This is the solstice, the still point of the sun, its cusp and midnight, the year’s threshold and unlocking, where the past lets go of and becomes the future; the place of caught breath, the door of a vanished house left ajar.
This comes from a fantastic poem called ‘Shapechangers In Winter’ by Margaret Atwood. A friend sent me this earlier today. Do read the whole version. Magic. Truly magic, conjuring up all the eternal power and pagan divinity of this special day.
(I use pagan in very broad terms. Let’s not forget Christmas is basically a pagan festival. And if you feel awkward about that idea, remember that at their hearts most religions celebrate the possibilities for renewal.)
In some ways I find the energies of the winter solstice even more compelling than those of the summer. We’re in a time of darkness, and now we’re returning to the light, minute by minute. The sun that’s disappeared behind the terrace over the back is gradually going to get higher and higher. But that presumes that light is better than dark, and in truth the dark is good in its own way. There are things in life we must gently accept. Tho too this is a time of rest and slumber and indoor pursuits, and long walks in fresh air with the dog.
In a couple of weeks, I’ll have exciting news to share. A Circle of Life moment that belongs to this auspicious day.
For this week’s writing experiment: write about a cusp where the past lets go of and becomes the future. You could include a solstice. If you write a poem, ground it in specific and concrete imagery. If you write fiction, include a specific and concrete gesture within. If you write nonfiction, be true.
Happy Solstice, Happy Christmas, enjoy the darkness, and may love and light be all around.
Eek, it’s Friday the 13th! Hope nothing unexpectedly bad has happened to you.
This set me to thinking about reversals of fortune – those unexpected happenings that throw characters’ lives into a spin and in testing them bring out their essential qualities. Sometimes, when a piece of writing is going flat it can help to craft a reversal of fortune to shake things up.
Sometimes reversals are positive: the appearance of Cinderella’s fairy godmother, Oliver Twist being taken in by Mr Brownlow, Charlie finding the golden ticket that takes him to Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory.
Sometimes reversals are negative: the outcome of Othello hangs on the accidental dropping of a handkerchief. Anyone who’s read Fingersmith by Sarah Waters will know (no spoilers) that something quite unexpected happens at a certain point, and that changes everything.
Sometimes reversals are more complex, as when Bilbo finds Gollum’s precious ring in The Hobbit. Bottom falling asleep in the woods in Midsummer Night’s Dream and having his head turned into an ass’s by Puck, and then Titania seeing him first on waking from her drugged sleep: they are reversals of fortune. Whether they are good luck or bad luck is debatable, but they certainly add to the mix.
For this week’s writing experiment: Create a scene in which you craft a reversal of fortune that somehow changes a character’s destiny. It’s a contrivance in the writing, of course, so much of the art will lie in making it believable as well as compelling. Healthy dialogue, a strong setting, and a well-drawn character will all come into play.
Despite its ubiquity, it’s hard to say whether or not self-help books really help anyone. There is very little scholarship on the subject. Publishing statistics claim that 80% of self-help book customers are repeat buyers, which could indicate that they are not helping. Some suggest that buyers of self-help books don’t read more than the first twenty pages, if they open them at all. Just the act of buying a self-help book is reported to make someone feel better.
This article reminded me, among other things, of Lorrie Moore’s wonderful story ‘How To Become A Writer’ (also available here). It’s a great exercise in irony, and also a fun way to observe the nature and easy use of voice in writing.
Your Publisher: Creates Book’s mold ahead of time, insofar as it curates the existing market into which book must fit. (Additional duty: being dumbfounded by that market.) Has an influence present at Book’s inception and steers project with implicit requirements, meticulously directing without directly touching, like the people with the brooms in curling. And, by working backward from the numbers and trends and making Book a function of the bottom line, ultimately has final word on content — in other words, acts as Book’s Author.
For this week’s writing experiment: Write a piece that in some way borrows something from a self-help book. You could use the title of a self-help book as the title for a poem or story, and see where it leads you. Or you might want to write a sequence of instructions: a How To, or a How Not To. Or you can write your own version of ‘How To Become A Writer’, or your own set of helpful definitions. You can be ironic, or you can be straight-up serious, or you can be both at once. Don’t forget to be concrete and specific in using details to bring the world of your story or poem to life.
Last night (and we nearly missed it) we caught the fantastic tv film Adventures In Time And Space, about the creation fifty years ago of Dr Who. The writer, Mark Gatiss, did a very affectionate piece about the making of it in yesterday’s Telegraph, and he’s also made a lovely short about the film too (and what else other than genius might we expect from anyone involved with the very brilliant League of Gentlemen).
I had maybe expected something designed for today’s fanboys and girls, and there was plenty of that, for sure. But what was perhaps more powerful was the genuine pathos the film established, particularly in the depiction by David Bradley of William Hartnell, who played the first Doctor. I also loved the portraits of producer Verity Lambert and director Waris Hussein breaking glass ceilings, and I’d forgotten that the first transmission went out the day after Kennedy’s assassination (did Lambert really insist on it being repeated the following week?!). It was a real nostalgia trip to a golden age of television at the BBC. It reminded me of a recent walk along the Thames in Hammersmith, when we stumbled across the former Lime Grove studios. It also reminded me of Dr Who annuals.
It also took me back to the age of four, when Daleks ruled in black and white and terror bolted me to the sofa in Cherry Tree Cottage. Back then, we didn’t have the immediate gratification of watching next week’s episode over on More4 or catching up on what we missed on iPlayer; we had to wait for next Saturday, part of the nation’s (or even Terry Nation’s) collective hivemind.
As I type this, Dr Who is covered on a story on the ten o’clock news on BBC1, soon to be followed by the last two Doctor Whos on the sofa with Graham Norton, while simultaneously on BBC2 the Culture Show is doing a special, which among other things shows Valerie Singleton creating chocolate Daleks out of Walnut Whips and Smarties (talk about nostalgia). I love it that the BBC is so shameless in plugging one of its treasures, but also that it’s being acknowledged as a Google doodle.
I’ve not always been the greatest of fans of the revived versions, for some reason I’ve not been able to put my finger on. The plots, story ingredients, and performers are strong, after all. Maybe I am a bit stick in the mud, and maybe I’ve found these productions a bit too run-around and chasey and shouty? And sometimes a bit mawkish in a soapy kind of way (though maybe that is a generational thing – hard-faced oldster speaking here, reflecting on how Coronation Street now feels more Hollyoaks than Alan Bennett). And their special effects are (mostly) too good, and thus suffer in comparison with the beloved creakiness of those primitive yet very striking sets of the 60s and 70s, greatly enhanced by over-the-top music.
Taking these thoughts further, something that occurred to me last night was that the low-budget productions back then were served well by things considered constraints: the close focus on those stagey sets, the overwrought mannerisms hamming up clunky dialogue, that music, those cliffhangers. And no colour back at the start, but no loss in that, really. And most haunting of all, that theme tune made on a shoestring in the Radiophonic Workshop by Delia Derbyshire. (Who could invent a name like that?) Even the Tardis was a constraint in itself – an exercise in expansiveness. We knew that set was some flimsy, wobbly cellophane confection, but it was a thing of wonder. We were forced to use our imaginations, and our emotional investment spilled over. There could be great tension within the limits of these productions.
For this week’s writing experiment: Spin some magic within a very tight constraint you’ve created for yourself. Maybe a very confined space, and/or a very short span of time. You could, perhaps, create a time-travelling spaceship-in-disguise of your own, but if science fiction is not your genre perhaps you can compress lots of meaningful action into one small room that contains far more than its appearance might suggest. A small room could also be a small and very tightly organised but allusive stanza of poetry.
And now, too, we hear that the Clangers are coming back! Eek. I can’t take it! Long live the BBC.
I’ve just returned from a trip to Boulder. It was wonderful to be back there. Through my eyes I breathed in the vast open spaces of the high plains, the Front Range rising in the distance. Ah! That vista conjures up so much. I felt back home.
I took two buses to Loveland, thinking that Loveland, Colorado is one of the most magical names a town could dream of. When I changed buses I stood under a tremendous old tree in Longmont, and thought of Sal Paradise sleeping under a tremendous old tree in Longmont in On The Road. I beheld an even more tremendous old tree in the great sycamore that Naropa’s Arapahoe campus is built around.
I befriended a dog and a cat and a parrot, and saw again an old-friend dog and an old-friend cat, and I read some of a book about dogs, and I heard stories about squirrels and raccoons. I also heard some shocking stories about the floods in Colorado, about streets turned into rivers and houses swept away and rain that was silver and hammering, and shocking simply because it was so there. I went for a walk along Pine Street, visiting great friends as well as Mork and Mindy, and then passing by the house where we used to live, and finally heading to the Boulder Public Library, where I saw more flood damage.
I ate chile rellenos, and deep-fried Brussels sprouts, and espresso-glazed donuts, and an apple and kale salad that must rank among the best things I’ve ever eaten. Gluten-free has replaced soy as dietary neurosis. Lots of homeless people. I meandered down Pearl Street, and bought books in my favourite bookshops (the Boulder Book Store, Red Letter, and Trident); the weight of the twenty-five of them in our luggage confirm that print is not dead. I thrilled for various friends’ publications past, present and future. I went to yoga, and was taught how to speak to plants. I saw many old friends. Seeing old friends and meeting new ones was probably the best part of this trip.
A particular highlight was visiting a class at Naropa. Thank you for making me welcome, o writers of Experimental Prose, and for giving me a copper heart from the class shrine. Afterwards, I realised, this gift made me feel like the Tin Man. And there was I thinking I was more like Dorothy. (Ella: you make a great Wizard. Bhanu: you are a great teacher.)
This reminds me of another Dorothy, a member of the British Airways staff we befriended on trips through Denver airport when we lived in Colorado. She was English, from Malvern. She’d married an airman and moved to Colorado, another Dorothy in the wide open spaces of the American West, but this one a Midlander. She had the best stories, the best lines. ‘Here, have a bottle of champagne and a crap sandwich.’ ‘Have rods been through these?’ (She was talking about curtains, relative to customer service in England.) We like to think we are friends of Dorothy. And there’s no place like home. This Dorothy had homes in two places.
Even though my home is now London, Boulder will always feel like home to me in some way or other too. For various reasons, and because life is always complicated (and yes, these are First World problems), living in Boulder was not always easy, just as now living in London is not always easy, as any Londoner will agree, and as I discussed with natives of London in Colorado. And just as complicated are the attachments and nostalgias you can feel for a place you’ve left. Home is such a rich idea, but it can be complicated, can’t it?
But life goes on, and we make accommodations, and indeed we use the power of that word accommodate to settle ourselves into a place. What was instructive, a while back, was one of those Colorado-resident natives of London telling me that Boulder would always be a home for me. Even if I’m not living there, it simply occupies a space within me, and I just have to create space for that and let it be. It’s as easy as that. If we think in practical terms (a flight, a passport), every now and then we can physically go home again too: it’s always there, available, if we let it. And of course we are lucky today to have other ways to maintain connections too (Facebook has its uses). But most of all it’s a state of mind, or maybe the heart. The Dorothy stranded in Oz was looking for home, and eventually found home was wherever she made it, and perhaps however she made it; there’s no place like home, and that was Oz as much as Kansas.
I’m thinking too of the powerful conclusion of The Satanic Verses, and the ways in which its characters succeed (or fail) at creating homes for themselves. So many great and well-loved books are about the search for home.
For this week’s writing experiment: Write yourself back to another home of your own that you created for yourself. Somewhere you know well, even though you are no longer there. Somewhere you made home (rather than the home you were born into). A place you can return to, maybe. If you want, do this for a character of your creating. Or fashion an ‘I Remember’ out of your reminiscences of what once made someplace your home.
Establish a setting, and maybe people this landscape with a memorable character or two. Think about tone, maybe write with affection, and to bring that place to life you’ll probably need (as ever) concrete and specific details.
