Country Life and the Writing Life

In Ruth’s thought-provoking piece in the Jan-Feb 2013 SCBWI Bulletin, From a View of the Med to a Garden Shed, she explores the influence of writer setting on story setting, and asks: Does it really matter where you write?

Well, I write in the spare bedroom of my house in London, on a laptop at a table facing a blank wall. But the stories are set on and inspired by the Sussex farm where I grew up.

When I was writing The Secret Hen House Theatre, I visited the farm every month for a year, notebook in hand, recording sensory details in different weathers, at different times of day and in different seasons.

I tried to focus on a detail and write down exactly what I saw, smelt, heard and felt, as clearly and simply as I could.

Considering that I had grown up on the farm and visited regularly ever since, I was amazed by how much more I noticed this way. I knew the yard was muddy in winter, of course, but I’d never noticed that the mud was ‘patterned all over with the spiky footprints of chickens’, a detail I wrote in my notebook and ended up using in Chapter Two, when Hannah trudges across the yard, head down, to help catch an escaped pig.

I’m now writing the sequel to The Secret Hen House Theatre and I regularly consult my notebooks to check things like when the blackthorn buds start to appear, or the texture of a swallow’s nest.

I need to consult my notebooks, because all the actual writing of the books is done in London. And I wonder whether, in some ways, distance might be an advantage.

While I find visits to the farm hugely inspiring, I need the distance to process my thoughts. Farm life is not the calm, back-to-nature experience that many city people imagine. Life on a farm is full of extremes: birth and death; beauty and ugliness; triumph and disaster; the natural world and the world of industry, with its vast machines and powerful chemicals. Tenant farmers are at the mercy of so many things: rising rents and unscrupulous landlords as well as disease, the weather and ever-changing prices for the food they produce.

When I’m at the farm, spending time with my family as they try to make a living against powerful odds, I am too emotionally involved to write about it. It’s only after a period of reflection staring at my blank London wall that I can weave all this into my stories.

So, a view of the Med or a garden shed? I think, for a lot of us, the answer is: Both.

The actual shed that inspired the Secret Hen House!

Helen Peter’s debut novel, The Secret Hen House Theatre, has been described by Michael Morpurgo as “a book I didn’t want to end”.

It is on the shortlist for the Solihull Book Award, the Essex Book Award and the Waterstone’s Children’s Book Prize 2013.

Find out more about Helen on the Nosy Crow website HERE!

Follow Helen on twitter: @farmgirlwriter