Writing | Matt Wingett

Work In Progress – Section: The House of Grain – an extract

By Matt on Wednesday, August 4, 2021

Here’s the latest from the strange pagan novel I’m writing:

The sun is already climbing by the time we set out along the rough track from the fields. It is not long before heat combines with beer and my head is a hot ball of discomfort, jostled and jolted on rutted roads. I sit up to peek out over the raised sides of the cart, my head swimming. Broad fields in strips, those already furrowed are lines of bare wounds open to sky. Between each strip earth baulks strewn with weeds and low hedges. And the ox teams work on.

The alewife sees me looking out – a sharp admonition – back down, blanket pulled over face.

I think I must doze. Awake again, sweat is soaking rough cloth. I uncover to gulp air, head aspin, staring up. Not a cloud, clear blue. The oppressive air makes my is head flush with heat, and my skull develops a steady throb like the slow grinding of a quern on oats. Spots of rain fall. Surprised, I look up and around. Still no clouds. Am I drunk, then? Wherever the rain is from, I am grateful for its washing over the cart. It builds to a sudden squall, clearing my head and soothing its pain. A rainbow arches across the clear sky. The alewife huddles against the rain and stares down at me a moment, thoughtful.

The squall passes as quickly as it came, followed by the fresh nose of persichor, deep pungency of clean green: scent of spirits imbuing every bush and watching from every plant. I feel them huddling around me, growing living things. I know they sense me.

I sit up again. Ahead, in the middle distance on a low flat plain by a winding river, a low settlement squatting behind an encircling moat and palisade. Others dotted away into the distance behind it. The track we are on skirts its edge. At four points around the circumference, a tall white pole, each adorned with its own emblems. Passing the first, I see animals carved along its full length – wolf chases bull chases dog chases cat chases mouse. The next is populous with carved insect life – bee, fly, moth, wasp, ant, beetle in thousands of iterations. The third is luxuriant with carvings of wheat and barley, the fourth with sheep, cattle, goats, swine, oxen and horses. From the tops of each, blue and white cloth streamers – aflutter in the wind.

The alewife turns to me and tells me once more: “Cover up, girl”. We enter beneath a high gateway. Inside, through a crack in the cart’s side I slice the village into stolen glances: low thatched cruck houses made with arching beams rising from the ground. A woman stooping over a sheep pinned helpless between her knees beside a pile of yellow fleeces brandishes shears in sunlight. Elsewhere, a group of women gently drawing wool onto drop spindles, another leaning over a large barrel filled with red dye, holding a bolt of cloth under the water..

As we grind through, the air is thick with greetings to the alewife. Neighbours call and hail, the women asking after their menfolk in the fields and for news from other steads. It is a bright and cheery scene, far different from the sombre village of my distant boyhood that seems now only to come to me in flashes and feels as if it were never mine.

At one moment, a shadow falls and we travel in a silent place at the heart of the village. I am cold and I pull in under my blanket. A presence here, dark, brooding. Something vibrating in the air that my gossamer sense can read. Rage and repression waiting to break and destroy if it can. I quiver in my skin until the shadow that falls over me passes, and the cart continues on its way. But even though the malevolent presence dies away, the air around me vibrates my nails and hair, teeth and skin with the residue of anger.

I steal another glance. At the farther edge of the village stands a place unlike the low cruck houses we have passed. A two-storey building, dun-coloured daub over wattle walls hung between thick oak uprights, some of the ground floor panels infilled with rough clay brick. A tall lean-to barn built onto one side. Painted in black on the brown daub above the oak door: a sheaf of barley.

“Here it is then,” the alewife says cheerily under her breath. “The House of Grain. You just stay tucked away, and you’ll see.”

She drives the cart through the barn door. Here, the air is rich with the smell of malt and the dry presence of grain that sits high in the nose and at the back of the throat. She closes the door and comes to me.

“Come,” she says, helping me climb down from the cart with a gentle hand on my arms, then guiding me through the grain store loaded with sacks and guarded by three black cats who stare down at me with green, unblinking eyes. We step through a low door to another room, where a copper vat as wide as my outstretched arms is set in a rough brick block, a blackened opening below revealing its purpose for heating the copper. In the vat, a sweet-smelling liquid with a thick foamy crust and the acid smell of fermentation. I resist a strong desire to plunge my hands into that creamy surface.

The vat room is tall stretching up through both storeys. On a network of beams sits a a life-size doll, resting in a place of honour high on one beam, where it presides over the room. She is a woman of corn, braided hair winding over her head in long plaits that give the illusion of a glow like the rising sun. Her arms are outstretched towards me, palms upward, in a gesture of welcome. She is enthroned on a seat carved with ears of corn and overlooks a raised vegetable kingdom: the beams across the ceiling hung with green nature – herbs and leaves, dried or quick, some still curling and drawing sap through their stalks that wind around upright beams, growing up from where they are rooted beneath the earthen floor. Other plants are cut and hung to dry – a vista of living and once-living things: broad leaved and narrow, thick-stalked and slender. One plant has roots in the shape of a man, arms and legs splayed, head set back as if ready to shriek. Among this hanging garden, pairs of eyes of mice tremble, docile, wide eyed. Throughout all, the strong nose of grainy sweetness, and a coolness here that raises goosebumps on my arms.

Then I see her. In the shadows at one side of the room frozen in the act of cutting herb stalks is a frail young woman of the most startling beauty. White as the snow of my home, she has platinum hair and the most piercing blue eyes that settle on me with an unreadable expression…

Writing

Thirty Year Copyright? Come off it.

By Matt on Friday, March 5, 2021

There has been some nonsense written about reducing the length of time of copyright for authors, down to, say, 30 years.

Many have already written about what this would mean for authors and other creators who produced something in their youth which was a steady seller, and then later in life struggled – thus relying on older work to carry them through a difficult patch. Beyond the fortunate few who have made millions from their work, there are many writers who work every day in a jobbing role, producing a body of work that they hope will see them through the leaner years.

The argument comes from a right wing Libertarian idea about State regulation. But this disruption of the conception of property would lead to results the Right would not be happy with.

The main argument those who want to drop copyright offer is a simple one: since it is now easy to reproduce works of art digitally, there’s no point trying to enforce against or discourage copying of work – and indeed, there would be a bonanza for other creators wishing to use the work of another writer and pay no fee.

Counter-arguments have included the idea that “a landlord of an apartment building wouldn’t expect to have his ownership curtailed after 30 years, nor should a writer.”

The reply is that a building and a book are different things. A building only has one owner.

And this is where that argument falls down. Because of course there is only one owner of the idea behind the written work, and that is the author.

“Ah,” comes the reply. “But the legal structures needed to support the idea of intellectual property amounts to a handout from the State.”

Let’s look at that. If one is opposed to State intervention when it comes to ownership of intellectual property, why stop there? Surely ALL State intervention in property matters is essentially supporting a legal fiction.

If you take the Libertarian argument to its logical conclusion, anyone who has acquired property through their labour is in the same position as the writer:

A house or a car can equally be said only to be in someone’s possession because the State upholds property laws.

If you can take away from the owner an idea they worked for, why can you not take away a physical object they have also worked for? Is it only because you can hold it in your hands or touch it? Surely, the point of principle about ownership is that the owner asserts the moral right to have earned it, whatever that property may consist of?

If we suddenly have a State intervening to strip people’s property rights, right wing Libertarians might consider whether this sits comfortably with their intellectual tradition. It is in fact half way towards socialism.

But it is only half way, because the State is only intervening to take away the property rights people now enjoy, yet providing no support for them after having done so.

As we saw with the massive handouts to business in the US during the pandemic, right wingers as ever support socialism when they see their own group will make a buck from it.

The fact is: intellectual property is property.

If right-wingers are going to ask people to hand theirs over, they’ll need to provide a fully socialised society to support those people they make destitute just because they happen to want to exploit a resource they neither wish to pay for nor want to put in the work to create themselves.

And as many a right winger will tell you: there’s no such thing as a free lunch. Not even a publisher’s one.

Writing

Experimental novel extract: A Pagan Story

By Matt on Sunday, January 24, 2021

I have been writing a novel with an experimental feel, the opening rough of which is here. I think some of the loneliness within it echoes things that are going on in life around many of us at the moment. Disassociation and alienation, bewilderment and hallucination are central to this short scene.

So, I thought I would try it out on a wider world. This is exactly as it was written with no corrections:

My father’s dreams come in powders and grow from the sacred mycelium each year. They offer renewal, a doorway into the otherworld that is one of the places where the gods, the Others, wait and plan and scheme.

In this dream I am walking through a woodland with paths that branch and branch outward and seem to go somewhere, but I follow them and they load only to more paths that branch. And one of those again leads to more branches. After days of walking in this way, I begin to sense there is someone nearby, just out of reach. The breathghost comes into being beside me with each step I take and every breath I take, but when I look to it, it is not there, though sometimes I catch fleeting visions of eyes disappearing into nothingness.

I become more agitated and can feel the shock of fear in my limbs, a rising anxiety that makes my limbs sting as if they somehow have honey running inside them, and not the blood which is the life of the world and is half sea, half earth and somehow, half spirit. The honey feeling rises, and it is not quite fear, and more like uncomfortable excitement.

I feel a rising sensation in my stomach that is like laughter and sickness at once, and around me in the shadows between the trees I see more eyes. Eyes everywhere. In the knots of wood, on the ends of the tiny tongues of needles in the branches, the raised eyes on stalks of snails. The stars are eyes that I catch between the gaps in the trees, and when I see the blackness above me, I wonder if there is the firmament there or infinite loneliness that stretches on far and far beyond the bounds of life into eternity.

I see a figure now in the woods, leaping and crouching, making strange twisted shapes with his body. He is wearing a mask of green leaves that covers his face, and he is green from head to foot. There are living oak leaves in his hair that flutter in an unfelt wind, and his clothing is a long green robe woven with the shapes of pine, and holly, and ivy, and the brown seeds of the trees, and the acorns. I am afraid of him as he approaches me, but his eyes watch me as afraid and confounded as I am.

I fall on to my knees, and scream, for he is a nightmarish figure, and he says in a voice I seem to know, “don’t be afraid, it is me.” I look up, aware that around us there are other eyes watching from every tree and every life and every needle and I realise this is why I am afraid. He reaches up and pulls of his mask to reveal another mask made of wood that he can’t pull from his face, though he tries. And so I watch him struggle with trying to take his face off.

I hear another voice as he pulls himself into the strangest shapes, and as I do I know new knowledge that rises in voice like a roaring wind through the trees:

“The gods also live in shadows and in the forest, in the sap of branches,” the voice says as the man in green convulses himself, in a crazed frenzy trying to pull the mask free. “And the great aerial-rooted trees that reach long fingers down into the world below from the cloudlands, from where they send the rain to fall on the neathland.” Fingers reach up from the soil, breaking the surface, the hands of men who have trodden here before, I know. And the voice goes on: “Trees, too, are the silent houses of watchful gods, for each tree is born out of spirit as much as earth, for earth is also spirit, and the soul of the heartwood is sealed in to it by the Earth herself, who shares her power in turn with the half-spirit sea (for it is spirit that continually moves the sea), and over all arches the Great Sky swarming with creatures made of the First Breath.”

And the trees sway and sway more, and begin to uproot themselves and walk in a circular dance around me. And still the voice rises, the sound now of a hurricane:

“All of this signifies the mystery of sorrow for us in the neathland. Our earthly paradise, digging in the soil, the mud and dirt is held together only by the rituals with which we implore, beg and petition the Others. The mystery of sorrow, the sorrow of pain, the pain of ending, the ending of life, the life of mystery, the mystery of sorrow. These are the gifts from the gods, for life is sorrow and life is sometimes joy – and everything in between is praise for the gods!”

And the trees clear a path and a patch of earth where corn begins to rise from the musty loam. And the voice cries out: “Childbirth, the ecstasy of the hunt, the reaching to the sky of the corn, the death of the BarleyGod, the teaching stories that are the legends of the Others. So much sorrow, but amongst it all, the glimmer of transformation. Transformation of life to new life, and an escape to something higher. What the Archimandrite himself tells us of – the chance to rise above Earthly pain. And so we serve the Others. We all serve the Others!!”

Inspirations

When The Snow Witch Escaped Me

By Matt on Sunday, September 1, 2019

As a writer, I’m going through something of an adjustment at the moment. Something I never really factored into my experience as an author is happening to me.

To explain – some time ago I wrote a novel based in Portsmouth called The Snow Witch. I personally know it’s the best piece of fiction writing I’ve ever done. I wrote it in a particularly ethereal style, but made the characters and the town really gritty and real. Some I made deliberately enigmatic. This combination led to the book coming out in the genre of magical realism.

Magical realism is a fabulous genre. It mixes the allegorical, the real and the mystical into a quite addictive brew that plays with your sense of what is possible.

I knew I had done something right when people who read it approached me and told me how much they enjoyed it. Over and over again. I was selling my books off a market stall once, telling a prospective customer about it, when a previous buyer marched across to me having spotted me, their arm outstretched, stared at me intensely and pronounced: “That’s brilliant!” then marched off.

This is deeply gratifying.

But recently, an artist, Lucille Scott from Little Duck Forge approached me and asked me if she could run an art exhibition based on the book. This was again, deeply flattering. So, we are having an art exhibition in Cascades in autumn 2019 based on the book. 40 artists have signed up for it. It is quite extraordinary.

Then, another artist came to me, asking to make the book the centre of another arts project. This has become Cursed City – which tells another new story of Donitza Kravitch, the book’s eponymous witch – that takes place in Portsmouth, though social media, street art and live events.

Much of the original story takes place in The Model Village, Southsea. Last Thursday I went down there to meet up with local artist James Waterfield and Roy Hanney, who is the creator of this project. James is a great local artist, and he had been working on a secret project as part of Cursed City.

He had created two figurines to place in the Model Village both depicting characters from my book. I looked at them and had a moment of real dumbfoundedness. Basically, I was holding an action figure in my hand that was his conception of Donitza. Someone had made a whole new work of art based on my creation!

I’ve worked with artists before, but nothing – absolutely nothing like this has ever happened to me. It felt surreal. Like, a thing that I thought of had come to life, stepped into reality, independently of me. I didn’t know what to think.

The figurines of Donitza playing her violin and Reynold Lissitch pasting up street art are now safely installed in the village. And I feel like reality is shifting for me. That Donitza has escaped the pages of my book, and begun to take on a life of her own. And I am standing, watching her move and grow, and am bewildered.

Inspirations

Turmoil in the Marketplace for Ideas

By Matt on Tuesday, July 3, 2018

There is a story that on arriving at the scene just a few minutes after Mahatma Gandhi’s assassination, Lord Louis Mountbatten, last Viceroy of India was met by an increasingly angry mob. One voice suddenly rose over the crowd, saying: “A Muslim shot him…” The story goes that Mountbatten, seeing the danger of a massacre by enraged Hindus shouted loudly: “You fool, it was a Hindu!”

Whether this story about Mountbatten is true or not, and whether or not a Hindu or Muslim had been responsible, the wisdom in such a reply – to quell rage and prevent scapegoating of the minority Muslim population is obvious. In fact, the murderer actually was a Hindu. But even if you put this to one side, the instinct was still sound.

As a writer, for some time I have been imagining how best one might cause a civil war in an imagined country. Suppose there were an invader seeking to destabilise the regime, but wanting to do so discreetly. What would he do? The land I imagine is low tech, pre-industrial and ruled by an increasingly distrusted Prince who has perhaps made one or two poor decisions, but who is in fact a kindly and beneficent ruler. How might agents foment revolution, I asked myself?

In a thought experiment, I imagined a marketplace, where people convene from all parts of the country to trade, meet and enjoy a two week fair. The fair-goers would include members of the ruling classes, tradesmen and merchants with connections to trade routes and fleets. It would include guildsmen, jealous of their work and their skills, guarding against impostors. There might be harlots and mountebanks and cheapjacks and performers all mingling with the general population who have come there to buy, meet others, share news, gossip and talk.

It was there that I realised that the revolution would start. In the marketplace for ideas.

It might happen thus: at one end of the market, a gossip spreads news about a well-established merchant. He uses those ships to trade in people, and whenever his ships land at ports, children always go missing. Is this a coincidence? The gossip only asks the question, but it is a question that others with no knowledge of the gossip’s agenda repeat.

In another part of the market, a rumour starts that local guildsmen were heard hatching a plan to kill another merchant because he brings in goods from the shores of Cathay that are putting local tradesmen out of work. Elsewhere a rumour goes up about the Prince, that he is using the taxes from the fair to raise an army, and will be conscripting soon. Others say that this is not true, but that he is in fact using the money to line his own pockets, or that the Prince is in the pay of foreign powers.

More rumours abound. An army was seen in the East, and those of the Eastern faith are accused as spies for that army. After all, wasn’t it invaders from the East who killed a child in the woods last year, even though no-one can quite remember the name of that child? Butchers are accused of selling infected meat and bakers of adulterating their bread with alum.

Soon, the harmony of the marketplace is disturbed by the rumours. Butchers and bakers look defensively at their rivals, tradesmen pit themselves against tradesmen, all look suspiciously at foreigners and more so at the Prince on whose watch this is all happening.

Over the next few days, factions form. Those who have been accused complain and grumble. Others of the secret invader’s agents, pretending to be on the side of the aggrieved, amplify their complaints, turning them from a mild grievance into an angry counter-accusation. The newly aggrieved on the other side respond, and soon the agents have very little to do as the factions take their grievances to each other.

For those spreading the rumours, the truth of one claim or another is irrelevant. The purpose is to spread discontent wherever possible. For those in the marketplace of ideas who have no idea of the agenda, they naturally take sides according to their preferences and predilections, their biases and loyalties, and soon, hardened factions have formed within the marketplace, where formally there was only interest in trade.

Neighbours look at neighbours on the stalls distrustingly, and guard their goods against theft. Accidental overturnings of carts, genuine accidents or planned, are immediately met with outrage and anger as proof of the ill intentions of one or other faction. The mood of the marketplace has changed so that reasonable discourse and the sorting out of problems is no longer possible. Everybody is aggrieved. Everybody is simmering and angry. The rumours become truths in the minds of those who now seek to interpret the actions of their neighbours from within the grossly distorted paradigms they have internalised.

Now the rumour goes out that groups from the East are carrying concealed weapons. They are challenged on the streets by butchers, with meat cleavers.. Though they are not carrying weapons, they soon begin to. The butchers are joined by the blacksmiths and the knife sharpeners. But these two factions already distrust each other, and arguments start between them, at the agents’ instigation.

Soon, everyone feels unsafe, and no-one trusts anything anyone says, except their own small factions. Civil society is breaking down. The Prince posts guards to ensure safety on the streets, and soon more whisperings are complaining that the Prince is both taxing and oppressing them. The guards themselves become the subject for distrust – and one night after a drunken brawl a guard is killed.

Rumours blame the people of the East, the butchers, the merchants, the traders, the guildsmen in turn. Each accuses the other and none will listen. Soon the factions are so widely separated and angry that more guards are called in as more and more discord breaks out.

And then, one man with a louder mouth who seems somehow to have the ear of the armed factions steps in. He ousts the Prince and installs himself in his place. He is a strong man He is one the crowd trust to “get things done”. Those who armed themselves are grateful for his intervention as he brings in increasingly Draconian rules to deal with foreigners and traders, and anyone who steps beyond his increasingly eccentric and tight restrictions.

Others complain that he is taking away freedoms, others that he is favouring certain groups over others, others that he is a bully.

All of these things may be true, or none may be true. The point is that while the people are thus preoccupied with their rage and accusation at each other, they do not even notice the coup that has taken place, nor fully appreciate how their lives have changed. The few who do notice and make a stand are shouted down and buried with rumours by agents. And in order to discredit those seeking to reinstate rational discourse, new rumour-spreaders join the rational side, so that there is very little rational discourse, only more and more rage, and more and more accusation.

Against those who do still persist in trying to speak their milder or more perceptive truths, it is not difficult now to raise an outraged mob. Some are intimidated into silence. Some disappear.

Meanwhile, the loudmouth who got to power continues to strengthen his hold, spreading further lies and adding to the general sense of distrust with proclamations and with increasingly sweeping powers. Those who want order at any cost rally round him, calling those who oppose his approach traitors, not seeing that what he is doing is quite the opposite of what they wanted, which was to bring them peace and liberty. And what his agenda is, nobody knows, though some suspect that the foreign power that some voices warned about in regard to the old Prince, have in fact installed this one in his place.

That is how one uses the freedom of the market to bring about its opposite. It is also, of course, an allegory of how free speech can, ironically, be democracy’s worst enemy.

Inspirations Writing

The soundtrack to Wonder Woman – how less can be more.

By Matt on Wednesday, August 9, 2017

Yesterday I watched Wonder Woman with specific attention to the soundtrack. It is extremely interesting how much this aspect, largely ignored, adds the power to the scenes.

Throughout the movie there is a sense of brooding growth and suppressed emotion. It mirrors the story of Diana, who as a stripling does not know the strength of her powers and is seeking to find them. There is a leitmotif for the warrior Diana in full battle mode, but also for other aspects of her personality throughout.

The interaction of the soundtrack and image in this movie is surprising. For example, the famous No Man’s Land scene, which could be played with loud orchestral flourishes and strident orchestral stabs is instead accompanied by a kind of steady solidity, a growing sense of certainty as the untried warrior first steps into battle.

The fact that it is set in one of the “holy of holies” of warfare – the awful horror of the trenches – makes the scene all the more powerful. Few writers / directors of mainstream film have had the temerity to use this setting, and to do so with a superhero movie could have been a disaster. Instead, the imagery is powerful. A lone woman striding across the fields of death and destruction of the Great War.

When she reaches the other side, she fights with as much emphasis on breaking the guns than killing the enemy, as if she will do what she must, but acknowledging that the enemy is war itself – which is one message of the movie as a whole.

Later, the soundtrack does break out into full action sequence with the Wonder Woman battle leitmotif in full cry. But this sequence works for its auditory restraint. This is an old lesson for writers and works across media: less is more.

Events and Products Inspirations

Not Waving But Drowning at the King’s Bar Loft, April 27th

By Matt on Saturday, April 29, 2017

I recently had the privilege of compering a night of Film Poetry Performance at the King’s Bar Loft, Albert Road, on April 27th. It was a fascinating night that showcased some extraordinary talent from Portsmouth and further afield. And it was an event, with wonderful projections provided by Dr Lighthouse and some great decor that gave the whole bar an unusual feel – as if we were descending into the dark depths.

The first act up was Elephant’s Footprint, a duo from Bristol, who gave a talk on Poetry Film and showcased one of their works. Poetry Film is pretty much what the label says – it can be a film with the poem integral to it, or, to give a frisson of live performance, the poet can deliver the poem on the night.

Next came Isabelle Bilton with a diary of an anorexic, and the night took an even darker turn with Jidos Reality performing a disturbing story of a psychopath, called The Hangman’s Many Souls. The first half was rounded of by Maggie Sawkins reading Stevie Smith’s Not Waving But Drowning and then showing some of her short films from her award-winning show about addiction, Zones of Avoidance.

So, a sombre first half.

The second half took us into the light, with a crazy, eccentric and ear shattering performance by The Vulture Is A Patient Bird, that lampooned corporate speak with a wicked touch. Next came Richard Williams reading a poem to Jenna Lions’s accompanying film – the change of pace to something gentle being much needed after the frenetic energy of the opening. Craig Maskell had us all laughing out loud with his hilarious Laurie Anderson style loops and auto-tune antics, while he played along to a series of Lego animations. One could feel the mood in the room shifting upwards. Next came Elephant’s Footprint again, with some really uplifting and interesting poetry film from around the world.

Finally, Matt Parsons performed a hilarious and clever piece in which an uppity computer took issue with his nostalgic view of the decline of Shipbuilding in Portsmouth.

The night was organised by Johnny Sackett, whose Front Room happenings at Aurora and Hunter Gatherer showcase some extraordinary talent from near and far, with visuals provided by Dr Lighthouse and sound by Ken Devine.

It was a special night indeed, and two phrases have stayed with me:

1) Why are you dressed like Arthur Askey?

and

2) We’re all in this together.

If you were there, you’ll know why!

Inspirations Writing

Extract from The Snow Witch – description of the town

By Matt on Thursday, October 27, 2016

snow-witch-cover-22a-copy With this section of The Snow Witch, I decided to write a potted history of the town with a level of dark style. Hope you like it:

Sleep.

The city sleeps, contracted in the cold to a singularity of stone. An island city, surrounded by tides flooding from the south, running up its eastern side, swelling the creek that orphans it from the mainland, swirling through its western harbour where it welcomes boats disgorging shivering holidaymakers and businesspeople and soldiers and home-comers and refugees.

A city just 5 miles long, with tight furrows in which were planted, in the last century and a half, rows of terraced housing hunched in lines, braced against the gushing sea gale. Long before they grew, to the south of the island, a few bleak, isolated cottages stood beside a long, muddy beach. Within a few decades, the health-giving sea attracted a rash of tall villas set back from the shore, separated from the ever-moving water by a desolate common. Upon it, from time to time, troops marshalled under white canvas bell tents between furze bushes near a small fortress garrisoned with redcoats. Later, as the salubrious saline’s effects grew fashionable, bathing machines rolled in, a pier, beach huts, ice-cream stands, and, in the by-now obsolete heart of the lonely fortress, a model village. Later too, the great morass where the island’s river waters pooled, was channelled into a manmade lake – and so the plastic swans were trucked in, to move upon the face of the water.

Beyond this southern leisure resort, the real business of the island unfolded in the west. How often had marshalled troops marched from the common in drilled ranks to the dockyard and embarked on ships? To this day, beyond the seaside resort and the old town that stretches along a spit of land to a tiny, hook-shaped harbour, ferries and freighters and warships wallow in giant docks, waiting to transport people, and goods, and death.

All that can be found on the city’s western edge: at the dockyard, at the container quay, at the ferryport.

Inspirations Writing

Real Writer’s Block – What it is, and what it is not.

By Matt on Friday, February 26, 2016

Despair Adele Parks gave a great talk last night at Portsmouth Central Library as part of Portsmouth Bookfest 2016, talking about her writing life, and how she became one of the top sellers of chick lit over the last 16 years. From an effervescent and ebullient childhood in which her grandfather persuaded her to write comics for 10 pence each, through globe-trotting as an advertising executive, to her decision “not to go to my grave wishing I had written that book”, it was quite a journey, and heartening, too.

With her joyous smile, lightning-fast brain and keen intellect, Adele is one of those people one can’t help liking. Blessed with good quality hardware, you can’t help thinking she would have made it, whatever she did. I’ve seen the same in other writers. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was similar – proud owner of a ferocious intellect coupled with a joyous imagination, he revelled in storytelling and much more besides. Like Doyle, Adele has energy. And lots of it.

Such traits make Adele supremely fitted to talk about the business of writing. But there is one thing she announced during that evening with which I disagreed profoundly, and it came when someone in the audience asked about writer’s block. This is one subject about which I have a brimful of firsthand experience. It is also something of which Adele clearly has none.

She started off this section by make a provocative point:

“There’s no such thing. You don’t get doctor’s block, or accountant’s block. So there’s no such thing as writer’s block.”

I’ve always wondered what people who dismiss writer’s block actually think it is. Today, at last, I heard it from someone at the top of her profession.

Adele equated writer’s block to lack of direction, or disorganisation. “If you sit down and you’re not able to write, it’s because you haven’t planned what you’re going to write,” she breezed. The solution was to plan your novel better, or perhaps have a change of scene. Go on holiday, go and write somewhere else. Meet new people. Go to an Elvis convention in Blackpool.

So there it was, writer’s block was a functional problem to do with not being properly directed. It was straightforward. It didn’t exist.

During a stay on the Isle of Arran in the 1990s, during Gulf War I, I spoke with the local female GP, an ex-military doctor, and mentioned PTSD to her. She furrowed her brow and said forcefully: “There is no such thing as PTSD”. She was adamant about it.

Everyone has a blindspot for something.

Here is what writer’s block is not. It is not sitting down to write one morning and finding that it takes 20 minutes to get in the mood. That is drinking a cup of tea. It is not worrying because your cat has taken ill and thus being put off for a day or two. That is anticipating a vet’s bill. It is not having a pile of papers that are out of order. That is bad filing.

How can I say this with such certainty? Because I lost the ability to write for thirteen years. Not being able to sit down and write during that period was not a matter of tea, cats or files. I had arranged my life so that I had all the time I needed. My despair, my utter, black despair came from something far deeper and far darker. If you’ve ever wondered what real writer’s block, is as opposed to feeling a bit uninspired or not quite knowing what to write about, let me tell you about my experience. Of course, others will have different experiences, but if you have no idea at all, perhaps this will shed a little bit of light – and explain to you why if you dismiss it out of hand you might get a furious response.

Writer’s block was the moment I realised the one thing I knew I could do really well had deserted me. It left me the day I had the final argument with a lover in which she criticised my work mercilessly, then walked out on me. Her criticism combined with that deeper emotional shock so that grief became the flavour of writing.

After her departure I limped on, writing scripts for The Bill. Her stinging criticisms came back as I wrestled plot lines, rang in my ears over and over again as I tried, stomach churning with panic, to string together stories and character motives. I criticised what I wrote, using her voice to do it. Not good enough, poor quality writing. Ugly writing. And so on.

There came a point at which I found myself unable to put one word after the other because I questioned if those two words worked together on the page. I couldn’t put together a satisfactory sentence, let alone a story. I wasn’t “feeling a bit uninspired of a morning”. I didn’t need to sit down and have a cup of tea to make it right. I had a central crisis of confidence in which I felt myself whirling into a blacker and blacker swirl of helplessness. I loved that woman. I wanted to impress her with my writing. She was gone. My writing was shit.

That was the sort of equation that was going on in my head. It usurped my emotions and took over my body. I wept at nights. month after month. The grief took control of my creative life. A deep, cold sense of bleakness. The blank page became unbearable. The stories I started to write and never finished were all tales of pain and suicide, of loss of faith in people, in God, in life itself. Sitting at my desk staring at the page, in the wordless spaces between each and every second, I sat and ruminated on how best I could die.

And still I was contracted to write 4 episodes of The Bill. A job that should have lasted six months took four grinding years to complete, until finally I was free of the show. Being trapped in a contract had compounded matters further. I was going through an existential crisis, whilst simultaneously being forced to turn out episodes of a cop show. I look back now, and that is darkly funny. At the time it was hell.

I eked out a living working in bars while the 6 months money I had been paid in advance dwindled out over 4 years, failing to fund my meagre existence. I began to associate poverty with writing. I hated myself, I hated the page, I hated everyone else – and most of all I hated the act of writing.

Sitting down to write meant pain. It meant loss of dignity. It meant humiliation. It meant having daily to inhabit that dark, lost spirit in the Hades of my soul who so wanted to come out into the light again but who was trapped.

I considered suicide.

In the end, I gave up trying to write, completely. I set up a series of businesses. I got into computer repairs, teaching English and bookdealing – the last of which gave me a steady income and such a rigid regime of work that for years I had no time to think about myself or my writing.

I did, eventually start to write again, but only after I got professional psychiatric help. I had a full thirteen years of writer’s block. Being told last night that, actually, that could have been solved with a trip to the local coffee bar (as if I didn’t try so many things) – that, I have to say, did not sit well in my soul.

The good news is that I did get out of that pit, and I want to tell you – if any of this seems remotely familiar – if you are another writer suffering in this way, and you’re sick of people who tell you to “buck yourself up” and “pull yourself together”, it’s okay to be sick of it. That person may be wise, they may be actually be bloody fantastic, but if that’s what they’re saying, then of the subject of writer’s block they know nothing.

Do know, however, that you are not alone and that there are ways back to the surface, to the sunlight. There are means of escape. There will come a time when you are no longer groping around in the dark and you will no longer feel destroyed. You will see yourself in a new way. You will be made afresh.

If you’ve got real writer’s block, most likely it won’t be a walk or a holiday that does it for you. If it does, then good luck to you. What you are feeling may be, in many ways, akin to PTSD. And just like with PTSD, seek help. There are professionals who understand the workings of the inside of your head.

Writer’s block is so much more than not feeling inspired. Writer’s block is feeling that your life is reaching its end because it is devoid of meaning. Be assured, however, it will go on. Writing, that little bright bird, she will fly back to you.

If you recognise any of this description and it makes sense to you, then seek help – and do it now. Don’t – like I did – take thirteen years to act. That’s thirteen years you won’t get back.

Opinion Writing

Angelina Jolie – To Say “Grubby” Doesn’t Say Half Of It – Book Review

By Matt on Friday, November 8, 2013

Angelina – An Unauthorized Biography, by Andrew Morton

Book Review

What can I do in reviewing this book except give you my overriding impressions?

The first one is about the subject matter as Andrew Morton likes to portray her. Under his hands, Jolie comes out of this book as a nasty, mercurial, capricious, selfish, unfaithful manstealing drug addict who continually lies and presents the truth to suit her own needs.

It’s not a flattering portrait by any means. Manipulative, destructive and shallow, Morton presents us with a picture of a woman driven by a series of addictions and compulsions. She is a whirlwind of sexuality and deceit who is quite happy to walk into stable relationships and wreck them to serve her own ends. Even her later work with the UN is portrayed as in some way capricious and self-serving, and even her treatment of the kids she adopts is according to Morton at best worthy of suspicion and at worst actually illegal.

Unlike Jolie, this book is not pretty. There is something mean of spirit in Morton, and it comes through in the overall impression her gives of Jolie, rather than the facts of her life taken individually.

The cause for Jolie’s unstable personality as it is here presented leads me to the second observation about the book. Morton is just as happy to point to the fact that Jolie is a Gemini to account for her character traits as he is to fill the pages with whacky post-Freudian psychobabble to describe her motives. The book is much better when Morton is not theorising on the deep unconscious reasons for Jolie’s behaviour and actually tells you about her behaviour. I don’t expect to be told about her personality on the basis of her star sign or spurious psychology just as I wouldn’t expect to be told that the lumps on her head are evidence that she was more amorous than other women, or that the full moon turns her into a werewolf. That, Mr Morton, is space-filling – and piss-poor writing.

That said, this book does give an account of Jolie’s life which – with its emphasis on destructive sex and drug abuse is like watching a slow motion car crash. She cuts herself as a kid, her mother gives up her bed to Jolie and her boyfriend when the couple are just 14, Jolie nearly stabs him to death and he does the same for her at the same age and both go to hospital… And so the sad show goes on. The young Jolie takes copious drugs and screws anything that is slightly warm and still breathing, and appears perfectly happy to wreck relationships and treat the people around her like disposable syringes. Essentially, she is portrayed as a fickle, feckless “user” – in all its connotations.

It’s not nice reading, but I suspect it is in part accurate – though it skims over Jolie’s acting skills and attempts pat “psychological” interpretations of her life as seen from the outside rather than giving a genuine insight into the woman herself. In Morton’s telling, the life she leads becomes so debauched and so dissolute that even she can’t handle it any more – the night she shares an apartment with her lover, ex-husband, lesbian ex-lover and her girlfriend and has a breakdown is pricelessly funny in the deadpan way it is delivered by Morton. I don’t think he was meant to be funny, but one can have little sympathy for a two dimensional character who has been set up by the author as willing to make a mess of her life apparently on purpose.

The character of Jolie is remarkable in this book simply because she weathers it all. She’s portrayed as a kind of adult role-play Lara Croft who raids married men’s beds rather than ancient tombs and comes out completely unscathed.

Where others would go to pieces, she simply goes for the next fix, which is either a tumble in the hay with someone else’s husband or a shot in the arm to keep her going. Unafraid to wreck the happiness of others to supply her own obsessions and compulsions, I found that I at once hated this version of Jolie and begrudgingly admired her for her apparent armour-plating and psychotic self-serving.

Her treatment of her father Jon Voight throughout is awful. Morton implies that Jolie wants to blame him for all her woes rather than address them, mature and grow up. This, could be true, I suppose, it could be the extreme life that the extremely wealthy lead, or it could be a gross caricature. If it really does lift the lid on what is beneath the surface beauty of Hollywood, and of Jolie, then it made me glad of my rather boring life.

To be frank, I felt grubby reading about Morton’s Jolie and her shenanigans.

Some things are better left unsaid. And some books unwritten. This is one of them.

Tag Archives: Writing

Angelina – An Unauthorized Biography, by Andrew Morton

Book Review