Green Men, Murder and Religious Mayhem - the Rochester Promenade Play

Yikes, what a week! I’m just back – today – from celebrating my mother’s 70th birthday by taking her to see La Traviata at the Millennium Centre in Cardiff and, finally, I have a few minutes to talk about the promenade play.

Actually, I feel like the last person who should be telling you about it – I didn’t even see it properly as I was the prompter for both performances. My eyes were glued to the script so I just listened and snatched odd visual snippets of what was going on. I will be able to watch it – eventually - as a cameraman from Kent Online has provided us with some uncut footage and the Ultimate Frisbee Freak was there with his digital video camera and the cathedral’s tripod recording it for family posterity.

We’d dreaded bad weather – particularly as one scene was played almost entirely in the cloister garden and we had no contingency plan other than to issue the audience with as many umbrellas as could be mustered – but, in the event, the sun shone all day, leaving the cast – most of whom were in medieval-style woollens – overheating in the unseasonal weather.

And the Indian summer encouraged the crowds to come. We had excellent audiences for both performances – in fact the audience for the first was almost too large, causing some delays between scenes and nasty moments of ‘do I come in now or not?’ for the poor cast. But all the actors coped with that – and all the other minor hitches of ‘with the audience’ performance - admirably. With ad libs to the fore and some nice moments of cast-audience interaction the whole thing was carried off with great aplomb.

Here are some pictures of the actors in action:

Actually, this one isn't an actor in action but, behind the mask (click on the picture to enlarge it) which was fixed to the outside of the organ loft, stood Bob, an actor with a mighty Green Man's voice which filled the cathedral with his rage during his anguished conversation with Justus, first bishop of Rochester:


Then there were the monks:
Ulf, the novice, who nearly slithered down the stairs in his haste to make his meeting with the Novice Master and

...Gundulf (not to be confused with Gandalf, despite the magician-like robes) aka The Weeping Monk of Bec who built the early bits of Rochester cathedral, its castle and the White Tower of London for William the Conqueror whom he didn't much approve of.

Then the audience was treated to a garden-based murder most foul. One of the cathedral's two saints - William of Perth, a thirteenth-century baker on pilgrimage - was done to death by his treacherous foster-son...


the story told by a storyteller and observed by a Madwoman...


...I'll leave you to work out which is which...

Then we watched as a conservator had a fright when the bishop whose memorial she was working on suddenly showed up with a lot of difficult questions...



...which were partly answered by the following scene in which two men who, in all probability never met - John Fisher and Nicholas Ridley - confront each other with chaplains at the ready...


The last scene, involving Dickens and a wholly fictitious biographer whom I had great fun inventing, allowed us to end on a poignant note - that of Dickens's last days.



Many thanks to my son, The Bassist, and to Richard Simmons both of whom took wonderful pictures of both performances in difficult circumstances.

And, in case you’re wondering where we came by all our fantastic costumes, the majority were designed and made by Berthe Fortin, a professional costume designer with whom we were very lucky to work. Berthe researched and produced all the medieval costumes which gave the early scenes – and particularly the story of William of Perth and Rochester’s madwoman - a great sense of unity and cohesion. The Dean and Chapter kindly made real vestments available for some of our Bishops and their chaplains which meant that the contrast between bishops Fisher and Ridley was wonderfully highlighted by the difference in clerical clothing the two men wore.

Of course, most of the experience of writing a play and having it produced is unlike novel-writing. The interactivity, the different medium, the audience… But one thing is exactly the same – the minute it’s finished and you can’t do anything to change it, you want to rewrite, cut, polish and change.
Fortunately for the actors, I restrained myself...

Many, many thanks must go to the Dean and Chapter of Rochester cathedral for giving me such free rein to interpret the history of their lovely cathedral in my own way – their faith in me is very much appreciated.

The Play's the Thing.. or is it the Actors?

As a novelist, you always know what your characters look like, what they sound like, how they move, what they’re fundamentally about.

It’s different with plays. When you write dialogue for actors you can have your views on these things but – in the end – they will be decided by the actor playing the part. Of course, if you’re the director as well as the author, you can influence how the character is played, but only to a certain extent. After all, an actor’s appearance can only be altered just so much; you can’t make a tall man short or a person of 50 look 20 (though it’s possible to do the reverse operation if you’ve got a good makeup artist).

So, writing and directing a play has been a very interesting process. (If you don’t know what I’m going on about, read this post.)

When you’re writing a novel, words are the only tools at your disposal. Crossing the tracks to writing dialogue, I kind of assumed that – to an extent - words would suffice there, too, but I’ve been surprised at how much of a difference costume and location within the cathedral make.

For instance, at the beginning of the dress rehearsal on Wednesday night, I walked in to the dressing room and saw a grey-haired, bearded man in a frock coat whom I completely failed to recognise as Owen, the actor who is playing Dickens! Suddenly, he was Dickens. And it may or may not have made a difference to how he felt about the lines, how he spoke them, but it certainly made a difference to how I heard and felt them.

What I’d forgotten, of course, is that both the writer’s and the reader’s imagination are constantly moving beyond the words on the page to see the characters they’re reading about. Writers and readers do what actors do – they use their imaginations to see the people on the page and to breathe life into them.
Obviously, the imaginative work required of the reader is slightly less onerous than that required of the writer – the reader doesn’t have to invent everything from scratch, merely to put their own interpretation on what the writer has written but, without imagination, the process of reading and understanding a book is impossible.

So, actors do for their audience what a reader’s imagination does. They take the bare words on the page, imagine what lies behind them and flesh the characters out, bringing them alive in the process.

All of which makes play-writing a far more collaborative process than novel writing, even if – as they playwright – you never get to influence the production. You are still in a process of collaboration with the actors to present the finished piece to the audience. In my case, I’ve been lucky enough to influence the production very much as its director, and it’s been wonderful to work with the actors.

Tomorrow is production day. If anybody is in or around Rochester, do come along to the cathedral and join in the festivities for the new interpretation project’s launch. You can try out the new audio-guides (voiced by Jools Holland) look at all the spiffy new display panels, see the audio-visuals and even watch the promenade play. First performance is at noon and the second will begin, seamlessly, just after one.

And the cathedral has a very nice tea-room too…

What you might call writing balls...

One of the lovely people we met at the charcoal burn in the Forest of Dean told us that the architects at the practice she manages don’t sit on office chairs – they use exercise balls instead. You know - those huge things that look like space hoppers without the ears and the goofy face…

So, because I have a back that enjoys tormenting me by popping its sacro-iliac joint fairly regularly and – according to my osteopath – pretty naff ‘core stability’ I decided I’d get one.

Foolishly, I followed the height recommendations at Argos and got a 65cm one when I should have looked at less cheapskate more medically-oriented ones which tell you ‘if you have unusually long legs this may necessitate the use of a larger ball’. Well I do have unusually long legs. I’m just shy of 5’10’’ and I have a 34’’ inside leg. Nightmare for buying trousers – average women’s trousers are 29/30’’ with 31/32’’ considered long or even (hah) extra long. For me, only Long Tall Sally trousers will reliably fit, so if I don’t like what they have on offer, I go without. I have a lot of very well-worn trousers…

So, having used my 65cm ball for a week, I sent off for a 75cm one instead. Of course, it arrived today. When we were all at work/school/in Portsmouth in the case of the Ultimate Frisbee Freak. So I’ll get it tomorrow.

Has anybody else tried alternative seating in a bid not to completely knacker themselves by sitting at a desk for large parts of the day?

Here we go...

Well, it’s only Wednesday and so far it’s a spiffingly good week – I’ve started actually writing The Black and the White rather than endlessly droning on about research for it and I’ve been quoted on the Bookseller’s online presence here.

In case any of you follow the link and are wondering where I said all this, the original guest-blog post is here on the lovely Juxtabook blog.

So, finally, the thing is started. I got the house straight (OK straight-ish) over the weekend, organised a new working space (I’ve been doing all my research work in the kitchen) and bought a box for my index cards instead of keeping them in a nasty confused pile on the kitchen table.

I spent Monday and Tuesday getting in to it and, after being at work today, I’ve decided I’ve started in the wrong place. So I think a long walk will be necessary tomorrow morning to try and get my head around how I’m going to start where I think I should have started.

More anon…

Charcoal burning escapades

As a parting shot in a comment I made on Tim Stretton’s blog last week, I asked – slightly breathlessly – ‘Don’t you just love research?!’

Because I do. Love research. But that was taken to a whole new level this past weekend when the Other Half and I headed down to the Dean Heritage Centre in the Forest of Dean so that I could watch a charcoal burn in the traditional, thousands-of-years-old manner.

I had thought I’d just watch. I’d spoken to the guy running the burn – Pete Ralph – on the phone and he had very kindly said ‘come and join in as much as you want’ but I didn’t think I would. I’m not a gregarious person and the thought of gate-crashing an event already supplied with sufficient volunteers who knew what they were doing and having to talk to loads of new people for hours on end didn’t appeal.

But I hadn’t anticipated the warm welcome of the volunteers – most of whom were our age or older and the easy way they just included us in the whole process. There wasn’t a whiff of ‘who the hell do you think you are?’ they just naturally included us and assumed that we knew as much as they did and were as fascinated as they were. Which turned out to be true – certainly the fascinated part, anyway.

The process of burning charcoal is actually quite simple. (And, like lots of things that are simple in principle, it takes years to learn to do well.)

Here’s a recipe for one smallish charcoal-burning clamp:

Ingredients:

2 cords of wood (a cord is a stack of wood eight feet long, four feet high and two feet wide, each ‘log’ being 2 feet long and approximately 3-4 inches in diameter. Interestingly the stack is called a cord because an eight-foot cord was used to measure the stack – the cord was doubled over to measure the 4 foot height and then doubled again to measure the 2 foot width. I always knew a piece of string would come in handy…)

Enough turf (approx half an inch to an inch thick) to cover the whole stack (a dome approximately 8 feet in diameter)

A mix of soil and charcoal dust/debris lifted from the hearth (ie the area of forest floor where the burn is going to take place) prior to building the clamp.

A nice flat area away from too much wind (which causes the stack to burn unevenly).

Method (in pictures...)

First build a central chimney...

then...

and...

then you put the turf on...

then you start covering it with earth...


and when it's nicely covered in earth, you (ie Pete) go up a ladder on the outside of the stack and , with a shovel, put loads of burning embers and half-charcoaled logs from the outside of the last burn (the brunts) in to the central chimney to start the fire.

We spent 5 hours building the clamp and watching the firing process on Saturday and then, on Sunday, we went back as proper volunteers on a shift which combined watching the clamp for signs of collapse or turf-shrinkage and putting patches on with chatting to members of the public who’d come to see what it was all about. We sounded like pros in no time.

One of the things I’d really been hoping I could do was to see the stack at night to find out what it looked like in the dark and how the woodland felt once the dominant sound wasn’t human but animal. (The owls were particularly vocal). Thanks to the generosity of volunteers James and Tina who were on the Sunday night shift we stayed until about ten o’clock and I was able to get a wonderfully atmospheric picture of what it might have been like to do the same thing in the mid-fourteenth century. I won’t wax lyrical here because, no doubt, a certain amount of that will find its way into the book. Many thanks to James, too, for sending me an article he had written on the evidence for medieval charcoal burning.

Sadly we weren’t able to see the clamp quenched (ie have lots of water poured over it) on Monday night or opened on Tuesday as we had to drive home on Monday. I’ll have to find another burn to discover the feel of those parts of the process. And I will. Because however many books you read, actually seeing, smelling, hearing and feeling the thing gives you the kind of first hand knowledge you can’t get any other way, no matter how erudite and specific your reading matter.

We’re so hooked we’re going back to the Dean Heritage Centre in May, as volunteers this time.

Who’d have thought there’d be so much entertainment value in watching a turfed-over pile of logs smouldering gently…?

PS Many, many thanks are due to the Dean Heritage Centre for putting me in touch with Pete Ralph and to Pete and his team of volunteers who made us so welcome. Thanks guys!

Accountants, index card boxes and the Forest of Dean

It appears I am low maintenance. At least according to my accountant.

I have, apparently, not claimed enough expenses in the last tax year.

Well, writing is pretty low-imput isn’t it? Even taking into account the internet which I use constantly for research, it’s not exactly a technology-intensive job. And you don’t need posh clothes to do it. Or a car. I keep trying to persuade myself that my laptop needs replacing but, as I generally can't bear to replace anything I own while it still actually works/fits/isn’t actually steam-powered, I plod on, bearing with it as it takes three minutes to log on to the internet and crashes if I even think about having iTunes and webmail on the go at the same time...

I may be about to gladden my accountant’s heart, however, as this weekend will see the Other Half and me and set off for the first of what will probably amount to half a dozen research excursions for The Black and The White. (It's what I heard Antonia Fraser refer to on the radio the other day - quaintly I thought - as 'optical research'. Aka actually eyeballing the places you're writing about as opposed to reading about them or looking at a map and inferring madly.)

To start with, we are off to the Forest of Dean because that’s where my central character comes from. And – hooray of hoorays - the Dean Heritage Centre is running a charcoal burning demonstration over the bank holiday weekend. So, I shall be in my element. I may have to borrow the Ultimate Frisbee Freak’s video camera and record the whole thing. The Other Half suspects I may be mentally preparing myself to back an unsuspecting charcoal burner into a dark woodland corner and fire arcane questions at him for as long as he's prepared to bear it. She says she’ll be in the café reading her book.

This has all come to pass thanks to the wonders – of course – of the internet. I was surfing around looking for details of the medieval extent of the Forest of Dean when I came across a reference to the Dean Heritage Centre and its lovely website.

Other things I have been using today as I plot – literally – my character’s journey through the novel are the online Domesday Book which will give you a list of every village in any given county mentioned in the said tax record (excellent for checking whether villages which are there now and look ancient were actually there then looking new) and Google’s map function which enables me to look at terrain as well as where things are in relation to each other. I basically have to get my main character across England while the Black Death rages and I want to make sure he’s taking a sensible route and not choosing to go over nasty steep hills when there are convenient valleys he could be following instead. In theory I can read an OS map perfectly competently, but it's so much more mentally strenuous than letting Google paint you a simple picture.

I also spent a lot of time today toggling between about four different websites as I tried to work out whether the bridge in Gloucester which crossed the Severn in the fourteenth century – a bridge which no longer exists as it crossed a channel of the ever-dividing river which also no longer exists – was inside or outside the city wall. OK, I know I could fudge it (‘…after crossing the river at Gloucester, he….) but I don’t want to. The people of Gloucester barred their gates to all comers to try and keep the plague out (sensible them, shame they didn’t know they should be trying to keep rats out) and I want to put that in. If he couldn’t go through the gates when he needed to, then that would have implications, even for a fudge.

Lest you think all my research is internet-based and therefore shallow and of dubious authenticity I would (if I wasn’t so lazy about taking and downloading photos) include a picture of my current work-area in our kitchen. The table is littered with books propped open, books sprouting yellow post-its like slim pointy fungus, books still waiting to be consulted and dozens and dozens of index cards with spider-diagrams and cryptic notes-to-self on them. For reasons of economy, when I bought the index cards (usually I’m a notebook person but my notes were beginning to resemble the disjointed ravings of a lunatic) I neglected to buy an index-box. However, this means that any minute now I’m going to have to go all Blue Peter and make one out of a cereal box before the cards start to migrate about the house and I lose track of some pearl-like thought or vital fourteenth-century fact.

Or maybe I should just bite the bullet, buy a plastic box and gladden my accountant’s heart….

Anxious times

I am in a state of anxiety at the moment for which I am prescribing myself long walks undertaken at marching pace. These are mostly working.

Why the anxiety? Well...

We came home from holiday to a million things that needed doing and which I had been putting off before we went away. Repairs to our kitchen roof, sorting out issues with our internet service provider, getting the boiler seriviced, thinking about my Mum’s 70^th birthday… and a ton of other, lesser things. The list seemed to go on and on. Last week saw most of them sorted, at least prospectively (appointments made etc) but there are always new things popping up.

Then there was the awful shock, ten days ago, of a friend of ours being admitted to the Royal Marsden Hospital with Acute Lymphoblastic Leukaemia. He’s just started what will be a 2-year course of treatment.

In a less dramatic vein, this Thursday sees both the first full rehearsal of Ancient Stones, Stories Told, my promenade play for Rochester Cathedral, and The Bassist’s AS level results. Both need to go well or the future is going to look bleak.

But, if I’m honest with myself, none of these things actually account for the gut-churning anxiety that’s plaguing me. All of them are difficult in their various ways but I would cope with them.

No, the anxiety-provoker in chief is, inevitably, The Book. The Black and The White. I’m a couple of weeks off being ready to begin writing. Outlines for the big, ‘set-piece’ scenes are beginning to form in my mind and I am frantically trying to decide where to begin the damn thing. (And don’t say ‘at the beginning’ or I may scream…)

I’m anxious because I’m captivated by the story and I DON’T WANT TO GET IT WRONG. I know it could be good and I don’t want to make mistakes at the outset which will compromise the whole thing. I am more excited by this book than by anything since I began my original draft of Testament which induced a similar state of nervous tension. I’m hoping that’s a good sign. Much as I enjoyed writing some of Not One of Us, it was nothing like this.

But there’s a problem. The more I think about my original structure for the book – the structure I discussed with Will – the more I’m convinced it won’t work. And I have a slightly dramatic solution which is also contributing to the lizards fighting in my intestines.

I need to discuss it with Will before I say anything here, so perhaps I’d just better go and compose an email.

More anon.

Back in Blighty...

France. Lovely weather – three weeks in which we only had one day where the weather gods even thought about rain. Wonderful. Less wonderful was the fact that, since we were last there two years ago, something dramatic seems to have happened to the cost of living: it’s now frighteningly expensive. And, as ever, the public toilets leave you longing for Britain…

But we did have a lovely time, including me wheeling out my very rusty A-level French (tenses all over the place, can never remember the gender of non-immediately-obvious nouns – A-levels are beginning to be a frighteningly long time ago…) with all and sundry, but particularly our Belgian campsite neighbour who concealed the fact that he spoke perfect English until the last evening. ‘The English – they never learn French, but you’re very good [clearly a lie but flattering none the less] and I think it’s good for you to practice.’

He had clearly had less than wonderful experiences of Brits abroad and was prepared to find my willingness more than compensation for my linguistic all-over-the-placeness. When our conversations revealed that I am more Welsh than English, he decided that this was obviously the explanation for my readiness to speak other languages. The Other Half hastily foregrounded her Irish credentials (50% genetically, 90% temperamentally).

Fortunately, because we live in the bit of England nearest to France, we haven’t come back to wet or dreary weather, which is nice…

Whilst we’ve been away, the work in progress has been on my mind hugely – in fact I can’t remember any of the books I’ve written (6 at the last count) ever preoccupying me so much. I’m hoping this is a good sign – and being able (after my resolution to turn over a new leaf and discuss my work instead of keeping it a deep dark secret until the end of the second draft) to discuss it with the Other Half helped. In fact, she came up with an idea which may go a long way to solving my approach to what was threatening to become the ‘sticky middle section’ of the book.

Now we’re home I’m back to research and while the teenagers – back from their various trek- and frisbee-based jaunts and not yet returned to work – languish in bed, I am reading about the Peasants’ Revolt and general life in the fourteenth century. Oh, and I’m also trying to find a demonstration of traditional charcoal burning so if you know anywhere that offers this, let me know!

I know I’ve mentioned it before, but Ian Mortimer’s The Time Traveller’s Guide to Medieval England really is a gem. In research for previous books (mostly Testament) I’ve read a couple of the more academic books that he quotes and have been referring to one of them (and getting bogged down in tables and endless details) as I read his lucid prose. How he manages it, I don’t know but Ian Mortimer manages to give you the most astonishing amounts of information (a digest of the more academic stuff, basically) almost without effort – reading his book feels like chatting with an immensely knowledgeable but highly agreeable person: an absolute treasure trove.

But more of that anon.

Meanwhile, the other thing which has been occupying my mind since we got back a day or two ago and I started the cyber-catch up is: should I be on Twitter?

Are you?

Is it a good thing?

Is it something writers should do?

Discuss…

Comings and Goings

I met up with my editor, Will, last week to talk to him about my ideas for The Black and The White. All the way up to London, on the train, I looked at the notes I’d made, thought more about my ideas, moved the thing on a bit more and - above all – wondered what he’d make of it.

And, of course, his making anything at all of it would be done in the context of what other writers of historical fiction are doing at the moment, how readers are responding to that and how TBATW might fit in – or not – to that context.

As you’ve probably spotted, there’s a vogue at the moment for historical crime, with or without a clear series intent. I’ve just read an extremely good book called The Redemption of Alexander Seaton by Shona Maclean which is a case in point. Though more of a historical novel than a murder mystery, there is a murder and it is central to the book and that gave me pause for thought. If somebody this good at time and place (Banff in the stiflingly repressive seventeenth Calvinist presbyterian century) feels it necessary to hang her story on a murder, should I be thinking along the same lines?

The Black and The White is not conceived as a murder mystery. There are deaths (it begins in the Great Pestilence which we know as the Black Death and ends in the Peaseants’ Revolt, deaths are pretty inevitable) but the novel doesn’t concern itself with finding out about how or why these people died. It’s the consequences of the deaths we’re primarily interested in.

But there is a mystery. And a quest. And an obsession. Or two.

So, if it’s not quite going to fit neatly in to what’s selling, is it a goer? And did Will like the idea?

Well, I hope it’s a goer and Will definitely liked the idea.

But, he and I both know that, for it to succeed, I’m going to have to get the central question which lurks at the heart of the novel absolutely right. Nails need to be banged exactly on the head. No thumb-dinging can be allowed, or the accompanying swearing. Which means that I’ve got to get the central relationship and its two protagonists spot on. There’s no real room for sloppy characterisation or anything less than perfectly focussed point of view. I’ve got to get it right.

It would be so much easier to just base the whole thing on a murder. Or at least, I think it would. Maybe that’s just because I’ve never written a murder mystery.

I mean, think about it (the murder option, not my lack of any relevant experience). England in the grip of the Great Plague would be the ideal time and place to hide a murder – if a dead body turned up, nobody was going to look too closely at it to see how the person had died and the fact that they’d been seen – perfectly fit and healthy – on the morning of their death would not need to throw any suspicion on the fact of their demise. The plague had three distinct varieties – classic bubonic plague with lymphatic swellings in groin, armpit or elsewhere which took a week to kill you and was contracted (probably) from flea-bites from infected rats; pneumonic plague which was spread from person to person, infected your lungs and killed you in two to three days; and last but definitely not least, septicaemic plague in which the bacillus entered your bloodstream directly and killed you in hours.

Anyway, murders aside, I’m still reading background stuff for the novel and, when we go away next week, I will be taking a couple of books to continue my research, among them Summer of Blood, the new book on the Peasants Revolt by Dan Jones who you can see talking about the book here.

He’s clearly as mad about the fourteenth century as me.

Before we can get away on Monday, however, there’s still tons to do getting the house in some kind of order a) because I hate coming back to a mess and b) because we have a kind friend coming in to house/cat sit and she can’t be expected to live with our mess.

So, if you’ll excuse me, I suspect I will next appear here when we’re back from our Francophile jaunt.

But, while I’m away, perhaps you’d like to leave your comments on current historical fiction, murder-based or otherwise…

Blogging compliments

As well as being dilatory on my own blog recently, I’ve also fallen behind on keeping up with many of my favourite bloggers so I’ve only just read these very kind words on Juxtabook’s blog.

It’s a privilege to be in anybody’s top ten books of the last decade, but when Testament finds itself in the kind of company Juxtabook mentions (Julian Barnes, Ian McEwan, Margaret Atwood) it becomes even more of a compliment.

I’ve read only four of Juxtabook’s top 12 though two others are on my tbr list. How many have readers of this blog read?

I am still alive...

I have, I fear, been a very dilatory blogger recently. This is partly because I have been busy with the promenade play, partly because I am - meanwhile - trying to fit in as much research and thinking as I can on The Black and The White and partly – no, mainly – because I am utterly knackered. In ten days' time we go on holiday and I can barely wait. Not having a proper summer holiday last year has had a terrible knock-on effect into the whole of the last twelve months and the Other Half and I are determined never to let it happen again. A fortnight off must be taken – a week is barely time enough to begin to relax.

So, where am I on various projects?

Well, the promenade play is now complete and has had its first run-through, though we were minus a number of cast members. Walking the thing through the cathedral raised a couple of issues – for instance the area in which I’d planned to have a murder taking place can’t actually be seen very easily from the position in which the audience will be standing at that point, so we’ve had to move it to a less dramatic but more visible spot – but, in general, it was felt that the action fits nicely in to the space. It does look, however, as if the people with the most to do on the day will be, not the actors, but the stewards whose job it’ll be to chivvy the audience through the cathedral at an appropriately fast clip so that we can get the whole thing done on time!

‘Aren’t we going to have long ‘lags’ whilst the audience catch up?’ a cast member asked.

Bloody valid question, I thought, gnawing some handy fingernails.

‘No’ said our casting director/the cathedral’s education officer who’s also playing The Madwoman of Rochester ‘we’ll just start when we’re ready and they’ll soon get the hang of the fact that they’ve got to keep up.’

Ruthless, I thought, but good… definitely good.

It was great hearing real actors speak my words as we went through the first read-through. People laughed when I hoped they would, nodded sagely at things they hadn’t known but were interested to learn (phew!) and the Green Man – cast for his wonderfully booming voice – is going to be fantastic as he fills the cathedral with his roars and his pagan cries of ‘Where are my trees?’

If it rains, the scene in the garden may be abandoned by the audience but the actors are hardened veterans of outdoor performances and were adamant that the show will go on however drenched they get. Stick some cathedral umbrellas by the south door and at least a few people will come out… seemed to be the general consensus.

There was a sticky moment when I realised that there’s going to be no honeysuckle in bloom in September (an essential prop in one scene) but our costume designer quickly came to the rescue and said she could so something in silk.

Yes, our costume designer. Not somebody’s mum or a put-upon volunteer, a real bona-fide costume designer. The Heritage Lottery Fund have given us a budget for the launch of the interpretation project, most of which is going to go on promenade play costumes. So, instead of having begged, borrowed, stolen and home-made costumes for each scene, we’re going to have the real thing, made by a professional whose last commission was to design all the costumes for a community opera in Lewes. It’s going to give a fantastic visual unity to the whole piece and Berthe (the lady in question) came along to the walk-through and took a whole memory-card’s worth of photos of the cathedral to inspire her and to use as background information. (What colours will stand out against this screen, will the black and white of the Tudor chaplains get lost in the polychrome of the lady chapel and if so what should be done about it, etc etc)

So, the promenade play is all coming together. The little casts for each scene will now go away and rehearse together and learn their lines before the next rehearsal towards the end of August when we’ll ‘block’ moves and start polishing things up. That’s going to be an interesting rehearsal as we can’t do it in situ because the cathedral’s being used for something else (tchah – a cathedral being used for services, how inconsiderate!). So I’m going to have to go around taking measurements at the site of each scene, so that we can mock up the approximate acting area, with columns, altars, steps etc, rendered in sticky-tape and cardboard boxes.

Should be fun…

As for the novel. Well, I’ve now met with Will, my editor, and talked it through, but news of that can wait for the next installment, I think.

As I mentioned, I am knackered…

The dangers of oversimplification

Sorry for the dearth of recent posts here – the promenade play, plus a couple of other work-related matters have been keeping me very busy. But, as I have now subdued the Reformation, so to speak, and am well on the way to finishing the last playlet (Dickens) I thought I’d post a few reflections on what I’ve been doing.

As John Fisher and Nicholas Ridley were both Bishops of Rochester and were on opposing sides (as it were) of the Reformation, we thought it would be interesting to have them confronting each other over an altar (which could plausibly act as a symbol of the whole Reformation argument as all altars moved from being stone, carved and ornate with beautiful hangings to being plain and wooden and bare – Rome vs. Puritanism).

But trying to distil the complex Reformation arguments of theology and religious practice into something around nine minutes long proved surprisingly (or, perhaps, unsurprisingly) difficult. Take into consideration the fact that this promenade play is not being written for an audience already well-versed in Church of England practice and history but for anybody from Rochester and the surrounding Medway Towns district who fancies a bit of casual Saturday afternoon entertainment and saying anything meaningful in such a short space of time moves into the realm of ‘distinctly tricky’.

So, I’ve slipped a bit of Why the Reformation Happened 101 into the transition from the previous scene to this one (as the characters and audience walk from the High Altar through the Quire and down into the nave, since you ask) and I’ve gone for lots of visual imagery so as not to make the whole thing too wordy. Oh and introduced two chaplains to the bishops who are basically into a whole game of ‘my bishop’s better than your bishop’. So we’ll see what everybody else involved thinks at the first production team meeting on Monday.

But one thing has struck me and that’s how easy it is to slip into saying things which are so simplified as to be scarcely recognisable as the actual truth. Strangely, my elder son came across this phenomenon when he was studying A-level biology. ‘Don’t worry about what you were taught at GCSE’ the class was told ‘because that was so over-simplified it was, basically, wrong. ‘ Actually, they were given to understand that, compared to the wonders that they would discover on a degree course should they choose to pursue the wonders of biological science, they’d discover that A-level wasn’t exactly 100% accurate either.

But then, isn’t it true that the more you look into anything, the more complex and multi-faceted it becomes? Nothing is simply cause and effect; everything is a multi-layered confection of causes, effects, spin-offs, unforeseen consequences, more effects and further causes of the next major upheaval.

When I was writing a speech for John Fisher (who fell foul of Henry VIII’s determination to divorce Catherine of Aragon in pretty much the same way as the more famous Thomas More did) on the whole sorry episode of ‘The King’s Great Matter’ I found myself making him say ‘If Catherine of Aragon had borne Henry a healthy son there would have been no break with Rome, no suggestion that the king was the ‘supreme head of the church in England’.
But is that true? If the sons Catherine gave birth to had lived to young manhood (bear in mind he was married to her for sixteen years before Anne Boleyn came on to the scene) would he really have been content to stay under the sway of the Pope? Would he have left the monasteries alone or did he have his eye on their great wealth anyway?

The problem with research is that you need to do it otherwise you’re in trouble; but the more you start asking questions, the more complicated everything becomes and you can end up in trouble anyway.

But ain’t that true of life in general?

A capital letter century

The fourteenth century. You’ve gotta love it. The Great Famine, The Black Death, The Peasants’ Revolt – it’s a century of capital-letter happenings. And it also had something we’ve got – climate change. Between 1300 and 1400 mean temperatures fell by one degree centigrade in England. The country went from having numerous vineyards to, effectively, having none.

Like us, fourteenth century people had a feeling that things were going downhill rapidly and that they might be looking at the end of the world as they knew it. Except they thought that the Biblical apocalypse was going to be responsible rather than a catastrophic rise in global temperature…

Through my research I'm getting the sense that a feeling of impending doom was very real and it’s going to be interesting to see whether our twenty-first century feeling of personal helplessness in the face of global forces has any resonances with the fourteenth century’s feeling of helplessness in the face of a God who had apparently tired of the waywardness of humanity.

I’m reading a couple of books at the moment – Ian Mortimer’s The Time Traveller's Guide to Medieval England: A Handbook for Visitors to the Fourteenth Century and The Black Death, An Intimate History by John Hatcher. They’re both very modern history books in the sense that they try to give the general reader a feel for what it was like to actually live then. They’re the kind of smell in the street, dirt beneath your fingernails, terror behind the next sneeze kind of books that I love.

These books appeal to me particularly, as both authors seems to be coming from a very similar standpoint to my own when I write about the past; their books ring with the conviction that human nature doesn’t change. The circumstances may change, the diet, the clothing, the worldview but human nature with its ambition, greed, violence, love, altruism and fear will always be the same until homo sapiens becomes another species altogether.

As Ian Mortimer says in his introduction ‘..most of all, it needs to be said that the very best evidence for what it was like to be alive in the fourteenth century is an awareness of what it is to be alive in any age, and that includes today.’

I think that’s right. What I aspire to in writing historical fiction is to make my reader see that though the people they’re reading about had a very different experience of life and very different expectations of it, they were the sort of people we meet, know and love in our own lives. They are us. In historical costume.

A secret project now secret no longer

I have to confess that the current novel is having to take a bit of a back seat to the other work that is in progress chez moi at the moment. I’ve been working on it for a month already but, until today, I couldn’t really talk about it on this blog as it wasn’t official yet. But now, the project has been approved by the powers that be (the Dean and Chapter of Rochester Cathedral) and I can tell you that I am writing a series of 10-minute playlets that come together in a species of promenade play which will be performed in the cathedral on Saturday the 26^th of September.

What is a playlet? What is a promenade play?

Playlet is my term; we were going with ‘vignette’ but that sounded a bit grand.

Promenade play is not my term, it’s a proper bona fide name for a proper bona fide dramatic form. The action moves and the audience follows.

Why am I doing a promenade play?

Well, at one level, because I’ve always wanted to write something dramatic for a particular space - a play (for want of a better word) which uses the building as part of the narrative. We went to see a play in Canterbury Cathedral last year and I was very disappointed to see that a stage (albeit a rather intriguing, undulating stage) had simply been positioned at the end of the nave and we all sat looking at it, just as if we had been in a theatre. I thought it wasa missed opportunity to do something with the space.

At another level, I’m doing it because Rochester Cathedral is launching a new, Heritage Lottery Fund-backed interpretation project this year complete with swanky new guidebook, audio visual effects, state of the art audio-guides (including narration by Jools Holland) and all the reception paraphernalia needed to welcome and inform visitors. Though all this is going ‘live’ quite soon, the official launch, complete with Open Day is on September the 26^th.

Now, I glibly say ‘I’m doing this’ as if I’ve been comissioned – from a throng of hundreds of other eager potential writers of promenade plays – to make this so. But, to be honest, though being picked from a throng of.. etc would have been lovely, that’s not quite how it went. This is how it actually went.

My Other Half is the Director of Operations at Rochester Cathedral. (That’s actually all you need to know isn’t it?) Ages ago (probably on the occasion of the aforementioned locationally-disappointing play) I told her that I’d like to write something for Rochester if they were up for it. As I was then, and for months afterwards, heavily into writing Not One of Us, she didn’t discuss it with anybody at the cathedral but, once NOOU was finished, she mentioned the idea to the Interpretation Manager who was very excited by the idea.

Within days I was sitting at a meeting with her and with the Education officer. It was one of the most extraordinary meetings I’ve ever been to. Now, if you’re going to have any idea why it was so extraordinary, you have to understand the background here. I’ve spent most of my working life within the NHS. Meetings occur. Decisions are made. The two are not always temporally related. At lteast not as temporally related as I would like. Usually meetings are had, ideas are discussed, sub-committees and working groups are formed, ideas are picked apart so as to be hardly recognisable, re-constituted by committee until all the originality has been removed, the original meeting is re-convened, the new, sanitised, guideline-compliant idea is resubmitted, teeth are sucked and – with luck - the idea is taken forward. A pilot occurs. Feeback is sought. After approximately two years something almost entirely unrecognisable as the original idea might actually be implemented throughout the team concerned.

As the person usually putting forward the ideas (all brilliant, natch…) I found this excruciating. I don’t do committees. My idea of joint working – actually expressed in so many words to one of my many line-managers, once – was ‘You get a committee to decide what you want, tell me and I’ll produce it for you.’ Inexplicably, they rarely went for this approach…

Anyway, after that axe-grinding digression, where was I? Oh yes, this meeting. Well, we arrived with no agenda and no real ideas of what we were going to do. I mentioned a few things I’d noticed in a swift trawl through the new guidebook in my Other Half’s office whilst waiting for the meeting’s appointed start time and, one of them following my lead, we were off on flights of ideas. At the end of an hour – yes, a mere hour – we had a plan. Six ten-minute vignettes in various, already decided-upon, locations around the cathedral would form a promenade play which would run through twice, so that visitors to the Open Day, if they wandered in and caught vignette three, for instance, could simply continue promenading until number three came around again.

Let me just say that again, for the benefit of other people who have suffered the kind of stultifying decision-making process that monolithic organisations tend to employ. At the beginning of an hour we had nothing. At the end of an hour we had a viable project which we were all very excited about. And that we were just going to go off and do. I was nearly delirious with shock at being able to have ideas, get them provisionally agreed and go away to make them happen within sixty minutes. It was probably the single most creative hour I’ve ever spent in the company of other human beings.

Fortunately, the Dean and Chapter operate on a similarly ‘can do’ basis and, with very minor and helpful suggestions, have waved the project through with smiles and thanks.

Compared to the kind of meeting process described above, it makes you want to weep, honestly.

So, thusfar, I have written an interesting encounter between a mythical Green Man (there are Green Man bosses on the cathedral’s wooden ceiling) and the cathedral’s first, seventh-century, bishop, Justus; given a young monk a close encounter with the tenth-century builder-monk Gundulf who built not only Rochester cathedral but also the White Tower of the Tower of London (amongst other things); arranged for one of Rochester’s saints – the martyr William of Perth – to be murdered all over again in the cloister garth and had a conservator given the shock of her life by being accosted by the real-live fourteenth-century bishop whose tomb she is restoring. I’ve still got a somewhat frosty dispute between the Reformation martyrs John Fisher and Nicholas Ridley to write and an encounter with Charles Dickens who had a long association with the city of Rochester and lived nearby.

The research – some of which overlaps with the research I’m doing for The Black and The White – has been fascinating. And trying to say something meaningful, educational, amusing and visually interesting in ten minutes is a great challenge for somebody who generally writes thick books. It helps that I used to have a column in a local newspaper that was limited to 500 words – I do know how to be concise… I’m just usually not.

Anyway, no doubt there will be more to say about all this in the coming weeks… you have been warned!

Characters becoming...

Today I came across this passage in the book I’m reading at the moment (Molly Fox’s Birthday by Deirdre Madden):

Many actors spend years doing exactly what Molly had dismissed: they pretend to be other people. They select voices and movements that might plausibly suit a particularly character, and they assume these voices and movements in the same way as they might put on a costume, a wig or a cardboard crown. It isn’t convincing.

I’ve always thought that novel writing is quite a lot like acting and this quote confirms it for me. I know that some novel writers (and those who write books about how to write novels) advocate making lists of exactly the kind of thing Molly rejects - what does your character eat for breakfast, does he have a quirky smile, is there a little catch-phrase he uses a lot? We are encouraged to know our characters inside out. But I think that this technique is actually trying to construct your characters rather than to know them, and from the outside in rather than the inside out which is the way I prefer to build characters.

For me, just as the personalities of real people are formed – at least in part – by the events and circumstances of their life, so fictional characters make themselves known through the events I make them live through. And yes, the events do come first. So does that make my novels ‘plot driven’? Yes, though I would hope that that doesn’t mean any sacrifice of psychological depth. I think – for me - the plot, the story, the narrative, whatever you want to call it arises out of a particular kind of character with a particular set of personality traits and flaws and the job of the author is to find them so as to make the plot work on a psychological level.

How do other writers out there ‘do’ characterisation. Do you make lists, think of somebody you know, consciously work out what kind of person would do the kind of thing that happens in your book or try, by tapping into the subconscious, to write ‘from the inside out’?

The fate of Not One of Us...

Last week on Juxtabook’s blog, I wrote an article which talked about getting the email that all writers fantasise about – the offer to publish your work. This week, I find myself writing about the email that all writers dread, the one that begins with all the things your publisher really liked about your book but whose second paragraph begins with the ominous word ‘However…’. That’s when you know you’ve failed to pull off the difficult second book.

Now, bearing in mind everything I said in that piece for Juxtabook nobody would expect the decision not to publish Not One of Us in its current form to be anything but thoughtful, considered and taken with due concern for my future work as an author. Nor was it. But, despite the extent to which the right words can soften the blow, reading Will’s kind comments and perceptive criticisms it was abundantly clear to me that, although there were good things about Not One of Us, overall it didn’t accomplish what I’d set out to do.

But all is not doom and gloom. Quite the reverse. This blog post has been a difficult one to write, not just because I didn’t want to admit to failure (though obviously that came into it) but because I’ve been mulling over how to convey my state of mind vis a vis my writing at the moment without seeming falsely bright eyed and bushy tailed.

So, what is my state of mind? Well, having read the fateful email whilst I was cooking supper after getting home from work one day last week, I spent the rest of the evening in a bit of a slough, trying to find it in me to disagree with the difficulties Will and his colleagues had found with Not One of Us (and failing) and just basically being pissed off that I’d spent a year working on a project which part of me knew I should have abandoned with the previous unfinished version of the book a year ago. The following day (after waking up and thinking ‘bugger, it wasn’t a dream’) I re-read the email and realised two things.
1) Though my judgement as to whether the whole novel hung together had clearly been wrong, I had known which bits really worked and Will’s email had agreed with that judgement – he had flagged exactly those elements.
2) Two (and this arose directly out of 1) Not One of Us had not played to my strengths as a novelist.

Later that same day I spoke to Will on the phone and, as a result of our conversation, I made a decision. Well, two decisions, actually, but let’s take them one at a time.

Firstly, I decided that I had allowed the essential fascination of the split time narrative – the ability both to write a historical narrative and then to have contemporary characters play with it, interact with it, reflect on it – to seduce me into writing, as Will put it ‘a novel about history rather than a historical novel’. The things I find most fascinating about history – how it affects us today, how we peer into the mists but can’t possibly see it as it really was, how we interpret the fragments that have come down to us in myth and document - are the things that lead me off the path of narrative and into something which becomes more about the idea than the story.

And that brings us to the second decision which is that my next book is going to be a straightforward historical narrative. No contemporary strand, no batting back and forth; I’m just going to maroon myself and my reader in the fourteenth century and see what we make of the people and situations we find there.

Various agents, readers, friends and relations have told me for years that they thought that this is what I should do (write historical novels, not maroon people in the fourteenth century) but I’ve ignored them. I don’t honestly know why, except that a) I’m not good at doing what other people say I should and b) I felt that it was a bit presumptuous for me, a non-historian, to produce fictions which basically said ‘I know all about this’.

So what’s changed?
Well, even the most determined go-er alone eventually realises that an opinion expressed so often and by so many different people is unlikely to be completely mistaken. And writing historical fiction of the split-time variety has shown me that you don’t actually need to know everything, you just need to be convincing about the bits you choose to shine a light on. After writing Testament there are still a million things I don’t know about life in late fourteenth century England but I know a great deal about the things I chose to spotlight – masons and building, the Lollards and the relationship between church and university.

And something else has changed as well. Or perhaps I should say that I’ve made a resolution that it’s going to change. Like many writers I am reticent to the point of paranoia about letting another living being see my work whilst it’s in progress. I don’t discuss my work with anybody and I don’t let anybody see it. I’m not a member of a writing group of any kind. Basically I DON’T ASK ANYBODY’S ADVICE. (See comments on not being good at doing what other people tell me, above...)
And this has to change. If I’d shown Not One Of Us to Will at an earlier stage a lot of wasted time and effort might have been avoided. Either I would have acknowledged that what I was trying to do was too ambitious and abandoned it or I would have changed the focus and done something different with the central idea.

So… I have agreed with Will that I will send him a synopsis of the book which is germinating - sprouting, growing madly - in my mind and that we will discuss the progress of said book as it goes along. In other words I will bite the bullet and show him the thing. I may not like it but I have come to the conclusion that it’s a necessary discipline. It would be nice to go all literary and say that I just want to be left alone to write the books I want to write but the simple fact is that I want to be published. And, however many times I heard, prior to Will’s offer to publish Testament, that ‘it must be so rewarding to write’ it frankly isn’t rewarding if nobody’s reading your stuff. For me, writing is not its own reward. I want an audience.
So it seems sensible to show my stuff to the man who gets to make the decision as to whether I’ll get an audience somewhat earlier than the moment at which I type THE END so that he can point out to me when I’m wandering totally off the point and losing my audience in the long grass of my own preoccupations.

And, contrary to what you might think, these realisations and decisions have left me feeling astonishingly energised. I can’t stop thinking about the new book (working title The Black and The White), about the central character and his predicament. Everything I do or see seems to spark off some new train of thought, some new avenue for research. (By the way, speaking of research, if anybody knows any good books on the history of charcoal burning in Britain, more particularly in the medieval period, please let me know.)

Far from feeling daunted at the thought of confining myself to the fourteenth century I’m feeling liberated. I can think more purely about the story and less about the historical echoes. There won’t be those jumps out of one century into another when I look at the prose and wonder why I can’t mirror something of the quality of the historical voice in the present day narrative. I’ll be able to immerse myself and my reader in another world.

Of course I’m annoyed that my own mistakes mean that I’m not going to have a book published next year. People keep asking me ‘when’s the next one coming out?’ and having to tell them that NOOU hasn’t made the cut isn’t quite the conversation I’d hoped for about the fate of my next book.
Of course I’m cross with myself that the characters of whom I’ve become so fond aren’t going to be there on the shelves for other people to get to know.
Of course I’m cross with myself that – even if all goes astonishingly well – there’s going to be a gap of more than four years between Testament’s publication and the next one. Not good for building reader loyalty.
And I suspect that people are going to take my enthusiasm for work on The Black and The White as a smokescreen behind which I’m attempting to hide NOOU’s failure. But it’s not. I’m quite honestly very excited every time I think about the new book. Probably more excited than I’ve been about writing since I got the idea for Testament. And that’s a good feeling.

Wish me luck…

Playing away...

Just in case you all thought I was being horribly lazy about getting blog posts up here recently, I have been working on a long-ish piece about being published by MNW for Juxtabook. In lieu of anything going on here today, you can find the piece here.
More news on current writing projects chez Bizarre soon.

Piracy or Publicity?

What are writers to think of this article about the increasing practice of pirating books on the net? Do we all start scouring the web-waves for examples of our books being hi-jacked by those who don’t want to pay, or should we, as Cory Doctorow says at the end of the article, be thankful for the publicity it gives our work?

I had a discussion with Son Number 1, better known to readers of this blog as the Ultimate Frisbee Freak, the other day about the Pirate Bay trial where various Swedish e-facilitators were found guilty of copyright theft/infringement. His opinion was that a) it put the word about bands, films and games ‘out there’, b) that many of the people downloading stuff from the site were probably kids who couldn’t afford to pay for the stuff legitimately and represented an untapped audience that would grow up to – possibly – become paying fans, c) that fans will always want the real thing (the CD, the DVD) partly because d) the ripped off copies are usually sub-standard for various technical reasons.

I don’t know what to think. (A state of affairs I find increasingly common. I thought one was supposed to get more dogmatic with age, not less?) For published authors, few of us are making enough money not to care that some people – who might otherwise buy our book – are downloading it free simply because they can. Yes, yes, I know that our primary reason for writing is that people will read our books and, clearly, that is what is happening with the pirated copies and yet… having had the validation of a publishing contract, we also now feel that, as well as wanting people to read our books, we’d quite like people to actually shell out money for them. We’ve put in the hours, our publishers have put in the dosh, it seems unfair that some people should benefit, gratis, from these investments.

But then there’s point a) above. We all – apart from those authors who are sure-fire big sellers from the off – want to be ‘word of mouth’ successes. Well, once the initial burst of publicity is over, maybe the best kind of word of mouth now has an e-component? Maybe where we once relied on recommendations passing from mouth to ear, we now need to see free copies being downloaded and a ‘buzz’ created on the forum or comments trail of many websites. Because if c) above is correct then that will translate into actual, hard-copy sales.

What do you think?