Another bright idea by Rainy City Stories

24th October

Talk of the Rainy City seems somewhat out of kilter today as bright sunshine streams into the new Cornerhouse Annexe through its floor-to-ceiling windows. The turnout is still keen on the penultimate afternoon of Manchester Literature Festival, where Rainy City Stories was launched two years ago. Having already submitted a poem to the website and taken part in one of the regular writing workshops run by the project, I’m looking forward to gleaning further Writing About Place tips from this discussion between some of the more well-known contributors.

Festival Director Cathy Bolton provides a brief background to the “interactive literary cityscape”, then hands over to the panel’s chair; author, Nightjar Press publisher and MMU lecturer Nicholas Royle. Nick is flanked by novelists Jenn Ashworth and Clare Dudman, and kicks off by inviting each in turn to step up to the lectern and read extracts of their work.

Jenn’s first novel, A Kind Of Intimacy, takes Lancashire fishing town Fleetwood as its backdrop, while her second, Cold Light, moves down the coast to Preston. Telling the story of two teenage girls, Jenn explains the importance of outside settings and space in this novel, which is due out next summer. Too young for pubs or clubs but too old for staying at home and keeping out of trouble, the characters take to hanging about in parks and other public places where they can drink and snog in peace. Jenn draws a link between the wildness of the teenagers’ behaviour and the wildness of the nature reserves (“where urban people go to look at grass”) they inhabit.

A little further afield, Clare’s novel, A Place Of Meadows And Tall Trees, is set in Patagonia, and her reading follows the story of Welsh settlers Silas and Edwin. Physical descriptions of the scenery play a big part in Clare’s narrative, with the two men trekking to a place where a perilous precipice overlooks a large lake extending into the distance. She describes a tangible tension, with man pitted against the environment, almost as if the landscape is a character itself. She also admits that perhaps she has an ulterior motive for choosing far-flung places as settings in her books: research provides her with the perfect excuse to go and visit!

Nick reads part of a novel that he is in the process of building up from a short story idea. The narrator, like Nick, teaches creative writing, lives in Nick’s house (albeit with a slightly different layout), sees what Nick sees and goes where Nick goes, which, in this case, is down onto the disused railway line that runs along the back of Didsbury Village. Nick instils in us his love of abandoned places – here the train track, but also dilapidated buildings: “It’s as if the story is waiting to happen; as if you disturb the stories as you explore.”

Each of the three writers is obviously attracted by wilderness in one shape or form, and the discussion which follows takes this as a starting point. Jenn finds wild places dramatically interesting because they are often where people get up to no good; Clare says wild landscapes allow for more interaction and give you the opportunity to let your imagination run free. From this, they discuss how place can be more than just a setting for a story; that it can also suggest a mood or a character.

All agree that it’s important to go to the place that you are writing about in order to immerse your senses and fully appreciate the sights, smells and sounds that can’t be experienced any other way (Clare recounts how, when researching a novel set in Greenland, she got lost but found her way back to the settlement by following the howling of the dogs the villagers kept, and how she wouldn’t have known this otherwise). By having this first-hand knowledge and feeling of a place, you can then evoke it and not merely depict it.

by Sarah-Clare Conlon

Sarah-Clare is a freelance writer, editor and press officer. She is the co-creator of Ask Ben & Clare, author of the award-winning Words & Fixtures, and regular contributor to Manchester Blog Awards 2010 Best New Blog 330 Words.

Heidi Thomas nimbly avoids the trapdoors of affectation and false modesty

19th October

There’s a definite sense of excitement in The Cornerhouse tonight, a kind of genteel thrill reverberates around the foyer. The atmosphere is somewhere between an opening night at the theatre – appropriate enough, given Heidi’s background – and the anticipation between the support and headline acts at a concert. You would not be entirely surprised if dry ice was to be deployed. As it is, when Ms. Thomas takes to the stage, she is preceded by a showreel of her ‘greatest hits’, or, as far as I can see, her greatest hits for the BBC.

This, however, is more chat show than Top Of The Pops, with Kate Rowland, the BBC Creative Director for New Writing, ably filling the chair that Parky used to sit in; the one that allows the guest the full focus of the spotlight.

Few would argue with Heidi’s gifts as a writer, whether as an empathetic adaptor of other authors’ work, as with her interpretations of Ballet Shoes and I Capture The Castle, or, as with Lilies, a teller of her own tales, but how will her gifts as a raconteur stand up in front of an audience?

As it turns out, marvellously well. Ms. Thomas is as witty and articulate as any of her creations, nimbly avoiding the trapdoors of affectation and false modesty.

Naturally, we are guided through a potted history of her career, from her early days as a playwright in Liverpool – her first play written, romantically (if inconveniently) enough following a bout of hepatitis – to a television apprenticeship on Soldier Soldier, into a present in which Cranford looms large, and on towards a future encompassing both what (thankfully) nobody on the evening calls a ‘reimagining’ of Upstairs Downstairs and a feature film adaptation of Middlemarch for Sam Mendes.

Along the way, we learn of Heidi’s low opinion of would-be academics who quote the interviews on DVD box sets and (eighty per cent of) television script editors. We are encouraged, too, to consider the striking parallels between a dreary family caravan holiday in Wales and the last days of the Romanovs, awaiting execution in the aftermath of the Revolution.

The latter is deployed as a neat illustration of the way a writer now associated with the past finds a connection with former times. For Ms. Thomas, the important thing is to always remain aware that the period setting is the characters’ present; their future, though knowable to us, an uncertainty.

As the past has become the country in which her writing has been increasingly set, so the adaptation has become the genre by which she has most often journeyed there. Her route, to overextend the metaphor, is to locate the essence of the novel through the ‘sacred moments’ in the absence of which it is no longer itself. These, it emerges, are quite often the scenes she describes as ‘sleevetuggers’; a phrase which paints the picture of the passionate devotee of the book earnestly pulling on Heidi’s cardigan in order to demand that a certain moment simply must be included.

Heidi recounted her satisfaction at being congratulated on the felicity with which she had depicted the harpsichord scene in I Capture The Castle; a scene which does not appear in the novel.

Although she did not develop the theme, she also described adaptation as an act of surgery, peeling away skin and limbs, to create something new in the image of the original. In retrospect, it would have made a good question from the audience; given her facility with period drama, and her talent for bringing characters to life, has she ever considered a Frankenstein?

Perhaps the excitement in The Cornerhouse air was the electricity of creation, after all.

By Desmond Bullen

Desmond is a graduate of the MA course in Screenwriting at the University of Salford. He is a mental health nurse working in substance misuse.