CREATING CHARACTERS  Once, after watching a poignant TV miniseries called The Lost Prince – I went to my bookshelf to look for information on this tragic boy, Prince John. I found there a memoir by the Duke of Windsor, one of John’s brothers. John gets but two passing mentions in the text which is a book I bought at a church fete. On the flyleaf the price – twenty cents – is written in pencil. The thing that drew my eye was the handwriting and the name of the original owner. In a fat and fluent uncontrolled almost-copperplate she has written her name in dark blue biro – Valda Goldbloom. I lost interest in poor little Prince John and went off on a search for Valda. In the Melbourne phone book there were two V. Goldblooms. Perhaps one or even both of these are Valdas. And Valda did not then have a presence on the world wide web. She is there now, although which of the web manifestations, if any, is my Valda, remains to be seen. Perhaps someone here in the audience is her niece or grandson. What’s the connection between Valda and the Duke of Windsor? Where are Valda’s love letters? Not that I have any real desire to see Valda or to speak to Valda. Her name, discovered on the yellowing page of an old Pan paperback, is a delicious source of inspiration, a bright invitation to give her a childhood, a romance, a large family of amazing children, a secret lover, a fondness for a particular shade of pistachio, a deadly vice, a winning smile, a garden in the Open Garden scheme, a career in television – well maybe not a career in television – but you see once I have been gripped by the notion of her, she is mine and I can make her. Did I find her or invent her? In a funny kind of way I think I was gifted with her. I feel that she came to me, trailing quite a bit of context and mood. She is somehow mingled with the exquisite nostalgic doom of the miniseries, with the battered old book, with the church fete (how did a Goldbloom book end up on the stall at St Barnabas – how did I end up at St Barnabas for that matter). Mind you Valda has only come as far as the Blue Marquee at the Byron Bay Writers’ Festival, but give the woman time, she needs to buy a wardrobe and have her hair done and maybe get a PhD in Business Management. Or a facelift. Not only do I love to feel a character stirring like this, but I also revel in the invention and/or discovery of titles for fiction – such as ‘Valda Goldbloom in the Blue Marquee’. That has a certain appeal. You see, perhaps as I speak Valda is sitting beside you, not knowing which way to look.   Maybe she breeds cocker spaniels. I chose cocker spaniels because there are many other breeds of dog I can’t confidently spell. Her husband is an orthodontist dedicated to Valda and to the accumulation of wealth. Valda is so depressed that she is contemplating leaping from the top of a tall building. How did Valda get into this mess? Well, I think that is for her creator to discover in the process of her creation. I will have to get on with the process of making Valda up – for that is what she is now – made up. That’s what fiction is – a made up story with its own life. Whatever the inspiration, whatever the ingredients, the final thing is an invention of the writer’s making.   I sometimes hear students and teachers of writing complain that lectures and workshops and text books purporting to be guides to writing fiction do not actually explain how to create a character. They do not reveal the secret and the rules. Now I suspect that there is something here that can not really be reduced to rules. And if there is a secret, it is like one of those secrets that can only be revealed to the seeker by the seeker. It’s Zen. Like most aspects and elements of writing fiction, there seems to me to be no straight answer to the question of how it is done. It is not exactly technical – it’s – well, kind of spiritual. If you listen to the many writers speaking at this festival, I think you will find that every now and again one of them will say something that hints at the fact that way back behind the stories there lies a certain attitude or disposition – the writer is a person who constructs fictions, fables, narratives – whatever you call them – and the writer sits at a particular angle to the world, with a particular kind of alertness to the shape and possibilities of people and events and experiences, with a keen eye and ear for the way things work, the way things might work, the way a character and a series of events might intersect and work together and unravel and wind up and so forth. I sometimes think that maybe the fiction writer lives half in reality and half in fantasy, forever playing with the elements of so-called real life and consciously or even unconsciously constructing new narratives – just in the course of everyday life. The writer’s pleasure is then to translate all that into written language for the pleasure of readers. And so as the writer writes, the characters form and develop. The whole process is in a sense on-going – so that when a character emerges in a story, the plot, the character, the mood, the meaning – these are all mixed up together, all part of each other.   The critics and the reviewers often come at the thing from another angle again. They say – this character is convincing, or flat, or tragic, or hilarious – or whatever. They are not so interested in how any of it came about, as in what the final effect was on them as readers. Which is of course fair enough. But behind all this, behind the reader, the reviewer, the wondering would-be writer – at the back of the fiction is the writer. How did the writer create the character? Found, invented? Well, I think bits of them are found, bits are invented – maybe the point is that the writer is there at the centre of it all, or at the back of it all – with that particular attitude, that state of mind, that readiness and willingness to fabricate the fiction – maybe that is what matters. I really am saying that I don’t think there are rules and formulas for this. All I think you can do is examine what other writers have done with characters in order to nourish your own process of the creation (and finding) of characters in your fiction.  I think it is so important to realise that the characters are part of the fabric of the fiction. Sometimes writers speak of characters who have arrived all by themselves in the narrative, and have proceeded to take over, leaving the writer wondering and marvelling and following as if from a distance. That does happen, it happens often, and it is truly one of the joys of writing fiction. You think you are writing such and such a story with such and such a set of characters, and then suddenly you find yourself typing something that is said or done by a character you had not thought of, and all at once that character starts to speak and act and change the direction of things. This is part of the glorious magic of writing fiction. Perhaps the most fun incidence of this in my own case was the appearance of Vanessa the talking cat in my two thrillers – Unholy Writ and Open For Inspection. I certainly never set out with a talking cat in mind. I might write a third book in the series, this one written by Vanessa. Another example in my work is the character of Virginia O’Day who wrote all the letters in Dear Writer. Another way of looking at this is to say that there might be a lot of me in Vanessa and Virginia, but because they are their own characters I don’t have to take full responsibility for what they might say or do. So they are very liberating for me.   Fiction is of course very bound up with the real world, and when characters are created they may have their genesis in who knows what part of reality, but then they take on their own being. Recently I read that Tom Keneally was inspired by a real live journalist called Caroline, and he created a character called Alice . Apparently he said that as soon as she became Alice she ceased to be Caroline, he forgot she had been inspired by Caroline, and she took on a life of her own. Tom made Alice up. Maybe Caroline doesn’t think so. But Tom thinks so. Who is in charge here? Well, that’s another matter for debate. Actually, I sometimes think at this point, of the legal questions of the algebra of a baby’s genetic heritage. Let X equal a baby Let A equal a woman Let B equal a man Let C equal a woman   Let D equal a man Let the egg of C and the sperm of D be hatched in the uterus of A to form X Let X be fed and clothed by B What is the value of X? So who owns that story?   Above my desk hangs this picture of Charles Dickens sitting in his chair surrounded by his characters who float about in the air. Are they the creatures of his dreams? Or are they spirits who have arrived from some unknown world of the imagination, spirits who have decided to visit Dickens for the purpose of becoming flesh as his creations. Or are they fragments of the life, the experience of Dickens, transformed by his heart, by his imagination – these are all such inexact terms – created, in the end by the use of words, by the music of his language.   I don’t actually think there is any answer to the question posed to the panel – not that that matters of course. I think the creating of characters is a truly mysterious process bound up with the mystery at the heart of storytelling. People love to hear stories. People love to tell stories, and yes, stories are inhabited by characters, but the music that is a story is so complex, so thrilling, that it seems to me it does not easily tease out into its parts. Not from the inside, anyway. You can take Wuthering Heights and examine the characters from the outside in all their amazing diversity and drama. But you won’t ever know where Emily got them from, and I doubt that Emily could have told you. They are integral to the thing the writer was doing. They are part of her gift to the reader. And the readers, all the millions of readers of Wuthering Heights make the characters again as they read. So perhaps there is not only the question of where they might come from, but the matter of where they are going.   My Heathcliff probably is not your Heathcliff. My baby X is not your baby X. As I read I make over the characters again and again, and so do you. And so does Valda Goldbloom. Bless her.

READING CHARLES DICKENS – first presented as a talk at Evensong in Christ Church Castlemaine July First 2012

Reading fiction has always been one of my greatest pleasures. I can trace my interest in the novels of Charles Dickens from when I was six. My sister was older than I was and she had borrowed The Pickwick Papers from the local Children’s Library. She would laugh as she read the stories, and sometimes she read out bits of them to me. I became desperate to borrow stories by Charles Dickens from the library. But – you had to be seven before you could take out books. So my father said he would take me to the adult library where I could borrow a book on his card. He led me away from the Children’s Library which was on street level, and where there was a tank of goldfish, round the corner to a yellow Georgian building. (This building, in Launceston Tasmania, no longer exists. It was lovely.) At some point inside he led me up up up a narrow spiral staircase that wound through shelves and shelves of books. My memory of them is that they were all rich brown and gold. Perhaps this is a true memory, or perhaps it is invested with the magic of the occasion. I searched long and lovingly among the Dickens novels for the one that I would take. I decided on Barnaby Rudge because it had delightful illustrations of a character called Dolly Varden. She wasn’t one of the alarming and vigorous imp-like caricatures, but a pretty girl in a bonnet. I also knew her name from a kind of cake, and also from a kind of figure that was often embroidered on tablecloths. So in a mood of quiet ecstasy I took home Barnaby Rudge. I am not really sure why my father let me do all this – perhaps I was impossible. Anyway.

Now I had a reasonable grip on reading, but when I set about reading this book I found that although I could often get the words, I generally couldn’t make any sense out of them. The sentences! Oh the sentences. Far from chuckling away at jokes that might have been in the narrative, I turned the pages slowly, weeping with a terrible frustration and despair.

For the record, here is how Dolly Varden, daughter of the locksmith, is described:

‘A face lighted up with loveliest pair of sparkling eyes – the face of a pretty, laughing girl, dimpled, fresh, and healthful – in a smart little cherry-coloured mantle, with a hood of the same drawn over her head, and on the top of that hood, a little straw hat, with cherry-coloured ribbons, and worn the merest trifle on one side – a cruel little muff, and a heartrending pair of shoes.’

I could see this from the pictures, but it was to be a few years before I could begin to comprehend the text. However this terrible beginning didn’t put me off, and I gradually collected my own copies of many of the books. In fact I became so devoted to them that from when I was about ten I used to write little dramas based on events in Dickens. I lived in Tasmania – this was before television, and entertainment was limited. So something people used to do was have eisteddfods where people – lots of them children – competed as singers and musicians – and so on. And it was possible to write little dramas and act them out with another child. I wrote up Pip and Estella from Great Expectations, also Miss Havisham and Pip. Another girl was Pip. I wrote up Oliver Twist and the Artful Dodger. I was the Dodger. Also Oliver and Fagin. Also Mrs Squeers and some of the boys from Nicholas Nickleby, and a monologue as Ebenezer Scrooge. We had costumes and scenery and sound effects. All this took place in a beautiful old theatre. This sounds a bit strange now – but in fact I think that the exercise of working, as it were, from Dickens, gave me some understanding of how a lot of it functioned. I came to love the sentences which had defeated me in the first place. And many of them have remained in my memory. In fact when I watched the recent TV production of Great Expectations I couldn’t understand why they made up new dialogue instead of sticking to the words Dickens had written.

Going back to Scrooge in A Christmas Carol – it was the name Scrooge that alerted me to the fact that some of the delicious and idiosyncratic names of Dickens’ characters had taken on lives of their own, and had gone into the language itself. My father used to read Disney comics to my brother, and I used to like to listen. There in the Donald Duck comics suddenly was the miser, Scrooge McDuck. The name of the Dickens character had come, longsince, to mean ‘miser’, and here he was – conflated with the Scottish stereotype of the penny pincher.

Just as the name Gamp, being Sarah Gamp,  the vividly terrible nurse in Martin Chuzzlewit, became a word for ‘umbrella’, Mrs Gamp’s umbrella being her signature. Havisham. Oliver Twist. Fagin. Then there is the eternal optimist Micawber in David Copperfield – he is sure something will turn up. It’s from him that you get the quote:

‘Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen six, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds ought and six, result misery.’ You don’t have to understand old English money to understand that this is a warning against the global financial crisis. The characters, while being hilarious or terrifying or tragic or moving, are forever offering pearls of wisdom.

Dickens is well known as a social reformer, not only because of the effect of his fiction, but also because in everyday life he campaigned for change in areas of moral, social and economic matters. His early novels expose isolated abuses and shortcomings of individual people, whereas his later novels contain a bitter diagnosis of the condition of England. Just one example – in Nicholas Nickleby where he describes the children abandoned to the care of Wackford Squeers in the school, Dotheboys Hall:

Pale and haggard faces, lank and bony figures, children with the countenances of old men, deformities with irons upon their limbs, boys of stunted growth, and others whose long meagre legs would hardly bear their stooping bodies, all crowded on the view together; there were the bleared eye, the hare-lip, the crooked foot, and every ugliness or distortion that told of unnatural aversion conceived by parents for their offspring, or of young lives which, from the earliest dawn of infancy, had been one horrible endurance of cruelty and neglect. There were little faces which should have been handsome, darkened with the scowl of sullen, dogged suffering; there was childhood with the light of its eye quenched, its beauty gone, and its helplessness alone remaining; there were vicious-faced boys, brooding, with leaden eyes, like malefactors in a jail; and there were young creatures on whom the sins of their frail parents had descended, weeping even for the mercenary nurses they had known, and lonesome even in their loneliness. With every kindly sympathy and affection blasted in its birth, with every young and healthy feeling flogged and starved down, with every revengeful passion that can fester in swollen hearts, eating its evil way to their core in silence, what an incipient Hell was breeding here!

And of course there is a dimension of Christian faith to the narratives, one brief example of this being in Dombey and Son. In the closing chapters Dickens invokes the presence of God, being: ‘that higher Father who does not reject his children’s love.’

Micawber’s story ended well, as he migrated to Australia where he prospered. In fact Dickens wrote a lot of essays about life in Australia – sailors, convicts, miners, bushrangers – and it features quite often as a place of hope and refuge in the novels.

Uriah Heep, also from David Copperfield, is synonymous with hypocrisy – he being the most vile and oily hypocrite who gets his power by pretending to abase himself. And as far as I know the Dolly Vardens who became embroidery designs took their name from the girl in Barnaby Rudge.

In Little Dorrit there is the girls’ companion the snobbish Mrs General – she is engaged to give the girls some social polish. She is forever giving silly words of advice, and is famous for trying to improve the mobility of their lips by suggesting they practice saying the words: papa, potatoes, prunes and prism. Prunes and prism – is a phrase that has gone into the language to signify a prissy manner of speaking.

Many of the wonderful names are obviously invented – the family of Smallweeds in Bleak House. Joshua Smallweed is ‘a leech in his disposition, a screw and a vice in his actions, a snake in his twistings, and a lobster in his claws.’ In such a description you can see the intensity of the vision and sense the momentum that informs the whole story. One of my favourites is that of Pleasant Riderhood, daughter of the pawnbroker in Our Mutual Friend. Pleasant is an unattractive looking girl with a muddy complexion. She marries the taxidermist, Mr Venus who has sallow skin and weak eyes.

The humour in Dickens is so sharp and hysterical, the pathos so melancholy, so sorrowful – and the whole thing comes at you with the power of hallucination, and stays with you forever.

Pickwick was apparently a real name that appealed to Dickens as the name for the genial founder of the Pickwick Club. He sets out on his travels accompanied by Tupman, Snodgrass and Winkle. Their destination is the cathedral city of Rochester. Now this is important. Dickens’ early life was spent very happily in Rochester. The terrible times came in later childhood when he had to work in the blacking factory, and when his father was imprisoned for debt. The extremes of good fortune and ill fortune are constantly being played out in the novels. In Pickwick, then, Rochester is a destination of joy and optimism and comedy.

Think now of the title of Dickens’ final and unfinished novel – The Mystery of Edwin Drood. Drood might be a real name – but in any case it is the very opposite of Pickwick. Death and doom and darkness and disaster ring in the name Drood. And again, the destination is Rochester – named in the novel as Cloisterham, it is clearly Rochester. So here at the end of the author’s life, when he was desperately troubled and ill, the scene returns to the place of his joyful childhood, but now it is a place of evil weirdness and terrible hallucination. The journey from Pickwick, through all the magic and drama of the novels, comes finally to Drood, to the tombs and terrors, horrors and opium dens of the last book. This story is imbued with mournful anxiety and an atmosphere of dread and foreboding. Cloisterham is a forgotten town, bypassed by the developing railway and subject to decay and destruction. The eerie Cathedral with its hidden secrets is at the dead centre of Cloisterham. Edwin Drood disappears on Christmas Eve – not the celebratory Christmas of A Christmas Carol, but a dismal evening in the shadowy town. 

Wonderfully, there are, in this creepy murky world, comic characters such as the stonemason Durdles who spends his time tapping the stones of the cathedral to discover the resting places of long dead celebrities. But as always, much of the comedy is in the way Dickens used language. Here is the description of Durdles who was: ‘Chiefly in the gravestone, tomb, and monumental way, and wholly of that colour from head to foot. In a suit of coarse flannel with horn buttons, a yellow neckerchief with draggled ends, an old hat more russet-coloured than black, and laced boots of his stony calling.’

There is the rosy and good minor canon the Reverend Mr Septimus Crisparkle who lives with his mother in Minor Canon Corner. As for his mother: ‘What is prettier than an old lady when her eyes are bright, when her figure is trim and compact, when her face is cheerful and calm, when her dress is as the dress of a china shepherdess.’ Many things would be prettier of course. By contrast is the main love interest, Rosa Bud who is a pupil of Mrs Twinkleton. Rosa as it happens is less vivid than Mrs Crisparkle. She is ‘wonderfully pretty, wonderfully childish, wonderfully whimsical.’ As for Mr Crisparkle the minor canon, who equates spiritual health with physical fitness: ‘His radiant features teemed with innocence, and soft-hearted benevolence beamed from his boxing gloves.’

You can quote Dickens forever and ever. But that bit about the boxing gloves was my punch line.

 

REVIEW OF NOVEL CAPE GRIMM

Go to this link to read a review of my novel Cape Grimm.

Review is by Dr Gerardo Rodriguez Salas of the University of Granada

http://www.carmelbird.com/pdf/Review%20Cape%20Grimm%20%20by%20Gerardo%20Rodriguez%20Salas.pdf

WRITING PLOT

Who Put the Overalls in Mrs Murphy’s Chowder? By Carmel Bird Published in Griffith Review number 30 Every working work of fiction, regardless of length or genre, is to some extent a kind of mystery offered to the reader; every work of fiction has its plot. Every work of fiction in some way troubles its reader, and tries to bring some form of solace, whether bitter or sweet. It is its own kind of question and its own kind of answer, taking the reader into itself as part of the fabric, part of the business that fiction has with the world. This year is the sixty-fifth anniversary of Tove Jansson’s first Moomin book. One of the great treasures in my bookcase is a 1953 copy of a picture book called The Book about Moomin, Mymble and Little My. Moomintroll, in the course of carrying home a can of milk, helps Mymble to discover her lost sister, Little My. There is one episode per page, and the question is, will they find Little My and get the milk home to Mother? You are dealing with a page-turner, since each page ends with the question ‘What do you think happened then?’ Here is plot reduced to its simplest elements. Situation, character, danger, resolution. Not quite the regulation sometimes put forward: situation, complication, rising action, climax, falling action, denouement (which don’t have to happen in that order). But near enough. You get the question and the tension as the answer comes in steps, as new dangers are put in the way. In case you are wondering, they do get home safely, but unfortunately the milk has curdled. As a cute coda, Mother says they will have strawberry juice instead. Always, as it happens. It is the repetition of the question ‘What do you think happened then?’ that often comes back to me when I am thinking about plot in fiction. Because I love the way the reader is involved in the business of it all. And in this particular story, the reader is constantly taken by surprise and thrown off balance by the trademark Jansson mixture of mild terrors and delicious, whimsical beauty. I often find it difficult, analysing fiction in hindsight, to separate plot from other elements, such as character and situation. It is even more difficult when I am the creator of the story, on the other side of the business, to separate them during the process of writing the work. I sometimes talk to groups who are studying the art of writing fiction, and I find that frequently there is a deep-seated notion that fiction writers begin by writing an outline of the plot of their short story or novel. Perhaps some writers do this, and do it successfully, but I am inclined to agree with Stephen King who, in On Writing (2000), expresses a strong opposition to this view. And I think there is much for a student to lose by trying to begin with a plot outline. When the work is finished, it will be possible to look back on it and analyse the plot, if that is something required by teachers and supervisors. But not before. Stephen King speaks of writing fiction as the act of digging out fossils, discovering part of an ‘undiscovered, pre-existing world’. He is vehement, saying that to make plot outlines is ‘clumsy, mechanical, anti-creative’. He points out that writing fiction is not a fully conscious and mechanical process, that much of what goes on is located in the writer’s unconscious. But it is also useful and instructive for a reader (and a prospective writer) to analyse the plots of fiction when the fiction is complete. Hold up the fossil to the light. I mean, you can analyse the things you read, and I also think that in doing so you can gain insight and inspiration for your own Kingean excavations of the fossils from that pre-existing world. An analysis of the psychological horror novel Misery, for example, is instructive in the light of what its author says about plotting. ‘Plotting and the spontaneity of real creation are not compatible.’ But of course there is a plot. He just didn’t put it there – he dug it up from the matrix of his own imagination and let it loose. EM Forster talks about plot in Aspects of the Novel (1927). He is, though, discussing the thing after the event, not what happens in the early stages of the writing process. He explains that there is a difference between ‘story’ and ‘plot’. He says that plot tells what happened and why, and gives meaning to it. But when speaking of ‘story’ his language grows ugly, and he says that story is ‘the chopped-off length of the tapeworm of time’, it is ‘mindless time-killing curiosity’. Ouch. Story, he says: ‘The king died and then the queen died.’ Plot, he says: ‘The king died and then the queen died of grief.’ All he has really done there is show how to make two facts interesting by making the second one consequential, something people do regularly when telling tales anyway. I think Forster was splitting hairs by dividing up story and plot like that; however, his assertion that plot is a ‘writer’s arrangement of events’ that will express that writer’s ‘attitude to the human condition’ is fair enough, I suppose, if a bit grand. Plot can often be boiled down to a very simple question like: Who killed Cock Robin? Who stole the tarts? Will Elizabeth Bennet marry Mr Darcy? This is not plot summary, but rather quick-fix plot essence. Some questions are more complicated than others, some answers more interesting than others. The how and why of the things that happened are what readers (and writers) love to know. Readers love the shocks and surprises, the twists and turns, the magical mystery tour of a well-managed plot as the writer’s ‘attitude to the human condition’ is gradually revealed. Main plots and sub-plots often have fun with each other too. Just as the Moomin line ‘What do you think happened then?’ pleasantly rings in my mind when I think about plot, so does the title of an old song I used to love playing on the pianola when I was a child, ‘Who Put the Overalls in Mrs Murphy’s Chowder?’ See how the situation and the character are beautifully bound up in the question. You want to know, don’t you? You want the terrible mystery solved. The matter arose from the rather horrible fact that Mrs Murphy did her washing and her cooking in the same vessel. She left the overalls in the pot by mistake, and then made the soup, and when she dished it up the overalls were discovered. She had the decency to faint. I speak here of mystery. Plot always, I think, involves mystery, however slightly, and therefore will invite suspense. Satisfaction comes with some form of resolution. NOW THAT I have boiled plot down (influenced perhaps by Mrs Murphy) to a question and an answer, I must speak of the importance of structure in the delivery of the goods. For the simple chronological accounting of the adventures of creatures such as the Moomins will not always do the trick. There will often be more than one question posed, and not all puzzles will necessarily be solved. Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca (1938) is notorious for leaving several key questions dangling. For some readers these gaps are part of the beauty of the whole; for others they are maddening flaws in the story. If you read du Maurier’s ‘The Rebecca Notebook’ you will see that she did a lot of planning, but the notes really outline her writing process; they are not strictly a plot summary. The structure of a story will provide the real strength. And structure is in any case intricately bound up with the characters and the events, as well as the language and the tone. How does a writer put the elements of the plot before the reader’s mind? Thinking about the structure of The Great Gatsby (1925) is a favourite pastime of mine. Where does the writer begin, at what moment in the sequence of events? And how does the writer organise those events to deliver not only the plot, but also the key ideas which inform the work? Think of how the death of Rebecca, the mystery that drives Rebecca, is woven into the fabric of the narrative, and seeps and spills into the story all along the way. Maybe it doesn’t really matter about the unsolved bits that will forever dangle and tantalise. Because the structure of The Great Gatsby places the death of Gatsby at the beginning, the question is, who was he and why did he die? The hit-run accident that marks the turning point in the plot does not feel accidental, but inevitable. It feels like part of the dreadful heart of the tragic fossil Fitzgerald brought to the surface and held up to the light. By the way, you can dig back into Fitzgerald’s short fiction and find the Gatsby fossil in various stages of revelation: in ‘Winter Dreams’ and ‘Absolution’. KATHERINE MANSFIELD AND Anton Chekhov have been noted for the ‘slightness’ of their plots, although I wouldn’t characterise them in this way. The stories work on the level of metaphor, subtly moving their people into view, revealing their hearts and predicaments with a particular melody that is captured by the reader’s own heart. They don’t appear necessarily to follow the rigid progress from situation to denouement, although often these elements are delicately present within the fabric. Here is the plot of Chekhov’s short story ‘The House with the Mezzanine’, sometimes called ‘An Artist’s Story’. The boiled-down version of the plot is: will the foreign artist marry the younger sister? (From the beginning the reader hopes not.) The narrator is a snobbish romantic French artist who is renting a grand house in a Russian provincial town. He is depressed and uninspired until he meets a family – a mother and two daughters. He falls in love with them and their house. One daughter is fiercely determined to work for the betterment of the peasants, and constantly argues with the artist, while the other, Missy, is clearly falling in love with him. Finally he kisses Missy, and watches the green light in her mezzanine room until it goes out. The next day Missy disappears with her mother. She has told her older sister what has happened, and has been sent away to protect her from the decadent fool of an artist. His response is to leave in a huff. He returns after seven years to learn that the older sister is having a certain success in local politics, and that nobody seems to know what has become of the younger. He admits that he is gradually forgetting the house, but imagines that Missy is waiting for him somewhere. He is just as big a prejudiced fool as he always was. Missy has had a lucky escape. The dramatic success of Missy’s original banishment to her aunt’s house, resulting in her seven-year disappearance from view, is quite brilliant. The power of that older sister. When I had finished reading this story for the first time I kept thinking about it, mentally going back over the details, relishing the success of the tone of voice which delivers the narrator, in his own words, up to the reader as the tedious creature he is. The question is, will he end up with Missy, and the hope is that he won’t. He doesn’t, and he hasn’t learnt anything about anything. Missy is safe somewhere – even, it seems to me, safe in the reader’s heart. (Perhaps incidentally passing on her green light to Jay Gatsby. I like to think so.) It may be a simple question this plot is asking, but it is set within a vivid, highly textured and complex fabric of Russian life in the 1890s. It is a beautiful story of Missy’s lucky escape. The story is finely tuned to itself, working within its own metaphor to trouble and untrouble the reader’s mind and heart. Katherine Mansfield’s ’Miss Brill’ is another little masterpiece whose plot is often described as slight. The question hovers and quivers – a ‘chill from a glass of iced water before you sip’. Working always within her complex and subtle metaphoric fabric, Mansfield has this story quietly pose the question, is Miss Brill dying? Is this afternoon in the park her last? To say that the answer is yes is too crass, really, but the answer is yes. All the story asks you to do is to walk with it, and look deep into Miss Brill’s heart. After reading a story by Mansfield or Chekhov you have a deep sense that something has happened. When I read my first Mansfield story, ‘The Fly’, at fifteen I knew with a jolt that something had happened in the story, almost when I wasn’t looking, and something also happened to me – I was in love with the short-story form. In The Common Reader (1925) Virginia Woolf explained that when you read Mansfield ‘the horizon widens, the soul gains an astonishing sense of freedom’. That seems right. ONE OF THE dearest novels on my shelves is Austerlitz (2001), by WG Sebald. You could perhaps think that this book did not have a plot. Oh, but it does. The question is a simple one: who is Austerlitz and what does his life mean? The answer is the whole glittering melancholy hypnotic transcendent cello music of the grand and flowing narrative which enunciates the dispersal of the Jews from Prague and their ultimate destruction. In this novel the writer’s style and the plot are so entwined as to create their own form, but truly the plot is deep and strong and essentially simple. I find it is a nice exercise – boiling stories and novels down to the simple plot questions, and then considering how the questions and their answers are inextricably woven into the other elements of the narrative. The simple questions remain throughout, underneath everything, tapping away at the reader, keeping the reader going, turning the pages to find the answers, taking pleasure in the twist and turns and highs and lows. In a sense every work of working fiction is a puzzle the story poses to the reader. Will the son inherit after all? Will the young man write the great man’s biography? Will Little Dorrit marry Arthur Clennam? Will Jane Eyre find happiness? Who killed Cock Robin?

Wheeler Centre "Moral Disorder"

May 15 at 4.15pm I will be speaking at the Wheeler Centre on the topic of Margaret Atwood's collection of stories "Moral Disorder".

EBOOK TASMANIAN THRILLER

'Freycinet' is a novel by Melanie Calvert. It is set on the east coast of Tasmania, and was inspired by two separate unsolved rural Tasmanian crimes, being the disappearance in 1993 of Nancy Grunwaldt and the murder in 1995 of Victoria Cafasso.
This novel is available only as an ebook, published by the author.
Readers of the weekend 'Australian Magazine' will be familiar with the back section of the magazine which is filled with coloured images of Tasmania in all its astonishing and beautiful moods. The Freycinet National Park is frequently featured, and is one of the island’s most pristine and treasured beauty spots. ‘Wineglass Bay’ has echoes of Nabokov, and the naming of the mountain peaks ‘The Hazards’ carries its own warning.
The novel, a thriller, is rich in lyrical yet ominous descriptions of the landscape. This is not exactly the place Tourism Tasmania is promoting in the 'Australian Magazine'. The epigraph is taken from Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘A Dream Within a Dream’, and references this to the character of Miranda in Joan Lindsay’s novel 'Picnic at Hanging Rock'. Where Lindsay’s novel offers (at least in its first publication) no answer to the mystery of the disappearance of its girls, 'Freycinet’s' final pages give the solution which is a grisly twist. The narrative develops in an atmosphere of weird danger, very weird indeed. The story of love, obsession, hatred, jealousy and hideous crime develops through the insights of dreams and visions, while following the procedure of a police investigation. Indigenous myths as well as European fairy tales play a role in the construction of this psychological thriller.

You can buy the ebook 'Freycinet' on Amazon for $US 4.99.

Fabulous Finola Fox

A children’s picture book, published in May 2012 by Penguin. The text is by Carmel and the illustrations are by Kerry Argent.

Carmel was inspired to write it when she read that urban foxes often collect shoes which they hoard in their dens.

Finola is a bright young fox, planning to open a gallery where she will display her collection of designer shoes.

She longs to find the pair to a beautiful green shoe.

Helping her in her quest is Frederick Fox.

Will romance blossom between these two gorgeous creatures?

WRITING PLOT

Every working work of fiction, regardless of length or genre, is to some extent a kind of mystery offered to the reader; every work of fiction has its plot. Every work of fiction in some way troubles its reader, and tries to bring some form of solace, whether bitter or sweet. It is its own kind of question and its own kind of answer, taking the reader into itself as part of the fabric, part of the business that fiction has with the world.

This year is the sixty-fifth anniversary of Tove Jansson’s first Moomin book. One of the great treasures in my bookcase is a 1953 copy of a picture book called The Book about Moomin, Mymble and Little My. Moomintroll, in the course of carrying home a can of milk, helps Mymble to discover her lost sister, Little My. There is one episode per page, and the question is, will they find Little My and get the milk home to Mother? You are dealing with a page-turner, since each page ends with the question ‘What do you think happened then?’

Here is plot reduced to its simplest elements. Situation, character, danger, resolution. Not quite the regulation sometimes put forward: situation, complication, rising action, climax, falling action, denouement (which don’t have to happen in that order). But near enough. You get the question and the tension as the answer comes in steps, as new dangers are put in the way. In case you are wondering, they do get home safely, but unfortunately the milk has curdled. As a cute coda, Mother says they will have strawberry juice instead. Always, as it happens.

It is the repetition of the question ‘What do you think happened then?’ that often comes back to me when I am thinking about plot in fiction. Because I love the way the reader is involved in the business of it all. And in this particular story, the reader is constantly taken by surprise and thrown off balance by the trademark Jansson mixture of mild terrors and delicious, whimsical beauty.

I often find it difficult, analysing fiction in hindsight, to separate plot from other elements, such as character and situation. It is even more difficult when I am the creator of the story, on the other side of the business, to separate them during the process of writing the work. I sometimes talk to groups who are studying the art of writing fiction, and I find that frequently there is a deep-seated notion that fiction writers begin by writing an outline of the plot of their short story or novel. Perhaps some writers do this, and do it successfully, but I am inclined to agree with Stephen King who, in On Writing (2000), expresses a strong opposition to this view. And I think there is much for a student to lose by trying to begin with a plot outline. When the work is finished, it will be possible to look back on it and analyse the plot, if that is something required by teachers and supervisors. But not before.

Stephen King speaks of writing fiction as the act of digging out fossils, discovering part of an ‘undiscovered, pre-existing world’. He is vehement, saying that to make plot outlines is ‘clumsy, mechanical, anti-creative’. He points out that writing fiction is not a fully conscious and mechanical process, that much of what goes on is located in the writer’s unconscious.

But it is also useful and instructive for a reader (and a prospective writer) to analyse the plots of fiction when the fiction is complete. Hold up the fossil to the light. I mean, you can analyse the things you read, and I also think that in doing so you can gain insight and inspiration for your own Kingean excavations of the fossils from that pre-existing world.

An analysis of the psychological horror novel Misery, for example, is instructive in the light of what its author says about plotting. ‘Plotting and the spontaneity of real creation are not compatible.’ But of course there is a plot. He just didn’t put it there – he dug it up from the matrix of his own fertile imagination and let it loose.

EM Forster talks about plot in Aspects of the Novel (1927). He is, though, discussing the thing after the event, not what happens in the early stages of the writing process. He explains that there is a difference between ‘story’ and ‘plot’. He says that plot tells what happened and why, and gives meaning to it. But when speaking of ‘story’ his language grows ugly, and he says that story is ‘the chopped-off length of the tapeworm of time’, it is ‘mindless time-killing curiosity’. Ouch. Story, he says: ‘The king died and then the queen died.’ Plot, he says: ‘The king died and then the queen died of grief.’ All he has really done there is show how to make two facts interesting by making the second one consequential, something people do regularly when telling tales anyway.

I think Forster was splitting hairs by dividing up story and plot like that; however, his assertion that plot is a ‘writer’s arrangement of events’ that will express that writer’s ‘attitude to the human condition’ is fair enough, I suppose, if a bit grand.

Plot can often be boiled down to a very simple question like: Who killed Cock Robin? Who stole the tarts? Will Elizabeth Bennet marry Mr Darcy? This is not plot summary, but rather quick-fix plot essence. Some questions are more complicated than others, some answers more interesting than others. The how and why of the things that happened are what readers (and writers) love to know. Readers love the shocks and surprises, the twists and turns, the magical mystery tour of a well-managed plot as the writer’s ‘attitude to the human condition’ is gradually revealed. Main plots and sub-plots often have fun with each other too.

Just as the Moomin line ‘What do you think happened then?’ pleasantly rings in my mind when I think about plot, so does the title of an old song I used to love playing on the pianola when I was a child, ‘Who Put the Overalls in Mrs Murphy’s Chowder?’ See how the situation and the character are beautifully bound up in the question. You want to know, don’t you? You want the terrible mystery solved. The matter arose from the rather horrible fact that Mrs Murphy did her washing and her cooking in the same vessel. She left the overalls in the pot by mistake, and then made the soup, and when she dished it up the overalls were discovered. She had the decency to faint.

I speak here of mystery. Plot always, I think, involves mystery, however slightly, and therefore will invite suspense. Satisfaction comes with some form of resolution.

FACT OR FICTION

REMEMBERING THE FACTS OF SILVER AND GOLD

Among the fifteen people in my memoir-writing group at Writers Victoria in January there were two sisters. I set the group a writing exercise where they would recall a significant clock or watch from their early lives, and write about it for ten minutes. After this I invited people to read out what they had written. Both sisters, without consulting each other, wrote about their grandfather’s fob watch. As we all listened to the second sister’s account, we could recognize the grandfather, but the funny thing was that one sister recalled a lovely golden chain, while the other remembered a silver one. Since the chain is now lost, we will probably never know whether it was silver or gold.

Workshops are often enlivened by moments not unlike this one, but I thought this textbook example of the behaviour of memory was worth noting. If these sisters can’t agree on the nature of the chain which they observed in the relatively recent past, just how much can ever be believed? And how much does this matter? When you are writing memoir you are in one sense fabricating a new past from the materials your memory offers you, you are constructing something like a piece of fiction, in some ways, while trying (I suppose) to stick to the truth. The truth as you know it.

Also worth noting is the fact that the group, as groups frequently do, decided to keep in touch with each other by email after the workshop.

I have been astonished by the energy and commitment of this particular group. They continue to write and to share their work with each other, and to offer clear-eyed yet always encouraging criticism of the writing. I think most of them will persevere and will write various kinds of memoir, some for general publication, some for family and friends. And I know they will all remember, in one way or another, the lovely lesson of the gold and silver chains.

MANUSCRIPT ASSESSMENT AT GIRRAHWEEN ON MAY FIFTH

Here is the timetable for the day at Girrahween

WITH GLENDA MILLARD AND CARMEL BIRD

There will be a group of no more than six writers.

They will all have forwarded by email a half page

summary of their manuscript, and two sample pages

of the work. Carmel and Glenda will have read and discussed

these documents together before the workshop.

On arrival at Girrahween writers hand in hard copy of the manuscripts they

plan to discuss and work on on the day.

10 am - 10.30 am

Glenda and Carmel welcome the writers with refreshments.

During this session the writers introduce themselves to the group and briefly

outline the nature and scope of individual projects.

10.30 - 10.45

Writers make written notes of some of the aspects of writing they would

like to cover during the day. Carmel and Glenda collect these notes.

10. 45 - 11.30

Glenda and Carmel give presentations of their own experiences as writers.

11.30 - 12.30

Carmel and Glenda answer the questions submitted in writing, and

broaden the discussion.

12.30 to 1.30

A delicious country style lunch will be provided.

During lunch Glenda and Carmel will withdraw to get an overview of

the manuscripts, and discuss with each other various approaches to

them.

1.30 to 3.30 pm

Individual consultations with both Carmel and Glenda.

Writers who are not in consultation at any time will be free to discuss

things with other writers, and to explore the house and garden.

Writers will receive notes on their work, and a range of suggestions for

future treatment of their manuscripts, as well as details of possibilities for

publication.

3.30 to 4pm

A general discussion led by Glenda and Carmel.

NOTE

Girrahween(which means 'place of flowers') is a delightful Victorian house in Maldon, a picturesque goldfields

town in central Victoria.

Bendigo resident Glenda Millard, who is a celebrated author of children's picture books and young

adult fiction, uses Girrahween as a house where she writes, and to which she invites

writers and illustrators for various literary events.

The house is furnished in keeping with the Victorian era, and the broad garden is filled with both native

and exotic plants.

This place is a haven and an inspiration for writers and illustrators, and people who come to events here

can enjoy visiting the sights of Maldon and sampling the cafes and the lovely local B&Bs.

Address:

Girrahween

108 High Street, Maldon.

MANUSCRIPT ASSESSMENT

YOUR MANUSCRIPT

Do you have a manuscript in development, or even completed? Are you looking for a first assessment? Picture Book, Young Adult, General Fiction, Non-Fiction, Memoir?

Authors Glenda Millard and Carmel Bird will host a

SATURDAY of consultation and assessment

AT GIRRAHWEEN in MALDON

On May 5^th from 10am to 4pm

GIRRAHWEEN is a enchanting Victorian house filled with books and pictures and vintage toys in the gold-rush town of Maldon, a place that has for years been a source of inspiration to writers and artists.

Girrahween looks serenely out onto a garden of native and exotic plants. This blissful haven has become a favourite destination for writers and illustrators.

The permanent writer-in-residence at Girrahween is Glenda Millard whose many picture books and young adult fiction are among the most beloved of readers, teachers and librarians. Glenda will be joined by novelist Carmel Bird to offer you clear and creative assessment of your work.

A weekend in Maldon places the visitor in the heart of a leisurely world of luxurious B&Bs, fine food and wine, galleries and specialty shops in the goldfields region. One of the literary and artistic events at Girrahween can be the focus of your visit.

The fee for the day is $250 (includes lunch)

See: www.carmelbird.com & www.carmel-bird.blogspot.com & http://www.allenandunwin.com/default.aspx?page=626

For enrolment & details: carmel@carmelbird.com & silksister@gmail.com

GIRRAHWEEN is at 108 High St Maldon