Category Archives: Just James

Anything I feel like putting online that may or may not relate to anything.

Michael Eaton – The Year of the Writer

Posted on by

Photo: Graham Lester George

Tuesday 19th January gave me a very tough but enviable dilemma: What to do in the evening? Putting aside the domestic basics which will always wait, my first option was the City versus United derby on TV and the chance to see overpaid idiots impress their American and Arabic employers. Very tempting, but you’ve seen one football match, you’ve seen them all. Now on the other hand, if it had been Forest versus County …

Next up was Howard Marks at the Y Theatre in Leicester, but I figured his own interpretation of ‘greening the economy’ was one which has been said countless times before and wouldn’t really offer me anything worth justifying the train trip to our southern neighbours. The Shoestring Press Evening at the Flying Goose on the other hand was a serious contender, ticking all the right boxes; local publisher, wonderful setting (outside of the city centre) and two local writers/poets in Eireann Lorsung and Dan Tunstall. Eireann has done wonders for poetry in the region, so supporting her would have more than justified the half hour bus trip to Beeston and LeftLion has unfinished business with Dan Tunstall. One of my Lit subs went out to interview him six months ago and it wasn’t quite up to scratch so it never got published. Fortunately another sub offered to go out and repair the damage. This meant my attendance (at least from a journo perspective) wasn’t necessary.

This left me with my final option: Michael Eaton giving a talk as part of the ‘Year of the Writer’ programme at Nottingham University. I decided to go to this event over others because I knew he would tell me something I didn’t know and make me laugh in the process. A bottle of wine sat on the edge of his desk as he spoke and was swiftly passed around the audience – on his instructions – and then returned back – on his instructions! It instantly united and relaxed everyone. He then dazzled them with his knowledge, finding the perfect balance between academic insight and comical stories. Michael describes himself as a ‘dramatist’ rather than a writer and he certainly chose an appropriate word. Although I’d love to share his trade secrets now, I’m going to resist the temptation and knock out an interview closer to the release of his Lockerbie play (which will follow on from where his seminal TV drama left off).

One interesting observation I will share relates to research and characterisation. Once Michael has ploughed through the archives and read the mountains of reports about his subject matter he then has to meet them in person so that he can get a feel for who they are, observe their mannerisms, look for accent and pronunciation. This is quite a guttural – almost anthropological – approach, but one which enables him to work out if they are genuine. As a dramatist, Michael refuses to add scenes that haven’t happened and avoids the pop psychology that can create unfair portrayals of people. Looking people in the eye enables this and is a moral that our gutless (rather than gutteral) politicians should consider. I wonder how eager Blair would have been for war in Iraq if he’d had to stand on the battlefield and look his enemy in the eye rather than ponder them from the warmth of his Downing Street apartment. There’s nothing quite as honest as the stench of stale breath…

Michael spoke as part of the Year of the Writer programme developed by Writer-in-Residence Arthur Piper. Other guests have included Jon Mcgregor, Nicola Monaghan and Mike Wilson.

Paper rounds and pondering

Posted on by

Photo by Steve Johnson at Pexels.

The benefit of having to drop my son off at 6.30a.m to do his paper round is that I get to see the world naked and silent in the morning. Usually I come back and switch on the radio as I potter around the house but today I sat down on my step and looked out across the street and up towards the sky. It made me think two things. Firstly I thought about my surname Walker and whether my heritage has impacted on my consciousness in any way. Ever since I was twenty I have constantly moved about between the cities of Cambridge, Manchester, Leeds and Nottingham. No matter where I have lived I have always had to commute in some shape or form, largely as a result of getting divorced and needing to get back to see my son each week. Now I am firmly settled back into Nottingham and close to my son I find myself commuting back to Leeds every couple of weeks to maintain the strong and wonderful friendships I made there. I realised this morning that there’s something unsettled inside me, something nomadic perhaps, that is constantly looking for excuses to ‘get away’ and escape. I have no interest in tracing my family line or finding out if my Great Aunt was a crook or an aristocrat. But today I realised the significance of my name – Walker, and wondered if there is anything within my gene pool that subconsciously keeps forcing me away.

The second thing about this morning is what I can only describe as the defiance of nature. As I looked up at the sky my vision was blocked slightly by the various naked trees and bushes that protrude awkwardly up out of my garden. Without the green frippery of leaves to distract the eye, the sharpness of the branches and the thickness of the root really stood out. I enjoyed turning my head around and watching the sky get cut up in various ways by the tessellating patterns of the branches. Maybe that’s the point of the seasons, to reveal what’s hidden beneath. The trees don’t really need the leaves. They’re just decoration. Today the branches just seemed so defiant, stoical, proud.

So what’s this all got to do with a writing blog? Well it’s always related to writing, that’s the curse. It got me thinking about the significance of character’s names in my work and how important context is in shaping their reactions to situations and people. This is part of the whole editing process, making sure the anecdotes are relevant, that the gestures reveal something about the character. Having re-read my book well over a hundred times now (or so it seems) I think I’ve shed all of the unnecessary ‘green frippery’ and left a solid carcass.

My book This is All I Know starts at 5.30a.m in the morning and ends at the same time a year later. The character sits on a step after discovering he’s got a woman pregnant and that this is going to complicate his relationship with his existing son. I have tried to write the book as subtly as possible, using simple imagery to convey his dislocation from his circumstances and now those trees seem the perfect image of defiance to capture a particular moment.

I guess instead of blogging I should be seeing if this image works – as it may not. But I need a little longer to contemplate it further. This is the whole joy of writing. Becoming completely obsessed by a mood, thought, image etc and then toying with it for hours. And of course writing is nomadic. Writing is about finding homes for things, about exploring possibilities, a constant travelling of the mind. So maybe there is something in the old family name and maybe there is something to be said about being inconvenienced by an early start to the day that would otherwise have been spent curled up in bed. And if it doesn’t materialise into a font at the very least it has been a pleasurable distraction that will occupy my thoughts for the next few weeks before it is replaced by the pitch of a beeping car, the rustle of leaves, something someone says on a bus, a headline in a paper. Who knows, but there will be something else at some point. Just probably at a more sociable hour.