Writing Workshop, Day Four

Posted by Tania Kindersley.

My poor students. Today, I suddenly realised, to my horror, that I can be rather abrupt with them. I am galloping along and someone will ask a question or make an observation. They are always good questions and interesting observations. And there should be interjections; my teaching room is a liberal democracy, not North Korea. But I often say, rather quickly, yes yes, no no, very good, and then charge onward.

I think I may have been rude. I hope my mother is not reading this. She will faint, she spent so much of our childhood teaching us manners.

It’s partly because I am trying to cram in as much as I can, rather against the clock. I think also I have had a sense of hurry since all the funerals; yes, yes, no no, on on. Because life is so damn short. But still, there is no excuse for incivility.

If any of them are reading this, I keenly apologise.

 

Here is some of what I told them today:

 

Ideas, and where they come from.

The question most often asked of any writer is: where do you get your ideas from?. It is as if people really think there is some kind of ideas shop, like Asda, where you can go and get a job lot, or some special place on the internet based in Lichtenstein which sells them under the counter.

One can’t really say: from life, baby. It would make one sound in need of medication and too poseurish. But the real answer is as simple as that. There is no secret code that you need to punch into the ideas vault. The ideas come from life, from your own experience, from the darker recesses of your own twisty little mind. They come from the news, they come from a snippet of conversation overhead on the underground railway (Alan Bennett famously eavesdrops in caffs and writes it all down), from a couple glimpsed in the distance on a windy day. They can come from emblems: a red balloon, a hopeful tie, a black armband. You can feed voraciously off other writers: what if Madame Bovary had been happy with her doctor? They can come from a mere sentence that wanders into your mind on a dull day: that is the line that starts the whole thing off. They can come from random association or rigorous intellectual curiosity.

The most important question any writer ever asks is: What if? What if a young boy grew up in a strict household where he was beaten every day by his father? And what if he channelled his rage into big ideas, instead of concrete acts? He did not go and bash kids in the playground, but he let his fury at his father, which he could not admit, grow into a spurious theory, about his country and the way it should be run. And what if he developed a craving for power, because he had been powerless? And he went into politics, and just at the time when his entire country felt powerless, so that they, as a group, had some of his own rage? They, he, needed something to stand in for the father, something to rage against, something which was other. So his psychological need, and the psychological need of his country just happened to mesh, at that particular moment in time. And what happens if he made himself the Father, and in the way that twisted psyches do, found himself doing the exact same cruelty that his own father did to him? And suddenly, you have Hitler.

The what ifs do not have to be nearly as big as that. A good story can start from the smallest what if. What if two very different people get stuck on a train? What if a woman gives up her steady job and decides to drive across France? What if a wife finds that she cannot have children?

The what ifs need to come from your own fascinations. Do not let The Fear tell you: no one will be interested in that. There is no subject about which a book may not be written. Perhaps it is as well not to write too much about crown bowls or chartered accountancy. There are some subjects which have wider interest than others. What if I chose the meat instead of the fish is not the most promising beginning. There are few novels written about people who collect stamps or make model trains. On the other hand, even if a subject seems unpromising, if you see fascination in it, and believe in it enough, and write it well enough, you will be able to take your readers with you.

 

Story.

You can be post-modern if you want, and deconstruct everything until the fat lady sings. It’s a fine balancing act though, and I am quite conservative in liking the traditional beginning, middle and end.

I also have a personal aversion to flashbacks. Some people love them, think they give depth and richness to a story. I have grown so intolerant of them now that I even hate them in films; if something start flashing backwards I actually purse my lips and tut.

The reason is, I think, because I love forward momentum. I want a story to take me somewhere, and for some reason that somewhere feels like it should be forwards. I don’t mind a back flash in a sentence or paragraph: she remembered her grandmother’s rasped voice, or he suddenly thought of his uncle leaving Liverpool in 1955 with nothing but one cabin trunk and his native wit. But just as one is settling into a story set in 1987, I do not want to be dragged back to thirty pages of the flappers.

This is a very personal reaction and one you may ignore. It does hint at a more general point though, which I think does hold. A very august writer, with whom I was lucky to spend some time when I was young and callow, once told me that one should always be aware of the pulling threads that draw a story forward. He mimed with his hands spread wide, as if he literally wanted to drag the reader from one page to the next.

I think the reason this struck me so forcibly is that I learnt dressage as a child. Forward momentum, my teacher shouted. I was always being told to push on. Sometimes I pushed on when I was not supposed to and that gave me a naughty subversive feeling. For whatever reason, the pulling threads drawing forward felt very important.

I do think that flashbacks can stop that forward momentum. They might be fascinating in themselves, add a marvellous, glittering hinterland to the characters, but they are still going backwards. Unless you are very careful and very skilled, you will stall the feeling of progress and movement in the book.

So: a beginning, a middle and an end.

It’s not quite that trite. One of the best tricks I know about story is that you should always start in the middle of the scene. Have the character in the process of doing something: lighting a cigarette, running downstairs, having a fight, being mauled by a sloppy dentist. See them first in action, even if that action is only the act of thought.

So do not think that beginning means that you have to go right back to the beginning, and recite verse and chapter, and map out the family tree, so that everyone knows about great aunt Gertrude and that remittance man from New Guinea.

It’s just that there needs to be a hard place to start, and a good line to open with.

And then you are off, and it does not have to be solidly linear. Even though I avoid flashback, you can dodge about in time and space. I quite like the three years later gambit. If you need to, don’t be afraid of hustling characters forward through time. Get them out of the room, onto the train, up the hill, into the bowels of the ship. You do not have to show them getting into the train, necessarily; have them suddenly in the carriage. France is flashing by the window.

One of the miracles of writing is that small black marks on a page or screen can physically move people through time and space. Don’t neglect that miracle. Use it until its ears bleed.

 

Character:

Another thing people say is: where do you get your characters from? Again, as if there were a special character shop, where you can go and buy them off the peg.

I think character comes from several different places. In one way, they start with the same What If? that a story does. What if there were a women who always dressed in red and was haunted by the memory of a stranger she once met in  Tangier? What if there were a boy from Brixton who ran away to join the circus?

I sometimes think the best ones come from yourself. I often think of characters as like cuttings, from plants. I take a sliver of my own personality, of my own self, plant it in the earth and watch it grow.

Some people love to base characters on people they know. I avoid this, for purely practical rather than ethical reasons. My reasoning goes: you will never, ever fully know another human being. Even one with whom you have lived for twenty years will surprise you. In fiction, you must know every last atom of your characters. So say you base a character on your great aunt Mabel, and then you put her in a traumatic situation like a car wreck or the middle of an ugly divorce, there is the danger that you suddenly think: I do not know what Aunt Mabel would do now. And so you are stymied. It can also lead to self-consciousness. Will Aunt Mabel read this and what would she think?

I quite like a bit of wish fulfilment. What if I were the kind of person who was brave enough to trek the Himalayas or ride the Silk Route? That can lead to a lovely character, with whom you can have fun.

Do not let your own lack of experience confine your characters. You have the precious human gift of imagination. Flaubert was never a bourgeois woman, married to a nice but dull doctor, yet he gave us Madame Bovary. Interestingly, he once said: Madame Bovary, c’est moi. This is quite a profound statement. Jung believed that we all, man or woman, contain the male and female principle, the animus and the anima. So in a sense, Flaubert was right: Madame Bovary, was lui. He was what our modern shrinks would call getting in touch with his female side.

Don’t forget the physicality of a character. Peggy Ashcroft said a wonderful thing about feeling her way into a part, understanding her role. She said: start with the feet. It’s not a bad rule for writing. How do they walk? What shoes do they wear? Do they hate their toes?

Sometimes, if I get stuck with a character, I interview them. I pretend I am Jeremy Paxman and say, I’m going to have to press you on this.

Don’t forget to give them loves and hates, fears and hopes, dreams and night terrors. Give them quirks and foibles and moments of the utterly unexpected. No person is ever entirely predictable. Characters should cohere; but that does not mean they always do what you might expect them to do, in any given situation.

As for the thing of characters taking over: some writers love this and believe in it. Oh, my character suddenly surprised me, they say. Others maintain an iron, Dear Leader grip. I am in the latter school. I make my characters do what I damn well want; I’m not having them skipping about ruining my plot. Nabokov said: my characters are like galley slaves, and I am with him.

 

Dialogue:

People in books do not talk like people in life; nor should they. If you transcribed a conversation, it would be full of umm and ahs, sort ofs and you knows, broken sentences and unfinished thoughts. Almost no one in life speaks in complete, grammatically correct sentences. If you put real life speech onto a page it would drive the reader, and you, mad.

The secret is to get a facsimile: just loose enough to sound as if it might actually be spoken, but tidy enough to work in fiction. A really good way to learn how to hear dialogue, and I do think it is something you listen for, as you write it, with your inner ear, is to watch films or television series by writers you admire. Aaron Sorkin in The West Wing is a fine example. Some people criticise him because all his characters sound like Aaron Sorkin, from the lowliest secretary to the President of the United States, but it is such sharp, cracking, rhythmic dialogue that I think there is a lot to learn from it.

It is a good thing to try and differentiate your characters by the way they speak, but I do not sweat blood over it. Perhaps one has a love of American slang, or one resorts often to platitude, or one speaks in very short, abrupt sentences. A useful thing to remember is that you can often tell as much about a character from what she does not say as what she does. Terence Rattigan was a master of this.

And a single, very practical note, as close as I get to a cast-iron rule. It is always she said, he said. Never use shrieked or trilled or grunted or warbled. If you are very, very good, I will occasionally allow: she shouted.

 

A note on language:

Use idioms, slang, figures of speech, metaphors, similes. Read till your eyes bleed is stronger than read a lot. But go carefully. Not everything is like something. Sometimes things are just what they are.

Avoid jargon and management-speak with every last beat of your good heart. It is flat and ugly and often bleached of meaning. Every word in a story or book should, in a perfect world, be earning its keep. Jargon is just a horrid freeloader along for the ride.

Also, remember, the one thing you are aiming for is clarity. If a reader ever, EVER has to go back and read a sentence again, because it is not quite clear, then you have failed. There is a difference between mystery and lack of clarity. You can keep the reader in the dark, doling out information like smarties, making them guess, read between the lines, wonder quite what is going on, but each sentence must be perfectly clear in its own terms. That is why a dangling modifier is the enemy.

There are many grammatical rules you may choose not to obey. It is sometimes perfectly fine to end a sentence with a preposition. It may even be better than fiddling about with to which or with whom; the rhythms may fall better on the ear. I quite often start a paragraph with And or But or So, all of which would make Strunk and White roll about in their graves. The only thing I would say is: know why you are doing it, and do it from purpose, not ignorance or laziness.

There are however, some grammatical rules to which you really should adhere. My number one, gold-plated, ocean-going, fur-lined, no exceptions allowed rule is never, ever, under any circumstance, dangle a modifier.

I do not say this because I am a pedant, although I do have that tendency. It is because of clarity. A dangling modifier always confuses. Also, I happen to think it is aesthetically displeasing, and clunky and clumsy and creaking. But the only real reason is because of the clarity thing.

Here are some actual examples, published in reputable newspapers:

‘Turning the corner, the trees were beautiful.’ 

This is meaningless. It should be: ‘Turning the corner, she noticed the beauty of the trees.’

Here is one from a travel writer: ‘Sipping cocktails on the balcony, the moon looked magnificent.’

She clearly means: Sipping cocktails on the balcony, we thought the moon looked magnificent, or he beheld the magnificent moon, or she thought the moon magnificent, or I gazed at the magnificent moon.

Because the cocktail sipping must refer to an I or a we, and the I or we is not in the original sentence, it is said to dangle. (In this case, we do not even know if it is an I, he, she or it who is looking at the moon.) Lonely as hell, it attaches itself to the nearest noun, which in this case is moon. What that sentence, as written, actually means is that the moon is sipping cocktails, which is highly unlikely.

I am sure you Dear Readers have never dangled a modifier in your good lives. Just in case you do have any doubts about it, my simple solution is: do not use the walking along, entering the room, turning the corner form to begin a sentence. If you always put the subject in at once, you can almost never go wrong. ‘As she turned the corner, she saw the beautiful trees.’

Before you beat yourself up, remember that even the most mighty institutions get it wrong. I once heard Fiona Bruce, on the BBC news, talking about Beryl Bainbridge. She said: ‘Nominated eight times, the Booker prize eluded her.’

We can pretty much work out what that means, but we have to think for a moment. There is the instinctive feeling something is wrong, and it is. That sentence literally means that the Booker Prize was nominated eight times, which of course is mad. A correct version would be: ‘She was nominated for the Booker Prize eight times, but it eluded her.’

Then there is the misplaced, more than dangled, modifier. A perfect example from the West Wing:

Abbey Bartlet: Women talk about their husbands overshadowing their careers; mine got eaten.

CJ Cregg: Your husband got eaten?

AB: No, my career.

CJC: Yeah, well, I’m on dangling modifier patrol.

 

There was a bit more, but I’ve gone on too long. Thank you for sticking with. And happy, happy writing.

The Pigeon came to meet the students today. She thought they were very fine:

Writing Workshop, Day Three

Posted by Tania Kindersley.

I want to say something quickly about being a writer. This is a very difficult subject to cover without sounding pretentious. I want to talk about it because often people who come to workshops or read them online may be trying to decide if writing is for them. I thought perhaps a swift list of pros and cons might illuminate the matter.

The pros are:

Your life is never boring. Because everything, even the smallest sentence spoken by the dullest person on the most inconsequential radio programme, may be of use, and everything is to be questioned, and every last received opinion is to be challenged, life is teeming with fascination. Even a ragingly dull person may become interesting in your eyes because you will one day want to invent the most boring character in the world. This sounds a bit excessive, and I might be exaggerating a little for effect, but it is mostly true. Everything: the world, the human condition, science, ephemera, politics, heartbreak, is grist. I have a vague memory of reading about someone watching his marriage fall apart, all the time horribly aware that the writing part of him was going Oh good, because it would provide such tremendous material.

This next sounds odd, but one gets one’s satisfaction in odd places: it is a good cohort to be part of. No one feels that happy, I imagine, to say that they work for an arms dealer or a tabloid. There is no pantheon of national heroines for tabloid journalists to look to. (This may be slightly cruel, but I am in full rage about the current revelations about The News of the World.) But if you are writing books, then you are following in the tradition of Eliot and Auden and Fitzgerald and Woolf. You are working in the language of Shakespeare and Milton. It’s just as well not to be saying this out loud in public, because people will think you unbearably flash and pretentious, but it is a warming thing to hold in your own mind.

You don’t have to go into an office and deal with bad lighting, bad coffee and stupid petty office politics.

You have a huge amount of liberty.

You do a job in which you actively aspire to be better every day. Bit chicken soup for the soulish, but important. Many jobs just require stasis.

One day, in the distant future, someone will come up to you, when you least expect it, and say: Thank you for that book, it made me feel less alone. And you will feel as if the entire Nobel Prize committee has just genuflected at your feet.

The Cons:

There is a danger that it makes your life too damn interesting. Sometimes regular and ordinary is more soothing. The Chinese had a curse that went: may you live in interesting times. It took me years to work out why that was a curse rather than a blessing. If you develop a writer’s mind, it is very hard to turn your brain off. It is hard to just live. It may also affect your sleep patterns.

Writing is really difficult to do well, and almost impossible to do as well as the heroes to which you aspire. In some ways, if every political life ends in failure, so does every writing life. The awful irony is that even the people who really were geniuses at it, like Fitzgerald and Hemingway, died drunk and young and miserable and alone. It did not bring them joy.

It pays really badly.

You have an enormous amount of liberty. This, as you see, goes in the pro and the con column. Liberty can be blessing and curse.

Unless you are visibly, financially successful, people you know will not take you seriously. Scribble, scribble, scribble, eh Mr Gibbon? Or similar.

In some ways, all this is unnecessary, because there will be a point when you know. You do not need lists; you do not need me to tell you. Most writers do it because they really can’t do anything else. It’s like a disease. I went on doing it even when I was sacked by both agent and publisher. It’s all my fingers know how to do.

 

And finally, as promised, I get to: Authenticity. Which is closely related, oddly, to The Fear.

The one most precious resource you have as a writer is you.

I’m going to say that again, because it is so important.

You are your most precious resource.

I know it sounds a bit cheesy and bumper stickerish, but it is true.

If you forget that, you will never be a good writer. You might be able to produce a decent sentence, or understand the semi-colon, but you will never be really, truly good.

This is not because every human contains in them some golden lode of brilliance, although most humans probably have more brilliance in them than they might allow. It is not because you are teeming with talent, if only you let yourself see it. You will, like all writers, have to work at writing, as hard as you can. I always say that good writing is hard, and it should be hard. It is right that it is hard, because anything worth doing is never easy.

It is because no one else has ever had your experiences, thought your thoughts, seen the world through the quirky prism through which you view it. No one has had your childhood, your memories, your hopes, your fears, your loves, your hates. Originality is one of the holy grails of writing; there is a reason that plagiarism is among its high crimes and misdemeanours.

What almost all readers look for is authenticity. This is why you are precious. They do not want to read some concocted soup of shop-worn opinions and second-hand ideas. They want to hear you sing your song.

This is where the fear comes in, and is so damaging. The fear says you are not interesting enough, not worldly enough, not dazzling enough. Who are you, with your small life and your limited brain? You have not shot big game in Kenya like Hemingway, or travelled in ocean going liners with cabin trunks like Scott Fitzgerald, or walked to Turkey like Paddy Leigh Fermor. You did not spend time with the aboriginals like Bruce Chatwin or consort with statesman like Gore Vidal, or be a statesman like Disraeli, although of course he was a better prime minister than writer.

So the temptation is to try and pretend to be something you are not. Because the fear is telling you that your puny self is to be dismissed, you may want to try on some bogus literary persona, to sound a bit more like your heroes. The moment you do this, you are lost. Readers are oddly forgiving. They will forgive workaday prose, if the story is good enough, which is why people read and love John Grisham or Alexander McCall Smith. Neither of those writers does anything interesting with language, but they can tell a hopping yarn.

On the other hand, if the language is like poetry, they will forgive the fact that nothing much happens, which is why they love Mrs Woolf. Hemingway once wrote an entire book in which the central event was a woman having her hair cut. It was published posthumously in 1986. I remember reading it at university, and it was so extraordinary that I finished it in one sitting.

The one thing that readers will not forgive is fakery. They can sense, almost like bats, when a writer is trying to be someone other than herself. If you do this, your writing will never ring true on the page. This is why the central need in a writer is the courage to be yourself. It does not matter how small your life is; most good writing is about the human heart, and you have one of those. Mine it. Remember that Jane Austen never went anywhere, hardly saw anything in her young, short life, was confined by the strict social mores of her age, when it was men who got to go out and do stuff. Yet she wrote three of the greatest novels in the English language. She once said that she painted in miniature, on ivory.

There is a second point to do with this matter of fear and authenticity. It is voice. There is a tremendous tendency in beginners to think that there is some kind of prescribed literary tone. You must use long words and flowing periods. You must be a Writer with a capital W. Look at me, you are saying: I know what antediluvian and gibbous and inchoate mean. I am not just writing, I am Writing.

This comes from the terror of being found out. The fear is that people will realise you are just a regular human like them, not some big literary titan up in a pantheon somewhere. It, too, will murder your writing stone dead.

Orwell once said one of the best things ever about good prose. He said: do not write anything that you would not say in ordinary conversation.

I tend to put it in a slightly different and less interesting way. I say: never use a long word where a short one would do. House is better than residence; car is better than vehicle; story is better than narrative. It is why Hemingway used the word nice because he meant to. (In the same way, short sentences are better than long ones; short paragraphs are better than long, rambling ones, especially now, in the age of the internet.)

This short word long word thing sounds very bare and small. It is not one of the great ideas of the world. But it is absolutely central to being a good writer. It is about being true to yourself and not falling into the pretention trap and not trying to be something you are not. It is about not being afraid. Never forget the power of the simple, declarative sentence.

It is also about trusting the reader. You neither have to impress your readers, nor spell every last damn thing out for them. Let them read between the lines; they are grown-ups, they can do it. You are not trying to dazzle them into submission; you are trying to tell them a story. You are trying to divert and entertain. You are trying to tell truths, however small. You are trying, I think, I hope, to touch the human heart.

So: be yourself, trust yourself, learn to hear your own voice. If you do that, you cannot go far wrong.

At the same time, do not think this means you have to limit yourself. You can be bold. You can play with the language, with the form, with the genre. (My friend The Man of Letters says that a day spent without Playing with the Form is a day wasted.) The paradox is that if you keep it simple, you actually have more opportunities for bashing away at the boundaries, not less. If you are permanently self-conscious, trying to do this twisted idea of high style that the fear tells you about, then all your mental energy is used up in this charade. You have no room for being playful, for experimenting, for letting yourself rip. Be your own lovely, true, flawed, frail, sweet self, and see where the music takes you.

Then go back and do a really, really strict second draft.

 

And the Pigeon says: Bugger them all if they can’t take a joke:

Writing Workshop, Day Two

Posted by Tania Kindersley.

Again: warning for length. Thank you so much for the kind comments of yesterday, and high salutes to those of you who are sticking with it. I am always slightly uncertain whether a blog is the right place to do this, and yet I always bash it out, in case it might be of use. I hope it is.

One thing I say to my students is that writing cannot really be taught. In some ways, you just have to go and do it. There is a lot of trial and error, of endless practice, of using your own initiative and learning to trust your own instincts. What I am giving you here is not carved in stone. It is suggestion, more than anything else. It is everything I have learnt, from years of doing it, from years of reading the good books about doing it. Take what speaks to your own writing heart, and leave the rest.

 

A quick diversion on rules, and the word Nice:

I talk quite a lot about rules, and when you may or may not choose to follow them. Some are absolutely chiselled in stone: the apostrophe must go in the correct place, both for clarity and correctness, and also trust. If your reader sees a grocer’s apostrophe, she will momentarily lose faith in you; she will wonder if she is in a safe pair of hands. (On a personal note, this is where blogging is quite frightening for me. I do not have time to polish madly; generally my posts are what I call draft and a half. In any other writing for publication, I would do a minimum of seven drafts, including one for clichés.)

Some rules are mutable. I think split infinitives are generally best avoided; on the other hand, if you find yourself twisting yourself inside out like a pretzel in order not to boldly go, then split the damn thing. Sometimes it does read better. Trust your instinct on this. It is the same thing with prepositions at the end of sentences.

In my wilder moments, I think there are no rules, or rather that there are, but when you get good enough, you can throw them out of the window, as you please. I always think of Picasso: he first became a master draftsman; he did the beautiful reality of the blue period; only then could he tear up the book and start putting people’s noses behind their knees. If he had not really known what he was doing to start with, then those later paintings would have been a mess. Guernica would not have meant anything. That’s quite a serious thing to think about.

So, rules are important, and there are some. But just for now, I want to give you an emblematic example of how rules may be discarded.

A lot of people will tell you: oh, don’t be using adverbs. Adverbs are the work of hacks, and Satan. And actually, if you want to be really good, go back and scrub out half your adjectives too.

When they are up on this hobby horse, galloping about and looking down their noses at the walking people, they will state, with granite certainty, that the one word you should never, ever use is the word Nice.

Nice is a nothing word, they will say, bleached of meaning. In some ways, this is right. Nice has so many meanings that it ends up often meaning nothing. If you were to write: it was a nice day, it would not tell the reader anything much. What kind of nice? Do you mean it was sunny, and you love the sun? Or do you mean it rained, and you were glad, because you were worrying about your garden or your crops? Or did something unexpected happen? Or had you been grieving a loss, and this was the first day since the death that you got out of bed without wanting to weep?

So, at first blush, it would seem to be the same if you wrote: he was a nice man. But, in fact, and this is where it gets interesting, that could be a very powerful statement. A nice day does not have many ramifications, but a nice man does.

Imagine if you invented a character who had a father who neglected her and a husband who betrayed her. Imagine if she were battered and beaten and bashed up by life and love. Imagine that she meets a new fellow, and lets herself try again. And it turns out that he is kind and thoughtful: he listens to her when she speaks; he notices when she is tired, and makes her supper without having to be asked; he lets her be silent when she needs not to talk.

Her friend asks her: what sort of a man is he? And she thinks for a moment, and sighs, and says: you know, he is a nice man.

That means something. It tells you a lot about the character. It says: she is not asking for much, she is not demanding a brilliant mind, or a high ambition, or a ton of money. She does not want castles in Spain. She has suffered from not niceness, and all she wants now is someone who is the opposite, to heal her bruised heart. The very smallness of the word is what makes it touching. It contains a subtext, and a hinterland.

Hemingway, who is the high master of the single syllable, and the simple, declarative sentence, and who won the Nobel Prize for it, uses nice a lot. He was never a man for the rules. In The Sun Also Rises, which is my favourite of his novels, he uses it in a most fascinating way.

In some instances, he employs it in the plain, simple prose for which he was famous:

‘Bayonne is a nice town. It is like a very clean Spanish town, and it is on a big river.’

This is a perfect example of what he did so well. Look at the small, simple words he uses: nice, clean, big. He does not go into raptures over the architecture, or paint a word picture, or describe exactly what the river looks like, and what colour the water is. He clears those sentences of all possible clutter. He places those plain words very deliberately and carefully, to summon up an atmosphere, a feeling, instead of hammering the reader with a long, descriptive passage. By keeping it so spare, he lets the reader feel the place, more than see it, and there is something brilliantly clever in that.

The big point about Hemingway, and why he is such a perfect example, is that you know that he used those particular words very much on purpose. He did not just roll out of bed with a hangover, grumpy after a fight with one of his many wives, and think: bugger, I can’t think of a word for Bayonne. I’ll just call it nice and hope no one will notice.

He did it with deliberation, because of the effect he wanted to create. Nice, clean, big. If you pay attention to the sound of the sentence, the rhythm of it, you see how well it works, on an almost tactile level. Bayonne is a big, singing word; it has a swoop in it. To juxtapose it with the small, short, usual ‘nice’ brings it into wonderful contrast. If he had said it was a beautiful town, or an ancient town, or had it steeped in anything, the effect would not have been nearly so telling. In this context, the placing of nice is the work of a master.

He does it in an even more brilliant manner when he is talking about Robert Cohn, one of the central characters. He says:

‘No one had ever made him feel he was a Jew, and hence any different from anyone else, until he went to Princeton. He was a nice boy, a friendly boy, and very shy, and it made him bitter.’

In this passage, the use of nice is not about atmosphere or rhythm. It does two very clever things. It contrasts the mild, bland ‘nice’ with the ugly shadow of anti-Semitism. By saying that Cohn was a nice boy, Hemingway throws into vivid contrast the absolute not niceness of those who think that Jews are different from anyone else, with its implication of not as good, when up against those preppy Princeton Wasps.

The second thing it does is just as clever. It carries an echo of Cohn’s roots. Oh, he’s a nice boy is just the kind of thing we might imagine a proud Jewish mother saying about her lovely son. We can catch the sound of it, even if we are not quite conscious of it. And again, it comes back to the contrast: as the mother says oh he’s a nice boy, the people who find Jewishness somehow wrong or frightening or to be disdained, are thinking the exact opposite.

The point about these two examples is not just that a master craftsman may use the banned word cleverly and well. The point, in a way, is not to deconstruct what he did and how it worked. The point is that when you use a word, however small and simple and derided it is, use it. Know why you choose it. Take it out and place it carefully. Make it work for you. Do it with thought and care. And once you have, stand by it.

One final thought on nice: the meaning I love the most is the one that means fine or subtle, as in ‘a nice distinction’. The reason it gives me so much satisfaction is that this usage takes a very familiar word and employs it in a slightly unfamiliar way. Hardly anyone talks about a nice distinction any more. It makes you sit up and take notice, and that is always a good thing.

 

I was going to do a long thing on authenticity today, but we had lots of questions, and a wonderful writing exercise, where my students dazzled and delighted, and so time trashed my lesson plan. It does not matter.

Instead, I spoke briefly of drafts. One of the best pieces of writing advice I ever read comes from Anne Lamott, who wrote a beautiful and useful book on writing called Bird by Bird. She says: let yourself do a really crappy first draft. I seem to remember I banged on about this at length last year. I sometimes think that if I had to tell would-be writers only one, single thing it might be this.

The reason it is so important is that if you set off thinking even your first draft must be neat and correct and perfect, you will be hamstrung from the start. The angry critical voices will come barging in; you will constantly be telling yourself that’s no good, that makes no sense, that does not work, that is not right.

The big, baggy, messy first draft is where you may give yourself permission to fly. Try things out, take risks, scoot about all over the place. Here, you need not be proper and disciplined. The great secret is to vow to yourself, almost as a formal promise, perhaps even spoken aloud, that no one will ever see it. That way, you need feel no shame when you fall flat on your face, as you surely will. There will be things that do not work, paragraphs that are risible, characters who are absurd or flat as pancakes. It does not matter; no one will point and laugh because no one will see. You can calmly go back in the second draft and cut all the dross out.

The other good reason to do a bad first draft is that it gives you more material to work with. If you are putting no limits on yourself, then you will produce an awful lot more than if you were in critical mode. This gives you much more scope in your second draft.

It is then that you must make like Michelangelo and chip away at the block of stone to release the sculpture within. In some ways, the second draft is the secret of any book. It will be almost all cutting, and it is where you will find the good stuff. If you have not let yourself go crazy in the first draft, there will be less good stuff to work with.

So be brave. It is just between you and your silent room.

 

If you have any energy left for reading, there is a wonderful article by the great Lynne Truss on the life of a pedant, and why the apostrophe matters, here.

 

Too tired for pictures. Every year it amazes me how absolutely exhausting teaching is. It is fabulously rewarding, and my students are always thrilling and incredibly hard-working and brave. They always surprise me, and I love that. But when I come home I am so drained that I cannot remember what my name is. (It is also for this reason that I must apologise for clumsy sentences and the odd typing mistake in these posts; too shattered to check for strict correctness.) It makes me realise what heroines and heroes teachers are, and I take my hat off to every last one of them.

So here is just a single shot of the smiling Pigeon, today in elegant black and white, because you must have at least one beautiful thing to gaze on. Or, if I am putting on my pedantic hat, upon which to gaze:

The little tinker.

Writing Workshop 2011

Posted by Tania Kindersley.

Each year I do a writing workshop as part of my local arts festival. For the last couple of years I have put an edited version up on the blog, for those of you with an interest in writing. I am doing so again now.

Two caveats:

It is very long, so you may want to print it out. Although I have rewritten it this year, there are only about seven things I really know about writing. This mean that there will be repetition, for regular readers, for which I apologise.

There is a bit of what I say not what I do that goes on here. Because this is a very intense week, and I am trying to communicate as much of what I know as I can, the actual writing is not my best. I do not have the time or energy to polish and cut and shape; so you have it in its baggy, shaggy, first draft shape. Please excuse solecisms and possible typos. This is more about communication than lovely prose.

 

So, here we go.

There is one thing that I turn to first every year, because I think it is the single most elemental thing that can stop you writing, and stop you doing good writing.  It is always the first thing I want to talk about because it is at the root of everything. I call it, with no great originality: The Fear.

 

The Fear.

The number one thing that will stop you writing is not time or talent or your other job or the fact that you do not dine with Sebastian Faulkes. It is not that you do not have a quiet space or that you have the wrong kind of typewriter or that your computer is broken or that your fingers hurt. Proust wrote in a cork-lined room lying in bed while the demons in his head howled at him. There is no perfect time, no perfect space, no perfect state of mind.

The one thing, the only thing, that will stop you is fear.

The Fear takes many forms, and it is a cruel and subtle beast. When you are telling yourself you are tired and you’ll do it tomorrow because the dinner must be made and the house is a mess, that sounds lovely and rational. In fact, that is The Fear. Any time you use the word ‘too’, that is The Fear. I’m too young too old too stupid too unoriginal too late too uninspired too sad too happy: it’s all The Fear talking. When it is at its most blatant, The Fear just marches up, fixes you will its baleful eye and says: I’m not good enough.

That is the central sorrow of the writing life, that one, small, bald sentence. I’m not good enough. No writer is good enough. Anyone who scratches a mark on a page will have heroes; it’s probably why they start in the first place. They wanted to be Virginia Woolf or Scott Fitzgerald or Jane Austen. I started because I wanted to be Evelyn Waugh. I wanted to write Vile Bodies; that was my very specific ambition. I would still like to write something as clever and funny as that, and I probably never will.

Every single writer will have moments, hours, days, even weeks of not being good enough. There are times when you sit down to write and there is nothing there. Your head is filled with mud, or the gusting emptiness that sounds like wind blowing tumbleweed down the main street of a one-horse town. There are days when you believe that you could not write fuck on a dusty blind, as my friend The Playwright says. There are days when all your sentences come out flat and leaden, falling dead onto the page.

There are moments when you simply cannot remember how to do it. Years ago, when I was writing novels, I remember suddenly forgetting how to get characters in and out of a room. It was quite bizarre. It was my third novel, I thought I should know what to do by now. I knew I was nowhere near my heroes, but I thought at least I had a basic grasp of logistics. I literally had to go and get a novel down from the shelf, and read it, to remember how to get my protagonist to move in time and space.

There is a crucial difference between the writers and the non-writers. The writer will learn The Fear, understand it, be so familiar with it that it will walk beside her like an old dog. She will accept that it will haunt her, at almost every waking moment. She will make a policy decision to bash through it, to defy it, to trick it, to laugh at its puny plan. She will remember that the definition of courage is not the absence of fear, but to feel fear and not be stopped by it. That line from a cheap, self-help homily will run through her head: feel the fear and do it anyway. She will tell herself, several times a day, Sod them if they can’t take a joke.

It can be useful to deconstruct The Fear. You need to know the enemy. The problem is that The Fear is a shape-shifter; it is agile and inchoate. Just as you think you have a handle on it, it will morph into another form.

Probably its central defining feature is: the terror that people will laugh and point. Almost every human fears being mocked. This terror is particularly acute when you are doing something that is very serious to you, that really matters, into which you have put your soul and heart. Most of us learn to combat mockery by learning to laugh at ourselves. It’s a very British thing: don’t take yourself too seriously, whatever you do. If you laugh at yourself first, before other people can, then you may remove the sting.

The problem is that writing is a very serious business. It’s not that you must walk around with a grave countenance, acting as if you are rehearsing your Nobel Prize speech. You need not be portentous and speak only in flowing periods. You do not have to pull on some grand literary cloak, in order to live the writing life. On the other hand, if you do not take it seriously, and do it seriously, then you will never be much good. It’s a very fine line to walk.

Because of this, if people do laugh and point, it will cut right to the heart of you. That is why even the grandest writers sometimes do not read their own reviews. They can’t take it.

This central fear is very straightforward. It is the apprehension that some people will not like what you wrote. The main thing to know is that this is true. It is not a straw man that you built in the crazier corridors of your irrational mind. No writer can please everyone, because writing is such a subjective business. I personally do not like Nabokov, which is practically an arrestable crime in some circles. It’s not that I do not think he is brilliant; I just don’t enjoy his work. I don’t like Philip Roth much, either, and I’ve never managed to get on with Updike. I love George Eliot, but I don’t have much time for DH Lawrence, except for the poetry, which I adore. I worship Virginia Woolf, but have never understood James Joyce. I could eat Henry James for lunch, but I have no appetite for Thomas Hardy.

So the first thing to understand is that: people will laugh and point. People will criticise. People will frown and say: what did she think she was doing? People will deconstruct and damn and demonise. Perhaps the vital thing to remember is that this will happen to everyone who ever publishes a word. The comfort is that you are not alone. The thin gruel of consolation is that it is an integral part of being a writer. If you can’t take the brickbats, you will never get the bouquets.

The technique for dealing with this is what I call Factoring In. It is to do with what the shrinks call false expectations. False expectations are one of the most vicious enemies of happiness. So, in a way, it is not about developing a hide like a rhino, or becoming defiant and even angry; it is more about realism. The reality is that every writer gets bashed about a bit, by critics, by publishers, by agents, by friends. Once you know that, in your deep, fragile heart, you can reset your expectations. It will not all be glory and applause. That’s not how it works.

The other thing to know is that it will hurt. It will hurt like hell. There you were, pouring your deepest self onto the page, stretching every sinew, ransacking every damn dictionary for the exact right word, and some grumpy critic who has never written a book in his life will come along and trample all over your baby with his hob-nailed boots. You cannot inoculate yourself against this. But you can learn to write through the pain. There are some good psychological tricks for this. Along with the factoring in, so that you were at least prepared, you can bring a big box of perspective to the table. You are not living in the Congo, where armies rape women with bayonets. Your entire family has not been wiped out by a tsunami. Your house has not burnt to the ground. This sounds melodramatic, but it is true. All right, you say to yourself, it’s a bad thing, but it’s not the worst thing that could happen. I still have my arms and legs; I still have my fingers to type.

Then, you move into the gritted determination phase. So, someone did not like this book, this poem, this short story. Well, damn them to hell and back, I shall just write another, better one. I’ll show them all.

There are other ramifications of the fear, beyond the central people laughing and pointing one. A great oddity of writing is that people seem to feel they need permission. It is as if there is some central committee somewhere, meeting in a smoke-filled room, as crepuscular light filters in through the slats in the Venetian blinds, sucking on their cigars as they decide who is allowed in, and who is not. It is like the Masons: if you do not know the secret handshake, you may not enter the sanctum.

So, before you even start, you will be reading yourself the list of your own disqualifications. You did not grow up in a literary family, you have never even been to Hampstead, you do not have Salman Rushdie on speed dial. You did not go to the right university, or even any university. You are not asked to the right parties. You have no contacts. You never studied English literature.

Whatever these random qualifiers are, you will gather a big old bunch of them in your head, stare at them, and decide you should go and do something interesting with sheep instead.

Here is the good truth. There are no qualifiers. If you have an idea in your head, and hands to write, and a work ethic, you can be a writer. Someone once said, I can’t remember who: a writer is someone who writes. It’s as simple as that. The lovely thing about this particular fear is that it is not true. You may cross it off your list.

There is another fear, which is that even though you think you want to write, and you have stories running round in your head, you do not know quite how to do it. This is where people often think that they must take a course. They must have a degree in creative writing, or go off on those residential things run by Arvon, or in some other way sit at the feet of a master. All these things can be helpful, but they are absolutely not necessary. In some ways, they can be antithetical to creativity, which sounds a bit counter-intuitive. This is because if you go on some strict course, and you are told that these are the rules, and they are carved in stone, it can confine you. You want to gallop over the prairie like a wild bronco, and you are told you must be doing dressage steps.

I think there is one basic way to learn to write, and, wonderfully, it is available to everyone. It is: read. If you ever read an interview with any successful writer, you will see that they were mad readers, often from a very early age. I am the only member of my family to need spectacles; by the time I was thirteen, I could not see a thing. I am almost certain that this was because I spent every spare hour when I was a child reading. I read in the dusk, when there was hardly light to see; I read under the bedcovers with a torch. I actually remember someone once saying to me, when I was eight: you will ruin your eyes. And I did. It was worth it.

 

 

A quick practical note; or, the Daily Writing:

Every year I hear myself talking in endless vague abstractions, about The Fear, about The Truth, about listening for the rhythms in your sentences. Sometimes I look out at the faces and think: did they really want to hear about this?

But there is one thing I know that can make your writing better and it is so easy a child of six could do it.

It is: every morning, write, without thought, for ten minutes.

Without thought sounds wrong and mad and bad. Also: counter-intuitive and probably dangerous. What I mean is: turn off your inner critic. You are going to need the critic down the road, the good, constructive one rather than the idiot one who wants to tear everything down with her bare hands and then drink gin and laugh. But there are times when the critic must be sent out of the room and this is one of them.

The great Dorothea Brande, whose book, Becoming a Writer, is still essential reading almost a hundred years after it was written, wanted you to do your daily writing before you were even properly awake, for twenty minutes. Her idea was that if you could scramble to your desk, still in your pyjamas, before breakfast, coffee, opening the post, then you could tap into that golden part of the subconscious which rational thought can suppress. My daily writing is a more practical adaptation of this idea. Sometimes you want to clean your teeth and put on your trousers.

The point of it is to make writing an easy habit. It is what you do. It does not then become a terrifying task, a wearying chore. The daily ten minutes also builds your writing muscle, so that rhythm and pace and even length of sentences start to become second nature. This frees your imagination. And, the doing it without thought, even if you write rhubarb rhubarb rhubarb, or bugger bugger bugger, trains you to turn off that inner critic, who is liable to shout.

The most important psychological aspect of the daily writing is that it is yours. No one will ever see it. Give yourself permission to indulge in flights of fancy, rampant self-indulgence, wild experiment. Just go. Then, after ten minutes, you can be a grown-up again.

 

No pictures today; too tired. You do, however, get a quick fix of the Pigeon, who spent a very nice day being spoiled by the Mother and the dear Stepfather:

And: a very happy Independence Day to my American readers, and a VERY VERY HAPPY BIRTHDAY to the Older Niece.

Sunday

Posted by Tania Kindersley.

My sister is home from the south. The sun is shining. We sit on a bench and look at my delphiniums and speak of our father and our childhood. There is the absolute comfort of going through the thing together. I don’t take that for granted, for a single moment.

I do 1414 words for my writing workshop tomorrow. I have all my notes from the last three years; I could just as easily use those. For some reason, I am starting from scratch. I have no idea why. It feels like an imperative and I am following it, blindly. My fingers tap tap tap over the keyboard; Amy Macdonald is singing a brilliant song about this pretty face don’t work no more; the Pigeon is slumbering at my side. I smile at paradox: I am going to go into a room tomorrow and tell my students to trust themselves, flaws and all, and all the while I am lashing myself to produce the best ever workshop they ever got. Theory and practice, I think; and all the gaps in between.

Here is what the world looks like today:

Last night I had a dream that someone moved the burn. The Victorians did actually do it, some time in the 1870s. This is about three quarters of a mile from its natural course. In my dream, I shouted: but where will the mama duck swim? It was so vivid that I had to run down this morning to check it was still there. It was:

This is my favourite photograph I have taken for a while. Sun on salvia, what could be more simple than that? I don’t know why I love it so much, but I do:

Pigeon, most gracious in black and white today:

And the dear old blue hill:

National nonsense.

Posted by Tania Kindersley.

So, poor Andy Murray lost at the tennis and suddenly he is Scottish again. Apparently, he is British when he is winning. I’m not sure if this is true, but it’s a trope the media adores.

One gentleman, splendid with indignation and mad to generalise, wrote on a message board on one of the nastier newspapers:

The Scots hate the English. They are so rude that my wife and I no longer take our holidays there, but go to Spain instead.

I think: the Spanish are welcome to him.

I’ve always been a bit wary of national generalisations. Can you really say what every one of the five million Scots are like? On the other hand, there do seem to be national cultures. I just read Malcolm Gladwell’s book, Outliers, and he has a fascinating section on the South Korean tendency to deference and very formal manners. He also explains crime in the Appalachians by looking at the cult of honour that the original Scots Irish immigrants bought with them.

From spending a lot of time in Scotland and Ireland, I have noticed that there is a very long Celtic memory. History is remembered in a much more vivid way than in England; the Hunger and the Clearances might have happened yesterday.  The English tend to forget their history, and why would they not? All that running round invading places and declaring themselves King of France for no particular reason. There is a wail in one of the papers today that there is to be no triumphalist celebration to mark the two hundredth anniversary of the Battle of Waterloo when it comes in 2015. In a classic piece of ministerial speak, Baroness Rawlings told the House of Lord: ‘There is likely to be some commemorative activity at associated heritage sites.’ Where do they learn to speak like that? Is there a special government school?

On the other hand, it’s quite a British thing to do. A bit of commemorative activity, don’t make a song and dance out of it.

The other thing that interests me about this national generalisation lark is how it seems to apply to some nations and not others. Many people, it seems, have very firm opinions about the French. They are, as every fule no, intellectual, arrogant, elegant, and keen on le sexy sex. It’s also odd how stereotypes get spun in good and bad ways. So, some people consider the vaunted French attitude to mistresses and cinq à sept tremendously sophisticated and grown up, while others think it slightly tawdry.

Meanwhile, other nations get no strong feelings at all. While some English, like that cross fellow, might deride the Scots, have you ever heard anyone say: well, it’s the Uruguayans I can’t stick? Or: it’s the Indonesians who drive me nuts? I know what the generalisation for the Italians is: volubility, love of food and family, the Mafia. I have no idea what it is for the Portuguese.

Sometimes, I’m not sure what nationality even means. I am Welsh, English, Scottish, Irish, French, possibly American (one of my grandmothers was a slightly unreliable narrator, so we are not certain), and Danish. I am, like most Britons, a mutt.

This is where I should come up with my definitive final paragraph, where I draw all the strands together. That is what my lovely history teacher, Mr Woodhouse, taught me to do when I was fifteen. But it turns out I don’t have one. Sorry about that. This is, I suddenly realise, the first post I have written since my father died which is about something other than my emotional state and my own tiny little world. There is a reason, I see now, for that. It’s because my brain is still not quite firing on all cylinders. Still, the very fact that I wanted to talk about something other than my bashed heart must be a Good Sign, even if it’s not the most polished, articulate thing I ever wrote. Or, something like that.

 

Here is what lovely Scotland looks like, anyway:

The beeches:

The sheep:

The coos:

More sheep, very Jane Austenish:

I adore this old metal fence. I imagine there are hardly any of these left now, but they are so elegant:

Up the avenue we go. The second dog is my sister’s poodle, who is staying while her humans are in the south:

The honeysuckle is in its vulgar phase:

I used to have many foxgloves in the wild part of my garden. Then, one year, they all disappeared. I found this one in the woods, dug it up, and planted it. I hope it will survive its transplant:

The philadelphus is suddenly flowering:

The dogs roses are wild this year:

Up close, these lovely long grasses are the colour of straw, but from a distance, they look like waves of purple:

Slightly wistful Pigeon:

Today’s hill, from a distance:

Bonus Post: inexcusably funny.

Posted by Tania Kindersley.

On the edge of my consciousness, over the last couple of days, has been the huge media fuss over Johann Hari and his use of quotes.

For those of you who do not know, Hari is a young journalist at The Independent. He has very strong views, boldly expressed. People love him or hate him, usually along tribal lines. He also attracts schadenfreude, because he started writing for a national newspaper when he was about twelve. I tend to agree with him quite a lot of the time.

Anyway, it turns out that he has been putting quotes into his interviews which were not actually said to him by the subjects, but come from their books, or other interviews they have given in the past. He did not give attribution, but inserted the quotes, often with real-time physical details (she sighed; he paused; she ran her hands through her hair kind of thing), as if they were being spoken. His explanation was that English was often not the first language of his interviewees, and he felt the points they were making were so important that, in the interest of clarity, he used the more cogent lines that he found in their books or articles.

The reaction has divided neatly into two camps. There are those who say: he is on the side of the angels, he is still representing the real views of the people to whom he spoke, and worse things happen at sea. For which last, read: in the evil tabloid press.

Then there are those who say: this breaks every rule of journalism, it is misleading and patronising the readers, and no one can ever take him seriously again.

I think I started off slightly in the first camp, and now am veering towards the second. This makes me a bit sad, because I think he is on the side of the angels, most of the time.

But the awful thing is I can’t help but laugh at what is going on at Twitter, where the interviewsbyhari hashtag has gone crazy. Even funnier, someone has put up a Youtube video of a clip from Downfall, about Hitler’s last days in his bunker, with subtitles superimposed about the Hari scandal. It is in the worst possible taste; it really is quite without excuse, but it is horribly, horribly funny:

 

Very, very naughty

Apparently, this is called ‘being Downfalled’. Apparently it is a thing.

On a more serious note, if you are interested, there is a robust, critical take on the whole thing by Brendan O’Neill here.

Roy Greenslade takes the other point of view here.

Vanity

Posted by Tania Kindersley.

One of the odd things about losing someone is that it is interesting. That sounds like such a strange word to use, but it is true. There is all the visceral stuff: the unreality, the sudden yearning, the bashing tears, the sharp regret, the moments of fury. Then, as it settles into a new fact, one that cannot be argued with, and small increments of normality seep back in, there is time to observe. Since the condition of being human is my favourite subject, closely followed by American politics, I find myself fascinated by the things I did and did not expect.

One of them is the absolute loss of vanity. I like to think I was not madly vain before, but I did wake up in the morning and put on my lipstick, a slick of mascara, a little bit of powder. I am not hysterical about looks, and know next to nothing about make-up, but I like to put a reasonable face out to the world. Also, one of the things about working from home is that I always feared getting to that wearing pyjamas at your desk stage, of which some people write. Because I must think of my work as work, and not just noodling about, because I must set my own hours and deadlines, and be rigorous, getting properly dressed and brushing my hair and putting on some lipstick felt like a crucial psychological marker. I think I believed that if I looked like a slob, I would write like a slob.

In the early days after my dad and my dog, I could not put on any make-up, because I never knew when I would be crying. I would put on a little bit of tinted moisturiser, to cover the worst of the blotch, and that was it. My tiny squinty little eyes were small and red for all to see; my face was plain and shiny. I did not care, because of the big thing that had happened.

I always rather admired those women who went out, quite bare-faced. I was never one of them. I had a phase of problem skin in my twenties, and got into the habit of always putting on a bit of base, which has never left me. Now it has, and it is oddly liberating.

I was sometimes aware that I must look frankly peculiar. My hair would be sticking up and my cheeks shining and my glasses smeared. I put on the nearest item of clothing, without thought.

I was thinking of this because The Mother and the dear Stepfather returned to the compound today, after a holiday in the south. I took the Pigeon up to see them and it was a joyful reunion.

As I left, I thought: what must they think I look like? I am extra wan today because the sleep patterns are still erratic and I did not get my eight hours last night. My shirt is a bit crumpled and my hair is insane.

I thought: perhaps vanity is creeping back.

I thought: I can’t work out if that is a good thing or a bad thing.

I thought: maybe it is just a thing.

 

Here are some Friday photographs for your viewing pleasure. I may have lost personal vanity for the duration, but I still take pride in the beauty of my garden:

Salvia:

There has not been nearly enough tree bark lately. This is the base of my beloved Scots pine:

Can’t get enough of these crazy violas:

Nor the lavender:

The light in the woods:

The festival of astrantias:

The little Hidcote:

The glorious astrantia in close-up:

The nepeta is just coming into flower:

I remain fascinated by these delicate grasses, out in the wild meadow beyond my garden wall:

And here they are with the trees and hills in the background:

A bold phlox:

The honeysuckle:

Can’t resist two more oystercatcher with baby pictures, from last week, for a special Friday treat:

A most regal Pigeon:

And the hill, from a different angle than usual, looking rather regal herself:

For some reason, when I look at that photograph, I genuinely expect Julie Andrews to come skipping down the slope, singing The Hills Are Alive With The Sound of Music. And would it not be lovely if she brought gorgeous Christopher Plummer with her? I really would have to put my lipstick on for that.

Have a happy Friday.