Writing Modern Magic: Stories of the Overbury Shops
I wrote for a common reason: I can find hardly anything I like to read in contemporary adult fiction.
From the fiction of the last hundred years, I enjoy classic detective stories and children’s literature, in which a well-worked story is primary and nothing is too heavy or frothy. I used to read a lot of nineteenth century fiction, mostly realist but some light fantasy. I’m not a big fantasy fan, but my friend and now my editor Elizabeth has introduced me over the years to good light fantasy, usually for children, of all periods.
I longed for a story in a realist modern setting with a light admixture of fantasy – I have just discovered that this is sometimes described as low fantasy, although work sometimes within the category, such as American werewolf children, is not at all my kind of thing. The contemporary ordinary part of my writing has also been termed moral realism by a journalist friend.
I knew that blending two genres would not be to everyone’s liking.
I wanted something like Edith Nesbit’s magic books, The Five Children and It, The Phoenix and the Carpet, The Story of the Amulet. They’re about Edwardian children but of course these were contemporary when she wrote. I wanted to see if something like them could be written for adults.
So much for the positive, but I had a much longer list of negatives.
I am conscious of conventions from which modern fiction often suffers; for example: if it’s nasty it’s interesting; if it’s pleasant it should be frothy; complicated narrative, especially interleaving narrators, is clever; include sex; don’t mention basic living such as going to the toilet; don’t have main characters who are exceptionally well-informed, cultured, intelligent; good people are especially boring; keep within one genre so that readers know where they are; don’t have even short diversions of history or natural history for their own sake; have one long, tiring main plot for the whole novel; language which is graceful is boring or wasted; a portion in a foreign language is similarly uninteresting.
I set out to break all the above rules as strongly as I could. I was particularly keen to demonstrate to myself that intelligent and good characters can be interesting and sympathetic.
Modern writing is so dark and so obsessed with crime and action. If it’s pleasant, especially feminine, then ditsy, syrupy, sentimental, superficial cosiness seems to be thought appropriate. Are our lives so tame that we have to wallow in the grisly and macabre, washed down by an overdose of sugar? Of course all of life should be in literature; elements that are disturbing, frightening, disgusting even should be there; but they have to be so very well placed and presented if they are to find a function in a story and not be an end in themselves.
I find this problem even more acute in cinema than in books and television. I love going to the cinema, and yet I can hardly ever find a film I want to see. My local cinema’s selection is particularly violent and (dare I say these) masculine and American. Only animations have improved in recent years, combining appeal for children and adults, although still without the beauty and imagination of the best Japanese animations. Britain used to have a flourishing B movie industry which, weak and silly though its products often were, at least gave a matinee alternative for adults.
Since I started writing, about five years ago, I’ve read quite a number of high-selling novels and I confess myself mystified by the plaudits that surround them. Some friends and I have exchanged analyses of particularly wrong-headed examples. I’ve read many excellent new books in that time but nearly all were factual. Only children’s writers seem to know how to produce intelligent and enjoyable fiction at the moment. Sorry to be sweeping, but that’s how I truly feel.
I could at least do no worse and produce something I liked myself.
So, when I started, I gave myself instructions:
I don’t want yet another novel about crime or anything very upsetting, nor a soft-centred love story. I shan’t be explicit about sex, but I shall be explicit on some matters not often described.
I want plenty of characters who are intelligent and have kindness and integrity.
Together these form the basis of the kind of realism I’m after: a streak of escapism, but also depicting ordinary fine pleasures and ordinary people with some goodness and common sense.
After hesitation, I can’t resist a magical element. This must fit with ordinary lives and settings, but also be entrancing and secret. It mustn’t leave questions hanging. I believe I can make sense of some common problems in fictional magic. I don’t do other worlds, back in the past, Arthur-speak.
I don’t want a complicated plot, but plots which resolve themselves quickly. I don’t have patience for long suspense – I’m very soon skipping – and I believe many readers are like me. I especially dislike broken narrative, chopping between several threads – again, I flick ahead. Three partially separate successive stories within one novel, each with its own narrator, would be right for my attention span.
I want a novel full of unexpected treats along the way, brief excursions into history and natural history, for example. Of course, these must fit with the story and narrator.
So making something I’d enjoy was my first spur, but I had two others.
I had long had two pictures in my head: a frozen pool and a cabin in a pinewood; and a certain novel character, a girl, giving out painted boxes on a railway platform, which I thought of before she was said to be able to paint – a little more on this is under MM’s Acknowledgements. As soon as I started, I ditched the platform, and the pool doesn’t get frozen until the second story, but these pictures just made my toes tingle – there was something underneath them.
I wanted to set out explanations for problems generally disregarded in fantasy writing; for example: we usually only meet male goblins; transformation into animals has a whole string of practical difficulties, listed in MM pages 157-8; curses must have a science of their own, which my characters deal with by modern methods such as a sufferers’ conference – well, you would, wouldn’t you; they rationally investigate bases of group magic such as whether nakedness is significant.
If I set myself any model it was the films of Studio Ghibli, Japanese animators.
I then had to decide on: plot; narrator, and whether first or third person; setting.
When I thought about fiction I’d recently enjoyed, I was struck by how slight the basic plots were. The appeal lay largely in presentation. I found as I wrote that even a simple plot demands a great deal in terms of motivation and full and exact details and gradual revelation.
By the way, anyone who can think up ingenious, original plots is already a golden writer! Please pitch to the film studios especially!
However, I began each of the three stories without any plot at all. I introduced a few characters and let them find their own actions and functions – they were constantly surprising me. I never saw more than a few chapters ahead, often not beyond the current chapter. For example, I only introduced Millie to show the shop in operation (MM page 118). By her taste, Millie was something special, and that was enough to generate all the plot. Alice on first appearance (page 116) was similarly functionless, which is why she’s a mystery and then within a few pages she’s introducing herself to Geoffrey. My only guide at the beginning was that I thought that a combination of magic and shops in the title might be attractive, especially to women, or possibly children.
One aspect of plot which worried me was how far I should go with the badness of bad characters. A basic to literary studies is that drama arises from conflict, mostly between characters. In my first story, the villain, as far as there is one, is a goblin, aided by poor decisions by other goblins. In the second, trouble comes from a foolish man plus the same goblin, but some of the challenge is from experiments in magic. There are unpleasant people in the third story, but the struggle is more within the narrator. In Millie, some people are tiresome but the struggle is within the narrator. I just find much badness boring or at least repetitive, as in fact I make explicit in the third story – the curses are jejune, banal.
If I wanted to get into a writing mode, I looked at books on magical theory or of magical stories, not for information but to draw in the feeling of the illustration. Then I closed my eyes and my characters began to move and speak as though I were watching a Studio Ghibli film.
I wanted to sound not too much like myself, and for this reason, of my three narrators, the first and second are men, and all are younger than me; I was throwing the characters at a distance like throwing a voice; although I have to admit that I feel unsuccessful here, and they all sound like me, although I excused this by saying that the first two narrators have grown up together and all three have edited each other’s texts.
I chose first person narration because I get a special thrill when a character narrates directly to me, especially one who does not normally have a heard voice or is writing confidentially on this occasion. Having three narrators, one for each story, prevents there being too much of one person in the book.
The narrators are adult and have adult thoughts. When Geoffrey startled me by falling in love with eleven-year-old Millie, I knew that the book had to be just for adults, but I think that decision was already made.
A beautiful natural setting was part of my escapist intention, and the New Forest is near enough to London to keep the characters moving between the two. Bloomsbury is familiar to me, especially as my father worked there, and in reality it has magic shops, and there’s the British Museum, which indeed turned out to be very useful for the plot, and it’s near some main line rail stations so well serves all the magically Gifted of Britain. I had written the first and second stories when I discovered that Gerald Gardener, the leader of the Wicca movement – an attempted pagan magic revival – and some followers lived by the New Forest between the World Wars. I inserted a humorous reference to them in Chapter 8 of Geoffrey’s narrative (MM page 138).
Humour of course comes from contrast between magic and modern lives. Just one example is the World War posters in the goblins’ bunker. I didn’t make as much use as I expected of magical secrecy within an ordinary setting; the magical characters were busy enough being secret from each other. In Millie I made a little more use of awkward magical happenings threatening Gifted security from Normals, but even these didn’t yield the humour or danger I expected.
I’d been afraid that the writing might be cosy, but I’d soon included the following, lightly or briefly described, however: business trials; family disability, division between generations, bereavement and divorce; mental illnesses; accidental taking of a mind-altering drug; entrapment in a Second World War and Cold War bunker; a long-term imprisonment there, and residence by refugees; an attempted forced marriage, with kidnapping, imprisonment and torture; a death by gunshot; attempted misuse of museum artefacts for a supernatural purpose; a love thwarted for twenty years and then fulfilled; a man falling in love with a girl child; two women who realise that they are happy to turn away from marriage and sexual relations; expeditions to Africa and the Far East, leading to a love affair, plant-hunting, and a long-hidden collection of Asian treasure; African witchcraft.
Though the writing is light and plain, I eventually realised that the novel has themes, mirroring relationships, and other literary features, but I’m not going to detail those.
As the novel grew, I found I was aiming to be reasonably encyclopaedic in magical elements.
I’d never tried to write fiction before. I wrote with tremendous speed, as though the words were being dictated through my pen.
I was satisfied that I’d done the most important thing I’d aimed for. The Gifted characters are quiet people, ordinary people, and yet adventure, heartache, humour and brainwork are native to them. Long-term emotional conundrums in their lives are taken forward and forced to resolution in their struggle to accommodate their magical natures.
I was satisfied also that the novel uses many favoured conventions but the result is not at all commonplace.
My history of my writing would not be complete without mention of persistent misunderstanding of the nature of the novel. Several agents notified me that they didn’t take works for children although I’d written that the work is for adults. A few readers too have made the same presumption, although some of the best-known fantasists – looking no further than Tolkien and J.K. Rowling – write of goblins and other magical folk and are I believe read as much by adults as children. My publishers insisted on witchy-wizardy cover and blurb, although I managed to soften the former by the inclusion of a cat. I undertook surveys, for example of the customers of Foyles and the Natural History Museum, to choose between the “Gothic” cover and an unusual “modern” one as likely to induce them to try the book, and the result was always clearly in favour of the latter. But my publishers wanted to present the book as Gothic, although one’s only to open it to see it’s not.
I’d like to finish by mentioning the contribution of two friends.
One is a gardening friend. I went to see her in hospital. As I entered her room she burst out:
R: It’s one of the most remarkable books I’ve ever read!
Me: ! [purr, purr, purr]
R: Mind you, there were some things I wasn’t sure about.
Me: There are some things I’m not sure about. Which for you?
R: Goblins. Magic. I don’t usually like them.
Me: I was hesitant about those too! Do they work?
R: I think so. I was so interested in the natural history. Such beautiful language. And the importance of changing into animals – learning their lives. And the thought at the end about ethics. It needed it.
Me: You’d have to, wouldn’t you. If you had a magical Gift. You’ve seen it just as I wrote it.
The other person is Elizabeth Harvey, born Bardelli, one of several friends from Durham University days who have helped me. She’s suggested good reading for years, and corrected my manuscripts and now my lecture notes with endless patience and encouragement. She knows far more about fantasy than I do. Thank you, Elizabeth.