A different kind of Flow
I've been editing 'God's Country'. Editing, to me, is a bigger task than actually writing. After a positive supervisory meeting on 27th November, I do feel like I'm on the right track. I have a sense of 'Joel-Lane-ness' coming through via the editing process, and spend a lot of time walking the towpath of Stourbridge canal, especially to the intersection of the canal and the river. In 'From Blue to Black', a conversation between Karl and David takes place there. Lane uses Karl to describe it as: ' "This place is strange, isn't it? Like a bit of wilderness. It's like one of those points you'd use for reference when drawing a map - to set the contour lines or whatever.' (p52). I took this picture, which is the section where the River Stour flows underneath the canal.'Beyond the dark river.' As Lane puts it (p52).
Another quote: 'We walked on to the canalside, where a few men were fishing in water that held a storm of weeds.' (p48)
At my supervisory meeting, Paul Evans talked about 'flow' in terms of the flow of water in the canal and the river, and it made me look again at the way Lane used a sense of flow in From Blue to Black. There is a sense of connection between the narrative flow, or action, and the flow of water. I took this picture, and thought of that quote above, and this: 'The canal water was so still that it reflected the mass of ivy on the bank.' (p49) Then, 'The river. It was slower and wider here than in the town...A thin stream trickled down...' (p50-1) And 'We negotiated a path through the trees, following the stream up to the metal walkway that covered the overflow.' (p55) Thinking about this, I did some googling around about the flow of canals, because I realised it would be important to use this information when my character, Guy, walks his old route. I found this: 'At the highest points you will usually find a reservoir, fed by water run off from higher land or streams. Some canals cross or make use of natural rivers for part of the their route. There is always some flow to lower portions, a lock at a time as boats move. or some leakage through many locks, some gates are intended to act as weirs when not in active use. When rain or river flow would raise the level there are other weirs and sluices to divert extra water to rivers and other channels. One of the problems with low flow is that they do silt up over time, so periodically need to be cleared by dredging as well as removing shopping trolleys.' (https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2018/jun/25/where-canal-water-come-from-flood retrieved 10th December, 2019)
I know I am keeping this in mind as I edit this section.
At my supervisory meeting, Nick Royle talked about my use of sentence structure, which, although grammatically incorrect, he saw as a deliberate attempt to influence the prose. In Sonia Overall's thesis 'Walking, Making, Thinking' (2018), she refers to the 'flaneuse' and then she says this: 'Useful examples of writers discussing the importance of walking to their writing also exist. Coverley’s book is named for Arthur Machen’s autobiography 'The London Adventure, or, the Art of Wandering' (1924), in which Machen uses tangential and meandering prose to discuss his use of urban wandering as imaginative fuel. Machen’s method, ‘London Science’, celebrates the richness and enormity of the city, as well as offering a way to combat his terror of the streets (Coverley P145). (My use of bold) As a female walker, who's walking influences my writing, I realise that I walk in this 'insurgent space' which, in Black Country parlance is called 'The Cut'. I can see that my grammatical style is, or has, as sense of a particular Psychogeographic Flow, but I also wonder how much the Black Country linguistics affect our - or my - view of space. 'The Cut' sounds like a dangerous, vicious place and I am a female walker (usually alone) down there. I wonder how much the psychogeographic flow in my writing is influenced by the. I like the idea of my 'tangential and meandering prose' which doesn't, as Machen does, discuss my use of wandering, but is realised within the creative response I have to it.