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

 

Bold Girls by Sheena Wilkinson

As a young woman, I never hesitated to say I was a feminist. I had a very consciousness-raising sort of aunt who used to take me on International Women’s Day marches before such things were cool and mainstream. None of my friends ever even knew that it was IWD, and I certainly couldn't have persuaded them to join me. I remember, in eighties Belfast, as a young teen, being shouted at in the street on such a march: ‘Get back to Greenham Common, ya pack of lezzies.’ It was all a bit wearing, but it helped inspire Star By Star, my suffrage novel with its determined feminist heroine, Stella. 

In some ways I'm not very far removed my younger bolshy teenage self who braved ridicule to march the streets of Belfast. That's why I was so thrilled to be included in Children’s Books Ireland’s new initiative, Bold Girls, a celebration of girls and women in children’s books. 

Here is what CBI has to say about their  project:

BOLD GIRLS' aim is to break down societal barriers and to instil confidence in girls and young women by showing them female characters in children’s books with agency, power and opinions, addressing at a young age some of the issues that stand in the way of women achieving their ambitions, whether that be in leadership, in government, in the arts. BOLD GIRLS will highlight and review books that feature strong, intelligent, self-possessed female protagonists in children’s books, as well as celebrating twenty female Irish authors and illustrators, both emerging and established, who have made an exceptional contribution to the canon of Irish children’s literature.

We’re delighted to be presenting Bold Girls with our partners Dublin UNESCO City of Literature, KPMG Families for Literacy Program, Trinity College Dublin, Dublin City University and the G-Book Project and the National Women’s Council of Ireland.

For the centenary of women’s suffrage in Ireland in 2018, Children’s Books Ireland’s BOLD GIRLS project celebrates strong, confident, intelligent, brave women and girls in children’s books, giving them much-needed visibility alongside their male counterparts.

The Bold Girls Reading Guide

This is the short essay I wrote for inclusion in the Bold Girls Reading Guide: 

Sometimes I was a tomboy; sometimes I played with dolls. Sometimes I had plaits; sometimes I wore my hair cropped short like George in the Famous Five. I owned nothing pink, but as everything in the 1970s was swathed in brown-and-orange paisley swirls, that wasn’t a political statement. At my girls’ school, it was fine to be good at maths and science, though I wasn’t, and I always knew I could grow up whatever way I chose to.

I was a bold, confident girl – the first hand up in class; the first one on to the stage; always ready with an opinion. I loved writing stories and music and books, and I called myself a feminist as soon as I was old enough to spell it. For me, feminism has always meant fairness.

The estate I lived on was quite rough, and I was the kind of bold girl who easily got into fights, so I was encouraged to spend most of my spare time in the local library. This wonderland was where I first fell in love with the world of books and stories, a world I’ve never left. I used to look at the books on the shelves and imagine seeing one – or two, or a whole row – with Sheena Wilkinson on them.

a bolder girl than she looks...

At school and in books I was used to seeing women in positions of leadership, but growing up in Northern Ireland in the Troubles, it seemed to me that men made conflict and women tried to stop it, but men were in charge. Mrs Thatcher was a bold girl, right enough, and a leader, but even as a teenager I could see that she didn’t stand up for other women.

Studying books set in girls’ schools for my PhD deepened my feminism because it allowed me to read women’s history in much more depth than the wars-and-rebellions history we’d done at school. I learned that this history wasn’t considered as important as “real” history. This is changing now, as we celebrate the role women played in shaping our present, the battles they fought for votes and equality and respect.

Now I write those books I dreamed of in my orange-and-brown paisley-patterned library-haunting days. I write about girls and boys and horses and wars and rebellions and music and suffragettes and schools and stars and friendship.

I visit a lot of schools and I see plenty of bold girls, but I also see girls who don’t like to speak up, girls who are worried about not being “nice”, girls who let themselves be defined by how they think society wants them to be. And even though in some ways there are so many more choices now, and society is so much freer, I often feel that it was easier for me to be my own kind of girl back then.

I’ll always write about bold girls, and I’ll be a bold girl even when I’m an old woman. Being a bold old woman sounds like fun.

In the company of some other Bold Girls at TCD

Last week I was in the magnificent Long Room of Trinity College Dublin, seeing the project launched in the company of other writers and book enthusiasts, many of them now friends. I can't wait to get involved in whatever the project has to offer and to spread the boldness!

Of course mothers never have favourites...by Sheena Wilkinson

Apart from ‘How much money do you earn’ and ‘Do you know any famous writers?’ the most frequent question children ask me is, ‘Which of your books is your favourite?’

I’m always reminded of The Railway Children: ‘Of course mothers never have favourites, but if their mother had had a favourite it might have been Roberta.’

Mothers never have favourites...

I generally say something in praise of each book, a canny way to remind them of the titles (heh heh, see Question 1). But if I’m being really honest, my favourite book is usually the newest one. It kind of has to be.

And now we are seven, as Star By Star is just about to be published. And … well, it really might be my favourite so far. Some books are just easier to love, and this one has been a joy from the start.

It all began last May. I had had (as I confessed on here) a difficult few months professionally: out of contract and nothing on the horizon. Then I got an offer for Street Song, a YA contemporary about music, from the lovely people at Ink Road (Black & White Publishing), which was exciting as it was, in effect, my UK publishing debut. I was thrilled, but it felt strange not to have a book coming out with Little Island, the small but wonderful Irish publishers who had published me since Taking Flight back in 2010. I’d loved writing the historical Name Upon Name for them, and my dream was to be asked to do another. 

2017's first book

And then, a week after the Street Song offer came my dream commission from Little Island: a novel for teens about the 1918 election when women voted for the first time in Britain and Ireland. I remember the thrill as I read the email; I think my response was simply YES YES YES!

my first teen historical novel

I’d always wanted to write an overtly feminist book, and this was my chance. Stella, my outspoken, well-intentioned heroine, a 1918 flu orphan with a burning desire to change the world, especially for women, just walked off the Liverpool boat one stormy grey October morning, with her heart heavy but her chin held high. And I recognised her at once. 

 

It’s not always like that: often I have to really search for the truth of a character, but Stella was open and honest with me from the beginning, a plain-dealing girl.  Often I don’t hear the character’s voice until I start writing – after months of planning, but Stella started talking before I could even open my notebook.

That’s not to say the book didn’t take a lot of planning, writing and editing. They always do and this was no different. The story changed as I went along; unnecessary characters were written out or simply killed off (a distinct advantage to setting a book in the middle of the most deadly pandemic in history.) But Stella was steadfast. When I saw designer Niall McCormack's gorgeous cover, I couldn't believe that, even in silhouette, he had captured her exactly as I saw her.

Star By Star

Last month I wrote about the courage of Honor Arundel in creating heroines who were not always likeable, and now I realise that I too have often had difficult narrators – unreliable, self-deluding, jealous, selfish, or simply full of doubt. I loved them all, but they didn’t half drive me a merry dance some of the time. Stella was, as writer Deirdre Sullivan, who gave me a lovely cover quote, said, ‘confident, outspoken and kind,’ and she was kind to me too during the months I laboured to bring her story to the world.  I hope readers will be kind to her.