Archive for the ‘Sacred Site by Kim Fleet’ Category

Sacred Site by Kim Fleet

Friday, August 15th, 2008
Hello, and thanks to everyone who’s stuck with me this far. This blog has been a jumble of cats and cooking and philosophy and time, with a few fieldwork stories thrown in. Some of my favourite fieldwork stories have an airing in Sacred Site: the experiences that are so cringeworthy or funny or peculiar simply had to be included, but I’ve still got a swag full left over. Like the time I stopped to help a carful of Aboriginal people who had run out of petrol on a remote track in Central Australia, and in return for 40 litres of petrol they plonked two dead lizards on my bonnet. And when you think of the cost of fuel these days!
            And then there’s the time when I turned up bright eyed and bushy tailed (I swear that naivety is the best quality to have if you’re an anthropologist) hoping to take an old man out on a field trip. I had notions of us driving out onto his traditional country; which he didn’t get to visit that often as he was very old and didn’t have access to a car; stopping by a steel windmill or at a waterhole and putting the billy on to boil while he reminisced about his time as a stock man, told me about his ancestors, maybe told a dreaming story, or instructed me how to make fire from kangaroo droppings. Uh-urrr! (Family Fortunes you got it wrong buzzer noise). When I pulled up, he bounded out, and excitedly told me “Young man in the community’s just murdered his father and tried to hang himself!”
“Oh, how shocking, what a good thing we’re going out today.”
“I’m not going nowhere. I’m not missing this! This is the most exciting thing that’s happened for ages.”
Right.
            And then there were the old ladies with their salacious stories that made me blush; the fights; the kids learning from their grandparents; the huge skies and scent of acacia blossom. I wanted to write about these experiences, and a writers’ workshop encouraged me to think about using the thriller format to do so. Why? Because then people would know what to expect; genre fiction is comforting in that it says what it does on the tin (deliberate reversal, before the emails start!). The more I thought about this, the more I thought that actually the ‘put it in a box and put a label on it’ approach to publishing was little to do with the reader, and more to do with pandering to the booksellers and packagers, the majority of whom, it seems, can’t cope with things that fail to be characterized. They don’t like cross over fiction, fiction that spans two or more genres, fiction were you can’t tell from one glance at the blurb whether it needs a pink jacket or a black one.
            That’s where Picnic is different. Their raison d’etre is to find books that readers will enjoy reading, and issues about genre and placing and labeling are secondary. And it doesn’t matter if the author is a big name, or has published squillions of books before; or if they’re an unknown with no previous publishing experience; what counts is the manuscript. We’ve all heard stories about authors who tried publisher after publisher and just got rejected time after time, only for the manuscript to turn out to be an enduring classic. Or the writers who penned several, maybe dozens, of full length novels before one, finally got accepted, and gave them the breakthrough they needed. I know that writing takes an apprenticeship, and that you could/should write several full length manuscripts before you get your voice, and before you build up the writing muscle power to sustain you through successive projects. But come on! I wonder how many wonderful writers simply give up, demoralised. Like I said earlier this week, writers write because they have to, but submitting a manuscript is like handing over a child, and if each time you do it, the recipient rejects your child, then eventually self preservation will win the day.
            I don’t believe that readers can’t cope with ‘different’ books. The success of recent books like the Time Traveller’s Wife and the Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time indicate that there is a healthy public appetite for books that defy ready characterisation, and maybe publishers are doing us all a disservice by trying to protect us from them.
            Thanks to Picnic, for being prepared to take a chance on unknown authors and authors who like to bend, break or smash  the rules.
            That’s it from me for now. Next week you’ll be in the hands of Roger Cottrell, author of retro-thriller ENEMY WITHIN.
            Bye! Kim

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Sacred Site by Kim Fleet

Thursday, August 14th, 2008
 Feeling tense? Author Caroline Rance’s blog at: http://www.carolinerance.co.uk/articles.htm has inspired me to consider the choice of tense in historical fiction, particularly whether it’s appropriate to write about the past using the present tense, or whether the past should stay in the past.
               I admit I love being provocative by using the present tense to portray historical events. It works for me in a couple ways. Firstly, often what I want to say is “Just because it’s in the past, doesn’t mean it’s over”, and the present tense is a way to avoid the linearity of time and create an impression of everything happening concurrently. When events in the past are unresolved, the present tense invites the reader to dwell on this. Secondly, the present tense brings the reader right into the action: they can’t distance themselves from a vantage point years ahead of the narrator.
               Sacred Site is predominantly written in the past tense (even the bits that are actually in the past), though there is a section in the novel, set in the late 1800s, that is written in the present tense. This part of the novel is concerned with the early settlers in the region, and I use the present tense for a couple of reasons: to give immediacy to the ‘voice’ of the settler narrating the story, and to evoke consideration of the chains of action and reaction that are put in place at this point, which will reverberate for over a century. The present tense contributes also to the ‘unreliable narrator’: the character who thinks they know what’s going on, but they’re lying or they haven’t got the full picture. The past tense has an air of trustworthiness about it that I shy from: if someone’s looking back and relating a story, then they must know how it all turns out. I like to give expectations a bit of a shake up.
               Unreliable narrators are all too familiar to me from anthropological fieldwork. It’s fascinating to see how people choose the events from their lives that they consider to be key, and how they choose to present them. People aren’t always heroes in their retelling of their lives, and I always used to ask several people for their version of what happened, and what was important. Suggestive, too, was the way that communities who had been studied over long periods of time by anthropologists seemed to form their own ‘community discourse’. Frequently I got the feeling that there was a standard response to anthropological questions (apart from the responses that are unrepeatable in a blog): particularly chilling when different people repeated the same incidents almost word for word, as if the story had crystallised, and I had to dig hard to shatter the outer shell and try and uncover what it was really about. Similar incidents are reflected in Sacred Site: the protagonist, Esther King, uses stories about family to get Aboriginal informants ‘warmed up’ before she tackles the more probing questions about culture and connections to land. With regard to the sacred site itself, the community she’s working with appears to have evolved a stock reply, not only to questions about what makes it sacred, but also to questions about the massacre that’s rumoured to have occurred there.
               And there’s me dropping into the present tense, because it’s a peculiarity of fiction that in writing about a novel, the convention is to use the present tense. So blurbs and synopses are written in the present, as though the action of the novel is going on as we speak. Some philosophies of the text would argue that this is so: that the novel is incomplete without the reader, and that it only really comes into being when a reader engages with the text and creates it all anew. So there are as many versions of the novel as there are readers. Not sure what happens if you re-read a book, but I guess that would also count as a new version of it, especially if you’ve spotted/ discovered/ created new meanings in the subsequent reading that were invisible to you in the first.
               All a bit mind blowing, isn’t it? Maybe I should stick to writing about cooking, and the problems of cats with their own ideas about editing manuscripts? Sacred Site had a few near misses when the cat stood on the delete key and then typed hghgghkjkdjkjhg across the page. In line with the best French philosophy of the text, I’ll let you bring your own interpretation to that!
               Thanks for reading so far. Thank you also to Andrew for his interesting comment on yesterday’s blog.  Until tomorrow, Kim
 
 
 
 

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Sacred Site by Kim Fleet

Wednesday, August 13th, 2008
Where’s home for you? I get asked this frequently, and my answer is always, “I dunno. I’m a nomad.” I’d lived in four different parts of England before I was seven, went to university in Scotland, and lived in Australia for years. Many places tug at my heart and can claim to have been my home for a while, and yet I also have an affinity with places I’ve only visited. There are times when the pull to go back to the flat red desert of Central Australia is so strong it aches like homesickness. The scent of eucalyptus is particularly powerful in inspiring longing for the outback.
               Questions about home and belonging thread through Sacred Site. Many of the characters are displaced from their original homes. For some, the relocation is enforced and unwelcome; for others, the chance to live somewhere else is a dream come true. Yet living in another country, in a different culture, no matter how familiar it may seem on the surface, is a recipe for tension, and ripe for the key element of fiction: conflict. Conflict doesn’t have to be people fighting all the time, just people with different motivations, ambitions, perspectives and problems to solve.
               Let me draw on some examples from Sacred Site. The protagonist, Esther King, is an English anthropologist working with Aboriginal communities. Though emigrating to Australia is something she’s dreamed about since she was a little girl, she finds it difficult to adjust to Australian attitudes, particularly sexism and racism. Her lover, an Aboriginal man called Kent, is affected by forced removal from his traditional tribal lands. His ancestors were affected by the stolen generation policy, which decreed that Aboriginal children of mixed descent could be taken from their families and raised in children’s homes or fostered with white couples. Several generations later, Kent has only recently discovered his Aboriginal heritage, and is uncertain where he belongs. As an Aboriginal man who has been raised as white, and until recently identified himself as white, he fits comfortably into neither white nor Aboriginal society, and both regard him as an outsider.
               Being an outsider is a theme in Sacred Site, reflected in all the historical periods the novel encompasses: the settler family who seek to tame the outback and who embark on a mission of hope to establish a sheep station in a newly discovered area of territory; the immigrants on the £10 passage who build a lifestyle that dazzles their relatives back in Britain; the man fleeing an acrimonious divorce by moving to the other side of the continent. The setting lends itself to this: a remote mining town that draws those on the run from the law, from broken hearts, from themselves. Dislocation is reflected in the Aboriginal stories, too: a Dreaming story about a hunter banished from his tribal territory, and a young Aboriginal woman shunned by her family for bearing a child of mixed descent.
               So where does that leave us? Where is home? Perhaps it’s where you want to be, where you feel you belong. Or maybe it’s where you’re accepted for what and who you are. Early in the novel, two Aboriginal characters joke with each other about the insults they receive at the hands of other Aboriginal people who resent the fact they’re educated, have jobs, and want the best for their children. They’re labelled ‘coconuts’: black on the outside and white in the middle. It’s a term that Aboriginal people who strive hard to break from a cycle of poverty naturally find offensive.
There are many Aboriginal people whose families were affected by the stolen generation and who wish to recover their Aboriginal roots. I’ve spent a lot of time with such people; people who don’t know who they are or where they belong, and they explained that they felt like there was something missing. They had been brought up to believe they were white, yet it didn’t fit comfortably. Once they discovered they were Aboriginal, a lot of things made sense to them, and they knew where they fitted in, where they belonged, and suddenly they had an identity they were proud of.
And maybe that answer’s good enough for my original question: home it where it all makes sense.
               Until tomorrow, Kim
 

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Sacred Site by Kim Fleet

Tuesday, August 12th, 2008
 I’m cooking a Bolognese at present, and mulling over the process of writing, and creativity in general. Nigella Lawson mentioned in an interview that she found the repetitive actions of cooking – peeling, chopping, stirring, mixing – highly therapeutic, a way to let her mind relax and let go of other concerns. And I find this to be true with writing: it’s when I’m involved in mindless repetitive acts, that my thoughts are freed to go off on journeys of exploration, and I discover that I’m absorbed in a scene, a conversation, a piece of action. It’s like giving my mind the space to be itself. When I’m stuck, I’ll take myself off and weed the paths or bake a cake, anything that will let my mind go into freefall and find the answer that actually has been lurking there waiting to be discovered all along, it’s simply that everyday concerns have put it in the shadows. (This isn’t true of ironing or dusting, which are both so abhorrent there ought to be an EU directive banning them).
               As to the process of putting words onto paper, I’ve tried many methods. Straight onto PC; writing in long hand then typing it up; writing with a detailed plan; writing with no plan at all, just a vague idea what the book’s about. All of them bring their own joys and difficulties. Writing with a detailed plan is fabulous if you want to write very quickly and don’t have time to explore new aspects of the story. If you have a scheme with all the characters carefully drawn, all the plot points timed, all the scenes and chapters set out precisely with their purpose, main event, who’s on stage, all you need to do then is write the words. It works; but it I find sticking to this method very restrictive, and one thing that I love about the process of writing is the surprises, the times when you’re writing and suddenly the characters go off on their own, the plot twists, and I go off into a strange state of consciousness where I feel I’m not really writing at all but channelling something that’s already been written. It’s the most glorious, liberating and exciting feeling. However, the second draft is hard work: pruning all those free flow sentences and taming the wayward characters who decided that really the story was all about them and threatened to derail it.
               Embarking with only a vague idea of what the story is all about is thrilling, writing by the seat of your pants, high octane, dangerous. You need to be prepared to crash and burn. Getting to the end is tough, and if you do get that far, oh the agony of the rewrite. It needs to be put away in a dark room for at least a month while cold, hard realism and an editor’s eye replace the jubilation, and then you put your finger on the delete key and keep it there.
               When I wrote Sacred Site, I had a detailed plan of the characters and the plot, and I had the chapters and scenes mapped out in reasonable detail, but when I came to write it, I still had enough flexibility to allow the characters to develop in ways I hadn’t envisaged, to bring in new characters, and to include more episodes from the past that impact on the present. I wrote direct onto PC, and rewrote only after I’d completed a full first draft. I’m currently working on another thriller, and I’ve used a different method for this one, writing in full in long hand, and then editing and rewriting as I type it up. It’s pretty grim, to be honest, to be faced with several spiral bound notebooks full of my frankly incomprehensible scrawl to be typed out, and I think in future that I’ll still write in long hand but type up at the end of each chapter.
               Long hand? Long hand! You technophobe, Kim! I can hear the screaming from here. I love writing in long hand, for several reasons: I write more slowly, so my thoughts have time to gather before I scribble them down; I can write anywhere, anytime: on the train, in bed, in cafes; and all I need are a pen and a bit of paper. I use a fountain pen (stop groaning), simply because I like the feel of it and my writing is much more legible if in fountain pen. Biro is a total non starter; I might as well write with my feet. I tend to curl up on the settee to write, perching my notebook on my lap, and regularly shoving the cat off the notebook (she gets comfy and goes to sleep) and dissuading her from chewing my pen while I’m writing. I like to have the radio or TV on in the background. I never hear a word of it, I get so absorbed in what I’m writing, but I find it comforting, almost as if I’m kidding myself I’m not actually writing, I’m listening to the radio and there just so happens to be a notebook on my knee.
               It’s the absorption I need, it’s the reason I write. Every writer will be familiar with this situation: you’re at a party, talking to a relative stranger, and you’ve diffidently confessed that you do a bit of writing. The relative stranger announces, “Oh, I’ve always thought I’d like to be a writer.”
Me: “What kinds of things do you write?”
Relative stranger: “I’ve never actually written anything. I just don’t have the time, but I’d love to be a writer.”
Now, I presume they don’t have similar conversations with brain surgeons and engineers? Writing, like all other occupations, needs a period of apprenticeship. You can’t just do it, you have to learn how to do it, and how to get better at doing it; and for that you’ve got to find time to invest. And it helps if you don’t write because you like to, but because you’ve got to. Why else would you get up early so you can write for an hour before you go to work? Because you have to; it’s a drug; you need your fix. Maybe it’s because real life is so uncertain that the ability to meddle in other people’s lives (even though fictional) is a way of exerting control in a wayward world, and that’s the compulsion.
               OK, Bolognese sauce bubbling away nicely, off to do a different kind of stirring. Until tomorrow, Kim
 

 

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Sacred Site by Kim Fleet

Monday, August 11th, 2008

Kim Fleet Monday, and my first blog for Picnic about my novel Sacred Site. I think I should start off by saying what the book is about. Sacred Site is a thriller set in an Australian Aboriginal community. A mining company believes there’s gold under Mt Parker and to get to the gold, it needs to destroy it. However, Mt Parker is a sacred site for the Aboriginal people who live there, and their permission is needed before the mountain can be destroyed. An anthropologist is sent to investigate the claim, but she also discovers there was a massacre of Aboriginal people there about a century before. She’s horrified when an Aboriginal woman reveals that child abuse is rife in the Aboriginal community. As she uncovers more, she receives threatening letters, her colleagues are attacked, and finally she is left fighting for her life in the outback.

Sacred Site is informed by experiences I had working as an anthropologist with Aboriginal people. I came to anthropology in a peculiar way, leaving school at 16 and then deciding after working for a few years to go back to college, do my A levels and then go to university. Anthropology was my third choice of subject at uni, but in the first lecture, I was captivated. A rough definition is it’s ‘the study of people’, and traditionally that meant living in the middle of nowhere and studying the customs of weird and wonderful tribes. But modern anthropologists are just as likely to study online communities, football hooligans, hospital patients or criminal gangs. I suppose that makes me a traditionalist, as when I came to do my fieldwork, I decided to work with Aboriginal people and hoofed off to Central Australia to live at Uluru (Ayers Rock) for two years. My original intention was to come home and be an academic, spending all day intoning ‘The Aborigines do this, and the Aborigines think that…’ but the experiences I had during that first period of fieldwork shocked me so much I couldn’t stomach lecturing about the people I’d lived with for two years. Both appallingly pompous and ridiculously naive, I decided I wanted to try to give something back to the Aboriginal people, and went back to Australia and worked in land rights.
What was so shocking? The condition of the communities. Imagine the third world. Imagine litter and dirt. Imagine scabby dogs driven mad with fleas. Imagine communal showers because your house doesn’t have washing facilities. Imagine TB, hepatitis, scabies. Imagine dying because you were drunk and fell asleep on the road and got run over. Imagine a community that condones child abuse as part of traditional culture and the rights of the elder men, at the same time as the women decry this as ‘bullshit culture’. Imagine violence as routine. Imagine squalor, a life on the dole, living in a community where everyone else is on the dole, where your children will never have a job, where you have no expectation of decent health care and education. Imagine living in a bubble in the middle of nowhere, where no-one thinks this is right, but no-one knows how to fix the situation, either.
I’ve lived in several remote Aboriginal communities, and the conditions I’ve described are common. Who’s to blame? Is it the government, for not sorting the problem out? Or the Aboriginal people, who ought to just pull themselves up by their boot straps? Difficult when you’ve poured money into the communities and nothing seems to change. Difficult to look at the long term when for the past hundred years your land’s been nicked, your children taken away, and hope has long since flown away. At the same time, I was moved by the humour, resilience and determination demonstrated by many of my Aboriginal friends.
It was these issues I wanted to explore in writing, but I didn’t want to write a polemical piece saying how dreadful it all was and something ought to be done, as what I also wanted to look at were the ambiguities inherent in the system. Are we to blame for the actions of our ancestors? Is it possible to atone for atrocities committed by people a century ago, who did what they did because their beliefs about the world were substantially different to our own? I remember talking to an Aboriginal man about the appalling treatment his ancestors had suffered: their land taken, forced to work on the land, paid no wages other than food and a blanket, and frequent beatings. He said, “Yeah, but what did yous do to your own people? You sent them right the way round the other side of the world just for stealing a sheep. No wonder they was like that to us blackfellas.”
I decided to write a thriller set in an Aboriginal community. I’d got an unusual heroine, a cast of colourful characters, and an exotic location. And I thought the thriller format would give me a forum to explore some of the issues in contemporary Aboriginal culture, and allow me to reflect on the history of Aboriginal-white contact. I’m fascinated by the past, and how the past is never ‘done’: it sends tendrils through to the present and future. I love the idea of time as a palimpsest: we might think the past is wiped away, but the ghost of it still lurks there beneath the present, and sometimes becomes visible.
And I’d also got a swag full of the kinds of funny incidents that happen when you work in Aboriginal communities: the kids playing football in the middle of an important meeting; the camels on the airstrip; the frogs in the toilet; the road kill kangaroo proudly brought in for a barbecue. And yes, I did eat it, and yes it was revolting, mostly because the bit I got was practically raw. Thank goodness for tomato ketchup, I say!
Until tomorrow, Kim
 
 

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