentist, or a car mechanic.

But broadly speaking, when called upon to do dentistry or fan belt fixing, these people probably get on with it. And yet the stories about writers not getting on with it are legion. Depression, booze and general lack of focus all have a part to play. Children can be an issue - Cyril Connolly wrote about 'the pram in the hall' which was meant to be the enemy of promise, though given the lack of interest men had in caring for babies and small children in the early part of the 20th century, I would have thought this was a bit of a feeble excuse. (Connolly was writing about male promise, in the main, primarily his own.)

My children are extremely large now - taller than me, short-ass Mum. But they still find ways - so many ways - to stop me from working. I lie awake till 3 am waiting for the sound of Daughter's drunken footsteps tottering home. I lie awake after 3 am wondering if Son might do some revision when he finally wakes up at 3pm.

And yet. One of the mistakes we can make as writers is thinking that the stuff we experience isn't Material. We think we are too banal, too boring. But all the stuff that is stopping you from writing is the very same stuff that could be your subject- as the great Raymond Carver found. Day jobs, life jobs, the daily grind - this is the Stuff. All we need is a pen, a pad and five minutes of our fragmented lives to get it down. There is no bathos in our lives, really, because everything that happens is worth writing about.

The power of Eeyore

There are many things wrong with the modern world. Fracking, snacking, 50 Shades of Grey, binge drinking, drones, abattoirs, nose jobs, the private car, Gardeners' Question time... I could go on. But in spite of this we are meant to conduct ourselves like a bunch of wilful, myopic Pollyannas. Thinking positive is - allegedly - a central requirement in the post-post modernist age.

Why? Is this a post-post modernist joke, referencing the appalling suffering in the last century, now hilariously summed up in faux WWII memorabilia telling us to Keep Calm and (insert joyless witticism here)? I dunno. All I can say, on a Tuesday, sipping my Earl Grey and feeling as far removed from Calm as it is possible to be, is that we are overlooking the power of negative thinking. The power, in short, of Eeyore.

It's almost exactly ten years since my dad died, and he was a loyal Eeyore fan. Not least because he saw a resemblance between Eeyore and me, his oldest, speccy daughter. As adolescence descended, like a black cloud of Knowingness, I began to look in the mirror more. But not in a good way. I would stare, eyeball-to-eyeball, at this unbelievably asymmetrical human which was housing my beautiful soul.

'Oh God,' I would groan. 'Oh God, it's horrible.' I would hog the hall mirror for hours on end, wallowing in negative narcissism.

And Eeyore, as all Winnie-the-Pooh fans will know, has a similar experience. He stares mournfully into the river, then crosses over with some difficulty, and then stares at his watery reflection again. 'As I thought,' he says eventually. 'No better on this side.' My dad enjoyed making this comparison. Eeyore, basically, c'est moi.

So far, so gloomy. But this is not the end of the story. Gloom is Good. Introspection is Cool. I am currently reading a brilliant book called Quiet in which the author, Susan Cain, sets out the case for introversion, and suggests that the modern world is run by reckless, optimistic extroverts.We are neglecting, suggests Cain, the valuable perspective of thoughtful introverts. What's more, according to a serious-sounding journal called Psychology and Aging, cautious, shy people live longer and have better health.

Writers are by nature pretty introspective, I would say. We might pretend otherwise, bouncing around like Tigger when this seems to be necessary. But there is an Eeyore inside most of us, staring sadly into the mirror, resigned to the awful truth.

Coping with success

Writers are better at being miserable than they are at being happy. Discuss.

Maybe this is not true. Maybe it is just me. They are - we are - generally well known for boozing and feuding with one another, rather than making cupcakes and being tactful. Writers stagger about with one layer of skin removed just so other people can carry on being thick-skinned. Writers are paranoid, negative, self-absorbed. On a good day.

And here is Truman Capote giving it all the depression he's got.

But maybe we need to lighten up. By which I mean, maybe I do. In a blog in which I have retained a cautious distance between my me and my actual feelings, The Work and Myself, I am suddenly confronted with one very nice thing which is definitely going to happen, and a second, almost equally nice thing which is also definitely going to happen but I'm not going to mention it till I have An Actual Letter.

So the first very nice thing is that my book, Dark Aemilia, is going to be published by the wonderful Myriad Editions. Proper people will read it, and Aemilia Bassano Lanyer, who is sort of my secret best friend, will be Out There, in the 21st century, being her intense and wayward self.  Yay!

 No less a writer than Neil Gaiman has said that writers should take a moment to experience the highs, and the successes, and I have this on the authority of the brilliant Liesel Schwarz who you can find more about here.  But this blog is not going to be about praise and publication from now on. Never fear. Success won't spoil it. It will still be about the daily business of being a paranoid writer. Just with some added optimism.

The Everyday

The Everyday is not very exciting. Almost by definition, the Everyday is dull.  New Year resolutions founder because we secretly want to be Cinderella, transformed by the wave of a magic wand into a perfect version of ourselves. Failing that, we settle for the Rubbish Self that deals with crap Mondays, eating chocolate or swigging caffeine to get by. (Or is that just me?)

In writing terms, this means that it's exciting to be writing a novel for about twenty minutes. For that period of time, you can be a Novelist. Your Novel, unwritten, is a work of genius. Your ideas, while they are in your head, are blindingly original. You might even feel slightly sorry for the people who aren't writing your novel, who don't have your brilliant mind.

After twenty minutes, the rot sets in. Writing becomes a chore. You have to earn the feeling of excitement, the giddy arrogance, the thrill. And it takes hours and hours and hours. Every day.

So my New Year's Resolution, in spite of having a massive hangover on January 1st, wasn't to stop drinking, or lose a stone or take up zumba dancing. It was just that I would write for at least 20 minutes, in my journal, every day. And on day 21, I have managed to do this. Every day. Still completely imperfect in every other way, of course, and the stuff I've written isn't literature or genius, but it's really helped. So that's pretty good.

Happy Midmas!

I don't often mention members of my family in this blog, partly for reasons of taste, decency, privacy etc and partly because none of them are famous. (A forgivable oversight on their part, but an unfortunate one, given that Celebrity Begets Celebrity.) But here is a tiny glimpse into the mindset of my Life Partner: he is a complete Scrooge. He was too miserable even to wear his black "Bah Humbug!" hat this year, and his current catchphrase is "Christmas is Over!" This means that no one is allowed to play the "Christmas at King's College Cambridge" CD and we have to listen to Steve Earle instead. Festiveness is a scant resource in our house.

Anyway. The point of this post is to say It is So Not. As in, over. I really love this hidden time, between the last mince pie and the social embarrassment of not knowing who to kiss at midnight on New Year's eve. All year long, I wish there were twenty five hours in a day or eight days in a week, and now, as the year staggers to a close, there are five unlabelled days to write in. It's a shame that some of this valuable time will have to be spent marking, but there you go. At least there are no presents to buy/wrap/deliver, the hangovers have receded and the obligation to turn in to a born-again gym bunny is yet to come.



In a way, Midmas is a good time to get into training for the really important resolution, the only resolution that counts, which is to Write More. I will be Writing More in the New Year, and no matter what the distractions - surviving my PhD viva/being published/not being published/torpid teenagers/everything else you can think of - I will also be trying to focus on Process.

My great discovery as a writer has been that starting with the end in mind is not desirable. It is far better to start with the middle in mind, and stay there. The happiest place for me is the Zone, where writing happens, and nothing else matters. See you there in 2013, I hope!

The Next Big Thing

Have been absurdly busy recently, not in a good way, more like a hamster which has accidentally nibbled some speed before jumping into its wheel. So I have been a tad hopeless about being part of a wonderful project called The Next Big Thing,  which brings together writers to answer questions about their books. I was invited to take part by my lovely writer friend Susanna Jones.

Susanna is a brilliant author and her most recent novel 'When Nights Were Cold' is the gripping and atmospheric story of a group of women mountaineers in the early 20th century. Her writing is taut and spare, and full of tension. Susanna's work has already won a number of awards, including the CWA John Creasey Dagger, the Betty Trask Award and the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize, and her novels have been translated into more than twenty languages. You can find out about Susanna and her work here.

Any road. This is my response to the Next Big Thing questions - and do watch this space for news about four fellow writers and their new books.

1. What is the working title of your next book? 

It has two titles: 'Dark Aemilia' and  . I'm a bit of a title junkie.

2. Where did the idea come from for the book?

I was writing a historical novel for my MA at Brunel University, and it was actually meant to b be about Lady Macbeth. I had the vague idea that either she or Macbeth himself might be the Fourth Witch, so that was the title of that book. Then I started researching Shakespeare's play-world in sixteenth century London, and then I came across a necromancer called Simon Forman who wrote the first known review of Macbeth, and through him I found out about a woman called Aemilia Bassano (later Lanier).

It was basically love at first sight with Aemilia. She was Jewish, illegitimate and orphaned at 17, when she became the Lord Chamberlain's mistress. When she got pregnant he married her off to her feckless, recorder-playing cousin - but she still ended up being one of the first women in England to be a published poet.  And she was - possibly - Shakespeare's mysterious and unfaithful lover, the notorious Dark Lady. I mean, what is not to like here? All my notes about eleventh century Scotland went into the bin.

3. What genre does your book fall under?

It's historical, but not a. bodice ripping or b. National Trust.

4. What actors would you choose to play the characters in a movie rendition?

This is very easy for me. Rachel Weisz is Aemilia, and Daniel Craig is Shakespeare. I'd avoid Dames Judy or Helen for Queen Elizabeth, and would go for something more unusual. Maybe Rupert Everett or Gary Oldman. Kathy Burke IS Moll Cutpurse. (Please pass this on if you happen to see any of these people.)

5. What is the one-sentence synopsis of your book?

Lady Macbeth stalks the streets of sixteenth-century London, searching for the story that will unleash her warped, demonic power.

6. Is your book represented by an agency?

I'm represented by Greene & Heaton.

7. How long did it take you to write the first draft of your manuscript?

Two years.

8. What other books would you compare this to within your genre?

I'm not sure about 'genre' exactly, but the historical writers I most admire are Rose Tremain and (of course) Hilary Mantel. But Angela Carter, Virginia Woolf and Jeanette Winterson have also influenced me. There is a bit of magic in the book. It's sort of realist magicalism.  

9. Who or what inspired you to write this book?

Aemilia Bassano.

10. What else about this book might pique the reader’s interest?

It's women's-eye Shakespeare, the play-world from the perspective of the mistress/mother/whore.

 Now... off to find those four other writers.

'Tis the season

I am approaching Christmas with what I suppose I must call Mixed Emotions. First, I'm relieved. I have pretty much worked my butt off for the last three months, and I like the idea of rising late, drinking wine, and reading by a large festive fire.  Second, I am chastened. The world probably won't end on December 21st, but from my perspective at least it has been a noticeably sad and horrible year. One that I will be glad to see the back of. And thirdly  - for as all writers know, three is a powerful number - I am determined.

Yuletide may not seem like the season for determination, it's more about Bailey's Irish Cream and just one more layer of Milk Tray. Determination is a New Year thing, designed to offload sudden-onset cellulite and shot-putter arms. But I like to feel determined at inappropriate times. It takes the pressure off, vis a vis trying to relax and enjoy yourself.  My determination is focused on Writing. There has to be a new book in 2013. The old book - much as I love it and always will -  has had a enough airplay. It's like a spoiled and over-watched last child, and is still living at home when really it ought to be out in the world, fending for itself.  2013 is going to be The Year of the Dark Thriller. With a dash of humour. And this is my cue for a suitable photograph.

There is only one fail-safe cure for the affliction of wanting to write, and that is writing. It can cure all the attendant ills, the uncertainty, the waiting, the unworthy jealousy of other authors, the mad staring at rival writers' launch events at Waterstones in Taunton on Facebook et cetera. (Writers sometimes admit to being on Facebook too much, but they don't often say what they are feeling.)

I'm not going to put labels and links into this post, though I know I really should. I am going to light the fire and uncork the bottle. But tomorrow. Tomorrow there will be some Attitude.

Here's one that didn't win....

Apparently, George Orwell often mistook rejection for failure. He kept going just the same, in a state of gloomy optimism with which I am pretty familiar.



I entered this story in the Bridport micro fiction competition, and it didn't win. So...it was rejected. But that wasn't a failure on my part: I successfully wrote it, entered it, and am now posting it. In the spirit of success. Or something. 

This is based on an actual theatre which was part of the Brighton Festival this year, and I really didn't go there, and there really was a Balkan band playing when I walked past, too busy to join the happy throng inside...

The Hurly Burly Café Theatre

I have never been to the Hurly Burly Café Theatre. I have never seen the oompah Balkan quartet with the gypsy in dreads from Dubrovnik. I didn’t buy black vodka from the pop-up bar, or sit on the bleached grass on Leonard’s raincoat with the wind in my hair. No one kissed me smoky when I scrounged a gold Soubrane. And when our lips didn’t meet, it wasn’t the real thing.

The song escaped over the addled roof-tops, the slates and chimneys and minarets. The curtains were cloud-drapes, moonlit and sun-dappled. Children ran among the giant legs. There were gryphons and unicorns and fluttering pennants. There was a pianola and roast chestnuts and a talking fish.

You were there, I expect, leaning over the table. Paying in florins and sixpences, counting the coins with rings on your fingers.

WRITING FOR YOUR LIFE

I'm preoccupied with death at the moment, the sudden and premature deaths of two people I knew, the fact my mother has a serious illness. I have just come back from a very beautiful funeral, which captured the everyday wonders of a supposedly 'ordinary' life.

One thing which came up over and over again was the fact that the person whose life we were celebrating loved stories - Discworld, the Narnia books, the Lord of the Rings. In recent weeks, I've felt as if my own concerns - with writing, and story telling and publishing what I write - are somehow trivial and self indulgent, as if I should Grow Up and get on with something else.

But I don't know how to do anything else. I can teach people, but what I teach is that writing is a way of finding meaning in life, if not the meaning of life. When someone dies, we sing songs, and read poems and the people who loved them tell stories about them, the memories and moments that live on. The music and poetry help us to survive, collectively, they keep the light burning.

And stories can do the same thing too. So that is why I write. Not to be published or famous or noticed. (Though every writer wants other people to be part of what they do.) But because I need to.

On the way back from the funeral, I got on a bus, weighed down with everything, the sadness and sorrow of it all. After a while, I saw the sun was out, shining through the mist of condensation that blurred the windows. We were passing the Brighton Pavilion, and I wiped the mist off the glass. I could see the pop-up skating rink they have set up for Christmas, empty chairs and tables waiting for the evening, a tiny glimpse of the ice through an open door. All in bright sunshine.

Plot number seven: Rebirth

And finally. We go to stories - and therefore plots - for things we can't find in Life. We are looking for patterns, for an explanation of some sort, a conclusion that can be drawn. We want the story to give us something back, a feeling of reassurance, the belief that while life ends, it also teaches. New beginnings emerge from bleak endings. There may or may not be rebirth in the hereafter, but there is certainly rebirth in the now. Or so the Hollywood screenwriters would have us believe.

I don't know what Christopher Booker says about this, because frankly I have looked at his book enough to feel pretty well informed about his point of view. His is the compendium approach to creativity, in which an assemblage of narratives, a great story pile, must surely offer something to those in search of narrative enlightenment.

Life is not neat or reassuring. Virginia Woolf thought sanity was a lie. Thing have happened in my life recently which don't suggest that life is a pattern of any kind. Experience tears holes in our reality, and there isn't much to mend them with. And yet. There is still the story of Pandora's box to keep the flame alive.

When Pandora opened the box, and all the bad things came out, all the evil and suffering and pain and horror, it seemed there was no hope. But Hope was exactly what there was, the tiny spirit trapped in the bottom of box who came fluttering out last of all. Ibsen said that human beings can't take all that much reality. Maybe he was being too harsh. Maybe all they need is a little bit of hope, enough to sustain the insanity of optimism which keeps us believing in the magic of story, and of being alive.