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Showing posts with label
Reflections: On the Magic of Writing.
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Showing posts with label
Reflections: On the Magic of Writing.
Show all posts
This article was inspired by an incident that I read about in the novelist Antonia White’s account of her early childhood in As Once in May.
It concerns what she called one of the great disappointments of her life. It happened when she was only four years old.
In addition to being a schoolmaster, her father gave private tuition to young men. Antonia got talking to one of these pupils while he was waiting for his lesson. He was so impressed by her knowledge that he gave her a gold coin, a half-sovereign!
When her father arrived and noticed the coin, he forced her to return it. He could not possibly allow her to accept it; it was far too much money for a child of her age. Despite his pupil’s efforts on Antonia’s behalf, her father was adamant. The coin went back into the young man’s pocket.
As she left the room, holding back her tears, she heard her father say:
“It was exceedingly generous of you, but I’m sure that you’ll see my point of view. No, no, she won’t be disappointed. I’m sure she knew all along she couldn’t possibly be allowed to keep it. Don’t worry. By tomorrow she’ll have forgotten all about it.”
This is what Antonia White said decades later:
“He was wrong. After seventy-two years I have not forgotten that breathless moment of possession and the bitter sense of injustice when the treasure was snatched away...”
This is a very good illustration of something that that really stands out in the biographies and autobiographies of many writers: how hard they take some things and how they often never forget and never forgive a childhood injury.
Diana Wynne Jones had this to say, in connection with being permanently affected by not being permitted to read fantasy books as a child:
“And it does bring you hard up against the responsibility adults have, if only because it shows you what a truly lasting impression can be made on a child.”
This is from her book Reflections: On the Magic of Writing, which is full of such insights.
A previous article gives details of two occasions when something that Diana Wynne Jones had just written about manifested in her life.
Diana Wynne Jones’s book Reflections: On the Magic of Writing contains two more examples of this phenomenon.
The first ‘coincidence’ happened at a time when she was working on her book Fire and Hemlock, for which the plot was, she thought, her own invention. An acquaintance railroaded her into a visiting a place where people started discussing a local legend - which strongly resembled her plot.
The second incident happened while she was working on Archer’s Goon. One of the characters discovers a newborn baby in the snow. The same acquaintance went out for a walk and found an abandoned baby!
The two incidents in Diana Wynne Jones’s own words:
The Fire and Hemlock incident
“Sometimes, however, the book comes true while I am actually writing it, and this can be quite upsetting.
Fire and Hemlock was one of those. One of the many things that happened while I was writing it was that an eccentric bachelor friend from Sussex University, who stayed with us while he was lecturing in Bristol, insisted on my driving him to some stone circles in our neighborhood. There, he began having mystic experiences, while I kept getting hung up astride the electric fences that crisscrossed the site. My outcries, he said, were disturbing the vibes, so he sent me to the local pub to wait for him.
As soon as I got there, the landlady and the other customers began talking about these same stone circles and related the local story about their origins. This story is called “The Wicked Wedding”: the bride, who is an evil woman, chooses a young man to marry, but at the wedding, the devil comes, kills the young bridegroom, and marries the lady himself.
This is the story behind Fire and Hemlock and, believe it or not, I had never heard it before - I thought I'd made it up. Well, after various other strange experiences, my eccentric friend went back to Sussex and I finished the book.”
Georgette Heyer was born on August 16th 1902.
Diana Wynne Jones was born on August 16th 1934.
There is nothing in Georgette Heyer’s novels relevant to the themes of this blog, although she has been featured here because of some similarities in her and Stella Gibbons’s lives.
Diana Wynne Jones is very different: her life and her books have been mentioned in several articles and there is still more material to come.
While Georgette Heyer never wrote about magic, witches or anything occult, Diana Wynne Jones wrote about little else. I wonder whether Georgette’ Heyer’s happy childhood and Diana Wynne Jones’s awful one had anything to do with this.
These two writers have only a few things in common.
They were both born in London and both moved around a lot - at least for a while. They were both heavy smokers, and both died from lung cancer.
While both were very tall, they were very different in appearance. Georgette Heyer was elegant, stylish and kept up with the fashions; Diana Wynne Jones was wild-haired and rather witch-like.
One of the biggest differences is their attitude to publicity.
Georgette Heyer kept herself from the world for most of her life. She is described as ‘ferociously reticent’.
Diana Wynne Jones gave interviews and talks; she visited schools; she wrote articles and spoke about the creative process and her life.
The two authors were usually treated very differently by people they met, as these two amusing anecdotes show:
I have written about some connections I made between certain scenes in Charlotte Brontë’s writings and events in her life.
I doubt whether she ever realised that incidents she had created and dwelt on in her imagination had manifested in the real world.
Diana Wynne Jones is another matter. She did notice a connection between what she was writing about and unexpected, unwelcome incidents in her life. This example comes from Diana Wynne Jones’s book Reflections: On the Magic of Writing:
“… And my books have developed an uncanny way of coming true. The most startling example of this was last year, when I was writing the end of A Tale of Time City. At the very moment when I was writing about all the buildings in Time City falling down, the roof of my study fell in, leaving most of it open to the sky.”
