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.

Rowena House Author on Facebook

Website: rowenahouse.com

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