MOOD MANAGEMENT and WRITING

I made the mistake of looking in some boxes. The idea was to throw things out. Why? I hear you cry. Space, fool. Anyway, I thought I’d start with a box which had OH GOD written on the side. I could have started with ODDS AND SODS or MISC (miscellaneous) but for some reason I dreaded MISC and ODDS AND SODS sounded boring, so it was OH GOD that got my attention.

Photo by cottonbro on Pexels.com

I opened  the box and filled with good intentions took out the following:

• the love letters my grandmother wrote to my grandfather during the months they were engaged
• old passports showing my mother in her early twenties and a photo of her whizzing down snowy slopes in the 1940s
• receipts from the 1890’s including one for a fancy lorgnette
• a copy of the Sunday Mirror 1918 splashed across the front cover of which is the announcement that my great great grandmother’s marriage was legitimized by a Scottish court thus legitimizing her 14 children, one of whom was my great grandmother
• a book into which is pasted from the Eastern Daily Press all the golf triumphs of my grandmother in Norfolk between 1907-1911. A grandmother I never met
• a diary my mother kept of a trip to Italy with the Byron Society at some point in the 1990s when she comments on the extremely handsome Italian sailors in the hotel she was staying in. Excuse me, Dad, where were you?
• a poem my great Uncle Norman wrote to his sister (my grandmother) giving moral guidance.
• the photos that same uncle took when he went up to Oxford round about 1905
• research my grandfather ( a history teacher who taught my father who became a historian) did into Tudor Cornwall
• an undated card sent to my mother from a doctor training in south London asking her if she was married yet? Well, were you mother? After all she kept the card
• a newspaper article about the battle of El Alamein in the Second World War, a battle my grandfather fought in with his tiny, indecipherable handwritten annotations on it

I’m a writer. Am I really going to throw out all these tiny fragments of family stories? Well, I’m not, am I? Although I did manage to throw out a thank you card to my great Uncle Norman from one of my cousins saying, ‘Thank you for the shoe horn.’ So I sat back put my head in my hands and groaned OH GOD!

And then I picked out an article by Anne Enright from the Guardian 5/7/08. Hurrah, I thought, this is why I have opened OH GOD. It is to find this article. And here at last we get to the title of the blog. This is what she has to say:

“Writing is mostly a case of mood management. The emotion you have is not absolute, it is temporary. It may be useful but it is not the truth. It is not you. Get over it…. You have no confidence? No one who is any good has any confidence. So, tell me what makes your particular lack of confidence so special.”

Interesting and here’s rather a good bit on ‘butch Americans’.

“Two years in (to a long project) you think of all the great books written in 6 weeks (why is it always six?) – Falconer’s As I Lay Dying, Steinbeck’s Cannery Row, Hemingway’s The Sun Always Rises – and why is it always these butch Americans? Did they all drink?”

Then I come across some reviews of my old crime books. One of JUMPING THE CRACKS in the TLS 4/1/2008. I’d completely forgotten about it but it ends with this paragraph.

“There is nothing wrong with any of this, and the writing is relaxed and literate, with some nice humour, all of which makes reading Jumping the Cracks perfectly pleasant, but in the twenty-first century shouldn’t crime fiction do more than simply please?”

Now then, you’re supposed to be grateful for any review and gracious about it but I have to say this posed an instant test of my mood management skills and it brought vividly to mind a letter which Judi Dench sent to the theater critic Charles Spencer, when he’d given her a bad review for Madame de Sade in 2009. She wrote:

“I’d always rather admired you but now realise you’re an absolute shit.” Referencing a stage accident which had meant she missed a few performances she continued. “I’m only sorry I didn’t get a chance to kick you when I fell over. Maybe next time …”

Amidst all this I also found at the bottom of the box a note on a bright pink piece of paper which states FREE YOURSELF FROM DEFENSIVE PERFECTIONISM! I wrote it but I’ve no recollection of doing so.

I now know exactly why I wrote Oh God on the side of the box.

Send help. Or advice even. Or Marie Kondo. Doesn’t she say you should only keep things that spark joy? Clearly the review doesn’t but it’s a minor miracle to get a book reviewed these days and it was the TLS. What would the butch Americans have done I wonder? Might it have involved drink?

All this and I’ve still got MISC and ODDS AND SODS to go. I think I’ll need a year of reciting the mantra The emotion I have is not absolute before I dare venture into them. Or perhaps I might try It’s perfectly all right to be perfectly pleasant. It has a rather nice Noel Coward/Cole Porter ring to it, don’t you think? And perhaps I should dance around throwing flowers in the air while reciting.

Have you got an OH GOD box? What did you find the last time you looked in it? And if you’ve got anything to offer on the vexed subject of mood management and writing I’m all ears. A perfectly pleasant response is guaranteed.

THE WINTER’S TALE or HOW NOT TO WRITE A PLAY

Judi Dench as Paulina in Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale

In my book TITIAN’S BOATMAN (published on 26th January) one of my characters, Terry, is an actor taking on the role of King Leontes in  THE WINTER’S TALE. Back in the day I had an idea I might like to write a play. I made the mistaken assumption that because I liked writing dialogue in my novels, plays would come easily to me. By the end of the course I felt like someone who walks past a BT engineer when he’s in the middle of fiddling about in one of those dark green wire-filled boxes. You stop and look and think how can he know what he is doing? Writing plays, I had discovered, was much more complicated and technical than I had ever imagined.

However, here are some things that my teacher would undoubtedly have advised against:

• do not get rid of a character by having him eaten by a wild animal. Exit pursued by a bear? No,no, no – it’s not on;
• check your geography. If a country is landlocked (Bohemia) do not give it a coastline;
• don’t just have someone come on stage at the beginning of the second act and say 16 years have passed. It’s clunky;
• do bother to sketch in a bit of back plot if you decide to hurl your character into a jealous, paranoid, fury that destroys his family and his kingdom;
• you can’t tell the audience a character has died and then bring her back to life with the words,    ‘It is required you do awake your faith!’. Suppose they haven’t got any?
• don’t write a speech like this because it will traumatize the actor who has to try and make sense of it and no one in the audience will understand it:

“Affection! Thy intention stabs the centre.

Thou doest make possible things not so held,

Communicat’st with dream (how can this be?),

With what unread thou co-active art,

And fellow’st nothing. Then ’tis credent … “

And on and on … into greater and greater obscurity.

THE WINTER’S TALE (Act 1.Scene 2.137)

• do not write one act as if you are a Scorpio and the second act as if you are a Virgo; try for a bit of consistency. Take it from me a mash up of Othello and As You Like It will not work.

All the above are things that Shakespeare does in THE WINTER’S TALE. The plot of which goes something like this. *SPOILER ALERT*. King Leontes the King of Sicilia starts behaving like Tony Soprano without the therapist. He accuses his best friend Polixenes, the King of Bohemia, of having an affair with his pregnant wife, Hermione. He puts Hermione on trial which leads to her death, the death of their son and the banishment of his infant daughter, Perdita. Too late it becomes clear he has made a terrible mistake and he and his kingdom are plunged into an endless winter of sorrow and grief. Jump 16 years. Perdita has been raised by a shepherds in Bohemia. She returns to Sicilia and is reunited with her father. Leontes is invited by Paulina to visit a statue of his late wife. When he touches the statue it is warm and it is clear she is not a statue but very much alive. He is reconciled with her and his kingdom returns to prosperity.

The first time I read the play I closed it with these profound words of literary criticism, ‘It’s bonkers and I’ve no idea how you’d act it.’ Then I went to see it and I thought aren’t actors mysterious, magical beings. I heard that speech spoken in a way that I felt the actor understood it even if I didn’t. I still thought it was nuts, and for the most part I found the second act pretty tedious (too many nymphs and shepherds). As soon as women start waving herbs about in Shakespeare it’s either too twee or a death is in the offing and I tend to switch off. But I could also see that it was powerfully nuts.

Then I went to see it again and it really got under my skin. Here are some of my thoughts.

• It is a really odd play.
• It is also a very powerful play.
• It has one of the most tender of lines in it, ‘Oh, she’s warm,’ and one of the most savage, ‘Burn it,’ in reference to the infant Perdita.
• It has one of the best roles for women in Shakespeare, in the character of Paulina. A woman who will not stop telling Leontes how wrong he is, a woman who is not afraid to speak truth to power. It’s an absolute powerhouse of a role and as you can see from the photo above it attracts some powerful actors.
• Don’t go and see it if you’ve recently been bereaved; it will break your heart.

In TITIAN’S BOATMAN my character Terry, while struggling with the role of King Leontes, suffers a nervous crisis. Now come on! Don’t tell me you’re not a little bit intrigued by that scenario. Have you seen the play? Or have you read Jeanette Winterson’s novel ,The Gap of Time, a modern day version of it. What did you make of them?

SHAKESPEARE’S WORST LINE

 

It’s the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death this year. By the end of the year we’ll all be sick to death of the old boy. So in the spirit of January – broke, suffering from SAD, looking for the divorce lawyer’s number, scraping the glitter from the end of one’s nose  for the nth time, here is my offering on what must surely be one of the worst lines in Shakespeare.

It’s near the end of King Lear and is spoken by a Gentleman – poor man:

“Tis hot, it smokes;

It came even from the heart of – O! she’s dead.”

KING LEAR ACT 5 SCENE III

Try saying those lines out loud in the privacy of your own home. Try saying them and not cracking a smile. Imagine rushing onto stage and belting out that line in front of an already emotionally drained audience. Just imagine. Incidentally he’s talking about a ‘bloody knife.’ Err, a smoking, bloody knife.

I saw this line delivered in Derek Jacobi’s King Lear. The audience was relatively elderly, very attentive and I would say reverential. There wasn’t a school girl or boy in sight. But when the poor unfortunate actor who had to deliver that line burst onto the stage and belted it out, the audience burst spontaneously into hysterical laughter.  Maybe that’s the point of it. After all by that stage it’s all been a bit much – elder abuse, eye-gouging, horrible curses, war, and madness. Oh, a typical Christmas, then. So maybe the audience needs to laugh and the line delivers the sort of hysteria that is never far away at funerals.

I think the line works better if it’s delivered in a horrified whisper. No, actually I think the line works best by being cut. After all you wouldn’t wish that line on your worst enemy, would you?

If you think by the above that I am immune to the joys of Shakespeare you’d be wrong. I love him. In fact tonight I’m off to see The Winter’s Tale with Judi Dench and Kenneth Branagh and I can’t wait. And I’m curious to read Jeanette Winterson’s novel, The Gap in Time – a modern day version of the play.

How about you? Are you looking forward to the following year of celebrating Shakespeare? Do you like Shakespeare? Do you have any favourite bad lines?