Tag: speak its name

J. K. Rowling, symbolism, and context

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I thought that I really ought to write something about the recent kerfuffle around J. K. Rowling’s revelation that Remus Lupin’s lycanthropy is a metaphor for HIV, which I thought we all knew already, but apparently not.

More specifically, I thought that I really ought to write something about the claim, which took me right back to the Dumbledore-is-gay revelation, that if she wanted to write a gay character she should just write a gay character and stop fannying around with all this symbolism.

Then I thought that I really couldn’t face writing something about it.

Then I remembered that I already had.

Section 28 was in force when I was at school. This is what it said:

a local authority “shall not intentionally promote homosexuality or publish material with the intention of promoting homosexuality” or “promote the teaching in any maintained school of the acceptability of homosexuality as a pretended family relationship”

Local authorities are responsible for, among other things, public libraries and state schools, and one of the effects of this was the complete absence of LGBT characters in children’s and teen literature that was written or published in the UK. We didn’t have the British equivalents of David Levithan, Alex Sanchez, or Nancy Garden. Nobody would publish them. The one book with any queer characters in my school library that I remember was Dare, Truth or Promise – written and published in New Zealand. Mentioning Nancy Garden above reminds me that the school library did have The Year They Burned The Books. Oh, the irony.

(Somebody asked me which book that was in. It’s kind of a spoiler, but if you click on the tweet it should take you to the question and my answer.)

And it took a good few years for the UK teen publishing world to catch up, and yes, I do have a horse in this race:

Which is not to say that I think that it was a good idea to come out now (pun not exactly intended, but I’m not deleting it now I’ve noticed it) and say what the symbolism actually, like, means. If the reader didn’t pick it up the first time round then bashing them over the head with it isn’t going to help, and it’s just going to annoy the ones who got it, didn’t like it, and were doing their best to ignore it.

Genre, revisited

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I discovered a few months ago that there is in fact a term for ‘can’t call it young adult, because the characters are rapidly departing their teens’. It’s ‘new adult’, which means, so far as I can make out, ‘young adult but with slightly older characters and more swearing’.

This is useful to know. Because really, Speak Its Name is, in structure at least, closest to those old-fashioned boarding school books where we see a little bit of the main character’s family but everyone else’s is pretty much irrelevant, the focus is on a group of people of about the same age within a confined space, and all the action happens in term-time.

But with less coyness about same-sex attraction. And more swearing.

I don’t like the term much – ‘young adult’ always sounded patronising to me, and ‘new adult’ feels even more so – but it’s useful to have something to put in the search box.

University survival kit

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'it is also shiny, which is always good!'
‘It is also shiny, which is always good!’

My mother used, whenever one of my cousins (and I have a lot of cousins) turned eighteen with the intention of going to university, to buy them an electric kettle as a birthday present. We, the children, would get mugs to go with it. The result was a gift that was both symbolic and practical.

When I turned eighteen, one of my cousins returned the favour and gave me the purple box in the picture above. It contained:

  1. a mug, and two teabags
  2. a packet of instant soup
  3. a tin of baked beans
  4. a jar of Marmite
  5. a tin opener
  6. a potato peeler
  7. two tea-towels
  8. a bar of chocolate

It also contained two pages of (hilarious) instructions on the use of the above items, which has allowed me to reconstruct the contents at over a decade’s distance, and concluded:

9. The box. This will be useful for keeping things in. During your years at university you will come across many things that cannot be defined or categorised. Put these things in the box, to avoid having to define or categories them. It is also shiny, which is always good!

The contents have gone the way of all flesh – actually, the tin opener might still be knocking around – but the instructions and the box itself survive.

The things that I have apparently been unable to define or categorise, as evidenced by their inclusion in the box, are:

    1. my last pair of glasses
    2. a previous pair of glasses
    3. six fabric floral corsages
    4. a luggage label in the shape of a cat’s face
    5. two CDs of wedding photographs
    6. an enamel rose-shaped brooch
    7. a monocle
    8. one of those fancy plastic combs that’s meant to make it easier to do a French pleat, now completely useless to me
    9. an elastic band with a sequinned flower on it, which I suppose I could use as a bracelet these days
    10. seven bottles of nail varnish
    11. a pillbox full of glass-headed pins
    12. more safety pins than I can be bothered to count
    13. two small scallop shells
    14. a pair of nail clippers
    15. a quantity of small change in euros
    16. a toy car
    17. a badge saying ‘Altos prefer it underneath’
    18. a magnetic bookmark with my name on it, telling me that I’m ‘A female tower of strength’
    19. a brooch made of buttons and wire
    20. a cross and a fish made of clay, which date from the Methodist and Anglican Society Welcome Week event 2005, at a guess
    21. a medal of the Blessed Virgin Mary, provenance unknown.

Gosh. That was illuminating. And it saves me from making a cheap point about how the only thing I found that I was unable to define or categorise was myself, which I would otherwise be tempted to do.

No, my cousin attended to my practical needs. My aunt on the other side of the family, meanwhile, presented me with a stack of useful books and newspaper supplements. They included, as I recall, The Bluffer’s Guide to University, the Cambridge University Student Union guide to pretty much everything (my cousin – I have, as I’ve mentioned, a lot of cousins – was an elected rep of some sort), and several years’ worth of the ‘how to survive at university’ insert the Sunday Times produces annually. To this I added Gaudy Night and Dear Bob, which I think I must have received the previous Christmas, and which was an amusing, if incomplete, guide to being Christian at university.

Armed with all that, I did reasonably well, academically and socially, at university, and mostly enjoyed myself hugely. But the book I was missing was the one that said ‘there’s more than one way to be Christian, and that’s not incompatible with not being straight…’

So I wrote it. I’d love to think that it’ll make it into someone else’s university survival kit one day.

Mapping Barchester

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Strelsau
Strelsau, recreated from textual evidence in ‘The Prisoner of Zenda’, ‘Rupert of Hentzau’ and ‘The Heart of Princess Osra’

I’ve always had a thing for fictional countries. Ruritania, Evallonia, Syldavia, you name it. Gondal, Gaaldine and Angria. Slavonia. (Points if you can name the works they appear in.)

More recently – fine, over the last fifteen years – my focus has narrowed and I’ve become interested in fictional cathedral cities. Fictional English cathedral cities. I’m not aware of examples from outside my own country, but I may not have been paying attention.

There seem to be two main ways to create one.

You can rename an existing city and all its environs, as Susan Howatch does to make Salisbury into Starbridge. Or, to take a more extreme example, you can rename everything in an entire region, as Thomas Hardy does. Even Oxford – sorry, Christminster – isn’t safe.

Or you can be a little bit fuzzy about geography. You can imply that you’re referring to a real city –

The Rev. Septimus Harding was, a few years since, a beneficed clergyman residing in the cathedral town of ––––; let us call it Barchester. Were we to name Wells or Salisbury, Exeter, Hereford, or Gloucester, it might be presumed that something personal was intended; and as this tale will refer mainly to the cathedral dignitaries of the town in question, we are anxious that no personality may be suspected. Let us presume that Barchester is a quiet town in the West of England, more remarkable for the beauty of its cathedral and the antiquity of its monuments than for any commercial prosperity; that the west end of Barchester is the cathedral close, and that the aristocracy of Barchester are the bishop, dean, and canons, with their respective wives and daughters.

The Warden, Anthony Trollope

– or you can swear that you’re not . You can stretch the map and squeeze in an extra county or two:

The diocese of Lindchester is not large, squashed as it is between Lichfield to the south and Chester to the north; so don’t worry, we will not be travelling far.

Acts and Omissions, Catherine Fox

(Incidentally, I’m convinced that this is the only possible way to fit Ruritania in where Anthony Hope puts it: between Germany and Bohemia. Most adaptations make it far too small and far too far east. Roll up that map of Europe: this is fiction.)

My own approach is somewhere between the two. I plonked Stancester down on top of a real town (Ilchester – the crossroads is a dead giveaway if you look at a map of Roman Britain, though I appear to have drawn the below map of Stancester before visiting Ilchester and writing the chapter headings that deal with its history). The geography is plausible, but the rest is pretty much all made up. I suppose I think of it as a slightly alternate universe, where the railway went through there instead of through Yeovil, though I still haven’t worked out what that means for the Great Western line. I may have inadvertently erased Wells in the process. I didn’t mean to, but I’m not sure it’s plausible to have two cathedrals of such antiquity so close to each other.

Stancester
Stancester: the map I worked from, though it probably didn’t end up being entirely accurate

Or, of course, you can borrow somebody else’s, as Angela Thirkell did.

Or not put any thought into the matter at all, supplying no identifying detail. Kate Lace, I’m looking at you. And your Westhampton. Look, I know The Chalet Girl is filed under ‘romance’ or ‘chicklit’, but if you’re going to do Barchester you might put a little effort in. And do some research, and by ‘do some research’ I mean ‘not sending your Bible-bashing eco-warrior fundie bishop to a fundraising event wearing a “soutane”.’ I’m comparatively High Church – I once went to Sainsbury’s wearing a cassock – and I had to Google ‘soutane’. Turns out it’s a cassock.

Sorry, rant over.

For some reason there’s a lot more going on in the south and west than there is in the north and east, and if one assumed these cities all existed in the same universe England would have to reach further out into the Channel than it currently does. The Archbishop of Canterbury* (even Thomas Hardy didn’t overwrite Canterbury, so far as I know) has far more fictional dioceses to look after than does the Archbishop of York**. ‘Write what you know.’ Or, rather, ‘overwrite what you know’.

But where are they really? They’re not anywhere really, because this is fiction. Even if they started out being based on somewhere ‘real’, they become very different in their passage through the author’s head. Even if they keep the original name – Morse’s Oxford, for example – they remain a portrait of a city of thousands of souls as seen through a single pair of eyes.

And authors get things wrong, and so do readers. A recent reviewer thought that Speak Its Name had a very convincing Oxford atmosphere. I fear that Oxford would disagree. In fact, the point of Stancester is rather that it isn’t Oxford. Of current British students, only an extremely bitter Cambridge one would mistake Stancester for Oxford, and even they would only be pretending.

Besides, if I’d meant to write about Oxford, I’d have called it Christminster. Or would I? Never mind. The lovely thing about fictional places is that they aren’t real. You can write them any way you like, and write anything you like about them. Just make sure you get your soutane straight.

 

*Barchester; Christminster (plus everywhere else in Wessex); Starbridge; Westhampton (I would guess, unless maybe it’s meant to be somewhere in the Midlands?); Stancester, sorry…

** Lindchester… er, that’s it.

 

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Unlikely writing techniques 5: write whatever the hell you like

kathleenjowitt2 Comments

This is not exactly a new idea. I have heard it expressed thus:

Write drunk. Edit sober.

Google tells me that Hemingway didn’t say that. I don’t write drunk myself, because if I’m drunk I’m either in company or about to fall asleep. None the less, it points towards a helpful concept.

Or – which perhaps gets closer to the point that Hemingway might have been trying to make, assuming he’d said anything like, Write drunk, edit sober:

Begin by putting in everything you like. Finish by taking out everything you can.

I don’t know who said that, but I owe them a lot. Do you know? Google’s no help at all; it’s just sending me to sanctimonious anti-procrastination blogs.

Here are some important principles:

  1. Nothing is going to be perfect on a first attempt.
  2. If something is not fun, people are less likely to do it.
  3. There is nothing wrong with making it fun.

There is a lot of suspicion about this kind of thinking. Received wisdom says If It’s Not Difficult, It’s Not Worthwhile, and No Pain, No Gain, and other upright, joyless maxims.

To all of which I say, well, maybe. But I feel very strongly that the reverse does not hold true. The fact that a writer made themselves absolutely miserable during the writing process does not automatically make the finished project readable. In fact, it makes it very likely that there will never be a finished project.

What writing whatever the hell you like looks like will vary. Here are some examples.

Skipping the difficult bits

I’ll say more about this another day, because I suspect it’s of limited application, but I am living proof that there are more ways to approach writing than –

Begin at the beginning, and go on until you get to the end, and then stop.

If what’s in my head at the moment is the climactic battle scene, then I write the climactic battle scene and trust that the rest will follow. Personally, I find it very useful to have something to aim at.

You might not want to skip straight to the climactic battle scene, but if you’re having trouble working out how your antagonists meet in the first place, it’s worth beginning with the very vivid picture that you’ve had in your head for weeks, with one of them hiding up a tree and the other eating a picnic underneath it. Or whatever it is.

But really, when the entire internet is banging on about how important it is to nail the first line, is it surprising that many writers never get to the second line? Skip the first line. It’ll come in its own good time.

Writing ‘unpopular’ themes

Anyone who’s interested in being published conventionally by somebody else should probably skip this section, because I’m writing this from a place where I don’t give a damn about pleasing anybody else, and I’ve never worked out how to please a publisher.

Nobody this side of the Pond wants to publish a book about an evangelical Christian lesbian at university, with bonus internecine student politics. But I wanted to write it, and it turned out that a fair few other people wanted to read it. And it may sound like a statement of the obvious, but if I hadn’t been writing what I wanted, I doubt I’d have been able to finish it.

If all of us stuck to writing what publishers thought would sell, fiction would be very pale, male and stale. The #WeNeedDiverseBooks hashtag exists for a reason, and if you have more patience than me and are prepared to persuade a  mainstream publisher to pick up a story that looks a bit different from everything else on the shelves then I wish you the very best of luck.

And, not to seem too serious, if you want to write about Romans when conventional wisdom says it’s going to be Vikings for the next five years, then go with the Romans.

Writing ‘unnecessary’ things

I also put in all sorts of self-indulgent in-jokes, trying-too-hard symbolism, author filibusters, and mots d’escalier, because it amuses me to do so. Sometimes ‘what I’d have said to Mrs Smith about my missing homework if only I’d thought of it in time’ becomes a piece of sparkling dialogue. Once, writing under a different name, I gave the heroine a Cousin Teresa in a nod to the Saki story, and Cousin Teresa ended up a very important character. There’s a bit in Speak Its Name that got there purely because I’d been dealing with too many standing orders committees and wanted to relieve my feelings by writing a truly incompetent motion.

Sometimes… Well, that’s where we get to:

The second half

You will have noticed that I’ve talked a lot about the ‘putting in’, the ‘drunk writing’, and not much about the ‘sober editing’, the ‘taking out’. That’s partly because you may end up taking out less than you expect of what you put in when you were writing what the hell you felt like. Or you may not. I don’t know. Rory’s dreadful motion to the Students’ Union stayed in; Peter’s thoughts on Bristol VRs didn’t. Nor did quite a lot of stuff that seemed very necessary and worthy when I wrote it.

But it’s mostly because my main point today is about having fun, and giving oneself permission to have fun. I might talk more about editing another time, but in the meantime I’m going to refer you to Joanne Harris, who talks more sense about writing than pretty much anyone else on Twitter.

None of which is to say that editing cannot be fun, or at the very least satisfying. I rather enjoy it, myself (and don’t think I don’t know about cutting huge chunks that I really loved writing); I understand that for others it can feel like cutting off one’s own arm. In which case, changing the metaphor may help.

I try to think of it like this: collecting a hundred thousand words was like quarrying a block of marble out of a hillside, and the editing is removing everything that doesn’t look like a story.

 

Talk of the Town

 

August Reviews

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Reading Twitter this evening, I’ve become aware of an initiative called #AugustReviews, which encourages readers to go to Amazon and leave one review on one book that they’ve read. This post by Terry Tyler gives a comprehensive explanation of the why and wherefore (and this post by Rosie Amber gives a very thorough description of the how, and the how it doesn’t have to be as intimidating as one might think).

I’m ambivalent about Amazon myself. As a good trade unionist I try to avoid buying things on there (I live in Cambridge, not far from Heffers and a huge quantity of charity shops; I own a Kobo; generally this is fairly easy for me) but it’s an ill wind, etc, and Amazon has been very good for independent authors. Me included. And yes, we like reviews, and no, the book didn’t have to come from Amazon in the first place.

Mine is here (UK) and here (US) if you’re suddenly feeling the urge to leave a review of it. But I think I’d be behind this idea even if I didn’t have a horse in the race, and I’d encourage you to review any book you’ve enjoyed. At the very least it’ll cheer an author up.

Review at the Cosy Dragon

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A four-star review for Speak Its Name over at the Cosy Dragon, who says:

I think it offers a unique entry into being queer in a Christian community, and I think it can help many people in their journey towards being comfortable with themselves

She questions whether it’s realistic for so few of my student characters to have jobs – and yes, it is indeed a UK thing. Of course, UK things have gone tits-up of late, with tuition fees heading north and interest rates on student loans stratospheric, and if I were starting from scratch today I would probably give a few more of my characters part-time work during term time. In fact:

Peter – probably, but he still has to find time to be a sacristan. What I might do would be to give Tanya an administrative assistant as well as a pastoral assistant, and make that Peter.

Georgia – definitely, though it’s possible that she’s also getting some paid music gigs – soloist for Stancester Choral Society oratorios, etc.

Will – no, still too rich to need a job.

Olly – yeah, why not?

Colette – no, when you’re doing a science you don’t have time to do much else.

Becky – yes, though where she finds the energy I don’t know.

But:

Lydia – no, she’s always been discouraged from doing it at home, and has assumed that the rules for university are the same.

So there you go. What they do in the holidays is, of course, another matter – even Will probably does an internship or two – and the only one who definitely doesn’t have a summer job is Lydia.

 

 

What you think the project is, and what the project really is

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Minor spoilers for Speak Its Name in this, including an extract from a chapter very near the end.

Visibility charm
Visibility charm

I mentioned last time that my main purveyor of author tracts (warning: that’s a link to TV Tropes, and if you follow it you may lose the rest of the day) in Speak Its Name was Peter. Which is not really surprising, when you consider that the book started out as a story of how getting too interested in student and/or Christian politics can play havoc with what you thought was a vocation to ordained ministry. That’s pretty much where I was when I started writing it, after all, so it made sense to bestow some of my own opinions upon the character who was dealing with that.

The other one was Abby, who is Lydia’s cousin, and who is in some ways much closer to an author avatar (TV Tropes again), or at least an author caricature. (‘A self-insert who turns up at the end to pontificate,’ was how I put it to one of my editors.) I am not blonde, or pregnant, or given to wearing pink, but at the time of writing I was very aware that I looked a lot like the Perfect Christian Woman. And – aside from the fact that my family is much less of a clusterfuck than the Hawkins – this was very much what my experience looked like.

‘What I wanted to say,’ Abby said, ‘was that I know that our family is not at all helpful when it comes to relationships that happen in anything like the real world, and that I know that your parents are if anything less helpful than my parents and that – if you wanted me to – I would come out.’

Lydia choked on her prosecco. ‘What?’

Abby told Colette, in a stage whisper, ‘I said it wasn’t a helpful family.’ Then, in more serious tones. ‘I’m bi.’

Lydia could think of nothing to say. Colette, clearly amused, said, ‘She looked less shocked when I told her I had a crush on her.’

Abby smiled, though it looked like an effort. ‘I wasn’t ever going to tell anyone. Not in the family, at least. It never occurred to me that I might not be the only one.’

‘Same,’ Lydia just managed to squeak. ‘Does Paul know?’

‘Of course – I wouldn’t have married him if I couldn’t tell him that.’

‘People must do,’ Lydia said. ‘Oh, God, this must happen all the time.’

Abby nodded. ‘I know four or five – happily married, most of us, still in love, still Christian, still trying to find a way to be truthful, always knowing how bloody lucky we are: that we could so easily have gone the other way, fallen for someone we couldn’t take to church with us…’

Except… when I was reading it through, on the second to last editing pass, I was struck by the horrifying thought, Good grief, that sounds miserable.

And then I remembered that was me, that the last paragraph there describes precisely the way I thought about myself and my faith and my bisexuality at the time I was writing. I might as well have put it in there so that I could say to anyone who asked, ‘You know the bit with Abby at the end? That’s basically where I am.’

Not any more. Somewhere in the writing process I’d moved far beyond where Abby was. I was mostly out, as opposed to being mostly closeted. I’d stopped thinking that the only appropriate way for me to be bisexual was quietly. I’d realised what a mess I’d made of myself by trying to do that. I’d started speaking up, and out.

The project is never what you think it is. I thought Speak Its Name was about vocation, and politics, and faith, and sexual orientation, and it is, but it is mostly about being OK with who I am, and I had to learn more about that before I could finish it. Writing a book changed the book, and changed me.

I suspect that writing Wheels will have something to teach me about working too hard and physical capacity and the importance of not doing things. I asked to learn more about that, after all.

I suspect that I do not currently have the breadth of understanding to imagine what it’s going to teach me. I suspect that it’s going to go far beyond juggling my working patterns and keeping every other weekend free. I suspect that it’s going to take me apart and put me back together again, and maybe I’ll notice while it’s actually happening, and maybe I won’t. Maybe, like last time, I’ll just happen to glance back over my shoulder and think, Good grief, is that where I was? What a very long way I’ve come.