Book launch in Manchester

Not for my book alas, but I have been invited to read from The Shakespeare Girl in support of the lovely Emma Jane Unsworth's second novel, Animals, which is already garnering excellent reviews and lots of buzz. There are other writers too, and music, and wine. It's at Waterstones Deansgate, who claim that 'All of Manchester's finest writers will be here...' Who am I to argue!?

Waterstones Deansgate Cafe, Thursday 1 May, 7pm, arrive early, and let them know you're coming with an email to:  events.manchester@waterstones.com

The Creative Process Blog Tour

Emma Jane Unsworth is about to launch her new novel Animals. She has been tangled up in a blog-web entitled ‘The Creative Process Blog Tour’ in which you answer four questions about your writing process and then pass the baton to two more writers. I am one of Emma’s chosen two, how flattering! Below are my answers, here are Emma’s answers, and I have scored two terrific contributors for my part: Zoe Lambert, poet, and Alex Niven, poet and music writer, who will post their responses soon. And the chain goes on! It's lovely to be part of it. Hope you enjoy!

What am I working on?

I’m tweaking my novel The Shakespeare Girl. At this stage the notion of second and third drafts is no longer applicable. It feels finished but I suppose I won’t be able to leave it alone until an agent wrenches it from my badly paper-cut hands. So what I’m really working on is finding an agent. In terms of writing, my blogging and arts work is ongoing and thankfully about to increase. I’ve started the research for a non-fiction project which I’m already very excited about. I’ve finished the research for another novel about the Blitz Kids and black magic. But the next thing I’m actually writing is a play. I sound like Daisy from Spaced now I realise… Trust me, these things will materialise though! I recently saw two of my ideas turned into finished pieces by somebody else and it made me realise with a start that you can’t sit on your ideas for too long because they are all floating around out there for other people to pluck out of the air…

How does my work differ from others of its genre?

This is definitely a question for a more seasoned and experienced writer than myself. If I knew what genre The Shakespeare Girl was I would be able to find a home for it much easier I’m sure! Literary-comic fiction perhaps? And a bit of pastoral. Maybe ‘tragical-comical-historical-pastoral,’ to quote Hamlet. I have a good idea of who my readership might be at the very least, if not the genre of the writing.

Why do I write what I do?

It’s really the strength of an idea that compels me to get something down. The first thing I ever wrote was a silly novella about a couple of temps who fall in love and win a huge amount of money and go on an adventure to experience life all over the world. I was lonely and broke at the time, no passport, no girlfriend, no boyfriend, and the fantasy of the story was a comfort so I ended up writing it all down and it proved to be great escapism. With The Shakespeare Girl the idea of digging up the playwright’s grave is so tantalising, not just because of what we might find but because of how it might make the world react. The idea never fails to fill me with curious energy and it was sufficient to construct an entire narrative and cast of characters around it.

How does my writing process work?

I’m still very much learning the craft but for the most part I know what the final point of the story is and I try to move the story methodically towards it. For instance, character A needs to learn something about character B: what’s the best way to unfold that discovery? The funniest or saddest or most unexpected way? I try out various scenarios in my head, often involving dialogue that I say to myself. When I’ve settled on the ‘method’ I map the chapter and fill it with detail and then I write that in one sitting and edit the following day, and then it’s done. It won’t get edited again until a larger chunk of the story is written because the context is such a big part of it, you can’t edit in isolation. I’m a very good editor but a nervous writer; the initial writing incubates for a good while before it hits the page.

Soho, Streatham, Southwark

I took a little writing sojourn to London recently, a long weekend in the wilds of Streatham Hill to live with a cat named Trevor. I spent a day in central London first though, visiting various places I’d been meaning to go to for ages. Saint Paul’s Church, Covent Garden – otherwise known as ‘the Actor’s Church’ – is where many a famous thespian is remembered. I got teary-eyed before I even made it inside, as each of the benches in the churchyard carries a commemoration, from Beryl Reid (‘So much love…’) to a long-serving head librarian at the RADA. The church itself was officially closed but I snuck inside by holding open the door for a man carrying a set of bongo drums. Inside is a lovely modest sort of church with plaques everywhere for the great and good of British stage and screen. That’s one reason I wanted to go, another is that legend has it that the first of London’s plague victims is buried here, one Margaret Ponteous, 1665. And yet another is that Henrietta Street, which runs alongside Saint Paul’s, was home to the Hell Club, an early New Romantic hangout, before they were called New Romantics and before they took over the Blitz. Steve Strange tells an amazing story of how everyone was on acid one night in Hell and the club was so hot they all spilled out into the graveyard and danced around there, tripping their noodles off in their outrageous costumes. Isn’t that an amazing image? I liked it so much I've drafted an entire novel plot around the idea. 

Having soaked up these lovely pagan vibes, I emerged into the decidedly more Christmassy environs of Covent Garden looking for coffee, which I found in a state of near perfection at New Row Coffee. The coffee is incredible, go there. They’re lovely folk too. Revived, I then walked to Soho to have a nosey at the Soho Hotel where one of the scenes begins in the novel I’m working on. There’s not much to see, Dean Street turns into a little mews with a red brick and quite Mancunian-looking structure piled up the end, which is the hotel. There’s a large shiny black Buddha cat in the foyer. From there it’s a short walk to Soho Square. I make a little pilgrimage here from time to time, especially when it’s cold, to sit on a bench and play ‘Soho Square’ by Kirsty MacColl, whom I adore and miss terribly... ‘… kiss me quick, in case I die before my birthday…’

Next stop is Southwark and I decide to take a Boris bike. Opposite the bike park at Soho Square, Will Young is waiting for a cab, holding a bunch of flowers. My mother wants me to marry Will Young so I wait at least until eye contact is established, but it’s brief. I guess the flowers are not meant for me. Will gets in his cab with barely a glance and I hop up on my bike. I love Boris bikes. It only costs a pound – and almost my life at Piccadilly Circus – but before I know it I’m sailing past the Thames, over Blackfriars’s Bridge, and into deepest Southwark. (When is somebody going to put something interesting where that old sandwich shop is at the bottom of the Blackfriars’s Bridge by the way…?)

Southwark is my very favourite bit of London, even more so now that I’ve been to the Cross Bones Graveyard, which you can read about here, and also because I discovered yesterday that Stock, Aitken & Waterman’s Hit Factory was round here too, on Vine Yard. I love Borough Market of course, and Tooley Street, and I’m even coming round to the idea of The Shard. Maybe. Yes, Southwark is the place for me.

From London Bridge I catch the train to Streatham Hill, deep in the South London suburbs. Angela Carter country. I arrive in the dark, meet Trevor the enormous handsome cat, do some writing, and go to sleep early. In the morning I leap out of bed and go for a jog in the dazzling autumn sunshine. I plough into the school run for the primary school a few doors down and from there I run to Brockwell Park, run right around it, and home. It’s downhill all the way and uphill all the way back. My legs are still in considerable pain four days later. It is the last jog I am even able to do for the rest of the trip. None of this bodes well for the sponsored 10K I am meant to run in May.

After a day of writing I catch the train back to Southwark. London is steeped in a marvellous silver fog by now. I walk over Tower Bridge, which is every bit as exciting as Brooklyn Bridge tonight. I walk down Park Street which is magical and Dickensian. We are looking for The Rose Theatre, London’s oldest surviving theatre, and the very first to open on Bankside. Tonight they are performing The Winter’s Tale on a small fenced stage above the excavation site of the ancient theatre. The Rose preceded even The Globe just along the river, opening in 1587. Shakespeare performed here as an actor and staged two of his own plays here too. The layout of the theatre, the outside wall and jutting stage, is described in red lights so you can see where the building once sat. It’s thrilling. I can feel old voices and ghosts coming up through the ground. Musicians play over in the far corner of the excavation site, lit by candles. The performance is lovely too; enticing and fun and heart-breaking. Francesca De Sica’s Hermione is wonderful. I am given a flower (at last!) by guitar-playing troublemaker Autolycus, but even he reclaims it at the end of the play. I take it as a good omen though. I fall for The Rose, and they have just this week heard they will be getting a Heritage Lottery Grant to complete the excavation. If/when The Shakespeare Girl is published I want to have my launch party there. Some fine ale follows in The George, off Borough High Street. There has been a pub on this site since at least 1543 and the current building dates to the mid-seventeenth century. Yes, Southwark is the place for me.

I am then firmly holed up for the next couple of days, churning out thousands of new words and feeling the spirit of what I first planned to write all those months ago. Twenty-three thousand words in, The Shakespeare Girl is coming to life. Missing social events and getting used to solitude gets easier the longer you write. Having a terrifyingly close deadline also works wonders. Angela Carter’s last novel, Wise Children, was a large part of the original inspiration behind the story. Streatham Hill is next to Balham, where Carter grew up, and I find out her old school is not far away so I take a walk there. It proves impossible to find mention of the house she grew up in though. I expect the present tenants would like to avoid legions of bespectacled girls in maxi skirts, and me, leaving flowers at the gate. Anyway, she’s in the leafy air down there somewhere and I go home and write a scene about a famous actor who goes out into the Soho night in drag, and I think she would approve.

Angela Carter's old school.

The Shakespeare Girl : a novel

‘GOOD FRIEND FOR JESUS SAKE FORBEARE,

TO DIGG THE DUST ENCLOASED HEARE.

BLESE BE THE MAN THAT SPARES THES STONES,

AND CURST BE HE THAT MOVES MY BONES …’

I’m writing a novel. Yes, another one. My first one is currently sitting unpublished in a  metaphorical sock drawer, as all first novels should for a time. One day I will take it out, dust it off and take another look, and possibly cringe, or maybe even re-consider and re-submit it.

In the meantime I have an MA in Creative Writing to complete. My final piece of work for the course is a novel: The Shakespeare Girl.  As part of the project I’ve set up a website to accompany the novel, which you can look at here. I will be adding various reviews, images, news items and guest posts to the site over the coming weeks, and eventually I will post an extract or two from the novel itself. 

The opening quotation above, as you might know, is taken from Shakespeare’s tombstone. If we believe, as many do, that these words are amongst the last ones written by the playwright himself, they reveal an anxiety about exhumation which also makes an appearance in sixteen of his thirty-seven surviving plays. When I first read about this peculiar obsession, I was intrigued. I began to read about the Holy Trinity Church, where Shakespeare is buried, and discovered that the building sits right on the riverbank, hovering over the waters of the Avon, and that it is in some state of dilapidation.

Erosion, disrepair … a thought occurred to me: What would happen if you had to dig up William Shakespeare…?

That was the starting point for a story, which I decided to people with characters whose lives are somehow connected to the Bard: a professor, a student, an actress… In homage to Angela Carter’s Wise Children, I also decided to include some type of reference –obvious, oblique, or somewhere in between – to every Shakespeare play in the course of the book. Not to be clever – I’m learning about Shakespeare as I go – but to try and neatly dramatise the way in which Shakespeare infiltrates our daily lives, often without us knowing.

So, whenever time permits, I’m working away at the novel. The plot, I think, is decided. The characters, I hope, are beginning to come off the page. It’s ambitious, hopefully funny, certainly accessible, and I can’t wait to finish it.

If you’d like to get in touch about my writing, or about anything Shakespearean, or better still, if you’d like to contribute something to my website, then I’d love to hear from you, at this address here. If you’re on Twitter I also have a dedicated account to follow, here.

Thank you for reading …!