Interviewed by Maria Grace

Maria Grace has kindly featured an interview with me on her blog "Random Bits of Fascination"

Non Fiction – Some Techniques and Ethics

I am not going to pretend I know all about writing non fiction, although it is the genre in which I have had most success. Basically, I have written about what I know, or what I could find out, and since I have specialised in equestrian matters, this is where my work has been published. Carriage Driving and Native Pony magazines, and small specialist publishers, have taken and paid for my work over the years.

While non fiction is for me the easiest route to publication, it’s not without its drawbacks. For a start, you have to know what you are talking about, which makes it a long haul: I have been interested in horses since I was two and a half, got into riding and working with them (usually unpaid) from sixteen, but didn’t have a pony of my own till I was twenty-eight. Until then, I had just one non-fiction piece published for money – an account of an unusual riding lesson, which earned me ten guineas from Light Horse when I was seventeen.

Actually, putting that on paper is rather sobering. Perhaps if you write fiction for ten years before achieving any publication you are doing better than I did. So take heart!

“Hoofprints in Eden”, published by Hayloft in 2005, was two years in the making. By the time I got around to writing it I had 35 years of horse experience behind me (and happy to admit that in many areas I am still a novice) but I had one priceless asset: I lived, and still do, in the homeland of the Fell pony breed about which I wanted to write. I also had the experience of writing for the specialist magazines, which had taught me how long it took to gather material for an article, and therefore I was prepared for a long haul to get the information I wanted to put into the book.

“Hoofprints” is not just about ponies. I wanted to get the real voices of the people who breed them, the language and the background and “The Knowledge”. As it happens, the Fell pony breed is becoming known world-wide, but the export of stock does not carry with it the sort of information which you can hear at a Cumbrian horse sale or a pony show. I knew, from questions that were put to me in other capacities, there was a need for knowledge among those who had taken ponies to their home countries, Germany, France, Holland, Sweden and (the most difficult and opinionated of all) North America. Now, I am not a native Cumbrian but an import from Cheshire, so if I were to write just in my own voice, to advise on the keeping and the history of the breed, it would not go down well with my neighbours. They were not only born here but bred to the keeping of Fell ponies, as were their fathers and the generations before that. I might sell a few copies of the book, but I would never be welcome to write another. Therefore, I had to think of another approach.

As you will have gathered, I do have some experience of ponies. But those whose opinions I valued had the inherited knowledge of decades, even centuries, behind them. I decided I would interview those whose record in the Fell Pony Society Stud Book showed that they had been breeding the ponies for longer than my own knowledge: at the time, the cut off point was 30 years. That gave me some 20 people to visit. Being already employed (at the local University) I really only had weekends to do the interviewing, so immediately the timescale became a lengthy one, since I would have to spend one day doing the interview and a week of evenings transcribing the conversation into a typescript. Realistically, too, nobody was going to want to talk to me at busy times on their farms, such as lambing, calving, haytime, silage time, or autumn sales. It helped that I’d done all those things myself and knew the farming year from the inside, so could gauge when I would and would not be welcome. I wrote a letter to the 20 people I wanted to listen to.

One person phoned me back agreeing to be interviewed.

5% is a normal response for any mailshot, so I wasn’t disheartened. On a cold, windy Sunday afternoon, armed with the silly questions that I’d collected from overseas and from “outside Cumbria”, I went up into the hill country to interview my first Fell pony breeder.

It was a long and involved conversation, and I was glad of the small cassette recorder which I placed on the coffee table between me and my interviewee. I don’t do shorthand, and even if I did, the writing down of conversations that are largely in dialect would be both difficult and disrupting to the flow, so the recorder was a must.

I do not hide the fact that I’m recording what is said. I make a point of putting the equipment somewhere highly visible, and I encourage the person I’m interviewing to tell me if they want the machine stopped when they get to an area that they don’t want published. It does happen occasionally. I also reassure them that once I have transcribed the interview, I will send them the full transcript so they can strike out anything further that they don’t want printed. Their confidence is of the utmost importance. Tempting though it is to go ahead anyway and write about the odd facts they consider sensitive, I have to respect my interviewees’ wishes. If I revealed in print that Mr X has always had a grudge against Mr Y and will not place his ponies in the show ring, or that Miss A alleges that Mrs Z’s famous stallion was not really bred the way she said he was, not only would I be open to libel suits, but nobody in this tightly knit little world would ever tell me anything again. And even here I’m not saying that those are real allegations, they are just examples!

That interview told me a lot of things. First, there was a huge amount of information to be recorded. Therefore the book was going to be worthwhile. Second, every pony breeder was going to tell me about similar things – how he got started, how long his family had been breeding Fells, what stock he used and where it came from, and accounts of show ring successes and of ponies sold for high prices to foreign millionaires. Up to that first interview I had vaguely thought of writing the book as a series of chapters about the various pony studs, but it became clear that it would be very repetitive and boring to do it that way. Also, as I listened and re-listened to the rich Cumbrian dialect, I realised my book had to retain the speakers’ original words. Who was I, an over-educated offcomer, to rewrite the experience of the people who really knew what they were talking about? “I was there and saw what happened.” I stopped thinking in terms of being a writer, and began to think instead as a producer of a radio programme, where the voices of those who are involved are the ones that tell the tale.

Perhaps a third of the book as it now stands is actual speech from the pony breeders themselves. My task was to select, prune, and present the information they so pithily expressed.

But so far, I have only told you about the first interview. That’s the easy one – where the person you’ve contacted is up for the job and realises that it will be good publicity for his ponies which will translate into sales. The next step was to persuade all the others to take part!

Cumbrian farmers regard every letter as a demand on their time, and those I know don’t use the telephone much except for business. Of my 20 interviewees in 2004/5 only two were connected to the internet – and neither of them used e mail by choice. Knowing all this, fortunately, I also knew that lack of response did not mean lack of interest. I solved the communication problem by telephoning, reminding them of the letter I’d sent, and arranging to meet when it was convenient to them. Two of my interviewees turned out to be really shy, but only one of those, the widow of a famous breeder, refused completely to be interviewed. She said that I should have come to interview her husband while he was alive (in fact I had done so, and produced an article as a result) and, correctly, she did not want her words to be quoted now as if her husband had said them. However, she did let me use a photograph she’d taken of her husband, and as every other person had extensive anecdotes to give me about him, his influence on the Fell pony is threaded through almost every chapter of the book and I feel we’ve done him justice nonetheless.

There were hiccups. One or two people were a touch worried about how I was going to present what they’d said. One elderly gentleman read the transcript I sent him and wrote back courteously that his words were a load of old rubbish and he didn’t want me to use them. I responded by expressing my sincere regret that people would not be able to read what he had said. In my letter I sent him part of a chapter, to show how I would weave in quotations from various breeders, including himself, to make points in the flow of the text. After that he replied that he “should have realised that you knew what you were doing” and he was happy for me to continue!

By that time I had settled on the shape of the book. I began by introducing Cumbria and the background of hill farming. I collected a glossary of dialect terms, which my overseas correspondents could not otherwise have understood; created maps to show where the breeders lived; and introduced the various studs in order of seniority – all based on fact, and calculated not to give any excuse for jealousy or accusations of bias. I used the Fell Pony Society’s own descriptions of the breed to open the chapter on what Fell ponies are like, and discuss its background. The easiest way to continue was to follow the stages of a Fell pony’s early life – from conception, foaling, and growing up, to its sale, education and the uses to which it might be put. Feeding, veterinary considerations, the breeders’ ideal ponies, and the future of the breed, completed a sequence that felt logical and avoided the repetition that had threatened to kill the idea in the initial stages.

The actual writing went on over several months. The business of publication isn’t my main point here, but perhaps I should say that I approached a publisher with an outline and some draft chapters as soon as I had a few interviews to quote. After a meeting, which went successfully, I got on with the writing.

During all this, I was also collecting photographs to illustrate the book. I had many of my own that I could use, I was lent old family photographs by breeders, and the FPS gave me permission to access its archive. Although copyright was not forgotten, it only impinged on the book once when I contacted a photographer in the South of England for permission to use an image he had created. He was touchingly pleased that I had bothered to ask what his fee was – a telling sidelight on the realities of copyright law.

Of course, I did some things wrong. I got two pony names wrong on images and the book made it to press before they were spotted. Unlike publication in an electronic medium, once the print run is done, amendments are no longer possible. Every time I sell a book from my personal stock I have to bung a label on one of the front pages pointing out the errors. Although I only made four small errors in a manuscript of over 60,000 words, believe me, I wish I had not made even those.

Well, that’s the tale. “Hoofprints” has been read in Europe and America as well as Britain, and I know from the feedback I get that it is doing the job it set out to do: new owners of Fell ponies have told me they refer to it as their “Bible”.  I am prouder of that – on behalf of my interviewees – than I am of the award the book won in 2006.

I hope you can see from this that non-fiction writing is both hard work and very rewarding. Maybe it’s something you’d be interested to try.

Resolution

It’s the first of the year and I’m going to lose weight

so I’ll bounce out of bed when I wake.

I shall weigh all the food that I put on my plate

when I’ve had just one more slice of cake.

It’s the first of the year and I’m planning to write

in a diary backed with gold foil.

I have filled up my pen, but the page is so bright

I’m afraid it is too nice to spoil.

It’s the first of the year and I’m joining the gym;

I shall tone up from tiptoes to crown.

I shall stretch and lift weights and become fit and slim,

but first I shall have a sit down.

It’s the first of the year and I’m giving up booze

since last night, when I fell on the cat.

I’ll try to be sober. Can I be excused

to lift two or three glasses to that?

Classy Language

Vocabulary

For some time I've been increasingly uncomfortable with the language that modern writers put into the mouths of historical characters. While I acknowledge that stories must be written in a style that readers find easy, there are times when a writer's personal vocabulary could benefit from being channelled to mark out a character's lifestyle and personal circumstances.

Georgette Heyer plundered cant and slang dictionaries for her lower-class characters. For example, in The Toll Gate her highwayman Jerry and people who associate with him have a quite different vocabulary from that of Captain Staple, who is the son of an aristocratic family.  (However it's not a good idea to copy Heyer's expressions, because in the same way that modern computer programmers build-in redundant code she also invented her own colourful phrases to check how many rivals were plagiarising her work.)

Historic correspondence

Original letters suggest that even during the Regency and the reign of William IV, everyday polite English between people of the educated class was surprisingly like the language we write today. A glance at the correspondence between William Wordsworth and his wife Mary in the early years of the 1800s, or the letters from 1829 onward between a young lawyer, William Holt, and his fiancee Mary Cox, shows that sentences were typically long, few contractions were used (can't, won't), and the & mark often replaces and. Other than those stylistic points the language isn't noticeably archaic. Most of the time they use the formal "you" when addressing each other, and use "thee" only when writing of more intimate feelings.

Spoken language

There's considerable difficulty for writers in researching spoken language, because recorded conversations even in works such as Mayhew's London Labour and the London Poor are filtered through the author's hand. They are probably a factual record of what was said, but they are not verbatim transcriptions. A further difficulty in composing historical conversations is that regional phrases and dialect would have been even more strongly localised than they are now, yet we don't want to make a character's dialogue totally incomprehensible to modern readers.

U and Non-U

In 1956 the terms 'U' meaning Upper Class and 'Non-U' meaning non-Upper Class appeared in Alan Ross's academic paper for the University of Birmingham: U and Non-U – An Essay in Sociological Linguistics. Nancy Mitford also wrote about these differences in 1956 in Noblesse Oblige.

There are some interesting distinctions made, notably the fact that the vocabularies of working class and upper class were similarly robust and forthright, while it was the middle class who used "delicate" phrases involving euphemisms and French words. This may sound strange, but compare the following lists. Which words will be in the vocabulary of the upper class, and which of the middle class?

loo lavatory sofa napkin drawing room supper lunch(eon) sitting room pudding house England vegetables spectacles looking glass sick underwear rich

toilet bathroom settee serviette parlour tea dinner lounge sweet home Britain greens glasses mirror ill lingerie wealthy

Food for thought

While some of the terms above are relatively modern, for historical fiction I hope the point is still clear: upper class characters shouldn't express themselves in fancy language, any more than working class ones should. The characters who do will mark themselves at once as middle class.

Good writing for an English "period" story should reinforce my belief in the society being described, and when the author writes about aristocrats in a way that is unmistakably middle-class, s/he loses my trust. This, in my observation, is a point where a good many modern writers (and especially writers who are not English-born) fall down.

Further reading

http://www.debretts.com/etiquette/british-behaviour.aspx

Hesitation waltz

I was reading out a poem in the writing class.

“Maybe the workmen
knocking down the old long-house
to build upon its footprint
stopped to help… ”

I saw out of the corner of my eye the tutor make an impatient movement. However, she waited till I had finished before she pointed out that “perhaps” and “maybe” have no place in poetry.

“Every word has to count,” she said. “If something’s uncertain, dig deeper. Dig until you find out why you’re not certain – is it you or is it something else? And if so, what?”

I was reminded of this a few days ago when I was beta-reading the draft of a novel (not one of mine). Every now and again I came across a phrase using “may” to imply uncertainty:

She wanted to stay, but common sense told her there may not be any news for some time

I don’t mind the construction of the sentence, but I want to put “might not” there. May is present tense, might is past. The Oxford English Dictionary (http://oxforddictionaries.com/words/may-or-might) says:

Some people insist that you should use may (present tense) when talking about a current situation and might (past tense) when talking about an event that happened in the past. …  In practice, this distinction is rarely made today and the two words are generally interchangeable:

I might go home early if I’m tired.
He may have visited Italy before settling in Nuremberg.

With all due respect to the OED, I think this confuses the issue. The second example reads like an extract from an essay or an academic paper, in which an author’s thoughts are usually present tense. The present form, may, is acceptable in that context even though the sentence discusses events in the past. However, in fictional narrative where the commonest tense is the past (he did this, she did that), the past form of “might” is going to make more sense.

She hoped he hadn’t recognised her, because he might cause trouble.

With the tutor’s advice in mind I usually step back when I rewrite, and try to find another way of putting the same ideas without using this phrase. This first version only suggests that the main character is timid. I might (oops) rephrase it by writing more fully:

She hoped he hadn’t recognised her. He’d been violent in the past and she was afraid of him.

Getting around the need to use either may or might results in the second version which gives us a background for her anxiety. It isn't always necessary but small edits like this can prevent us jolting the reader out of their belief in what we are writing and also offer the chance to add extra depth to our story.

COACHMAN - a spare chapter

Not all the scenes I wrote for COACHMAN made it into the final form of the novel. Here is an extract that might have been part of the final chapter:

The day they travelled north it was a sharp, bright morning, a day on which George was impatient to drive and irritable at the thought of sitting on a train with nothing to do. To make things worse, Lucy had remembered the smoked and sooted confinement of second class railway travel, and insisted he wore his oldest coat. Its shabby appearance laid another smudge across his mood.

A four-wheeled cab waited in the street with their belongings packed on the roof, the damaged writing case among them, strapped up with an old belt. However, George would not trust his whip up there, and carried it as always with the long lash looped and tied.

Mrs Bowe had wrapped herself in a shawl to lead the farewells. Tom Thetford stood by with a stolid face, and observed the fussing as though determined that no-one should have hysterics while he was about, while Mrs Bowe made sure that Betsy had securely wrapped her few possessions for the journey. Betsy herself was bundled inside a secondhand coat so large it appeared to be wearing her.

‘Now you girls,’ said Mrs Bowe, not really making any distinction between Lucy and Betsy, ‘look after yourselves, and make sure this coachman fellow does the same. I know what these driving men can be like. Betsy – you imp – behave yourself when you get to your new home – it’s a crying shame you leaving me to instruct a new girl from scratch – but it’s your good heart, I know – and I had rather see you go and look after Mrs Davenport than get yourself into trouble with young Robbie.’

‘I never went with ’im,’ muttered Betsy. She pretended to be engrossed in stepping on and off the doorstep.

‘I should think not,’ said Mrs Bowe. ‘I told you, you’re not allowed to have followers. You’re much too young.’

‘E’s walkin’ out with Lizzie Pearson now, anyway.’

‘Stop fidgeting,’ said Lucy.

George, with a wink at her, nudged Betsy’s shoulder. ‘There’ll be a score of sturdy lads come knocking at the door when we get to Kendal.’

‘Only if you introduce them to me first,’ said Lucy firmly, ‘and I arrange what evenings they’re allowed to call.’

‘There now,’ said Mrs Bowe, ‘that’s very fair, that is.’

‘But we shan’t let you hobnob with any old riffraff,’ added George. ‘They’ll have to present calling cards.’

‘Don’t be so foolish, Mr Davenport!’

‘Well, how else are we going to keep track of ’em all?’

Betsy giggled, and Mrs Bowe said, ‘Don’t give her ideas. Oh, dear, Lucy – I shall miss you! Go well and safely, my dear. Breathe deep of that north country air. I’m sure you’re going to have a beautiful healthy baby.’

‘I’ll write to you,’ promised Lucy, and hugged her, and all three women clung to one another.

‘Damned if I’d like to be seen carrying-on in the street,’ said Thetford, and turned to discuss the cab horse with George. ‘There’s been some quality there, y’know.’

‘Showing his age in the hind fetlocks, though.’

‘Ah!’ agreed Tom. ‘Well... I daresay it’s a good thing you’re leaving.’ 

George glanced at him, surprised by his quizzical tone. ‘I have to follow the work, if that’s what you mean.’

‘No. Not entirely. Seems to me there’s a young woman we both know, as gave a fair show of jealousy when she worked at the Swan. I recall as ’ow she come out special-like to travel with you on the Albion.’

George reddened, in spite of himself.  ‘She did.’

‘Kind of flattering, but I ’ope you didn’t do nothing about it.’ The wise old eyes gave nothing away.

‘I warned her off, Tom.’

‘I ’ope you did, for Mrs Davenport’s sake.’

George realized that Tom guessed what had happened, but the old man was a realist. Making a fuss over the truth would benefit no-one. As along as nobody asked him directly, he knew Tom would keep his suspicions to himself.

‘Mrs Davenport knows,’ he said, ‘And as for the young lady – she’ll get over it.’

The cabman, his gaze fixed on the horse’s ears, stolidly observed, ‘If yer party’s wishful to be at Euston for the ten o’clock train, better get in now.’

Tom took the hint, and shook George by the hand. ‘That proprietor in Kendal will be lucky to get you. I wish you all the best, I do, heartily, and Mrs Davenport and the baby too.’

George returned his handshake, liking the old man better than ever. The two of them stood irresolute for a moment before he said, ‘Well, I’d better disentangle these women, or we’ll be here the rest of the morning.’

Mrs Bowe startled him with a hug and a hard kiss on the ear, and when he escaped to help Lucy into the shabby interior of the cab, she showered advice on Betsy.

‘Remember to make yourself useful, gel! Get up early and don’t be to call – you riddle the fires and sift the ashes... make life easy for Mrs Davenport...’

George settled Lucy in a forward facing seat, and put Betsy opposite, where she sat excitedly waving farewell to Mrs Bowe and Thetford, even before the driver called to his horse and they set off. Lucy held her head high and felt for George’s hand, all the while staring rigidly out towards the great dome of St Paul’s. He knew she was struggling not to cry, and gave her tense fist a reassuring little shake.

He wasn’t sad to be leaving London. It wouldn’t be long before Sherman and Nelson and other less canny proprietors realized, as Chaplin had done, that the railway was an implacable competitor, and then they would sell out too, and the coach routes would die, and as they died he would have to seek work in more and more remote areas, and compete with more and more drivers out of place. He’d come here with an ambition to make his name, and instead he’d found that the best part of his driving career was over.

Lucy’s hand in his was a trust he mustn’t betray again. He wasn’t an irresponsible youth any longer, who could move on at a whistle and travel light.

They passed the Queen’s Hotel for the last time, and the Post Office, and somewhere in the clustered buildings behind it, the Swan. He watched as the cab bore him away, until it turned the corner into Newgate Street, and he couldn’t see even the buildings any more.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

The complete book is available here: (Amazon USA) http://www.amazon.com/Coachman-ebook/dp/B009DORFOI/ref=sr_1_1?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1348161105&sr=1-1
or (Amazon UK) http://www.amazon.co.uk/Coachman-ebook/dp/B009DORFOI/ref=sr_1_1?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1348161105&sr=1-1

Writer’s Monday

8.30 am
Feed starving cat and pony. Muck out stable. Note that it has snowed, but the snow is thawing.

9.00 am
Sit down at computer.
Send email to wife of celebrity asking for article for charity publication which I had volunteered to edit.
Condole by email with elderly friend in Australia, who has paid me previously to do various editing jobs, but is feeling very poorly today.

9.30 am
Check writing forum web site, another volunteer job. Discover 11 spam messages selling kitchens and one sarky verse from a member about same.
Grind teeth.

Go into admin panel and delete spammers and messages. Reset 4 lots of forum permissions to disallow new members from posting without approval.
Breathe sigh of relief.

10.00 am
Discover that resetting forum permissions doesn’t trickle down to individual categories. Go back into admin panel and reset seventeen categories.

10:30 am
Email forum owner to tell him what I’ve done. The only writing I’ve done so far this morning.

10.45 am
Catch husband on the point of departing with neighbour’s Land Rover and give him two customer book orders to be posted (pre-paid order, packed yesterday and postage paid online). A GOOD THING.

11.00 am
Field phone call from one of son’s idiot friends who would like to bring a 45 foot wagon trailer and do a changeover in our yard. Tell him that said trailer will not fit, and so neither will its changeover friend. Discourage idiot boy from calling again. He will.

11.10 am
Postman delivers, snow having melted sufficiently to allow him to get here in Royal Mail van. Retrieve post, hoping to find parcel of paper bags ordered a week ago ready for a farmer’s market bookstall on Saturday. No bags.
Open envelopes.

Elderly archaeologist with a fixation on a Roman cavalry settlement in Lancashire sends 2000 word article for perusal and comment. Last corresponded 8 years ago.
File in pending tray.

Legal Deposit Library communication from Edinburgh requesting 5 copies of 2 books for Ireland, Scotland, Wales, Oxford and Cambridge. This is A Good Thing, but it’s at my expense, not theirs – A Bad Thing. Luckily just to one central address so postage not horrendous.
Contact Print on Demand service and send order through for delivery.

Local Literary group requests me to go and talk to them on topic of my own choice. They will PAY me! A VERY GOOD THING.
File in pending tray.

11.30 am
Email from Pony breed society asking me to update their web site with advertisement and photos. A Moderately Good Thing – they pay. Update site.

12.00 mid-day
Need coffee. Discover husband’s melted snow boot prints across kitchen floor.
Clean floor and redecorate tracks from door to Rayburn to fridge to chair with thick glossy, coloured pages of health products catalogue. I knew they’d come in useful.

12.30 pm
Sit down with coffee and oatcake to write blog – the first creative thing I’ve done all morning.

1.00 pm
Blog written. Must write back to the Literary group.

1.15 pm
Email from web client, with photos, requesting update of site with offers for January.

1.25
Phone call from Pony breed society requesting photos from  last issue of magazine, which I edit - another volunteer job.

1.30 pm
Thinks: Will the Literary Group believe this?