Some field notes about synchronicity and storytelling

I’ve been doing a lot of reading for my next book. One of my characters is a late-1800s English woman who finds herself in a frontier town. Let’s call her I—, in the good old Victorian fashion of blanking names that were to be keep secret (and decent) by omission.

I—’s chapters are written from a first-person point of view, so I’ve had to read a lot to get into the language and headspace of a woman from that time and in that situation.

I don’t want to give away too much by discussing too much about the books I’m reading for this, but I do want to say how remarkable I find it that every time I start a story and need information to flesh it out, the information arrives without me searching for it; often without me being fully aware that that’s what I’m looking for. Every time.

For example, I’ve been helping out my friend at her bookstore every so often for the past few months, and without fail, every time I’ve arrived, there’s another book that’s ‘just come in’ that just happens to be *exactly* what I’ve been looking for – or what I need without looking for it – in terms of research for tone or time. And these aren’t common books.

Three especially spring to mind.

The first is this book by Eliza Whigham Feilden, called My African Home. It’s a collection of Feilden’s journal entries detailing her arrival and five-year stay in Natal in the 1850s.

‘March 8th, 1852.—This is our seventeenth day at sea, and where has been my journal? Perhaps it is as well I have not kept one; it would have been weary to read, and now I may give a general impression of what is past without the lasstitude and drowsiness we have all felt more or less.’ – Eliza Whigham Feilden, My African Home

What I loved about this small gem of synchronicity especially, is that when I found it, I’d already started writing I—’s chapters, finding her voice, framing her context, understanding her point of view, but I wasn’t certain I was getting it right.

I mean, you can read a lot — women in the 1800s were ardent writers and journalists — but how can you be sure you’re creating a believable historical character with all their colour and texture?

And then I started reading My African Home and there was I—! Feilden had set the blueprint in her own journalling and now, some one hundred and sixty years later, her voice echoes in I—, first by ‘chance’ and then design.

The second is The New Women & The Old Men – Love, Sex and the Women Question by Ruth Brandon, a book about the birth of the modern woman in the late-Victorian era.

In discussing the advent of the ‘New Woman’ and the Women Question, Brandon follows the lives and loves of Olive Schreiner (thought I’d tossed Story of an African Farm in the great book purge of ‘23! But found it on my ‘classics’ shelf.) and Eleanor Marx (Karl Marx’s daughter).

‘But for New Women like Olive and Eleanor [the suffragette movement] was never the nub of the question. It was merely one of a range of inequities and moral and economic double standards which they saw as being imposed upon women.’ – Ruth Brandon, The New Women & The Old Men

What I love (still reading it) about this is that reminds me that there is no ‘olden times when people were ignorant’, not really.

When it comes to the human project – sex, love, politics, religion, living, food, relationships – it’s all just one big churn, whereby pockets of humans advance thought and consciousness, and if we’re lucky, the rest of humanity’s consciousness inches forward ever so slightly because of them with each century.

Then, it was all Darwin and God and sex revelations and women’s right to vote. Now, it’s all space exploration and robots and God and the new puritans and women’s (and everyone who is not a heteronormative white man, frankly) right to exist/own their own bodies/vote.

And then the third book – and actually the first of these small synchronicities – is The Plains of Camdeboo by Eve Palmer.

I was initially going to set my story in the Karoo and then decided against it, but Palmer’s account of the Camdeboo (LOVE the mouth-feel of this word) was just a boon to the world-creation of the setting I eventually chose.

‘Few people have the good fortune to be born in a desert. I was. All my life I have been conscious of my luck. Not indeed, that we of the Karoo often think of our land as desert. It is the travellers who have crossed our plateau for two hundred years, and our visitors of today, who have called it this — and still do.’ – Eve Palmer, The Plains of Camdeboo

Writing, story creation, is magic. It calls energy to itself, builds on the author’s ideas, introduces its own, sparks synchronicity, leads and is lead, demands and listens. It doesn’t matter how you are able to engage, just that you do.

And engaging, writing those daily words, over the last few weeks has been tough.

Personally, I’m having to deal with some realities that can no longer be ignored (like: time to get an actual 9-5 job dummy, because freelancing ain’t supporting your storytelling habit anymore); and collectively…well…you know what’s going on in the world.

But even though the words have been slow to come, I love being in this part of the story creation process. Like: LOVE. IT. Spiritually, romantically, sexually. LOVE IT. I honestly think it’s what keeps me hooked: just being party to this magical process that unfurls inside and out.

Anyway.

Hope you’re having some groovy moments.

Love and light,
t

Photo by Jonatan Pie on Unsplash

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