The Novel as Blog

This is not Part Two

It is an explanatory non-fiction piece, which I shall eventually move to the other page - just as soon as I have got all this off my conscience (and my chest)!

I apologise for the italics in the final paragraphs. I didn't put them there. Somehow they just sprang up, and I have been unable to get rid of them.)

It was always to have been an experiment, this telling of my old half-written novel as a blog by instalments. I had reached the stage of discouragement in writing a long and complicated novel alone, and entirely for myself. I had begun to see I was going nowhere very much; I had been going nowhere very much for more years than I cared to count indeed, and had begun to think I ought to be looking for a more direct approach.

The blog seemed the thing. Others were doing it after all, and a look at Google suggested that it wasn’t such a very difficult matter to get started; so off I went. I began with a great deal of trepidation, it has to be said - I daresay every blogger starts that way. But in my case, since it was not so much my daily thoughts and activities as my heart and soul - my very life’s blood, if you like, in the shape of my attempt at a novel! - that I was going to be posting, then the risk seemed greater still. I wasn’t even sure I would have courage enough to post the first instalment! And when I had done so, there were several weeks in which it seemed as if I was destined to remain perpetually unread, and un-commented-upon, and should probably abandon the whole enterprise at once, before more harm was done.

But the blog world is wide, and generous of spirit, and it was not so very long before I began to collect a reader or two; and to find – greatly to my astonishment –that there was a sense in which the thing was to become not only read, but reader-driven. That was the first surprise – that people hitherto unknown to me would visit my pages, and begin to seem as if they were taking my fictional characters, if not yet quite to their hearts, then at least into their own hands to some extent.

This was a little disconcerting at first. There was a moment in which I found myself inclined to try to throw a protective mantle round my characters, just to keep their development firmly in my own hands. But then, suddenly, it began to seem like fun! Where were the limits to this, I began to ask myself? Or better still, what was the range of its possibilities - when readers were all at once showing themselves interested enough to want to take a hand in the onward progress of the story? This was the way forward for the novel perhaps? A twenty-first century version of the old practice of telling it by weekly magazine instalments? At all events, it seemed a useful experiment, and worthy of a try.

There were disadvantages and possible pitfalls too of course. The first, and most perilous of which was that I no longer seemed to be writing quite the story I had started out with! My original concept had been of a house, Macauley’s house; which was indeed to have been the title of the book. I was seduced perhaps by the excitement of unexpected reader response? I was at any rate buoyed-up and carried along by it enough, to wish to give readers what they seemed to want. So that what was to have been Theodora’s story - hers and that of her house - had suddenly changed to become the story of Frances Fanshawe and Mr Porteous instead!

This was the first shock. And the extent to which it was never really intended, can be best demonstrated by my quoting a short passage from the opening chapter of the original, third-person narrative. I had begun this chapter by describing the present derelict appearance, and more glorious past history of Macauley's house. I had introduced Jack Macauley and his Theodora, and given an account of their marriage, and early life together. After which I had summarily killed-off poor Jack, I fear (well, he was 85 by then!). And sent the widowed Theodora fleeing into long exile abroad, accompanied by her daughter Isabella, known as Belle.

Only in the final paragraph or two did I bring them back to the old Macauley house. And it seems worth quoting from that early version now, if only to show the extent to which I have departed, in the blog, from what was my original concept. I had called that opening chapter “Before it all Began“; it was fifteen pages long, and here is how it came to an end:

>“..... Thus came Theodora home again, to the house which Jack Macauley had bought for her at such high price more than sixty years before. There was no brass band this time; the old house scarcely blinked a light, or raised a blind, in welcome. And Theodora herself had not the least idea of any kind of a return to glory. She was old, and she was tired. She had lost both her Jacks, the second almost as irretrievably as the first. For Jack her son had been married young to the girl she called his ‘fine cold Alice’, a Scottish landowner’s daughter, who had carried him off the day after the wedding to some old castle her family had up near Aberdeen; from which fastness she had seldom permitted him to re-emerge.

Theodora would have liked to see Jack and his boy again, but she doubted that Alice would view her impending death as a sufficient emergency. She hadn’t the strength to take up the cudgels again with Alice, she said. She asked Belle for a cup of tea instead; and then she sank back upon the pillows of the big bed she had shared with Jack for forty years, and sighed, as if it were the end.

Just so might it all have ended. Not with a peal of bells and a wedding, as in the best fairy stories, but with the sad expansive sigh of a very old woman who had come home to die in her husband’s bed. The old house might have closed its walls around her and sighed its last, even as she did. Except that this is not quite a fairy story; and Theodora is not quite an ordinary woman, nor Macauley’s quite an ordinary house. There was life in both of them yet, whatever they may have supposed. So that what might seem to be the end is only in fact the beginning……”

And so it began, in the original version. The first, blog-induced change came with my idea of writing it from the first-person point of view. And from the point of view of Beatrice and her brother Bill, at that; both of whom had started out as fairly minor characters in the book. As indeed had Mrs Baines and Roland; and poor little Frances Fanshawe, with her tipsy housekeeper and her splendid Queen Anne house. These people had been intended to form a kind of supporting cast – a ‘chorus’ if you like, whose function it was to elaborate and comment upon events as they unfolded. (They do this in the blog too, of course, with their conversations. But that is only one of the devices to which a writer must resort, when employing a first-person narrator.)

David Porteous had been intended from the start for higher things, it’s true. But he was to have been largely Lady Macauley’s creature; she was to have taken him up first, and held on to him pretty fast. He was to have had several adventures, but had never for a moment been expected to run off like that with Frances Fanshawe! (Or had he? There's a sense in which it was always going to be on the cards that he would. But that is for tomorrow's blog-piece!)

Here is the manner in which Mr Porteous made his first appearance in the original story:

“.... The clergyman’s name was David Porteous. He was approaching his sixtieth year, but had lost few of the splendid physical attributes of his youth, being broad of shoulder, straight of back and candid, clear-gazing of eye. He had recently retired as rector of a pleasant parish in rural Gloucestershire, a position in which there had been little to trouble or perplex him, and much, always, to keep up his already highly developed sense of his own worth. He had come to take up residence in the rather run-down Victorian villa lately bequeathed to him by old Miss Florence Porteous, a lady who had been a kind of village gorgon while she lived, but who also happened to have been his aunt....”

The Macauleys were away in Florence at the time of his arrival, and so his meeting with them was delayed ; and the account continued, a little later, with this:

"..... This, then, was the man who all unbeknown to Lady Macauley at present, had lately arrived to invest the village with the manifold advantages of his presence. In the normal course of events it might have been Lady Macauley herself, or Mrs Mountjoy perhaps, in her capacity as the old lady’s unofficial representative, who would have been expected to extend the hand of welcome to the interesting new man. And even in their absence, it was not many days before his arrival had started little ripples of excitement in the village. In those parts of it, at least, in which dwelt ladies of sober habits and mature years, whose susceptibilities these days were mostly for fine manners and an air of distinction; who admired a military bearing in a man, and could be moved almost to little flutters of the kinds of emotions they had thought long dead, by the sight of a fine full head of elegantly silvering hair, and the hint of a clerical collar only recently shed.

A Mrs Pamela Baines was the first to take the field; a large and stately lady who lived in a pretty cottage overlooking the pond on the common....”

So there it was. The glorious freedom, as I see it now, of the expansive, third-person narrative approach. And it’s only in looking back over those early passages that I fully understand the limitations of writing it in the first-person, and within the length-constraints of a blog. In the early version, for example, I had been able to ‘get inside the heads’ of my characters as much as I would. Which must have made them more convincing – or at least more reader-friendly - versions of their present selves.

Where Mr Porteous in particular was concerned - well, I had been able, for a start, to account for the failure of his marriage, and his subsequent divorce. With all that they involved of his searching his soul for possible shortcomings of his own - and finding none! I had been able, too, to write about what Mr Porteous said to the Bishop to account for his early defection from the Church – and what the Bishop said to him in response. And so it was that he arrived in the village fairly well written-up and accounted-for from the start!

These were the luxuries of the third-person narrative approach, I see that very clearly now. And it’s a fact that the moment one shifts to the first-person method, one comes up against all the problems of how to show what characters are actually thinking; and the range of possibilities for both character development and narrative diversity shrink on the spot, in accordance with that.

I do wonder if this long exposition of my present difficulties is pure indulgence on my part, though? I daresay it is. I have opted to tell the story as a blog after all, and ought to be doing the best I can to succeed within the particular limitations I have imposed upon myself. But I can’t quite escape the suspicion that in making the transition from book to blog, I have somehow sold readers short too. And if, by giving an account of some of the things I’ve had to omit I can I can somehow manage to redress the balance, then it seems to me to be worth a try at least.

It’s entirely possible I shall find I’m writing all this purely for myself! But equally, since this is an experiment in the practice of writing a novel by instalments as a blog - and since there might be others out there who are making a similar attempt..... it did seem worth the effort of trying to identify some of the problems, at least. And it will, if nothing else, assist me in deciding how I can best and most effectively start out on Part Two.

There will be a little more in this vein tomorrow, for those whom it might interest or concern... There will be an account of how it was always more or less on the cards that Frances Fanshawe would 'take off' like that with David Porteous, for a start!