The Bitterbynde Trilogy (2 page)

Read. I echo Michael Morpurgo's advice. Read, but read the best authors, the ones whose works enchant you, the ones you love.

Yet it was not only words, but art and music (their sister muses) that formed me; in particular the art of the Pre-Raphaelite painters (especially John Waterhouse and Edward Burne-Jones), the masters of Art Nouveau such as Beardsley and Mucha, and unparalleled artists like Cicely Mary Barker, Arthur Rackham, Maxfield Parrish, Brian Froud, Alan Lee, Kinuko Y. Craft, Julek Heller and Michael Whelan. The love of art made me pick up a brush and execute several oil paintings of my own.

During my teenage years I was inspired by rock 'n roll and heavy metal music, and by the melodies and lyrics of the English and Celtic folk-rock revival, including such bands as Fairport Convention, Steeleye Span, The Chieftains and Clannad. Again, I was so thrilled by this art form that I felt compelled to participate. I began playing and singing in amateur folk-rock bands, having learned piano as a child and having taught myself to play guitar.

Music, poetry, prose, art, sculpture—they are all faces of the same muse—my muse. For me, visual images, sounds and literature are so closely related they can at times be almost indistinguishable.

Write
.

Since stories are so enthralling and delightful, what could be better than to create one's own? I cannot remember when this notion first occurred to me; I can only assume that I was born with it. Very early I began, as soon as my small fingers could hold a pencil, to record the tales that were already chasing each other around in my head. My mother preserved a story I wrote when I was about six years old, in painstakingly formed, rounded letters. Approximately six pages long, with one very short sentence per page, it is illustrated with pictures of a prince, a princess, a horse and a willow tree. I still have this story filed somewhere, and it reminds me of how desperately I wanted to create something that did not exist in the real world but that had sprung from the fount of my imagination.

Write. In my room at night, after school, hour after hour into the darkness, that's what I did. Poetry (plenty of that, all rhyming, all metrical). Ideas. Diaries. Stories—never short, always epic. Pictures to illustrate the stories. Notes. Lists of fantastic character names and place names. Maps. Descriptions. Outlines of plots. Fragments. Most were more ‘outpourings of spirit' than anything that could claim to belong in the literary domain. All the tales I wrote before I reached my teens were tales of fantasy. After Mum joined the Science Fiction Book Club (which is still running), I incorporated sci-fi into them as well.

Writing was a form of recreation. ‘Come out and be with the rest of the family!' Mum sometimes irritably called to me from the other side of my bedroom door. But they were all watching TV. I wanted to be somewhere better.

Not that I never watched TV. When at last we owned one, I made full use of it. According to my teen diaries, I adored old movies—movies made before 1950, preferably starring Jeanette McDonald and Nelson Eddy, Deanna Durbin or Shirley Temple. These films helped shape my literary wellspring, with their elaborate costumes and hair styles, their romantic themes and their sheer innocence.

Write I did, and my purpose was to construct a world that blended all the best parts of the Real World, with none of the bits I despised, and some extra ingredients concocted by myself. For Teenage Me it was nature, seasons, landscape, music and weather that I loved best in the real world. (That, and boys.) If ever I awoke to a clear autumn day with the sun shining and a breeze blowing through the fiery panes of a liquidambar tree, or looked out across the horizon to see the piled-up purple cloud-bank of an approaching storm front, or found myself in the hills in winter, with snow encrusting the needles of fir trees, or noticed the first daffodil of spring pushing up from the earth, my heart leapt with such wonder that I longed to preserve the whole experience, to somehow place it in a jewel-box so that I could take it out in later days and look at it, and feel that thrill all over again—perhaps at some dark time when it was desperately needed. The only way I knew how to preserve impressions and feelings and scenes and events was to describe them in words. I tried to preserve them by drawing or filming (for a while I joined a film school), and I wanted to use a combination of drawing and filming to create fantasy animations, but all that was beyond me, then. These days, CGI and 3D animation are within our grasp. They are fields I would have greedily seized upon, had they been available when I was growing up. Their possibilities fascinate me. How I wish I could make my inner worlds real with the use of computers! No doubt future generations will be able to do this easily and cheaply.

I wrote and wrote. I filled drawers and boxes with my longhand scribblings, my ‘Juvenilia'. Images of some of this work are reproduced in this very volume. At the back of a wardrobe, recently, I came across not Narnia but an old story of mine called ‘Tales of Frostfire'. I wrote it when I was still learning, still finding my voice still experimenting. I had illustrated it in black and white, in a style reminiscent of art nouveau, of which I am a huge fan. Fortunately I never showed this work to anyone. It was never published and never should be, for it is a preliminary, not the finished product. The creating of it was a lesson—a lesson I was teaching myself.

For I did teach myself. I learned by writing and by reading. All the passion was innately in me, the stories were swirling in my head from the beginning—but I needed to learn the art of putting them on paper, not merely word after plodding word, but in a form that made the words sing. The more I wrote, the more they sang. In hindsight I am glad I never studied creative writing. In my case, learning the ‘rules' would have stifled me.

Live
.

Michael Morpurgo's advice was to immerse yourself in real life—to watch it, and learn from it, and record it. As mentioned earlier, during my formative years Fantasy land was my favourite place; however good stories need good characters, and the best characters—there is no doubt of it—are drawn from real life. In ‘The Bitterbynde', Sianadh's personality, for example, is based on a friend by the name of George, a funny, loveable, irresponsible, reprehensible adventurer who looms larger than life.

Live.

Live life to the fullest. And while living, observe. Collect. Record. The person sitting next to you on the train, the teacher of your class, your friends and family—more often than not they will do or say something amazing or funny or profound or whimsical that you must capture before it wings away into the mists of forgetfulness. Carry a notebook. Keep your eyes and ears open.

Read, Write and Live. This is what Michael Morpurgo advised the little girl who wanted to write books.

Without my knowing it, from the moment I was born Fate was teaching me to be an author.

Cecilia Dart-Thornton

Juvenilia: Youthful scribblings and fragments of poetry and prose

Juvenilia: Illustrations for an early fantasy story

1

FOUNDING

Speechless, castaway, and wry, a spellbound oddity am I
.

My feet are planted in the clay, my gaze is locked upon the sky
.

F
ROM THE
T
ALITH
S
ONG
“Y
EARNING FOR
F
LIGHT
”

The rain was without beginning and without end. It pattered on incessantly, a drumming of impatient fingers.

The creature knew only the sound of the rain and the rasp of its own breathing. It had no concept of its own identity, no memory of how it had come to this place. Inchoate purpose drove it upward, in darkness. Over levels of harsh stone it crawled, and through dripping claws of vegetation. Sometimes it slept momentarily or perhaps lost consciousness.

The rain lapsed.

Time wore away.

With stiffening limbs the nameless creature moved on. Reaching level ground, it now rose onto trembling legs and walked. Thought-fragments whirled like dead leaves inside its skull.

The ground emptied from beneath its feet. It hurtled downward, to be brought up on a spear-point of agony. A band around its arm had snagged on a projection. The scrawny thing dangled against the cliff face, slowly swinging like bait on a hook.

Then slowly, with great effort, it lifted its other arm. Bird-boned fingers found the catch and released it. The band sprang open and the creature fell.

Had it landed on the rocks, it would have been killed—a kinder fate—but it finished, instead, facedown in a green thicket of
Hedera paradoxis
. Stealthily the juices of the poisonous leaves ate into its face while it lay there for hours, insensate. When it awoke it was too weak to scream. It used its last energies to crawl from the toxic bushes and lie frozen in the morning sunlight, its now ghastly face turned up to the sky.

A benison of warmth began to creep into the chilled flesh, seeping into the very marrow of the bones. Detached, as though it viewed itself from afar, the creature felt its jaws being forced open, inhaled the steamy aroma of warm broth, and sipped instinctively. The sweet, rich liquid coursed inward, spreading waves of flowing warmth. The creature sipped again, then fell back, exhausted.