Carrotty Kate meets Wombwell’s Menagerie – Going to Bath Fair

There was mayhem at the Bath Fair of 1839. For years the event had been held at Lansdown, high above the city on the flat-lands that abounded the Bath Road. They had been largely peaceable affairs and widely enjoyed. In the early morning farmers would congregate to buy and sell livestock. In the afternoon the local population all gathered to see the wonders of “Wombwell’s Menagerie.”

“Wombwell’s Menagerie” was essentially a travelling zoo with tigers and elephants and other exotic animals, together with merry-go-rounds and swings,  stalls and sideshows. But the fair always attracted a large number of more informal drinking-booths, dancing-tents, contests of skill, and games of chance.

At ten o’ clock on the night of the 10^th August 1839 the Sangers, owners of “Wombwell’s Menagerie,” decided to shut up shop earlier than usual. The crowd had been more boisterous than usual and from early evening fights had begun to break out around the showground. But as the Sangers began packing up the tents and stalls, “Carroty Kate” arrived at the head of a large contingent of already drunk residents of the Avon Street area of the city. George Sanger described her as:-

 “a red-headed virago, a big brutal animal, caring nothing for magistrates or gaol, who had long been the terror of every respectable person in Bath and its neighbourhood.”

Kate’s gang soon began looting the drinking-booths and beating their owners. Anything they could not drink or carry, they smashed. Booths and stalls were wrecked and burned. Many, including children, ran and hid in the surrounding fields and woods in fear of their lives.

Eventually Kate and her gang headed back to the city. But James Sanger loaded his blunderbuss, gathered the showmen together and set off in waggons, pursuing them. They caught a dozen of the fleeing rioters, including Kate. The men they tied together with tent ropes, like a human chain. Then as though it was a tug-of-war contest they dragged them back and fro through a deep pond. When they were half-drowned the show-men dragged them towards the waggons.

One of the rioters shouted,”Are you a-going to kill us? Ain’t you done enough?”

“Not half enough,” one of the showmen replied.

A captive called out, “Murder! Murder!”

“Shut it!” came the answer. “Save your breath for the next scene. You’ll want it then!”

Their captors tied them, two by two to the wheels of the waggons and flogged them with riding whips. After two dozen lashes each they sent them back to the city, barely able to walk. Then they turned to Kate.

The proprietor of a wax-works tent, a woman, shouted, “We’re not going to drag ‘ee through the pond, bad as you wants washin’, nor use the horse-whips to ‘ee, but you’re a-going to be made to smart all the same.” Four of the women in the party then held Kate over a trestle while two others beat her with canes before releasing her.

The rioters who escaped capture by the show-folk fared little better. They were met by the police as they entered the city. Another skirmish ensued. Several were arrested and later transported. One of the rioters though, severely injured a policeman with an iron bar. He was later tried and hung, for wounding with intent to murder. History does not record what became of “Carrotty Kate.”

Avon Street was a dangerous place to be – and to be from.

Rules of Writing – Kurt Vonnegut – The Long and Short of it.

Many authors have produced their own sets of Writing Rules. The longer version (below) by Kurt Vonnegut is fairly well known and remains one of my favourites, though it was aimed more at short story writers than novelists. I think it’s a good guide because it is less prescriptive than many, yet in a way it is far more demanding.   Vonnegut’s “rules” look at writing predominantly from the reader’s perspective. The writer is simply fulfilling their side of a two-way contract between reader and writer; the book, a bridge between the two.

The Long Version

1. Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted.
2. Give the reader at least one character he or she can root for.
3. Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water.
4. Every sentence must do one of two things—reveal character or advance the action.
5. Start as close to the end as possible.
6. Be a Sadist. No matter how sweet and innocent your leading characters, make awful things happen to them—in order that the reader may see what they are made of.
7. Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.
8. Give your readers as much information as possible as soon as possible. To hell with suspense. Readers should have such complete understanding of what is going on, where and why, that they could finish the story themselves, should cockroaches eat the last few pages.

Vonnegut’s “rules” don’t seek to provide a guide to writing a bestseller or a book which will attract critical acclaim. Instead they emphasise the need for the writer to empathise with and respect their potential reader,  to acknowledge the work a reader has to do if the book is to work for them. He had in fact drawn up an earlier list which was even more succinct:-

The Short Version

1. Find a subject you care about

2. Do not ramble, though

3. Keep it simple

4. Have guts to cut

5. Sound like yourself

6. Say what you mean

7. Pity the readers

Like any good writer he opens and closes with his strongest messages and maintains a strong thread between the two.

The opening point relates to the true freedom of the writer as Vonnegut sees it. For him, freedom lies not in style, or the ability to write as you want, but in the choice of subject matter and how it is communicated.  And if the writer doesn’t care about their subject, why should the reader?

The final point though, to my mind has the greatest impact. Vonnegut explained it like this, “They (the readers) have to identify thousands of little marks on paper, and make sense of them immediately…Our audience requires us to be sympathetic and patient writers, ever willing to simplify and clarify — whereas we would rather soar high above the crowd, singing like nightingales.”

Perhaps he should have added – or at least trying to.

Doorway to Another World

The demands a writer makes on a reader are quite incredible. Embarking on a new novel the reader is expected to suspend their own life, to ignore their surroundings, and to use their imagination to enter the writer’s imaginary world – and the world of the novel is constructed entirely of words.

Every sight, sound, touch, smell, or taste, is entirely imaginary. Each emotion the reader feels is triggered (or not) by imagined experiences. Every character is a figment of the writer’s imagination. There are no actors, sound-track, special effects, atmospheric lighting, or carefully directed camera work to assist them, simply words arranged on a page. And the reader has to translate those words into moving pictures and see them from a new perspective, to empathise with the characters, to care about what might happen to them, and to react to what does.

Yet no two readers will see that imagined world in quite the same way. They will often see it differently than the writer intended, bringing their own perspectives and expectations and experiences to bear. And while it’s naturally exciting to see my book published,  I have also come to realise that the world of “Avon Street,” that I spent so long creating is no longer mine. Now the book is out there I have no say in how it should be read, or what people should think of my characters, or their stories, or my ability to convey them.

The use of plot, sub-plot, pace, characterisation, dialogue, settings, atmosphere, style, and use of language are all finalised now. They are set in print and cannot be changed. Whether I have got the balance is right is for the reader to judge. I just hope that those who read it, enjoy it; and that the world of “Avon Street”  and its inhabitants feels real, and stays with it’s readers, at least for a while.

My Favourite Opening Lines – in Novels.

It hardly needs saying that many people do judge a book by its cover, particularly nowadays. But unless the author is well known, their book is likely to be marketed as belonging to a particular genre or category of fiction, rather than as an individual novel. As a consequence, the chances are that the cover will be very similar to lots of others in that particular genre.

So the potential reader turns to the back cover in search of recommendations. But again, unless the writer is an established name they are unlikely to attract reviews and recommendations from other well-known writers or the mainstream media.  And the blurb will often do little other than to confirm that the book fits neatly again with what is expected of the genre.

So the reader thumbs through the book to get an idea of whether they like the style of writing. Some readers even have a particular page number that they turn to and read. But however a reader chooses a book they will almost certainly read the opening line.

These are a dozen of my favourite opening lines of novels – Not only because they draw you in to reading the book, but also because they manage to give a strong flavour of what is to come. There are of course many more  – and long before Creative Writing Courses and the boom in Marketing and Promotion, the Great Writers of the past recognised the power of the opening line.

1. “It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.” – Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice (1813)
2. “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair.”  Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities (1859)
3. “Miss Brooke had that kind of beauty which seems to be thrown into relief by poor dress.”
   -George Eliot, Middlemarch (1872)
4. “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” – Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina (1877)
5. “It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.” – George Orwell, 1984 (1949)
6. “Someone must have slandered Josef K., for one morning, without having done anything truly wrong, he was arrested.” – Franz Kafka, The Trial (1925)
7. “If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you’ll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don’t feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth.” – J. D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye (1951)
8. “A story has no beginning or end; arbitrarily one chooses that moment of experience from which to look back or from which to look ahead.” – Graham Greene, The End of the Affair (1951)
9. “It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs, and I didn’t know what I was doing in New York.” – Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar (1963)
10. “Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.” – Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967)
11. “All this happened, more or less.” – Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five (1969)
12. “It was the day my grandmother exploded.” – Iain M. Banks, The Crow Road (1992)

The opening line of my own novel, “Avon Street” is – “Thomas Hunt left his home in the early hours of that February morning in 1850 and made his way through the maze of Avon Street alleyways.” -perhaps not up there with greats, but I hope it draws some readers in and gives them a taste of what is to come.

Why do Writers Write? – George Orwell

“All writers are vain, selfish, and lazy, and at the very bottom of their motives there lies a mystery. Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand. For all one knows that demon is simply the same instinct that makes a baby squall for attention. And yet it is also true that one can write nothing readable unless one constantly struggles to efface one’s own personality.”

George Orwell

It sounds a little harsh, but anyone who writes will recognise at least some truth in what Orwell says. To an extent writing is vain, if only in having the belief that you can write something that is worth reading. It is certainly selfish. Writing is a totally absorbing activity. You can be sitting in a room surrounded by people you love, but when you are writing your mind is somewhere else and you are cut-off, in your own world. So why write?

Orwell  identified four reasons as to why writers write, and what determines how they write or what they write about. Again he didn’t mince his words:-

•  Sheer egoism. Desire to seem clever, to be talked about, to be remembered after death, to get your own back on the grown-ups who snubbed you in childhood, etc., etc. It is humbug to pretend this is not a motive, and a strong one…

• Aesthetic enthusiasm. Perception of beauty in the external world, or, on the other hand, in words and their right arrangement. Pleasure in the impact of one sound on another, in the firmness of good prose or the rhythm of a good story…

• Historical impulse. Desire to see things as they are, to find out true facts and store them up for the use of posterity.

• Political purpose. Using the word ‘political’ in the widest possible sense. Desire to push the world in a certain direction, to alter other peoples’ idea of the kind of society that they should strive after. Once again, no book is genuinely free from political bias. The opinion that art should have nothing to do with politics is itself a political attitude.

Having just had my first novel, “Avon Street” published, perhaps it’s an odd time to wonder why I write?  But at the moment I’m trying to publicise my book and wondering how far I want to go, and how much I’m willing to let my goals change, when all I really want to do is get on with the next book.  But family and friends keep asking how the book is doing, and it’s made think again about what people expect – and what I expect?

Much as I admire George Orwell, I think his list is too simplistic. Some writers, also feel a basic need to form bridges of communication with others to overcome the feeling of “separateness” that comes from being an individual human being. For others writing is a coming to terms with what has happened in the past.  For many, writing is a form of exploration, of challenging their own perceptions, of trying to empathise with others and to understand a complex world which sometimes makes little sense – and to define for themselves what it is to be a human being with a sense of consciousness.

Perhaps Orwell was too noble-minded to identify money  in his list of motivations, or perhaps times have changed, but it  cannot be ignored nowadays, though many see writing as a more spiritual quest, in search of the Muse, or God, or some higher purpose in our nature. For others it is a way of exploring thought processes and the relationship between conscious and unconscious mind. And let’s not forget the sheer sense of enjoyment that the process of writing can bring.

Other writers have their own definitions. Monica Dickens said,

“Writing is a cop-out. An excuse to live perpetually in fantasy land, where you can create, direct and watch the products of your own head. Very selfish.”

While John Fowles said,

“There are many reasons why novelists write – but they all have one thing in common: a need to create an alternative world.”

There is also the question of when are you entitled to call yourself a writer. When I started writing fiction, I honestly had no interest in being published, yet as soon as I had finished the first draft of my novel it seemed pointless simply leaving it in a drawer, so I started sending it off to publishers and agents. Slowly publication became almost an obsession, and so my goals and expectations began changing. As Lee Child asked,

“If you write a book and no one reads it, is it really a book?’

Yet if you write, you are a writer and publication is often just a matter of luck or fortuitous circumstance. As Kate Mosse said,

“There’s only one difference between published and unpublished writers and it is this – the first group see their work in print on the shelves of Waterstone’s or Tesco or online at Amazon; the second group are yet to have physical evidence of the hours, weeks, years spent fashioning words into their patterns.  You are already a writer.”

Perhaps some or all of thes motives for writing (above) are common to every writer, but the strength of their influence will be different from writer to writer and they will rarely remain the same. Orwell was right when he said,

“It can be seen how these various impulses must war against one another, and how they must fluctuate from person to person and from time to time.”

Each individual writer’s motivation is complex and personal – and it changes over time as expectations change. In truth there are as many reasons for writing as there are writers – and writing will always have something new to say, or find a new way of saying it. But it seems important to remember why you started writing and what you expected then, rather than chasing new rainbows.

20 Novels that Changed the World

In the relatively short history of the Novel many have changed the lives of individuals, but (in my opinion) few have changed the world, or at least helped shape and change Society’s attitudes and values.  These are the novels that have, for the most part stood against persecution, de-humanisation and the exploitation of the many by the few. They have perhaps helped us evolve a little and remain as relevant today as when they were written.

I have drawn up a list of 20 novels. They are largely of my own choosing though I must thank Reine and Dovegreyreader for their valuable suggestions of titles I would otherwise have missed.

 

• “Robinson Crusoe” (1719) –  Daniel Defoe – Many books can lay claim to being the first novel and for shaping what came after, but “Robinson Crusoe” certainly popularised the form. By the end of the 19th century, no book in the history of western literature had been so widely translated or been printed in so many different versions, and the adaptations  still continue today. The novel also had a moral compass which challenged many of the commonly held values of the day.

• “A Christmas Carol” (1843) - Charles Dickens - Collectively Dickens’ novels had an undoubted impact on Victorian society by giving faces and voices to the poor. He perhaps more than any other writer changed his world and helped shape the future. Many of his novels could be included here, but I have chosen this novella because it is here that Dickens’ overall message is expressed most succinctly, at least for me, particularly when the Ghost of Christmas Present  reveals the two children and says, - “This boy is Ignorance. This girl is Want. Beware them both, and all of their degree, but most of all beware this boy, for on his brow I see that written which is Doom, unless the writing be erased.“

• “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” (1851) -  Harriett Beecher Stowe  -  This book was the best-selling novel of the 19^th Century. It increased awareness of, and help change attitudes to slavery, eventually helping to bring about the abolition of slavery.

• “Ulysses” (1922) – James |Joyce – Probably the most definitive work of modernist fiction, not least for its use of stream of consciousness writing. It may not have changed the world, but it certainly changed the world of literature.

•  “Lady Chatterley’s Lover” (1928) – D.H. Lawrence – The novel that changed the laws of censorship. Penguin second edition, published in 1961 carried the following dedication,  ”This edition is dedicated to the twelve jurors, three women and nine men, who returned a verdict of ‘Not Guilty’ and thus made D. H. Lawrence’s last novel available for the first time to the public in the United Kingdom.”

• “Brave New World” (1931) – Aldous Huxley – The novel demonstrates the loss of individual identity that can come through assembly line production, indoctrination and the abuse of technological “advancement.”

• “All Quiet on the Western Front” (1929) –  Eric Maria Remarque – One of the major themes of the novel is the difficulty of soldiers to revert to civilian life. Commenting in the preface Remarque says that  he,  “will try simply to tell of a generation of men who, even though they may have escaped shells, were destroyed by the war.” The book was banned and burned by the Nazis prior to the Second World War.

• “Testament of Youth” (1933) – Vera Brittain – Not strictly speaking a novel, but “Testament of Youth” was a biography that gave whole generations of “civilians” a new understanding of the impact of War. Up until its publication many still viewed war as a wholly heroic enterprise, without contemplating its effects on those who went through it, nor the suffering undergone by their families and loved ones.

• “The Grapes of Wrath” (1939) – John Steinbeck – The book was subject to many  public book-burnings,  but Steinbeck changed attitudes on the plight of the poor and migrants following the great depression. Steinbeck wrote, before writing the book: “I want to put a tag of shame on the greedy bastards who are responsible for this the Great Depression and its effects.”

• “The Citadel” (1937) – A.J. Cronin –  Exposed the inequity and incompetence of medical practice at the time. In the novel, Cronin advocated a free public health service in order to defeat the wiles of those doctors who he said “raised guinea-snatching and the bamboozling of patients to an art form.” It played a major role in the development of the National Health Service in the UK.

•  “The Little Prince” (1943) - Antoine de St Exupery – There are many novels which could be cited as providing guidance on a way of living or “spiritual” awareness. I chose this one because it is my favourite and because it communicates across generations and age groups.

• “Diary of a Young Girl” (1944) – Anne Frank – Ann Frank’s Diary stands as a symbol and reminder of the effects of persecution on ordinary lives and still communicates with young readers.

• “If This is a Man” (1948) – Primo Levi – Not just a testimony of suffering and cruelty in the concentration camps – but also a demonstration of how mankind can be dehumanised through degradation.

• “1984″ (1949) – George Orwell -  Gave us the concepts of “Big Brother” and “Doublethink.” Revealed the dangers of Nationalism, Censorship, Surveillance, Manipulation through propaganda and alerted people to the dangers of an over-powerful state and totalitarian government.

• “The Catcher in the Rye”  (1951) – J.D. Salinger – Adopted by generations of youngsters as the book that speaks to them and for them.  The anti-hero, Holden Caulfield, searches for a sense of belonging, and identity, in a Society in which he feels alienated.

• “Atlas Shrugged” (1957) – Ayn Rand – This book is not to my taste, but it has to be included because it helped found and sustain the new economics, which rejects ethical altruism in favour of unfettered capitalism, and  puts the concept of self, before society. Rand termed her philosophy “Objectivism”, describing its essence as “the concept of man as a heroic being, with his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life.”

• “To Kill a Mockingbird” (1960) – Harper Lee – Deals with issues of race and class discrimination, but in a way which is almost uniquely accessible to younger and older readers alike.

• “Catch 22” (1961) – Joseph Heller –  The novel plays with time-lines and perspectives in a very individual style and demonstrates better than many other books, the insanity of war. It also perhaps shows, that if not for their own absurdity and inefficiency mankind would have wiped themselves out years ago.

• “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich” (1962) – by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn – Never before had an account of Stalinist repression been openly distributed in the Soviet Union. This book also forced Western countries to acknowledge their hypocrisy in ignoring breaches of  human rights behind the “iron-curtain.”

 

• “A Novel” (1962 to Now) – Unspecified because perhaps only time can judge which novel written in the last fifty years will have helped change the world and shape our futures?

 

 

 

Books (v) Films – No Competition

The relationship between books and the screen is often seen as some sort of competition. People argue that the novel is outdated.  It takes so long to read a book and a good film can achieve the same impact in a couple of hours. Defenders argue that few films are ever as good as the book they are based on, that a book fires the imagination far more than any film. Yet the two have so much in common and so much to learn from each other, in meeting changing expectations.

Before writing Avon Street, I did a short script-writing course in evening classes at Bath University. I’ve never subsequently written a script, yet I have tried to bring  to my writing some of things I learned on that course.

• In judging a script, a film director/producer will often cover up the names of the characters down the left hand margin and see if they can recognise which lines are spoken by what character. The important lesson is that everyone speaks in a slightly different way. In any form of drama dialogue is part of what makes a character unique.

• A scene is never static from a film camera’s perspective, just as our own perception is constantly changing. One second we are looking at a wide angle view, the next we focus on a small detail. Those shifting focusses are important in conveying atmosphere and setting, defining character, and in drawing the audience into the scene.

• A scene is not just what we see, but also full of sounds, smells, tastes. A film maker tries to engage all the senses of the viewer, drawing them into the scene. But a film has actors, sound engineers, cameramen, lighting technicians to build those impressions. The writer has to fire a reader’s senses in different ways and yet remain mindful of these same techniques, playing with motion, light, angles of view, sound, smell, taste, and touch, trying to envisage how an actor would express the character’s emotions.

• A film maker also recognises the power of silence in conveying mood and atmosphere. Sometimes what marks an exceptional actor out from others is how they perform when they are still part of the scene, yet not speaking. It’s difficult to convey silence in writing without losing the reader’s interest and yet it can be so powerful when it works.

• A film plays with plot, pace and atmosphere by changing scenes and perspectives at regular intervals. We are taken from a cliff-hanger to a place of calm, from the main plot to a sub-plot. One minute we see the world from one character’s viewpoint, the next from another’s.  Those changes of scene and perspective have to run smoothly, almost imperceptibly – and they should always serve a purpose.

• A film foreshadows what is about to happen or might happen, not only through story development and the careful release of information, but also more subtly through changes in mood and atmosphere. It is that building of anticipation that creates tension and pace, and maintains credibility in the plot.

A good film can be just as enjoyable and significant as a good book – and vice versa. They’re just different ways of telling a story. The important  part is the “good,” and even that means different things to different people.

Yet having said all that about what the writer can learn from films, it’s worth observing that Charles Dickens never saw a movie in his life, and yet he employed all these techniques and wrote novels that have provided the plots and characters of many successful screen adaptations. If he was writing now he would probably be writing scripts for “The Killing” or “The Wire” -and film makers would be fighting for the “screen-rights” to his latest block-buster novel.