TANGRAM

HARES

My tribute to the hares lovingly carved as they climb towards the waxing crescent Moon on the trunk of an Oak tree in Wickersley Wood, near Rotherham, South Yorkshire, UK.

Writing as sculpture: finding and freeing the treasure hidden inside the rock

Writing feels to me a bit like carving a sculpture: it's as if I'm finding and freeing the treasure hidden inside the rock.

First come the seed ideas, the months of thinking and dreaming about my characters, their lives, their situations, the plot, the research that may never make its way into the finished novel, but which is the solid grounding reality and background to everything. That's the stone.

Then second, once it reaches a tipping point where all the elements are in place and I can no longer resist the writing, comes the first draft. That helps me see clearly the seams and fault lines of my characters, the shape and flow of the plot, the dovetailing strands of the story as I chip away. Now I can make full eye contact with the characters I dreamed up, hear them speak, smell and taste their world more vividly than before. That's the sculpting.

Then comes the editing, editing and re-editing which I love. It's like the tumble-polishing of the whole piece, murdering my darlings, killing dead adjectives, spotting typos, reordering, throwing it out to my faithful proofreaders to savage and sniff out the impurities and howlers. That's the smoothing.

Once it's published and out in the world with the readers it was born to meet, my writing can then be enjoyed and explored by everybody from their different viewpoints, preferences, angles, looking at the crystal with all its different facets, each reader taking away something different from my story. Such a privilege and joy when some are unable to look away until the end, getting what they need from the book I sculpted, perhaps treasuring it as a favourite read to return to again and again, each time getting something different from it.

I'm currently having such fun immersed in the sculpting stage of my second novel, which sees my heroine and hero from "Goatsucker Harvest" going into deep waters, dangers and wildlife dilemmas in a Humber Keel off Yorkshire's Holderness Coast and the sea cliffs and caves around Flamborough Head in the 1850s.

If you enjoyed this blog post, please let me know by commenting and please feel free to share your own ideas and experiences of writing and reading.

Thanks for stopping by!

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What I don't know about wet collodion and Victorian post-mortem photography

I'm just working on a short story about an itinerant photographer who travels with his tripod and cumbersome portable dark room from village to village producing snapshots of the locals. I won't spoil the plot in case it is published one day, but basically, the sittings in one village lead to a crime, after which the young ambrotypist is called on to take an early post mortem photograph for the local constabulary.

I feel most alive when I am writing and never cease to marvel how much we can learn from researching our stories. In the course of researching this story, for instance, I've been discovering the developments that took place in the 1850s, when the early Daguerrotype process was improved on by the wet collodion process, particularly popular for its quick, cheap "instant" results. This meant that the image could more easily be replicated from a single negative. The glass plates for wet (and later, dry) collodion photos were also more readily available than the older silver-plated copper.

But its usually true of the research we accumulate for storywriting that it's better left in the background, to inform rather than hijack the tale. You DON'T want to know all about coating glass plates with silver nitrate and the dangers of working in a confined space with acid, bromide, iodide salts, alcohol, ether and goodness knows what else! Still less will the reader want to know about the gruesome fashion for "post mortem" photographs I've just discovered while striving for background knowledge. I now know that Victorian mourners often had their lately deceased loved ones photographed for posterity, even having "eyes" painted on the closed lids for a more "lifelike" effect! Some of the many existing examples of these memento mori are the stuff of nightmare and have no place in my own tale. Facts are facts, and anyone can pursue them. What the readers long for is a tale to inspire them, transport them. They want to know "Who did it?", or "Do they get together in the end?" or to encounter a host of other life-enhancing, challenging moments that only fiction can nudge their way.

What a joy and a journey! The challenge I've set myself in this story is to try to let the reader see through the eyes of the camera what is really going on under the surface. Of course, being me, on the way I inevitably become voracious gobbler of weird and wonderful facts that get stored away in my brain and imagination. Sometimes these things lead to other stories I never would have planned, often more intriguing than the original idea! Stories, like ourselves as writers and readers, are always open to evolve and change as we interact with God's glorious, endlessly gracious creative power. Stories give us space too to fix a snapshot of some truth within the rainbow of possibilities, developed like the photographer's negatives exposed to the sunlight of the human heart.

From the Open University's Learning Space "Arts and History" Unit on "The rise of the itinerant photographer": Image 78: Photographer/Painter: John Thomson. Subject: The Itinerant Photographer on Clapham Common’, from John Thomson & Adolphe Smith, Street Life in London, 1877/78.

(One of many excellent sites used during my research for the story mentioned in this post)