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

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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. 

@HouseRowena on Twitter

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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

 

Truth, art & a bit of politics - by Rowena House

In a bid to escape the stresses of Covid19, which are making writing impossible, I’m exploring a practical and philosophical problem common to all writers who weave their tales around real people: how truthful can and should I be about my protagonist?

Luckily, the publication last month of The Mirror and the Light re-ignited debate on the subject as novelists and historians weighed in with their opinions about Hilary Mantel’s interpretation of Thomas Cromwell, the bloody yet in her version beguiling chief minister to Henry VIII.

I plan to plunder this debate shamelessly when I can make time (and find the headspace) to read as many contributions as possible. Meanwhile I’m framing questions about the balance to strike between the demands of art (AKA story craft in this case) and the recorded evidence.

Unlike Mantel, I have scant evidence to work with. My protagonist was poor, hers rich; mine left one pamphlet behind for posterity, hers years’ worth of state documents. My protagonist’s biographical record includes two years in which he ‘flourished’, as the historians put it, but not the year of his birth nor when he died.

What I do know is his name, and that he either wrote the pamphlet bearing his name or allowed someone else to edit it and leave him to carry the can.

I’ve found a few footnotes about his earlier life and later career, and perhaps more will emerge as I delve deeper into the period. But the essence of the man - a young man, I think, at the time of my story - will likely remain a mystery. 

Such unknowns could be seen as a blessing: empty spaces in which to conjure whatever character best suits the story. But my starting point for this work-in-progress is essentially political, though since we’re talking about fiction here let’s call it a theme, the theme being disempowerment and its, at times, horrific ramifications.

And since my protagonist was disempowered in life (by virtue of his low social status) it seems to me to be a disservice to him (and to my broader purpose of telling some kind of ‘truth’) to deprive him in fiction of what little agency he had in reality. In other words, I don’t want to make stuff up if it’s possible instead to uncover plausible explanations for what he did and didn’t do.

Fortunately, at this point in my writing life, I have faith in the process of writing to provide solutions to this conundrum, particularly the iterative phase of research and creation, investigation and insight.

Having spotted one tantalizing mismatch between his version of events and an established fact, which opened up the possibility of a falling out among conspirators, I’m aiming to hunt for more clues about my protagonist’s motivation and intent within disparities in whatever records have survived. 

Where that fails, I’ll research parallel situations for authentic hints and suggestions about 'my' man. Most of all, though, I’m hoping insight will spring from unexpected quarters, a telling detail of its time that still speaks to us, a lost pathway between his world and ours.

What I suspect will be the hardest part of this process is trying to imagine that I believe what he believed, or at least what he would have been expected to believe, given his status. I don’t just mean superstitions and religious orthodoxies, I also want to understand how he might have felt about his place in the world and the way society was ordered. Did he, for example, genuinely believe in the divine right of kings or suspect that it was a self-serving and dangerous royal delusion?

When the lockdown is over, I aim to visit places my protagonist saw, and stand in an ancient court house where he witnessed what I believe was a dreadful injustice, and then go from there to a field where (probably) the local gallows once stood and innocent people died.

I’ll make the best story I can out of it, not lecture or preach, though naturally one’s tempted to rage against the cruel stupidity of all ages. But in stating from the outset that my intention is to explore the ramifications of disempowerment as I perceive them, using an historical lens but with an eye very much on the present, then I have to accept that I’m engaged in a polemic, politics, propaganda even, and not creating some neutral, abstract, objective thing.

And that’s fine; art is political. And yet…

How far should I make my protagonist political, too, with sensibilities capable of recognising the oppressive nature of the society around him? How far can I allow him moral qualms about his complicity in its injustices? What if the evidence suggests he willingly participated in the lethal plots of powerful masters? Will I ignore that for the sake of creating a hero? Would Wolf Hall have ‘worked’ if Mantel’s Cromwell was remorseless?

I don’t know the answers yet, but that's fine. There’s a long way to go. Meanwhile, thank goodness for storytelling. Lockdown without it would be a lot, lot tougher.

@HouseRowena on Twitter

Website: rowenahouse.com

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