The last time I was lucky enough to have a writing residency
was a few years ago, at the Little Blue Hut in Tankerton. The Little Blue Hut
was all about space, the quiet of the hut, and the sea stretching to the
horizon. The environment crept into all of the work I produced at the time, but
it was the mental and physical space that was the most important part of the
process.
This residency is very different. As I said previously, on
my first visit I was surrounded by possibilities, ideas of things I could use
as inspiration. And I've found this has continued, each time I visit I’ve been
struck by something new.
A great inspiration recently has been the Enid Blyton
exhibition, and it had a double impact for me. I’m always fascinated to see the
way other writers work, and seeing her actual notebooks brought home the fact that
all writers have to put the long hours in, even someone as prolific as Enid
Blyton edited and refined her work. And being reminded of that process always
gives me hope, reminds me that all writers write crappy first drafts and have
to edit.
It also took me back to my childhood. I was an avid Enid
Blyton reader, and remember devouring the Famous Five by torchlight under the
covers at night, I wished I could go away to a school like Malory Towers and
have midnight feasts, and go up the Faraway Tree to a different land for a day.
Being surrounded by images from her books, suddenly I was six and seven and
eight again.
The past is something that many writers revisit, we are the
sum of our experiences, and those memories are a treasure trove that we can plunder
for our writing. Even if we don’t write about our past directly, then it still
sneaks into the worlds we create in one way or another.
The exhibition also got me thinking about perceptions and
the effect of social context. I’ve recently reread some Enid Blyton, and many
of her books seem littered with casual racism and sexism, her characters are
often stereotypes in a way that would be criticised today. Anne in the Famous Five
is pleased to be told she was like a good little housewife, whereas George
wants to be a boy, because life would be much more exciting. But then Enid
Blyton was a sum of her experiences and the world she lived in, in the same way
contemporary writing is written within today’s social context. What we now perceive
as the various –isms were perfectly acceptable to most people at that time.
This all adds to the impact this residency is having on my
writing, for me, my visits to the Beaney have been less about sitting and
writing, than taking in ideas, scribbling notes and taking photos, these have
been accumulating into ideas. There’s also
something about the museum and it’s exhibits that have made me look at the way
I write, I've found myself researching more about Egypt, about gemstones, I've
found myself exploring new ways of generating writing, looking at other writers
that have been inspired in similar ways. So far, the residency is really
shaking things up and showing me new ways of looking at things, which has to be
a good thing.
