24th February

A new way of writing

Writing has always been a solitary experience for me – part of my love for it in a way, even from being in my teens, sat gazing out of a window and scribbling down angst ridden words of unrequited love… that kind of nonsense… and until recently, I have continued to write in isolation, predominantly from my writing chair, or whichever room I happen to be in when an idea strikes, making handwritten notes before becoming insepearable from my laptop.

Bristol Temple Meads Station

However, my new WIP (work in progress) is asking for something else.  This manuscript involves a different way of writing, one that I find incredibly exciting and that impacts on the WIP at every turn and in the most amazing ways.  I hadn’t realised, initially, that this novel would need such a different approach, but it soon became clear just what the potential was for experimentation.  This novel won’t write itself from the confines of a house or the car when I’m waiting to pick the kids up.  This novel needs me to find my wings, and suddenly, and very surprisingly, I have gone from being a ‘stagnant’ solitary writer, to a ‘writer on the move’ with other people to bounce off.

Needless to say, I took a wee trip to Somerset a fortnight ago as part of this ‘adventure’. I

St Michael's Tower, Glastonbury Tor

wrote page after page on railway platforms, on the 6 trains I took in total for my journey there and back, which have now become the basis for one of the chapters.  I wrote a few lines in a wonderful cafe in Glastonbury, that I know will appear somewhere in the book, and I formulated a whole scene from a visit to Glastonbury Tor and the cathedral ruins.  It literally sprang up and blew across me like a cold north wind.  I took stacks of photos too, and used these later to weave other ideas into the scenes.  I’m going to put these in with the growing manuscript – it has its own folder now – along with other notes and bits and pieces I gather along the way.

On Saturday, I spent an hour and a half in a Morrisons’ cafe and filled 8 pages of my notebook while people-watching and listening to Lana Del Rey (wonderful cd by the way).  Strangely, a character from an early scene of the novel appeared, as if by magic, just as I’d visualised him, which was a tad disconcerting.

Very fishy!

Yesterday, I explored an area of Derbyshire, visited places I have never been, gathered fragments of history, imagined the past, moved my characters around it and put words into there mouths.  It was utterly inspiring.  There are many other scenes sparked by situations and settings… but I’m not going to spoil it by saying any more.

But I am finding, that for the first time of in my years of writing, this is a story which is really coming alive – filled with real people, real places, with photos as memory joggers - memories captured and held.  Already, 12,000 words in, it has become a living, breathing thing, more than anything else I’ve ever worked on.  To say I am exhilerated by this project – and it is a project – is an understatement.  I feel as if, after years of writing, I have discovered ‘the secret’, whispered to me quietly when I least expected it.  Whatever happens to this book, it is the biggest part of my journey yet, so liberating and so full of energy and wonderful memories that it’ll stay with me forever.

There will be more trips to more places, more trains… who knows where?  I may even find myself in another country.  I have found my wings!

What is your approach to writing? Do you prefer to write alone, from home, or spread your wings for inspiration?

17th February

Not THIS one… but the one after

I think it’s fair to say that there’s a strong feeling for most writers of wanting to be published… but perhaps ‘strong feeling’ isn’t strong enough - maybe ‘desperation’ is closer to the truth.   That’s certainly how I have felt at times.  Mostly, for me, it’s that feeling that I need confirmation that the hours I spend in my head and the stories I weave, will come to something, that the characters who I have worked on for so long that I can almost touch them, will leap off the paper and into other people’s minds.   So, initially, you don’t  see past the first book deal that you so desperately want.  You just want to be published, for someone to say YES!   And this sense of desperation intensifies the longer the wait goes on.  That’s how it was for me anyway.  But here’s the rub… what happens once you’ve been published?  Because, the thing is, you still want to write, there are still all those ideas and untold stories in your head… and there’s even more reason to want to be published now because you’ve been published before - after all, you’ve had the big green light, affirmation that, yes, you are publishable.  So if you’re publishable, publishers HAVE to want to publish you again… don’t they?

Well, maybe  they do.  But does having been published once make it easier? And is the next book any more guaranteed?  I was thinking about this in relation to Buttercup Magic.  ‘Buttercup Magic: A Mystery for Megan’ is due for publication on 27th April this year – woohoo!  In fact, I have just read through the proofs – proofed the proofs if you like.  There was an erroneous ‘to’ and a couple of other inconsistencies, but other than that, we appear to be cooking on gas!  This will be my sixth book (pinch me!) but my first mid-grade novel, so quite a big deal for me… a lot of a big deal actually!  I planned the idea to span more than one book – three hopefully.  All the ground rules had to be set out in the first book.  The story involves a young girl, Megan, who moves into Buttercup House and befriends Freya, the girl next door.  It also involves a group of animals, The Protectors, who can communicate with the girls and who have special gifts and are able to help them when help is needed.  It took me seven drafts to get it right, because ‘the forensics’ (as my publisher, Piccadilly Press, call it) had to be right.  If there were any plot errors in this first one, everything would come tumbling down in the next one.  I suddenly realised the implications of writing a series of books that had more developed plot lines.  The Ruby and Grub series (for 2-6yrs) had been much more character based, with simpler plots appropriate to the age range.  But now I was writing for 6-9yr olds… very discerning 6-9yr olds!

So, thinking ahead, as you do, I have now completed the first draft of the second book in the series.  Was it easier than the first?  Yes, because the building blocks, the rules, the plotlines were all tight in the first book (we’re talking seven drafts later remember)…  and by the way, it may not have taken seven drafts had I plotted properly in the outset (see 6th January blog post on the Plot Planner!)  This time, I went into the second book knowing what the animals can do, how it all worked, why they disappeared and why they have returned.  But in another sense, writing this one was more difficult.  I had to work harder to build and sustain the energy of the first book.  Also, I have had to open the second book with the close of the first.  This can work both ways – it gives you a definite start, but doesn’t allow for the freedom of a brand new book.  You, as a writer, have to retain the spark and excitement you feel when you are working on a brand new idea or concept.  Then, of course, you have to make sure it’s at least as good as the last one… and everything has to tie in with the last book, so you may have an amazing idea, but you can’t use it because it doesn’t fit in with the ground rules you’ve established in the first book.

But, there’s more certainty that book two will be published, isn’t there?  Not necessarily.  In theory, yes.  But if the first book doesn’t sell as well as hoped, or if there’s no interest from abroad (those elusive overseas rights) then maybe not.  The world of publishing is a hard one – for publishers AND for writers.  Will it stop me writing?  Never.  If a hairdresser does a dodgy perm, does she walk out and threaten never to titivate someone’s locks again?  If a plumber bursts a pipe, does he stop being a plumber?  Erm, dubious analogy here because maybe he should… but you can see my point, I hope.

Writing’s a job, a wonderful job, and if I write something that doesn’t work, isn’t marketable or falls apart in the making, I shall get over it and move on… write something new that will blow people’s minds!

9th February

The end… or is it?

A short and sweet one from me today – and an early one – today I BLOT (Blog on Thursday) as opposed to BOG (Blog on Friday)!

This week, I have finished my first YA work in progress … well, I say ‘finished’ – first draft is completed and I’m having a few weeks break from it to work on an adult novel (see my 2 in the morning post from 20th January).  It’s a long way from being finished, and yet there is, I think, a feeling of satisfaction at having completed the cycle.  I think all writers must feel this.  But, there is an element of sadness too… saying goodbye to the characters whose skins you’ve crawled under, who wouldn’t exist if you hadn’t penned them.  So I have mixed emotions, and am especially sorry to say goodbye to my main protagonist, who is lovely!  However, I will see him again soon in draft 2… and 3… and 4… so it’s more of a ‘see ya later’ than a ‘goodbye’.

Those of you who read my post, ’The Plot Planner’, from 6th January, may remember that I was using this ‘creation’ to help with my writing – plotting not being one of my strong points.  So, you may be wondering how it’s gone… if not, just humour me!  I didn’t completely stick to it – I don’t think that was ever the idea anyway – but I did follow it mostly.  And yes, I would make one

Re-jigged Plot Planner

again – definitely!  It got me through the first quarter of the novel spectacularly well, and the first quarter of the middle bit.  But, I confess, I had mad frenzies in the the latter part of the middle bit, where I peeled off some of the strips and shuffled them about a bit and stuck them back on in other places, and sometimes didn’t stick them on – as you will see by the blank spaces in the pic opposite!  Sometimes I ripped them into pieces.  Sometimes I wrote a new idea on the other gunky gluey side of them and whacked that on somewhere.  It was a lot more random than I’d thought it would be, and once I was into the last few chapters of the endy bit, things got even more random… in fact, I forgot to look at it for a few days, and when I went back to it was surprised how much I’d veered off course.

The thing is, it was fine.  I knew where I needed to be at the end, and I was still heading there, albeit by a slightly more circuitous route.  But that’s good isn’t it?  When you get in the car, sometimes it’s nice to follow your nose – you can always get to wherever you want to be from wherever you are… a nice motto to have in life maybe.  Anything is possible!

Me as toast!

Speaking of which, this week I have been made into toast by a fellow tweep @darbythefirst surely proving that anything really is possible.

Do you find it difficult to let go of your characters?

3rd February

A Poem

Sometimes writing – what I think of as ‘proper writing’ goes a bit awol.  It happens to the best of us I think… life gets in the way, we’re tired, distracted, anxious, or all of these.  Sometimes we have to push through this and there’s no doubt in my mind that writing is a discipline that can do this.   That said, this week, I confess, I have struggled.  The YA is no closer to being finished than it was a week ago.  The new novel is shaping up nicely, piece by piece.  But concentrated writing has been difficult.  I’ve let my demons get on top of me and the evil Self Doubt has raised her very ugly head.  Even this post is being written on Thursday, 9.30pm… I never normally leave it this late!

Poetry always comes to my aid at times like this.  It’s how my writing life started and when all else fails, a poem comes.  Wrote this on Tuesday evening over a glass of wine.  I don’t normally air fresh poems, unedited, just written, as it was written then, knocked up in about ten minutes.  But sometimes poems seem to fall from a special place and hold everything that needs saying.  This was one of those.  I hope you like it, and I hope it makes you think a bit and furrow your brow.

Signs

A buzzard died in my dream last week,
floated, headless towards my less than perfect slabs.

I saw her the next day, head in the correct place,
sat atop a hedge, not a cracked slab in sight.

Three white doves flew, not in a dream,
out of a hedge, across my path, across my wide open gasp.

Is it time? I think.  Is this the time?  Now?
Is this when everything changes?

So I follow the signs and I link them with feathers
and I tie them with silk, loose so that they can still fly

and not for the first time I ask myself why
Why me? Why now?

And the answer is…
they come because they need me to listen.

So I take a trip across a field and gather mud
and thoughts, unzip my coat and leave it trailing on the floor.

Is there more?  Oh yes.  There’s always more,
until legs become so light you cannot feel them.

The wine is empty.  My tears are dry.
My path is as unclear as it has ever been.

Two arms held me in my dream last night,
held me so tight that when I woke I was clutching at my breath.

What do you do and where do you turn when life gets in the way of the words?

27th January

In the real world

I remembered something this weekend, something I’d forgotten… how important it is to retain a sense of equilibrium in this rather surreal 21st century world that we live in.  As a writer, it is easy to become so involved in our stories, our creations, that we shut out everything else.  I know that when I am really immersed in a peice of writing, as I am now, I can find myself writing for hours on end – for many more hours than I would spend at a ‘normal’ job.  Working on two big projects at the moment means I am often ‘in the zone’, but being ‘in the zone’ takes me away from reality, and sometimes the balance can slip a little.

Of course, social media often interrupts this focus, allowing for a bit of light relief… but it is not always beneficial light relief is it?  It can be, but in order to interact, I find I am still sat looking at a screen, still typing words into it.  I felt the weight of this recently, and have put it right, in the best way I know how – going out for long walks with the hound across boggy fields.  I’ve taken my camera and stopped to take photos as I’ve gone along. I’ve watched the clouds flit across the sky, stared at the reflections in the babbling stream that skirts one of the fields, watched a beautiful grey heron take off with wings that caught at the air, and watched how the light played on the edges of branches.  It’s reminded me that there is a world ‘out there’ and that the one in my head isn’t always enough.  Sometimes I’ve had company and conversation.  I met a woman with two lovely lurchers one day, one of whom got very giddy over my hound, and she told me a doggie story, which I wouldn’t have heard if I’d been sat at my laptop.

On my first boggy walk I noticed that the gate I’ve used in the past was locked, so me and the hound had to find another way round, cutting across the back of a farm.  There’s something about slightly derelict places that has always fascinated me, and old broken things lying around in fields – its the contrasts that appeal I think.  If I hadn’t had to bypass the old route, I wouldn’t have noticed the reflections of this lorry in the puddles, which had me transfixed for quite a while – greyhounds are very patient beasts.

Sometimes, we forget to be spontaneous.  We forget to talk to people we don’t know.  We forget that if we lie down on the grass and look at the clouds, we might see one shaped like an elephant, or a wizard.  We forget what it is to be really alive.  This week, I have the evidence of life clinging to my footwear… I hate cleaning the mud off boots, so the result of all of this is that my walking boots have great clods of mud clinging to them and I have very artistic splatters on most of my jeans.  But I’m so glad!

What do you do to get out of the zone and back into the real world?

20th January

2 in the morning

This wasn’t the post I had lined up for today, but sometimes stuff happens, and at 2am yesterday morning, I woke up with a bright new shiny idea in my head.  It was an idea for an adult novel, brought about by a sequence of events that have happened over the last week.  I grabbed my notepad and pen (always have these by my bed) and started to write the idea down in the dark.  Lay back down.  More ideas, like fireworks fizzing.  So turned the light on this time and wrote more.  I think I did this five times, writing the framework for a novel over the space of about 20 minutes – probably around 5 minutes writing, 15 minutes thinking.  Not only did I write the framework, but I saw the humour and a twist, the sting in the tail.

Lights out, I then lay awake for close to two hours.  I even considered submitting to the buzz and fizz completely, donning dressing gown and going downstairs to write on my laptop.   I convinced myself that this would be a bad idea – school run to do in the morning and all that.  But I kept diving at the notepad and adding to it as pieces fell together.

Later on yesterday, I wrote a two page synopsis for the novel, and was so excited (still am) by it, I actually felt quite sick.  I must add, the timing of this is a bit precarious.  I am mid-way through my first YA… but this new idea, this book, is beating like a blood red ruby in my heart, and I can’t ignore it, and I know I mustn’t ignore it.  And there are reasons that I know this…

A week ago, I started keeping a journal – a journal of unguarded writing, not aimed at an audience – thoughts, impressions, triggers – anything and everything that was prominent in my mind and that seemed significant.  I recorded conversations, dreams, observations, and suddenly became profoundly aware that these were all somehow connected.  I am currently reading ‘The Alchemist’ by Paulo Coelho so this has been buzzing around my head too – ideas of living out your dreams, destiny, ‘Maktub’ – what is written, and the significance of omens.  A sequence of dreams and sightings of specific birds, over the last couple of days, led me to do a Google search… the results were mildly spooky!

Then, at 2am, it all fell into place – the whole lot, tied in.  I am SO excited about the idea, which is like nothing I have ever read, or written, that I’m not sure how I’m going to sleep over the next few weeks / months.  But sleep I must.  And, I am still very enthused by TSP, my YA novel.  So, do I juggle?  Yes I do!  I can, actually, juggle three balls… and I have juggled stories before – lots of authors do.  So, the plan is to continue with around 1,000 words a day on TSP and make notes and collate bits and bobs for the new novel so that when the first draft of TSP is complete (in around a month hopefully) I can launch myself into this little gem… I wish I could tell you more, but at the moment, I can’t!  But I know that this is a story waiting to be written and it needs me to tell it.

Do your ideas come to you in the silence of the night… and do you embrace them, or push them away?

13th January

Let me tell you about gates…

Last year, I was lucky enough to attend a poetry writing workshop hosted by Derbyshire County Council.  They do quite a lot of these types of workshops - always enjoyable and a great opportunity to meet fellow writers and have a good chin-wag about writerly kind of things.  This particular one was hosted by three wonderful poets: Jeremy Duffield, Cathy Grindrod and Wayne Burrows.

The workshop left a lasting impression on me for two reasons.  One, Wayne Burrows is the editor of a wonderful Nottingham based poetry magazine, ‘Staple’, and he gave me some really constructive feedback on my poems.  Secondly, I learnt something about the importance of perception and interpretation in writing, something I thought I knew, but I didn’t truly understand it.  It was one of those lightbulb moments, which is like the sun setting in your soul and coming to rest in a place it knows it belongs.

Anyway… let me explain.  Jeremy asked us all to write a poem, in 5 minutes, which should begin: ’Let me tell you about gates’ … yes, that’s what I thought too!  I’m not used to writing from another person’s idea, and within a certain time, so I was thrown into momentary panic, before realising that momentary panic would eat into my writing time… it was like school exams all over again.  But I dug deep (being given no other choice and not wanting to look like a fool) and wrote this:

Let me tell you about gates
because they won’t tell you about themselves.

They won’t tell you but they will show you
in oh, so many ways.

Open me up, this one says,
Come in, Come in.

Close me up, says another
as it nestles low beneath the long grass.

Chip, Chip, Chip, says another.
Caw, Caw, says another

or was that a crow flying overhead?

But the one near pebble beach
says none of these things.

She stands ajar, rope dangling
from her rusty shoulder, wrenched

into an inch of mud
and waits for someone to come and try

to slide her open a little more.

Then she will say, Hi, Hi and let you in,
across the dry sand, wind blown,

beyond the pebbles cranked together,
snuffled up against the wind,

past the tin can rattle
and out towards the waves,

towards the white frayed edge that says,
Come in, Come in, Come in.

So how did these words come about?  Why these?  They were inspired by the lasting impression of a deserted pebble beach, and the journey to it, that I made two or three times a day on a holiday in Wales the year before.   They came from a personal experience, one that was so strong, that under pressure, it was this that sprang to mind.  This brought home to me just how important it is to absorb what is around you, and how, as if by magic, these moments reappear when you most need them.  Our writing is not only what we create from our imaginations, but what we have experienced and stored away in the treasure chests of our minds, and in our hearts.  Because, most of all, I think it’s the feelings and sense of place or experience, that stick.  Also, on reflection , I realised that this poem could be read on many levels.  I have a real affinity with the sea, possibly as a water sign, and feel quite haunted by its rhythms, all of which I think are subconsciously reflected in this poem, even in its form – something I wasn’t conscious of at the time.

What I also found interesting, is that not one person in the room – I guess there were around 12 of us - dealt with this subject matter in the same way.  Some took it literally, to be about gates.  Some took a wider view of the historical nature of gates and architecture, others took gates to be ‘Gates’, a person.   Our differences in perception and interpretation hit home to me in a way they never had before – how we all carried our own voice, how we all spoke from somewhere deep within us, both consciously and subconsciously, and how that somewhere was so different for each ot us.  And yet, we were all able to step back and admire one another’s efforts.  It truly was a lightbulb moment for me.

But there was another thing too – I also learnt something about myself.  When I read my poem out to the group, Jeremy made a comment which stuck with me.  He said it was interesting that I had written about gates as a way of letting people in, when most people thought of gates as shutting something off, or keeping people out. It made me realise that it said a lot more about me than I had thought, and that maybe I had let people in even more than I intended… in a silly old poem about gates!

Have you ever had a similar experience through a writing workshop?  Or have you ever had a lightbulb moment about writing, or yourself, through your writing, that has stuck with you?