Constraints and Creativity ... Cecilia Busby

I was driving home yesterday and heard Jeanette Winterson talking on the radio about her new book, The Gap of Time, which is a reworking of Shakespeare's A Winter's Tale. She had obviously had a hugely fun time working with the ingredients of the play, going back to the original source, a play by that famous Elizabethan drunkard and womaniser Robert Greene, and finding creative ways in which she could explore the story and make it work for her own purposes.

It made me think a little about the nature of creativity, and what happens when you put constraints in it - suddenly instead of 'write anything!' you have the injunction to 'write this story and make it new', or 'use these characters and say something original about them'... It's interesting to think about how that process differs from the one of writing when your imagination is unbounded. Initially, it might be thought that putting those kinds of constraints on your writing is a handicap - it results in a bound creativity, one that's stifled, forced into only certain channels. It ought to result in less good writing. And of course, as with the rather pedestrian sequels that are sometimes tacked onto the end of series when the author has died (the later St Clare's books, anyone?), often that's exactly what happens. But sometimes, the constraints seem to give an energy and direction to a writer's creativity that results in something better than they could ever have imagined.

Neil Gaiman's The Graveyard Book is a case in point. For my money, it's the best book he's written for children (his best book for adults, I think, is Neverwhere, closely followed by American Gods). I don't know why it's his best, but I suspect it's the way he had to work his creativity, the way his imagination was forced and constrained into certain channels by the model he based it on: Rudyard Kipling's The Jungle Book.  Would the man Jack have had the same bite if he wasn't also, at some level, the tiger, Shere Khan? Would Silas have been the same silent yet powerful beast if he wasn't also Bagheera, the black panther? (Of course, it has to be said that Disney's Jungle Book had no part in the production of The Graveyard Book, which has all the brooding menace and powerful emotional tug of Kipling's original and none of the silliness...)

Another recent triumph of constrained imagination is Kate Saunders' Five Children on the Western Front, where E. Nesbit's original Five meet the psammead again, and are followed through the First World War. The book is heart-breaking, and all her own, but it's the work her imagination had to do, taking off from those original stories and bringing exactly those characters back to life in a new setting, that created the magic.

My first series for children was set in Arthurian Britain, and featured all the usual suspects - Arthur, Merlin, Sir Gawaine, Sir Lancelot - as well as my child characters. Bringing them to life as my own creations, yet still on some level connected to all the versions of them that were running around my head from previous stories, was exhilarating. But it was when I wrote the second book in the series, Cauldron Spells, that I got a real taste of how creative constraining your writing to a model can be.

Having written the first book as a stand-alone, I had been asked to turn it into a series of four, and thinking about how to do that led me to the four treasures of Celtic Britain - the sword, the cup/cauldron, the stone and the spear. I thought I could work with those, and so book 2 became the cauldron one, book 3 the stone and book 4 the sword. Having decided a cauldron would feature, it didn't take long to decide that would be the cauldron of Annwn.

There's a very strange and at times undecipherable poem from the book of Taliesin, called the Preiddeu Annwn, or the Lay of Annwn - and I decided that I would base the quest part of the book on this poem.

The full text is here, although there are various alternative translations and retellings, from some of which I got other ideas and images. However, it's from that poem that I got my cauldron - plain, black, with a rim of pearls. And from that poem I found my quest - Arthur and his companions had to go to Annwn, and 'only seven' would return.

This being a children's book, that meant only seven would be going - which became Arthur, Merlin, my two main characters with their pet dragon and pet rat and their father, the gruff, burly Sir Bertram. The poem gave me a 'challenge' for each of them - and amazingly, the dangers Arthur faced in the poem could be beautifully fitted to my characters. Sir Bertram - who always wins the competition for The Knight Who Can Quaff the Most Ale in a Single Swallow - was perfectly fitted to the Fortress of Mead Drunkenness, while Adolphus the hare-brained dragon had immense fun chasing all the Hounds of Hell around an enchanted forest. Ferocious the rat got to bite the ankles of the Nine Maidens, and Arthur himself tackled the silent sentinel guarding the Fortress of Glass.

Taking this obscure and odd little part of the Arthurian legends and remaking it for a whole new audience and context was a different kind of creativity from just 'making it up' - but it was one I had immense fun with, and Cauldron Spells has a special place in my heart as a result. There is something about the focus that gives you, and the extra resonances that come from ducking and weaving between texts, that is quite amazing - the constraints become in an odd way liberating.

So I am looking forward to reading The Gap of Time, and relishing its connection with A Winter's Tale. I'll be interested to see if the constraints worked to energise Jeanette Winterson's already formidable imagination.


Cecilia Busby writes fantasy adventures for children aged 7-12 as C.J. Busby.

Her first series was the Spell series, an Arthurian knockabout fantasy aimed at 7-9. Her latest book, The Amber Crown, was published in March by Templar.

www.cjbusby.co.uk

@ceciliabusby

"Great fun - made me chortle!" (Diana Wynne Jones on Frogspell)

"A rift-hoping romp with great wit, charm and pace" (Frances Hardinge on Deep Amber)