On Middle Class Guilt

A Goldsmiths creative writing graduate, Ross Raisin came to talk to us for the Critical Contexts component of our MA this week. Author of God's Own Country and Waterline, Raisin has a growing reputation as an astute observer of life at the margins of contemporary British society, be that through the eyes of a disturbed, obsessive adolescent ranging across the Yorkshire moors or a bereaved Glaswegian ex-shipbuilder down and out in London.

God's Own Country earned Raisin the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award in 2009 after reputedly being scrummaged at auction by a gumshielded pack of publishers.  Penguin turned over the ball. He has since been nominated for a range of prizes, including the Guardian First Book and John Llewelyn, with the Scotsman hailing Waterline as 'the definitive novel for our times.'

Raisin rejects the implied superiority attributed to him by those who insist he gives 'a voice to the voiceless,' suggesting instead that fiction is the lens through which he chooses to explore social and political issues, that writing and language is at the core of how he articulates himself as an individual in the world. Kicking off with an appeal to consider the idea of the writer's 'responsibility' – to the reader, to sources, to society at large, to yourself as a writer – I found Raisin candid, compelling and provocative.

Raising many of the questions I have faced in my own day job in international development, he asks us how we might write about 'social issues' without getting hoodwinked by a voyeuristic publishing industry or simply aestheticising 'the needy,' and how we might communicate about poverty, deprivation and 'deviancy' in a way that might meaningfully challenge what we think we already know. He reminded us that, as Orwell once wrote, the belief that 'art should have nothing to do with politics is itself a political attitude.' 

This was right on the money as far as I was concerned – it spoke to my own preoccupations as I attempt to cobble together an entertaining book that explores consciousness raising and the roots of early feminism; it spoke to my current concerns about my responsibility to historical 'truth' as well as to my ongoing queries about whether anyone out there even cares about all this stuff anyway.

I gathered my courage to stick my hand up and ask Raisin how he'd lived with the subject matter of Waterline – loss, grief, alcoholism, homelessness - over the two or three years of drafting; and he responded that it was 'all in the process': focusing on your craft, your journey through the subject matter, 'getting it right' for reader and character(s). In the discussions that followed, there came the suggestion that Raisin was hostage to a bad case of middle class guilt, that all this talk of 'process' was just a pretentious cover for a grammar school boy who sought reparation for his background in 'healing the world.' For myself, process is at least partly about craft and craft is what you need to be damn sure you master if you're going to ever make a serious go of being a professional writer. As for dismissing the choice of the socially conscious to address difficult issues in fiction as a misplaced salvo of class war – well, it just seemed pointlessly flippant. Overtly political or not, I do think that our subject matter is 'determined by the age' in which we find ourselves living. I suspect that my compulsion to write about the early women's movement and its links to colonisation and slavery might be something to do with what I, and others see as the failure of Feminism (yes, with a capital F) to appeal to a popular audience beyond its second wave. I'm not yet sure why that might be the case but I'm pretty sure I wouldn't have been writing this book in Greer's heyday.

That being the case, how am I supposed to deal with this question of responsibility? Am I just writing out of a very particular form of white middle class guilt about western feminism's rise and rise off the back of colonial oppression? If my book has a 'point' to it, if I am trying to work out – as Raisin puts it - 'where I stand on the subject,' then surely I have a responsibility to ensure that the details of my story are accurate and true? That my position is worked out on the basis of facts? But then what if those details aren't there, what if I have to make them up? What if the as-yet-unknown biographical truths that I do uncover in future research forays don't fit with the story I'm set on telling – what happens then? Do I change the character names – make them archetypal rather than historical/specific? Do I change the story? Or do I stick with my intention and trust the process to sort it all out in the end?

Peter Sellers and the Ugly Ducking: A Residency at Cove Park

You know that sketch – it goes something like this:

Peter Sellers walks into a party, gets a drink, begins to mingle, turns to another guest and introduces himself.

'And what do you do for a living?' he asks.

'I'm writing a novel,' says the guest.

'Neither am I,' replies Sellers.

Boom boom.

There are days when it feels like I am stuck in an endless repeat of that sketch, me being the guest, friends and family standing around, politely averting their eyes to peer in the bottom of their glasses. So I've taken myself off to Cove Park on the coast off Argyll in an attempt to wrench myself out of that loop. I have six clear weeks ahead of me before I need to pick up paid work again and I really want to make the best of them. This is meant to be my flying start – six days of hard graft that should quicken the sagging word count and set me on course til December.

Reached by boat from Gouroch to Kilcreggan, Cove Park is a residential arts centre beautifully situated overlooking Loch Long and near enough to Faslane to induce paranoid fantasies of horned sheep moonlighting as Iranian spies. Clefted by bucolic brooks, this enclave of artistic industry in the midst of MoD real estate is a creative writer's dream. My own little cube, a converted shipping container with its own private dew pond, is likely the most well appointed bedsit it will ever be my good fortune to inhabit. This week I have decided to look my Big Project squarely in the eye without the assistance of workshops or tutorials to cheer me on, but the wonderful poet Polly Clark is available on site to offer mentored retreats if desired. Here is a cosy kind of isolation, swaddled in fog and disconnected from the beguilements of mobile phones and internet connectivity, you give yourself over entirely to your muse – it's just you and your laptop and the Big Blank Page.

Day One goes well. Ish. I immerse myself in all the notes and sketches I had made in the margins of late summer's manic work schedule and bowl through the target word count without too much difficulty. All good. But then Day Two comes along and I spend the morning writing a pile of words resembling the hefty deposits made on the tracks hereabouts by the resident Highland Cows. Not so good. Sitting with the discomfort of that shitty first draft feels even worse than it sounds. If truth be told, I'm tearing my hair out but I still try my best to be stoic: said words are typed up through gritted teeth, hearty soup is had and I set out on reccy of the surrounding area - upon which I learn never to trust a pregnant ceramicist who tells you that a peninsula only has one road: it's impossible to get lost. The rain is pissing down and there is heavy fog.* There are times, I find, which call for drinking stolen red wine from the communal kitchen.

Last night's blowout appears to have had the desired effect and I begin Day Three with a writing session that edges me closer to the voice I'm looking for in my Big Project. By default I work on character too – my lead's description of her sleeping son helps me start to get into her idea of herself as mother, protector, woman. I am heartened some more on venturing up to the centre at the top of the hill to read Jill Dawson on the challenges of getting a novel going: 'A rough start is unavoidable,' she says. 'Weak beginnings are inevitable and essential.' Great! It isn't just me then. Later, I listen to a podcast on historical fiction and realise that my recent choice to write in first person present tense turns out to be a quirk of the genre – who knew? Perhaps after all, I'm doing something right. For today anyway... 

Day Four is a bit slow to get going, but coaxed on with gallons of tea, go it does. It seems there's a barrier that, like with running, once broken through, the writing finds its own comfortable pace. We're not talking sprinting or flying here – think more of a waddle, in circles, a few fledgling attempts to take off, ugly duckling style. Today is for fleshing out detail and working on the troublesome problem of period dialogue. I check out Wolf Hall on a forage through the shelves at the centre and try out my own version of straight-up contemporary narrative. I'm quite taken with the effect. I go back to my original sources and start to feel it might be time to leave them behind and launch entirely off into fiction. None of this is planned – it just seems to be happening.

And ... Action! Day Five is a gift – where the heck did that come from? I send the High Priestess Mantel my thanks – you are a fucking diamond, my dear. Something good has happened in the old brainbox overnight and to my total amazement I bash away at the keyboard all day and all night. One thousand, two thousand, three ... the words just keep coming. I schedule in some time for my Censor:

'It can't be this easy! This must be a total pile of crap!'

'Meh,' says my Subconscious.

'Historical fiction is so uncool,' says my Censor.

Subconscious just does the vees up and gets on with it.

In the piece I've written today, there's not a word of 'period dialogue' to be heard, very few contemporary references. It's just a woman arguing with her bloke, two girls having a chat by the fire. Character gold.

Day Six and it's time to head home. I miss home. It's good to go back to my life and my love and my cat. But dammit, who knows what might happen with another week on my hands!... I spend the morning planning out the next scene, working out what its endpoint will be, what details I need to research to get it right, without bogging myself down in historical mud. Sally Wainwright says writer's block just means not being mentally prepared and ready to hit the page. 'Think through what happens next before you write your next scene.' There's a lot more to that than you might think.

I realise that this has been a week of sorting and sifting, working out what I do have and what now needs to be done. Looking around the room before I pack everything away, I see there is a corner given over to engravings and pictures, another to a set of draft scenes, a chair piled with photocopied essays of writers on writing. I realise that reading all this stuff, gathering it together, taking stock, is an essential part of the work – it's about getting your ducklings lined up and giving yourself space and time for a few test flights. Bags zipped, laptop stashed, I jump in the Cove Park van to make for the boat and wonder what might happen tomorrow.

* with apologies to Dawn, the actually extraordinarily helpful and thoroughly-bloody-nice Cove Park staffer. If only I were more like her... oh, and sorry about the wine: I'll bring some back next time, I promise.

Art for Art's Sake?

The soporific effect of William Fiennes' presentation at Goldsmiths this afternoon may possibly have had more to do with the quantities of ibuprofen I had imbibed than with him being a less-than-scintillating speaker (which he is not). Yesterday I inflicted a large and brooding swelling upon my own shin after a slow-mo, high impact fall whilst jogging in the park. Still, whichever way you look at it I was 'lulled' in the truest sense of the word – I listened to Fiennes speak as if he were singing to the room, a lullaby to hold and soothe and comfort us as we drifted towards our dreams of writing.
It didn't matter that we had no clear destination in mind – as Fiennes himself said, 'I can't really do plot' – what mattered was the language, the poetry, the evocation of the universal and the mythic: beauty, return, home, suffering, nostalgia, memory, family, loss, resurrection. Those of us who choose to honour (some may say, indulge) the compulsion to write need no convincing of the inherent value of language for language's sake - we choose to see and to interpret the world through the filter of words, that most constitutional and essential of media. And here was a wonderful, enriching meditation on this theme exemplified in both the readings and the presentation.

Nevertheless, I would normally be the first among those to jeer and taunt at art-for-art's-sake for its inaccessible elitism, its implied narcissism, its self-satisfied superiority over the plebeians left at the academic gate. I'm interested in literature with balls, real literature, literature that teaches and provokes and has something to say about the world – literature that means something. So what's all this pining after language for language's sake?

Fiennes spoke of the writing impulse arising from 'necessity' and 'strong feeling' – no one is ever going to say there are not enough books in the world, he reminds us. It is critical to write what you really care about, not some dross you think will sell – but writing that you are compelled to do, stories that cannot not be told. This resonated deeply with my own sense of what I'd like to write (and hope that I am writing). I have lost count of the times I've read a manuscript shared in a writing group and wanted, were it not for a very English sense of politeness, to chuck it in the bin and run around the room, hands waving overhead, shouting 'what's the bloody point of this?!' - another gratuitous tale of scatalogical sexuality, another gap yaah jaunt around Asia, yet one more fucked-up marriage on a beach.

I.

Just.

Don't.

Care.

I understand that this is all relative – one girl's Proust is another's Jilly Cooper, after all. But doing my best to write well about things that matter is absolutely fundamental to my own developing practice, to my sense of myself as a writer in the world.

I hope to write the kind of fiction that has something to say and in so doing write with an energy that conveys that sense of the necessity of saying it – at the moment I have at least three books in my head that I feel I can't not write: they've been following me around for years – stories that want to be heard and understood. So where does the beauty bit come in? The attempt to create something beautiful – what might at first appear as the use of language for language's sake – is bound up with the impulse to say something and say it well. Books can teach us things about life, about people and history and power and love and war and any other Big Idea you can name – and the best ones do that without us even realising it, most often by beguiling – by lulling – us with their beauty. Language, style, tone, theme, motif, symbol, pattern, structure and so on are all elements of a book that contribute to the imperative and effect of aesthetic enjoyment: the stuff that makes us like books and words.

Listening to Fiennes today – talking about all of the above, along with form and genre, structuring techniques and principles, editing and economy of words – has somehow given me the permission again to reconnect with the more 'poetic' qualities of my own writing and not to feel self-indulgent doing so. And he has reminded me that having an opinion about something and wanting to put that in (creative) writing need not deliver bland finger wagging didacticism but, rather, can be done in a way that uses the 'stuff that makes us like books' to have a meaning and resonance that takes us beyond 'mere' words.

Writing The Real

My first purposeful blog post about the process of 'becoming' a writer starts here – I intend to use this blog now as a writing journal, tracking my own development as a fiction author and exploring in more depth some of the issues raised by my own writing and reading, as well as those emerging from discussions on my MA at Goldsmiths (I'm now entering my final year).

Blake Morrison led a discussion at Goldsmiths this week that was rooted in questions raised by his own work which has covered themes as diverse as misogyny, murder, family and memory (The Ballad of the Yorkshire Ripper, As If, And When Did You Last See Your Father), and been written in a variety of forms from creative non-fiction and novels to poetry and memoir. Blake raised questions around topics such as life writing and documentary, the choice of form as a means of story-telling, the use of language, voice and dialect. All super-relevant to where I'm at as a writer right now.

I've been pondering a lot recently about how to write about – and to fictionalise - the real, the past: what are the limits of fictionalising real life? What can and can't - should or shouldn't - you do? What are the challenges, advantages, risks, quandaries of writing about real life? Who might you expose, glorify, insult, humiliate, sentimentalise, offend - and does it matter? Doesn't 'writing well,' for instance, from the point of view of Peter Sutcliffe – as Blake has done - romanticise rape and murder? Don't the sensitivities of his victim's families deserve more respect? Are there thus subject matters and subjectivities that should be off-limits to the creative writer? … But saying that is just censorship.

Isn't it?

And then there's the whole question of the ethics of 'making things up.' Fictionalised 'real' events are surely just straight-up fiction to all intents and purposes, aren't they? If that's the case, then why bother alerting your reader to the historical fact(s) in the first place – why not just say it's all made up. Or is there value to be found in creating a near-as-dammit true story for the lessons it teaches us about life – say, in the case of James Bulger, about which Blake has also written? Is there such a thing as 'story truth' that matters more than what 'really' happened? Does anyone other than writers even care – shouldn't we just get on with the real business of writing and to hell with the consequences of misinforming readers with inaccurate historical details: a good story's a good story, right?

I've been turning over all of these questions like stones in my palms over recent weeks as I've embarked on writing a novel about an historical figure. The story has been nagging at me for years – one I uncovered in a previous, long-ago life as an English Lit academic - I just hadn't found the right way to tell it before now. Not least because I'd never given a moment's consideration to the idea of myself as an historical novelist – too many connotations of elaborate head gear and the nostalgia of empire-line muslin gowns. And yet, here I am...

Eliza Fenwick was a spirited early feminist and a radical writer, involved in the literary and political circles of 1790s London. She was good friends with the Lambs and with William Godwin; she attended the birth of Mary Shelley before comforting her dear friend Wollstonecraft in the final days of her life. Details of Eliza's own life are sketchy – she has never attracted the attention of eighteenth century scholars to the same degree as her more illustrious contemporaries: Fanny Burney, Anne Radcliffe, Laetitia Barbauld, Hannah More, and others. There are some letters, as well as some of her publications, that give clues to her life but the rest I intend to fictionalise. We do know that Eliza wrote popular children's primers and published an epistolary novel promoting women's rights and anti-slavery politics, and that she married John, a charming though impecunious Irish patriot who eventually drunk and gambled away what little funds they had. Although they seem to have married very much for love and John and Eliza had two children together, Eliza eventually requested a separation from John when she could no longer bear the haphazard life of drudgery imposed upon the family by John's carelessness. In 1814, Eliza left England and John behind and set off for Barbados, where she established a school in Bridgetown and, in spite of her radical politics, eventually became a slave owner. Her daughter was a leading actress in the local theatre and her son got a lucrative position as an agent with a Bridgetown merchant. The journey that led Eliza into slave-owning, for which she made such a shameful and 'unheroic' compromise of her principles is the focus of the novel. I want to know what that compromise 'cost' Eliza personally, what it felt like from the inside, and what her particular story might tell us about the rise of the Anglo-American women's movement.

Knowing what we know about Eliza, surely means that she cannot be upheld as a heroine of the feminist movement. She is, in many ways, an unheroic figure who gained the foothold that lifted her life into social success and economic security on the backs of the oppressed, enslaved peoples of the Caribbean. Do we then just dismiss her in the end as a run-of-the mill white colonial racist like all the rest? The Eliza I am writing will no doubt differ significantly from the 'real' Eliza – how then will I ensure that I stick to the emotional truth of her character? By writing about her life, do I risk romanticising her and becoming an apologist for slavery – “it was OK and understandable, really – she had to earn a living and, hey, wasn't she an amazing pioneer feminist that we should be proud of since she bravely felt the fear of going to the colonies alone and succeeded against the odds?” These, and many other questions, are those I find myself asking. I don't know yet if I will find the answers. What I do know is that I believe that there is value in documenting her life, however creatively – that it can tell us things we ought to know about power, about race, about gender, about all of our pasts and our presents.

Of course, one of the pleasures of working as a creative writer or artist is that there is no engraved granite mandate to find and set down The Answers. Creative writing has given me a freedom to explore rather than to expound, to investigate and ask questions, to try things out, to be in a perpetual state of discovery and wonder. But the expansiveness of the creative process is also one of its limitations – where do you draw the line? When do you have to reign in all that exploration and tell the difference between right and wrong, truth and lies? This brings me back to something Blake said at Goldsmiths this week. He spoke of the importance – the necessity – of getting your hands dirty as a writer, of asserting some kind of moral authority through the writing process, which to me is tantamount to taking some kind of line on the issues that you raise in your fiction.

I find in the many versions of white women portrayed in post-colonial literature that there are too many cartoonish figures, too many lazy caricatures of pompous memsahibs, too many bitter, prejudiced and sexless stereotypes. In seeking to write a more complex portrait of a white woman in the colonies, yes I am seeking to give credit to the courage Eliza showed in transgressing the boundaries of early nineteenth century gender roles but at the same time I am seeking to unapologetically expose the price of that achievement.

Wasn't it Socrates who said that the unexamined life was not worth living? For me, writing the real - however much that might mean fictionalising and filling in details here and there to bring the story alive - has a real and enduring value. In the case of Eliza, her story can help us to deepen our understanding of how love and motherhood, power and oppression, works and drives the course of history. Drawing on the particularity of her circumstances to create a narrative that has the potential for universal appeal and can speak to my own and others' preoccupations and concerns is a challenge that I, for one, don't want to miss - with all it's risks and caveats.