There are times in this writing life when life jettisons writing, grabs you by the hand and hauls you up and away from the notebook and the desk to somewhere else out in the real world. These last two weeks have been such a time for me. Helping my father move hundreds of miles from Somerset to be near us here in the North East has filled my days, my nights too, for there’s all the thinking and fretting that goes on in the dark hours, as well as the sheer physical challenge of packing up a home and starting afresh. He described it this morning as being ‘a touch overwhelming.’ I know what he means…
but over lunch in the library cafe today, we began to relax. We began to dwell on all the positives – and there are many – while enjoying the food and music, and while my father read his newspaper I took my notebook from my bag as I heard the whisper of writing in my ear. I felt rusty but excited. I’m going back to Arkansas and the White River – here’s what I said about this recently in my newsletter – (Newsletter will be back to normal next Monday – thanks for your patience.)
Write what you know is a maxim often repeated to writers and it can be good, sound advice. Many great writers have spent a lifetime writing about their own backyard.
I discovered that my own little postage stamp of native soil was worth writing about and that I would never live long enough to exhaust it... William Faulkner. And as the internationally recognised children’s writer and short story master David Almond says:
The local can contain the universal. The part can stand for the whole. Some of our greatest books – Wuthering Heights, Ulysses, Sons and Lovers – are local books whose authors and characters have a passionate and dynamic relationship with their local landscape
However writing is all about imagination and invention and writers have often written successfully about places they’ve never been for example, Stef Penney’s The Tenderness of Wolves – Costa Book of the Year in 2006. It’s set in 1867 in Canada, a place she had never been, and researched entirely in the British Library.
This last week I’ve been writing a story set on the White River in Arkansas in 1930-40 s. It’s been in my mind for some time after I saw a documentary about the river people who lived on houseboats there and I’ve finally got round to writing it. Once or twice I’ve wondered if I’m unhinged writing about a place and a people this far away but I’ve loved doing it and if as writers we feel the call of faraway places why shouldn’t we go there? Historical novelists do all the time, and sci-fi and fantasy writers invent whole worlds. But of course if we are going to step outside what we know and write about it, we want to do it well and with confidence, we want to get it right, and this is where research plays such an important part in the writing process.
For myself interested as I am in Arkansas 1930 ish my best hope was in finding written histories, in particular from local sources: people who have written about their lives on the White River back then. These kind of sources are often self-published or can be found in visitors centres etc. I’ve been lucky enough to find two such books (and download them onto my Kindle )and they have been invaluable because they contain all kinds of detail about everyday life back then in that environment and they’re great for naming things and people accurately. I used both books to help me name my characters; once I have a name that I’m confident is right I know I can find the character. I’ve also used Google to find websites and blogs and family history accounts – great to have it all at our fingertips. I’ve looked at photographs and maps. I’ve watched a You Tube video diary of a life lived alongside the Mississippi in the changing seasons. I’ve read some Huckleberry Finn. I’ve consulted registers of flora and fauna and in all I’ve enjoyed the research process as I have the writing. Of course a trip to the White River would have been a research highlight but in this case it’s just not possible: sometimes we have to be content with what we can discover and what we can imagine, the power of which is in fact limitless……….. to be cont.
A writer needs three things, experience, observation, and imagination, any two of which, at times any one of which, can supply the lack of the others. W Faulkner
