Differing Points of View

When I started writing I wanted to be a novelist, and wrote a first draft of one when I was in my early 20s. I wrote what I knew…that was the advice for writers. I sent it off for a crit. I was told (I’m paraphrasing here), that if I wrote about uninteresting people from uninteresting places that I wouldn’t get anywhere.  I was very down.  I took to my bed.

And then got up again, when I realised that by ‘un-interesting people’ he meant working-class, and by ‘un-interesting places’ he meant the English Black Country*.  I was angry.  Was my world view to be deemed lesser because of where I was looking from?

In tandem with this novel writing, I was making a career for myself as a performance poet.  In that world, the things I love doing such as writing from the viewpoint of others to create character pieces, writing comedic verse, and using the dialect and vernacular of the English Black Country didn’t seem to be a problem.  Still isn’t a problem.  I’ve performed all over the UK, and know that people will tune in to a dialect or patois if given the chance to listen.  Surely that should’ve been the same with fiction.

I learned a lot from writing my first novel which, despite being shortlisted for the Mslexia unpublished novel prize in 2012, still remains just that.  Unpublished. Some of the agents and publishers who read it because of the short-listing said positive things about my work, whilst also still saying things I’d heard before,  “Maybe dialect isn’t such a good idea…it might put people off.” “Maybe set it somewhere else….because a story should be able to work anywhere shouldn’t it?”

Unperturbed**, I wrote a second.  And I admit that the second is infinitely better for my having written the first, and having taken good advice about pace and the narrative arc.  But did I drop the dialect as suggested?  Did I avoid writing working-class characters?  Did I avoid setting it in a so-called ‘un-interesting place’***?

NO!

In fact, I went at it with more conviction. I wanted to celebrate who I am and where I’m from, and the way we speak is integral to that.  Ironically, or perhaps not, the novel is called ‘Dogged’. It came out with a small press, the wonderful Ignite Books, in April this year.

In part this acceptance for publication now is due to the resurgence of interest in working-class writing, coming as a result of Kit De Waal’s Common People (I was one of the featured writers. Thank you, Kit).

So what’s my new novel about?  Well, it follows two women in their late 70s, and their attempts to protect the contents of a tartan shopping trolley (an undisclosed amount of money won at the bingo) from ne’er do wells and hoodlums on the mean streets of Wolverhampton****.

Although it’s a third person narration, at times the narrator inhabits not only human heads, but also the heads of dogs, the occasional canary, and even the sun gets a look in at one point.

I was once told anthropomorphism wasn’t really the done thing in poetry, that it’d gone out of fashion.  Here we go again…me getting it wrong!  But that’s the good thing about fashion it comes back in again like a tide.*****

I’ve got many performance poetry pieces where I become things.  In one I’m a grandma flamingo in Dudley Zoo.  In another I become the canal.  Both of these poems appear in my poetry collection ‘Close’ (Offa’s Press).  In that collection I also become a fox, a cat, and at one point a candlestick.  “Never centre your poems…sign of madness.” I was once told on a creative writing MA.  And yes, it is a convention to never centre your work, and you shouldn’t…except sometimes you should, particularly when what you want to say needs to be said in the voice of a candlestick.

I find writing as a non-human thing liberating.  It allows me to write things I wouldn’t dare write as myself.  In the same way as a ventriloquist’s doll can get away with much more than the person working it. It’s great to vent in both sense of the word.  Writing this way can also be a good exercise in sustaining metaphor, by using relevant language and terms connected to the thing you are writing as.

For me having used personification and anthropomorphism extensively in my poetry, it wasn’t a huge leap to include it in my novel.  And I had fun doing it.

So if you want to write as an orange highlighter****** , the dog that’s just gone past outside, a money plant, or a cuckoo clock, or from your uniquely working-class perspective then my advice would be don’t let differing viewpoints about what is or isn’t the done thing stop you.

And on that note…I’m off to see what the kettle has to say for itself.

Emma Purshouse

*The English Black Country is endlessly fascinating. He was talking through his arse.

**That does mean gutted but resilient doesn’t it?

***I repeat the English Black Country is endlessly fascinating.  He was talking through his arse.

****People of the Black Country will, at this point, argue about whether Wolverhampton is part of the Black Country. It will go on for hours. Tis…Tay.

***** Looks admiringly at her flares.

****** probably best not to write in orange highlighter, not sure publishing is quite ready for that yet.   

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Tags: featured, women writers

Category: On Writing