SLIDING INTO NOVEMBER by Penny Dolan

Tonight is Hallowe’en. Tomorrow, and the date this post will appear , is the first of November, often known as All Saint’s or All Hallow’s Day.

The first of November is also the time of year when the Celtic festival of Samhain was (and is) celebrated, marking the end of summer and the growing season and the arrival of the cold, dark winter months. 

 During this worrying chink in the calendar, the link between the worlds became thin: all manner of ghosts were free to walk. Right now, with the weather murky, the daylight gone and wild gales shredding the last leaves, this Halloween feels worrying enough, even without the many issues concerning the world.

                                   

Matching this day's melancholy mood, I have been working on a now old-fashioned non-writing task. I have, at last, begun sorting through the many boxes of family slides inherited about two decades ago. I found an old screen and a dusty projector and have been going through the images one by one. 

 

  

It is strange work: I come across images far too faded to see or read, quantities of unremarkable Mediterranean scenes and, among them, the occasional moments of happy recognition. 

Yes, this is the face I know, 

this the expression I want to recover,

 this is the smile I wanted to see again.  

Within these tiny plastic squares, family stories are silently exposed: people appear and disappear, stand alongside then apart, they grow and thrive and age and vanish. One single box now contains all the slides that have made it through this first rough cull.I will go through them again weeding out all the almost-duplicates, the half-squinting smiles, separating the out-of-focus from the sharp. 

Later on, I’ll decide how to  keep the precious ones that I want, how to compile the slides into logical sets, and maybe how to share those images with the people to whom they might, as voices from the past, speak.

Right now, though, my eyes are weary and my vision is flickering. I have been darting between the mix of screens – projector lens, big screen, light-box, single-slide-hand held viewer - for too long. I need some sleep.

                  

And, by the by, I noticed that editing all these slides seems remarkably like the process of editing a story:

Who are the characters that matter?

When do they matter?

Which settings are sharp enough to add to the experience?

Which moments drift in or out of focus?

Which bits of the story does one need to know or show better?

And of course

What order do the images need to go in?

Or, as was put in a much better way by a true visual storyteller:

. . . WRITING A STORY IS NOT SIMPLY A MATTER OF WRITING LINES OF WORDS

BUT CALLS ON THE WRITER TO ASSEMBLE THE SENTENCES

IN SUCH A WAY THAT THE READER RECEIVES THEM

IN THE RIGHT ORDER

FOR STACKING IN THE MIND . . .

From “Seeing Things: An Autobiography” by Oliver Postgate, 2000

I love Postgate's description of creating a story almost as much as I love Bagpuss and Noggin the Nog, and Ivor the Engine and more.

                             

In addition, November is also the month of Nanowrimo, the month when lots of people try to writing their novel in a month. 

 Here’s wishing you good luck, if you’re one of the many souls going in for that long haul. I hope that you will end up with a story full of perfect moments and memorable images, feeling content and unfazed by all the words and phrases that might have to be lost on the way. Onwards!

                           

Penny Dolan

@pennydolan1