Thursday, May 03, 2012
The
Art of Writing No. 28
I began a writing MA at the University of
East Anglia around 1970. I was the only student and I followed the year after Ian
McEwan. I did not succeed the vagaries of the course which then required you to
do two terms of the Literature MA. I left after the first term feeling I had
more to offer as a social worker than a writer! My tutor had been Malcolm
Bradbury. He said I had a messianic drive to offer answers to the unanswerable.
Curiously, I hadn’t even thought of my work that way. Now I have written Azimuth
and what is it about? - people who search for answers to the unanswerable,
albeit on a rollercoaster of mystery and adventure! Probably many authors feel
they have something to say that might change readers’ perceptions or attitudes
to some aspect of existence, big or small.
Even among the majority of writers, those
who make their niches within a strict genre, there is a desire to turn the odd
phrase, expand on a concept, throw in a philosophical swerve ball, all to make
the reader sit up and say Ah! as s/he experiences a shock of illumination. As
I’ve said in earlier pieces, writers are the gods of the book-worlds they
create. Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search of an Author explores just such a
theme. The film The Matrix
transposes it to computer programs in which the avatars want to discover who
has created them and rules their virtual universe. Blade Runner has replicants
(artificially designed humanoid creatures who can work in deep space) returning
to earth to find who built them. The relationship between an author and characters sits on a
spectrum, as I have said, between cipher and flesh and blood, three-dimensional
reality. The more you veer towards the latter, the more your characters must influence
the narrative. This often results in us asking the following lit crit questions;
is the theme one that matters? Do the characters change and develop because of
how they experience the effects of the theme in their lives?
For there to be a positive answer to these
questions there need to be substantive issues running through the narrative
which are returned to over and over again, explicitly or implicitly, via the
actions, attitudes and insights of the book’s characters. They can be the thin
skin of civilization in Lord of the Flies, the pantheistic glorification of sex
in Lady Chatterley's Lover, totalitarianism in 1984 and Animal Farm or agnosticism in
His Dark Materials. On the other
hand, the themes may be small scale and intensely psychological but recognisable
within most people’s lives, such as father and son relationships in A Voyage
Around my Father. The more a book’s characters are engaged in some way in trying
to handle and navigate what we all find complex and challenging, the more they
grow in significance. They cease to be run of the mill, two dimensional appendages
to the narrative. They become extensions of ourselves.
All literature, whether formulaic or
idiosyncratic and organic, benefits from the author’s dexterity and focus on
questions that vex most of us, from the apparently imponderable to the depressingly
or upliftingly ubiquitous. They can be like a trace of spice in a bowl of rice or a rich and
satisfying sauce on a meal that has taken days to prepare. Depends on what you are writing.
Details on Azimuth can be found at www.azimuthtrilogy.com
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