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.
