Introduction

Introduction to 'The Radio Rooms'

The Radio Rooms was born out of three pieces of work all written here
at Birkbeck over the duration of the course in the Certificate in
Creative Writing.
The first inspiration point (draft 1- Room) was a writing exercise set
in a class during my first year. This exercise was to describe a room
in the third person without any dialogue. The second inspiration point
(draft 2 - Lithium Rose) was the poem I submitted for the poetry module
in the first year of the course. The third inspiration point (draft 3-
The Snowbaby) was an attempt at a short story in my second year.

I enjoyed the Room exercise. It stayed with me and I filed it away with
the aim of perhaps using it later on (I keep everything that I write,
good and bad). I knew that the poem, a prose poem of sorts, could be
expanded into a longer piece, but I needed a suitable arena in which to
make it work.
I presented the short story at a tutorial halfway through the spring
term in the second year. After consultation with my tutor, I decided
that while the piece was entertaining, it was essentially not more than
an accumulation of notes, a list of experiences. However, I felt there
was something there to work on. In almost desperation, I trawled
through all my old work, my numerous writers' notebooks and my memory.
I concluded that I should merge the strengths of the exercise, the poem
and the short story to see what might happen and perhaps find a
structure and a formula that would link them together. This was the key
that opened the door to The Radio Rooms.

There are many threads in The Radio Rooms, but the main themes I wanted
to explore are the attainment of love, the loss of love and the triumph
of redemption over self and exterior destruction. I had the desire to
write an entertaining sprawling, ambitious novel, set over three
separate time frames that finally meet and push the story to a
conclusion.
The reasons I wanted to write such a novel were because of personal
experience. The novel is a thickly disguised autobiography (aren't
most?) and I wanted to explore the many incidents of an individual's
life and where they stand in the maelstrom of a history. To be more
direct, I needed to work myself out, as well as those people in my life
that had affected me, and myself them. I believe that everyone's story
is big, even epic, filled with the dramas of joy and disaster. If the
mundane elements of our lives can be sculptured away, then
extraordinary truths will be revealed, a possibility of a better
understanding of oneself and others. These themes may seem at first
pretentious, but if written (and this is vitally important) with the
purpose of entertaining the reader, then it can surely be
achieved.

There are many influences across many forms that I have drawn on in the
writing of The Radio Rooms. John Steinbeck's East of Eden is one, for
his sublime execution of a melodramatic family saga. Tim Lott's
heartbreaking autobiography, The Scent of Dried Roses, a study of
depression twinned with social history, is another. I read many books
on and about Australia to jog my memory and give me inspiration. These
included the excellent Tracks by Robyn Davidson for its evocation of
landscapes and the will to succeed over adversity, and Robert Drewe's
The Shark Net, for its meditation on growing up as a boy and teenager
in the isolated city of Perth, Western Australia.

Music is a constant throughout the piece, from Bartok to Bruce
Springsteen, Miles Davis to Madonna. I trawled my own record collection
and others to find a lyric or a chord change to drive me on and inspire
me to a memory. A collection of songs that I kept going back to was the
album The Village Green Preservation Society by The Kinks. This album
recalls a lost Englishness; the songs are about an imagined suburbia,
when everything was somehow better. Radio was pivotal in the writing of
the piece, both physically and audibly. I am a collector myself and as
well as examining my own radios, I went to many markets to look at
older and rarer models. I listen to radio constantly and luckily have a
strong knowledge of historical events attained from the airwaves.
Photographs and historical information garnered from the internet were
crucial to the development of the work. There were also various visits
back to my hometown of Basildon, for research and to gain
atmosphere.
The greatest strength I discovered whilst writing The Radio Rooms was
the flexibility of writing in the first person. It's a no-nonsense
technique, and if the story is strong enough, the reader will hopefully
feel a personal attachment to the first person voices. By definition,
writing in the first person concentrates the point of view and
disciplines the writer. Of, course this strength can also be seen as a
weakness, as it leaves less room to manoeuvre, to change the point of
view or to stand back and observe the story.

When I finally decided on what I was going to write about it seemed
easy, but as always, the traps set themselves along the way. Writing to
three different time frames became tricky. Will the reader believe in
these jumps of years, locations and themes? Early drafts were written
leaving no clues to what had gone on before or indeed what was to come.
They read as too episodic, almost like diary entries. With repeated
re-drafting, cleaning up the tendency that I have to sometimes
overwrite (better to overwrite than to underwrite; for me, trimming is
easier than searching to expand), the story became much clearer. I
started to add little teases of continuity, information that would
hopefully grip the reader and invite them to read on. The difficulty
with re-drafting was the possibility that I might 'over-draft', leaving
the work devoid and dry. It's a big challenge to know when to stop,
when to say to yourself "enough is enough".

Writing The Radio Rooms has and is proving to be one of the most
invigorating and demanding projects that I have ever been involved in.
It has become a compulsion, a mystery that needs working out. It will
develop further, I'm sure. There will be more developments and plot
twists once a full first draft is completed, and it will be. To leave
it in a bottom drawer or as an icon on my desktop would be detrimental
to myself and maybe a wider audience. Welcome to The Radio Rooms.