CONCLUSION

The course concludes by describing how:

‘Writing what you know’ is a large and rich project, one that provides an endless resource, and one that can be undertaken in all the types of writing discussed in this course – poetry, fiction and life writing. The skill lies in reawakening your senses to the world around you, and then using what you find with discrimination. By realising the potentials of your own life experience, you will be collecting the materials necessary in order to write. ‘Writing what you know’ can amount to a lot more than you may have first bargained for. It doesn't mean that you are limited solely to your own life story. Neither does it mean you have to be entirely true to your memories. Often a different kind of truth will emerge from the activity of writing about elements of your past and your everyday life. In this way, writing about what you know is a route to a different understanding of your own experience, and therefore also a route to finding out what you don't know.

Statement of Participation Certificate

One can see Steven’s Statement of Participation here.

— End of Course —

Section 04 > Memory and narrative

4.1 Using memories to order narrative

The course describes how:

The philosopher John Locke made the assertion that individual identity is inextricably linked to memory – we are only what we remember being. Memory is a central part of how we think of ourselves, and indeed a central strand of what we might know. Memory is not simply a mechanical process. It works in various ways and you will use it in various ways in your writing. It will be useful to start thinking about memory and narrative now, as your memories will be of use in your poetry and fiction, as well as in your life writing.

Part of what a story does is organise events in time, as Lee has done. Memory often works like this – even when you aren't intending to write your memories down but are simply thinking. So when you try to remember what you did yesterday you start perhaps by recalling some fragments – a conversation, having breakfast, going to the park. The more you think about the fragments, the more you are likely to arrange them in some sort of temporal order – like a story. I had breakfast first, then I went to the park and when I returned, that's when my mother rang. Thinking of memory as a form of narrative or story is a great asset when you come to your own writing. But it's important to consider your memories to be narratives that you can use freely. Don't feel that you have to render them exactly in an ‘as it really was’ fashion.

Activity 6

After reading the text below, click on the link supplied to read Lesley Glaister's ‘Memory: The true key to real imagining’. Look for the following things:

1. How is the memory realised and written about?

2. How is time organised in the memory?

3. In Glaister's version of this memory, what really brings it alive?

4. What use does Glaister make of her memory in her writing?

Click here to open Lesley Glaister's ‘Memory: The true key to real imagining’.

1. The memory begins with a declarative statement, “I am on a beach.” But then, the fuzziness of our ability to remember every detail is immediately interjected with, “I don’t know where - Southwold perhaps.” The rest is a very vivid recollection of her experience on the beach, small fragments in a short segment that reveals something deeper… there are descriptions from what she wore and how it felt, to how the bubbles of water her swimsuit filled with when she went into the sea. The reader feels the cool air the narrator feels - shivering on a towel, sitting on the beach after being in the water. The narrator spends time describing what she remembers noticing about her father - his hairy legs, and what is likely a wound on his leg (its odd because it feels oddly reminiscent of a wound I had on my leg during the summer, it too ended up like a hole someone could set an egg in). She wants to ask about it, but doesn’t - and watches as he disappears into the water for another swim. His disappearing into the water as he swims further out is something that frightens her, “I have seen my daddy drown but I don’t say a word.” Is it some kind of sixth sense the child narrator is having? Reference to the heart appears twice - “…feeling my heart thudding against the lumpy pebbles.”, and “…I lie there with the sea or my heart roaring in my ears.” Her father eventually returns, the narrator notes, “…invigorated and oblivious to my terror…” The next paragraph describes the memory as representing a profound moment for the narrator when she was a child, representing, “…the sudden realization of my dad’s vulnerability and his morality - and by extension of everyone including myself.” She then moves ahead in time, but acknowledges that the moment she remembered can feel both significant and insignificant at the same time. Glaister notes how this seaside memory served as a lynchpin and a way into the larger piece she was writing - a novel called Easy Peasy.

2. The first memory, of the day at the beach, is a fairly compact recollection of a specific point in time - a specific day, at a specific place. Although she says “I lie paralyzed by fear and guilt for what seems hours…”, we know the time that passes is likely a lot shorter than she describes - because we related to moments of uncertainty and how they can make time feel as though it has slowed down. She then moves ahead in time to when her father indeed does die, a moment in time when she learned about whey he had the hollow scar on his leg. It becomes more reflective, in how she remembered the day on the beach after her father died. She learned more about his service in World War 2, which was why he had been injured.

3. Glaister’s description of little things helps bring it to life, especially the moments on the beach: “…how hairy his legs are, like a gorilla’s legs…”, “…a hollow… big enough to cup an egg in, not hairy like the rest but dull pinkish, fuzzy like newborn mouse skin…”, “My mum is reading and my sister is shovelling pebbles into a bucket…”. These little details help bring the experience of the beach to life, and even emphasizes the isolation of each character who is lost in doing whatever it is they are interested in doing to relax.

4. For Glaister, memory is “…refracted through imagination, often unconsciously, into something new… That, I think, is the real stuff of fiction - memory blended, refracted, transformed. That is why something that is apparently entirely imagined can have the real force of emotional truth.” It can serve as a starting off point, and a way into the world she is creating, which helps make the work feel grounded and real for her and her audience. She also notes that for many writers, what happens to them in their past, especially in their youth, helps to shape their imagination.

4.2 Raiding your past

Finally, the course describes how:

I’m The more you write, the more you will raid your own past. These incursions won't diminish or reduce your memories – rather those recollections can be enriched and become more fully realised. As Jamaica Kincaid says of her writing: “One of the things I found when I began to write was that writing exactly what happened had a limited amount of power for me. To say exactly what happened was less than what I knew happened.” (in Perry, 1993, p. 129)

Writing using your memories can amount to more than just reciting the facts. If you take A215 Creative Writing, you will look at a Jamaica Kincaid story in Part 2, the ‘Writing fiction’ section, and can then consider what her particular mix of fiction and autobiography might look like. For now, it's important to realise that you will not betray the truth of any particular memory by failing to stick steadfastly to certain details, or by changing elements, or by not having a total recall of events.

There may be times when you will wish to use episodes or elements from your life experience more or less directly. Often you will use just fragments of your own past. You might like to use a single aspect of a character, or a place, for instance. You might like to use a turn of phrase that your grandmother used; you might focus on the feelings of being lost on the first day at a new school. There is no rule for how much or how little you can use.

Activity 7

Using the present tense, like Glaister does, write about a personal memory of either a place or a character in your notebook.

Make it brief, 250 words or so, but try to get as many sensory perceptions as possible going, and try to fix the memory in time, as Glaister does, so it is just one moment. Include everyday details and don't be afraid to admit one or two uncertainties.

Felker Lake’s water felt cool against my skin as I kneeled down to submerse my body into the shallow depths of the water by the shore. My legs launched my small nine year old body forward, and they then kicked like a frog’s to continue propelling me through the water, not far above the brown and grey river rocks that speckled the bottom perimeter of the lake. Once I was far enough out, with the rocks receding behind me, it was an adventure to dive head first into the phthalo blue depths of the water. I headed to explore the lake’s murky bottom, which had the poorly lit look of split pea soup sprawled across the lakebed. I let my hands run through the grainy muck of the lakebed, scooping up a bit of it to bring it along on a journey with me, slowly slipping from between my fingers like chemtrails in the sky. I then sprung up out of the water head first, in my boyish attempt to be as large as a killer whale, my upper body feeling like it was gliding in slow motion, only to flap back down with a smack that broke the still water, and I’d roll onto my back, so I could stare up at the bright, blue sky.

— End of Section 04 —

Section 03 > The senses

3.1 Involving all of the senses

The course website describes how:

Becoming more aware of the everyday world around you involves more than just looking. If writing is a perceptual art then perception should involve all of the senses, not just the visual. You must also start to smell, feel, taste and hear the world you are trying to realise. So, in the made up scenario, when you see the man with the Scottie dog you might be too fearful to stroke his dog, but perhaps you could touch the cold metal bar where the dog was tied up – after he is gone, of course! You might feel the rough bark of the tree close at hand, smell the brash perfume of the washing detergent steaming out of the nearby launderette, taste the bitter dryness this causes in your mouth, and hear the wind whistle past the buildings. You might see the graffiti on the wall and appreciate that part of the street is always quiet, not even any traffic, and that there is a different smell: ammonia, it smells like fish.

By awakening your senses and becoming more conscious of the world around you, you will be enriching your grasp of that world. Once this heightened way of perceiving your environment has trickled down into your writing, your reader will benefit, getting a much fuller picture of the worlds you are creating.

Activity 4

In an indoor location write down three things for each of the following:

• sounds that you can hear;

• textures that you can feel;

• odours that you can smell;

• flavours that you can taste;

• objects that you can see.

Location: White Rock Starbucks @ 19:07 on September 2, 2024.

• Three sounds that I can hear include: 1) a young man and woman talking giddily behind me about photos on her phone; 2) the sound of a barista using a steam wand to make some kind of hot beverage, the sound of the barista washing a metal container used to make the drink, and the sound of the barista banging the little thing used to put the coffee grounds into; 3) the music playing in the cafe - Shazam tells me the song is by Stephen Sanchez, Send My Heart With a Kiss.

• Three textures I can feel include: 1) the hard plastic of my ipad’s keyboard - it’s not completely smooth, it has a slightly rough texture, a smooth roughness to it; 2) the smooth polished surface of the brown countertop I’m at - my hands occasionally rub over it; 3) the relatively soft paper of the napkin that I lift to my face to wipe up a bit of tea that spilled from the cup onto my chin.

• Three odours I can smell include: 1) the smell of the apple cinnamon croissant that’s been warmed in the cafe’s oven by a barista; 2) the cool crisp air behind me coming from the outside as people come in and out of the cafe; 3) the perfume a young woman near me has on.

Location: White Rock Starbucks @ 17:00 on September 13, 2024.

• Three flavours I can taste include: 1) the rooty, crunchy and hard surface texture of the almonds as I bite into them with my teeth, feeling them breakout like shards of rocks across my tongue; 2) The Iced English Breakfast tea I’m drinking has a cold feel to it’s slightly bitter, malty flavour; 3) I’m also sipping a hot English Breakfast tea with 2% milk and the milk softens the bitterness of the tea which is still stronger than my iced tea because the teabag is still inside the drink itself.

• Three objects I can see include: 1) the blue flashing cursor on my iPad screen, as I type into my SquareSpace journal to complete this assignment; 2) there’s a young woman standing across from me waiting for her order and she’s wearing black beats earphones, the beat logo is red… her hair is tied into a pony tail, it hangs down past her shoulders… she has white sweatpants on and a black shirt, the shirt covers her right shoulder but hangs down revealing her left shoulder and a black bra strap is visible because of this… she is talking to an older man, most likely her father; 3) my Bob Ross backpack, Ross is upside down from where I am sitting but his eyes are bright, his smile inviting me to want to paint alongside him.

I found the odour and taste prompts to be the most difficult to complete. I did google words related to the sense of taste.

3.2 Contexts

The course website notes how:

On their own, sensory perceptions don't tend to mean that much. They depend on a context in which they can be brought to life: for instance, that of a character. Such sensory perceptions as you've just listed in Activity 4 might hold more meaning if the man who twitches the curtains was the character smelling the smells or touching the surfaces; if his neighbour in the purple sari was the character hearing the noises, tasting the flavours. Sensory perceptions offer dimensions that will enrich your writing, but generally they cannot operate in isolation.

Activity 5

Read the opening of Laurie Lee's Cider with Rosie . Think about the following questions:

1. Which sensory perceptions are used, and how are they used?

2. Do the perceptions belong to a character?

3. Is a place realised through the sensory perceptions?

4. How is time being organised?

5. Are the perceptions from one moment or many?

Click here to open the start of Laurie Lee's ‘Cider with Rosie.’

1. Lee begins by referencing a kind of psychic sixth sense, describing how the main character felt “…a sense of bewilderment and terror…” even at the young age of three. By providing a visual description in the second paragraph, Lee is able to describe the claustrophobia associated with being so small amongst tall grass that “towered above me and all around me, each blade tattooed with tiger-skins of sunlight… I was lost and didn’t know where to move.” Next Lee describes the feeling sensation of the heat coming from the ground as well as the odours of the soil the young boy stands on. This bleeds into the visual, olfactory, and tactile descriptions of seeing elder-blossoms, which hang “banked in the sky,” and shower “…fumes and flakes of their sweet and giddy suffocation.” The narrator emphasizes how he is alone in this moment, as if it’s the first time he remembers being alone in awe and bewilderment. Lee then uses visual, olfactory, oratory, and tactile senses to describe in short succession birds flying overhead; smelly plants; and the feel of insects hopping and buzzing about. He creates sound that he would be able to hear, howling, and feels the sun “…hit me smartly on the face, like a bully.” The sixth sense is again spoken to, as he describes the emotion of this situation as being a “…daylight nightmare.” There’s a visual description of his sisters “…scrambling and calling up the steep rough bank…”, where calling references what he can hear. There’s a lovely visual description of his sister’s faces, which were “…familiar, living; huge shining faces hung up like shields between me and the sky…” The feeling of unease and terror melts into an ease and maybe even a joy as the boy sees his sisters, followed by more visual details: “…with grins and white teeth (some broken)… their mouths smeared with red currants and their hands, dripping with juice.” One can almost smell the currants on the two girls. You can also feel the long brown hair of one of his sister’s who “…lifted me into her long brown hair…” and you can feel the fast uneven movement of them “…jogging down the path…” Vivid descriptions follow of their cottage, “…that stood in a half-acre of a garden on a steep bank above a lake…” Lee moves into another sequence of things found within the cottage and with this, a reader can experience each of the descriptions through their own memories and experiences of them, such as “…frogs in the cellar, mushrooms on the ceiling…” It ends with another inner revelation of not knowing where he’d been before this moment. There’s one more description of where he was at the beginning of this short excerpt, where he was “…piping loud among the buzzing jungle of that summer bank…” and a declaration of inner emotion, of how, in that moment, “…I feel, was I born… it was the beginning of a life.’

2. The perceptions belong to the narrator, most likely an older gentlemen who is reflecting back on the first concretely vivid moments that he can remember of arriving at a cottage that would become an important part of his life. He describes the world around him, the field and its tall grasses, the nature around him which feel all-consuming and even claustrophobic. He describes feeling more secure when his sisters appear and take him to the cottage.

3. A place is definitely created through the sensory descriptions that Lee uses. An almost idlyic countryside is described, one that at first can feel a bit overwhelming for this young boy but we don’t know in relation to what. Was the boy from the city? From London? We are never told as this is his first memory that he can recall.

4. The movement of time here is fairly a fairly brief glimpse of a specific moment from the boy’s life: the moment of first significant remembrance. It’s a short moment from being set down to his sisters running to greet him, and taking him down to the cottage where they would live. The narrator does note that this was “…in the summer of the last year of the First World War.” Which gives it a very specific placement in the larger perspective of the world. It’s also specific to the First World War, so the narrator is old enough that he has seen the Second World War as well, so at least 25-30 years or longer have passed since the narrator was the three year old first arriving at the cottage. There’s nothing more given in this specific passage to pinpoint the exact age of the narrator or the time from which the narrator is writing from - other than it’s at some point during or after the Second World War (was it even referred to the Second as it played out?).

5. The perceptions given are from three moments, his standing in tall grass; his meeting of his sisters; and arriving at the cottage.

— End of Section 03 —

Section 02 - The everyday

2.1 Building a believable world

This section of the course explored the idea that writing is a perceptual art.

• PERCEPTION > Wikipedia defines perception as “…the organization, identification, and interpretation of sensory information in order to represent and understand the presented information or environment.” Writers use words to describe what they perceive, and from this a reader makes meaning from the words that they read.

  A good writer must be alert, mindful, and aware of the world around them.

• AWARENESS > Wikipedia notes how awareness: “…is a relative concept. It may refer to an internal state, such as a visceral feeling, or on external events by way of sensory perception. It is analogous to sensing something, a process distinguished from observing and perceiving (which involves a basic process of acquainting with the items we perceive). Awareness can be described as something that occurs when the brain is activated in certain ways, such as when the color red is seen once the retina is stimulated by light waves. This conceptualization is posited due to the difficulty in developing an analytic definition of awareness or sensory awareness.” M-W notes that to be aware is to “…have or show realization, perception, or knowledge”

• ALERT > M-W describes alertness as a “…state of careful watching and readiness especially for danger or opportunity”

BE AWARE > THROUGH OUR SENSES TO what’s happening in the world around us.

Move beyond being stuck in the habit and routine of the day, look at these with our senses to help build a believable world for readers to explore.

Activity 3

Close your eyes for a few moments and think of the room or place around you. Think of the details that you would include in any description and make a mental note of them. Open your eyes and, without looking around, write down what you thought of.

My eyes closed, I can hear the spray of warm myst escaping from the steam wand a barista is using to make a latte or some other hot drink. As the milk gets hotter, it feels as though the pitch of the steam aerating the liquid gets ever so higher until the barista sharply shuts it off. I can hear another machine blending the ice and cream together to possibly create a Frappuccino. I hear the muffled voice of a woman placing an order to another barista who repeats it back to her. The other sounds of the cafe are just loud enough to make their discussion unintelligible to me. A rather mellow song is playing overhead, filling the gaps left between the noises of the operational cafe. I open my eyes briefly to open Shazam on my iPhone and it tells me the song is by Melpo Mene, called Ain’t Gonna Die While Sitting Down. I close my eyes again, reaching for a warm chocolate chip cookie that lays in a small white Starbucks takeaway bag. I feel the paper of the bag on the back of my hand, it’s smooth and warm. I feel the cookie between my fingers, as I break off a part of it, letting my hand carry it up to my mouth. My teeth bite down on part of it, I feel the warm chocolate on my tongue, as my tongue pushes the warm crumbly softly sweet texture of this teeth to the roof of my mouth, feeling it start to break apart as I begin to chew. I feel the hard plastic keys of the keyboard that’s connected to my iPad, the bumps above the ‘F’ and ‘J’ keys always feel slightly off. My hands aren’t raised in the air as they should be: most of my palm and wrists are resting lazily on the hard wood of the raised table I’m sitting at, my legs dangling from the high rise chair.

ARTIFACT 01 > Steven Lee. “Inside a Starbucks Writing 18:57. (2/2).” 01 Sep 2024.

Now look at your surroundings and write a paragraph (no more than 150 words) describing them, picking out at least three things that you haven't noticed recently – things you didn't think of when you closed your eyes.

I open my eyes to find the room bathed in a warm orange glow of the sun that’s setting in the west, bleeding in through the very top of the cafe’s window. There’s a cool breeze from the cafe’s air conditioning that brushes across my bare lower arms, it’s a sensation that moves up into my spine, sending the shiver of a chill down my back. It’s slowly getting darker outside, but it’s still daylight, a muffled, muted daylight, cloaked in a eerie shade as the sun slowly slips further away across the horizon, now behind several buildings and trees that block it’s rays, turning the room back into a more normal look. The people who were waiting for their orders are now gone, just another man sits across from me at the other end of this long table we’re at. A new song is playing and I think he’s singing along. It’s another song I don’t know, but Shazam tells me that it’s called Conquer the Heart by Orville Peck & Nathaniel Rateliff. Another regular is making one last order to go as the cafe closes soon. I can hear him talk a little easier now that the cafe is less busy. He asks if she’s working tomorrow, and she says she is. Another barista has gone on her break, her apron removed, she walks over and sits across from the young man who had been singing along to Orville and Nathaniel. She’s eating something, but with my glasses off, I can’t quite make out what it is. He used to get Fridays off he says, and just isn’t used to working on Fridays again. The rest of their conversation is more muted and soft. I remember waiting for Jessie when she used to work at Rogers Arena, I remember waiting and watching for her to come out of the employee’s entrance, and then we’d head to get a bite to eat at some cafe or restaurant that was still open at eleven o’clock at night.

ARTIFACT 02 > Steven Lee. “Inside a Starbucks Writing 19:29 (2/2).” 01 Sep 2024.

2.2 Collecting and selecting

NOTEBOOKS > an essential tool for recording observations and accounts of daily events. Can be a place to record ideas for future writing - be it a short story, memoir, or poem. A notebook can be used to record and keep clippings from magazines and newspapers. You can record your thoughts about books or poetry you’ve read, as well as your thoughts about plays, performances, concerts, or movies you’ve seen, or songs you’ve heard. A NOTEBOOK is for you, by you, and it should contain whatever helps you or inspires your writing.

Awareness of your life is important, as a major source of potential material is your own life. What one sees, experiences, thinks, and feels. KEEP YOUR EYES OPEN. How are people dressed, colour co-ordinated clothes or messy garbled clashing? How do they act? Do you notice other people’s routines or habits? Tone of voice? Is someone alone or with others? How do they interact? Are they walking a pet, what’s the pet like? Friendly? Snarly? The weather? Character descriptions? Overheard conversations / turn of a phrase? Can record bullet points - things that will help you remember later. Perception is always selective, as we can’t record everything one sees. Nor can one record everything… but the things that one notices can be things one uses later on when writing. Sometimes, observations can almost form a narrative, or the fragment of something larger. Keep one’s ears open to - what are the acoustics of a room like (the loud hollow echo of a gymnasium)? How does a place smell (chlorine in a swimming pool)?

Shift ones judgment to curiosity. Mindfulness as a writer (Dinty W. Moore). Have an investigative attitude to one’s environment. Look at things from different angles, try to see what usually goes unnoticed by others or by yourself. When one looks at their notebooks later to work on a larger writing project, more selection will be made - a writer is always picking and choosing what to use. What to include and exclude. What details are important, what details feel repetitive. You might notice you didn’t collect enough information to begin with. If you visit the same place often, be open to the idea that places can change over time. What new things do you notice? It may seem banal or mundane but often things shift. Dr Neale’s course lecture noted how:

“It is these shifts in the way ou see your familiar world that revive it. In this way writing is a process of scrutinizing, looking closely at things, and then taking the observations onto a new level of perception, one in which you understand your world just a little more… Whether apparently insignificant or more focused, there is no prescription for the sort of observations you should make; they will always be personal to the individual writer.”

2.3 Using your observations

Dr. Neale wrote the following about using one’s observations in the last unit of this section:

“The observations you make in your notebook might not always appear imaginative or pertinent to anything, but the mundane recording of events may have unlikely uses. Writing in my notebook on 15 December 1998, I observed the sky – at the coast on a murky winter's day, when the low cloud seemed to be lit by a churning, subterranean force:

the earth comes to the surface, the soil muddies the sky, clouds the air – it even turns the sea into a sandy mix … the sea, the puddles, the rivers, the sky – all glow brown, glisten, shimmer – but not with the light of any sun.

On another occasion in the same notebook I observed a familiar river, and how the current flowed in ‘one concerted way in the straights but was torn between two directions at the bends’. By struggling to express what I saw on those two separate days, the observations stayed with me, largely because I had taken time to write about them. I later combined parts of these two descriptions in a scene of a novel, The Book of Guardians (Neale, 2012), using the river setting to reflect the inner state of my main character, Philip Eyre:

The swell of the river had caused the current to be perplexed, flowing concertedly in one midstream direction but torn between at least two, whirling between calm and rush, in the shallows and elbows. The rowing boat bobbed and turned uneasily like a gelding on its rope. The cigarette smoke smelt different – and I wondered whether it was because we were outdoors. Now it was fragrant, balmy even, like woodsmoke in the night.

It was one of those days: the earth rising to the surface, muddying the water, overflowing into the sky and air. The world was in spate. The earth appeared to be glimmering with the density of its own substrata.

(Neale, 2012)

What you put down in your notebook can act as a mnemonic, a memory aid, reminding you of the original observation, reviving certain thoughts and emotions. In this way your notebook – as well as being a writing ‘gym’ where you exercise perceptual and linguistic muscles – can also act as a future resource.”

— END OF SECTION 02 —

Section 01 - Writing what you know

1.1 Using life experiences in your fiction

Creative writing courses and manuals often offer the advice ‘write what you know’. This is undoubtedly good advice, yet what exactly does it mean? Many writers testify to using their life experiences – their memories and their everyday perceptions – as a source for their fiction or poetry, as well as for their autobiographies and memoirs. Yet these experiences aren't necessarily extraordinary in themselves. You don't have to have led an unusual or exotic life in order to write. You do, however, need to raise your level of perception above the ordinary. Writing what you know means being aware of your own world, both past and present, in as full a way as possible.

This course will introduce and briefly elaborate on some of the ways in which you might ‘know’ the world around you. By looking at the commonplace details of your life in a different way, using your sensory perceptions and learning to use your own memories, you will be exercising certain writing muscles, ones that need regular flexing. In this way you may discover you know more than you thought.

Activity 1

Write down a quick sentence in response to the advice ‘write what you know’. What does it immediately suggest to you?

“Write what you know” refers to writing that is informed and shaped by an author’s own experiences and observations, which can serve as a starting point for finding a way into the world an author is creating.

Activity 2

The purpose of this activity is to provide you with an example of how a known writer has exploited his everyday knowledge and memories in his work. Clicking on the link below will allow you to listen to an extract of an interview with Andrew Cowan, a writer and senior lecturer in Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia. Below is some background information you may find of interest.

Artifact 01 > Author Andrew Cowan.

Pig was Andrew Cowan’s first novel, and it won numerous awards, including the Betty Trask Award and the Sunday Times ‘Young Writer of the Year Award’. Published in 1994, its meticulous realism received great critical acclaim. The novel has obvious connections to Cowan’s own background – it has a Scottish grandfather and is set in a new town in decline very similar to Corby, Cowan’s hometown. He has subsequently published two other novels and at the time of the interview his fourth novel, What I Know, was about to be published. The novels discussed in the interview are Pig(1994), Common Ground (1996) and Crustaceans (2000).

Pig: When his grandmother dies and his grandfather goes into a home, teenager Danny is determined to look after their elderly pig. He and his girlfriend, Surinder secretly meet at the grandparents’ house, enjoying a fragile summer idyll, a refuge from the racist neighbours and family members, brief respite from the blighted new town in which they live.

Common Ground: Ashley, a disillusioned geography teacher, chronicles the birth of his daughter, Maggie, in letters to his globe-trotting brother, Douglas. Painting an intimate picture of his relationship with his partner, Jay, the novel offers a bleak picture of inner city life, and the couple’s growing need for some sort of political involvement. It comes in the form of the road-protest movement: the novel also charts the controversial birth of a road and the campaign to save the nearby Hogslea Common.

Crustaceans: Set on one day – 22nd December, which would have been his dead son Euan’s sixth birthday – Paul drives to the coast, as thick snow lies on the ground. Talking to the imaginary Euan in the back of the car, he tells him the story of his birth, of his first words, and of Paul’s relationship with Ruth, Euan’s mother. He also tells the story of his own parents, including the unexplained death of his mother when he was a child.

Some questions to think about while you listen:

• How did the idea for Cowan’s second novel, Common Ground, come about?

The idea for Cowan’s second novel, Common Ground, came about through the regular writing of journals, handwritten long letters to his friends, and the clipping of stories Cowan thought could make a good starting point or addition for a novel. One set of stories stood out for Cowan - the story of new age travellers and there protests of the building of roads through environmentally sensitive woodlands, which became a part of Common Ground.

• What parts of Pig were imagined, what parts researched and what parts autobiographical?

Cowan describes how the beginning, middle, and end of his book Pig were there for him from the beginning as a glimmer of an overall vision. To this end, Cowan explains how: “Every writer writes to figure out what it is they are trying to say, and every book is a kind of journey or exploration where you are looking for the words that will give form to the glimmer.” Cowan notes that although he had the story idea, finding the words to fill out the story was difficult and it ended up being a process he would come to and then leave over the course of several years.

As Cowan has written more, he does more research. The pig itself was an imaginative creation based on research that Cowan did checking out a book from the library about how pigs acted, behaved, looked, and even reproduced. From this he made notes. At one point, Cowan describes how the local authorities became suspicious of his activities when he phoned to ask questions about the legality of boiling swill. On top of this frame of basic research, Cowan placed his own autobiographical experiences of growing up with collie dogs as his pets to provide the pig with the familiarity people associate with having a pet.

• How does Cowan use everyday details in his novels?

At the start of the interview, Cowan reads a brief passage from his book Pig. The writing is visceral, raw, and heavy. There’s a sadness in what we learn right away that weighs over the entire short passage that concerns the circle of life. The description of the pig squealing outside, trying to wake its elderly master who we learn is now a widower. The scene feels reminiscent of how a dog in its yard might bark when it’s frustrated and wants the attention of its human. It’s a detail everyone would be familiar with. I also loved the detail of how the pig didn’t end up waking its owner, rather Cowan describes how the sound of the pig’s squealling fed into a dream the elderly master was having. It’s a beautiful way into what is going on in the man’s mind as he slumbers. And through the dream, we learn about the man and his first interaction with pigs as a kid. We learn of how he works alongside a girl, the person who would eventually become his wife, the person he’d spend the rest of his life with. And we learn of the man’s own grandfather, who is struggling to kill a pig in a slaughterhouse.

Cowan, Andrew (1994) Pig, London: Sceptre.

Cowan, Andrew (1996) Common Ground, London: Penguin.

Cowan, Andrew (2000) Crustaceans, London: Sceptre.

Cowan, Andrew (2005) What I Know, London: Sceptre.

— END OF SECTION 01 —

INTRODUCTION

Writing what you know

Introduction

I took this free course, WRITING WHAT YOU KNOW in August and September 2024 through OpenUniversity. The course was written by Dr. Derek Neale, an award winning short story writer and creative writing lecturer. It includes reading and writing activities that are geared to developing the use of memory, observation and the senses. The aim is to develop your perceptual abilities, honing your capacity to see detail in the world. You will be encouraged to start seeing the familiar in a new way and to make good use of your own personal history.

Artifact 01 > Cut a Long Story. “Dr Derek Neale - Writer Interview with Cut a Long Story.” YouTube, 23 Dec 2014.

Learning outcomes

After studying this course, you should be able to:

• articulate the notion of ‘write what you know’

• write ‘blind’ descriptions of known objects and note new observations

• have an enhanced ability to list sensory perceptions

• write short texts about a personal memory of either a place or a character.

— END OF INTRODUCTION —