Writing on the Right Side of the Brain

by Caroline Lawrence 

I just finished a wonderfully stimulating week as Writer in Residence at Summer Fields, a boarding school in Oxford for boys of late primary and middle school age. I leapt at the chance to come: now that my own son is grown-up and living in Los Angeles,  I wanted to re-connect with my target readership.  

Summer Fields School, Oxford

All week, I have been doing right and left brain activities with the boys. The left-brain plot structure exercises were great and the literate Summer Fields boys took to them like Hollywood screenwriters in the writers' room. We identified some of our "Achilles' Heels" and then came up with a story in which our hero would learn a strategy to deal with his weakness. 

Caroline teaching at Summer Fields

Here are some of our titles (all fictional, of course): "Mr Guy Nice" for a boy who is worried about being too eager to please and falls in with a group of delinquents. "The Debate", about a boy who is afraid of public speaking and must come up against his talented older brother in a debate. "The Sleepover" about a hypothetical younger sister who is afraid of the dark but has been invited to attend a sleepover at a popular girl's house. What will happen when the lights go off? 

An exercise they found more challenging was one I often use to generate ideas: continuous writing to a piece of music. I call it (Day)dreaming a Setting.

Before I did this exercise I had to explain how the right and left hemispheres of the brain control different mental functions. 

This clever Mercedes Benz advert (above) is quite a good summary of left and right brain function. The LOGICAL LEFT BRAIN says: "I am a scientist. A mathematician. I love the familiar. I categorise. I am accurate. Linear. Analytical. Strategic. I am practical. Always in control. A master of words and language…" In the ad, the left brain is painted in black and white, with lots of words. 

(This part of the brain loves listing plot beats and working out story structure.)

The CREATIVE RIGHT BRAIN says "I am creativity. A free spirit. I am passion. Yearning. Sensuality. I am the sound of roaring laughter. I am taste. The feeling of sand beneath bare feet. I am movement. Vivid colours. I am the urge to paint on an empty canvas. I am boundless imagination…"

This exercise is one I used to do when I taught art at primary school. I first came across it twenty years ago in one of the books that has changed my life: Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain.

I ask the children to close their eyes behind cupped hands, rest their head in their hands and their elbows on table. And breathe. Then I put on a piece of music and ask them to imagine the colour of the music. The taste. What scene does it describe? What time of day is it? What can you feel beneath your bare feet? Are you inside or outside? On earth or somewhere else? In the past, the present or the future? Who is in the scene with you? What are they doing? What can you smell? What can you feel? How do you feel? 

Although I used to do this for many years in my art classes, when someone else asked me to do it in a creative writing class, I bridled! The teacher put on a piece of yearning violin music and told us to "Close our eyes and imagine the scene." A little voice in my head said, "This music is too emotional. I hate this kind of music. What a stupid exercise!" That little voice was my left brain, always critical. Sometimes you want criticism, other times you don't. The left brain hates not being in control and it was just scared. So I reasoned with it. "Look, I've paid money to be on this course. I may as well try to get my money's worth." 

My left brain backed off and my creative right brain stepped forward. 

It showed me a picture, vague at first, but becoming clearer as I went along with it. Red brick buildings in the fog. A Roman town. An ancient Roman town. Ostia, the port of Rome. Where my (then) work-in-progress was set! And out of the fog came a funeral procession. Mourners carrying a bier with a body on it. I knew it was one of my characters. But which one? I had to wait until it came closer to see. My subconscious knew but my conscious brain hadn't yet realised. Then at last I saw who it was, and I knew it was TRUE. It was good. It was right. Yes, it was sad, but it had to happen. Logical arc-planning left brain and creative, intuitive right brain were in agreement. But left brain had to back off to let my right brain show me what was deep within. 

funeral procession from Roman Mysteries title sequence

I was working on my third Roman Mystery at the time but this incident does not appear until book thirteen, where one of my characters has a prophetic dream of a funeral procession in the fog and realises someone close to him is going to die. It even appears in the opening credits of the BBC television series based on my books. That's how powerful that image was.

caravan of camels

I was so excited by this that I started using this exercise with other music. I was listening to jazz guitarist Larry Carlton at the time and put on a piece called Slave Song because the title made me think of Nubia, one of my four main characters. The music immediately evoked a slave caravan crossing desert on camels. Yes, the title was suggestive but that didn't matter. It was a powerful, moving scene and it went straight into the book I was writing at the time, The Pirates of Pompeii. 

Buddha Lounge disc 1

Fast forward, ten years. As I left my London apartment to get the train to Oxford, I grabbed a CD, one I hoped the boys wouldn't have come across before: Buddha Lounge 1. Mainly instrumental. A nicely atmospheric variety of upbeat, intriguing and spooky tracks.


Over the week I played a selection of songs in eighteen different English classes. I asked the boys to visualise the music for a minute or so, then I got them to open their eyes and write without stopping, another way of confounding the left brain. 

"Don't worry about neatness or sense or spelling or grammar," I told them. "Just keep the words coming. If you can't think what to write, write I can't think what to write. I can't think what to write. until something comes to you." 

At first the boys found it hard. Were they doing it right? "The only rule," I said, "is keep your hand moving. Keep writing something, anything. If you are panicking that is just your left brain afraid of losing control. Tell it to chill."

The class teachers were game and tried it, too. One teacher was able to do it but confessed it gave him a headache here. (He tapped his left-brain!) Another teacher wrote in her native language, French, and found her handwriting changed after the first few sentences as she got the "hang of it". A third teacher "saw" a bright room with no doors, windows or even light switches. He realised he was a baby in the womb. 

The reason I'm writing this in the History Girls blog is to encourage all you writers of historical fiction. Put on a piece of period music, or the nearest thing. 

Get a piece of paper. Turn it sideways to show your left brain you are doing something new. Take a fibre-tipped pen or a crayon to show your left brain you are doing something new. 

Now put on the music. Close your eyes. Let the music conjure up a scene. Not just sights but smells, sounds, tastes, textures, emotions, movement and detail. 

Got it? Then write! 

Caroline Lawrence is author of The Roman Mysteries, The Roman Mysteries Scrolls and the P.K. Pinkerton Mysteries. Find more of her writing tips on her website at www.romanmysteries.com 

En Charrette

by Teresa Flavin

I am writing this a few days after having finished the first draft of my next book. A few months ago said draft was just a synopsis that sounded fine in theory. Today it is a complete, though rough, manuscript. A few weeks from now I will have the measure of it from my excellent editors and will spend the summer rejigging and polishing it.

I always get a little starry-eyed at the end of writing a first draft because it's still a relatively new experience.  At first the task seems insurmountable, but after many days of keeping my posterior bolted to my chair and getting the words down, somehow it takes shape and there is, hopefully, a story that will work. A novel doesn't develop on the page like an illustration, which I can see growing all at once, but it requires the same hard work and determination.  

When I was entering the last few days of writing, I mentioned to a friend that I was about to go en charrette, 'on the cart', to finish the draft. When I got a blank look, I explained that this was the term we used in art school to describe the frantic period just before a deadline. I remembered, with a mix of dread and nostalgia, these regular descents into periods of nonstop work, where day blended into night and all that mattered was having your work pinned up by 9am on deadline day so it could be critiqued. These reviews, especially at the end of the academic year, determined whether you progressed or not.

I don't recall where we learned the term en charrette but most likely it came from our professors, who had undergone the same process during their training. There was something quite exotic about having a French phrase to describe the exquisite creative torture we were all going through. It also fit in very nicely with our image of the charrette as transport to one's execution by guillotine, though the phrase actually refers to carts that carried large works from students' studios to the École de Beaux-Arts in Paris for assessment. Today charrette also can refer to collaborative brainstorming sessions held by architects and planners to involve stakeholders on a proposed project. 

In his 1886 novel The Masterpiece, Émile Zola described the activities of sixty Beaux-Arts architecture students 'who, being behind time, had to knock off the work of a week in a dozen hours' on the 'night of heavy toil'. This will sound horribly familiar to anyone who has procrastinated on a project, but the similarity probably ends when one reads that the students fortified themselves with viands and cheap wine, the companies of ladies and a smoking competition to aid them in their work. Some might argue that this sounds far more interesting than twelve hours in the company of black coffee and take away meals. When the charrette arrived, the students piled their work on it and those who hadn't finished would climb on and keep working as their fellows pushed it noisily through the streets. 

Being en charrette at art school built camaraderie and a gallows humour, but it was an experience I didn't want to repeat too often in my professional career. There have certainly been times in my illustration practice when I worked for very long hours at the end of a project and I was once caught touching up a piece as the courier arrived to ship it overseas. But the biggest lesson the charrette taught me was to break down creative projects into manageable pieces, to schedule as realistically as possible and to do the work according to plan. I don't always get it right, and sometimes life sends problems that throw plans off course, but I keep trying. 

The charrette symbolises one other important thing: the quest to make the writing or the artwork just that bit better, even at the last minute. I might drive myself slightly crazy and spend too long tweaking, but in the end it's worth every minute on that cart. 

Teresa Flavin is the author of The Blackhope Enigma and The Crimson Shard, art historical fantasy novels for young readers published by Templar Publishing in the UK and Candlewick Press in the USA. She is currently working on the final book in the trilogy. 

HISTORY YOU CAN LIVE INSIDE by Emma Darwin

A few weeks ago, my daughter's school Chamber Choir was singing Evensong in Southwark Cathedral, so I went along to listen. Many years ago, when I first crossed the Thames to live South of the River (which as all Londoners know is slightly more drastic than crossing the Channel to live permanently in France), in the daytime Bankside was busy with suits, doctors, and wholesale cabbages. But outside the working week it was Tumbleweed Town: anyone who could fled to the salubrious suburbs, and those few who couldn't had nothing to tempt them out of their grim blocks of flats.

Now the council blocks have been done up, there are university halls of residence, lofts and flats and family houses for urban living, there's Borough Market, the Globe, the Golden Hinde, the London Assembly, at least ten branches of Prêt à Manger, and you can walk along the Thames Path, from Deptford on your bank and St Katherine's Dock on the other, to Lambeth Palace and the Houses of Parliament. It's full of people living and working and drinking and talking. In becoming more modern, Southwark has become more ancient: it's once again the mirror-image of the city across the tide that gave birth to it.

Southwark Cathedral wasn't built as a cathedral, but as a church: St Mary Overey (as in, Over the Thames). So although it's a fine bit of Early English Gothic it's not particularly large or complex. But it still has that unity in difference which is the great joy of mediaeval architure: the pointed Gothic arches don't come just in large and small, but can stretch broad or high, vaulting above your head, or stooping to make a canopy over a baby's little tomb. Some of the columns are like bundles of saplings, others are great, ribbed tree-trunks; you walk through puddles of colours where the light from the stained glass windows splashes down as regularly as a wave.

There was a hymn, all solid, Anglican harmony, and then the Responsory: call-and-answer with the choir. And then the choir sang alone, weaving in and out of each other as pitched and patterned by Orlando Gibbons, and I remembered Peter Wimsey, in Dorothy L. Sayers' Gaudy Night, saying to his Harriet, "Anyone can have the harmony, if they'll leave us the counterpoint".

As one of Gibbons' contemporaries nearly wrote: Licence my roving notes and let them go / before, behind, between, above, below... But I couldn't - for good manners' sake - rove on foot during the service, thought I've done so in many other churches. So I sat still, and allowed my mind's eye to rove instead, imagining how as you walk and look the clusters of saplings in the different aisles set to partners and then pass on, the ribs like branches stretching out to join those of another tree overhead; triplets of windows dancing between bigger trunks; the arch that opens to a whole new chapel of variations; the path that leads you on, curls you round the back of the altar and brings you to the centre again, under the still, pendulum point of the crossing.

They say that architecture is frozen music. In which case, I thought, gazing up the column by my shoulder to where it sprang up and out into the vault, music is surely liquid architecture. What I'm sitting in - what those nameless medieval masons built - is a fugue in stone; a fugue that you can live inside. And perhaps a piece of music is therefore a building that sings.

So where does that leave the reader and writer of fiction? Like music, writing can only exist for the reader in time but, unlike music, it can only sing one note at once. The Donne (mis)quotation suggests that poets may be closer to music: their words have explicit patterning, repetition and sound. But fiction does have architecture: a novel has pace, scale and proportion, as I found when I started thinking about writing a novel as building a bridge. Ian McEwan says the first thing he knows about a new novel is "the maths", by which, as Pythgoras and Stravinsky would have agreed, he also means "the music". In fiction we can play as we choose with echoes and repetitions of ideas and images, as well as with sounds, and build them into something which you can live inside: the world of the novel not just in the sense of setting and characters, but a structure of sound and rhythm and image.

And historical fiction? Well, there's your answer: Bankside. Many historical novels take the reader to live in the year and moment of the action: - steam trains screeching and puffing above Dickens' head as he tries to rescue a six year old prostitute; two monks turned out of their priory as Henry VIII's men pull the lead off the roof; families emerging from the Tube station air raid shelters to see if their homes are still standing.

Other historical novels are also novels about history. The Golden Hinde is a replica of Francis Drake's ship that he sailed round the world, and there are modern American schoolchildren clambering about on it, snapping each other on their mobiles. But in the 1970s it was moored across the river, and my sister was on it - only because the Tower queues were too long - when the IRA bombed the Tower, killing one and injuring forty people. The Golden Hinde is a world you can enter and live in, a world at once Now, and many Thens, a world built of ribs and beams: wood, tarred and caulked to sail as well as it did five hundred years ago, dancing over the waves with the wind singing in the rigging. The replica embodies the history that it hasn't actually seen but also what it has seen, as novels about history do: a historical novel is history you can live inside.

From the Sketchbook: Summer’s End

by Teresa Flavin

I just came across a small plastic bag in my studio. Inside was a collection of sea glass and pottery shards from one of my top-secret locations on the west coast of Scotland. I felt the loss of summer days as I brushed away the sand and bits of dried seaweed. August’s salty wildness has no place in business-like September. Or does it?

We hurl ourselves into autumn with long lists of creative goals we mean to accomplish, relieved that people are back in their offices and that, at last, things are getting moving again. Suddenly, we are keenly aware that winter festivities are just ‘around the corner’. Before long, we are stuck and uninspired, weighed down by the calendar and its deadlines.

The ideas that flowed while we walked beaches and explored new places are harder to reach, packed away with the sandals and shorts. It’s no surprise that we are more receptive in a beautiful place with no pressures. I once played with the idea of a graphic novel while on a Greek island. I was convinced that I would start it upon my return home, but when I was back in my studio overlooking the motorway and tower blocks, the plan melted away. I had enjoyed playing with it, but the passion did not last. I decided that was okay and moved on. When I think of that Greek island now, remnants of the story resurface and I remember the pleasure of inspiration flowing in.

But how do we call down the Muse when the next holiday is almost a year away? Or when there is no chance of a holiday at all?

Ideas turn up when we aren’t looking for them. I once read that people find inspiration when they are in one of the ‘three B’s’: bed, bath and bus. When I step away from the struggle to unblock my creative flow or to make a problematic manuscript work, solutions bubble up. I’ve grown so used to these practical epiphanies that I look forward to my morning ablutions and transport to the studio. If I really want to tempt inspiration, I have to leave my routine, even if only for a little while. I wander through the wool department in a department store to soak up the rainbow colours or dig through a chaotic used bookshop looking for nothing in particular.

Sometimes I step back into the studio with a fired-up head and a lot of fantastic photos. Last weekend I went for a forest walk in Aberfoyle that was far more atmospheric than I expected. It was hugely inspiring but I still feel slightly odd when I look the pictures. You can see them and read about what I experienced on my blog.

I bring home treasures after other mini-adventures. Even the smallest objects can call down the Muse. After cleaning my sea pottery and glass with great care, I wondered how they were driven into that special cove where so much washes up. I became slightly obsessed with finding out how old the china patterns are and where they were made. Who might have owned the shards when they were part of whole plates and cups? In my hand were a dozen mysteries in the form of sea pottery.

I located other people who are passionate about sea glass. I became fascinated with the potters’ marks I found on some pieces. I discovered I have many pottery shards that seem to be decorated with the late eighteenth-century Willow pattern, which has an intriguing legend associated with it. So far, so good. I even found an explanation for a small white glass marble I collected: it may have been ballast on a ship. A story started creeping into my head.

But then I came across a china shard that intrigued me more than all the others: the lady on horseback, arm outstretched with a landscape in the distance. What is going on in the rest of the picture? Suddenly I could ‘see’ who was with her and what was about to happen.

A few scribblings later, several tiny story ideas were in my notebook and the talismanic shards and marble went back to the windowsill overlooking the motorway and the tower blocks. They may trigger a novel or end up in a painting like the one at the top of this post. Or not.

I hope they will be joined by a pinecone from a haunted castle garden in October or a battered book of old woodcuts in November – or any new talismans that usher in the wildness of the creative spirit.

Teresa’s second novel in The Blackhope Enigma series, The Crimson Shard, will be published by Templar Publishing on 1 October in the UK. You can enter to win one of five copies in our competition on 30 September!