Saturday 31 August 2013

Unlocking Your Inner Potential - Rebecca Lisle

Well, is there inner potential, that's the question.  I'm certainly not sure there's any in me. I suspect that my innards are devoid of anything. Everything. I'm trying to write and I can't. My inner muse or well of inspiration or whatever, is now nothing but a clogged up puddle of mud.

I wondered if a self-help guide might help. Although I don't want my own self-help, I want someone else to help. Actually I guess I want someone else to write my 'book words' for me.


The trouble with this book is I am already full of fear and personally I think it's plain dangerous to do something you know for sure is scary. That's why it's scary. To stop you from doing it. Sensible really. Protective.
So this book is no help at all.

Apparently I do have an inner genius, really I do. There's lots about it on the internet. I have to find it, that's all. Unlock it. So I turn to my store of images which I gather as I go about the world, hoping one day they will become something. Anything. Since I always find doors inspiring and interesting here are a few of my favourites. They might give you inspiration. But these doors are . . .


              
          

Locked. Maybe for ever.
OK.  
I've got more photos. I've got these fascinating boxes, surely full of wonderful ideas and exciting plots:

How about this ancient box. What was it used for? Why the huge lock? Surely I can be inspired by its mysterious paintings of birds and spiky plants?  


What are those two chaps hiding in there? Are they smiling? I'm sure they look smug. I have the feeling they know the secret of how to write a good book and they've got it locked up in there and won't tell.

And what's inside this 15th century iron cask? The secret to the Universe? The best plot in the world?

And although I have some extraordinary keys - 


guess what - they don't unlock anything.

So back to the self-help books.  "How to be Happy" Impossible. It'll never happen. "How to write your novel in one year!" That's far too long. I want it done by the end of the week.  "The Easy Way to Write." That's just lies - there isn't one. "Everything I know about Writing." Fine, but you know it, you're successful, stop showing off. I know nothing. I can't write a thing.

Finally I take the plunge and write my very own self-help guide. A must for all would be novelists. It's called "The Only Way To Write"by Rebecca Lisle. Because there is only one me and only one way to write. And the best thing about it is it won't take long to read and it really does work!

There is one page of credits and acknowledgments: 

Firstly, I thank myself for all the hard work I've put into this book, myself for being my constant support and critic, myself for never giving up hope and belief in me and myself for feeding me constant cups of coffee and buns. I will never forget you. 

On the following page the advice begins. And ends. 

Stop faffing around and get on with it. 


Rebecca Lisle  www.rebeccalisle.com

Rebecca's most recent book THE SPIN, published by Hot Key Books has been nominated for the West Sussex Children's Book Award

Friday 30 August 2013

The power of (long, silly) words - Lari Don


I’ve just moved house. I'm sure any other writers who work from home and have suffered through a house move will agree that it can be extraordinarily disruptive. But I’m not going to moan at you. Instead I’m going to be cheerful about the power of words and the loveliness of librarians.

I had to send a lot of emails over the summer apologising in advance (or even worse, after the fact) for being inefficient, hard to contact and easily confused, all of them using the explanation / excuse that I was in the midst of moving house.

I had a variety of responses. A frequent response was: “Oh, how exciting!” (Em, no. Not exciting. Tiring, expensive, irritating, destructive of any creative impulse …)

But my favourite response was from the lovely librarian who said she completely understood that I would be hard to pin down for a few weeks, and that I might not be sending the most coherent emails for a while, because (and I quote her email):

                 “…moving house is superbusystressmonkey!” 

I laughed out loud at her word, and I nodded, and I printed the phrase out, and I stuck it to my wall (both walls actually, old study and new study) and her word MADE ME FEEL BETTER.

‘Superbusystressmonkey’ is the perfect word for the feeling of moving house. It acknowledges the chaos, but punctures it with humour. It recognises the panicked lack of control, but by trapping that panic in a word, it gives you back a little bit of control.
A superbusystressmonkey climbing a wall of boxes

It may have been a throwaway line from a supportive person, but that word ‘superbusystressmonkey’ actually made the whole house move easier for me, because I had a word for it, a word which made me smile. 

Which made me realise just how important words are. The right words. Words that acknowledge something difficult, that allow you to articulate how you feel, and therefore give you a feeling of control over the problem.

Words can make you feel better.

I don’t know (though I suppose I could ask) whether the lovely librarian made up ‘superbusystressmonkey’ on the spot, or whether she (like any good librarian) knew exactly where to find the right word when she needed it. But it was a new word to me, and I’m sure I will find it very useful in the future.

Now I’m almost settled, I can take ‘superbusystressmonkey’ off my wall, and put up a calmer and more creative new word instead. ‘Superfocusseddeadlinetiger’ perhaps?


Lari Don is the award-winning author of almost twenty books for all ages, including fantasy novels for 8 – 12s, picture books, retellings of traditional tales and novellas for reluctant readers. And she hopes never to move house again!

Lari’s website
Lari’s own blog
Lari on Twitter 
Lari on Facebook

Thursday 29 August 2013

Snapshots


Recently I found myself thinking about my earliest memory. It is a snapshot from a time before I had much in the way of language and it has worked itself from the moorings of anything else I was experiencing at that time of my life and floats freely now in the stream of my imagination. As a writer, it is a scene I find interesting precisely because of its lack of moorings, because it throws up questions and starts me thinking of the possibilities of its context.

So much of the memory is clear and sharp. I can see, hear, feel and taste things as though I were experiencing them this instant. The first thing I see is bars – cot bars. This immediately throws up the first question: how old am I? I must be less than two, as I know that I had to vacate the cot for my younger sister who came along about two years after me. But I am sitting up, so I am not a small baby. As I let the scene run in my mind’s eye I realize I can hear crying, and that it is me making the noise. So, I have been left in my cot and I am crying. But why? I am still very small, arguably too small to be left crying like this. I then hear that the crying is not particularly convincing. It has in fact reached a point where I am simply moaning the word “Mummy” over and over again at a subdued pitch. So possibly I have given up hope on anyone coming to see what I am crying about. I then realize I have already cried too long and too much by this point. I have come to the memory at the point where I have almost cried myself out; my eyes are swimming with tears, and my nose and mouth are full of tear-snot, that liquid which is thicker than tears and which comes at the end of a particularly long bout of weeping. I have managed to produce so much of it by now that I am blowing bubbles with it every time I say the word “Mummy”. My crying is slowly giving way to the creation of these bubbles as I watch, intrigued at how big I can make them. 

And then the memory ends, switches itself off as though I were watching a short video clip which is now finished. Did my mother come and get me? Had she left me for a long time because she had fallen asleep, exhausted by looking after a toddler while she was pregnant with my sister? Or perhaps someone else was looking after me that day? If so, did they feel bad when they finally came to me and saw how much and how long I had cried? Or was I in reality only crying for a matter of minutes anyway, my sense of abandonment amplified by my lack of an understanding of the passage of time?

As I thought about this memory, I realized that my writing often starts like this, with a scene or a snapshot of a character, and then the whys and wherefores, the what ifs and how comes are what set the cogs whirring and thus the story into motion. Without an initial image or soundbite, I do not have a hook on which to hang my story.

My book Monkey Business started with a voice in my ear, that of the hippy uncle character, Zed. I heard him muttering one day, talking to his nephew, Felix, and explaining how Nature has its own rhythm without recourse to watches or clocks. Suddenly a scene was there, fully formed, and I could work outwards from that to create the rest of the book – a story essentially about a little boy who worships his uncle and shares his love of animals and how this, coupled with a large dollop of misunderstanding, gets the characters into some tricky situations. I had wanted to write about a boy like Felix for a while, but had not known how to start the story until Zed turned up.

My most recent book, I’m A Chicken Get Me Out of Here! had a similar beginning. After a night of anxiety when one of our chickens did not come home to roost (but did thankfully appear the next day unscathed) I began to wonder how she had survived. I was turning this over in my mind when my son's friend asked if he could bring his guinea pig round to our house to meet our chicken. This meeting sparked off a scene in my imagination where the fictional chicken arrives at her new home to find she is expected to share a hutch with an OCD guinea pig called Brian. Once I had scribbled down my imagined scenario, the rest of the story found its way, spreading its tentacles outwards from that snapshot.

Even though snapshots such as these kickstart a story, they rarely find their way on to page one of the finished story; more often than not they will worm their way into the middle of the book, and beginnings are often written once I have got to the end.

So I thought I would throw this out into the ABBA ether – how many of you start with a scene or an image? And how many prefer to work in a more linear way? Answers on the back of a snapshot, please.

www.annawilson.co.uk

Wednesday 28 August 2013

A Life In Writing, by Philip Caveney


A recent email query gave me pause for thought. A reader in America wondered if I had any plans to write a sequel to The Sins Of Rachel Ellis. I was, to put it mildly, gob-smacked.

You see, Rachel Ellis was my very first novel, published back in the heady days of 1977, when I was a drummer in a rock band and had a more than passing resemblance to Rasputin, the Mad Monk. I liked drumming very much, but I had a burning desire for something else, something that had been ignited in me at the age of thirteen when I first read Ray Bradbury’s wonderful fantasy novel, Something Wicked This Way Comes.

 I wanted to be an author.

Getting that first book published was my reward for something like ten years of hard work.

I began, like most writers at the time, by sending my manuscripts off to publishers with a polite letter asking if they’d care to consider my words of genius for publication. The pages would come back to me, almost by return of post, with a brusque ‘thank you’ note and nothing more. In those days of course, there was no electronic submission. You sent the whole typescript, including a hefty cheque for when (it was never ‘if’) the publisher decided to return it. The pages had so much Tipp-Ex plastered to them, they had the approximate weight and feel of the tablets of Moses and the postage was equivalent to the national debt of a small country.

At some point, I read a line in a magazine that suggested that if you were an aspiring writer, the best thing to do was to put your work into the hands of a literary agent.

I was living in North Wales at the time, where such exotic creatures were somewhat thin on the ground. Eventually it dawned on me that since all the publishers and agents were in London that was where I needed to be. And when the rock band I played with were offered the opportunity to go to the Capital for two weeks to provide the music for a youth theatre production of Godspell, I seized the opportunity with eager hands, promising myself that I wouldn’t go home until I’d found an agent who was prepared to handle my work.

It was tough going. I, and the bass player with my band, memorably lived for two weeks in his Hillman Imp. We used to park around the back of the Barnardo’s children’s home in Redbridge and the kids there would bring us out some sandwiches. (Now that’s poverty!) The two weeks soon went and the rest of the band dutifully headed home, but I stubbornly stayed on, finding myself a flat, a job and a circle of friends. I was not going to give up on this.

My stay in London was eventually extended to around five years. For most of that time, I worked for a marine electronics firm as a clerk. There wasn’t much to do, but I did have an office, there WAS a typewriter and an endless supply of typing paper. What more could any aspiring writer ask?

Meanwhile, I kept writing. At every opportunity.

Finally, my perseverance paid off. A friend who worked for Thames Television furnished me with the address of an agent by the name of Janet Freer. I went to her offices in Tottenham Court Road, walked in, dumped my typescript on her receptionist’s desk and when asked what I thought I was doing, panicked and legged it out of there like an utter maniac. Luckily, I’d remembered to tuck my phone number under the elastic band that held the pages together.

Against all the odds, she phoned me back, telling me that my work was unpublishable (the bad news) but that it had ‘promise (the good news). I was to bring her the next thing I wrote. A year later, I did as she asked and she deemed this ‘an improvement’ but told me, as gently as possible that it still wasn’t quite there. She asked if I would be prepared to pick up the bat one more time…

I wrote an eerie ghost story set in North Wales called The Sins Of Rachel Gurney and a year later, it was ready to hand to Janet. She sold it two day’s later to St Martin’s Press in New York. I shall never forget her distinctive Canadian voice on the phone saying, ‘Hey kid, I got you a deal!’

It’s hard to convey how exciting that was. Thirty-five years later, I can still recall punching the air in delirious excitement. I had cracked it! I was now officially a published author. The world was at my feet. The title of the book got changed at the 11th hour, because an actress called Rachel Gurney had a show on Broadway and the publishers were worried she might litigate, but that didn’t matter, I had actually gone and done it. The thing I had longed for, dreamed about, gone half crazy to try and achieve had actually come to pass.

Well, I was twenty-six years old and very naïve.

The years roll by. Manual typewriters give way to electric typewriters, which in turn are superseded by Amstrad word processors, which somehow mutate into Apple Macintoshes and finally, my current darling, a state-of-the-art iMac. I can submit a manuscript at the touch of a button and shares in Tipp-Ex must be looking pretty dodgy these days.

Thirty published books later, (more if I count the three romance novels written under a female pseudonym), I look around and tell myself that while the hardware may have changed, so much of the writer’s life hasn’t. I still meet young wannabes, prepared to throw themselves repeatedly at the brick walls of the indifferent publishing industry. The majority of publishers and agents can still be found in our country’s capital city and so much of publishing is dominated by people who are famous for some other reason and who have no qualms in engaging the services of a ghost writer to tell their story for them, whilst omitting to give them any of the credit.

And once again, I look at that email. Thirty five years down the line, am I considering a sequel to The Sins Of Rachel Ellis?

Well, you know what?

I would never entirely rule it out.

Tuesday 27 August 2013

It's not the end of the world - Lily Hyde


“Oh please recommend us some books to read!” a young avid reader and her mother fell over each other to ask me recently.

They sounded as desperate as if they had been living on a desert island in an information vacuum, instead of surrounded by the thousands of books being published and the millions of reviews and tweets and posts being published about them. Their problem was not with any shortage of books though. It was with the type of books.

“Something without the end of the world in it,” pleaded the mother. And “ANYTHING that isn’t a really, really depressing future dystopia,” begged the daughter.

I was delighted to oblige since there’s little I like better than recommending books. But their plea, especially from a bright and lovely fourteen-year-old with all her life ahead of her, made me wonder what the current vogue for YA ‘dyslit’ is doing for its intended readers. 

When I was little older than her, 1984 made an unforgettable impact on me, as did the post-apocalypse novel Riddley Walker. These books made me think about what humans do to the world and to each other. They taught me about society, politics and the environment from a perspective I could relate to. 1984 depressed the hell out of me; Riddley Walker scared and inspired me; each of them offered a convincingly bleak and strange but recognisable version of the future.

But each was only one version. I spent a good part of my teenage years convinced we were all going to die in a nuclear holocaust. Yet looking back now, those years seem quite carefree. I didn’t have global warming hanging over me. I didn’t have economic meltdown and debt crisis and pandemics and increasing poverty and inequality looming from every side. Floods, refugees, disasters, gladiator games or zombie apocalypses didn’t feature in too many of the books I was reading; dystopia was not a recognised and highly fashionable YA genre.

The signs for the future are bad, if you believe the news and half the current novels and movies. I don’t envy today’s teenagers, growing up with it all. It’s a huge responsibility we have put on their shoulders and I sympathise with a girl who’s tired of reading stories about how bad things are going to get. 

That’s not to say that there are not some wonderful, important, thought-provoking examples of dyslit being published now. The best offer not only ideas how to survive, but also ways to change things.

The future, after all, is what we make it. What happened to dystopia’s maligned and unfashionable other side, utopia?


Monday 26 August 2013

How to be Creative - Andrew Strong

I’m not sure whether creativity is as complex as writers of books on creativity would like us to think, and books on creativity are not in short supply, which suggests that the writers of these books are not that creative, for if they were they’d write something on a subject other than creativity, something no one else has thought to tackle, for example, How to Speak Lobster or Dummies for Beginners.

From 1964 and Arthur Koestler’s monumental The Act of Creation to 2012 and Jonah Lehrer’s Imagine – How Creativity Works (later withdrawn as Lehrer was forced to admit he’d been a bit creative in the quotes he’d attributed to Bob Dylan) -  I have read a lot of these books and I can tell you - they don’t help.

Because what they don’t often say is this: creativity is just a sunny word for work.  Long ago, at art school, it was impressed upon me that artists have to understand how their chosen materials behave. Whether your materials are paint, stone or film, get inside the form, practise, work. You must understand your medium, and for writers, these are words, sentences, paragraphs and so on.

I kept journals for twenty years.  Five hundred words a day.  Whatever the weather, whatever I was doing, I wrote.  If I had nothing to say, I made things up.  If there was so much going on that I had no time to write, I would still write.  And then one day I looked at all the words that I’d written and thought, if I’d written novels, instead of journals, I might have something proper to show for all this writing.  So I stopped writing my journal and started writing a book.

Writing a book is hard, isn’t it?  It’s not easy starting, and it’s even harder to keep going. To write well there is no doubt you need to harness your creativity.  I noticed from the early chapters of my first book that I often harnessed my creativity to develop ways of fooling myself I was working when I actually wasn’t, and the three most brilliant diversions I came up with were notebooks, research and coffee.

The lure of the pristine notebook is very powerful: it’s so exciting shopping for one, you feel like you’re working when you’re not, of course, and you can even stop when out shopping for a notebook and have lunch. And once you’ve found the notebook, you can start thinking about a new pen.

Similarly, research. For me research is a way of reading interesting snippets on the internet without actually writing.  I can spend an hour just looking for a minor character’s name. I set my most recent book in a real city I’ve never visited. This was a cunning excuse to spend weeks on Google Street Search, going for imaginary cycle rides. 

But preparing coffee is the quintessential distraction. I have an elaborate coffee making ritual that lasts around twenty minutes.  I love those twenty minutes.  I can think about my writing, pretend I’m very close to actually writing, but be staring out of the window at a tree, or a bird.  If there were a job that involved staring at trees and birds, I would love it.  Although I’m sure that after a few months I’d be looking at ways of not actually staring at trees and birds but something related to it, like shopping for a notebook so I could jot down which trees and birds I intended to stare at for the next week or so.

You see, this is the problem with being creative. You end up creating so many forms of distraction that your whole day is spent making coffee, jotting in notebooks and conducting research. And just to make matters worse, you can add to this list of distractions reading books on how to be creative. And as I said, I’ve read lots of them.

There are wonderful things some of those books have taught me, and very few of them have failed to be interesting. Guy Claxton’s Hair Brain, Turtle Mind is good on the importance of allowing the mind to wander; Tor Norretranders’ The User Illusion – although more about consciousness than creativity, does say some astonishing things about how limiting conscious thinking can be.  I’d also recommend Iain McGilchrist’s The Master and His Emissary – a huge work exploring how western cultures have become too conscious, too ‘left brained’, too restricted. 

These books, and many others, are compulsive, and all emphasise that creativity occurs unconsciously, and each, in its own way, suggests how we can set up the right conditions for allowing the unconscious mind to play with ideas and come up with something. But for all their insight, these books don’t really help, they just tend to confirm what I’ve suspected all along, which is this: I need to get on with it.

So if you came to this blog as a distraction from writing, stop reading now and get back to work. However, if you came because you hoped for a tip or advice, I’m not going to disappoint.  Here it is: if you're a writer and you want to be creative, go and write, go and write anything at all, even if it’s what you’d rather be doing instead of sitting down and writing. Just write and write and write, and eventually, if you’re lucky, something magical will happen and you’ll suddenly realise that you have something, and you won’t know how it happened.

I just hope it doesn’t turn out to be a book on creativity.

Sunday 25 August 2013

Ten Things I Wish I'd Known by Tamsyn Murray

It's been three years since my first book was published and I like to think I've learned a lot in that time. Things like how royalties work (erm...) and what publishers want (erm...) and the secret of how to make writing pay (erm...). What I really need is a DeLorean with a working flux capacitor and a Sports Almanac, then I wouldn't need to fret about any of those things. But while I wait for Michael J Fox to turn up, here are ten things I wish I'd known before I was published:

  1. Writing your first book is easy compared to writing your second - you will never be so free again. Enjoy that freedom while you can.
  2. Writing will not make you rich. Don't give up the day job - it keeps you in Haribo.
  3. You will never think you are good enough.
  4. There will always be someone more successful than you. Be reassured that they will never think they are good enough.
  5. Don't be afraid of other authors - they are mostly lovely. Except that one person - you know who I mean...
  6. Do not read reviews.
  7. Don't give your work away for free. It doesn't work.
  8. Do your edits sooner rather than later. Don't leave them until the last minute.
  9. Social media is work - allow time for it. Read, make friends and if you follow any links, NEVER read the comments under the articles.
  10. Once your book is published, it is no longer yours. Let it go. And if you work out how to do this, let me know.
So what do you wish you'd known before you were published?


Saturday 24 August 2013

Never Say Never - The Story of a Sequel: by Anne Cassidy

This time ten years ago I was probably reading through the proofs of my book LOOKING FOR JJ, which was to be published in the following January (2004). This was my seventeenth novel and truthfully speaking I hadn’t made much of a splash before then. LOOKING FOR JJ was to change that. It found a wide audience and won prizes and sold lots and was made into a play. I list these things lightly but it was the most fantastic experience. To have one’s work taken seriously and yet to find it had a mainstream appeal. Things couldn’t have been better. The result of this meant that I was able to write the kind of books I liked, crime fiction for teenagers.

Many people at the time asked me if I would write a sequel and I said an uncompromising NO. It was a book that people liked, I thought, why spoil it by doing a follow up that people would probably say wasn’t as good as the first one? Why do that?

Years passed and still, whenever I went to schools or met people at events, their first comment or question was about LOOKING FOR JJ. It was wonderful for a book to be still read and enjoyed even though it had been published so long ago.

Some years ago I began writing a four book series called THE MURDER NOTEBOOKS. This was a long project, a real joy for a writer. A crime story that unfolds slowly (too slowly for some) over four books. A series that raises the question, in a number of ways, 'Can murder ever be justified?' After I’d finished this I felt pretty wrung out and looked for a comfortable place to rest for a while.

I began to think again about LOOKING FOR JJ. I’d just read The Chocolate War by Robert Cormier and the sequel, written TEN years later, Beyond the Chocolate War. I’d been blown away by these books (how was it that I had never read them?). I also noted that Robert Cormier had allowed a ten year break between the two books. Ten years is enough time to stand back from the thrill, the feeling of invincibility that came about with the success of the first book. Ten years is enough time to feel humble again, uncertain. Can I do this? Can I take this character and write about her again?

Other things happened. A high profile case of a child who had killed another child had broken down and the offender had been returned to prison. It made me start thinking about Kate Rickman, the new name that Jennifer Jones had taken at the end of LOOKING FOR JJ. She was at Exeter University. Would her life be smooth? Or would she be destined to fail whatever she did? The new book is called FINDING JENNIFER JONES and is published next February by HOTKEY.


And many thanks to SCHOLASTIC, the original publishers, for giving me a lovely new cover to celebrate ten years since original publication.

Friday 23 August 2013

Researching the Market - Lynne Garner


I'll admit when I first starting to write picture books I didn't approach it as I did when writing my non-fiction books. That is to say I didn't see my stories as a product that had to fit in a competitive market. However when I finally experienced that light bulb moment I quickly placed my first picture book, A Book For Bramble.


What changed?

I started to research the market. I visited the local library and spent hours looking at picture books. As I read I took notes. I then visited the local bookstore and repeated the exercise (slightly more discreetly) to discover if there were differences between what was being published and what had been published (the books in the library). Armed with these notes I returned home and tried to discover if I could see patterns in subject matter, in the way subjects were covered, in the way sentences were constructed.

I discovered:
  • Humour appears to play an important part in many books
  • Tools such as repetition are used to help move the story along
  • The magic number three appears in many books for example in The Gruffalo you'll discover 'three' hidden all over the place


Today I still continue to research the market and read picture books as often as I can. The receptionists at my dentist, doctor, optician and vets are used to seeing me rummage in the stock of picture books they provide to keep kids entertained. The assistants in the library and bookstore now take no notice as I read their picture books. Family and friends watch in amusement as I encourage their children to show me the latest addition to their bookshelf. Without this research I'd not be able to keep up-to-date with a changing market. 

So if a new writer (of any genre) wants to become published my advice is research, research, research.

Lynne Garner

P.S.

I have three new distance learning courses commencing in September via Women On Writing: