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.
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.
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