THE GAME OF THE NAME

It may come as a shock to you (or you may not give a stuff), but Jane Ayrie isn’t my given name. Well, the Jane part is, but the surname is completely made up. 

My original surname is perfectly unobjectionable, but it’s also very common. In 1954 a lot of its owners apparently had a revelation and decided calling their daughters ‘Jane’ was the best idea ever. Far too many of these daughters, if you ask me, became academics or writers. There’s bloody millions of them out there. I am vain enough to have Googled my name on a few occasions and it’s like looking at one of those big shoals of herring you see on ‘The Blue Planet’. They’re all little individuals with their hopes, dreams and ambitions, but no big fish is going to bother distinguishing one from the other.

I’m very fond of my first name. It’s my identifier. My parents chose it with love. I’ve never really got the fuss about family surnames, though – they’re just accidents of history and if you need a name to remind you which family you belong to, maybe you should be looking for another family. I suppose if it’s something extraordinary you might feel an attachment to it, or it might be important as a signifier of your culture, but ordinary run of the mill names like mine really don’t warrant the fuss.

My kids have both parents’ surnames, which was still a bit of a novelty when they were born. I was amazed at the number of people who asked, in horrified tones, ‘But what about when they have children? Will those kids have three surnames? Or four??’ To which the obvious answers are: a) why should you care? and b) in my experience, people generally have sufficient gumption to sort out names for their kids. I might not like some of those names, but that’s not my business either. 

The names we choose for ourselves, professionally or personally, are very significant. The reasons for a pseudonym vary: John Le Carré said his position in MI6 made it essential he used a different name, and both the Brontës and Mary Ann Evans (George Eliot) were pretty sure unambiguously female names would hamper their chances of publication. Some writers feel adopting another persona helps them focus when they sit down to put words on the page. I find that. For me, it’s part of ‘going to work’. The non-writer part of me is a directionless slob who, given half a chance, will sit doing crosswords all day, drinking cups of coffee (morning) or tea (afternoon) while nibbling toast (morning) or scones (afternoon). Occasionally this persona will look up to peer through the front window, conveniently placed to observe the coming and goings on the three streets that converge in front of it. Jane Ayrie is the persona who says, ‘Get up, you lazy, nosey bitch. The sodding draft won’t edit itself.’ 

Why people choose particular names, though, is often less clear. Le Carré sometimes said he chose the name because it would stand out, and sometimes said he’d seen it in an advert on the side of a bus. Gloria Jean Watkins chose the name bell hooks (deliberately not capitalised) as a tribute to her much admired great-grandmother. Whatever the reason, there is something about it that clicks with the writer and feels right. It says something about who we are, to ourselves if no-one else.

‘Ayrie’ emerged from fiddling about with my username on a writing website. No great emotional heft, no clever word play, but I knew when I looked at it that it would do the job well. 

I get a similar moment of joy when I discover the right name for a character. I say discover, because I don’t choose characters’ names. I have to wait until they introduce themselves properly. Sometimes they piss me about, trying to fool me with false monikers, but I know when they’re lying. I can see it in their eyes. I know that if I just wait, they will eventually tire of the game and tell me the truth. And then we’re good to go with their story. We don’t get anywhere until they tell me their name.

I find the processes of naming, whether real children, characters, or ourselves, endlessly fascinating. I’d be delighted to hear what you think about it all.

Thanks for reading! 

Jane

What I’m reading: 

Dhalgren, by Samuel R Delany (I have a 50 year old copy published by Bantam, so I don’t know who publishes it now). This was first published in 1975, so I’m giving it an anniversary re-read. It’s been compared to Ulysses, but don’t let that put you off. I was gripped from the first word, which is not something I can say about Ulysses. There is a story, about a drifter, the kid, or Kidd, who fetches up in a place called Bellona, with no memory. From there on reality is fluid, narrative is circular, narrators are unreliable (or are they?). Language is beautiful and at times incoherent. I’ve read it many times and I hope this time to work out what it’s actually about. Nah, who am I kidding?

Samuel R Delany is one of my favourite writers, and this is my favourite of his books. It’s both revered and excoriated, and Delany does tend to be a Marmite author. If you don’t know his stuff, it’s probably best to start with his magnificent short stories, and there’s a lovely collection titled Aye, and Gomorrah published by Vintage. For my money, Delany is one of the most brilliant speculative fiction writers we have, but I’ll shut up now, because I could go on about him for ever.

Elidor by Alan Garner (originally published by Collins, but still out there somewhere). Another anniversary re-read! Elidor came out in 1965, and I got it for Christmas when I was eleven. I have re-read it every couple of years since. A group of kids in Manchester slip through a portal into another world and return as guardians of ‘treasures’ that must be protected to ensure the realm of Elidor can be saved from the powers of darkness. But darkness keeps seeping into 1960s Manchester…

This was my first introduction to what I suppose would now be called Urban Fantasy. I was gripped, scared out of my wits, and filled with the desire to write stories like that. These days, the fact that a group of kids, at least two of whom are pre-teen, can wander about Manchester day and night with no means of contacting their parents or anyone else, while no-one raises an eyebrow, seems as fantastical as the interdimensional baddies chasing them. Alan Garner is one of our greatest story-tellers, and this is one of his best. If you had the misfortune to see the bloody awful BBC TV adaptation in 1995, don’t let it put you off. It bore no resemblance whatsoever to the book.

The Big Secret And The Challenge

OK. It’s time to come clean. If you made it past the blurbs at the front of the website, something presumably caught your attention and made you want to read on. I therefore feel safe to tell you my secret.

I’m seventy years old. I hesitate to put that up at the front because people who haven’t personally met me or many other seventy-year-olds tend to make all sorts of assumptions. We’re sweet or we’re smelly, we’re feisty or we’re drooling nincompoops. We’re bewildered by technology, we unremittingly vote Tory to protect our holiday cruises, and if we are women writers, we write romance or family saga because we’re past the age where we can convincingly write chick-lit. 

That is, of course, if we’re not Margaret Atwood or Pat Barker, who are both in their eighties and who, most people will acknowledge, are in a different universe from the rest of us.  

Romance, family saga, and the astute, funny observational writing that is branded ‘chick-lit’, are all wonderful things. It took me while to come to those, because since childhood I’ve always been more of a science fiction, urban fantasy or horror reader. When I was eight or nine I got A Princess of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs (of Tarzan fame) out of the library. I loved it. When next asked to write a story at school, I produced my own variant, complete with pictures of stripey Martians sporting multiple limbs. I didn’t know the book was a pulp classic and hugely influential on SF writers like Arthur C Clarke and Ray Bradbury, and on the scientist Carl Sagan. It’s nice to know I had good taste, though.

As a child I was, and still am, completely devoted to the books of Alan Garner. Elidor was my introduction to urban fantasy. I still read it at least once a year. The idea of an alternate dimension leaking into 1960s Manchester, not with an almighty crash but with a quiet, menacing, creeping determination, both scared and fascinated me. I can see the influence of Elidor in a lot of what I write now. Blurring the lines, the familiar made terrifying, family dynamics (familiar and terrifying in themselves). Only I tend to put more laughs in. 

In my early teens, I loftily decided that Romance (unless it was Jane Austen) definitely wasn’t me. I was a snotty brat in my early teens. When it came to Romance I was a snotty brat for quite a chunk of my life. Romance was all Mills and Boon and it wasn’t me. Then I met a romance writer in a writers’ group, and had to read her stuff to provide feedback. Her work was beautifully written, immaculately researched, and had complex dual timeline structures I could never manage. 

It's never too late to admit you’ve been an eejit. Or that you can change the habits of a lifetime.

Up until now I’ve been mainly a short story writer. I love the short story as a form. Reading a short story is like catching a glimpse through a lighted window at twilight. You see a moment in the lives, not only of people, but of their surroundings. It doesn’t matter if the short story covers a day or a century; it’s a distillation of a theme, a certain experience, a certain emotion. 

Some people think writing a short story is easier than writing a novel. You don’t have to find so many words, you don’t have to pursue character or story arcs in the same way, you don’t have to commit months or perhaps years to it (although it can take that long to get there). Three thousand words, say, can be a single chapter in a novel. 

But that’s the point. An opening chapter sets the scene. You then go on to expand your ideas over another seventy thousand words. You can digress. You can use a few thousand words to dig more deeply into your underlying theme, explore different ways of expressing it, maybe introduce a totally new theme half-way through. In a short story, you have to do everything in a few thousand words. You haven’t got the luxury of having words do just one thing. 

Short story words have to do at least two things at once. They must tell you not only what the person is doing, but how they feel about it, where they are, and what they look like at the time. There isn’t space for separate explanations of how the room smells, feels, or sounds. Somehow you’ve got to find a few words that sum up everything.

It’s bloody hard work to write, and it’s glorious to read the best writers doing it. Stephen King, Raymond Carver, Katherine Mansfield, Doris Lessing, Guy de Maupassant. And many, many others. 

So here I am, completely in love with the short story, and I decide to write a novel. At my age.

It was partly to see if I could. Partly because I had an idea I didn’t feel I could contain in a short story. Maybe some of those aforementioned brilliant writers could, but not me. Age was definitely part of it. If you don’t give yourself new challenges as you get older, your brain settles into a comfortable rut and then can’t be bothered to take on anything different from what it’s doing already. 

As it turns out, I’ve thoroughly enjoyed writing the first draft of my novel. Feedback from my critique groups has been amazingly helpful and mostly encouraging. (Of course you want constructive criticism of the chapter you’ve spent days on and are so proud of. It’s helpful to know everyone thinks that bit really doesn’t work, it contradicts what went before, that character would never do that. Smile through your pain, park it for now, and be bloody grateful three weeks later when you realise they were absolutely right.)

I’ll say it again: writing may be a solitary pursuit, but it need not be a lonely one. It really is better if it isn’t. 

Of course, now comes the editing part. I like editing. Writing the first draft of anything is rather like having a great big lump of clay delivered. It’s full of potential, but you have no idea exactly what’s going to come out of it. Editing is the shaping, honing, smoothing, or maybe roughing, to produce the best thing you possibly can at the end. I’ll let you know how that goes. 

Thanks for reading. Do drop by again. 

Jane