How to Cook a Story on a Slow Burner

Posted on May 10, 2013 by Trish

May04~02

No guarantees this will work for you, but if you’re stumped for a story idea, or plain ‘stuck’, you have nothing to lose.

And if you’re here by mistake, thought this was a foodie blog and it has never occurred to you to write a story, then this moment is a gift from fate. Stay and play – you have nothing to lose either.

Why a slow burner? Good stories need time to ferment, with regular tastings to check flavour and seasoning, and our minds continue to work on ideas without us knowing, they need space to mull things over. And anyway, it’s better than staring at an empty page waiting for the fast story delivery man who has lost your address…again.

So lighten up, don a sexy pinny and let’s begin.

First, we make our stock:

Look at the theme ideas below. Think about each one: what it means to you; how true it is, and what questions it raises. Can you think of examples? You can change the words, go off at a tangent or think of something weird, we are playing with ingredients here, ‘wrong’ does not exist.

1. Sweet revenge sickens when it costs you more than your victim.

2. Your best friend becomes your enemy when you both want the last cream puff.

3. A pig in a poke may have a gold ring in his nose.

4. No one has power over us until we submit to them.

5. Love and hate eat at the same table.

Carefully peel and chop finely to release their full essence, there’s no rush. When you’re ready, pick whichever theme set you thinking the most, and jot down how it might play out in your own life: what if it happened to you?…to someone you know?

Leave to simmer for a few days.

Now for the dumplings:

With the stock that you have, what flavours will your dumplings need – sweet, tart, meaty, spicy, sour? Think of the sort of people who could enact your chosen theme: for a flash fiction you will need only three at most. Give them names, and knead thoroughly until you release their full flavours, textures, and colourings. What do they do? Where have they come from? What do they want out of life? What do they fear? What is their role in the theme? What is their connection with each other?

Marinade the dumplings in the stock for one week. Sample occasionally, adding any little seasonings that come to mind: a teaspoonful of honey, a dash of sauce, a pinch of bitter rue.

Blending:

Stir well until all ingredients are well mixed and the stock has soaked thoroughly into the dumplings. How do the characters interact? What do they do to each other? Say to each other? Write as much of the story as comes into your head – start anywhere.

Set aside to cool. Return at intervals to reheat, stir, and add elements until your story is more or less complete, and you have a sequence of events.

Leave to ferment for at least a further week, checking and tweaking from time to time to ensure the aroma is enticing for your opening paragraph, and the last mouthful will be satisfying at the end.

Serving:

Sample your concoction once more: you should be able to taste the stock in every spoonful. Are the dumplings substantial, firm and flavoursome? There is plenty of time for a few adjustments if necessary.

When you are entirely happy, present your delicious story neatly, without dribbles, stray hairs, or bits falling off the plate.

Pour yourself a large glass of wine, tuck in, and enjoy!

~

If this recipe has worked for you, I’d be delighted to know. Please leave a comment, use the contact page, or tweet me @trishanicholson.

Oh, and one more thing I should mention – about writing technique – never drag out a metaphor to absurdity J

And for some after-dinner reading: From Apes to Apps: How Humans Evolved as Storytellers and Why it Matters -  http://collca.com/fata

 

 

 

 

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Tips for Creative Travel Writing Part 3

Posted on May 3, 2013 by Trish

 

Potala doorThese last five topics – theme, structure, beginnings/endings, voice, and detail – are closely related. Blend them like an exquisite curry and your travelogue will be as tasty and memorable.

Theme

A theme – an idea or perspective that creates a pattern through the weave of your travelogue – gives it focus and purpose, and provides a backdrop against which to display your experiences. In an article, it provides you with your slant – the angle from which you approach the location – and the rationale to decide what to put in and leave out.

Your choice of theme will depend where you travel and what you do there. Here are some possibilities: local history; food; a trek or trail, as I used in Journey in Bhutan; continuity and change seen through a major cultural event that I describe in Masks of the Moryons; political conflict as in Rory Stewart’s The Places in Between, based on his travel across war-torn Afghanistan, or a personal quest as in Tim Flannery’s search for unknown mammal species in Papua New Guinea, described in Throwim Way Leg.

Structure

The form, or framework: how you display your story; the order of events, and their causes and effects with which you divide a travelogue into chapters, or an article into paragraphs. It provides a route for your readers to follow, and allows for the inclusion of suspense and intrigue in the sequenced revelation of your travel story. If the experience of travelling itself is the key feature, it may be a simple chronology, but ‘Day 1’ followed by ‘Day 2’is unlikely to grab and hold a reader’s attention.

Structure is related to theme in that an account of a trek, for example, obviously follows the route of the trail for at least that part of the travelogue. Other themes offer a range of creative possibilities: for an historical theme you could start with ‘modern’ and work backwards, or vice versa; if your location includes a major river system, start at the estuary and work towards the source; from a mountain summit to the valley, or from urban to rural. Be creative, but make sure it fits with your theme and material; it needs to have some logic and be easy for readers to follow.

In Homage to Barcelona, Colm Tóibín writes separate chapters on events, e.g. the Civil War; activities (‘Food and Sex’); places, and famous local people (Gaudi, Miro, Picasso), but the overarching structure of the book is chronological, from Gothic to modernity.

Beginnings and endings (and resolution)

As I suggested in Part 1: start with a hook. The anticipation in booking your tickets, cramming another pair of socks into the suitcase, and cancelling the milk may excite you, but is unlikely to thrill your readers, so start with a dramatic arrival, or your first climax, and weave in the back-story of why or how you got there, focusing on highlights. Similarly, the most satisfying endings close on a relative high. We don’t want to follow you all the way back home, dragging luggage up three flights of stairs to your flat to share your jet lag –  or the pile of bills on the mat.

“The minibus is already parked at the front, loaded with our luggage; we will leave when the dancing is over.

I think this is the last dance; they wear fearsome dragon masks, prancing and gyrating with incredible energy, eight of them, weaving about in circles, the music raucous and strident, cymbals crashing.

Ngawang will come with us, of course, retracing our steps along that tortuous road to Phuntsholing where we will stay tonight, then the long drive through Darjeeling to Siliguri, and finally to the airport at Bagdogra. There he will leave us to take our flight to Delhi. But I have decided to end my journal here, by the forest, with the dragons. It seems fitting: part of me cannot leave, and will stay here, returning to the mountains.” (Excerpt from Journey in Bhutan: Himalayan Trek in the Kingdom of the Thunder Dragon).

Having reminded the reader of the route we would retrace, I gave no other description of that long return journey, except for the steep, muddy scramble on foot to avoid a landslide that blocked the road to Phuntsholing.

In The Old Patagonian Express, Paul Theroux surveys the vast space of Patagonia, his final destination, leaving us with two sentences: “The nothingness itself, a beginning for some intrepid traveller, was an ending for me. I had arrived in Patagonia, and I laughed when I remembered I had come here from Boston, on the subway train that people took to work.”

A resolution may be included in your ending: a reference to a previously stated mission now accomplished – or not; what finally happens to a key character in your account, or an indication of a new direction for people you met or for yourself – closure can sometimes be an opening, a revolving door.

Voice

Your writing voice emerges from your whole character and personality: how and what you think and feel. Revealed not only in what you choose to write about, but in the style of writing: choice of words, their arrangement into sentences, and the viewpoint from which you write. Travel is generally written from a first person point of view – using ‘I’ or ‘we’ – because it relates personal observation, and most often in the past tense, telling the reader what has already taken place, which also enables the use of hindsight.

Writing convincingly in the present tense is much more difficult, but it gives a sense of immediacy: it is happening right now and the reader can share that freshness of experience with you. But you can achieve the best of both. In Journey in Bhutan I wrote in the present tense, alternating with extracts from my journal – recorded at the end of each day in the past tense – to allow me to reflect on events.  

Detail

It is the small facts and details that resonate with readers and give authenticity to travel writing. Walking around a local market, for example, simply describing local craft, art or food, however colourful and attractive, is less inspiring now that we see so many of these fabrics and foods in our own shops and restaurants. Take us into a local kitchen to see how they make samosas. Better still: let us share your messy attempts at making them yourself. Or, like Frances Mayes in Bella Tuscany, quote some local recipes.

Show us where the carvings are made. The wooden mask I wore for the Moryonan festival in Mogpog, in the Philippines, was made here:

“His workshop smells of sawdust, with traces of paint and linseed oil. Curls and chips of wood litter the floor, and hanging from the ceiling is an assortment of wooden masks in different stages of completion. Standing in the corner, partly covered by a cloth, is a roughly carved wooden figure waiting to be worked on. From its shape and the drapes already clear around the head it is probably the Virgin Mary – perhaps a new santo for a local family or even for someone in Manila; he is one of the best carvers.”(Masks of the Moryons).

Tell us about the weavers and their traditional patterns:

“Only women weave; it’s an important source of household income. Some still spin wool, but most buy skeins of yarn. She had a huge range of colours and patterns, some quite plain with small motifs or narrow stripes, others in broad red and yellow strips, busy with additional designs woven into the colours. Various patterns and weaves are associated with different regions and have specific names; the more elaborate and colourful weaves are worn for ‘best’ on festive occasions.” (Journey in Bhutan).

I hope you found these three posts helpful, and I look forward to reading your next piece of travel writing – maybe it will be an e-book. My publisher, Mike Hyman at Collca, is always scouting for new authors for their BiteSize Travel series. If you want to follow this up, clicking on either of the links below takes you to a page of Collca’s website, the tab ‘Write For Us’ opens into submission details.

You can find out more about the e-book Journey in Bhutan: Himalayan Trek in the Kingdom of the Thunder Dragon here: http://collca.com/jib

And Masks of the Moryons: Easter Week in Mogpog here: http://collca.com/mom

 

 

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Tips for Creative Travel Writing: Part 2

Posted on April 26, 2013 by Trish

 

Longinus from Masks of the Moryons
Longinus from Masks of the Moryons

Last week I shared some fiction writing techniques – hook, character, point of view, back-story and flashback – to enrich travel writing without being tempted to ‘make it up’. Here are five more:

Imagery

Bring alive an historic site by imagining the sights and sounds of its original period. What would you hear, see and smell in Saint Columba’s Abbey on the Scottish Island of Iona in the sixth century? Or in the Roman Colosseum during its construction in 70 BCE/AD? When I stood In front of the ruined 17th century Drugyel Dzong in Bhutan’s Paro Valley, I closed my eyes and envisaged how I might have experienced it in its heyday as a fortified monastery and administrative centre.

“Standing in this quiet spot, listening to birds singing and leaves crinkling in the breeze, it is hard to imagine these hillsides echoing with the thunderous clatter of war horses and the deadly whisper of arrows, but since at least the seventh century, various Tibetan war-lords and rulers have tried to expand their influence into the favoured valleys of Bhutan. Over the same period, waves of refugees from cycles of political chaos in Tibet have migrated and settled here.”(Journey in Bhutan: Himalayan Trek in the Kingdom of the Thunder Dragon)

The Senses

Readers of travel want to experience exotic environments without leaving the armchair or putting down their gin and tonic. Travel writers can indulge themselves in descriptive creativity (the bits less perceptive fiction readers sometimes skip in novels), so use all your senses in conveying what you see, hear, smell, taste, touch, and feel intuitively.

“Higher up the hillside, grass gave way to woodland and then dense montane forest rising out of a maze of moss covered rocks and tree roots. The heavy shower was reduced to drizzle under the canopy and it invigorated the forest; every shade of green was intensified, glistening and vivid. Lazy drops of water glided slowly along leaves, dripping silently onto moss beneath. Fine hairs on the ribs of fern fronds, usually invisible, were lit-up by tiny twinkling water droplets like miniature fairy lights. And the air was filled with the fecund mustiness of moist earth seasoned with the tang of wet foliage.

Picking our way between gigantic trees, their trunks smothered in creepers, ferns and grotesque fungi, we pushed aside lianas that hung down from overhead branches, or were they aerial roots?  Or snakes? It was hard to tell the difference. Huge spider webs looped from branch to branch, their spun strands elegantly draped by the weight of raindrop beads. Terrified of getting entangled in one, I kept well behind Thomas.

Apart from the clatter of water dropping onto flat waxy leaves, the forest stood in strange, expectant silence, muffled by the press of growing, spreading vegetation all around us. Yet every surface, especially the dark underside, was teeming with life we could not see, or would not recognise if we did, and we couldn’t see beyond the next tree trunk or veil of hanging moss. The sense of being enclosed, entrapped within an unknowable multitude, was overpowering. (An excerpt from my current travel narrative on Papua New Guinea).

 Emotion

Every trip has some emotional highs, and lows. Readers relate to emotion, a shared human experience. Andrew Harvey draws us – without elaborate language but using his senses – into his expectant excitement at the beginning of his travels in Ladakh:

“It is dawn. The muezzin has just been singing. All the dogs of Leh are barking as they always bark at dawn, different bell-like barks from the hills, from across the valley, from the river. I have the ‘Glass Room’ in the hotel; it looks on to the garden. The fat, already glowing sunflowers knock against my window as I open it. The air is so fresh it makes me half-drunk, and my hand is unsteady finding my shirt.” (A Journey in Ladakh).

Language

All the usual advice on fiction writing applies to creative non-fiction: avoid clichés, use original metaphors and similes, fresh adjectives, adverbs only if necessary, and active verbs to avoid the latter two where possible. In addition, for travel writing, applying local names for things and places (putting the translation in brackets, not the other way round), not only adds atmosphere, it shows respect to the uniqueness of local culture. In Venice, use viottola, not alley; in Thailand, tuktuk rather than auto rickshaw, and in Kenya, minibuses are Matatus.

Plot

How much you use plot – a series of events around conflicts that characters face, and the causes and effects of their resolution which turn the direction of a story to its conclusion – depends on the nature and length of your piece. It could include strife encountered on your journey and how you overcame it, or perhaps it influenced your final itinerary, but it also applies to challenges and opportunities acting on the land and people you experience, and the outcomes recognisable in the places you visit – even changes resulting from tourism.

I made this the theme of a recent travelogue on Marinduque Island in the Philippines. I include an extended extract because the topic is particularly relevant to tourism and travel writing:

“Moryonan has changed in small ways over the years. Only small boys and anthropologists still scamper through the streets looking for Longinus…Moryonan is certainly a tourism attraction: many strangers visit Mogpog for the pugután [ritual execution], but political interest and public funding have not yet turned it into a tourist commodity.

A combination of factors has maintained tradition…Among the ‘cultural guardians’ in Mogpog are the elderly men and women who have spent a life-time carrying out lay functions in the church, or fulfilling their Moryon panata [vow of penance]. They may not hold any official political, social or religious status, but they are respected for their age and knowledge. In Mogpog, young people still lift the hand of their fathers and grandfathers and raise it to their own forehead in a respectful request for their blessing.

‘Cultural guardians’ hold collective memory, reflecting back to the community inconsistencies or ‘errors’ in ritual performance and custom. They remember the old rules and the reasons for them. They know the music, the traditional chants and movements passed down orally from former generations, and they can pass these on to those who will listen. It is a fragile guardianship, eroded by the passage of time and the general pressures of social change.” (Excerpt from: Masks of the Moryons: Easter Week in Mogpog).

 In the final Part 3 next week, I will write about structure, theme and resolution, among other things. You can subscribe to the blog if you don’t want to miss it.

Leave a comment if there is anything else you would like me to include in next week’s post.

If you like reading or writing about travel, you might enjoy my two eBook travelogues published by Collca – Journey in Bhutan: Himalayan Trek in the Kingdom of the Thunder Dragon. http://collca.com/jib

And Masks of the Moryons: Easter Week in Mogpog. http://collca.com/motm

 

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Tips for Creative Travel Writing: Part 1

Posted on April 20, 2013 by Trish

DSC_0071-001Non-fiction authors lack the freedom of fiction writers to ‘make things up’. We have to show factual truth as best we can discern it. Without such authenticity our reputations are at risk. But avoiding invention does not mean we can’t use imagination, drawing on creative techniques to increase the quality of our writing.

Both fiction and non-fiction share the same writing craft, so whether for a blog, an article, a travelogue, or a travel memoir, here, in this first of a 3 part series are some ideas from fiction to enhance your creativity:

Hook

Hook the reader in the first sentence with a compelling local character. In a recent blog post, A Hidden Gem in the Scottish Highlands, I mention an octogenarian cycling back to front to amuse his grandchildren – placing his picture as the leading illustration because his golf course was one of the ‘gems’. A ‘person hook’ is usually more appealing than an inanimate one, unless a view or building is truly extraordinary.

Character

Include a well-known person associated with a location, especially if your trip coincides with the anniversary of their birth or death, or you see an interesting monument to them. Research their back-story, and describe their character, appearance and quirks as a novelist would. Discovering the date was Gaudi’s birthday while travelling in Catalonia, I went to Reus, his birth place. After visiting his childhood home, a bronze statue of him as a youth, and a wondrous centre dedicated to his work, I blogged a brief post about him later that day as A Birthday Card.

When describing local people you meet, mention not only their general appearance, but clothing and how it is worn, how they move, body language, things they carry or have around them in their setting. If you talk with them, quote some of what they say so the reader can ‘hear’ them. (When quoting people at length, or photographing them, ask their permission first).

Points of View

Use additional points of view – other people’s perception – of culture and place to give depth to your own. In The Songlines, Bruce Chatwin uses Arkady, an Australian citizen of Russian descent researching Aboriginal culture, as guide and mentor on his travels. Sun Shuyun, a Han Chinese but a Tibet scholar, spent a year in Gyantse staying with the local Rikzin family, through whose lives he observed and filmed traditional rural Tibetan culture. His travel memoir, A Year in Tibet, is enriched by their insight.

My current travel narrative is about Papua New Guinea where I lived and worked for 5 years, but even if you are in a place for a short time, you can talk with local people and visitors, including your travelling companions, to gain at least some knowledge of their views.

Back-story

Share your own back-story, why you are there. This not only shows what drew you to the place and might attract others, but allows the reader some understanding of where your particular ‘truth’ is coming from – part of your credibility. We all carry personal ‘baggage’ and bias, however objective we try to be. This is what took me to Bhutan:

“I would have come to Bhutan whatever I’d had to go through to get here. I’d already sold my car to pay for the trip.

A couple of years ago, sorting through dusty boxes of old books and magazines left me by a favourite aunt, I came upon a National Geographic Magazine from 1914. A bookmark – a crinkly, yellowed invoice for marzipan (my aunt had owned tearooms) – drew me to the most amazing photographs of mist threaded mountains, exotic architecture, and distinguished looking men wearing what appeared to be navy blue dressing gowns with broad white cuffs…had my aunt longed to go there herself? Was the marzipan marker a message of some kind? … Finding out how to get there was my next step – the fact that I would get there was somehow taken for granted in my enthusiasm.”(Journey in Bhutan: Himalayan Trek in the Kingdom of the Thunder Dragon).

Flashbacks

Use brief flashbacks to compare your experience with other places and cultures, especially your own. In Travels with a Donkey in the Cevennes, and even when writing about the South Pacific, Robert Louis Stevenson frequently harks back to his native Scotland. Non judgemental contrasts and similarities can sharpen what you wish to portray. Writing Masks of the Moryons, about the Philippines, I compare celebrations of the fascinating Easter Week pageants in two neighbouring towns to highlight the more traditional events in Mogpog, where the Moryonan originated 150 years ago.

These are only a few suggestions, if you read widely you will find others. Consider every writerly means that is appropriate to your project.

In Part 2 next week, I will write about imagery, the senses, emotion, language, and plot. You can subscribe to the blog if you don’t want to miss it.

If you like reading or writing about travel, you might enjoy my two eBook travelogues published by Collca – Journey in Bhutan: Himalayan Trek in the Kingdom of the Thunder Dragon. http://collca.com/jib

And Masks of the Moryons: Easter Week in Mogpog. http://collca.com/motm

 

 

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The Wizardry of Oz

Posted on April 12, 2013 by Trish

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Part of Australia’s magic is that while snow nestles against rocky peaks, and dripping jungle throbs with life, desert sands could grill a T-bone steak. But the distances are great: you can’t have it all at once.

 

IMG_1622Last week I was in the Mornington Peninsula, an hour or so drive south from Melbourne and their particular wizardry is wine. Within a 20 km radius, at least 50 vineyards offer tasting, tours, restaurants and cellar sales, including hand-crafted artisan wines in family-run wineries – a gourmet’s paradise. (If you nurse a degree of snobbishness in your palette, be aware that Australian wines have pretentions to grandeur: in the duty free shop in Auckland airport was a single bottle priced at NZ$559 (roughly £300) – no, that’s not a typo).

IMG_1627A world away from city wine racks the intimacy of these vineyards lets you sip wine from the third vine on the left before trying the fourth one down on the right. Lush names swirl over the tongue: Pinot Noir, Shiraz, Chardonnay and Cabernet Sauvignon. For lunch or dinner it is essential to book and bring a well stacked wallet – some venues charge $70-$80 for a one-platter deal.

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We settled for lunch at Merricks General Store. Now a wine cellar and restaurant with 80+ covers, it began in 1924 as a shop and post office serving the scattered rural community.

On previous visits to the area years ago I bought bread, coffee, handicrafts and birthday cards there, and being protected as historic heritage, it has retained its traditional appearance.

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They still sell milk and stamps during the week, but this time, I bought freeze-dried strawberries coated in thick dark chocolate to accompany the wine.

And what better place to enjoy it than my friend’s terrace. Next summer, she’ll be able to pick grapes without getting out of her chair.

IMG_1614I walked-off my lunch around the garden, under some of the trees I saw planted ten years ago and now towering overhead.

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And in the grass lurked not The Tin Man,

but a tin cow.IMG_1599

 

By the way, there is nothing wrong with this naked tree, some gums are natural ‘strippers’, shedding bark like a snake sloughs off its skin.

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With spot-on timing, a King Parrot posed for me in the fig tree.

IMG_1610Equally colourful is the Cubby House, a favourite place to exercise teenage independence.

IMG_1588A downside of the farming boom is destruction of native habitat. Koalas, such fussy eaters that only certain Eucalypts will suit them, are rare in the area now, but on an earlier visit these cuddly-looking, razor-clawed marsupials were a common sight on my friend’s property.

koalaSo were Kookaburras.

kookaburraMornington Peninsula is long and narrow - a beach never more than a few kilometres away - with many small communities sporting such evocative names as Rosebud, Sorrento, Mount Eliza and Bittern. As well as booze and berries, birds and boats are everywhere.

 

Merricks beach

Merricks beach

The energetic can walk along the coast, in the national park, or through the wetlands and woodlands of Coolart Reserve near Somers, exploring also the 19th century homestead at its centre. No wonder half the population of Melbourne pours into the area at weekends.

It has been a long dry summer on the Peninsula. I did what I could to conserve water:

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Writer’s Voice and Gogol’s Paintbrush

Posted on March 29, 2013 by Trish

 

IMG_1570Are writers in danger of losing their ‘voices’? Forgetting who they are and why they write while they strain to ‘give the readers what they want’? And having followed one’s ‘voice’, does it lead to heaven, or hell?

Big questions stirred up from my recent reading of Nikolai Gogol’s short story The Portrait – much wordier than modern short stories, but then he didn’t have to spend time answering emails, sending text messages, and Tweeting his Amazon links. Lucky man.

The Portrait shows us a struggling young artist, Chartkov, way behind with his rent, who finds in a junk shop a half-finished portrait of an Oriental male whose eyes are painted with such extraordinary vitality they seem to bore into the viewer. He buys it with his last 20 kopeks, although he is not sure why. That night in his studio, those eyes, which seem to have a malevolent quality, give him such nightmares he throws a sheet over the picture. But later, when the frame is accidentally damaged, he finds inside a cache of gold coins.

His initial thought – enough to keep him for three years of further study to perfect his art – is quickly overtaken by images of himself in a fashionable apartment; a popular portraitist, a man of fame and fortune. He chooses this route, producing unremarkable likenesses of the moneyed patrons he charms, increasing his wealth and pomposity, until he comes upon the work of a young artist with the extraordinary talent he might have achieved himself had he stayed on his original path.

He looks again at his earlier paintings, finds among them the half-finished portrait that had changed his course, and is filled with demonic rage and envy. He squanders his fortune buying and destroying the best works of art available, and finally dies in his madness.

Temptation and the tempter. In some ways, the story echoes Gogol’s own experience although he did not struggle in such penury; he was no peasant. Born of minor gentry, his father a dabbler in writing and staging comedy plays, Gogol had aspirations to write from an early age. With ambition gleaming in his eyes he left poor, dusty Ukraine for St Petersburg at the age of nineteen. Abandoning attempts at German Romantic poetry (which he self-published and later bought up and destroyed in a moment of insight), he took up the fad of the times – Cossack folk tales from the plains he so recently left.

This was what the readers wanted. Being Gogol, these were not a re-hash of traditional tales, but highly original combinations of the realistic and fantastic, and frequently the diabolic. Although born and brought up in the area, he had to write home to his mother for details of Cossack culture, dress, and festivities, and his characters were based more on Little Russia archetypes than personal observation, but Gogol’s writing exceeded readers’ expectations and his Ukrainian stories made his name.

But I think there is far more in The Portrait than a cautionary tale of the dangers in forsaking one’s ‘real art’ for the market place.

In the last part of the story we learn that the portrait is of an infamous moneylender, whose clients, in some mysterious way, turned into monstrous characters and came to a bad end. The painter was a mature artist who had spent a life of dedication to his art. Innocence of heart allowed him to create exquisite religious works, portraying holiness and purity in the eyes of the saints he painted, much esteemed by the Church authorities who commissioned them.

He had no need to paint the moneylender’s portrait; he knew who he was, and was reluctant, but seemed drawn irresistibly into complying with his request. Before the painting was finished, however, he could no longer bear to look into those evil eyes which his genius led him to depict so vividly and realistically. He abandoned the project. But shortly afterwards, the moneylender died, and the painter was left with the half-finished canvas. Like everyone who had been involved with the Oriental, he, too, changed his character, becoming unaccountably jealous, violent and destructive. As the painting was passed on, bought and sold, it wreaked havoc on everyone who owned it.

As to the original artist, only after spending the rest of his life in the most austere monastic regime, putting himself through life-threatening hardships, did he regain his equanimity and take up a paint brush again in the service of his monastery.

Gogol’s recognition as a great writer was well established with his other satires – The Government Inspector, The Overcoat, Dead Souls – works for which he is perhaps better known. But he returned to The Portrait years later to edit and rework it. The story seems to have expressed a dilemma he identified within himself.

I’ve often read the phrase, ‘the writer plays God’: we create characters, prescribe our own reality, invent worlds. The power of this disturbed Gogol. What he produced from the inner voice that poured into his writing seemed to surprise, even shock him. As the painter, by depicting so accurately the evil in the moneylender’s eyes, created something beyond his intentions and control, so the results of all art can extend beyond its creator, for good or evil. Was the satirical humour – never far from Gogol’s stories – cheerfully derisive, or demonic, laughter?

Gogol’s conviction, that his portrayal of the devil and other grotesque imagery, even in satire, might indicate some measure of corruption within himself, concerned him so deeply he sought the counsel of a spiritual advisor. In his last years, Gogol subjected himself to rigorous self-deprivation, finally refusing to eat, and dying an uncomfortable death at the age of forty-nine.

We live in a less superstitious age where only George Bush calls foreigners ‘evil’, but no one would deny the power of story. It fashioned our humanity and continues to construct our lives.

[Reference: The Collected Tales of Nikolai Gogol. Granta Books. 2003]

A cautionary tale none of us can afford to ignore
A cautionary tale none of us can afford to ignore

You might also enjoy From Apes to Apps: How Humans Evolved as Storytellers and Why it Matters. An ebook published by Collca: http://collca.com/fata

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