How do you dress a well?
There’s a lovely tradition in rural Derbyshire where the community comes together to create a colourful mosaic using natural materials pressed onto a board filled with wet clay. These are displayed beside ancient water sources to attract visitors to the village and raise money for charity. I’ve always been in awe of the work that goes into them but, when I decided to include a well dressing scene in the novel I’m currently revising, I didn’t realise how hard it would be.
Judith, my central character, lives and works in the village she grew up in, perfectly attuned to the rhythms of country life. At the planning stage, it seemed a great idea to include a well dressing in an early chapter. This would show both her investment in her community … and what she has to lose when everything goes awry.
My first attempt was rather flat. Judith was enjoying herself but I doubt she’d have convinced the average reader. But that was okay. I was writing this in the depths of winter and Google could only take me so far. But I knew that, when summer came, I’d be able to observe a well dressing in the making and get to grips with how it was done.
I went to three in different parts of the county where the experts generously allowed this outsider to have a go. Bougainvillea petals for part of the flags on a design to celebrate the Olympics; lime-tree berries for a field in a vast rural landscape; eucalyptus leaves at the bottom edge of a commemoration of Eyam’s plague museum.
As you’ll see if you follow the links to the finished versions, my contribution was minuscule.
But I learned loads from each one. And that new knowledge inspired me to rewrite the well dressing scene in my novel – sometimes more than once. It wasn’t easy. I wrote with two types of critics sitting on my shoulders. One said You’ve got it wrong and You haven’t explained it clearly enough while the other reminded me I wasn’t writing instruction manual and badgered me to move the story on. Another complication was being a novice when my narrator had practised the art for decades.
With a sense of relief, I’ve set it aside for the moment. The scene is currently three times as long as in my original draft but there’s a much better balance between the practicalities of well dressing and the emotional arc of the story. I’ll revisit it in the next round of edits.
There’s a symbiotic relationship between my characters’ lives and mine. Things that have happened to me feed into my fiction but it also works the other way around. Having focused so intensively on well dressing lately, I find myself looking at plants in a different way. Are those petals the right size? Would those berries squash if pressed into clay?
So even if this novel flounders, it’s given me something. Those pesky seedheads clinging to my clothes on an overgrown footpath? Well dressing materials, of course.
