The personal detail of Duffy’s poem seems to revolve around one fictional character, although it can be safely presumed there are more than a few of Duffy’s own memories contained in the poem. It is set in one specific year, which broadens into an era, one to which the narrator is rather conservatively attached. After celebrating that era in the first part of the poem, the voice takes on a rather bitter tone in the last stanza, still clinging to the old cultural perceptions (‘I want it back’), challenging his own children with questions about old currencies, and still calling Zimbabwe ‘Rhodesia’.
When you use your own cultural memories in your writing, it’s important not to use them just for purely nostalgic or conservative reasons. Duffy has used such details here almost as a caution against nostalgia – while at the same time realising the warmth and energy of such memories. It’s important to retain a focus and have a purpose when you use your past; beware of indulging your own nostalgia.
Using the Duffy poem as your model:
n write down in your notebook some cultural details (songs, singers,
films, historical events) from a period of your own past;
n list some personal details from the same period (like the names of
roads and friends such as Duffy includes);
n pick a specific year and an event – it could be a cultural event like a
pop concert, sporting event or TV programme (as Duffy uses); it could be a more personal event like a school play, a homecoming, a wedding or a party.
Write either a poem (using no more than sixteen lines) or a piece of prose (up to 250 words) – which uses some of the cultural and personal details you’ve just gathered, and which focuses on the event you’ve chosen. This can be fiction, autobiography or a mix of both; the event can be a success or failure. For instance, you might write about the scoring of the winning goal in a cup final, or the school play in which you are humiliated by singing out of tune. Don’t forget to use any pertinent sensory perceptions as well as cultural associations.
ACTIVITY 4.3
DISCUSSION
It is important that you make your memories dynamic and bring them alive rather than stick with staid perceptions. By changing key elements in your memory, you can sometimes learn more about what it is you are writing and what you want to write about. What would happen if I just shifted these people here, made them live in a different town, moved them to a different continent? What would happen if I set this story in the eighteenth century rather than the present day? What would the episode that I recall look like through the eyes of someone else, someone who was also there perhaps?
Asking these sorts of questions about what you remember, then shifting the recall, can lend a new energy or perspective to your subject matter, reviving an over-rehearsed memory, so you discover it anew as you reveal it. This is a vital strategy in all forms of writing, as you will now see.
Imagination
Writers have always found ways to overcome the difficulties presented by subjects beyond their direct experience. Pat Barker, for instance, wrote The Regeneration Trilogy of novels about the First World War and the plight of several male characters suffering from the effects of the war; the story largely covers their treatment by a male psychologist, Dr Rivers. The novels were written from the points of view of the various male characters. Yet Pat Barker is a woman and certainly didn’t fight in the First World War. She has never worked as a psychologist. Barker evidently didn’t experience any of her fictional events directly. Yet she did have a grandfather who survived being bayoneted during the war; she has talked publicly about how she remembers seeing his scar when she was a child and hearing her grandfather’s explanation of how he had survived.
Some might draw the biographical link between her grandfather and the working-class character of Billy Prior, from whose perspective the second book in the trilogy is largely told. This link may not have been the only personal connection between the author and her material, yet in the novels she went well beyond that which she possibly could have known directly. Part of this came through research, which will be
to the creation of any textual world, whether that world is poetic, fictional or biographical – the use of the imagination.
‘Use your imagination’ is an imperative phrase that has come to be used in everyday conversation as a sort of mundane exhortation. It usually means something along the lines of ‘think a bit harder’. In the context of the creative process, ‘imagination’ holds other connotations, many of them grander than this first assertion. It can suggest powers of invention, impersonation and also a semi-mystical process involving chance and inspiration whereby you wait for the bright idea to come along.
Although these connotations might be relevant sometimes, it’s important to retain that first mundane definition, whether you’re jotting something down in your notebook or preparing a final draft. Imagination is thinking harder. But remember, ‘thinking harder’ doesn’t necessarily mean
thinking in more difficult ways, it just means asking more questions. Imagination is a way of exploring possibilities, and going beyond what you immediately know. It is not necessarily mysterious, though it can undoubtedly be magical in terms of what it might produce. It isn’t an exclusive skill possessed by a talented few. We all possess imaginative powers, but not all of us use them as fully as we might.
Pat Barker emphasises the use of imagination in converting material from her experience, but noticeably she doesn’t call it ‘imagination’ or even ‘being creative’. She talks of asking questions, the same sort of questions we have already considered as possible strategies for reviving tired and worn out knowledge:
Quite often you are going off on a tangent – taking a fact in your own life and saying, ‘What if? ...’ and from that point you are going away from your own life at right angles, although the bedrock of the book was your own experience. For example, in The Man Who Wasn’t There it’s simply the sex of the child. What if you had been born into an all-female family as a boy rather than as a girl? ... If a boy were raised by these women, to what extent could he take strength from them and to what extent would it be a threat?
(Reading 8, pp.434–41)
Write down five facts about a person you know well. These facts can be just the straightforward details of their lives – their age, where they live, hair colour.
ACTIVITY 4.4
Now ask some ‘What if ...?’ questions about these facts and write them down. So, for each fact come up with at least one alternative. You might have chosen a friend who lives next door but your new version will live in New York; your friend might be tall and now is short; might be a woman and now she is a man!
DISCUSSION
You might have found that asking one question is enough to launch a whole new character and a stream of further questions that need
answering about how this new character might live. Each and every life is surrounded by unfulfilled possibilities. By seeking out some of these possibilities you have started to use your imagination. This is not just something to be done with people. You can also do it with places – what if the village wasn’t actually in Yorkshire but in Devon? What if the café was in the main street and not in a back alley? What if it was a Balti curry house instead of greasy spoon? You can do it with sets of
relationships, as Barker does in The Man Who Wasn’t There. You can do it with fictional characters, as Jean Rhys does in Wide Sargasso Sea, where the character of Bertha from Jane Eyre becomes the main protagonist rather than a peripheral figure. Indeed you can also do it with historical characters, as you will shortly see Barker does in Regeneration.
Research
John Fowles, whose novels are often set in specific historical periods, has said that every writer incorporates a ‘wild man’ and an ‘academic’. The wild man gathers details of the story via associations, via the imagination and through the fickle, rambling process of trying to form a narrative of events. The academic tends to the pruning of what is produced, but also gathers other forms of knowledge, the elements that lie outside the writer’s direct knowledge. This is something you will often need to do – research what you are writing about.
Read the interview with Pat Barker, Reading 8 on p.434, from which you read a quotation earlier in this chapter. Focusing on what she says about The Regeneration Trilogy, answer the following questions:
n Which parts seem connected to her own life? n Which parts relate to her imagination?
ACTIVITY 4.5
n Which parts are connected to research?
DISCUSSION You can see from Barker’s account of the sources for Regeneration that
there was a definite biographical link but also an awful lot of research. Notice the number of real historical characters, such as Rivers, who have been used by Barker; how she has, according to this testimony,
reinvigorated old memories that aren’t necessarily personal to her. She has revived memories of a generation and a nation. By looking at the old case histories and then dramatising events she has deployed both
historical fact and invention. As well as having a possible biographical source, the character of Billy Prior, it can be seen, was also ‘very slightly based’ on one of these real case histories.