Beryl Fletcher

Blog Number 12: 26 January 2009

This blog is three days late. I am deep into marking short stories that are part of the assessment for the creative writing summer school set up by Peter Wells. We have over forty students with a wide range of abilities. Some of the students are already working at a professional level.

It is interesting to see a difference between how men and women write. Not so much in terms of technique but in choice of subject matter. The men write more densely plotted stories and they are not afraid to place their work into well defined genres like science fiction or crime. The women tend to write stories about loss of love or betrayal or from the point-of-view of a child.

So this past week has been all about judging the work of others. Meanwhile, my own writing of the novella has stalled. Hannalore and Juno are in limbo, freeze framed, waiting for me to return and rescue them from the little town of Piopio, circa 1920.

I remind myself for the hundredth time that writing long fictional works requires a long period of solitude and peace. I really enjoy teaching, especially creative writing. Each time I go into a teaching situation, I learn (and re-learn) something important about the craft of writing.

But teaching eats up the imagination; it drinks from the same fountain that provides sustenance for the writer’s own work. Sometimes the fountain dries up. It has something to do with the relentlessness of messing about with written language, both yours and the work of others, day in, day out.

Sometimes I become overwhelmed with language; I begin to lose words, or invent new ones. I try to keep a balance in my everyday life by doing boring tasks like cleaning or having banal conversations in chat rooms or on the phone but in the end, the lure, the terror, of language pulls me back.

I look at the lives of my two sisters, one older, one younger than me. They are both retired. They spend their days playing golf, tending to their homes and gardens, reading books and enjoying their friends.  Sometimes I envy their freedom from the wretched drive to create a fictional world that invites me into its maw each day in order to chew me up and spit me out.

There’s only one thing worse than writing each day and that’s NOT writing.  If it lasts more than a week or two I enter a stage of grief. It is so difficult to put this feeling into words. Grief doesn’t really cut it. It’s more like a complete cancelling out of self.

Writing this blog helps. It forces a nameless dread into the straitjacket of written words, and once that is done, the fear tends to decrease. It works for me and that is all I know.

 Blog Number 11: 19 January, 2009

The week just passed has been (for me) a typical juggling act in the life of a working writer. Not the usual problems of being pulled from my desk by the lure of the summer sun, or the demands of family life. I am (mercifully) at that stage in my life where my adult children lead interesting and productive lives and I have no further obligation to my much loved parents who are both deceased. No, the juggling act refers to moving across virtual worlds and being able to switch from one to another without forgetting which world you currently occupy.  

In the course at the University of Waikato where I am the tutor for Peter Well’s Creative Writing Summer School the students are currently involved in presenting their book reviews to the class for part of the assessment of the course. With almost fifty students choosing radically different books to review, the task of keeping track of them requires careful documentation. This is the world of the present, in terms of both action and the outcomes of action on the part of the student.

Back at my desk at home, I return to the 1920s, the era I have chosen for the setting of my first attempt at writing a series of linked novellas that will range across a hundred years, 1920 to the year 2020.  

I have never attempted to write within a past era before. I have used the device of a person going over his or her past by the use of ‘flash backs’ but I have not written a book where the point-of-view of the main character comes directly from the era. I am developing a greater respect for writers who do write historical fiction. Every bit of dialogue must be as close to the setting as possible and the geographical and landscape where the characters live must be as authentic as possible. The biggest problem is the overuse of research ‘facts’. It is so easy to end up writing descriptions of characters as museum pieces instead of living breathing real people or falling in love with your own research to the extent of using it regardless of the requirements of the plot.

For example, I had to create a small scene in the last fragment (14) of my novella where Mr Cattermole and his companions are spotted by a group of workmen walking along a dirt road outside Piopio. It is necessary for the future plot that Mr Cattermole was seen with the two young women who were not supposed to be in his company.

During my research, I had discovered a fascinating photograph of workmen (taken about 1915) burning clay on a carefully constructed log fire in the middle of a dirt road. After a few days the gray clay would have had hardened into brick and turned a beautiful shade of red. This cheap road surface was called burnt papa. As soon as I saw the photograph, I remembered seeing as a child the remnants of red roads around the back blocks of Kawhia and Raglan. When they were wet with rain, they not only looked beautiful but they provided a safe surface on the mud roads. So when I wrote the scene where Mr Cattermole is sprung by the workman Clive, I incorporated the sight of one of these burnt papa make-shift kilns.

When I do the rewrites for the final edit, I will constantly ask myself this question; does this section use the technologies and the language etc of the past as an enhancement of the plot and the character development or is it in the text merely because I had enjoyed reading it as part of my research of the past?

Every day for three hours (except Thursday, our longest teaching day) I move into the past with my characters in the novella. For about an hour after I have finished my daily quota of fiction writing, I still live in the past. Or at least my head does. It sometimes requires a physical wrench like turning on the TV news or watching a soap opera to bring me back to the present.

This past week, the converse happened. I was flung into the future when I read one of most compelling books I have ever read: Climate Wars, by Gwynne Dyer. (Random House Canada: 2008).

I found it hard to live in the present after devouring this book. I had meant to give it a brief glance but it is so well written and so well researched that I could not put it down. Going back to the 1920s with Hannalore was even more difficult. I started to drift away from her era and into the future. Suddenly, I had one of my characters lecturing others on the folly of burning off the great forests to make arable land for sheep and cows. Methane alert! I had to make good use of the delete button to try to pull the text back to an earlier zeitgeist.  

Some writers I know refuse to read books while they are writing a piece of long fiction in case they find the other writer’s style and plot seeping into their own work. This has never bothered me. What is becoming more difficult is this frenetic moving between virtual realities due in large part to the changes in world-wide communication that demand instant response.

The past, the present and the future are no longer discrete states. They have collapsed inwards upon each other. The power of Dyer’s book lies in the way that he sometimes  writes from the point-of-view of a future historian looking back on catastrophes that have yet to happen. The frightening thing is that these events are all based on current knowledge and research.

The next section of Hannalore was posted yesterday on Pages. Fragment 14 is the new episode to read. Hannalore and Juno and Mr Cattermole leave the shelter of the raupo hut and travel through the bush towards the small town of Piopio. Mr Cattermole has not told them where they are going to stay once they are in town but Hannalore knows that it is something to do with the officials hunting Juno in order to place her within an institution. Now read on…

Blog Number Ten: 10 January, 2009

It’s Friday night. And hot. The TV news contains the usual holiday news: murders, road accidents, giant jellyfish, drownings, and yesterday, the most bizarre incident, two young brothers killed by the collapse of a massive ice overhang at Fox Glacier. 

New Zealand people (and tourists) seem to throw caution to the winds during the summer holidays. Talkback radio ran hot on how stupid people are to forget life jackets, to be beneath an ice shelf, to go hiking alone, to get drunk and fall into rivers, to go out to sea on a jet ski, to roar along rivers in jet boats, to drink a bottle of whisky and get stuck up on a ledge in a remote bush area… it goes on and on.

There is a puritanical streak in the New Zealand psyche that loves to denigrate any individual who comes to a sticky end. For example, there has been a spate of fatal house fires, the latest killing four children. The cause of the fire was a chip pan that was left unattended. I could hardly believe my ears when people rang a local talkback radio with various comments on the tragedy that ranged from claiming that the parents were drunk (not true) to bad mouthing the parents for allowing their brood to eat cheap filling foods like chips instead of healthy snacks like avocado and brie and smoked salmon. (Words fail me). After rubbishing the victims, the callers quite often called for further legislation or an enquiry into the particular Government Department that ‘should have’ prevented the accident in the first place. The cultural reaction to tragedy is a fascinating topic and one that writers have often mined. The New Zealand attitude (and I confess I am sometimes guilty of this) claims that everyone else (except me) is a bloody idiot, and why doesn’t the government DO something about it?

This week, Peter Wells and I began to teach the summer school on Creative Writing at the University of Waikato. We were surprised and somewhat disconcerted when fifty students turned up on the first day. The room was crowded and hot and some of the students had to wait until some extra chairs could be found. But the students seemed to be a good humoured mob and keen to learn. The in-class exercise on creating a character devised by Peter went well.

Forty-three students came to the second session. We had a larger room this time and just enough chairs. This class is much bigger than the one we ran last year and I think this will change the interaction between us and the students. There may be less time to give the students the individual help that we were able to provide last year. However, my impression so far is that there are a greater number of students this year who have already had some exposure to creative writing.

I began the lecture by covering some of the technical aspects of writing the short story using the wonderful story by Tolstoy, How Much Land Does a Man Need? I followed this with discussion and analysis of a few New Zealand stories including the recently published story Closer by Peter Wells and My Beautiful Balloon by Carl Nixon.

Peter Wells finished off the class by talking about the book On Chesil Beach written by Ian McEwan. This was to give the students some guidance to the format and style of the book reviews that they will be presenting to the class starting from next week.

Saturday, 10 January, 2009

I feel somewhat saturated with fiction today so after finishing this blog I had planned to read the first few chapters of the book my sister Alison lent me. She called it a ‘must read’.  It’s called Climate Wars, and is written by Gwynne Dyer. I’ve just flicked through the first page of the introduction. Dyer, a respected commentator on international conflict and socio-political change, goes way beyond giving us a run down of the science of climate change. He points out that political realities will override most attempts to co-ordinate the measures required to heal the wounds that we have inflicted upon the planet. He predicts a rise in the use of violence in the food wars, the water wars, and the civil wars that are to come.  

Oh hell. Come back fiction; all is forgiven.

So sorry not to be able to post the next episode of The Black Stones of Hannalore this week. No, this is not a case of writer’s block. The reason is the course on Creative Writing and the extra work and energy it has required to get it off the ground. I will try to behave myself this coming week and work harder to write the next fragment. This is more for my benefit than the readers. I know from bitter experience that once you leave characters stuck in a particular place they sometimes wander off and do things that contradict their back story and the sense of character that you are trying to convey.

Blog Number Nine: 2 January 2009

Mid December: I have begun to write the second part of my novella The Black Stones of Hannalore. I should be honest and say that I have almost begun to write.

It’s Tuesday morning two days before the old year of 2008 dies for ever. I am sitting at my laptop not writing. Waiting for the first two paragraphs to begin Part Two.  Waiting waiting. There are so many ways of starting a new part of the story. An added problem is that as a novelist, I have a natural inclination to spin out the lives of my characters in minute detail that could ruin the concise format of the novella that I am trying to write.   

To make matters worse, I keep looking out of my workroom to make sure that my giant tomato plants have not fallen over with the weight of the fruit. My partner Mike had to come to the rescue with some hooks and stout cord to attach the plants to the wooden box where they are trapped within tomato cages. Just as well he was a Wolf Cub in Canada during his boyhood. Out of the dim past came the memory of a couple of professional looking knots invented no doubt to fasten a sail to the bowsprit or some other nautical function.

The tomatoes have become so large and top heavy that when the westerly blew yesterday and the rain fell in horizontal strings, I feared for the plants that I have watched and watered for two months now.

See how writers divert their imagination? Here I am worrying how to introduce Hannalore and Juno into the frontier town of Piopio in the King Country and how to reveal the relationship between a man that Hannalore is about to meet and her lost mother… and all I can do is think about are two tomato plants that have grow too big for their boots.

It’s now Thursday the 1^st of January 2009.

A hot afternoon. Progress! I think… Outside, the motor mowers roar across the extensive grounds of the boy’s high school just opposite my house. School is out until late February. I miss the raucous scenes at the bus stop when the boys are let out of their cages each afternoon. I once used the noise of the boys to excuse myself from the keyboard until I realised that I was playing mind games. We writers excel at making excuses not to write. It is something to do with the deep terror engendered when creating imaginative stories in written language. Once written, once published, they stare back at us flawed, banal and trivial. The only safe way to cope with this is to stop writing. Or hide your work away. Or grow a thick skin. Or learn to love it. 

But I’ve started to write Part Two and although it is painfully slow, I think that the ‘voice’ and the characters that I have established carry over well from the first part of the story.  I’ll leave the readers to decide if it works or not.

I have worked out over the years a system that seems to work for me. I understand the fatal error of distraction. Each morning I try out my excuses why I cannot write today. Too busy, too tired etc etc. But I know from experience that writing long works of fiction requires a certain stubborn doggedness that has some kinship with athletes who train each day for years to produce the desired effect in one event. The ‘writing’ part of the brain needs to be used each day. It does not need to be a long workout; three hours is my limit when writing the first draft. I consider it a good work day if I produce 300 to 400 words in this time. Little and often seems to be the answer. For me anyway.

The other thing that works for me is that I play CDs that seem to fit the mood of the section I am writing. Classical mostly, not opera though. Anything with words must be banned because I begin to listen to the words and this diverts me from the ‘words’ I am battling with on screen.

For those of you following the story of The Black Stones of Hannelore go to the PAGES menu on the right hand side of your screen and click on Hannelore: Part Two.