A winding journey with many regressions

On a writer's forum the other day someone asked how each member got into writing their current novel
I could not give a brief answer to that question but here here is my reply, probably tediously long and overly self indulgent.
My novels sprung from oral story telling. For the last half hour each day, when I was a primary school teacher, I would tell stories to my class rather than read books. Most stories I told were based on Greek and Hindu legends but occasionally I would tell stories from my own childhood – hunting treasure in the secret tunnel under our house in Jerusalem, guarding , without adult assistance, a Mediterranean beach against the threat of German invaders in a pseudo military camp; learning to swim by being chucked off a pier when British soldiers mistook me for a Jewish child.
I started writing these personal incidents when I first attended a creative writing class.
The tutor suggested that I write a whole childhood memoir. I followed her advice.
The class at the local community college closed and I started at another. In introducing my writing to the new class, I obviously didn’t explain sufficiently that my work was a memoir because the tutor soon told me that I had too many characters in the central family; I didn’t need the little brother; I had too many names that started with the same letter so I would have to change most of them; and Zoe, (my mother’s name) was too modern for the period about which I was writing
Obediently I made the changes; decided I was now writing a novel instead of a memoir and pruned it down from 250 000 words to 120 000.
By the time I had finished revising, multiculturalism had become flavour of the decade and I was infected with a hefty dose of PC. I agonised that I had described a period of Palestinian history only through the perspective of a British child from a fundamentalist Christian family.
In the midst of my anguish, a local librarian told me that her mother was honorary secretary to a nearby synagogue and had lived in Palestine during the era about which I was writing. I visited her mother. We agreed to co-author a second novel about a Jewish woman with the start based on my co-author’s childhood in Frankfurt and departure for the Middle east in 1933. We had our heroine and her family live in Munich though as my co-author didn’t want to be identified by people she knew and we made our protagonist sail straight to Palestine rather than going to live with family in Iraq first. We based the main plot on an incident in my own history when my father’s best friend, a British Inspector in the Palestine Police became engaged to a Jewish girl but was killed by hashish smugglers a week before the wedding.
We spent time deciding on names for our characters. Many German Jews born in the twenties, had German forenames, my co-author told me, but she was surprisingly gentle with me over my inappropriate suggestion of Kristina . Since German girls, she said, were more likely than boys to have Jewish names, we settled on ‘Dalia’ for our heroine.
Back at writing classes I was in for more trouble with this second novel. We had one member of our class who was married to a British Jew. She told me that, as a gentile, I had no right to be writing about the holocaust. She would solemnly walk out of the class whenever it was my turn to read. I persevered but needn’t have caused the lady all the aggro as in the end, on literary grounds, I guillotined the first four chapters and started the novel with the heroine arriving in Palestine.
After three sessions my co-author retired from the project because her eyesight suddenly deteriorated. I carried on alone (although I did hand over part of the proceeds when my first novel was published many years later)
With the Jewish story finished, I began the Arab story that was to be the third novel in the trilogy. I had no trouble starting as I based the main character on the live-in maid who came to us straight from an orphanage school in Nazareth at the age of 12 when my family first moved to Palestine. For the heroine’s grown up life though I needed help. I flew out to Israel to stay in a hotel in Tiberias and took an Arab bus up to Nazareth, disembarking in a hurry when we passed a Baptist primary school with a board outside written in both Arabic and English. I asked the secretary if she could find me a retired Arab teacher. She did, and I had a very useful meeting with a delightful lady whom ,in 1948 at the age of 14, the Israeli authority had put in charge of a class of 80 children mostly refugees from the surrounding countryside. She agreed to co-author the third book and we had a most productive session. When I returned to England we continued our correspondence by email but unfortunately after our first week she became seriously ill and had to withdraw. While I was still dithering on whether I could finish the third book on my own, I looked again at the structure of the trilogy. There would be two books centred round grown-up heroines and one written from a child’s viewpoint. I decided to rewrite the British based novel, giving it a grown-up heroine, Patsy, and making it considerably less autobiographical.
I had finished the replacement novel, and was continuing with the Arab based novel, when I had a one to one interview with an editor of Writers’ News.
She pointed out that if I wanted to show a balance view of the last decade of the British Mandate in Palestine, I would have to rewrite the trilogy so I had three chronological novels, each telling the story from the viewpoint of all three women.
I went home fired with enthusiasm and started separating the scenes in all three novels, jigsawing them into new patterns and making alterations as needed to synchronise chronology.
I worked 18 hours a day, attempting to keep the whole structure in my head. Unfortunately my head wasn’t big enough. At a social gathering of fellow writers, my memory shut down until it allowed me to retain only the current three second strip.
My caring friends took me to the Infirmary assuming I had suffered a stroke and stayed with me until one of them had fetched my daughter from one of Leicestershire’s more remote villages. I recovered in a few hours but after that experience I took things at a steadier pace.
I finished the first of the chronological novels and won a cash and publication prize. Unfortunately in between signing the contract and finishing the second and third novels, the firm that had bought the first novel changed hands and became a self-publishing firm. This would not be so disastrous if they didn’t still own three years of copyright.
Criticisms made by agents of the other two novels that I sent out is that, although it is acceptable to see events in a story from three or even more viewpoints, there must be a single character at the centre of a novel with whom the reader identifies.
So now I am writing a new first novel centred round an Arab Muslim character who plays an important part in the second and third novels but is not the central character in those stories. I have sidelined an original Arab Christian central character, Susannah, and am re-using some of the pre-1938 material concerned with Patsy and Dalia that I erased from the chronological trilogy.
When I have finished this new first novel then I will have to tinker with the second and third to make Patsy the central character in one and Dalia central to the other.
All this rewriting is preventing me from starting the novel constantly swirling in my head about a Neighbour Watch Scheme in an English Midland town.

Ageism

Two incidents today have made me realise how guilty I am of Ageism. Both are connected with books in some way so I don't feel they are altogether irrelevant to this blog.
Quite early this morning I was phoned by one of my WRVS (Women's Royal Voluntary Service) Books on Wheels volunteers who is 87.
Her role, in company with her 86 year old husband, is to carry heavy baskets of books to 4 residents of an old people's residential home. She phoned to say that the arthritis in her legs has recently become very painful and she will have to give up her task at the end of the month. I was expecting to have to find a replacement for her 10 years ago!
Soon after I put down the telephone, I checked my email and found a reply from a 95 year old Palestinian lawyer whom I had contacted by email the previous evening to ask about the path he had taken pre-WW2 to gain his law qualifications. I requested this as part of background research I needed for the book I am writing to replace the already published first volume of my trilogy. This new novel will cover the period from 1933 to 1948 and will centre on a woman who was a minor character in the original first volume.
I received a far clearer and more succinct reply from this elderly lawyer than I would have expected from anyone from a younger generations, the only irrelevance being his apology for boasting about the hard work required to gain his credentials.
In those days truly there were giants in the land

Regards,
Margaret

Vintage launch

A member of our club, Maxine Linnell held her book launch last Thursday. Her book was published under the genre Young Adult but it is a good read for adults too.
There was a strong correlation between ethos of the launch and the theme of the book. In the launch the author was superbly supported by her offspring who provided a buffet in two parts , one with food that would have suited such an occasion in the 1960s and one with the more globally inspired recipes that we enjoy now
The theme of the book contrasts family relationships and expectations in 1962 with those of 2010 using the 'body swap' device to good effect.
After reading the book I felt that the author and I were in agreement that on the whole family relationships are healthier and more mutually supportive in 2010 than they were in 1962 although social life outside the family for young adults can be physically more dangerous now than they were fifty years ago.
For those of us who were parents fifty years ago there is a realisation that although we gave our young children greater freedom than primary school children get today, yet we put too many restraints on them in puberty.
For younger people , the book will pose very different questions.
We old ones can also read this book for nostalgia, young ones for horrified incredulity.

WW2 in Palestine

What is it about the WW2 years that cause novelists and civilian writers of memoirs who write in English about the British Mandate of Palestine to skate over them?.
I have had people tell me that nothing interesting happened in those years so they wouldn't want to read about it anyway but I would argue that the events of 1942 are as eventful as any, marking as they do a watershed in British -Zionist relations. I consider the formation of the Palmach by the British as a resistance group against probable German Invasion and the subsequent disbandment order was one of the single biggest factor leading to the post war mess. Yet people seem to know nothing about those events
Golda Meir probably had an excuse for skating over the period in her memoir in that the war years covered painful events in her marriage,
Moshe Dayan also had an excuse in his memoir. He was in prison from 1939 and then so severely wounded in Syria in 1941 that he confined his life to his own family for three or so years.
Other people who became famous were on war service outside Palestine but there were others
who stayed in Palestine who must know their importance. A small part of it may still be covered by the official secrets act but most of it is in the public domain.
Perhaps it is because of the paucity of memoirs that novels set in that period appear to be non-existent.
My outburst is caused by today's delivery of two well-written novels by Dvora Waysman. I had been looking forward to their arrival for some time. One covers events from 1951 onwards but the other The Pomegranite Pendant is a saga that covers the period 1890 -1950. I turned to it eagerly only to discover that the events of WW2 occupy about a page and a half.
It makes me all the more determined to hone my writing skills sufficiently to get the second novel in my trilogy spanning the years 1942-1945 published.

Snow here and now, snow there and then

A whole lot of activities have been cancelled here in Leicester due to a few inches of snow and colder whether than we have experienced for over 20 years. This gave me more time for writing. In my last post I spoke of my discoveries about November 1945. Those had given me 6000 words. It was now time to move on from Givat Hayim. The carastrophic event had caused a rift between my diverse characters and I needed to get them together again. The best way to do that in Palestine is via a wedding. The wedding I chose was of the Greek Orthodox variety. For plot purposes wedding invatations needed to appear to appear early in January. I thought I should leave at least eight weeks between invitation and wedding so hit on on the first Wednesday in March as the wedding date. That would provide me with an opportunity to describe a host of spring flowers. Luckily I had not wasted too much time in word-painting Palestine Spring before I realised my whopping error. I had not taken into account Great Lent.
Since Great Lent starts over 40 days before Greek Orthodox Easter Day my first task now was to determine the date of Eastern Orthodox Easter in 1945 - which proved nothing so simple as adding a fortnight on to Western Easter or co-inciding it with Jewish passover. I found two web sites claiming to calculate Orthodox Easters from way back. Unfortunately each arrived at a different date, so I used Nazareth tourist guide logic and plumped for the more convenient date. During the research into Greek Orthodox rituals I had come upon another perinent piece of information. Orthodox weddings generally take place on a Sunday. Employing a modicum of maths, I discovered the wedding would have to take place on February 17th.
Snow was piling up on my garden and the top of my car as I clicked my way through the Palestine Post, searching for news of political importance. I discovered a real coincidence. On Sunday 17th Fenruary 1945 snow had blanketed Jerusalem and made roads leading to it impassible. So that, I thought, was the weekend we had built our snowman abd Dad had wanted to take us sledging by Rachael's tomb but we hadn't been able to get out. That too,according to the Palestine Post was the week end every chemist in Jerusalem sold out of camera film, which explains why, when the elderly show you their favourite snaps of Palestine, you are tempted to think of el Quds as a city built inside the arctic circle.

Palestine Post and Researching November 1945

I realised the other day when looking through the first draft of the third book in my trilogy that no scene takes place in November 1945 and as far as I was aware, nothing interesting happened in Palestine that month. Then I realised that I spent most of that month on board the liner Caernarvon Castle, travelling from Durban to Suez. Nowadays people travelling on liners may be able to keep in touch with what is happening anywhere in the world, but not so in 1945.
Even when we had landed and in Suez and had travelled on to Palestine to meet my father, whom we had not seen for two and a half years, for the rest of November I was too immersed in settling into our new home on Mt Carmel and into my new school.

Once I realised why I had no interesting memories, I looked through a few timelines on the internet and found one that claimed terrorists had bombed CID HQ in Jerusalem on November 25th.
As is my custom when finding an entry so close to home I brought up the relevant issues of the Palestine Post to read reports and comments. I found nothing in November about the blowing up of any CID station but as I skimmed through a story emerged of escalating violemce culminating in the most deplorable happenings in the Hefer Valley area. It was hard to believe that such a disaster could have occured while I was in Palestine and that it had passed me by.It would not have done so two and a half years earlier, nor would it have done so a few weeks later when I had once more become accustomed to discussing current affairs with my father.

A word here about the Palestine Post. It was an English language paper published by a Jewish firm but read by all the British, because its front pages and editorials not only concentrated on internationl news but also reported on British football matches and county cricket. It covered Palestinian affairs as well, of course and in the least overtly biased way of any Palestinian paper.
Comparing it to contemporary English papers, it had more in common with the Manchester Guardian than the Daily Mirror.
It is now readily accessible to all. Formerly, if I wanted to read an item in the Palestine Post, I had to travel to the British newspaper library at Colindale where I might wait hours for a microfiche reader to become available.
Now however, I just click on the favourites button on my computer and I can browse through all the extant issues.
This is thanks to the University of Tel Aviv's Jews of Islamic Countries Archiving Project , established by Prof. Yaron Tzur. In personal terms I am extremely grateful to the technology manager, Shaul A. Duke (fka Shaul Garcia), who has helped me so often when I changed to a new browser.

An introduction

Land of Broken Promises is the name I gave to the trilogy of novels I planned many years ago to be set in the British Mandate of Palestine covering the years 1938-1948. I chose to concentrate on this period and this location because I spent my childhood in Palestine when it was being governed by the British. So far only the first novel in the trilogy has been published and in some ways I wish it hadn't (although I was grateful at the time for the money received from the publishers!)

The trouble is, once one part of a trilogy is set in stone, it limits what one can do with the rest. One can't change the names of the main characters, nor alter their previous history, however convenient it would be for the novel one is currently writing.

The title of the novel that has been published is Struggling Free and covers the period 1938-1941. It centres on three very young women, one English, one Jewish and one Arabic who between them are unintentionally responsible for the death of two men.

The second novel has the working title Spreading Tattered Wings and covers the period 1941-1945 It has not yet been published. I learnt my lesson on that with Struggling Free.

I am working on the third novel (working title Home to Roost) and am about two thirds of the way through. It will cover the period 1945-1948.

Some people seem to be able to dash away at their novels and do their research later. I can't do that. I do my research first but am constantly discovering while writing how much more research I need to do and find can't continue writing until the facts are clear

In the course of this blog I hope to show some of the things, not necessarily of a literary nature that I have learnt during the years I have been writing this trilogy