Words Unlimited

What is Fiction For?

An intriguing insight into the relationship between two great fiction writers [Jonathan Franzen and David Foster Wallace] struggling to define what fiction is for was provided by a third smart writer [Zadie Smith] guest editing the Today programme on Radio 4 on Monday 29 December. Apparently, between Christmas and New Year there is no news.  Zadie peppered the programme with many a thoughtful piece including a tribute to the late David Foster Wallace in which Jonathan Franzen recalled how, through ‘bickering road trips’, ‘awkward chess games’ and ‘even more awkward tennis rallying’, they’d settled on fiction being:

“A neutral middle ground on which to make a deep connection with another human being, this, we decided was what fiction was for; a way out of loneliness, was the formulation we agreed to agree on.”

The words ‘neutral middle ground’ seem oddly bland from two such high-wire acts, though not if you think of a space such as an airport departure lounge or a railway waiting station, a place where you might make a deep connection with a total stranger and risk saying something you might not say elsewhere. In the departure lounge space that is the blank screen/page the novelist [eventually] creates something coherent out of their own and the world’s chaos; the reader may then explore the patterns woven through language and story as a way of exploring their own chaos. Fiction as a place to reflect.

Aside from the chess,the tennis, the road trips, Franzen said that the most “intense interaction” he’d had with DFW came when reading Infinite Jest because in that book DFW had, “Arranged himself and the world the way he wanted them arranged.”

Fiction as a place to rearrange the world, or choose to pay a different kind of attention.

In fiction both writer and reader have the opportunity to pay close attention, try out new perspectives, override their default settings and day-to-day assumptions.

Paying attention is a topic on which DFW writes quite wonderfully in the piece “Plain old untrendy troubles and emotions.”

It would be wonderful if Today or any news programme gave this kind of attention to fiction all year round.

Historical Fiction

When does fiction become historical fiction? How far back to you have to go?

Talking over drinks after Emma Darwin’s reading from Secret Alchemy  at Goldsmiths I was asked: ‘Do you write historical fiction?’ and swiftly answered ‘Oh no…’ And yet, pondering this question on the train back to London bridge I thought, well, no Kings and Queens, but my characters get caught up in ‘real’ events. Andy Warhol and Gandhi both make an appearance in my fiction.

For Taking In Water [set in 2002], I’ve imagined my character back into the 1953 flood that deluged the East coast in January of that year and, then into Warhol’s Factory in New York in 1963/4. Broken Threads [set in 2004/5], travels back to the cotton mills of Lancashire in the 1920s and 1930s, and for Deep Blue Silence [set in the late 1990s] understanding the social conditions around glassmaking in 1930s was crucial to imagining Faith’s past.  All three books required research into social history – what did they wear, eat? How did they speak – dialect etc? Work patterns, living conditions etc…  With all three books it was the history - my curiosity about particular events and how they impinged on a single life - that formed the core obsession, and it was the historical research that grew the work…

Biological Time

Never mind Prof Cox and his illusions of time... the hair turns grey, doesn't it? seems we have, incontrovertibly, a beginning, middle and end. Perhaps fictional time is more aligned with biological time?

Tapping you on the head with a teaspoon

Time seems to be on my mind. I’ve been preoccupied with tense this last couple of weeks and have to admit the book I’m working on is maybe not best served by the present tense. The ‘real’ time frame of the novel is 2 weeks. I wanted to create a sense of urgency, a character thrown back to face an event of fifty years earlier in light of unexpected encounters in the present. ED, I noticed, used the present in her new book Secret Alchemy, so I emailed, we had a ‘discussion’ and a phrase of hers sticks in my mind. The problem with the present tense she says is that it can feel as if,  “I'm being tapped repeatedly on the head with a teaspoon.”

Part of the problem of letting go of the present tense, is that I know it works well in my opening chapters but I have feeling the teaspoon effect is a problem later on. Mmm, no, don’t want that. So, back to the past. Ahh but now those moments of the character’s past that come as fragments - the heart of the book -  can be written in the present and become more vivid, not a teaspoon tap on the head but a heightened whisper – come closer, listen to this… Once again the realisation that writing it in the present tense was part of the process, to keep close that character's pressure until I had the story down…

Time - is it all fiction?

Time is a slippery thing for a novelist. Characters make choices, take actions over time. The novelist relies on the sense of time passing to create layers of past and present. So I was somewhat unnerved then when Watching ‘Horizon’ earlier this week to find that time is even more slippery for particle physicist Professor Brian Cox. He claims he has no idea what time really is or what time is it.

Apparently the earth does not reliably take 24 hours to turn on its axis – a strong wind pushing against or getting behind the Himalayas can slow things down or speed them up. And, several million [or was it billion?] years ago a day was a mere 22 hours. Cox says that our experience of feeling the passage of time might just be an illusion.  So are we novelist are working a double illusion? Could you create fiction without any sense of time passing – a novel that is just one continuous now?

The Bricks of Venice

With apologies to Ruskin it was the bricks of Venice that caught my eye - invaded by salt water and crumbling...

The Bricks of Venice

It was a marriage made in earth,
fine particles mingled with water
united as clay and turned
to useful things. Squared,
baked solid, bricks congregate, stand firm,
assemble into walls, palaces, a whole city
poised in the sea,

that water with a brine-tongued partner
that bides its time, waits for the level
to lick over stone foundations.
Salt seeps into thirsty, hard-working bricks,
leaches the trust from that long-held union,
forcing between it, its own white crust.

Uncoupled, crumbling in powdery drifts
between paving and door, they’re scattered
with litter and gull feathers. At a glance
it seems they are back together, bound
by overnight rain, but run your toe
along the spine, the mass of red breaks down;
inconsolable dust.