Poets of WW1

My dissertation project for my MA is a novel about a young woman during and just after WW1. There are enormous research challenges with writing a story set in another time period - checking every little detail can hinder the creative flow.

Anyway, part of my research has been to read some of the poetry of the time. So I've decided to dedicate my Poem of the Week section to the extraordinary poets and poems written between 1914 and 1918.

This week is Anthem of Doomed Youth by Wilfred Owen.

Year two gets off to a snowy start...

Year two of my MA has started with a shock after a long summer off. This year its time to get the big project done, or dissertation. I decided to tackle something I'd never contemplate taking on board without the support and structure of the MA programme.

For a long time, I've been interested and moved by the events surrounding WW1. I remember as a teenager being deeply moved by the intensity and emotions evoked in Testament of Youth by Vera Brittain. Even 30 years on, I still have vivid memories of some key passages in the book. 

Last year I read a book called Singled Out by Virginia Nicholson, which highlighted the plight of women after WW1. There were over a million 'surplus women' who had no chance of ever finding a husband because an entire generation of young men had been wiped out.

There are a lot of stories told about how awful things were for the men during this time are numerous - and rightly so. But I thought I'd like to focus on what life was like for young women during this time. Most were uneducated because they were brought up to be wives. So I'm making a stab at a novel about the life and times of a young woman who loses her fiance in 1917.

At this stage I'm spending most of my time researching the times - it's important that things are historically accurate. That's the current state of play, more info as the project unfolds.

What's in a name?

I’ve been keeping notes and scribbles around for a long time. I have a shelf in my study that holds a ridiculous number of notebooks – all containing a mish-mash of ideas, snatches of overhead conversations, and witty anecdotes. I even have a notebook devoted to unusual names and places. One of my favourites is a sign on a van I saw in Whitby with the words ‘Martin Chicken – Funeral Director’. I cried with laughter. Could you ever imagine a name for a funeral director more unlikely than Martin Chicken? In my writing this makes me realise how important character names are in a story.  If Martin Chicken were a poultry farmer in a story, it might appear contrived. But as a funeral director, it opens up all kinds of possibilities for an interesting back story and personality traits. Was he bullied at school with a name like that? Does he come from a long line of ‘Chicken’ funeral directors? Where does the name originate?

Place names are also terrific, particularly when travelling. When in Colorado in the US this January this year, we drove through a real place called ‘Hangmans Gulch’ (sorry, there was no apostrophe in the original sign).  The images and ideas that name conjures up are just fantastic. Setting in a story is very important to create a sense of location and surroundings – it makes a huge contribution to help readers make a visual connection to the story and imagine what the place would like.  It’s highly unlikely for example that ‘Hangmans Gulch’ would be set in darkest Surrey.  By setting the a story in Hangmans Gulch, you are immediately transported to an imaginary world where Clint Eastwood lookalikes wander around in cowboy hats, whistling the theme tune to ‘The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly’.  Although in reality, while it was certainly what you would call a ‘one horse town’, it was more like an extended trailer park. More ‘Tarrentino’ than ‘Eastwood’.

What would happen if we took Martin Chicken – Funeral Director, and placed him in Hangmans Gulch? Let’s say Martin Chicken is Mayor of Hangmans Gulch, and he is chairman of the town twinning committee. They are expecting a delegation from Pratts Bottom, Kent as possible twin partners. Hangmans Gulch sets about sprucing itself up and arranging local entertainment for its English visitors. So by thinking about names and places, a potentially amusing story starts to unfold. But of course it doesn’t have to be amusing; we could add a touch of tragedy. Perhaps there’s a Reginald Chicken, a solicitor from Pratts Bottom who travels to Hangmans Gulch as part of the Town Twinning project. On arrival, he is met by Mayor Martin Chicken, who is every inch his double.  We could unfold a story of twin brothers separated as babies, each sent to stay with different branches of the Chicken family on the death of their parents.  OK, it would need some serious work, but it could be fun.

By having these thoughts written down like this, I’ve got a record, not just of the names and places I already had, but a few jottings of an idea for an interesting story that could be used for a short story or a play that I could come  back to sometime, or incorporate into another piece of writing.

Conflict, crisis and resolution

When drafting a story, there are some useful tools that can be embraced in order to 'test' the depth, shape and structure of the piece. There's some useful information on this in Janet Burroway's book 'Writing Fiction'.  She talks about 'The Tower and the Net' - Story, form, plot and structure.

The key things to consider are:

1. Conflict, crisis & Resolution - Conflict is a fundamental part of fiction. It can be comic, tragic, or dramatic as characters move through the story to find resolution. It creates tension and keeps the reader interested.
2. The Arc of the story - This is essentially the shape of the story - beginning, middle and end and what happens at each essential part of the story's journey.
3. Patterns of Power - Looks at the power struggle between the different forces in the story. Power could mean physical strength, charm, knowledge, moral power, wealth, ownership, rank etc.
4. Connection & Disconnection - Patterns of conflict and connection occur in every story and sometimes they are in evidence in much smaller compass. Like conflict and its complications, connection and its complications can produce a pattern of change, and both inform the process of change recorded in scene and story.
5. Story form as an inverted check mark - This is a way of analysing a plot in terms of a pyramid of five actions: an exposition, followed by a complication, leading to a crisis, which is followed by a falling action or anticlimax, resulting in a resolution.
6. Story & plot - A story means a series of events recorded in their chronological order. A plot is a series of events deliberately arranged so as to reveal their dramatic, thematic, and emotional significance.

All of these elements are useful to 'check back' over your story during the editing process and can help make you think about what you're written in a different light.

Things as part of the narrative story

It's amazing how things can make a difference to how we view characters. I'm reminded of a passage in The Great Gatsby by F Scott Fitzgerald, where Gatsby is showing Daisy all the shirts in wardrobe.

'He took out a pile of shirts and began throwing them, one by one, before us, shirts of sheet linen and thick silk and fine flannel, which lost their folds as they fell and covered the table in many coloured disarray. While we admired he brought more and the soft rich heap mounted higher - shirts with stripes and scrolls and plaids in coral anda apple-green and lavendar and faint orange, with monograms of indian blue.'

Gatsby is showing Daisy that he has 'made it', showing his wealth to a woman who once spurned him because he was poor. I think as a writer, it makes me see how showing, can be so much more powerful than telling.