Penelope Swithinbank has just had a week-long official blog tour to launch her new book Walking Back to Happiness. I am thrilled that she agreed to guest blog here to talk about what it was like to write the book…
“Good artists copy; great artists steal” Picasso.
Austin Kleon, the young American writer and artist, uses Picasso’s line to illustrate how we ‘steal’ ideas from everything around us, and advises us to focus on how to transform, remake, improve, thus unlocking our creativity. And, he warns, ‘computers have robbed us of the feeling that we are making things’ (steallikeanartist.com). Simply using pen and paper can help us to be more creative.
You often don’t know what you think of something until you write it down and describe it. I discovered that as I sat and wrote my journal each evening after completing the daily steps of a long walk. We were backpacking across France, my husband and me, from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic, partly to celebrate our retirement and partly in an attempt to heal the pain of a broken marriage.
Each evening, after a shower and change of clothes, and hopefully, tea or something stronger, I used a good pen and a beautiful journal to record the day’s experiences – places, people, conversations, thoughts, feelings. Someone once said that genius can write on the back of an envelope but mere talent requires a fountain pen and excellent paper. It certainly helps.
Margot Asquith, a well-known hostess and socialite, as well as wife to a prime minister, published a work in the early 1920s, based on her extensive diaries. When complimented on it, she is said to have replied, ‘Keep a diary, my dear and later on, perhaps, the diary will keep you.’
It was not in my mind to keep a diary in order to write a book about the 330-mile walk. But when the God-given prompt came, the daily accounts were there to be enlarged and rewritten. And for the most part, I wrote it chronologically – it was, after all, an account of getting from A to B.
Chronological seems easy and straightforward; but it can come over as dull and predictable. Sometimes it’s good to ask if there is some other way to write a memoir. For example, Penelope Lively’s autobiography, A House Unlocked, has the ‘umbrella’ of her grandparents’ house in Somerset, but her life story is told using different objects in the house. Rather than the ‘cradle to the grave’ autobiography, she has a more kaleidoscopic approach to time. In Moon Tiger Lively has Claudia say, ‘Chronology irritates me. Shake the tube and see what comes out.’ So there are some flashbacks in my book, and some pointers to what has gone before.
I tried to remember to ‘show not tell’. Significant sounds or smells, or the response of the body – the ‘sand between the toes’ image where you make the reader actually feel what your words are bringing to mind. Or describing the colour as if to a visually impaired person, and the sound to the deaf. Margaret Forster, writing about Daphne du Maurier’s father in Daphne du Maurier draws the reader in with noting that at a certain theatre, ‘Gerald du Maurier was scoring an immense success, the night his new daughter was born, in a light comedy entitled Brewster’s Millions.’ Much more interesting than merely ‘Daphne’s father was an actor.’
So I was noticing what had happened each day; I used the senses; I used the weather. I used people, conversations, a sense of time and place. I used my own reactions and feelings, because this is memoir, after all. And later, when I was writing the book, when there was a danger of it all becoming too serious, I added humour to lighten the touch.
Morning by early morning, I sat up in bed, writing desk across my knees, and I typed my story. I made myself do it for a couple of hours every weekday for several months. Until it was done, and I’d reached nearly 60,000 words, and the story had reached the Atlantic. Then I sent it to my beta readers – a few good friends, some acquaintances who would be honest, my (grown-up) children – and a professional editor.
It cost £100 for that edit (www.thebooklab.co.uk). And it was worth every penny! The editor divided the story into ‘blog size’ sections within chapters of different lengths. People have short attention spans, he said; people are busy. A short section can be read quickly without the need to concentrate for too long.
Then he took out all my erudite words. He told me it read like something from Brideshead Revisited, the book I had been reading while in France. I took that as a compliment! But he reminded me that the majority of people are not going to plough through that style of writing. I had to remember my target audience, their likely preferred writing styles, their vocabulary. This was for the normal market, not professors of literature. Fewer adverbs, plain English, making every word earn its place. And he removed all the descriptive speech words, such as ’retorted’ or ‘cried’, and put back the basic ‘said’ or ‘says’.
Lytton Strachey, a great biographer of the early 20th century, advised the writer to ‘aim at a brevity which excludes everything which is redundant and nothing that is significant’. That much at least has not changed!
Eventually came the final edit. I found it helpful to print it in a different font and different colour, to trick the brain into being more objective. And then, I went to a writing day organised by the Association of Christian Writers, something I’d booked several months earlier, never guessing I would have a manuscript waiting to be revealed. The editor had recommended a particular publisher; to my surprise, the co-publisher was one of the speakers that day and I was able to talk with her, whereupon she asked me to send her my manuscript immediately. The rest, as they say (and you should never use clichés, of course) is history. And an answer to prayer.
Penelope Swithinbank is an avid walker and spends a lot of her time stomping in the hills and valleys near her home outside Bath. She is a chaplain at Bath Abbey and a spiritual therapist and counsellor for clergy (and some normal people too). Since becoming a vicar nearly 20 years ago, she has worked in churches in the UK and the USA, and has led pilgrimages in the UK and in Europe. She and her husband Kim have been married for more than 40 years and have three children and six grandchildren. Penelope rarely sits down, loathes gardening and relaxes by walking, reading, going to the theatre or playing the piano. She is the author of two books, Women by Design and Walking Back to Happiness and is currently working on her third, due out in 2020: Scent of Water, a devotional for times of spiritual bewilderment and grief, especially after bereavement. She also contributes to Bible reading notes for Scripture Union. https://penelopeswithinbank.com