Frailities and foibles, and the virtues hidden within the failings
It’s my contention that, however exaggerated a negative characteristic, there is a flipside that contains a virtue The nosy parker is the one who leaves the milk on the doorstep when you have covid. The chatterbox is the one who alerts you to the broken paving stone. In the 14 novels I’ve written, I have brought to the page about 64 characters, taking six people per novel as average. Where do they come from? I think there are bits and pieces of me and everyone I’ve ever met in my characters. I hope they are credible. I’m running a competition to find out.
Competition
I would love to hear from you if you have found anyone in any of my novels who has similar characteristics to yourself or to someone you have met. Give me a brief description of that real life person as well as the page number and title of the novel in which you found the broadly similar, fictional character. I may post your entry on my Facebook, Linked In or Twitter page. The person whose entry pleases me the most will receive a signed copy of So Far, So Good, the memoir on sixty years of marriage with Peter Barrett.
I don’t quite understand why I skim over compliments, barely registering them. What a waste! I’ve just re-found an email of praise from a writer friend whose opinion I value highly. Did I take it in on first reading? Not well enough, is the answer. I read it again this morning and glowed with pleasure; so much so that I will copy and paste it here.
Dear Susie,
I finished Flood & Flame a couple of days back and Lu has now done so, too, & I’m sure she’ll write to you.
I just wanted to say how much I had enjoyed it.
I thought the form perfect, the content beautifully done and the writing itself terrific. I completely fell for your characters, all in their different ways, and your account of lives over many decades rang so true and resounded hugely.
I have to say that the end had me gulping – it was terribly moving.
And if you really aren’t going to write another novel, I’m sure there’ll be more poetry, both on the page and off.
All love to you both and many felicitations for having created & produced something really special,
We’ve begun working on something new. Its working title is:-
Wandering and Wondering in Wales
an exploration
by Peter and Susan Barrett
INTRODUCTION
From a high point near our home on the borders of Devon and Somerset in the southwest of England, we can see Wales. Today, in the mid-winter sunshine, a shining band of white is visible on the far side of the greyish blue Bristol Channel. We wonder what town it is, so far away yet seeming so close. We plan to find out.
During our sixty-three years of our marriage, we’ve worked independently as artist and writer. We’ve also produced books together, the results of the notes and sketches we’ve made while spending time in various parts of the world, mainly America, Greece and New Zealand. It’s time to turn our attention to the country on our doorstep. Over the next six months we will explore the landscapes and seascapes, mountains and valleys, rivers and lakes, waterfalls and canals, railways and mines, and the many castles and curiosities of Wales.
The result will not be a guide book but a personal description of what we find, to be shared with people like us, who no longer wander far from a car park yet still wonder at the wonders to be found.
So Far, So Good is the title of our latest book. It’s the culmination of a year’s work, started during lockdown as a celebration of sixty years of marriage. The party we arranged for our diamond wedding anniversary in June 2020 couldn’t take place. The anniversary card Peter painted for me is now the cover of the book – the story of our life in words and pictures.
AVAILABLE NOW! SIGNED AND NUMBERED COPIES IN A LIMITED EDTION OF 100
SO FAR, SO GOOD Peter and Susan Barrett
Sixty years together in words and pictures
A 152-page softback book (240 x 270 cm) with 365 illustrations composed during the first months of the pandemic describing our life over eight decades, pre-covid, as artist and writer
£18 incl p&p, by cheque or BACS sort code 30-98-45 A/c 01330952
or £15 by hand. For postage abroad, please enquire.
P J and S M Barrett, Little Penn, Hemyock Devon EX153 SR, tel 01823.680192
We’ve been waiting for lockdown to ease before putting our latest book in the hands of the printers. Tomorrow we visit Short Run Press, Exeter, to see how Peter’s page layouts, which he has worked out on paper, will translate to digital.. SO FAR, SO GOOD is a 150-page book with illustrations on nearly every page. It shows, in words and pictures, how we have made our life together, shaped by our separate years of childhood, meeting as young adults and sixty years of marriage. We began working on the book in the summer of 2020, the year of our diamond wedding anniversary. Now, in April 2021, we are about to go into production. The back cover will show this oil painting of our local lane.
‘Along the lane’, oil painting by Peter Barrett
back cover text:
When Peter and Susan met and married in 1960 they shared similar ambitions – Peter to paint for a living, Susan to write. The present book completes an unintended trilogy charting the way they have fulfilled their dreams: Travels with a Wildlife Artist, the Living landscape of Greece, Columbus, 1986; The Garden of the Grandfather, Life in Greece in the 1960s, 2018; and now this book, So Far, So Good, sixty years together in words and pictures, which celebrates their diamond wedding anniversary in the midst of the covid pandemic, 2020.
COPIES WILL BE AVAILABLE AT £15 (+ £3 p&p) FROM MAY 2021
My mother’s only surviving and much younger brother was an occasional part of my and my sister’s childhood. He was a childless widower, his wife having died early on in their marriage. He used to visit us in Devon, riding to Tavistock from Sutton in Surrey on his BSA Bantam. On the day of his arrival, the pressing question always was: would Uncle Dicky cross the moor from Moretonhampstead, or take the longer, less exposed route via Okehampton? If his visit was in the summer, then he’d cross the moor and arrive looking like a tightly-wrapped, red-faced, camouflaged parcel. He was not a tall man. I think I’d reached the top of his head by the age of 14 or so. However, the energy contained within his small frame was boundless. He’d cram any number of rounds of golf and hands of bridge into the short time he was with us, before jumping on the Bantam and disappearing over the hill bound for his Sutton home.
What did I know about him? In childhood, not a great deal. His house had a brass cover to its front step which I used to polish when we went to stay with him. He had a housekeeper called Mrs Jones. Sometimes he had to ring her half way along a road out of London to ask her where he was going. (An absent-minded professor type for most of his life, he veered into dementia in his mid-90s). He took us to The Wizard of Oz and we went backstage because he knew the Tin Man. Or was it The Lion? Whoever it was, it was a supremely exciting meeting. Uncle Dicky masterminded London for us country bumpkins. He had a friend who was a writer with a mulberry tree in a Chelsea garden. In boat race season my sister and I were conflicted because Uncle Dicky had been at Oxford and our father at Cambridge. Our loyalty was mainly for Cambridge but we could equally well celebrate if Oxford won.
I knew he taught economics and economic history which was not, for me, exciting in any way at all. But my elder sister Jane appreciated Uncle Dicky and went to live with him so that she could study at the London School of Economics. I remember taking in the information that Uncle Dicky was something called a socialist which disturbed our grandparents. His sister, my mother, didn’t seem to think it mattered very much, but she was unhappy about his address: a socially undistinguished number 110 in a very long road of indistinguishable suburban houses. In the 30s, she said by way of explanation, many undergraduates were so left-wing they became communists. I could have learnt more about his views had I been up for it. In timid compromise between upbringing and inclination, I voted Liberal when I was old enough to vote. The schoolfriend who I shared a flat with was working for the Liberal Party and asked me to think of a slogan to print and place in the back windows of cars. Go with the Liberals! I suggested. Goodness knows what Uncle Dicky thought of my job as an advertising copywriter. Too capitalist for words. But he never indicated a shred of disapproval of his flighty younger niece.
Today he’s back with me, freshening up my memories, despite dying many years ago. This is because I’ve got down from the loft a huge great volume of ancient newsprint which I acquired from his second wife. It is a collection of the daily editions of The Times for a whole year: 1793. It measures 14 inches wide by 20 inches in height by three and a half inches deep. Within scuffed cardboard covers its layers of crinkle-edged pages look like the strata of mouse-coloured sedimentary rock. They smell mousy, too; yet they are amazingly unnibbled. I, and my predecessior owners, wrapped the volume securely. I will be able to extract nuggets of information about life in 1793, as reported in the Times, my unrealised intention for the last 10 or more years. This year my ideas have at last crystallised into the framework of a novel, which I’m calling HARRIET, NOW AND THEN. ‘Now’ is nowadays. ‘Then’ is the reign of George III, 1760 – 1815. Uncle Dicky’s volume, which he probably inherited from our mutual Mellersh family in Godalming, is coming into its own as background material – just so long as I can see the print clearly enough through a magnifying glass. My eyes could similarly date from the 18th century, judging by the difficulty I have in deciphering complete words due to macular degeneration.
However, the reason I’m writing this post does not lie in the volume itself. It comes from a cutting tucked between the first two pages. It’s from a 20th century newspaper and headed Men & Matters. Under the title Economy class, the writer (by-line “Observer“) describes Uncle Dicky on the occasion of his retirement after 30 years as secretary of The Economics Association. It starts: “The spread of economic literacy in Britain owes a great deal to Dickie Phillips.“
It continues: ….”An Oxford boxing blue and former teacher, he joined the Association in 1951 when the ‘dismal science’ was allowed in few British schools. The Association itself had only 100 members – mainly teachers interested in stimulating economics education.
“We had a lot of opposition at the start from some of the universities,” says Phillips. “They thought economics was too difficult to be taught in schools and were afraid that bad teaching might spoil the ground for them.“
...”Under his cheerfully eccentric but efficient administration the Association has exerted a growing influence in the educational world.”
Cheerful, eccentric, efficient – what a great combination. I think there may be many economists today who owe a lot to my uncle Dicky. I send salutes to him from today’s more understanding distance. I have no idea what he thought of my novels, but I can guess: he wouldn’t have bothered to read them. Fiction for him was a waste of time. The books on his shelves were all non-fiction, so he might have approved of the way I presented the family letters exchanged during World War Two. And I’m sure he would have been glad that the massive, mouse-grey volume of the Times of 1793 is about to be used as a vessel for research, even if it is in aid of fiction.
I know it seems beside the point to be talking about fiction in the face of the appalling pandemic. But Covid is having its deadly impact on every aspect of our present day life, no matter how we earn (or don’t earn) our living.
As I have begun writing a new novel, a problem has become apparent. The fiction I write is usually set in the present and the plots are wound around contemporary dilemmas and characters. How can I, and writers like me who like to create a credible reality, treat the pandemic? Do we take it into account? Or do we pretend it doesn’t exist in our “real” world?
This is not a dilemma for writers of genre novels set in the past or future – fantasy, sci-fi, historical or crime novels. Nor is it a difficulty if you want to write a story with Covid as the driving force. There will be lots of stories that deal with the pandemic. My puzzle is akin to those situations which prompt the expression “the elephant in the room,” that is, any subject too big to mention.
Should my fictitious characters, living in the present, be affected by the pandemic? Or should I let them live happily without a mention of it?
Novels reach the hands of their readers through reviews, recommendations, bookshops, libraries and readers’ groups. Naturally enough, readers want books that have the kind of objectively-awarded, quality hallmark that comes from being published by a traditional publisher. There is no such hallmark for self-published books.
Ever since I took a ten year break from writing and fell off my perch with mainstream publishers, I have tussled with this question: how can writers of thoughtful, well-written fiction assure potential readers that their work is worth reading? We swim in the vast ocean of self-published material, which has no arbiter of quality at all.
When I set up writersreadersdirect.com, I hoped to help myself and other skilled writers of thoughtful, entertaining novels to reach a readership. But the business of selecting the better from the worse was tiresome and time-consuming. Marketing and publicity were impossible on no budget at all. I now just look after myself, bringing out my recent novels on Amazon and contenting myself with a very small readership among my known contacts.
Every so often my mind reverts to my headline question. I know of Goodreads, of course, based in the US. For an outlay on review copies, you can get your novel reviewed but where do the reviews get you? Nowhere very much. Today I’m thinking of the many readers’ groups in England whose members read literary novels of a good standard. I wonder if it would be possible to marshall the support of these keen readers? Trouble is, they like to borrow the books on their lists from libraries, rather than buy them. So they don’t actually support the writers of those books, leaving aside the small sums that come from PLR to the authors who are most read in any case. If each group agreed to include one self-published novel a year in their reading list, chosen from a small selection circulated by … but here the mind fogs over.
We need something on the lines of an apple-sorting system. If there was a way to run novels down a shute which only let the well-written fiction drop into the collecting box, we’d have the necessary quality control in place! Has anyone out there got any ideas? And/or fellow feeling?
One of the hardest things about writing a novel, I find, is describing it in a few short sentences. With Covid 19 this is particularly hard. It seems such a frivolous waste of time to be writing fiction in a pandemic.
I didn’t realise when I started writing my present novel in 2019 how apposite it would turn out to be in 2020. Its underlying theme is the balance of power in relationships, and imprisonment of various kinds, in life, work and love. This theme echoes the effects of the virus.
Covid 19 has come along and taken us by surprise. Its immediate effect around the world has been, and will continue to be, tragic. But its lasting effect may turn out to be good rather than bad. There may be a re-balancing of power in the relationship between the poor and the rich, and the underdeveloped and developed regions of the world. Humanity may pay greater respect to, and take greater care of, the natural world we depend on. The virus, in its containment measures, has caused a kind of imprisonment in life, work and love. But it has also brought joy and happiness, companionship and emotional proximity.
It seems heartless to be writing fiction at such a time. But I bet there are thousands doing it. Judging by the flood of inventive and clever videos on YouTube, created by talented people usually employed outside the home, I expect there will be an increased flood of novels hunting for agents and publishers. Very few people don’t believe that they have a novel within them. They’ve heard it often enough. The men will be bashing out science fiction and thrillers; the women, romance. They will be thrilled with the completion of their work and expect fame and fortune pretty well at once. Some will self-publish. A few will find publishers. There will be readers who will be entertained, whose minds will be stimulated. Does creative work add to the world’s well-being? Yes, it does, as much for its providers as for its recipients.
So here’s the blurb for my just-completed novel ELFRIDA NEXT DOOR:
Taking coercive control to its limits, Nicolas keeps his wife in a hermit’s cell in the ruins of a priory at the bottom of his garden. Rachel, his new neighbour, becomes interested in the legend of Elfrida, the cell’s first occupant. This leads her into danger and gives Nicolas a new problem to solve. The balance of power in relationships, and imprisonment of various kinds in life, love and work, provide the underlying themes of this light, dark novel. Or is it a dark, light novel.
Do we see an accurate reflection of ourselves in a mirror? I think it’s a two-way process. If it is you yourself who is looking at the reflection, a lifetime’s doubts about what you look like get in the way of how you see yourself. So a mirror’s reflection of ourselves cannot be how others see us. It struck me today that it’s the same with writing. It is hard, if not impossible, to form a faithful picture of anything you’ve written yourself – well, at least I find it so. For that reason, I always want to hear readers’ views. It is not a matter of longing for praise. Somehow, praise can be dismissed, in the way that ‘how beautiful you are’ is seldom believed even by beauties. Any praise must be descriptive and valid to be heard. Easiest to believe and appreciate is reported enjoyment. I write to entertain a reader as well as to leave them with some thoughts about the underlying theme, which is usually about a quirk of human nature. If I didn’t need occasional validation, I would probably continue to write so long as I have fresh ideas, but the work would stay in a drawer. As it is, I do need to hear what people think of my work. That’s why I’ve continued to publish, despite not having an agent or a publisher. It’s become easier and easier to self-publish. CreateSpace is now part of Kindle Direct Publishing who produce ebooks for Kindle but also paperbacks to sell on Amazon. After an initial, stupid mistake on my part which resulted in my latest novel, Greek Gold, coming out in proof form in far too large a size, I corrected this fast and just a day later, up came the novel in Amazon’s book pages, right size and right format. A plea to anyone out there who reads this blog … please consider shelling out £5.50 plus postage to read this latest Susan Barrett novel and tell her, i.e. me, what you think. Compliments are welcome, of course, but make them credible. Severe criticism would be hard to bear, and maybe best kept to yourself! The crux of it is that I’d like to know if the novel works. It’s like a soft-boiled egg. Until it’s cracked open, you can’t be sure you’ve got it right. In the case of Greek Gold, I hope it’s not like the proverbial curate’s egg …
Greek Gold is available on Amazon co.uk as an ebook and in a paperback edition.
