I’ve just finished the redraft of what I hope will be my next book. It's an attempt at comedy, but I wanted to capture the idea that an era is coming to end, a golden age is over, and an uncertain future must be faced with courage. I’m not sure how well I have succeeded, but the book is written, and I have to hope that it comes across.
It was only when redrafting that I realised how incidents in my life were creeping into the story. It was written through a very harsh winter, so characters in my book do battle with the elements. More recently, I’ve been watching the birds return, the house martins and swallows. These have woven their way into the story.
But there are other things that are less obvious and a little unnerving. I wanted a name for a big, family house. I won’t use the actual name I chose, but instead will use an equally ludicrous one as an example, let’s say ‘Heron’s Thumb’. I googled this made up house name just to see what came up. I discovered that not only is there a house of this name, (and there is just one) but it’s in Bridport, Dorset, where generations of my father’s family lived. My great grandfather may well have known ‘Heron’s Thumb’.
Which reminds me of something that happened to me after I’d just bought my first flat, in Leighton Road, west Ealing, London. My mother, who then lived in south Wales, wrote to me, and included in the envelope a photocopy of a letter written to her mother, by her grandmother, around 1930. The address on my great grandmother’s letter was the same Leighton Road.
But when I went out on to the street to find the house, it no longer existed. I discovered later it had been bombed in the war. Had it still stood, it would have been directly opposite the flat I had just bought. Not only this, but my mother went on to tell me that her grandparents had owned many houses in the area, but more or less gave them away in the 1960s, when they were unable to sell them.
Therefore, my first flat was one my great grandparents may well have owned, and the name of the house I've chosen for my next book could have been one a great grandparent might have known.
I tend to dismiss anything that has a whiff of the supernatural, and would rather seek out some sort of rational explanation. I suggest this: the human brain is a vast warehouse of clutter, stuff we’ve collected over decades, and even inherited. When we write, some of that clutter comes tumbling out into words, unconsciously.
It made me wonder, have any other writers retrospectively researched the name of a character, or a fictional place or event, and discovered some buried family history, or disturbed a long buried personal event?
9 comments:
Fascinating, Andrew! I completely agree about the 'warehouse'. I think we store away lots of information we are not aware of and then it tumbles out and we're surprised by it.
I haven't had the experience with family history, but certainly I've things up about places or people and found out later they are true. Probably I had accumulated enough peripheral information to make a very good guess without realising it.
I think all sorts of things can be dredged up from our subconscious without us being fully aware of what is happening.
I used a name without realising it had any significance until something prompted me to look it up! What prompted me? I have no idea.
I experienced a very spooky coincidence with my first published book. Two names in the story turned out to be the names of the MD and Commissioning Editor of the publisher who offered me a contract (Chicken House). I had no knowledge of them while I was writing and later, when I realised that their names were in the manuscript, it just felt like it was meant to be. Weirdly, a couple of months before I met them I also rescued a large, white chicken from the side of a busy road who became the founder member of my current flock. Funny old thing, life, sometimes...
I love this sort of thing. Not that I’ve written about, but yes to the grandparents thing passing down the line. My father was christened Neil Duncan Taylor Fergusson, the Taylor part hailing from his mother. When my dad married and my parents had my brother and me, they dispensed with the Taylor part of the name. Incidentally, I was closest, very close, to my paternal grandmother, still miss her now.
Years later, I was pregnant with my first child, and due to marry the father. His name was Taylor. It occurred to me that we could fudge it and call the baby by the surname of Taylor-Fergusson – after my father. A few years later, and if you stand my second child, Hector, in front of a photograph of my father’s mother, the resemblance of the eyes, the expression is uncanny. People have commented on the likeness. Nothing unusual there, you might say – except that my father was adopted.
A Macclesfield friend who works as a medium would say that your ancestors are introducing these links into your world to show you that they are there and are interested in you and your life. Of course, this is a highly controversial train of thought, and I’m not saying that I believe or don’t believe, but then I don’t practice as a medium. Whatever else, it’s a rich seam for writers.
*practise.
I think it's quite easy to plant the seed of an idea into someone's head, and for them to think it's their own. This is my own idea.
Rachel, you say you had 'no knowledge' of the MD or editor of CH when you were writing. But you may well have seen their names somewhere, and stored them away. When you were writing the book, your wily subconscious included them as characters in the story. Isn't that a possibility?
I think you're right. I had no conscious knowledge but as you say it was probably my wily subconscious at work. Doesn't explain Betsy, the escaped chicken, though...
I think you're definitely onto something here, Andrew. Something very big. Just one example from my writing - I thought I was writing in a very impersonal, academic way in my book 'Piper' about choosing between slavery and safety or freedeom and risk. It is only more recently that I have realised that that is my own very personal dilemma. But now I look back and it's so obvious.
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