Drawing with Light (23 page)

When I was little, and Kat read me that fairy story about the woodcutter taking his two children into the forest and leaving them there, all I could think about was the children being abandoned and lost and afraid in the dark. What I realise now is that the story actually had a happy ending: the children came back. In spite of everything the adults did to them, the children found their own way home, their pockets full of precious stones and pearls that gleamed and shone in the light.

There's one last photograph I'm going to take before we leave. I've planned it out in my mind's eye. I'll rest the camera on the garden table, press the timer. The background will be the hayfield, and the mountain behind, going up into the clouds, and in the foreground my mother and I will be standing, side by side. I want to be able to remember how it has been here. I want to be able to hold the photo in my hand and see for myself the ways we are like each other, and the ways we are different. And then I'll be ready to go home. Seb and I together.

Acknowledgements

I'd like to thank Nicola Davies for one particularly helpful conversation we had; my son Jack for letting me borrow some of his Photography notes; my sister Sue for information about working with stone; the Creative Writing department at Bath Spa University for allocating me research time; and Emma and Diana, my editors at Bloomsbury.

Julia Green is the Course Leader on the MA in Writing for Young People at Bath Spa University, and has had three novels published by Puffin and three by Bloomsbury:
Breathing Underwater, Drawing with Light
and
Bringing the Summer.

She lives in Bath.

Learn more about Julia and her writing with a brief Q & A.

When I was Emily's age, I was reading books for A level English:
King Lear
and
Measure for Measure
by Shakespeare; contemporary plays like
The Royal Hunt of the Sun
by Peter Shaffer; novels by Thomas Hardy
(Tess of the d'Urbervilles, Far from the Madding Crowd)
and D.H. Lawrence (
Sons and Lovers
). I read
Wuthering Heights
by Emily Brontë,
Jane Eyre
by Charlotte Brontë, and
Pride and Prejudice
(Jane Austen). I started reading the Romantic poets about this time (Keats, Wordsworth) and also poetry by Dylan Thomas, Stevie Smith, Philip Larkin, Ted Hughes and Seamus Heaney. I loved Dodie Smith's
I Capture the Castle; Catcher in the Rye
(J.D. Salinger), and historical romances by Georgette Heyer and Jean Plaidy… I read widely, everything I could get my hands on! My parents loved books and our house was full of them. I had a brilliant English teacher called Miss Fox, and she suggested books to me too. We went to see a production of
The Tempest
by the RSC at Stratford-upon-Avon and I was blown away by how magical it was. I've never forgotten it. I use quotations from
The Tempest
in my novel
Breathing Underwater.

All my stories are a mixture of ‘real life', closely observed or remembered, and imagination. Different combinations of the real and the made-up. I do use my experiences a lot, but always re-imagined. Memories, thoughts and feelings are transformed in the writing of them. But that's not the same as saying my novels are autobiographical. They most definitely are not! My characters are not me. They are all imagined, created by me. But I need to feel a connection to the material I am writing.

Different novels take different amounts of time. I think and dream and imagine and write notes for a long while before I start writing down the story. Once I know enough to start typing on my laptop, it takes me about nine months to a year.
Breathing Underwater
took the longest: that's because I wrote one version then realised there was a better way to tell the story, with the parallel sections of ‘This Summer' and ‘Last Summer', and I rewrote the whole novel completely! I'm very proud of taking that time to get it right. I'm a slow writer because I think so much, and rewrite and edit a lot. Plus I'm not writing full-time: I have another job, as a university lecturer teaching Creative Writing.

I hope my readers will immerse themselves in the story. I hope they will be able to ‘see' the places I describe and imagine themselves there. I hope they will be moved and feel strong emotions alongside my characters, going on their own emotional journey. I hope they will think about things: their own lives, choices, friends, families, relationships. I hope they will put down the book at the end and feel satisfied and uplifted.

Impossible question, but if you could only read one book, it would have to be a children's book:
Tom's Midnight Garden
by Philippa Pearce. Like the best children's books, it's a book for readers of any age. It's a beautiful and moving story. It's perfectly constructed, I think, and profound about the connections between the young and the old, between past and present, and the importance of memory.

I knew that I wanted my next novel to be a love story. Before I started, I wrote in my notebook
I
 
want to write about the transformative power of love: the way it changes you and opens you up to the world.'
I drew on some of my own memories of first love when I was creating the character of Seb. Gradually, I came to see that I was writing about lots of different kinds of love: the love between sisters, and the love between a man and a dog, love between friends, and the love that holds families together: not just parents and children, but step-parents too. Central to my story is the relationship between a mother and a daughter, and a big question: what could happen to make a mother abandon her own children? Could you ever forgive a mother who did that? This is the mystery at the heart of the novel.

While I was writing, the title I had in my head was ‘Talking in the Dark', with all its associations with intimacy and secrets. It's what sisters do, and best friends, and lovers. I like the final title
Drawing with Light
because it's more uplifting and hopeful, which reflects the story more accurately, and because it is a reference to the art of photography, which is a very important strand in the story.

I've chosen the first chapter in Notebook 3, Summer, Pyrénées Atlantiques. It comes towards the end of the novel. The novel is divided into Emily's three notebooks: this helped me to structure the story and deal with the passage of time, and is also a ‘nod' towards Dodie Smith's wonderful novel
I Capture the Castle,
in which her character Cassandra is writing in notebooks.

I've chosen this passage as it is the point where I first started writing the novel; it's where Emily finally meets her mother for the first time. I could ‘see' the whole scene as if I was standing there watching it all unfold. I knew the place — I had been there a year or so before — and had a photograph of it on my desk: the mountains behind, the fields where hay-making was taking place. In my head I heard that first, hesitant encounter between Emily and her mother.

As I started to write, I began to see that the real story would be about what has brought Emily to this point, so that she feels strong enough to make such a difficult emotional journey. Falling in love, and being loved back by Seb, gives her that courage. I started to think about the mother's story. What has happened to her? How could she do such a terrible thing as abandon her own children? In the back of my mind were things I had read about women who have been artists as well as mothers (like the sculptor Barbara Hepworth, for example) and for whom that has been an enormous tension and struggle. Maybe I was remembering what it was like for me when I was bringing up my small children and also wanting a creative life. I am fascinated by the whole question of how we can be good parents, and also not give up on our own deepest desires and needs.

I had to imagine what it would feel like for both Francesca and Emily. I knew Emily would feel very angry, and I knew that anger is how people cover up hurt and sadness. I had to keep rewriting the scene to get the emotional feel of it ‘right', as well as describing the setting where it's all unfolding.

After I'd first written this scene, I wrote in my notebook
‘It's the end of the story…rather than the beginning!'

Writing for me is a slow process of discovery: it seems as if the story already exists out there somewhere, and if I listen hard enough and pay sufficient attention, it will gradually come close enough for me to see exactly what it is.

There are many layers of influence in this novel. There was my original journey to the house in the Pyrénées, and an earlier trip to the museum of modern art in Ceret, France.

While I was at a conference in Vancouver a few years before, I came across the amazing paintings of trees by Canadian artist Emily Carr. Earlier still, as a teenager, I loved Robert Frost's poems ‘Birches' and ‘Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening'; as a younger child I played in woods near my home and made a den under an oak tree with a friend.

By happy coincidence (‘happenstance'), as I was beginning to write the novel, my younger son was beginning to learn about Photography for A level, and his exciting, experimental photographs were an inspiration to me for Emily's own photos. I borrowed some of his notes. Later, he took photographs of trees and rivers to help me further. My artist sister has a studio where she works on stone sculpture, and her work helped me develop that aspect of the story. I based the stone mouse that Seb makes for Emily on a replica of Toby's mouse from
The Children of Green Knowe
by Lucy Boston, which I bought at her ancient, beautiful house in Cambridgeshire when I visited it a few years ago. I keep the mouse on my writing desk…

Go to an art gallery. Look closely at the paintings you like or feel drawn to. Write about them in a notebook.

Find out about Emily Carr. One good book about her is
Beloved Land: The World of Emily Carr,
introduced by Robin Laurence (Douglas & McIntyre Ltd, Vancouver, 1996). Look online at
www.emilycarr.ca
for pictures that are in the Vancouver Art Gallery collection.

Take photographs. Look at work by Ansel Adams and Charlie Waite.

Go for a walk. Look closely at the trees! Sit under one to daydream, think and listen. Write a poem about the experience.

Read
I Capture the Castle
by Dodie Smith. It was written a long time ago, but it's a wonderful story and the central character is inspiring. Cassandra is seventeen and wants to be a writer…

Keep your own writing or photography notebook.

My attic is the place where I can escape to write. It is quiet at the top of the house, and from the skylight windows I can see hills and fields and trees and plenty of sky. It is full of books, some on shelves, others stacked high on the floor. There are piles of paper, boxes of old manuscripts, and photos, postcards, other things that help me to write whatever story I am currently working on. It is very untidy but I know where everything is! A small carved mouse (Toby's mouse from
The Children of Green Knowe)
perches close to my laptop.

www.julia-green.co.uk

Breathing Underwater
Bringing the Summer
Blue Moon
Baby Blue
Hunter's Heart

Bloomsbury Publishing, London, Berlin and New York

First published in Great Britain in March 2010

Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP

This electronic edition published in October 2010 by Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

Text copyright © Julia Green 2010

The moral rights of the author have been asserted

All rights reserved
You may not copy, distribute, transmit, reproduce or otherwise make available this publication (or any part of it) in any form, or by any means (including without limitation electronic, digital, optical, mechanical, photocopying, printing, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages