Writing History

I’m currently working on my second Holocaust project. This is the story of one Clara Lehrs, born in 1871 and exterminated in 1942 at Treblinka. I’m writing about her life from 1918, when her husband died, until her own death in 1947. See more on my blog The House onSchellberg Street.

I have the bare bones of the story and if I divide that into scenes there is pretty well a full length book – probably about 90,000 words.

Two types of details

Concrete facts        

In order to tell the story accurately there are certain things I really need to know:

• Where people lived
• Where they married
• Where children were born
• Which day of the week certain dates fall on
• What was happening in the background in key places at key times – e.g. Mecklenburg, Berlin, Jena, Stuttgart, Rexingen, 1918, 1924, 1928, 1933, 1938, 1942

Setting details

At various times I need to know about:

·         Homes

·         Clothes

·         Towns

·         Transport

·         Political problems that impinge on everyday life e.g. inflation, treatment of Jews,

·         Feelings of well-being / feelings of being oppressed

Sources of information

Primary resources

·         documents  - death / birth certificates

·         verbatim accounts written at the time

·         diaries

·         letters  

I actually own quite a few of these so that was a good start.

Repeated experience

·         train journeys through Europe

·         visits to places mentioned above plus Theresienstadt and Treblinka  

·         viewing the house on Schellberg Street

I’m planning a trip to cover this and I’ve used crowd-funding to finance it.

Research through imagination

There are some things we just cannot find out. At that point all we can do is put the characters in the situation with as many facts as we know and as much setting material as we can muster and see what happens. It almost becomes a type of “method” writing – a little like method acting.  

Procrastination tool?    

I tend to ascertain the verifiable facts before I write. However, the writing itself asks more questions. How did young married women behave in the early 1890s? What was it like living in Berlin 1871 – 1914 (la belle époque)?  What did they wear back then? Even when I’m sitting at my desk writing I tend to do two hours research to one hour of writing.

Then there are the visits and researching the concrete details.

So this particular 90,000 words will take a long time to write.  No matter, all the other activities are writerly ones and not actually a procrastination tool even if that’s what they look like.

And actually, what an interesting way to spend one’s time.    

Writing Flash Fiction

I started a project at the beginning of January this year. I intended to write one piece of flash fiction every day for the whole month. I managed it and I’m now, to some extent, addicted. You can find the work at http://gillsstonesjanuary2013.blogspot.co.uk/.

I’m not sure that actually everything I wrote is flash fiction. There are, at a stretch, pieces of memoir, some philosophy and just collections of words it pleased me to put together.  But the texts are all very short and each one makes its own point.  

It wasn’t necessarily easy all of the time though it did get easier as I went along. I was constantly searching for stories. Sometimes I’d have two or three lined up. I’d then rehearse the next story over and over in my head until it was time to write it. Now I’m actually finding it impossible not to find stories everywhere.

I was never too strict about word count. The story or the needed to be the length it needed to be. It had to be short and it had to be tightly written.

I’ve enjoyed this experience and now want to make flash - fiction or otherwise – something I write regularly, though perhaps not as often as daily.  

It is a different writing experience from what I normally do – writing for children and young people. For those texts I see a film in my head which I need to get down into prose. With my very short pieces I hear a voice telling me the story. I feel a more intimate relationship with the readers and even the narrator I have created. Intriguingly the voice in each piece is entirely different.

I’m so glad I took on this project. It has been a joy.             

One Writer’s Relationship with Books

How it all began

There have always been books. Every house I’ve lived in has had books. As a very young child, before I could read, I had my own collection. I loved people to read to me and soon I knew the books so well that the pictures were enough to remind me of the whole story.

My father was the youngest of nine and we actually lived with his mother. This meant that there were always other members of the extended family present, including my cousins, all older than me, and all knowing how to read.

I gathered reading was about staring at the page for a long time before you moved on to the next one.

Soon, though, I wanted more and nagged my father to teach me how to read. He had no idea how to do that but I learnt a little: how to identify “the “and “a” and my mother taught me to read the names of all the shops we visited daily.  

Learning to read

I can’t actually remember a lot about that. I remember a few flashcards, then Dick and Dora books – I’m too old even for Janet and John. However the latter were around and my parents bought them for me as a supplement for my own reading scheme. You just needed to be able to turn the little black marks on the page into words. I progressed quickly through the books, I’m told.

Leaving the reading scheme

That was an absolute joy. Now I got to choose my own books.  If I was ever ill – and I was quite often until they took my tonsils out - my father would buy me a new book. And oh, the disappointment the day he bought me one I’d already got. Once I could read, I couldn’t get enough books. We had to do something.

The library

Thank goodness for the library. At West Bromwich in the 1950’s it seemed rather grand. A dramatic staircase led to the children’s department upstairs. We were only allowed three books at a time. One particular Easter holiday, I borrowed three books every day and got through most of the Famous Five books and the Mallory Towers ones before I went back to school. There were no more Famous Five books so I had to write my own. By some process of osmosis I knew how to write just like Blyton.

Ha ha! Did my writing career begin then? No, not really. An infant school teacher called in my parents: she was concerned because I kept writing horror stories.

The lean years

But I was still reading, just not for leisure any more, apart from the odd magazine.  At Grammar School it was Shakepeare, Dickens, H.G. Wells, James Joyce, Browning and Wordsworth. Later at university it was Goethe, Schiller, Kleist, Brecht, Bőll, Kafka, Hugo, Flaubert, Zola, Sartre, Molière and Baudelaire.

Nevertheless, after a few years of domesticity the trips to the library and the reading for leisure came back.

And now?

I can go shopping for an essential item of clothing and come back with a book instead, without feeling at all guilty. 

I have a Kindle, which I love, and it is always loaded up with about thirty “to be read” books. I still have shelves full of books – those I cannot bring myself to throw away, including several signed copies, and those yet to be read. I try to refrain from buying more hard copy books but it doesn’t work. I have forty-five waiting to be read: ones I’ve picked up at book launches, on special offer at conferences, second-hand at some worthy fund-raising event, or those with too attractive a cover to ignore. And I also have books from the library. I fear retiring in case I can’t afford to buy more books and I finish everything I’d want to read from the library. I still read in several other languages because I can.    

I just don’t get these life-style TV shows about home-making that consider books clutter. To me nothing looks cosier or more welcoming than a room lined with books. Isn’t it also extra insulation?  

I’m a very fast reader these days and I’m also very critical. I find it hard to get rid of the jabbering editorial voice. Very occasionally it happens and I find a book that is an absolute wow. But none of this robs me of enjoyment.

My default activity is reading.  

I’m a lecturer in English and Creative Writing and so am fortunate in having a day job in which reading plays an important part. I’m sure also that reading helps me be a better writer. That is also part of my day job. How lucky am I?          

                             

Responding to copyedits

Electronic feedback  

I’ve recently had a script back from a copy-editor. It was due 29 September and I finally got it the first week of November. More and more publishers are now using Track Changes on Word documents and it can seem a bit like being at school and getting back work covered in red ink. It’s easy to think your work must be terrible. It isn’t. Otherwise the publisher wouldn’t have accepted it. Your copy editor is good.

It’s very tempting to “accept all” and be done but that isn’t a good option.

Copy-editors are not infallible

This one was pretty good, actually, and made a lot of helpful suggestions. Typos were corrected. My script was aligned with the publisher’s house-style. There were actually just one or two changes I didn’t agree with so I rejected those. And this copy-editor did make one mistake: she misinterpreted an indirect thought as a direct thought. Eventually I also noticed a couple of things she had missed. So, it is a good job I painstakingly moved to every change and either accepted it or rejected it. This usually means accepting two changes at a time – often a deletion then an insertion.

More than a proof read

A copy edit is more than just correcting blatant mistakes. The copy-editor also advises about bits that aren’t working, checks for consistency in content and form and spots stylistic awkwardness, including, for example, the over-use of certain expressions.

How I worked with this particular editor

I kept “Track Changes” on all the time, so that I could see where I made extra changes.  

First of all, I went through every change and either accepted or rejected it. I probably accepted 99.9% of them.

Then I looked at the comments in the margin and responded to them. This produced new text that I had to copy edit myself. Sometimes, though, the comment related to a change I’d already accepted.

I revisited my own corrections and accepted them.

I rechecked my new work.

I kept revisiting chapters where I’d made changes until I’d no corrections left.

All of this took about three weeks. Finally I sent back a script that was much stronger than the original because both a copy-editor and I had worked hard on it.   

Professional jealousy = wasted energy so get over it

However, this isn’t always that easy.  Jealousy isn’t always something we can control. It’s an emotion that takes over. It chips away at us and can seriously damage our well-being. Can we talk ourselves out of it?

I’m probably not alone in being jealous of J K Rowling. She’s a great story-teller, obviously well-read and we all love Harry and co. And darn it, her first adult novel has gone straight to the top of the bestseller charts. But some of my stories are just as good, aren’t they? I’m well-read too and I think my writing is quite good. I have another feeling towards J,K, though. I’m extremely grateful to her for giving us another great example of good versus evil, of getting so many people reading – including some previously reluctant males - that more people are reading my works too.     

It’s sometimes harder when it’s closer to home. My colleague Antony Rowland recently won the Manchester Prize for his poetry. I lecture in creative writing at the same HE institution where he teaches a little creative writing and lots of other things. I immediately felt useless. Shouldn’t I and the others in the creative writing team be achieving this sort of success? Hang on a minute, though.  I’m not a poet and I didn’t enter the competition this year even though there’s a section on short fiction. That spark of jealousy, fortunately, only lasted about five minutes. The next emotion was of extreme pride. One of us has been noticed. I was also extremely touched when Antony said in an interview with a newspaper that he was part of a strong creative writing team.

Frank Cottrell Boyce recently won the Guardian Literary prize. That’s where I’d like to be and maybe I won’t get there because – well, Frank Cottrell Boyce – will I ever be that good? But wait a minute: he writes a range of material for the same readership as I write for. So, my work counts. I’m glad he was given this award. I’ve met him once and even shared the dubious of pleasure of getting lost and arriving late at the same event with him. I will be working with him in the not too distant future. So, someone in my circle of influence is highly regarded … bring it on.

What about when someone in your critique group or another writing friend gets published / represented where you’ve been looking? Or gets a better book deal than the one you were offered? Or wins a competition that you also entered? That can be harsh. You want to be glad for the friend but you are so disappointed for yourself.

At this point I have to remind myself of what I often tell my students. You can do it IF you really want to. It is of course an enormous “if”. You will have to face rejection, feelings of inadequacy, possibly poverty, they say 10,000 hours working on your craft and this occasional jealousy for which you may well hate yourself for a while. You have to hold the vision. There is some luck involved but you usually find when your scrutinize the more successful work, that guess what, it is actually better then yours even if it is by only a small margin.

This is where those fellow-writers who make us jealous for a few moments can help us.  They provide the bench-marks. It’s the Manchester Prize, the Guardian Literary prize and a decent book deal with representation by a decent agent that you set as your goals. Our friend / colleague / writing buddy has done this, therefore it is possible for us as well. We may have to try a little bit harder, though.

I always take much comfort in remembering Louisa May Alcott who worked as a jobbing writer for twenty years, no doubt earning a meagre living but being content in her work, and then wrote Little Women. Aren’t we glad that she did? She invested what she earned from that in the railways and became quite rich. Possibly after 10,000 hours of other writing?  

We can’t help the feelings but can we turn them into something that can work positively for us?