Deborah Swift's Blog, page 44

Writing Historical Fiction - The Power of Then and the Power of Now

All historical fiction readers understand the power of Then. The lure of an unknown time or place which is only unknown because it happened to take place before we were born. Unlike fantasy, this is an unfamiliar world which, if we took them back far enough, our own flesh and blood ancestors would be able to recognise. The small everyday details are what represent for me the power of Then. The type of flax cloth used for washing your face, the way a fire was lit with a tinder-box, the particular smell of tallow candles, the tickle of a feather in your hat. As a novelist my job is to place the reader in that time, but only recently have I come to understand that the job of doing that is really all about the power of Now.

The best plots spring straight out of Character. In other words, if my characters have strong enough motivations, particularly opposing ones, then the plot will naturally arise from their thoughts and actions. My most convincing writing arises when I inhabit the character so well that I lose track of time and am fully in the Now with that person going about their daily life. When I am trying to force the character to conform to a plot idea, historical event or action, then the writing becomes harder and less natural. Much of it is about listening to the character's voice and letting them speak.

The British LibraryFor a historical novelist to find that voice might mean reading diaries of the time, listening to archive material or looking up dialect dictionaries - all things I did to try to find voices for my two country girls in The Gilded Lily. I also read plays by Aphra Behn and by Dryden. My previous characters had all been well-educated, spoke proper English and had broad philosophical and worldly horizons. Not so Ella and Sadie Appleby, my two working maids from a small isolated village in The Gilded Lily. Their vocabulary was of necessity smaller, many of their thoughts were conveyed by gestures - a shrug or a raise of the eyebrows. They had naive views about finding fame and fortune and their place in the world, but more complex views about justice and fairness and honesty.

And I wondered how this would change as they went on the run in the big city, whether they would learn new ways of speaking or  new ideas, or yearn for new horizons. And of course they do - the city moulds them into someone different, but not just the city, the London characters they meet; the wigmaker, the pawnbroker, the astrologer.
















Of course I live in the twenty first century so after my research the voices I heard in my head were not pure 17th century, but unique voices, a blend of 17th and 21st century expression. It is odd, but once I can hear my characters speak, then the characters become flesh and blood. Them surprising me is all part of the Power of Now. This is probably one of the reasons why I enjoy writing my books from several different contrasting viewpoints. I spend time in the company of each character, walk a few miles (or chapters) in his or her shoes.


For The Gilded Lily that meant becoming so familiar with my 17th century map of London that I could literally walk the city streets and turn left and right from Sadie and Ella's lodgings to the Pelican Coffee shop where Jay Whitgift, the handsome, but deadly, rogue did his business. As I went I practised walking as they might walk, looked up at the landmarks on the way.

For me, a narrative structure arises from the choices of my characters not from my own choices. How can that be, when I am both creator and created? This is the mystery and excitement of writing for me - the discovery of a great adventure, or that moment when I come back to myself and read it back, and see that the character is alive there on the page.The Power of Then, and the Power of Now.


THE GILDED LILY
Blurb:A novel of beauty and greed and surprising redemption, set in a London of atmospheric coffee houses, gilded mansions, and the shady pawnshops hidden from rich men’s view,

England, 1660. Ella Appleby believes she is destined for better things than slaving as a housemaid and dodging the blows of her violent father. When her employer dies suddenly, she seizes her chance - taking his valuables and fleeing the countryside with her sister for the golden prospects of London. But London may not be the promised land she expects. Work is hard to find, until Ella takes up with a dashing and dubious gentleman with ties to the London underworld. Meanwhile, her old employer's twin brother is in hot pursuit of the sisters, and soon a game of cat and mouse begins. As the net closes on the girls, danger looms from quite another unexpected horizon...

UK version out 13 Sept
US version out 27 Nov

Books on The Pendle Witches - 400 years ago this year

I parked in a car park opposite this pub, The Golden Lion, a few weeks ago on the way to the shops in Lancaster. As I passed it I remembered that this was the spot where the famous Pendle witches stopped for a last drink before being taken to Gallows Hill to be executed.

I stopped to read the two plaques that are on the wall. The scroll gives the passer-by a little information, and the brass plaque is like a memorial and lists the names of those who were executed.

The year was 1612, exactly 400 years ago - a turbulent time in England's history, an era of religious persecution and superstition, under the reign of James I. At the foot of Pendle Hill, (later the inspiration to George Fox's Quaker Movement) nine villagers were accused of witchcraft following the deaths of several people in and around the Forest of Pendle, and they were later sent to trial at Lancaster Castle, where they were found guilty and then executed.

In both my books, The Lady's Slipper and The Gilded Lily, the shadow of witchcraft hangs over the women of Netherbarrow in Westmorland. In The Lady's Slipper Alice Ibbotson spends time in Lancaster Castle accused of witchcraft, just as the Pendle witches did, and in The Gilded Lily, Sadie Appleby is terrified of being accused of being a witch because of a birthmark on her face.

In the 17th century witchcraft was blamed for anything that could not be rationally explained, and the fact that James I was obsessed with finding witches did little to help the causes of those people, mostly women, who were accused.This extract showing how people were afraid of witchcraft is from the excellent Pendle Witches website, where there is a wealth of information on the women themselves and on the trials and executions. www.pendlewitches.co.uk

"During the sixteenth century whole districts in some parts of Lancashire seemed contaminated with the presence of witches; men and beasts were supposed to languish under their charm, and the delusion which preyed alike on the learned and the vulgar did not allow any family to suppose that they were beyond the reach of the witch's power.


Was the family visited by sickness? It was believed to be the work of an invisible agency, which in secret wasted an image made in clay before the fire, or crumbled its various parts into dust.


Did the cattle sicken and die? The witch and the wizard were the authors of the calamity.Did the yeast refuse to ferment, either in the bread or the beer? It was the consequence of a 'bad wish'.


Did the butter refuse to come? The 'familiar' was in the churn.


Did the ship founder at sea? The gale or hurricane was blown by the lungless hag who had scarcely sufficient breath to cool her own pottage.


Did the river Ribble overflow its banks? The floods descended from the congregated sisterhood at Malkin Tower.


The blight of the season, which consigned the crops of the farmer to destruction, was the saliva of the enchantress, or distillations from the blear-eyed dame who flew by night over the field on mischief bent."
From History of Lancaster 1867 - Thomas Baines.













If you are interested in reading a novel about the Pendle witches then I can recommend Robert Neill's "Mist over Pendle". A nice review of it is over at What Kate's Reading.

Alternatively you might try "Daughters of the Witching Hill". You can read an interview with Mary Sharratt here about her process of writing.

Events to commemorate the Pendle Witches are happening throughout the year of 2012.
Those listed below are just a few. More information from Lancashire Witches 4000

"Sabbat" at the Dukes and Hoghton Tower
Witches Art Trails through the Forest of Bowland
`A Witch-Themed Murder Mystery` at Lancaster Castle
The Crucible by Arthur Miller at Lancaster Priory
Exhibition by Joe Hesketh – The Pendle Investigation, The Dukes
Lecture - Fair Trial or a Foul Bill - The Legal Significance of the Lancashire Witch Trials, Lancaster Priory
Service - In Solidarity with Victims of Persecution and Hate Crime, Lancaster Priory
Exhibition: Spellbound: Superstition, stories and the silver screen
Exhibition: A Wonderfull Discoverie: Lancashire Witches 1612-2012
Witches and Guy Fawkes Festival
Lancashire Witches Guided Walks around Lancaster City
Guided tours of Lancaster Castle.
A multimedia exhibition spanning time and place: “Witch Hunts, then and now”

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Spinning -The Roots of the Language of Writing

The language of story is peppered with references to the craft of spinning. We 'spin a yarn', and 'weave' a tale. The art of 'fabric'ation has very deep roots as one of the earliest forms of creation.


Spindles and spinning are also built into our mythology and folklore. Who can forget childhood tales of Rumplestiltskin or Sleeping Beauty? Plato says the axis of the universe is like the shaft of a spindle with the milky way as the whorl of wool in his Republic. In Greek mythology, Arachne challenges the goddess Minerva to a spinning and weaving contest and when she fails she is turned into a spider. Theseus follows a thread out of the Labyrinth. The three Fates, or Norns, spin, measure and cut the threads of life. The art of spinning is also identified with nature's spinner, the spider, and her web. Most of us writers use the web every day, without thinking much about its roots.
Before the spinning wheel, to make yarn, wool or plant fibre was twisted or spun by hand onto a stick or distaff and then wound onto a second stick or dropspindle. The act of turning the fibres bonded them together into a continuous thread. (Have you ever lost the thread of your story?) The female side of the family used to be called the "distaff" side of the family, the spinning of flax on a distaff being a female occupation. Warterhouse - La Fileuse

Thus, the dropspindle was 'the primary spinning tool used to spin all the threads for clothing and fabrics from Egyptian mummy wrappings to tapestries, and even the ropes and sails for ships, for almost 9000 years.' (http://kws.atlantia.sca.org/spinning.html)

In order to increase the spin, a whorl was added. The spindle, or rod, usually had a raised lip to hold the whorl. A wisp of prepared wool was twisted around the spindle, which was then spun and allowed to drop. They are amongst the most common Medieval finds, as the process of spinning was the most common occupation. The majority of whorls were made from stone or recycled pot but some were carved from wood or cast out of lead.


It was a natural evolution that spinners invented a way of speeding up the process - the spinning wheel. However, no one knows who invented the first one, but it probably originated in India between 500 and 1000 A.D. It is said that the hand spinners in India were able to spin almost half a million yards of yarn from a single pound of cotton (Hochberg), a fine quality that machines until recently were unable to do. 
In the  past spinning was mostly done by women.The resulting thread was woven by men onto looms to produce cloth. Hand loom weavers were men because of the strength needed to batten the cloth. Many superstitions abound about winding thread - for example fishermen's wives would not wind wool after sundown, for if they did they would soon be making their husband's winding sheets.(Dictionary of Superstitions).
By the13th century spinning wheels appeared in Europe, putting an end to handspun thread, and in 1764, a British carpenter and weaver named James Hargreaves invented a hand-powered multiple spinning machine that was the first machine to improve upon the spinning wheel, ending the 'homespun' era for good and paving the way for modern machine produced goods.


Like Theseus, when writing  I often feel I am following my own thread out of the maze of the plot, and after writing a book, I often think of  editing as 'tidying up loose ends' and 'winding it up' neatly, both expressions which have probably originated in our lost spinning culture.

I can recommend this book, Women's Work, for those who want to know more about spinning and weaving in early history.


Want to try metal detecting to find some spindle whorls of your own?
http://www.colchestertreasurehunting.co.uk

Interesting You Tube video on spindle whorls http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n6TGuypgXms

The History Room by Eliza Graham

I am delighted to welcome Eliza Graham today,  to talk about her new novel, The History Room.

Hello Eliza, nice to have you here. Letchford, the private school in The History Room feels very genuine. Did you base the school on any particular place?

My children are at schools that sometimes play matches against various other schools in the South that look pretty amazing: acres of grounds, beautiful old buildings.Some of the pupils are pretty slick and amazing-looking, as well. It's easy to think that everything must be perfect. But of course, teenagers are teenagers wherever they are. I certainly had an idea of what the school looked like and it was fun building the world in my imagination.

I was interested in how you parallelled the effects of the past, particularly war, on two different generations. The repercussions of the injury to Meredith's husband and his rehabilitation must have been difficult to write. How did you go about tackling this subject?

We live quite near Wootton Bassett, to where repatriation of dead service personnel used to take place until recently. Every time I saw one of those big Globemasters overhead I'd feel a sense of dread and wonder who was waiting for a lost son or husband or father. I spent some time watching documentaries about how emergency medical transfers are operated between Camp Bastion and England to get the contemporary details right (I sincerely hope). Very sadly it seemed that almost every week there were details of casualties in the newspapers and it wasn't hard to learn about the work institutions such as Headley Court in Surrey, the rehabilitation centre, offer. It was tragic to read about the effects on relationships of injuries in warfare. But some of the stories of service personnel who'd survived appalling injuries were inspirational, too.

How did you research the Czechoslovakian wartime history? Were any of the events based on real incidents?

I read biographies to try and get a real sense of the tragic history of Czechoslovakia from 1938 and through the Soviet occupation and there were stories I came across that were similar to the one I tried to portray of young people deciding they couldn't bear to stay on in their own country once the Soviets smashed the Prague Spring. The escape stories were quite gripping in many cases. It must have such a hard decision to make: to leave your home or stay on.

Emily is a very dark character and pivotal to the plot. Please give us an insight into how her character developed. 

Although she is dark she was actually really interesting to write, which sounds awful. But most of the other characters are more or less decent people, or aspiring to be so. So writing about someone who has no scruples was rather a release. I wanted to play a rather unpleasant stunt involving a very lifelike 'Reborn' doll and I needed someone who could do unpleasant things and was exploitative, preying on younger girls.
 

On a more serious note, I have read quite a lot about adolescent girls who cut themselves. I found it hard to understand at first but the more I read about it the more I wanted to know. So Emily was quite intriguing for me and I enjoyed writing her parts of the novel.

Thanks very much, Eliza. 
Check out Eliza's other novels, Playing with the Moon, Restitution, and Jubilee 


Review of The History Room
This is a novel where nearly everyone has a secret past, and their past impacts on the present to create a plot that gradually unfolds for the reader. The plot begins with a prank at a private school, which shocks the pupils and staff. In trying to find the culprit, Meredith Cordingley, a teacher at the school, must delve into the motives of her pupils and into her family's past. In doing so she discovers her father, the headmaster, is not the man she thought he was, and that the repercussions of war still haunt him. Not only must she contend with family secrets, but Emily, a teaching assistant at the school has an axe to grind, and will stop at nothing to get revenge for events of the past. Chilling and mysterious, this is a book I can highly recommend. 

I am delighted to welcome Eliza Graham today, to ta...

I am delighted to welcome Eliza Graham today,  to talk about her new novel, The History Room.

Hello Eliza, nice to have you here. Letchford, the private school in The History Room feels very genuine. Did you base the school on any particular place?

My children are at schools that sometimes play matches against various other schools in the South that look pretty amazing: acres of grounds, beautiful old buildings.Some of the pupils are pretty slick and amazing-looking, as well. It's easy to think that everything must be perfect. But of course, teenagers are teenagers wherever they are. I certainly had an idea of what the school looked like and it was fun building the world in my imagination.

I was interested in how you parallelled the effects of the past, particularly war, on two different generations. The repercussions of the injury to Meredith's husband and his rehabilitation must have been difficult to write. How did you go about tackling this subject?

We live quite near Wootton Bassett, to where repatriation of dead service personnel used to take place until recently. Every time I saw one of those big Globemasters overhead I'd feel a sense of dread and wonder who was waiting for a lost son or husband or father. I spent some time watching documentaries about how emergency medical transfers are operated between Camp Bastion and England to get the contemporary details right (I sincerely hope). Very sadly it seemed that almost every week there were details of casualties in the newspapers and it wasn't hard to learn about the work institutions such as Headley Court in Surrey, the rehabilitation centre, offer. It was tragic to read about the effects on relationships of injuries in warfare. But some of the stories of service personnel who'd survived appalling injuries were inspirational, too.

How did you research the Czechoslovakian wartime history? Were any of the events based on real incidents?

I read biographies to try and get a real sense of the tragic history of Czechoslovakia from 1938 and through the Soviet occupation and there were stories I came across that were similar to the one I tried to portray of young people deciding they couldn't bear to stay on in their own country once the Soviets smashed the Prague Spring. The escape stories were quite gripping in many cases. It must have such a hard decision to make: to leave your home or stay on.

Emily is a very dark character and pivotal to the plot. Please give us an insight into how her character developed. 

Although she is dark she was actually really interesting to write, which sounds awful. But most of the other characters are more or less decent people, or aspiring to be so. So writing about someone who has no scruples was rather a release. I wanted to play a rather unpleasant stunt involving a very lifelike 'Reborn' doll and I needed someone who could do unpleasant things and was exploitative, preying on younger girls.
 

On a more serious note, I have read quite a lot about adolescent girls who cut themselves. I found it hard to understand at first but the more I read about it the more I wanted to know. So Emily was quite intriguing for me and I enjoyed writing her parts of the novel.

Thanks very much, Eliza. 
Check out Eliza's other novels, Playing with the Moon, Restitution, and Jubilee 


Review of The History Room
This is a novel where nearly everyone has a secret past, and their past impacts on the present to create a plot that gradually unfolds for the reader. The plot begins with a prank at a private school, which shocks the pupils and staff. In trying to find the culprit, Meredith Cordingley, a teacher at the school, must delve into the motives of her pupils and into her family's past. In doing so she discovers her father, the headmaster, is not the man she thought he was, and that the repercussions of war still haunt him. Not only must she contend with family secrets, but Emily, a teaching assistant at the school has an axe to grind, and will stop at nothing to get revenge for events of the past. Chilling and mysterious, this is a book I can highly recommend. 

Why is my Kindle Library so unappealing?

Like many other bookaholics I have bought a Kindle and have quite a few books on there waiting to be read. They are historical fiction books that were offered free for a limited time, other books I thought at the time I could not wait to read, and books about my craft of writing. I intend to get around to reading them all, or I wouldn't have downloaded them.

So why haven't I?


The answer is, there is an equally large To-Be-Read pile sitting on my bookcase. These are paperback books. More often than not, if I want a book I will go to this pile, rather than the Kindle. This is because I am in fact browsing again for my choice of book, and in this browsing process of what to read next, the cover and the blurb  makes a big impact on my choice all over again.

Seeing a typed list of which clothes to wear in the morning is not the same as looking at them hanging in the wardrobe.

So very often it is a book from the paperback pile that I will choose, and the Kindle books stay unread unless I am going on a long-haul flight. After all, most of my reading is done at home, and when I am packing to go on a short trip, my choosing is done at home.

This lack of appeal on the device makes no difference to the publishers - after all they have already made their sale. But it does make a difference to writers. If someone buys a paper book, there is a good chance it will be read - or recycled via a charity or thrift shop to someone who will read it. On the kindle, a book can get lost in a list for a long time, and as it takes up little space, may never be read.

The World Book Night Books I gave away
When I gave out books for World Book Day, they were all physical books. A physical book jogs the memory - hey, I'm here! So I like to think many of them will be read, even though I gave them away free. I collected them from Arnside Library where a big part of the Library experience is browsing. I cannot imagine a library where I just read titles.

Arnside Library As a writer, I want to be read, rather than just stored on a machine, so it seems to be that the more sensory data there is with a book, the more likely it is to be read. I like to browse my books, so the sooner the Kindle can come up with this browsing function, complete with colour cover image and graphics, the better.

What do others think? Have you many books sitting unread on the Kindle?

Time-slip historicals - twice as hard to write?

"The huge advantage, as a novelist writing in both the present and the past, is that you can use both to shine a light on the other."' Kate Mosse.


I've recently finished Mariana by Susanna Kearsley, a novel in which a woman travels back in time to the 17th century after she buys an old manor house. The house acts as a portal to another era. Susanna Kearsley had been highly recommended to me and this is the first of her books I have read. However - a mystery - it must be a reprint as it was first published in 1994. This explained to me why it had a slightly dated feel in the modern sections with nobody owning a mobile phone or spending hours on the internet. So my first thoughts on writing a time-slip novel is that the contrasting times work well if the modern-day part is up-to-date, and that perhaps time-slip novels may date more easily than simple historicals.


However, The Mathematics of Love by Emma Darwin combines two periods - the 1970's and the 19th century with ease. Both parts of the story will have required research in order to create what she calls "a unique space where serious writers can explore fundamental desires and fears, while revelling in the nearness and otherness of worlds that we know were here, but can' t quite see."

Parallel narratives can allow the writer to do just that - draw parallels and make links between two periods for the enrichment of the story.

The knack with time-slip novels is to keep both stories ticking over and to persuade the reader to give equal amounts of  emotional investment to both parts of the plot. I am currently reading Kate Mosse's Sepulchre, and one of the ways she achieves this investment is simply by making the book long enough so that both aspects of the story are in effect a full-length novel. The modern story of the american, Meredith Martin, researching Claude Debussy is satisfyingly familiar with online research and all the trappings of modern life.One of the reasons I enjoy time-slip books is that after sections in our "familiar" world, the world of the past feels fresh again when we revisit it. A bit like clearing the palate between courses.The contrasting periods thus enrich the novel.

On her website, Kate Mosse says
"Timeslip novels are complicated to write, though. It's not just a matter of remembering where characters are, what's happening to them, how they connect together, but also keeping the 'voices' of the different periods separate and distinct. The way I work with the material, therefore, is to write the entire 1981 – 1897 historic story line (in the case of Sepulchre, Léonie and Anatole's story), then write the whole of Meredith's story, to ensure that the voices, the timbre and the cadences of each section stay distinct. I then start to put the sections together, ten chapters in one time period, ten in the next and so on, until I have a second draft. Finally – and this can be heartbreaking to see all your work going into the virtual rubbish bin – I cut half of it to produce a third draft, which I then edit!" 
Wow, that sounds like a very long daunting process, doesn't it?  
On the fiction Forum, Emma Darwin, author of "The Mathematics of Love" says "you need to make an extra-compelling case for having two separate stories in the same book......
"It's also not easy to do well because you're asking the reader to do the literary equivalent of patting their head and rubbing their tummy, understanding each strand as a stand alone story, even though it's chopped into chunks, but also making the thematic and other links across between them.

There's also the risk that the reader is more compelled by one strand than the other... it's a dangerous game... Many responses to my novels are that the reader preferred one strand to the other: the risk is that they get so fed up with plodding on with the one they don't like, in order to get to the one they do, that they give up altogether. Others resent the wrench when changing, even if they like both stories, or find it disorienting. Many settle down in the end but it makes many find it slow going to start with - and no doubt some give up. I do know that some people just find it too much like hard work, and some don't ever get why they're both in there. On the other hand, others love it, and love the extra dimension it adds."
The issues when writing a time-slip novel seem to be the same as when writing any historical - not only do you need accuracy of research to build a credible world, but also the switch of points of view  between characters needs to be carefully handled when they are changing in time.The whole mood and way of talking are different in changing centuries. Dialogue in 1970 is not the same as dialogue in 1870. The flow of the narrative is especially hard to achieve I would imagine. 
I would recommend all these novels as good examples of the time-slip phenomenon.If you would like more suggestions, then have a look at the Woman and Home top 5.
http://www.womanandhome.com/articles/travelandentertainment/books/385161/5-best-time-slip-novels.html

Read an interview with Susanna Kearsley
Emma Darwin's excellent writing blog 

Last word on the subject from Kate Mosse:

"I also believe, strongly, that the past casts a shadow over the present, sometimes for the good, sometimes less so. Human experience is a continuum and we are linked with those who have gone before us. What links us together is greater than what divides us – religion, context, period of history, nationality – and the human heart does not change so very much."


www.katemosse.com

The Language of Flowers - Vanessa Diffenbaugh

Common in the 19th century, the idea that flowers had symbolic meanings led people to convey their emotions through the gifts of the flowers they gave one another. Known as the art of "floriography", these symbolic bouquets became popular, and the posies were known as "tussie-mussies" in Victorian times. Today you can find more about the meanings of individual flowers from The Gardener

This Image comes from Joyce Tice's website

The Language of Flowers tells the story of Victoria, a homeless eighteen year old and her passion for the meanings of flowers.


Victoria has been brought up in foster care, and the only adult with whom she had a meaningful relationship was Elizabeth, the woman who first introduced her to the language of flowers. Because of a catastrophe for which Victoria herself is to blame (I won't spoil it for you) they have become estranged, and now Victoria is living rough. Desperate for work, she ends up in a florist's shop where her gifts with ascribing meaning to flowers are appreciated at last.

But life is not that simple, and Grant, an acquaintance from the past turns up.From there, things grow more complicated, and after they begin a relationship, Victoria becomes pregnant. Through a series of flashbacks the reader begins to understand what happened during Victoria's childhood to make her so distrustful of herself and others.

This book has been available for a while and has won awards. I imagine by now it is a book club classic, because I thoroughly enjoyed it. It is a well-written and absorbing read. You can watch Vanessa talk about writing her novel here

Here is my floral review, taken from the dictionary at the back of the novel.

 Lisianthus - appreciation
Rose, orange - fascination
Sweet Pea - delicate pleasures

Transparency for writers - how not to point at yourself

When writing a book, I am obsessed by the quality of my own writing. I agonize over choice of words, apposite phrases, clever ways to convey what I want to say. When a reader reads a book they don't want to see any of that - they want to hear the story. They want the author to be transparent. This is why we are urged to use the word "said" for our speech attributions - a word that is neutral, invisible. As soon as we say "retorted" or "quipped" or (heaven help us) "declaimed", then we are pointing at ourselves with the "look at me I'm a writer" finger. The more the writer gets in the way of the story, the less involved in the reality of the story the reader will be.

Likewise, too many adverbs or exclamation marks make the writer suddenly appear at the reader's shoulder as convincer -
e.g  "Shut up!" he said crossly.
instead of, "Shut up," he said.
The writer is trying to force the reader to understand what they have probably already understood - thus making another unwanted appearance.

Too many similes or metaphors also point to our own cleverness, and can bring the reader up short.
eg Writer : "The water was black as treacle."
Reader: "Black as treacle? Is treacle black? What does she mean?"
Hey presto, the writer is muscling in again.

A lot of the knack of transparency is scrupulous awareness. If you are particularly proud of a phrase, view it with suspicion! It is probably a phrase where you are showing off, and therefore putting yourself between the reader and the page. Awareness for a writer is about being able to put yourself in the reader's seat and having the courage to remove your cleverness in favour of the truth of the story.

Many writers think that if they give up pointing at themselves they will lose their own unique voice. This is not so, as your voice will be there even more strongly if you get your ego out of the way of it.

This idea applies as much to life as it does to creativity.

The best book I can recommend on awareness in general is Awareness by Anthony de Mello. Eminently sane advice without any new-age nonsense.


For looking at this topic from a writer's perspective, the writer Dorothea Brande, (whose book, "Becoming a Writer" has been a classic for the inward journey since the 1930's) has another work, "Wake up and live!" available for free as a pdf here:
http://lesecret.net/DorotheaBrande-WakeUpAndLive.pdf
Although a little dated, it has some excellent ideas about how to succeed creatively.

As some people know, I am a great promoter of meditation in all its forms - here is a nice post by the writer Orna Ross on the benefits of meditation and awareness for writers: http://janefriedman.com/2012/01/02/meditation-increases-creativity/

And on a completely different topic,  for anyone interested, my post on 17th Century Garden Design for Women  is over at the English Historical Fiction Authors site. And you can win a copy of The Lady's Slipper at Brits United. (Until 5th April)

Writers in the 17th century were obsessed by character

A jobbing writer in the 17th century, just like me, was obsessed by characters. This is because the News Sheets of the day from London were dull and factual, designed to inform rather than entertain.
The Weekly News and the London Courant were the first papers (1622),  followed by the London Gazette in 1663. But none of these papers ran what we would call today "human interest" stories.

So a new wave of character writing sprang up to give the public what we would call entertainment, or tabloid stories. Wycherley the playwright lists the common targets of this new breed of writer:


"lying jests against the common lawyer; handsome conceits against the fine courtier,delicate quirks against the rich cuckold and citizen."



Also popular subjects were ridiculing the fads and fashions of the day, as in this pamphlet about ridiculous fashions, The World Turned Upside Down.In order to get material, the seventeenth century writer
"frequents clubs and coffeee houses, the markets of news, where he engrosses all he can light upon: and if that not prove sufficient, he is forced to add a lie or two of his own making.." (Samuel Butler)




So, not so different from tabloid journalists of today then. The writer of the 17th century  was mostly printed in pamphlets and chapbooks, pocket sized thin booklets that could be easily carried for sale on the street. On the left you can see a peddlar with a tray of books and chapbooks. The upright citizen's greatest fear was that he would feature in one of these and his reputation be ruined, a fact I exploited in my book The Gilded Lily.I used some of the larger than life characters in my book too - the avaricious pawnbroker, and the swaggering rake, as described by Rochester:
. Room, room for a Blade of the town,That takes delight in roaring,Who all day long rambles up and down,And at night in the streets lies snoring.
That for the noble name of SparkDoes his companions rally,Commits an outrage in the dark,Then slinks into an alley.
Apart from characters, the sensational and unbelievable made easy subjects, often with lurid woodcut illustrations. See below for The Mowing Devil and  The Womanish Man.








Today pamphlets and chapbooks are popular for poetry, but there is a whole range of possibilities inherent in this  medium, for a few ideas about chapbooks today, visit - The Book Designer
For more in depth  information on 17th century pamphleteering I recommend The Function of the New Media in the 17th Century

Thanks to The Newberry, Chicago
Bodleian Library Collection article