Preservation

Last night I gave a talk to the Friends of the Chester Literature Festival. At the end of it they gave me these beautiful flowers.

They are so gorgeous I thought I would preserve them here so I can appreciate them for a little longer.

I was asked to talk about 'The Writer's Life' so I decided to plump for an autobiographical account of how aspects of my hapless relatives have tended to land in the middle of my fiction.

Flicking through my work yesterday for examples to illustrate my theme I realised how much they are in there, especially my younger brother Huw: the time he ran into a lake aged three, for instance, or the way the fingertips of his left hand always held the imprint of his violin strings. I suppose, in some way, he is preserved there too.

It is not him, of course, just a part of him. I suppose when anyone writes fiction there is a merging, a collision of experience, research and invention, which allows the writer to enhance an imagined event with a little detail which lends an air of authenticity. But for the large part I expect the writer has to rely mostly on the person he knows the best and the most intimately - himself. But this turns out to be not too confining; for instance with just a little exaggeration I found it worryingly easy to turn myself into someone else and imagine pulling the legs from flies, spearing slugs with sharpened sticks and even drowning an adversary with more strength than I have ever known, holding his head under the water until his limbs lay still.

Time, perhaps, for some more of those glorious flowers...