New Masthead...Capitals and Headstops

With all this imagination going on, what better time to revamp the masthead of this blog?

St Helen & St Giles, Rainham, Essex

I have used those odd grey eyes staring out at you more than once on blogs.  It is a door capital from the 12th century Anglo-Norman church of St. Helen and St. Giles in Rainham, Essex. 

St Helen & St Giles, Rainham, Essex

Capitals are generally encountered where there is no projecting stonework beyond the face of the wall into which they are built.  Capitals in the classical sense are split into 'orders': that is Ionic, Doric, Corinthian and Composite which start with simple Ancient Greek designs and end with complex Roman versions.  The types carved into the heads or faces of people or animals are most often pre-Reformation medieval although the Victorians took a liking to them on occasion.

The one used in my masthead is one of a pair.  I admit it does appear to be rather stylised - pictured left - and has something sinister about it which is why it appeals to me.  Its companion, however, is just weird.  It looks like a pair of eyes staring through a chainmail coif.  And it may be.  

Ely Cathedral: Prior's Doorway (LH)

Monastic masons were, first and foremost, trained to think and build structurally and be portrait artists last - if at all.  Their role was to build churches and cathedrals that glorified God, not play to the vanity of prelates and benefactors.  At Rainham, it's possible these strange carvings may even be afterthoughts:  attempts to create faces out of stones originally shaped and fitted.  I've not done any major research on them to learn what greater scholars such as Sir Nikolaus Pevsner thought of them and I'm happy to leave it that way.  I'm letting my imagination run a little wild here.

Ely Cathedral: Prior's Doorway (RH)

Elsewhere in the country stylised representation was not always the norm.  Left are the two capitals from the Prior's Doorway at Ely Cathedral.  Believed to have been constructed around 1135AD, these faces are almost certainly real people.  Yes, they are slightly stylised but nowhere near the extremes presented at Rainham.  The cathedral's own website makes no comment about the heads indicating it has no idea who they were or whether, indeed, they were both the same person at different ages.  They may have been father and son or master mason and apprentice.  Perhaps, they were Prior and Sub-Prior.  We will almost certainly never know.  We can only admire the skill of the craftsmen that made them along with the rest of the door (not shown but well worth a visit).

Dorchester-upon-Thames:  to me this 
looks like the Formula 1 racing driver
Sir Jackie Stewart 

Headstops are most commonly encountered in church architecture.  Most people have seen or at least heard of gargoyles because fiction and cinema have made them often sinister, even animate, elements of gothic horror stories.  However, headstops are more frequent that capitals carved into faces and are, literally, carvings of heads (medieval ones often depicting major benefactors of the particular church they are attached to) where the arches over windows or other recessed features stop (see right).  Sir Nikolaus Pevsner, the 20th century's doyen of church architecture gave the definition as:  a terminal to a hoodmould or label (projecting moulding above an arch or lintel) carved with a head.1

To finish up, below are some wonderfully expressive examples of other headstops from around the country.  When you're out and about, have a look for them - although you may need binoculars or a good camera lens like an 18-400mm to get a decent view/shot.

St Andrew, Boreham, Essex

St Andrew, Boreham, Essex

Chapter House
Southwell Minster
Notts

St Cosmas & St Damian, Challock,
Kent

1.  Pevsner's Architectural Glossary, 2nd Edition. App by Aimer Media. Copyright owned by Yale University Press

Note to Self: get the referencing properly sorted.  Harvard style!

Where's My Imagination?

Previously on "Where's My Imagination?", I explained in my rambling way that I had lost the plot.  Quite literally lost the plot of my novel Broken Bonds.  The more academic I had become, the less my imagination could operate within the true historic framework of the 12th century.  Ludicrous really but none the less true.  I had no plot, only a vague notion of where the story was going and absolutely no idea how to end it.  I wasn't even calling it Broken Bonds any more.

Well, that last post gave me a lot of freedom to think afresh.  And this time, it seems to be bearing fruit.

I wondered: what if I went back to the beginning?  What if I wrote down what I remembered of my original intentions from almost 30 years ago (other than trying to be Umberto Eco and Ellis Peters in the same novel)?  Let's try that.  So, without any plan other than to write what I remembered, I started typing.

To digress just a little, I use a fabulous piece of writing software called Scrivener produced by Literature and Latte.  It is now on version 3 and, although I have barely touched the surface of its capabilities, I use it for all my fiction.  (I may one day use it for my academic and blogging output, too, but for now, it is just for my fiction.)  There is also a sizeable community on Facebook, various YouTube videos and authors' blogs.  It's popular, in short, and justifiably so.  The image below gives you a taste of the layout that I haven't really bothered to customise and it is this that I have used to rediscover my intentions...and rekindle my imagination.

Sample screen of Literature & Latte's "Scrivener 3" app on macOS.

Now, me being me, that personality trait of mine called 'neat' wanted to give my thoughts some structure, create a table in Scrivener, a nice, ordered table that I could keep expanding.  I won't do that again.  Tables in Scrivener are awkward to me and nothing like what I am used to in MS Word.  However, another personality trait kicked in called 'integrity' so because I had started the table of awkwardness, I was determined to finish it...a bit like writing Broken Bonds.

Now I'm not going to publish an image of the table but essentially, I asked myself questions like:

• What was Broken Bonds about originally?
• What did I want to achieve?
• What was the intended underlying backstory?
• Should I rationalise the number of key characters?

It was quite cathartic and made me think even more.  Best of all though, it inspired me to simplify, clarify and plot.  That is what I am going to write about today.

Simplifying is a major challenge.  I don't do simple, I do detailed.  So, to tackle that first item on the list decided to strip the story back to being centred around one character - Aymeric - the central character of the original novella.  The numerous versions of Broken Bonds have seen various characters come and go.  Some I was quite attached to.  Some were far better developed than Aymeric which was really rather stupid given his status.  Thus, I set out to redress this glaring weakness and complete his backstory:  a major detail I had never done in 30 years.  I had roughed out his life up to 31st March 1146AD but thereafter let the next 21 years become a bit...er...lost to history.  Not now.  Last night, I had his backstory up to the date Broken Bonds actually starts on 1st September 1167AD.  It is coherent, it is believable, it is complete.  And it may never get used to the full.

Turning to clarifying, I need to sweep away the randomness, the diversions and those sparkly little facts that had me fall down repeated academic rabbit holes and not find my way back out for decades.  I recognise that in the past I have spent hundreds on books, travelling and all manner of academic incidentals to track down a fact only to discard it later because it just wasn't needed!

Moving swiftly on, then, genre has actually caused me more trouble that I expected.  In my last post, I made it clear my intention was not to write an historical murder-mystery.  I had always had a highbrow aim for my novel and saw the Crime genre as requiring the incessant search for that 'wow' moment to hook a very savvy readership.  Ellis Peters had cornered the 12th century sleuthing market with Cadfael and I had no wish to be branded a poor imposter.  I had it in mind to make my novel a one-off commentary on 12th century social history and deeply literary.  Ha!  Who was I trying to kid?  What I have realised is:  the original rewrite of Broken Bonds was fundamentally a cold-case murder-mystery - just not a very realistic one.  Inevitably then, I have a quite a lot of work to do to straighten this out.

And once that's done, what's next?  Well, the plot: from beginning to end.  No, actually, from end to beginning.  As I was typing this post, a lightbulb went on it my mind's eye illuminating a writing technique I used when I was doing my BA & MA back between 2003 and 2012:  write the end first.  It doesn't mean the end is a 'foregone conclusion' but it focuses the mind.  On more than one occasion during my studies I realised my intended outcome was unsustainable and had to rethink and rewrite.  Here, with Broken Bonds, I have already written the outline of the ending.  I wrote it years ago as the beginning of another, connected story and it has been repeated in various forms ever since.  Now though, I see it as the end of Broken Bonds.  Obviously, I am not going to give anything away and the precise wording will go down on the page as I work through to the last full-stop.  Thereafter, my Editor-in-Chief will release the Red Pen of Doom to do its worst before the final denouement sees the public light of day.

So, there you have it.  Clearly, my imagination is alive and well after many years of academic oppression and rejoicing!  Now all I have to do is write 300-ish pages of coherent fiction to prove it...