Stealing Voices

One of the great things about being a writer is that you can be a thief or a jackdaw, picking up bits of information, sound-bites, ideas from pretty well anywhere. Of course you mustn’t plagiarise, but remember that Shakespeare pinched all his stories/plots from other writers. There are several places where you can find stories and the most obvious ones are newspapers and magazines. In this case you will be stealing from other people’s lives but then I reckon that is what every good writer does. And if you take stories from the newspapers or similar sources rather than from your own life experiences, you are less likely to step on the toes of family members who might be offended.

Even within your own family you might make mistakes: your own memory is not always to be trusted. I wrote a poem once about a childhood incident that took place in the days when there was a late evening post. My memory is that I was sent out to the front door to welcome the prophet Elijah, part of the Passover ceremony celebrated once a year by my not very religious family. As I moved towards the front door, a hand came through the letter-box and dropped a letter: obviously the evening postman. But to me it was of course the hand of Elijah and I was so terrified I couldn’t even scream. When I showed this poem to my older sister just a few years ago, she said: “That didn’t happen to you, that happened to me. You’ve pinched my story.” I could of course have written in the third person and then the “she” could have been any child. Moreover, the “I” in a poem does not have to be autobiographical any more than the “I” in a piece of prose fiction.

So where are the best places to find stories no matter who they belong to? I find the Blind Dates in the Guardian Saturday magazine, or the family agony aunt questions in the Guardian Family supplement useful in suggesting relationships and possible plots. If you go online, you can get the Irish census information for free so that a whole street of characters will start to come alive for you every ten years. If you visit your local archives, you can find police and court records, head-teachers’ logs. Here is a website where someone has summarised the heads’ logs over a long period, see it here, but if you look yourself, you can find the day-to-day details. I found one log in Sheffield for 1865 where a pupil teacher had continual arguments with the head. I doubt a present day School Direct trainee teacher would dare to be so outspoken.

If you are an eavesdropper on buses and trains, you can maybe get a whole story for free. I made up a play about families in the village where I taught, after I heard one mother say to another, referring to their two eight-years-old daughters who were sitting in front of me on the bus: “They are so looking forward to being sisters.” I sat for some time trying to work out how two kids who are not already sisters might become sisters: adoption, new marriage of parent, sister of one marrying a brother of the other – that would make them sisters-in-law at least. I settled on this last possibility and wrote a play for children about family and village politics set at the time of the miners’ strike in 1984 when this particular village was split between strikers and blacklegs.

So, once you have the germ of a story, you can do what you like with it: say “what if” and fictionalise to make it more intriguing. My most recent foray into historical fiction has resulted in a sequence of poems in the voices of all the people who impinged or might have impinged on the life of a Victorian woman, Sarah Simpson, who lived from 1830 till 1919, starting life in Sheffield, crossing the Atlantic with a Father on the run from creditors, and then marrying into a slave-owning cotton plantation family. The research in house deeds, court records, newspapers and USA genealogy websites was actually done by the present owner of the house in which Sarah lived in the 1830s and 40s. When I heard about his research, I said “That would make a good story,” and the owner of the house said: “Feel free.”

So I started writing poems in the voices of Sarah, her mother, one of her sisters. When there was no evidence, for example, about the slaves in the family she married into, I researched slave stories of the time and fed them into my narrative. I finished up with 23 poems in the sequence which was recently performed at Sheffield’s Off the Shelf Festival. I’m beginning to think it could be a novel or a film now.

As Nina Milton wrote in a recent blog a writer has to get to know their characters. And I got to know Sarah and all the people in her story bit by bit as I wrote each of the poems. Some writers are planners, and know from the start what their characters are like and what is going to happen to them. To some extent, the character and plot were a given for me because the story was based on a real person’s life. But I didn’t know everything about Sarah until I began to write. So I stole Sarah’s voice and made up some more voices. I didn’t know whether Sarah would have supported her slave-owning husband or whether she would have been on the side of the slaves but as I began to write that bit of the story, Sarah’s voice came through clear: she didn’t approve of slavery.

I don’t think it matters whether you are a planner or an explorer. What is important is that you redraft your writing. You look at structure and plot, you look at point of view and character, you look at language, you look at setting and detail. And whether it is prose, poetry or script you make changes. Then you look at it again and sometimes you might go back to the original but the important thing is the re-reading and thinking about your writing.

So if you haven’t started on a life of crime yet, start thinking about where you can make your first robbery. If you want to share in my life of crime, Sarah Simpson’s Story is available from me for £4.00 including postage: email me (lizcashdan@oca.ac.uk) in the first place with your address and I will provide you with my address to send the £4.00 to.