You have the ability through your own imagination to create your future. Your destiny is not locked in.’

Robert Waxler
Professor of English
University of Massachusetts
Director: Changing Lives Through Literature

The Returning Offender

 
Continue reading “Blog”

Working with Sharon.

It’s so good  to work with  fellow professional –  journalist and novelist Sharon Griffiths,  in developing and publishing her  new novel.

We have spent the last few days putting final touches to the cover of  Sharon’s exciting new novel Amity and the Angel. I

This is Sharon’s third published  novel, It is a marvelously perceptive venture into the exciting field of  future fiction – imagining life in a  future world which has been virtually destroyed after the destructive 21st Century Oil  Wars.

The heroine, teenager Amity, lives on a distant island which – in its own process of survival – has reverted to a restrictive religion-obsessed world. Amity  battles on with the restrictions, trying to assert her right to live a normal life.  Her  childhood sweetheart, who  had left the island, now returns strangely changed,  .One day on the beach  Amity  comes across a golden haired wounded figure whom she takes to be  an angel.

…G

 

More about Sharon Griffiths and Amity

Originally from Pembrokeshire, West Wales. Sharon ended up in the North East of England by way of    Bristol  University and Radio Oxford.   For some years she has written regular columns and feature articles for The Northern Echo   (http://tiny.cc/ia6lky)  and  the Eastern Daily Press in Norwich – as well as features for national newspapers.

Sharon’s columns and articles are widely popular for their intelligence, warmth and humour as well as  their insight into domestic, cultural and political life. Her previous novels, The Accidental Time Traveller and The Lost Guide to Life and Love, gained plaudits here and abroad.

With Amity and The Angel Sharon enters new territory. In this novel we flip back what appears to be medieval times in a severe Protestant island sect. However this is the contemporary world, after world-wide oil wars have destroyed much of the planet. (How resonant this is, of present day fears …)

The island is loosely connected to equally isolated mainland communities and is serviced by travelling tradesmen who  bring them news of the wider world. On the island there are no machines, few horses, no dancing, no singing, even in church, where there is much haranguing and instruction and bullying authority, There is  a chilling scene here, of the public shaming of a girl who has had a child out-of-wedlock

Amity does no fit into this oppressive community with is clerical hierarchy and gender based laws. Here own discontent is fed by the memories if the grandmother she takes care of, who has told her tales of times when there was singing and dancing, mobile phones, high heels and lipstick.

After Amity’s friend Finn leaves the island for the mainland, she finds solace in a creature she finds in a cave on the beach. She thinks of him as an Angel . Perhaps he can be a key to change and the restoration of normality both for her and the world community?

A wonderful and thought provoking read. W.R.

]

 

      

Damselfly Editorial are delighted to be working with author Sharon Griffiths on her new, strangely prescient novel Amity and the Angel. 

 

Originally from Pembrokeshire, West Wales. Sharon ended up in the North East of England by way of    Bristol  University and Radio Oxford.   For some years she has written regular columns and feature articles for The Northern Echo   (http://tiny.cc/ia6lky)  and  the Eastern Daily Press in Norwich – as well as features for national newspapers. 

Sharon’s columns and articles are widely popular for their intelligence, warmth and humour as well as  their insight into domestic, cultural and political life. Her previous novels, The Accidental Time Traveller and The Lost Guide to Life and Love, gained plaudits here and abroad.

With Amity and The Angel Sharon enters new territory. In this novel we flip back what appears to be medieval times in a severe Protestant island sect. However this is the contemporary world, after world-wide oil wars have destroyed much of the planet. (How resonant this is, of present day fears …)

The island is loosely connected to equally isolated mainland communities and is serviced by travelling tradesmen who  bring them news of the wider world. On the island there are no machines, few horses, no dancing, no singing, even in church, where there is much haranguing and instruction and bullying authority, There is  a chilling scene here, of the public shaming of a girl who has had a child out-of-wedlock

Amity does no fit into this oppressive community with is clerical hierarchy and gender based laws. Here own discontent is fed by the memories if the grandmother she takes care of, who has told her tales of times when there was singing and dancing, mobile phones, high heels and lipstick.

After Amity’s friend Finn leaves the island for the mainland, she finds solace in a creature she finds in a cave on the beach. She thinks of him as an Angel . Perhaps he can be a key to change and the restoration of normality both for her and the world community?

Amity and the  Angel promises to be  a very special novel

We are working on the cover. Thought you’d like to see

our work in progress…

]

 

      

The thing that separates the professional writer from the amateur writer is the strength of their characterisation.

Have fun with the following – as you start to build the characters in your short story or your novel.

Characters – where to start?

You may recall characters who live on outside the story where they were born:
Think of Bill Sykes and Fagin
Think of Elizabeth Bennet and Rupert Bear
Think of Hannibal Lecter and Scarlett O’Hara
Think of Molly Bloom and Paul Morel
Think of Huckleberry Finn and Holly Golightly

Remember:

The characters in a story are the most important element.

1. They are the colour and the depth In your narative,
2. They carry the story forward in their wake
3. They are the medium and the message.
4. They are the parts and the sum

Points to remember.

1. The character may share many of your insights and experiences but s/he is not you.(This is, of course, very liberating….)
2  Only boring characters are all-good, or all bad.
3  However outrageous and outlandish a character’s actions and sayings are, they must be within the logic of this character. There is some kind of inner explanation for everything, even if you don’t explain it within the story. 

You, the writer, are becoming the expert in these people. 

Naming your Character
Names can give us personal, regional, national, historic and idiosyncratic clues to character. Do not choose a name lightly. If you choose not to name your character it should be a deliberate artistic choice, not a copping out.  (Read Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca, where the narrator is not named.)

Seeing/Feeling/Smelling/ Hearing your Character
It could be that you  never mention the appearance of your character in your story, but you need to see him or her in your own mind. Characteristics will filter into your storytelling.     Close your eyes.  SEE!

For instance

• Is s/he tall or short? Tallish, shortish?
• Is s/he thin with thick ankles?
• Is s/he fat with beautiful legs?
• Does s/he smell of cinnamon or chicken-fat?
• Lavender or old sweat? Machine oil or patchouli?
• Is his or her skin smooth or rough to the touch?
• Does s/he have spots or old boils, Tattoos or needle marks?
• Is it golden, white greys, brown, black, pink or sallow?
• Does s/he have large or small hands?
• Are they clean or dirty?
• Are they used to manual work or non-manual work?
• Are they masculine or feminine hands?
• What do you know from the way he or she speaks?
• Describe the timbre of her voice
• How does s/he make you, the storyteller, feel?
  Where did you first see her/him?
  How does s/he speak? Does s/he have speech mannerisms?

Contradictions
Interesting characters are often perverse. Think of the vegetarian butcher, the gentle torturer, the plain seductress, the beautiful loser, the mild murderer, the loving betrayer, the rich thief, the fit invalid, the superstitious scientist, the child hating teacher …
Can you add to this list?

Try-Out Your Character!
NB, No matter whether or not you mention any of the above characteristics, they will be implicit in the prose you use in these try-outs.
Try …

• Write ten lines in the first person about your character’s fifth birthday.
• Write their own view of the star sign under which they were they born
• Write a sentence written by them about a scar they have on their body.
• Write ten lines about the view from their window when they were (or will be …) 25 years old.
• Write three lines from their school report when they were thirteen. What do their teachers say?
• Write five lines of dialogue between them and their father or their mother.
• Write a first person account (ten lines…) of the first time they fell in love.
• Write a first person account (ten lines …) of the first time they broke the law.
• Write a monologue of them trying to make someone give them a job they desperately want.
• Write a monologue of a friend trying to describe them to a very interested police officer.

 

NOW! Put them in your story.

© Wendy Robertson 2016

 

 

All readers and writers have novels which are their benchmark for quality, creativity, and literary verve.

This novel is my benchmark, my lifelong inspiration.

 

Like Virginia Woolf’s ‘Mrs Dalloway’, Toni Morrison’s ‘Beloved’ exploded my views on how language works. Like George Eliot’s ‘Middlemarch’, this novel stunned me with its subtle view on the politics of a complicated world at a certain time in history,.

However Toni Morrison’ed ‘Beloved’, was the first great novel I read without bidding from scholar or teacher on page or in person. It was 1987 when I first read this novel and felt it to be great. I did not know then that ‘Beloved’ would win the Pulitzer Prize, or its author the Nobel Prize for Literature.

I read this novel once, then reread it instantly to find out why it had made such an impact on me. Then I read it again, to ignite more fireworks in my head with Toni Morrison’s words, her prisms of meaning, her verbal music. That was years ago. This week, I read it again and, the catherine-wheels have started to spin, spitting off fresh insights to be encoded into my idea of ‘Beloved’.

At the centre of this glittering catherine-wheel of a novel are Sethe, her flesh-daughter Denver and her-ghost daughter Beloved. Spinning around these three is Baby Suggs, shamanistic woman of great heart, mother to Sethe’s absent husband, Halle, who worked years of Sundays to buy his beloved mother’s freedom,

Spinning around them is is the incident in the shed of a house on the banks of the Ohio eighteen years before. Here, rather than have her baby daughter returned to the spoilage of a slave’s life, Sethe kills her with a saw.

Towards the edge of catherine-wheel spins Sweet Home, the plantation where Sethe was born, where Baby Suggs worked in the kitchen and where Halle, Paul D and the other ‘Sweet Home men’, worked the land for the apparently benevolent Mr Garner, who kindly allowed Halle to work years of his free Sundays to buy his mother’s freedom.

Further out beyond Sweet Home spins the sea, from where came Sethe’s mother who spoke a language Sethe could not understand, and who ended at the end of a hangman’s rope.

And beyond the sea spins Africa, always Africa.

Time is given little linear respect in this novel: it flashes inwards and outwards, backwards and forwards to allow us a deeper and deeper sense of the interior landscapes not just of Sethe and Baby Suggs, but of Denver and of Paul D, who comes to Ohio to find Sethe; and of old Stamp Paid who rescues slaves on the banks of the Ohio.

The palest, whitest, most glittering light shines on the interior landscape of ‘Beloved’, the aggressive mischievous ghost finally embodied as a girl, ‘who had new skin, lineless and smooth, including the knuckles of her hands.’

The novel inhabits not only light but music, in the layering and counterpointing of word and word and word, and in its incantatory prose rhythms. Buried in there too is the syncopated development of motif, which spreads, divides, then fuses in the artfully artless manner of jazz. Music also lives in the novel in plain sight: Upstairs Beloved was dancing. A little two step, two step, make a new step, slide slide and strut on down.

Already praised for her earlier novels, Morrison changed gear as a writer with ‘Beloved’. She took her sense of the essential music of language to greater heights in her later novel, ‘Jazz’, set in 1920’s Harlem. Then came ‘Paradise’, which Morrison wrote as the final instalment of a trilogy that began with ‘Beloved’. ‘Paradise’ begins with the best first lines, ‘They shoot the white girl first…’ but for me ‘Beloved’ is the best, the first great begetting.

Morrison, a career academic, is a highly7 conscious creator. Straight narrative, plain talk, fancy allegory, elliptical forms, metaphoric language, magic and music are her fingertip tools. In her Nobel Prize speech, she said, ‘The vitality of language lies in its ability to limn the actual, imagined and possible lives of its speakers, readers and writers. Although its poise is sometimes a displacing experience, it is not a substitute for it. It arcs towards the place where meaning may lie.’

Now that ‘Beloved’ is on firmly fixed on curriculum lists we are treated to a wide range of analytical perspectives of the novel and its writer. However, arguments regarding the informing issues of race or of gender seem to me cripplingly reductive. Morrison herself said, in an article in Time Magazine ‘Race is the least reliable information you can have about something. It’s real information, but it tells you next to nothing.’ 

The race under the microscope here is the human race.

And gender? Well the feminist in me finds much to cherish in the closeness, the high definition and elaboration of the female characters: their strengths and their discreet consuming passions; in the elevation here of female sensuality in food and colour, appetite and domestic routine. But the tenderness and acute perception which Morrison also shows Paul D and Stamp Paid, and even the absent Halle, properly includes men in this universe of pain and redemption.

‘Beloved’ shoots out light, life and even hope in all directions, including ours. It’s the best.
Read it!

(NB This article was first published in Mslexia Magazine. They edited out my admonition ‘Read it!’ I have restored it here,)