On dinosaurs and castles - Rowena House

 

Joan Lennon’s February post [link below] gave me a lot of comfort.

For a dinosaur like me, raised on traditional books – and still forlornly wedded to outdated notions about traditional publishing – it’s clear from commentaries such as hers that self-publishing is a rational and respectable choice for authors of repute and a solid backlist, and thus for someone like me with just one novel and a short story out there, it would be no shame at all. 

Thank you, Joan. Your post got me out of bed this morning.

That sense of relief follows two bruising encounters with reality this past month, both of which occurred during a research trip to locations where my seventeenth century witch trial work-in-progress is set. 

 

Touching the stones that imprisoned the people I’m writing about is depressing. I’ve been to Lancaster Castle three times now, and it is both extraordinarily useful inspiration but also a sobering reminder that real people suffered real horror there.

I’m co-opting their lives for my fiction in the hope that my serious intent justifies that decision. It’s a subject I’ll write about more another time, but mid-development edit, I found those sanitised glimpses of their reality demotivating.

It didn’t help that just before a tour of the former prison within the castle I had tea in the castle’s swanky modern café with its smooth music and yuppy feel to the clientele. It was jarring. The tone of the tour jarred, too, with the guide making light of ‘my’ prisoners, who as ‘witches’ belong to everyone.

Could they conceive of being tourist attractions?

Or characters in novels?

The second unpleasant encounter was with an old version of myself at a book launch event.

The event itself was lovely. Held in Heptonstall, Yorkshire, a large and friendly crowd gathered to celebrate Liz Flanagan’s adult historical novel, When We Were Divided, set in Heptonstall during the civil war. It’s compulsive reading & beautifully written. Congratulations again, Liz. 

Amid all the positivity and fantastic cake, I briefly met Liz’s publisher, and a former self – the pushy woman who got The Goose Road out there – materialised in the space where I’d been standing a second before, all forced smiles and anxiously friendly.

It felt horrible and fake and rammed home this truth: I don’t want to be a needy writer stereotype again. It was unpleasant enough last time around, when I was highly motivated to get published. It would be painfully shabby now. My apologies to the publisher who no doubt spotted the type straight away.

For the time being I’ve retreated to my comfort zone of writing and editing to a deadline. As a pledge that something will happen next, I’ve signed up for an Arvon short course about publication in May and vaguely started looking around at small independent publisher, the whole getting-another-agent thing being way too dismal to think about after mine retired.

Meanwhile, posts like Joan’s and others in the ABBA community have lit a torch in the dark cave of the future. There is another way. Sincere best wishes to everyone battling to get their beautifully crafted words seen.

Good luck and go get ’em.

Link to Joan's post: 

https://awfullybigblogadventure.blogspot.com/2026/02/a-funny-old-journey-in-childrens.html

Wouldn't you know it. Google automatically hyperlinked a bunch of words in this post, but the link I want to be live, Joan's post, no chance. Google also refused to let me upload a photo of Liz's book cover. It might be my browser. Like I said, dinosaur. 

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A question of empathy - by Rowena House

A recent academic paper about empathy and the historian has set me thinking about empathy and the fiction writer, a complex topic embedded in our craft.

As writers, our capacity for empathy begs huge psychological questions about how we understand the feelings of others whose life experiences might well be profoundly different to our own.

Empathy also raises (perhaps more familiar) ethical questions about whose stories we get to write. and whether we have a duty to uncover subconscious biases which influence our creative processes. 

Basically, just because we care about someone else's story, and think we can write it well, doesn't mean we should.

Looking at these issues from a historian's perspective was instructive. So, for you reading pleasure, here is the link to the article by Dr Sarah Fox, a research associate at the University of Birmingham’s department of history. Do, please, take a look. It's the very definition of thought-provoking!

https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/transactions-of-the-royal-historical-society/article/archival-intimacies-empathy-and-historical-practice-in-2023/F2A7CD1F8C351B487586D9497471A6A8

I'd love to have time to explore her findings for this post. Sadly, real life can't be put off. So intead (and based on her work being open source when properly credited) I've edited her research questionnaire down for space and replaced her key words ‘historian’ and ‘historical work’ with novelist and creative work.

I’ll leave these questions here for now, and return to them when I have some honest answers in relation to my seventeenth century witch trial work-in-progress, in which I'm trying to empathise with witch hunters as well as the persecuted. Exactly why I'm doing this gets to the nub of the story (I think).

Meanwhile, if anyone else fancied having a crack at answering one or more of these questions, I’m sure we could have a fascinating conversation about our replies. 

 

Questions derived from Dr Sarah Fox's paper Archival Intimacies: Empathy and Historical Practice in 2023, published by Cambridge University Presson behalf of the Royal Historical Society, 7 Aug 2023:

What is empathy in your opinion, within the context of your work as a novelist?

Is empathy a skill, a quality, or a virtue? Can you learn it?

How does empathy shape your research and the sources you work with?

What role do you think empathy plays in your writing processes?

What happens to creative work when empathy is absent? Does it matter?



Thank you very much for these questions, Dr Fox. You've got the neurons firing!

 

Have a happy (dry) rest of the summer if you can.

 

Twitter: @HouseRowena

Facebook: Rowena House Author

Enough is enough - by Rowena House

Here we are again, at the end of another difficult year for too many people, including in our industry, where recent ACLS data demonstrate that average author earnings have fallen so low (£7k) that writing books can no longer be considered a career for the majority, since you can’t live on £7k a year, which, in turn, shows yet again that talk about the drive for diversity in publishing is largely make-believe.

We should be out on the creative picket line in solidarity with each other. 

And in support of health workers, academic and railway strikers. And all the families being failed by our under-funded health and welfare systems. And refugees in the Channel. And the people of Ukraine. And Somalia. And, and, and…

But this is a creative writing blog and art is meant to bring light to the dark, so rather than facing grim realities, I want to end the year on a positive note. 

By chance, just before real world stuff stopped me writing for several months, I re-read an online article about the home of a woman who is the inspiration for a major character in my work-in-progress.

Typically for women in early modern times, my heroine gets no mention in the article, but her husband’s will is quoted in a footnote. In it, he expresses his gratitude to the two women who kept him afloat financially throughout his life: first his mother and then his wife, Lady Beth Knyvet.

Coming across this footnote was like finding a gemstone in the mud of the patriarchy.

Those few words, dictated by a dying courtier, are proof that Beth must have been, as I had imagined her to be, smart, independent-minded, and adventurous enough to make her own fortune at a time when married women could not own property.

It wasn’t inherited wealth; her father had bequeathed his fortune elsewhere and her mother came from City of London middling stock. She must have earned her money herself.

I don’t (yet?) know how, but for creative purposes I have invented a career for Beth and linked it to an incident in the life of Elizabeth Stuart, a princess turning sixteen and approaching her marriage at the time of my story.

Neither Beth nor the princess was a victim. They were educated, wily, able. It is a privilege to research their stories and weave them into a fictional history.

This opportunity to imagine other lives and how they might still touch ours is a gift which, at one level, is reward enough in itself, even if £7k p/a is an insult of galactic proportions. 

In a cold and lean Yuletide, with sad stuff to deal with, imagination is something rich to hold onto, a promise of sanctuary and learning, for which I want to thank ... something. The universe. The genes of my ancestors. Luck. The gods.

I also want to thank it/them for the people who made this year’s best moments: my husband and son, lovely Naomi, fab writer friends Eden, Lucy, Tracey and Liz, and for the people who held my creative hand professionally: Dr Kathryn Gray and Dr Min Wild of Plymouth university, and plotting guru Jeff Lyons in California.

And how could I dream without our darling dog, who is always there, and takes me out daily to breath and witness beauty. Thanks, too, for the cat, who’s a pain, but also always here.

To you, I send my best wishes for 2023. Whatever you do with it, I hope it is enough. 

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rowenahouse.wordpress.com

PS, the photo is Staple Inn, London, which features in the work-in-progress, but is mostly pictured here because I don't have anything festive on the new computer.

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 17^th 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 21^st 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.

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Website: rowenahouse.com

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