Is the Old You Still In There?

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Do you ever wonder if you are still the same person you have always been? Can you feel your inner child inside you, reacting to the life you live now? Do our personalities survive intact over years of growth, change and (at my age) a certain amount of external sagging?

Sometimes we feel completely divorced from our past selves. What do I have in common with the Sophie who so desperately wanted to win the bunny hops race at primary school that she burst into tears yards from the finishing line? Or 26-year-old Sophie who left everything behind and flew off to live in Hong Kong, with only the promise of a floor to sleep on and a reliable supply of Chinese food?

Think of the number of brain cells that have died and been replaced since childhood, continuously creating a new self and discarding the old one. Am I, in scientific fact, not still the same person I was?

As a married forty-something with a mortgage and two children, I was stunned when a counsellor looked me in the eye and said, ‘Ah! You’re a risk taker. It’s a character trait.’ I remembered how toddler Sophie climbed the highest slide in the playground, and came swooping down, thrilled, while Mum called out predictions about ending up in casualty. And how, at 26, I was ready to relocate to war-torn Sudan where, disappointingly, there wasn’t a big demand for book editors. But was I really still that person?

Yes, something of the child survives – and this is how I know. A few years ago I went to a primary school reunion, and there was Sally Forsyth. She was called something different now, and was an adult woman, and – I kept having to remind myself as we stood in the school building where we were once best friends – so was I. We caught up with where life had taken us. I had had children, and she hadn’t. She had a head for business, and I don’t. But I came away knowing exactly why I loved her when we were five. There was the same spark, the same sensation of a self recognising a compatible self across a crowded room, and knowing we should be together.

A few weeks ago, I went to Jim Watson’s funeral. The Watsons were our closest friends when I was tiny. Kitty was Mum’s friend; and Jim was Dad’s. They had two girls too. I was the younger child but paired up with their older daughter, Rosalind, while my older sister was friends with their younger girl, Miranda. We played together all the time, spent Christmas day together, grew up side by side.

We had not seen each other properly for years, yet at the funeral, my sister and I each gravitated towards our former friend. And there was that spooky sense of recognition. Rosalind’s sharp wit. The way she laughed out loud when she found something outrageous. The forthright, original things she said. She was still the bright, imaginative, quirky person she had been as a child. We might have been back in the bedroom where she put pillow slips on her arms, we back-combed her hair and she sang ‘Ride a White Swan’ like Marc Bolan; where we screwed our eyes shut and convinced ourselves that her bed could fly us to the moon. She was still the person that child-Sophie thrived on and recognised as one of life’s true friends.

Courtesy of www.fruitacresfarms.com

However many brain cells die, however much adult life buries us, something deep within us is continuous, and survives. Now excuse me while I head for the park to find the biggest slide.

Top Tips for Revising Your Novel 4: Make Setting Work For You

Setting, as the consultant who delivered a report on my novel in progress noted, is a tricky one. Modern readers are much less tolerant of long, detailed descriptions than, for instance, the Victorians were. Reading Dickens today, we can become weary of the sheer volume of description and end up thinking, ‘I just want an impression of that area of London – not so much detail that I could find my way around it blindfolded!’

Once again, the consultant’s advice has been vital to my rewrite:

‘What you want isn’t bulk, but a few telling details. Setting is never just a place where things happen: it always conveys important information... Decor signals taste, social class, income and even the inhabitants’ likely world view: black granite backed by glass and bristling with steel gadgets? Gingham curtains, home-made bunting and shabby chic? Old –fashioned groceries such as lard, tripe, white flour, Bisto, Bird’s custard, Abernethy biscuits?... In real life we are constantly picking up and decoding these signals, which is one reason why entering someone’s house for the first time is a step towards greater intimacy: we can read the signals they have chosen for themselves. Their puce-coloured bath with gold taps (or their conservatory smelling of cat pee, or their immaculate minimalist living room, or their collection of ceramic thimbles) will influence our opinion of the kind of people they are.’

Before I learned this valuable lesson, I had barely hinted at the settings in which my characters found themselves, and thinking much harder about how they would express themselves through their surroundings made me realise that the characters themselves needed more thought. The search for those ‘few telling details’ taught me to define the characters more carefully, and not to waste a word on random or irrelevant detail when describing the settings.

In the latest version of Unspeakable Things, the difference between Deb’s mantelpiece and Sarah’s points to a deeper contrast between the two friends and their lives. Attempting to tidy her chaotic house before Sarah and Jim come round, Deb notes  the overcrowded mantlepiece and the general mess:

...’these rooms were a mishmash of styles and influences, souvenirs of disparate places, piles of magazine clippings Mum gave her that she never had time to read, books of her Dad’s and stepmum’s, and on the walls, posters from films and comedy clubs mixed in with an array of photographs, old and new: the chronicle of her large and complex family.’  

Going back into her own ordered house after Jim goes off on a trip, Sarah notes:

 ‘...there was their sofa, where she lay in the evenings with her feet in Jim’s lap, facing the mantelpiece which she kept spacious and uncluttered; with just a vase in chunky recycled glass in the centre, holding Calla lilies.’

After Uncle John lets her into the attic treasure trove full of mementoes of the mother she doesn’t remember, Jim returns to find a transformation:

‘She had framed the wedding photograph and the one of Mary with her and David, as well as a couple of others of the twins, and these and many unframed prints were crowded on the mantelpiece. It had lost the stylish, minimalist look she used to favour and was suddenly inhabited by numerous faces staring out.’

But Sarah is about to discover that families are not a neat and tidy affair; it is not only her mantelpiece that has become messy and out of control...

I can’t leave a discussion of setting without alerting you to an excellent post by blogger Kristen Lamb on using setting to deepen your characters: http://warriorwriters.wordpress.com/2013/08/22/show-dont-tell-using-setting-to-deepen-your-characters/. If you are here looking for writing tips, I can’t recommend Kristen’s blog highly enough, and this post sent me rushing back to my novel with a new zeal for using setting to show, rather than tell what a character is all about.

Glancing around my surroundings now, I wonder what they express about me... festering tea mugs, piled up notebooks and index cards, a teetering pile of undone ironing; pens on the floor (oh that’s where they all are!) and a cushion, inexplicably, on the printer. Is this the setting for a lazy, disorganised character who is barely coping with life? No no, I tell myself firmly, it’s a writer’s room, that’s what it is.