Where do stories come from

and more Ted Hughes//Arctic Monkeys//Marlon James//Bill Ryder-Jones

I am in Hebden Bridge. A variety of things conspired to bring me here, just like they did the first time I was here. That time, I replaced Raynor Winn as a tutor on a writing retreat, the need for a replacement also a confluence of conspiracies. That week, something special happened. I’m not sure what it was. Maybe it was something about the equinox. Maybe it was something about feeling like something terrible was shifting - there was something terrible last year, I likely will never write about the specifics of it - but that terror was lifting, and I felt that first, here, or there even, on the haha at Lumb Bank, a sense that things would be ok even if they currently weren’t. Future tense once again felt assured, and it hadn’t for a while. This time, I am on a deadline, a friend’s offered me their house while I’m away, I need to be in Edinburgh on Saturday, it almost makes sense, if you’re given to squinting at sense, to stop here, just about halfway between the south of England and Scotland, hardly a diversion, if you’re used to diversions.

Last time I was here, I ended up in Liverpool by mistake. I like to blame it on the fact I’d been in a Swedish forest for a month and there really is not much company to be had in a cabin in November in Sweden. This aloneness didn’t bother me much, I have come to realise that although I like people to the point of forensic distraction, I really like being away from people too. It helps with the dissection. I found how confronting isolation is interesting to observe. And slightly addictive too. I moved house two days after I came back; I was furious then with the fact of pavements, I’d spent most of my time walking on moss, tripping over tree roots, and on returning, found myself assaulted by the boredom of tarmac. No, it wouldn’t do. What I needed, I reasoned, if reason had come into it, was a night out nearly 300 miles away. Perhaps reason had departed by the time I piled into a tour van and we set out west from Hebden Bridge. Perhaps the few remembered facts of the evening chased reason away: there were games of darts - because it was one thing Sylvia did like about here - and there were four pints which when you’re half pint sized like me is an ambitious and terrible amount to drink (and that was before the gin and juice), and then there was the bursting into the green room and proclaiming you’re the only person who understands Sylvia Plath. I’m not saying the fact of the proclamation and the pints are connected but I’m also not not saying it. The next morning, I woke to a text from a friend in Glasgow who was expecting me later in the day, when I told her where I was all she replied is of course you are. Sometimes, we are more predictable than we want to admit.

I have grand plans while I’m here in the way I always have grand plans. I will finish the novel I’m writing. I will do some screen work. I will read ALL the books I need to read for Edinburgh next week. I will walk miles every day. I will wash my face every night. I will eat at least two meals a day. Yes, I think, the countryside will heal me.

Second to last time I was here which was also the first time I was here, I was healed. I’d spent the Sunday night before I arrived in a Travelodge in Manchester and while it might seem unlikely to be healed in any hotel with such a chasm between its spelling and pronunciation, I did believe myself healed. What I had not factored into this belief was the way that belief rarely relies on fact, or experience, or evidence. At the end of that week, I did go to Glasgow. It felt good to be driven home north, and to carry on through Bolton with flags littering every lamppost, to stop at the fancy services for coffee, to listen properly to a playlist; there is something about being in a car that makes you talk to the person next to you. You don’t have to look at them. It helps, the side by side thing. Glasgow and it was cold. Felt like it the first weekend of autumn. I think we went out that night. Drank whisky with friends. Later, I dreamt of snakes coming out my skin. They stung. I threw them away. I said it was on account of the healing. They weren’t so much snakes as leeches. Eels, maybe, I said when I tried to explain the dream. See, I said, I’m healed, forgetting the time I ate an eel and the next morning had the worst food poisoning I’ve ever pretended not to have as I sat in a meeting with my editor.

This time, I am not foolish enough to believe myself healed. I am not arrogant enough anymore to want to be. I walk to Sylvia Plath’s grave. I walk through the woods to Ted Hughes’ old house. The first time I do this, two little boys run down the steep hill towards me, their arms flying in the way only children’s arms do. Oh, one of them says theatrically, if only we knew where we were. The other, older by half a head’s height says, it would be nice if we were not so very lost. I smile at them. Think of the ways we find to say the things we don’t know how to say. Some of the best writing advice is from Marlon James - ‘people never say what they mean’, I think you can take it further, people rarely say what they want. This tension between what is said and unsaid is what makes writing work. They carry on running, straight towards me. One of them’s wearing a Messi top, his hair all summer colours from the sun, the other alike enough to be his brother at a guess, is taller, better assembled, but with less of the imp than the younger one. Lady, says the little one, do you know where we are? I tell him that yes I do, reminding myself this is not the time to give them a history of literary couples although it’s tempting. The elder child says, I think we’re lost. Yes, says the little one, our granny told us to go and run around in the woods but we couldn’t find the circle.

I want to squeeze this child very tightly, I want to tell them never to lose this literal mindedness, I want to tell them both to go back into the woods and keep playing. Instead, I say, do you know your address. Of course we do, says the bigger one, we aren’t that lost. I suggest I could walk them back to their granny but they are horrified by this, to be accompanied would clearly be an insult to their navigational skills and their independence. If you carry on down the hill you’ll get to Hebden Bridge, I say. You know you could have just said that, says the little one, and off they run, arms and legs still flying. And then they stop, lady, they shout back up the hill, are you sure? Yes, I shout down to them, just keep running.

There comes a time when you’re writing a novel or a screenplay, that everything seems to belong in it. You take this as a sign what you’re doing is right. See, you think, when you’re in a bar eavesdropping on the couple at the table next to you, this is the exact dialogue you need. The same is true say when you trip over a goose because you’re too busy laughing at the performative runner on the other side of the road, yes, this makes for an excellent scene. The same with the little boys in the woods, or the man you meet at Plath’s grave who patiently replaces the Hughes when its defaced, or the insufferable bore you overhear later telling mostly the air around him that Ted was playing Heathcliff his whole life. You realise so much of life belongs in a book or a film, but not in the way its lived. It’s the same with Marlon James’ dialogue advice, you change things, shift them, magpie them around, you collapse different people and events into other characters, and you do make things up, but maybe more than inventing things, there’s some act of alchemy happening, you’re transforming the lived into story.

There’s a line in Wild Roses by Bill Ryder-Jones, that says turning stories into beautiful truths, which is maybe what you’re after when you’re using life as a springboard to writing; you have to transform them into something if not beautiful, as near to a truth as you can. Not the truth, but a type of universal truth. In his typical self deprecating fashion, Bill follows the line with, not that it matters to me. Precedes it with, taking every single piss.

I like novels, and I love poems, but a good song lyric- that’s a dark and high art - I will happily bare knuckle fight anyone who dismisses the genius of a pop-song. The night I first met Bill, we yapped about song lyrics, how they need to not be on the nose, specifically bonding over John Cooper Clarke’s I Wanna Be Yours. The whole song is a masterclass in both saying and not saying a thing. I wanna be your vacuum cleaner, breathing in your dust, works because he’s not saying it explicitly. If he was, it would be schmaltzy nonsense. The Arctic Monkey’s more famous cover of the song, takes it a step further, grounding it in a place as well as a time when they twist electric meter, to the northern iteration, leccy meter, the line becoming, I wanna be your leccy meter, I will never run out. My sons think these are terrible lyrics, they like to laugh at them (and me) so badly that they made their own cover. It was quite good.

Some time between the boys in the woods and the man at the grave, I begin to think about these lyrics again, that conversation again, and somehow it shifts what I’m working on. These are all the things you can’t really reply with when someone in the audience asks where you get your ideas from, because they’re there, all the time. The trick is to be alive to them, that way they’ll never run out. The same as the trick to creating the strange circumstances of chance that lead to these half stories, wrong turns, dead ends, new possibilities, is to get in the van and go to Liverpool by mistake or live in a forest for a bit or hike through the woods when it’s nearly dark. Or like my biggest kid texted me yesterday morning, why think when you could do. Partly the story needs to come from somewhere but it needs something to be born through, life births it, imagination transforms it. What you need to remember is you are mercilessly in service to the story, and not it to you. We just get called the author, but it writes itself, the trick is to find it, and keep finding it.