Friday 15 May 2020

Lockdown, food & the creative patriarchy - by Rowena House



Despite snatching a few hours every day to research the work-in-progress, writing the novel is currently the stuff of dreams.

Worse still, my mental safety valve of believing myself to be ‘a writer researching a new book’ is being corroded by an inner voice endlessly nagging away: have you defrosted meat for tomorrow’s dinner yet? Are there any Tesco delivery slots?

Six weeks into lockdown and shielding vulnerable family members seems to have become one long production line of meal planning and preparation.

It is *insert favourite swear word here* frustrating.

Time, then, to look for silver linings.

Writing this is A GOOD THING. I’ve done it over two sessions and found the concentration therapeutic.  

A two-hour Zoom workshop on plotting and structure with Louise Doughty for Arvon last month was another good thing, and also excellent value at £35. I’d thoroughly recommend checking out their future sessions via their website or newsletter.

Another excellent writers' organisation is piloting free Zoom salons from next week, but since I can't find they've announced them publicly I won't go into details here.

Best of all, thanks to becoming a newbie PhD student at the University of Plymouth in April, I’ve now got free access to a guide to feminist research into historical women's autobiographies.

This isn’t an academic discipline I’d heard about before, and reading in has been a real eye-opener. One set of ideas in particular dropped a small explosive device into what I thought I knew about storytelling and how to approach it. 

To paraphrase (and over-simplify horribly): women’s life stories historically transgressed the masculine limitations of coherence and closure.

What? But I like a good ending! Now you’re telling me I’ve been assimilated into a creative patriarchy? *insert fresh expletive here* 

At this point, youthful me from back in the day would roll her eyes and express the 1980’s equivalent of, Duh?  And when I’d dried my hands on my pinny, she’d lead me to the office and shove my nose against shelves groaning with advice guides by male writers, then flick through multiple notebooks (and ABBA blogs) dripping with adulation for Messrs McKee, Yorke, Vogel etc. At which point I’d probably try to hide my brand new copies of Christopher Booker’s Seven Basic Plots and David Baboublene’s Primary Colours of Story which have just arrived in the post.

Listen, I’d say, I’ve read Bird by Bird and that other one about big magic, and The Heroine’s Journey. Look! I’m reading Girl. Woman. Other. But she’d be right: it is the advice of male guides that I’ve been following for years.

Why?

Partly, I like their logic and clarity which speaks to the rationalist in me. Also, their advice helped me through the development edit of The Goose Road which clinched the publishing deal with Walker. Why wouldn’t you believe in people who helped you to achieve a life-time’s ambition?

What’s more, I’d tell my angry young self, female editors whom I admire greatly also champion individual protagonists with clear goals struggling to overcome obstacles in stories that reach coherent and defined end-points. What’s so masculine about that?

OK, it’s not how life works, but this is art, innit, the craft of storytelling.

Or is it?

Another inner voice is now asking how much of this conformity to a commercial paradigm is actually about economics and the forlorn dream of making a living as a novelist. Merely hoping to get published again seems to dictate playing the game of characters-in-conflict and more-or-less tidy endings.

No doubt there is a serious debate to be had about whether goal-orientated Western protagonists are necessarily masculine archetypes, but it’s hard to match this description with real women's life stories defined by relationships and communities.

Why this should feel like some kind of revelation I don’t understand. Perhaps the brain's been addled by all that blasted cooking. Or maybe I’ve spent too long researching the WIP’s male protagonist and neglected the young woman who is central to his story.

She is distinctly ‘other’, disempowered to the nth degree by men who abhor her gender, her beliefs and her class. I have found a literary device to allow her agency and a strength she would have been denied in the early 17th century. But a device isn’t character and, so far, I’ve had little success discovering who she is.

Now I’m wondering if she might transgress 21st century publishing conventions as well as Jacobean norms, whether I can free her from Aristotelian (another bloke) three-act arcs, and give her fluidity in time and place, and an ambiguous ending.

After all life is never neat and tidy.

@HouseRowena on Twitter.
Rowena House Author on Facebook
Website: rowenahouse.com

The Goose Road, nominated for the Carnegie Medal, shortlisted for the Branford Boase Award

 

3 comments:

Chris Vick said...

This is a great blog. It seems - to me at least, based on what you have said - that you are asking the right questions of yourself and your writing. The blog speaks to mystery and exploration,being acutely aware of the conventions and expectations but also a very real need to transgress them. Like you I've read the (male)guide books, and whilst useful, I think I need to get in touch with the emotional, transcendent, unconcious side of things, and not stress too much about character, conflict and comfortable resolution. Tricky though, puts us in unknown territory, but overall I think it's better to explore and even experiment, than to stick to what we know.

Susan Price said...

Very interesting, Rowena. I'm going to look into this further.

Rowena House said...

Thank you, Chris and Susan. Though I wrote the blog light-heartedly, it is a big question for the WIP. You persuaded me to read Booker, Chris, and I'm so glad you did. Its depth and detail bring into focus many of the questions I'm asking myself at the moment. I agree the emotional, transcendent and unconscious are essential components of stories and characters, shaping identity, psyche & our/their subjective experience of events. I'm researching the WIP from two angles: objective history and subjective experience, neither of which is transparent; both invite challenge. It's liberating to reject orthodoxy but better, I suspect, to pick & choose particular established forms and tropes, since 'new for new sake' is likely to distance a reader unnecessarily. I think familiarity can effectively locate adn frame the narrative making it seem more authentic and believable. Presumably, like most things, it's a matter of balance. Don't alienate your audience, but equally don't blindly accept bias.