Creative Writing: The Unexpected Visitors!
Today, we are going to explore the way settings might be ‘visited’ in fiction or poetry, examining the details that convince us of a scene’s reality.
Here’s an extract from Chapter 36 of Jane Eyre.
I looked with timorous joy towards a stately house: I saw a blackened ruin.
No need to cower behind a gate-post, indeed! — to peep up at chamber lattices, fearing life was astir behind them! No need to listen for doors opening — to fancy steps on the pavement or the gravel-walk! The lawn, the grounds were trodden and waste: the portal yawned void. The front was, as I had once seen it in a dream, but a well-like wall, very high and very fragile-looking, perforated with paneless windows: no roof, no battlements, no chimneys — all had crashed in.
And there was the silence of death about it: the solitude of a lonesome wild. No wonder that letters addressed to people here had never received an answer: as well despatch epistles to a vault in a church aisle. The grim blackness of the stones told by what fate the Hall had fallen — by conflagration: but how kindled? What story belonged to this disaster? What loss, besides mortar and marble and wood-work had followed upon it? Had life been wrecked as well as property? If so, whose? Dreadful question: there was no one here to answer it — not even dumb sign, mute token.
In wandering round the shattered walls and through the devastated interior, I gathered evidence that the calamity was not of late occurrence. Winter snows, I thought, had drifted through that void arch, winter rains beaten in at those hollow casements; for, amidst the drenched piles of rubbish, spring had cherished vegetation: grass and weed grew here and there between the stones and fallen rafters. And oh! where meantime was the hapless owner of this wreck? In what land? Under what auspices?
Bronte, Jane Eyre, Chapter 36.
How does Jane experience Thornfield in this (re)visit?
In the passage above, Jane Eyre returns to Thornfield, the home of her beloved former employer, Edward Rochester, and finds Thornfield a ruin. Thus, Jane’s return visit to her past proves literally impossible and her haunting presence reminds us that time reshapes everything and that mortality is inescapably our destiny.
Interestingly here, Jane seems as ghost- like as her former home. The two merge together in a truly Romantic moment where Jane seems a poet wanderer trying to resurrect the literal and metaphorical ‘architecture’ of her Thornfield through a language that oscillates between the spectral and the violently curious.
Intense suspense is created through the conflict between grief -stricken remembrance and Jane’s fiercely interrogative curiosity.
Now consider the following poem by Carol Ann Duffy:
Dark School.
It is dusk when I enter the classroom,
the
last of the chalky Latin verbs going out on the board.
I sit
at a desk at the back
and
dip my first real pen into blue-black ink.
My
jotter is dusty pink.
I rule a margin, one inch wide,
then
write the names of the lost, the dead,
in a
careful, legible list.
I
memorise this, stand up,
recite
it word-for-word to twenty shadowy desks.
The
tall windows blacken and fill with night.
But I can see in this blurred school,
my
carved initials soft scars on the wood,
and
when I open the lid of my desk
there
are my books, condition fair,
my
difficult lessons.
I must not run in the corridor,
but
walk at the speed of smell
to the
hall, to the empty stage,
along
the silent passageway to the gym
where
my hands grasp the hanging rope that brushes my face.
Dark school. I learn well; the black paintings
in
their burnt frames; all by heart —
the
lightless speeches in the library,
the
bleak equations, the Greek for darkness.
Above
the glass roof of the chemistry lab,
the
insolent, truant stars squander their light.
- What is the ‘school’ the poet has elected to revisit- if indeed any choice was involved?
- How does Duffy’s detail make you feel about the school with its resurrected ‘lessons’? Is the school dangerous or poignant or both? Why?
- Is this a poem about Duffy or us all? What is at stake?
Think about the words of Stephen King who said: ‘We need ghost stories because we, in fact, are the ghosts.’ And also ‘ “So do we pass the ghosts that haunt us later in our lives; they sit undramatically by the roadside like poor beggars, and we see them only from the corners of our eyes, if we see them at all. The idea that they have been waiting there for us rarely crosses our minds. Yet they do wait, and when we have passed, they gather up their bundles of memory and fall in behind, treading in our footsteps and catching up, little by little.”
I love the way Stephen King animates memory, like a modern Dickens!
Quick Summary.
- In order for our character to either be a ghost or to be haunted (or both!), they have to be somewhere, most probably visiting a somewhere where/when the past overtakes or overwhelms them.
- Places evoke memories. They often act like storage units or incubators. Some of these experiences are more accessible and palpable than others. Think of Dr Who’s Tardis or Pandora’s box.
- Remembrance reanimates the past. Is this helpful or destructive for the protagonist?
- Or is the protagonist just a willing/unwilling tool or conduit for the Ghosts?
Workshop.
- Re-imagine a place you have visited or know in some capacity. Give the place a definite personality through the specific details. Write only a paragraph evoking your setting. No protagonist yet!
- Now introduce your protagonist. Make them arrive in the scene. What do they bring to your setting?
- Now introduce a problem. Maybe another character. Or perhaps a secret. Or something askew that needs attention. Again work on the choice of detail.
- Add to the tension through more conflict or doubt. Heighten the stakes. What is at stake for your protagonist and even for your setting?
- Finally, think about your resolution. Will the situation end in healing or catastrophe? Who will survive? Or what will survive?
