Lost Down a Bright Yellow Rabbit Hole
Lost Down a Bright Yellow Rabbit Hole
‘How much research do you do for your books?’ That has to be one of the most frequent questions I’m asked at author Q&A sessions.
The honest answer is, too much. If you’re a curious person at heart, like me, research for a novel can become an addiction. The more you do, the more you have to do. You browse the internet or reference books, or even – in my case – go out ‘in the field’ to delve deeper into your subject. Then you come across an intriguing side-subject, and that leads to another, and another, and before you know it, hours of precious writing time have been eaten away. If you’re not careful you can find yourself down a rabbit hole mugging up on ancient Egyptian iconography, say, when your novel is a gangster story set in 1930s New York. All very fascinating. Of zero use to your book.
I’m prone to this. All the time I’m indulging myself, I pretty much know only a tiny fraction of what I learn will make it into my final manuscript. What’s worse, I write comic fiction, working hard to make my books funny, as well as meaningful – heart and humour. And there’s nothing worse than an ‘info dump’ for killing a joke stone dead. Of course, any novel should be credible and convincing. For that, you need to do a certain amount of research. But I’ve learnt over the years, acres of background exposition, with too many dates and irrelevant facts shoe-horned into the narrative, are comedy black holes.
It’s hard, when you fall in love with a subject and have researched the heck out of it, to have to leave out all that lovely knowledge. Take me and ochre pits. What? You’ve never heard of them? You don’t even know what ochre is? You haven’t lived! Nor had I, to be truthful, before I found myself disappearing down that particular bright yellow rabbit hole.
Ochre, I now know, is a mineral pigment, commonly yellow or orange but also ranging in colour from red to purple, dug out of the ground and used in the manufacture of artists’ paints. Or at least it was until some clever clogs in the 1920s found a way of creating a synthetic version and the English industry collapsed.
In their day, however, Oxford ochres, mined at a place called Shotover Hill, were the bees’ knees. Reckoned of exceptional purity, some said they were the best in the world. As such, they were used by the best artists, including JMWTurner, who, I was thrilled to discover in my browsing, had depicted an Oxford ochre pit in one of his landscapes. For centuries a royal hunting forest, Shotover is now a country park open to everyone and – by happy coincidence – not more than a dozen miles from where my family and I live.
How does this geological, historic and artistic information accumulated in my rambling research relate to A Novel Solution, my latest comic fiction? The book is, after all, about a wannabe novelist, a lovable loser, whose life turns into more of a fiction than anything she’s capable of writing.
I had plot and characters – in principal, at least. What I lacked was a location, somewhere memorable, unusual, off-the-beaten track, ideally with an underlying, unsettling atmosphere. Shotover, renamed Oaker Wood, and its ochre pits fitted the bill perfectly and became central elements of the novel.
I decided all this before I’d set eyes on the actual pits. Truth be told, I was having trouble finding them in the almost three hundred acres of unspoilt woodland and hidden valleys that make up the country park. To say I was obsessed by this time is not an exaggeration. In fact, I toyed with the idea of making The Ochre Pit the title of my book, until it dawned on me that this made it sound more like a geology textbook than a comedic suspense novel.
More visits to Shotover followed, searching for the remains of the pits. I’d walked there many times, but never paid much attention to what lay under my feet. Now I was astonished to notice how yellow the soil was. Bright yellow. I was in the right neck of the woods but where were the disused workings? I wandered about in the undergrowth for some time before almost falling into the nettle-infested holes that are all that’s left of them.
So the ochre workings of my book really do exist. I have pictures to prove it. Should you find yourself in Shotover Country Park, however, and go looking for them, beware. Though it is without doubt an evocative, bosky place, weighty with history and natural beauty, you will search in vain for the dramatic pits of my book.
What can I say? I’m a novelist. I make things up. I juiced up the ochre pit setting to ramp up the excitement of the climactic scenes of A Novel Solution. Research can only get you so far. Then imagination has to take over.
sueclarkauthor2020
@SueClarkAuthor
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In a varied writing career, Sue Clark has contributed to newspapers, magazines, trade journals and guide books, as well as penning comedy scripts for BBC radio and TV stars such as David Jason, Lenny Henry and Tracey Ullman.
After she was able to give up the old nine-to-five, she did what she’d always wanted to do and became a full-time novelist. She took a creative writing course at Oxford University, joined a writing group and – at last! – unshackled her imagination and let her love for comedy run free.
The result, her debut comic novel Note to Boy (‘She wants her celebrity life back. He just wants a life.’) was released in 2020, and was a Pencraft award-winner. Her second, A Novel Solution (‘When your life becomes fiction’) was published in June 2024.
A NOVEL SOLUTION
‘It’s a bit tricky to find. Just down the lane from the old ochre pit.’With these words, Trish, badly bruised by life, is catapulted into the world of celebrity author, Amanda Turner.Her marriage on the rocks, no job, and at odds with her teenage daughters, Trish vows to reinvent herself. ‘Like Madonna, ‘ she tells her teens. ‘Only as a writer.’Naively, she pins her hopes on arrogant Amanda to nurture her and weekly classes begin at Amanda’s gloomy house in the woods. Trish takes an instant dislike to Amanda’s strapping young handyman, Pavel. Her suspicions grow, as an air of foreboding – as well as a nasty smell – hang over the house.When Amanda vanishes, it’s left to Trish to mount a rescue. Is she woman enough for the job? Will she ever write that bestseller?Funny and touching, A Novel Solution is an engaging and uplifting story of a woman’s struggle to sort her life out.
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