The funny, and kind of scary thing, about week 3 was a nice little journey into an idea vortex.  It started with my sitting down for some more world-building and within seconds a great swirl of ideas appeared.

Normally I like this kind of creation, but when the swirl began to spin and got faster and faster, ideas began to be forcibly sucked out of my head and I started to worry.

Not, you understand, because of fear of running out or that those liberated would fly away into the ether. No, I was worried because every one of those ideas will at some point have to be either used or discarded. And there were just too many of them!

For now I am capturing all of them and hoping that they won’t gang up on me to turn my novel into something unrecognisable. Still, it’s a nice problem to have.

I’ll probably do a post about family histories and autobiographies in old novels, but in this post I want to share my deep puzzlement over this book.

Madam Bovary is a classic. You hear/see its title everywhere, even without necessarily having any idea of what it’s about. Flaubert and this novel are always present in discussions of great literature.

I read the book. I skimmed a lot of text. I hated the protagonist. I found it a largely sardonic and cruel type of story which criticises everyone and seems to find no pleasure in the world. It read like it had been written by a deeply misanthropic writer. Its great fame left me completely puzzled.

Figuring I was missing something and not having a literature professor on hand, I turned to the modern equivalent: the internettythingy.  It was most informative.

Before I say anything else, I should say that for all my skimming there was some really great description, and excellent characterisation. I could see the talent of the author… or so I thought. Then the internettythingy informed me that you don’t know anything about Flaubert’s genius until you can read it in French. In French it’s pure poetry.

In English… well… it doesn’t have the beautiful language to soften the ugliness of the story. Or so says me.

I’m sure my French will never be good enough to read the original and that makes me kind of sad, but I’m still a little puzzled about why people rave about this book without mentioning the ‘must read in French’ caveat.

Maybe I’m still missing something, but it has very little to make it a good read for an non-French speaker. A great book to study as a part of literary history – absolutely – but that’s not what I read it for.

If you love this book, and read it a) in english & b) not as a part of a course of study then I’d love to know why you love it!

Written by someone with years of experience counselling creative people, it listed and discussed the main types of anxieties that creative people feel about themselves and toward their creative process and work. My friend had just had one of those ‘oh yeah, that’s me!’ experiences reading it and from a quick look it seemed like almost any writer would.

He and I then got into a long discussion about the strangeness of our relationship to being creative, in that we all seem to struggle for external validation of one sort or another, we all doubt the worth of what we create and… well it’s a long list really!

Why is it that being creative is such a fraught thing?

And ironically – at least in my mind – writers also have to have a contrasting touch of arrogance. If we didn’t, surely we’d never think other people would be interested in our scratchings.

As you can tell, I’m still mulling this one over…

Fairly pleased with that, particularly as it was a very exhausting week at the day-job and overall energy for writing took a bit of a hit.

Started a new short story though, which was very nice, and think my ‘kids novel’ finally has its world-building under control.

Gaskell takes us on a journey through the social changes brought on by industrialisation, and how the agricultural South became ever more a different world from the busy industrial capitalism of the North. She explores (somewhat painfully at times) the issue of strikes and Unions, as well as the harsh reality of health impacts and poverty associated with factory work.

Religion, and the changes occurring in English churches at the time are also examined, and in fact form the main catalyst for the change in Margaret Hale – the heroine’s – life.

If you like history, and particularly have an interest in the world that spawned the thinking of Marx and Engels, then this is a book worth reading simply for the historical context.  Nicholas Higgins and his family form a remarkable sub-plot which touches all the themes mentioned above while providing challenge and friendship to Margaret.

Margaret is one of those wonderful heroines who is good, a little proud, but a rock of sense in a maelstrom of dislocation and loss.  She feels deeply, and is the human lens through which the many social issues are given both consideration and response.

One of the things I like about North and South is that much of the romance between Margaret and the mill owner Mr Thornton, is told from his side. We spend a lot of time in his point of view watching Margaret and understanding his love, which only deepens as he is refused by her and then thinks she loves another.

Aside from some dizzying head-jumping, the focus on Mr Thornton’s thoughts and feelings (and his own life of struggle and success), makes the story richer.

Something else that I like is the tragedy.  Seven people – four of whom are very important in Margaret’s life – die in the course of the book.  This aspect of real life, changing fortunes and the sense of mortality it gives, again make this book feel more real than many of its contemporaries. It is not morbid though, nor does the death toll really strike you until you’ve done reading.

There are great characters in this book. From Dixon, the faithful and feisty servant, to Mrs Thornton, the imposing matriarch, and Higgins, the firebrand unionist, there is no one who is comical or satirical, but just solid, well-drawn and engaging.

My main criticism of North and South is that it wants to educate the reader, and this shows. Blocks of dialogue and exposition are dedicated to filling us in on the details of manufacturing and unionism. These were probably fascinating to readers at the time, and might be likewise now if you don’t know much about them, but they slow the story at times.

I don’t know many people who love this book the way they love Pride and Prejudice or Wuthering Heights, but I think that’s because this book has a more serious purpose. Or maybe it’s the extensive use of Northern dialect which takes a bit of getting used to!

For anyone interested in the story, but not the reading, there is a reasonably faithful BBC production of it floating around. Otherwise, I recommend it as a very interesting, well written book.

A little patchy in terms of writing everyday, which means I’ll be recording a ‘no’ against meeting the challenge this week, but having said that I actually wrote over 1,000 words!

My main hurdle for daily writing came in the form of the need to do world-buliding. Stopped me dead in my tracks for two days. I think that was one of the things nagging at me with WIP#1 for much of last year in fact.

Now I’m all excited about my world again!

In terms of tracking words, I’m still going to use the page here on Lamellae, but I decided I’d broaden what I’m recording just to see if there is anything of interest to be gleaned from it.

I know there are other writers out there doing a more ambitious 500 words a day challenge so I’ll finish this progress report with a Good Luck! to all of them.

After a disruptive period offline where being online was about the last thing I cared about, coming back to blogging was a bit like slipping on your favourite slippers on the first cold day of the year. Comfy and habitual. But is that reason enough?

So I’ve started rounding up the reasons I like blogging:

1. I’ve always enjoyed writing essays and articles, so blogging appeals as a way to do that in mini form among my fiction projects.
2. There’s a lot going on in my head that wouldn’t interest the people I spend my days with, so blogging is a way to put it out into the world and share it.
3. It’s a wonderful way to squeeze extra enjoyment from my love of hunting out word origins. And words in general.
4. It’s a better use of my brain than watching TV!
5. I think there’s also some discipline in trying to write short (hopefully) engaging posts.
6. Blogging gives me reason to go searching for things of interest in the news, in books and online.

The ‘cons’ if you want to cast them that way, I guess come down to two things…  Blogging is a time-suck, though a manageable one, and as so many writers blog (and most of Lamellae’s audience are people I know) I can only say that I’m blogging for myself.

These two things form a neat balance, because to try and share with a broader audience, and make what I do stand out from the plethora of writing/writer blogs, I would have to spend a lot more time on it.

So are the things I like about blogging, enough to let me sit back and enjoy the intimate cafe lunch that is Lamellae?