Stanley’s ambitions

Stanley is showing a remarkable flair for marketing. Having caused a minor stir with the mugs (he insisted I recycle that pun on his behalf), he was rather taken with the idea of featuring on the front of a t-shirt. His preference, for some reason he refused to divulge, was for one worn by a female, so I think the illustration will not be to his liking, which, of course, in his world means it WILL be to his liking. Anyway, once again, he’s seeking to tempt you with his merchandise to such an extent that I’ll no longer have to write about his exploits.

(By the way, the wording on the shirt is an addition of mine - to acknowledge the hero of Looking for Eric. The words were spoken in the movie by the great Eric himself, with 'Cantona' instead of 'Stanley'.)

In fact, there are already seven Stanley stories, which is convenient because, with six more to appear and six more grandchildren in line for dedications, there’s a pleasing symmetry about the whole enterprise. The trouble is that, by the time the seventh is published, I’ll have written more – and I certainly don’t want any more grandchildren; Christmas is already horrendously expensive. The other trouble is that, with Stanley threatening to sue me if I step even marginally away from the truth of his words and actions, I may have difficulty maintaining that willing suspension of disbelief needed to sustain the reader’s interest.

One thing I should have added before, when I posted the shot of his mugs, was that Stanley’s image rights belong not to him, as he insists, but to Melanie Chadwick who first sketched his portrait. The fact that she made him (according to him, anyway) far less attractive than he finds himself, is irrelevant. As well as suing me, he intends to ‘take her for everything she has’ (his words) for whatever the visual version of libel is. He even used the words ‘bearing false witness’ before I reminded him that that was in one of the commandments and represented the word of God, not the word of Stanley. But all that did was start him muttering about the parables he could tell.

In the end, Mel and I might need not just a lawyer but an exorcist, too.

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Stanley - Genesis

I once had to fake a picture of the village in which Stanley was born because the posting was about snow and there wasn’t any. This picture is legitimate, however. I’m spending a couple of days at his birthplace (and no doubt soon to be shrine) so it seems apt to say a bit about him.

I’ve no idea whether anyone’s going to buy or read the Stanley stories but, for me, he’s taken on a life of his own. I ought to be treating him as a commercial proposition, and I will, of course, but even as I do so, he’ll be there as a presence, casting a sceptical eye over and shaking his head at my efforts.

I’ve mentioned before how some ideas have been generated by the early morning arrival in my bed of grandchildren, bright, wide-awake and wanting to be entertained. When I’m clever, I can get them to do their own inventing (such as when Tracey the lion took the part of Goldilocks in Tracey the Lion and the Three Giraffes), but sometimes, a riff starts and it’s easy for me to pursue it.

Stanley started as one of these. It was about the same time as I started describing the life and family of a giant about whom I can’t remember much now except that his wife played rugby. That family and more importantly, Stanley, grew from a technique I’ve mentioned in other contexts – that is, putting together things that are not normally associated with one another. My blog Searching for something other than the grooves expanded on this idea – blackbirds with vertigo, and so on.

So that morning, we were talking about fairies and, in order to provoke my two listeners, I said that some of them were different from the dingly dell, sparkly, Disneyesque creatures which were so familiar in their books. They wanted examples and, starting from the premise that not even the greatest optimist in the world can be happy ALL the time, I suggested that there were miserable, grumpy fairies. And, as the demands for more detailed explanations continued, the figure of Stanley began to form. He was everything fairies aren’t – male, with an unfairy name, a predisposition towards melancholy and a pathological dislike of every normal fairy association. Being such an outsider, he was also pretty aggressive in defending his chosen status, and, as a result, the person in whose bedroom he lived (i.e. me, in the persona of Jack Rosse), had to be extra-tolerant and all the things Stanley wasn’t, and the two became a double-act.

This all sounds too analytical and too deliberate. In fact, it was just me answering questions about this Stanley creature who, as more details emerged, took over so much that it was obvious that he would refuse to tick any of the usual fairy boxes. But why, when I got back home, did I bother to write a story about him? I’ve no idea. Tracey the Lion and the rugby-playing giant’s wife didn’t get their stories written down, so why Stanley? Maybe it’s because, having established him as a ‘person’, I was tempted to put him into various contexts to demonstrate his differences. And, once the first story was told, several others suggested themselves. So far, there are seven of them. The first, Stanley Moves In, is in fact the most recent one. I wrote it in response to the publisher’s query (based on what she knew her two young sons would ask), about how Stanley came to be living in my bedroom. And, so far, there are six more.

But who are they for? What’s the age range of the target readership? That should be easy, but Stanley makes sure that it’s not. It’s obviously for kids from maybe 4 to 10, but friends who’ve read them suggest that, in a lightweight way, he’s attractive (if that’s the right word) to adults, too. (And it’s true that, when he goes on holiday to France, a French counterpart does ‘explain’ his condition to him in ‘philosophical’ terms.)

But all this ‘explaining’ does nothing but make the whole thing sound pretentious and planned. I haven’t written this way about any of my other books, so why write about a kids’ story? I think because, the ‘reality’ for me of such an unreal character demonstrates again what a strange business writing is and what a perverse pleasure we get out of it. It doesn’t matter that it’s a ‘trivial’ story for ‘kids’ – for me it’s as absorbing to get involved in as any ‘serious’ stories. We make our worlds, we make other people and other things, and they’re as much part of our reality as the feel of the keyboard under my fingers now or the irritating beauty of the deep snow I see through the window. Stanley, like my figurehead carver, my policeman, or my murder victims, is a fact. Of course I don’t believe in fairies, but I believe in Stanley.

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Stanley in his own words

I'll write about the background to and genesis of Stanley some time soon but, since he's now public (in e-form at least), I'm giving him this guest spot to speak for himself. This is the trailer for the first story in which he appears - Stanley Moves In.

He had full editorial control over script and images.

Having him sit for the portraits must have been very trying for Melanie Chadwick, the illustrator, but she has plenty of patience.

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Ladies and Gentlemen, I give you … Stanley.

By a nice coincidence, my first ever collaboration with an illustrator began just after I’d written the previous blog – about visuals in text. My kids’ stories featuring Stanley, the fairy who lives in the washbasin in my bedroom, had been accepted by a publisher and I obviously needed someone to create some appropriate images for him. Fiona-Jane Brown, a FaceBook friend, suggested I contact Melanie Chadwick. I did and, as a consequence, met Stanley for the first time.

By that I mean that, although I’ve written seven stories about him and am aware of his character, his habits and his presence, I’d never really thought about what he looked like. I knew he was the size of a mouse and that he preferred being miserable, but that was it. In the first story, which I wrote in response to the publisher’s request for information about how he’d come to be living in my bedroom in the first place, I gave him a scarf, woollen socks, a tee-shirt and some shorts, but I never envisaged him wearing them.

Melanie agreed to do some sketches for me and I have to say I’m delighted with her ideas, her style, and the Stanley she’s created. But …

The first sketch she sent me was a black and white version of the one above. I’d told her that Stanley was miserable and that’s what she’d given me. But it was only when I looked at it that I realised that, more than miserable, Stanley is angry, aggressive, rude, impatient. I’ve known him for two or three years at least but it was only the visual representation of him that brought that realisation. So a more typical Stanley pose is this …



The point is that all my theorising and/or speculating about visuals in text was exactly that – abstract – and it was only when I literally had to look at a picture of Stanley that I first began to wonder what he looked like. Well, thanks to Melanie, now I know. She’s produced lots of versions of him in various moods and has designed three of the seven covers, bringing her own sense of Stanley (and sense of humour) to them and really transforming the stories into something other than the things I’d written. Her sketches have also given me ideas for more stories because I’ll now be ‘interfacing’ with the character in a different, more questioning way.

This business of visuals in text is even more complex than I thought it was.

By the way, it’s important for me to say that the copyright for these images belongs to Melanie Chadwick and they can only be reproduced with her permission.

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