You probably never read that bit at the beginning of a book. That blank page before the chapters start. The bit that says “all people, events and places in the book are fictitious, and any similarity to the living or dead is coincidental”. It is of course put there to fend off legal complications. It’s not really true.
You can’t write about something that bears no resemblance to things you’ve experienced, places you’ve been, people you’ve known. Same with actors, developing the roles they play by thinking back on character traits, accents, physical habits, of persons they met. Same with painters. Even Picasso. Especially Picasso. He could paint the other side of an imaginative cubist still-life because he’d looked at it. He wasn’t making it up. Picasso could paint a bull in two or three strokes of the brush, and it be perfect. Because he’d watched them. Many times.
When your small children, anyone’s children, started drawing, it’s usually of mum, with a huge round head. The head is what they got to know first. Scribble-hair usually comes next. Arms and legs come last, as simple sticks, because they haven’t yet figured out what’s beyond the close, cuddled face.
When you see ancient drawings by Native Indians, Aborigines, Inuits, of beings in “space suits, you can be sure they’ve seen them first. There is no other possibility. They didn’t get it from Spielberg movies. Try it. Try to imagine something you’ve never ever seen, which looks like nothing else at all.
So that’s how I’ve spent my 30+ degrees heatwave. Sheltering, plenty of fluids (make mine apple juice), trying to push myself through an already difficult chapter, whilst assuring myself that “all people, events and places in the book are fictitious, and any similarity to the living or dead is coincidental”. Yeh, right.
All text and photographs copyright ian gordon craig.
