Life as a House

16th December 2012

Nothing to do with writing, I just want to mention Sandy Hook Elementary and the atrocity that happened there on December 14th. I want to say, "Wake Up America! Look around you - other developed countries manage to incorporate freedom and the strictest gun control. You're being manipulated by a thoroughly dishonest body called the NRA, ad it needs to stop before one more innocent person is gunned down by a madman."  There, I said it. And I'm not sorry.

Now to things literary: When I first set out to write my oeuvre, I wanted to get five novels under my belt, so that if one sold, I would have an easy time of it following up with others. I didn't want to be under pressure to produce, because, as we all know, the muses need to fly free. So, sitting here waiting for the machinery to take me onto the next phase of the publishing process, my mind naturally travelled towards a sequel. I started one tentatively, and all kinds of things started to happen in the story that I hadn't anticipated. Often writing feels like walking into a screening room for an already completed film. I sat down and started to watch, and it was pretty interesting. So, I've written fifty pages, which is a sixth of a book, and I have no idea how it is going to unfold. But I do like the space to be still and listen to the story come.

There was an article on writing in The New York Times earlier this month called "The Art of Being Still," by Silas House. Can't he get a Pulitzer just for his name? It should be a new category:  Best Author's Name. What else could he have been but a writer with a name like that? He could have worked in construction and caused a few chuckles. But he is a writer, and what he was saying in the article was how writers creates their own stillness inside the most mundance tasks, that you can't actually wait until life conspires to give you uninterrupted time to write your great opus. You just have to find it, and if you have something to say you will.

So, excerpt four from the current novel, "Veil of Time." Chapter Four: Back in her own time, Maggie longs to get back to Dunadd AD 735. She hasn't yet met Fergus, but she has spent some time with the Sula the druidess.  She still thinks she's dreaming....

"Something in me it is that pulls me to fire.  I tug my raincoat on and climb to the fort in the wind today, stopping at the cleft of the rock where in my dream the gates stood. I remember them down to their heavy wooden smell and the knot in the wood above the sliding hatch.  And I notice on my way up this time, and wonder why I have never noticed before, several holes in the rock where the gate posts must once have been lodged. There’s a stain of rust leaking out from iron rods that must still exist somewhere deep in the rock. I gain the flat grassy area where the houses stood in my dream, but now instead of buildings, I am standing amongst rubble, half submerged in grass, looking like nothing at all. 

On the summit, I sit on the little ledge of stone left from the original seat in the witch’s hut. If I close my eyes, I can hear the snap of the fire, smell the drying herbs hanging from the rafters. Even now you can see why the ancient people picked Dunadd as a fort, for it looks straight across the Mhoine Mhor, a great stretch of peat moss leading down to the Atlantic.  Off to the south, through the dips of the foothills, you can see mountains; to the north and east great forests rise and fall, and along the valley floor the River Add wraps itself around the fort before snaking through The Moss, as though it really would prefer not to get to the sea at all. The sun is setting behind the islands, casting the world in an orange wash. From below, only the raucous call of the pheasant interrupts the stillness."

Darlings

7th December 2012
The literary admonition to kill your darlings has been ascribed to several authors. I thought it was Auden, others say Faulkner. Here is Stephen King harping on about it: "Kill you darlings, kill your darlings, even when it breaks your egocentric little scribbler's heart, kill your darlings."
But whoever its author, it remains a very good rule for any writer to impliment. The "darlings" in question are not just certain flowery phrases by which you aim to impress, but those thoughts, expressions, pictures, that have a personal weight or meaning for you but act as dead weight in your writing.  You're going through an edit of something you have written, and there's an illusion, almost a private one, that gives you a bolt of joy (hence the "darling") and it takes all your strength to highlight the phrase and nix it. You almost have to close your eyes. Sometimes it's whole pages. I have had entire characters that fell into this category - someone I once knew and want to honour, but they're getting in the way of the story. Kill your darlings. It hurts, but kill 'em anyway.
One darling I won't be killing any time soon, because my protagonist Maggie would protest, is her love interest in the eighth century, Fergus MacBridghe (MacBreej, I want to write it out phonetically, so no one mispronounces it, but that's just one of those darlings that needs to get nixed.) This passage is from Chapter Three, when Fergus is first introduced:
"The call of an owl muted the subtler sounds; wings fluttered suddenly to Fergus's left, a good portent, the druidess would say. He had not meant to be away this long, too long since the day he left his daughter in the arms of her grandmother. Already, in his absence, the celebrations for her eighth year had come and gone.  Two years since the plague had taken her mother, and now there was talk among the Britons of another round of the pestilence coming up from the Sassenachs in the south.  If it spread this far north, he would take his daughter to the people who lived away from Dunadd, in the houses on the lochs, until the danger had passed. Illa was all he had left of his wife and he meant to hold onto her.

Fergus leaned forward into the smell of his horse, ran the coarse strands of her mane between his fingers. Horses were like the Druids in a sense, hearing and seeing more than they should. Only a little while now and he would be home--not the home he had shared with his wife, for he had closed that door two years ago after the body had been burned."

The Writer's Compass

December 1st 2012

"The most essential gift for a good writer is a built-in, shock-proof, shit detector. This is the writer's radar."

I think Hemingway has hit on something very important in this quote. It's what Nietzsche referred to has having "psychological antennae." Someone once descirbed writing a novel as moving through a deep forest at night with a flashlight. But for that you need an inner compass. You need to know you'e going in the right direction, even though you are only consciously aware of the few trees in front of you.

And it would be a  mistake to interpret Hemingway's "shit detector," as an excuse for cynicism. The modern era has happily latched onto that one, because it's easy and instantly gratifying.  The writer's "shit detector" should be a highly private faculty, a radar screen behind the eyes, an instrument of  navigation, that, to my mind, is the umbilical cord to the source of all creativity that lies in the collective consciouness. The "shit detector" is best at routing out what is ego or mere circumstance. It's also a muscle, and it atrophies if not used. It's located deep inside the body, and you have to listen carefully or its message goes unheard.

Last week I posted a paragraph from the first chapter of my novel "Veil of Time." Due to popular demand (!), here comes another - this time from chapter two. To fill you in: my protagonist, Maggie, has moved into the cottage at the base of Dunadd Fort in rural Scotland. She has a history of seizures - in fact she is biding her time at Dunadd until the lobectomy surgery that should end these for good. Her medication usually takes care of them, but the following one slips through, and we begin to sense that her stay at Dunadd is going to bring more than she had counted on. This early in the story, she thinks these are just  dreams, but , as time goes by, the plot will thicken:

"After the seizure comes sleep.  I dream I am at Dunadd--not the present Dunadd, because in my dream there are high walls all up the side of the hill where nowadays the footpath meanders through heather and bracken.  I am standing where the house ought to be, looking down on the river, only this time there’s a footbridge, and across the field aren’t sheep but a village of houses, all thatched and smoking, not rectangular stone houses but round houses made of wattle and mud, houses that look for all the world like an African village.

I have had dreams before in the aftermath of seizures: I have argued points of theology with Mary Queen of Scots, who wasn’t the blockhead history has made her out to be. I have strolled along the beaches of Saint Helena with Napoleon insisting to me that he was being poisoned. But nothing has struck quite so close to home as seeing Dunadd in this way, with goats tethered and children running barefoot, with great waves of drumming and singing, and at the back of it all, a low murmuring like a didgeridoo. I must have arrived during some kind of festival.

Far From the Madding Crowd

26th November 2012

Late with this blog, but now my running over the globe is done for a while. Still, my internal monologue hasn't caught up with me, and my thoughts are still flying all over the place, yielding no place to settle.
So, now is as good a time as any to post a paragraph from "Veil of Time." If my publisher would let me, I could post a paragraph a week and let out my novel sowly like a fishing line, Dickens-style. But I have been promised I can post an entire chapter further down the editing line. So stay posted.
This passage is from page 2 of the novel. We have established Maggie Livingstone as the protagonist, and the fact that she has recently left her husband, Oliver Griggs, back in the city of Glasgow and moved to a cottage far from the madding crowd.

"What is this place called Dunadd? It is shades of green and all covered with bracken; it smells of moss and rain pouring for days on end. It is grey stone walls and cloud and bog and black slugs. It is sea and seagull cry, and the rough call of the pheasant. It is all these things and it is not that far from Glasgow, if you are a crow. If you are a bird, you fly high over a treeless mountain pass, over waterfalls and fingers of sea lochs that take a person in a car three hours to drive. Dunadd is a great rock rising out of a wide valley that runs from the hills that encircle it down to the sea at Crinan. It’s not the place it once was, when Crinan was Scotland’s main port, and wine and spices, jewelry and slaves were brought to Dunadd to be traded.

Mornings in my little cottage beneath Dunadd are so quiet now; the clouds are low and drizzling. Glasgow, where I lived another life with a husband and children, has no currency here. My children, who look at me from their picture frames when I awake, are not known here. Neither is Oliver Griggs of the University of Glasgow. Not even Margaret Griggs is known here, because I have unearthed the old Maggie Livingstone of childhood and pasted it over the Margaret I had become." 

Literary Scaffolding

9th November 2012

I came back to the United Sates with a heightened sense of place. Scottish place.  If there is to be a sequel to "Veil of Time," it's going to have to take place in the grounds of what is now Scone (SKOON) Palace in Perthshire. There was once a village called Scone here, but the overlords didn't like having plebs alongside their Cedars of Lebanons and peacocks, so when they built the palace in the early 1800's, they dismantled the village and reinvented it into the "New Scone" village of today, about two miles to the east. Of course, not a word was mentioned about plebs and their unsavoury lives; it was all couched in terms of progress (isn't it always?) and good will to common man. All that's left of the village is the Mercat Cross (Market Cross) where the plebians would gather and hold court.
But I wandered around the place where the village once stood, around the graveyard where they buried their dead (even "progress" recognises certain limits.) I took in Moot Hill where, once the center of the Celtic World had moved here from Dunadd, the Scottish kings were crowned (most notably Robert the Bruce, if you'll remember your Braveheart.) So, this area is replete with voices, and I want to go even further back than The Bruce and discover it in its heyday as a Pictish centre, and, for my purposes, the religious (read Druid) capital of old Alba.
I'm doing this in case a sequel is forthcoming, and so far I don't know if it is. But the first step was to get a sense of the place, and that's what I got, peacocks notwithstanding. I can't bring to mind an author I admire who doesn't start here: Bronte in Yorkshire, Lawrence in Nottinghamshire, Steinbeck in Monterey, Galvin in Wyoming, Lewis Grassic Gibbon in north east Scotland.
While I was in Scotland, I drove past a house where my family had once lived in a nice park area of Glasgow. When you're a child, you don't just live in a place, you absorb it and it takes up residence in you alongside other influencing features such as parents, syblings and friends. It beomes forged in the smithy of your soul (James Joyce in Dublin, let us not forget) into the armiture that your sensiblity will rest upon. Streets, signs, landscapes, a people.
Of course, Scone in Perthshire doesn't sing in my soul like Dunadd in Argyll, just because I came to it late. But it is humming. Just like the much-photographed Stones of Callanish on the Isle of Lewis, which I've only visited once. For a writer, if you get a humming place, the rest should be history. I'm waiting to see if this one is.

Bronte Fire

The Bronte museum. In Haworth, Yorkshire, is maybe my favourite museum - partly, I think, because it is housed in the actual Parsonage where the Bronte's lived all that time ago in the 1800's. So the couch, on which Emily uttered her famous last words "I shall see a doctor now," is still in the front parlor, and the father's bowler hat still rests on the table beside his chair. There is no touching, of course - the single most thing I dislike about museums. I want to touch so badly, I find myself sizing up the thickness of the glass, the paces it would take for the curator to get to me from his post at the door. Wherever possible, I can't help but ignore the "Please do not touch," signs - there's too much at stake. Being there turns me into a medium who needs to wrest what she can from the objects: vibes, a sense of the people who long ago touched them.  Emily's painting set is just the way she left it, with a depression in the block of black ink that she made with her paint brush. I look out at the rolling hills she saw from her window, and I am Kathy listening through the wind for Heathcliffe. It all comes rushing in, down to the weak limbs that come from her last consumptive days.  Houses, objects, once owned, I firmly believe, absorb a sort of psychic energy. It's there for the tapping, and it is one of the reasons I keep going back to Haworth to find the Brontes.
The other museum I went to this week, "The Burns Experience," celebrates the life of out great national bard, Robert Burns, author of "Auld Lang Syne," sung by all on New Year's Eve, but understood only by a few. Oddly enough, there's not that much to experience at The Michael Jackson Experience, sorry, The Burns Experience. It is just trying too hard, with verses writ large on the walls and on the glass cases wherein lie the letters you are trying to read unsuccessfully. The constantly running tapes of readings and songs squeezes out what might otherwise have been gleaned from his walking stick or his jacket (I reached past the sign and closed my fingers around the edge of his desk.)
I'm sure he's there somewhere, waiting to get a look in, but he's more present in the "neeps and haggis" in the restaurant than in the spirit of the place.
It is important, I think, to look back and bring these greats from the past into our company. They represent a pinnacle of achievement for our race and wait to provide stepping stones for us to go further, or at least step along with them. I like to think they take an interest in us. That's why I take the opportunity to wander around the parsonage in Haworth waiting for something to catch a spark, a little flame once harbored in the hands of those sisters, a little something to light my way.

Veil of Dunadd

                                         Friday, 26th October 2012

There's a Brigadoon quality to this part of Scotland. I came in late to Glasgow Airport and drove (on the left-hand side of the road, which is always an astounding challenge, even if that's how you learned to drive all those eons ago when you were 18 years old) almost solo along Loch Lomond, over the pass and around loch roads. My headlights alone lit the wayside trees, bare now for the late autumn that it is, and the rusty bracken in its unlikely retreat from summer. After almost three hours, you turn a bend, and then out of the darkness appears the white town, it's front of small-windowed houses lit by spots of yellow light, unchanged from those far-off 18-year-old days. It is not yet the middle of night, but no one is walking, the shops all shut up tight. No wonder it has provided me such a wealth of life for my, perhaps unusual, imagination growing up here. 

Beyond the town you're back in pitch black except for the car's yellow eyes, along narrow roads that were never built for more than the plod of a horse and cart. You flick on the ticking indicator, turn down the lane, and there she rises like a figment in the night, the great mound of Dunadd, tight-lipped, still guarding the memory of all she has known, from the Druids and warriors, to the farmers and holiday makers, to the tourists mounting her back to wrest what they can from the other lives she has lived. 

The break of morning finds me in the cottage where my book "Veil of Time" (now the title seems only too fitting!) takes place. I haven't been back here since I wrote that story, but here I am, a cup of tea between cold palms, staring out the window on the river winding through fields of sheep that my heroine, Maggie, looks out in between bouts of slipping back into this country's naked past. What comes to me in the silence of this place on this frosty morning is how easy a slip that might be.