Quote by Stephen Cox. Photo: Tim Mossholder via Pexels.com.
Some broader current?
Novelist Stephen Cox considers ‘where the words come from’
‘Where do you get your ideas from?’ I realise some writers call this a bad question – certainly an annoying one, since it is so common. Yet it’s an honest one: a seeking after truth.
The author Neil Gaiman says writers’ reservations come from nerves, because who knows where inspiration comes from? Maybe, he laughs, if examined too much it will stop. And a novel is more than an idea. ‘Boy goes to wizard school’ is not new and not enough to sustain one book, let alone seven. Originality comes in the work, the implementation. Once you have an idea, a great many ideas and decisions need to be built around it. Not every keystone can support a great arch.
There is a curious parallel with spoken ministry. For me, ministry draws on my own experience, knowledge and skills. It feels like something it is specifically for me to speak aloud. Yet it also feels external to me, like I am being guided to deliver it. I must mull over it to be sure what words are not my own prancing ego. We dispute exactly what we call that movement in a gathered Meeting, whether it is just some higher self, or some broader current that runs through us and guides us. But, for me, true ministry is both me and other.
I don’t say that God called me to write the book! Yet there is a similarity of inspiration followed by work, a similarity in finding which pieces fit, and which, however creative and wonderful, must be discarded. Perhaps writing a novel is more like a concern, in the Quaker sense; a feeling one is under guidance to pursue a certain path to wherever it leads. It’s true that I had to make hard decisions about work, leisure and service to finish it.
The Myers family
I had an idea for a short story. That idea was three characters: a nurse, Molly Myers; her husband Gene, and their little boy Cory. It is the United States in the 1960s. Molly sews Cory’s Halloween costume. How much they all love each other, and yet, it’s a strange house, where they can only keep Cory safe if they keep him a secret. They are in danger that very day and do not know it…
The short story was rather good, but I hesitated to send it out to magazines. I became obsessed. Why was Molly sad in autumn, how had Cory come to live with them, why did I mention his dreams and Molly’s love of music? I began to think that there was a book in the Myers family, perhaps a better book than the different one I was writing. But I start with a situation, interesting characters and the forces that will oppose the ending they want. I build out.
Many things flowed into the book. Fifty years observing people in families, in authority, in love, in conflict. A lifetime around strong, intelligent women helped me write Molly and the other women in the book. My odd relation with America, where I was born, but left too young to remember. A lifelong love of books, some of high renown and others that you probably haven’t read. And cinema, since I feel the book cries out to be a film, too. Is it a Quaker book? During its writing, a Friend asked if it would be ‘The Great Quaker Novel’.
I was lucky enough to go to the Quakers Uniting in Publications (QUIP) conference in April, to run a session on fiction. Some of those present openly saw fiction as a way to proselytise. They thought a Quaker novel needs to be about Quakers, presented positively, not about our flaws, but a tract to bring people in. Well, I have read ‘message’ novels and they can be extremely hard work. All agreed that our Quakerism must inform what we do, since we claim it is a faith for the whole of our life. Yet other writers don’t hang the word ‘Quaker’ on their books.
A spiritual journey
I am all for promoting the Quaker message – it is one of my callings. But I wanted to write a story about people you would care about. It is, at its heart, about family, about rearing a child who is very different, and about the cost of love. It ended up being a book where Molly is on a spiritual journey, but it’s not a Quaker tract. The word ‘Quaker’ does not appear in it. So far, Quakers seem to like it.
One of the odd features was writing about the 1960s; I thought I would be open to the charge of evading reality, using sweet nostalgia to ignore our current dilemmas. However, the issues that ran through that era included divisions in politics and culture, war and peace, liberty and compulsion, the role of women, a rising desire for racial justice, and the way to fight poverty and oppression. The unnamed president in the book has a reputation for untruth and prosecutes an unwinnable war in the name of peace. The longer I worked on the book, the more I became sure it was about our human present and the future.
Our values, our principles, are sometimes easy to hold to. ‘Easy’ is not a good story. I wanted the characters to face the cost of their necessary lies. Gene and Molly hate guns and the bomb and the war; they are armchair followers of Martin Luther King Junior, but nonviolence is difficult and carries consequences.
Choices
I guess there will be those reading the book who do not like the choices they make. I may be questioned by the ‘Quaker inquisition’. For me, I tried to write believable people facing terrifying difficulties.
And the final issue. All fiction is untrue – the author is holding their own special mirror up to the world. I believe sometimes we see our own world more clearly when we use the mirror of ‘What if?’. I use the tools of science fiction or fantasy. I could have made Cory a Vietnamese refugee, and that would have been a fine book, but not mine. (‘It doesn’t read like sci fi’ my daughter insists.)
Cory, the ‘Child of the Stars’, shows us humanity, warts and all, as an outsider would see us. For all my emphasis on writing a story about a mother’s love for her son, Cory gives us a vision of how we humans could be, if we wanted. And it is both the personal – parental love – and that vision which have resonated with readers to date.
Our Child of the Stars by Stephen Cox will be published on 24 January 2019 by Jo Fletcher Books at £14.99.
Comments
As an author I identify with much of this. I too am often asked the question and can sometimes identify sources - a glimpse of white deer standing out in the (roe) crowd, a news item. I too let my characters lead and try not to preach, but of course - unless the writing is simply an exercise driven by commerce or formula - any writer’s values underpin their fiction. Being a climate and peace activist now part of Extinction Rebellion I now wonder whether anything else is worth writing about, but I know that the humanity of the characters must come first and that the language must sing, surprise and connect. So it’s a difficult balance. I look forward to reading Our Child of the Stars.
By suehampton@btinternet.com on 13th December 2018 - 13:53
Thanks Sue. Please do let me know what you think, in due course.
By Stephen_Cox on 13th December 2018 - 17:40
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