Moving Between Virtual Worlds
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…