In this chapter I want to search with you for the spirit of place, to conjure up the spirit that will give life and breath to descriptions of places. I find that many new writers’ stories and poems seem to occur in a spatial and social vacuum: the writer launches straight into an account of action, ideas, thoughts, feelings, without giving any clear sense of where all this is taking place. The result is that the reader feels lost – because the writer hasn’t bothered to say where they are. It is frustrating, confusing and severely diminishes the pleasure the writing could bring. But if the place is there, living and breathing through what happens, then the writing achieves another dimension: it becomes more real:
The present breaks our hearts. We lie and freeze,
our fingers icy as a bunch of keys.
Nothing will thaw these bones except
memory like an ancient blanket wrapped
about us when we sleep at home again,
smelling of picnics, closets, sicknesses,
old nightmare,
and insomnia’s spreading stain.
Adrienne Rich, ‘Readings of History’
Even poetry, which seems to arise out of nowhere, requires its nest, its squatting place. Look at the image Adrienne Rich has used in her poem: that of home. She conjures up a place to balance against the freezing and breaking of the present. She appeals to our memory of shelter, our perpetual desire for it and fires our memory into longing with the ignition of ‘blanket’, ‘picnics’, ‘sicknesses’ and ‘spreading stain’. How much is evoked by spreading stain! A glass of juice toppled onto a white tablecloth; blood dripping onto the carpet or linoleum; the staining of childhood by what we learn to fear. We can each supply our own particulars but the important point is that Rich has set us going with her place – her place that grows out of memory.
Now bring your own memories to bear. Clamber back in your mind to the house that meant most to you when you were small. I am going to offer you certain words: threshold, attic, cellar, kitchen, bedroom, corridor. Choose one or two of them. Take a blank sheet of paper and write down everything that occurs to you about the word(s) you have chosen, giving yourself about ten minutes.
Were you surprised at how much these words evoked for you, at the richness of feeling and detail they seemed to compel? This was the reason I asked you to return to the house of your childhood: because the places we have loved – or hated – as children remain in the mind as almost a structuring force. They become part of us, both consciously and unconsciously, determining our perceptions and our understanding. When we return to them with the scrutiny of our adult minds, they appear as towering shelters, full of colour and minutely remembered detail.
When the house of childhood does not serve as a place of support and nurture, when there is intense conflict between different members of the household, then we may find that many memories of indoors have been suppressed. If this is true in your own case, try a word like window, garden or playground. There may have been so much conflict indoors that you had to construct your shelter elsewhere. If, however, you can consciously remember conflicts or tensions inside the house, then go ahead with your writing work. Ask yourself: did conflict regularly occur in certain areas – at the kitchen table for example? I want you to concentrate on the way the rooms themselves bring about certain kinds of behaviour.
A note on ambiguity
You are likely to find that your memories of the house of childhood are split – into fear and security, fire and ice, harmony and conflict. Try to hold these contradictory memories together: don’t give in to the temptation to simplify your experience by discarding one important aspect of it. You will find that your writing becomes thinner, poorer, less convincing if you take this easy way out. The courage to hold contradictory impressions together is a brave skill, highly prized by writers. John Keats called it ‘negative capability’ and it is akin to Ernest Hemingway’s ‘becoming strong in the broken places’. Michel de Montaigne was so convinced of the importance of contradictoriness that he had emblazoned on the domed ceiling of his library the motto: ‘To Every Reason an Equal Reason can be opposed.’ So do not be afraid to hold on to impressions that logically seem to cancel one another out.
At first you may have to represent this contradictoriness chronologically, in the manner of ‘At first the corridor frightened me, but later I came to love it, its hatpegs, its long coats to hide behind.’ With further practice you will discover words that hold more than one meaning, that are themselves ambiguous, enabling you to represent contending realities at a single stroke. Here is an example from Antony and Cleopatra, where Cleopatra is persuading the snake to bite and kill her:
Come, thou mortal wretch,
With thy sharp teeth this knot intrinsicate
Of life at once untie. Poor venomous fool,
Be angry, and dispatch.
Act V, Scene ii
The ambiguous words here are mortal, intrinsicate and dispatch. Mortal means both that the snake is mortal, will have a life and then die, and also that it is capable of dealing a mortal blow, of killing. Intrinsicate is a deliberately created ambiguity, a made-up word designed to contain two words: intricate and intrinsic. Shakespeare uses it to make us feel how complex and deeply inward is the knot of life, the knot which, while it remains tied, causes Cleopatra to be alive rather than dead. The snake will untie the intricate knot and the deeply hidden force of life within Cleopatra will cease. Dispatch contains the sense of ‘to get on with something’, haste, and also ‘to do away with’, to polish off, to send off to the next life.
Be aware of the ambiguities in your own writing. When, reading over your work, you discover one, ask yourself whether or not you intended it. Does it add another dimension? Or is it merely vague? There is a great divide between ambiguity and vagueness. Think how irritated you would be if you began reading a story with the opening sentence ‘They were cooking apples.’ Does the ‘they’ refer to the apples or the cooks? It is an unnecessary vagueness that demands clarification. When you question yourself about whether a phrase is ambiguous or vague, the litmus test is usually ‘Did I intend it be written that way? Does that phrase need to be ambiguous?’
Living room, writing room
How can you use your descriptions of place – a room, a garden bench, the large cupboard under the stairs, a lift in a block of flats – to create a mood strong enough to sustain your story? For events do not take place spontaneously, out of nowhere; they come to fullness as a result of many active forces. And the place is not simply the background or backdrop against which the action occurs; it plays its part in the drama.
Look at this description of a place and try to guess some of the action of the story from it:
They arrive at the empty basement flat just after one. She dumps the baby straight into his cot. He is wet and hungry, but also tired. And so is she. They cry themselves to sleep, he behind his wooden bars and she on the big sagging bed. The peeling wallpaper, damp-stained and stinking of mould, decorates her dreams. She awakes to the sight of mildew spreading beneath the window-sill. The odour of must and the small waking cry of a child seep into the air.
Sandra Warne, ‘All in a Row’
I think you will agree that the physical scene determines the atmosphere of the writing, which in its turn determines what will happen, the action of the story. I am making a very simple point: that the material conditions of our lives and our characters’ lives shape, to a large extent, the way those lives progress. We know this from experience; it seems so obvious that it is not even worth saying. But if we omit those material conditions from our writing, then the writing voice loses much of its authority and power. The reader senses that one large cause of events is missing.
Spend some time considering the effect of your own living conditions upon your writing. Under what circumstances do you write most easily? What prevents you from writing? Consider too the circumstances of Jane Austen, whose novels breathe such grace and balance that we assume she wrote with no distractions:
‘How she was able to effect all this’, her nephew writes in his Memoir, ‘is surprising, for she had no separate study to repair to, and most of the work must have been done in the general sitting-room, subject to all kinds of casual interruptions. She was careful that her occupation should not be suspected by servants or visitors or any persons beyond her own family party.’
J. E. Austen, Memoir of Jane Austen
Although the nephew may have exaggerated his aunt’s powers of concentration – Lizzie and Jane in Pride and Prejudice each have a room of their own and servants to build a fire for them – there is no doubt that our working conditions do influence the quality of our writing. The place, in this too, plays its part.
Conjuring up the spirit of place
Imagine yourself in a room you love. Close your eyes so you can walk into it. In revery, walk around your room. Cast your eyes around slowly; dwell on each object. Imagine yourself picking one or two of these objects up. How do they feel next to your skin? How do they smell? Allow yourself to become open and spongy, soak up the atmosphere and objects in the room until you feel drenched by them.
This room might exist in your house or flat or only in your imagination. But whether it is real or imaginary, it should be something of an ideal, a place where you feel secure and protected. I want you to think of it as the room where you do your writing. When you have spent about ten minutes in quiet revery, describe the beloved room.
The place you’ve just written about helps you to feel at ease, to feel nourished, warm, loved. It helps you to feel like a whole person: integrated, centred, in some important way satisfied. Remember that, even if no such room exists for you, you have written as though it does. What you have started to do is create this place of support and satisfaction in yourself: you’ve begun to make room in your mind for your writer-self.
Now read your writing through. How do you feel when you read it? Emily Dickinson defined writing that works as ‘something that makes me feel as though the top of my head is coming off’. She said she knew of no other way to assess the value of a piece. You can measure your own writing in this way, too. Ask yourself these questions:
Have I written all I wanted to write about the room, or have I left out something important? How do I feel when I read it – elated, stretched, sad, longing …? Or do I simply feel the same?
If the writing doesn’t have a tangible effect on you, the writer, it is unlikely to stir or arouse others.
Reworking and strengthening
Now it is time to focus in detail upon your description. Take two felt-tip pens, of different colours, and underline in one colour all the words that catch the meaning you intended, that evoke strongly the feelings you have about the room. With the other pen, underline the parts you are not satisfied with, the phrases that fall short of expressing your meaning. Remember that you are your own best critic and only you can finally decide what it is you wanted to say.
Make a list on a separate sheet of paper of the flabby, vague, unfocused parts, so you can look at them out of context. What is it about them that dissatisfies you? Have you used words that are too familiar, worn-out similes, too many abstract nouns? As I go through some of the possible problems, check back to see which of them apply to the slack parts of your own writing.
Abstract nouns
These are words like ‘joy’, ‘truth’, ‘misery’, ‘reflection’, ‘beauty’ and ‘ingratitude’: naming words for states of mind, intellectual concepts and categories. They are not words for physical things, like objects or parts of the body, but for states or processes that we cannot physically see or feel. Consequently, these words mean quite different things to different people. In creative writing they often only do half the job you used them for: they say more or less what you mean, but not exactly. For example, to write that you feel joyful in the room is a kind of vague shorthand. It reminds you how you felt there but leaves the reader with unanswered questions. The reader would have a much fuller impression of your state of mind if you lovingly evoked, say, the feel of a rug under your feet, the texture of the curtains, the smell of a shawl. Bringing in these things would make the room real to the reader – and new to you, the writer, because you’d have recreated it, having laid each of your senses open to it. The writing then becomes tangible, concrete, unique, instead of vague and hard to grasp.
Adjectives
Adjectives describe nouns. They give us extra knowledge about the thing itself. Here are some examples:
a fierce temper
a moving story
a bitter quarrel
an old man
You will notice that the adjectives in this list are, to put it bluntly, boring. We’ve heard them so many times that they’ve ceased to have any effect. Check your work for boring adjectives. When you find one, ask yourself ‘Do I really need this word or would the noun work better on its own? Can I find a noun that would convey the sense more clearly?’ You may find that you do need an adjective, but not that one. When searching for the right adjective, bear in mind that your effect on the reader will be stronger if you can create a physical sensation, if you can make the reader conjure up a colour, a texture, a smell or a sound, rather than using a word like ‘soothing’, or ‘lovely’ or (worst of all) ‘evocative’. Say, for example, there is a smell in the room that reminds you of your childhood. Don’t be tempted to describe it as ‘reminiscent’ or ‘reassuring’. Say exactly what the smell is. Is it mothballs or furniture polish or tobacco or vapour rub? If you ‘give’ the smell to the reader rather than using your own private shorthand, then the reader’s own nose will do the work. The reader will smell the smell with you, with real participation and pleasure, rather than having to resentfully take your word for it. Also, you may find that in taking this concrete approach, you are making your nouns work harder for you and using fewer adjectives. This, again, will make your writing firmer, more substantial.
Adverbs
Adverbs describe verbs in the same way that adjectives describe nouns. They usually end in ‘-ly’. For example:
I walked slowly into the room.
Lovingly I touched the curtains.
I held the vase carefully.
Adverbs and adjectives contain similar problems: they both prevent the verb or the noun doing all the work it is capable of and rob a phrase of its necessary precision. Adverbs often do not render exactly how an action took place. Compare these sentences with the examples above:
I edged into the room.
I sidled into the roomWhich was it?
I fondled the curtains.
I caressed the curtains.Which was it?
I lifted the vase between my thumb and forefinger.
I grasped the vase with both hands.Which was it?
Different verbs offer alternative meanings in each of these sentences. They are all more exact than the sentences that rely on adverbs.
On the other hand, when adjectives and adverbs appear in clusters, they can produce a necessary ritardando. They force the reader to slow down, to dwell or brood on what is happening. They stop the eye from moving so fast, as in these sentences:
Silently I circled the desk, pacing, prowling. Wooden, solid, it seemed to catch my eye, with its open, cleared space, its black, inviting pen.
You can see the way the italic words, the adverb and adjectives, work to hold the reader still, locking their gaze upon the desk, which then seems to hypnotise both writer and reader.
Conversing with the spirits of place
There is a kind of mystical, powerful writing which does not simply evoke the spirit of place in order to determine action but seeks to converse with it, enter into a dialogue with all that has gone before. There is a kind of writing which lets the spirits of place speak. This writing may at first seem strange because it aims beyond the physical reality of our senses – addressing the past, the future and the spirits of those who are before and after. I want to write about it here so that new writers will know it exists and perhaps be brave enough to address this difficult aspect of our experience in their work.
In The Color Purple, Alice Walker, through the letters of Nettie, a young black woman who has accompanied two missionaries to the home of the Olinka tribe in Africa, writes of the healing, life-giving qualities of the roofleaf plant, which embodies the spirit of place for the tribe:
The people prayed to their gods and waited impatiently for the seasons to change. As soon as the rain stopped they rushed to the old roofleaf beds and tried to find the old roots. But of the endless numbers that had always grown there, only a few dozen remained. It was five years before the roofleaf became plentiful again. During those five years many more in the village died. Many left, never to return. Many were eaten by animals. Many, many were sick. The chief was given all his storebought utensils and forced to walk away from the village forever. His wives were given to other men.
On the day when all the huts had roofs again from the roofleaf, the villagers celebrated by singing and dancing and telling the story of the roofleaf. The roofleaf became the thing they worship.
Looking over the heads of the children at the end of this tale, I saw slowly coming towards us, a large brown spiky thing as big as a room, with a dozen legs walking slowly and carefully under it. When it reached our canopy, it was presented to us. It was our roof.
As it approached, the people bowed down.
The white missionary before you would not let us have this ceremony, said Joseph. But the Olinka like it very much. We know a roofleaf is not Jesus Christ, but in its humble way, is it not God?
So there we sat, Celie, face to face with the Olinka God. And Celie, I was so tired and sleepy and full of chicken and groundnut stew, my ears ringing with song, that all that Joseph said made perfect sense to me.
In i is a long memoried woman, Grace Nichols builds a stunning sequence of poems out of just such a search for an imaginative resting place. Her memory ploughs back, past the beginning of her own life, to Africa and slavery, to Guyana, sugar, punishment on the plantation, loyalty and betrayal. Through the story runs the gold thread of religion and magic:
alligator teeth
and feathers
old root and powder
I kyan not work this craft
this magic black
on my own strength
‘Omen’
a thread which visibly supports the poet’s intercessions with the spirits of her past. Through the search over three continents, homelessness and pain-memory, she is able to find a new tongue as the last poem, in a sort of quiet, cautious exultation, shows. I want to stress this connection between searching for home and finding a tongue, a writing voice, because I believe it to be fundamental to your own writing development.
A new angle of vision
In the exercise you are now about to attempt you will begin to see a familiar place through unfamiliar eyes. Your aim in this writing is to penetrate and supervene the way you normally see and construe your surroundings, to discover a new angle of vision. You may be unsym-pathetic to the transcendental or spiritual interpretations of reality in the writings I have just cited: that doesn’t matter. I have written about them to show that spiritual journeys and beliefs are legitimate, fruitful ways of exploring the world and to encourage writers to go ahead with this kind of exploration if they so wish. If you do not wish to do so, then there are many other new angles of vision available to you: a child’s viewpoint, for example, an animal’s or the viewpoint of a stranger who may interpret familiar customs in unfamiliar ways. The painter Jean-Baptiste Chardin shatters our ‘knowledge’ of the world by presenting it to us in a new way, as if we were children and his bowl of fruit stood just above our eye-level. This ‘newness’, which is not really new but more an expansion of the rigid barriers of the individual self so that we see something as if we were not ourselves, is, I believe, one of the attributes of authentic, pleasurable art.
This exercise can be approached in one of two ways:
•Take a familiar place and describe it through unfamiliar eyes.
•Write about a journey to an unfamiliar place, a place that, when you visited it, fractured, ruptured or enlarged your understanding of the world.
Before you begin to write, think over what you have learned from the previous exercise. Think about clichés, abstract nouns, adjectives and adverbs. As you are trying to find a new angle of vision, it is particularly important that you avoid familiar or worn-out ways of writing. Although I am reluctant to lay down rules, I do find the following guidelines, set out in H. W. & F. G. Fowlers’ The King’s English, helpful as a sort of mental checklist for my own work:
1 Prefer the familiar word to the far-fetched.
2 Prefer the concrete word to the abstract.
3 Prefer the single word to the circumlocution.
4 Prefer the Saxon word to the Romance.
5 Prefer the short word to the long.
It is not necessary to stick rigidly to these. But if you do use a farfetched or archaic word like valetudinarian, for example, as Jane Austen did on the first page of Emma, be sure you know why you are using it. Be sure, first, that no other word will do.
If you look closely at the Fowlers’ five ‘prefers’, you will find that they are trying to guide you away from fancy writing. It is difficult to accept such guidance because often, in school, we are misled into thinking that fancy writing is good writing. We learn, mistakenly, that good writing is obscure, dense and full of hard words. We come to believe that good writing shows how clever we are. But when we read a page of powerful writing, we see immediately that it is not clever and has nothing to do with fanciness or obscurity. It uses plain words to their fullest effect so that we are stunned by how much the writer has enabled them to mean. When Maxim Gorki as a young man read a story by Guy de Maupassant, he marvelled ‘why the plain, familiar words put together by a man into a story about the uninteresting life of a servant moved me so’.
Look at this section from Adrienne Rich’s poem ‘In the Wake of Home’:
But you will be drawn to places
where generations lie
side by side with each other:
fathers, mothers and children
in the family prayerbook
or the country burying-ground
You will hack your way through the bush
to the Jodensavanne
where the gravestones are black with mould
You will stare at old family albums
with their smiles their resemblances
You will want to believe that nobody
wandered off became strange
no woman dropped her baby and ran
no father took off for the hills
no axe splintered the door
– that once at least it was in order
and nobody came to grief
Note how simply Adrienne Rich says what she has to say. There is no superflux, no trailing extras: only a piercing representation of the constant search for the secure, good-enough home, the search that we persist in despite endless disappointment and frustration.
Note the startling sparsity of adjectives: she uses them only when she is forced to, so they seem pressed out of the nouns through sheer weight of need. Look at these adjectives: family, country, black, old, strange. They are tough, tensile; part of the structure of the poem rather than decorative vines creeping around it. Note particularly the total absence of adverbs. The verbs do their own work. They don’t need to lean on an adverb for greater clarity.
Bring all you have learned to bear on the exercise. Find a place to write, a room, and make room for your writer-self in your mind.