Great Starts by Alex English

This week has been a busy one for me and my fellow Bath Spa graduates as it's been the release of Bookshelf, the anthology of extracts of our work produced on the MA Writing for Young People course. It's the culmination of a lot of hard graft and I feel very proud of what we've produced.

A shameless plug for the 2018 MAWYP anthology!

The anthology consists of the first two thousand words of each student's manuscript for children or young adults and, after weeks of hard work with the rest of the team, I've at last got round to reading these twenty-six brilliant little nuggets of writing. It was hugely enjoyable, but it also got me thinking – what does make a great beginning to a children's (or indeed any) novel?

This is what hooks me when I read, and it's what I look at when I'm editing work too:

1. Whose story is it?

It sounds obvious, but I want to know straight away who my protagonist is. Whose side am I on? If I like them, that's even better. And please don't overwhelm me with zillions of characters from the get-go, feed them in gradually so my feeble mind can cope.

2. Where am I?

I don't mean starting with swathes of description, a few simple details are enough, but I need to feel grounded somewhere pretty much straight away. If there's a sense of the wider world then that's great too. Whatever you choose to include, just make it specific – the tick of the grandfather clock in the eastern hall, Grandpa's drawer of mermaids' purses and scallop shells or a screeching wind rattling the orphanage shutters all help to set the scene in a few words.  

3. Is anything actually happening?

Again, this seems obvious, but something needs to be happening in the first chapter. Characters shouldn't just sit and talk, they should talk while they're doing something interesting. Let them have that argument while they're trying to break into the castle, or let them try to hide that secret from their mother while she's cutting their hair. It's a whole lot more fun to write, and more fun to read too. 

4. What's at stake?

A sense of something deeply important being at risk for a character keeps me on the edge of my seat and therefore keeps me reading. This doesn't need to be life and death (of course it could be, depending on the genre), but it needs to mean life and death to the character. 

5. Is there a sense of mystery?

This might be a personal one, and I don't think this is essential for every story, but a sense of foreboding, of something not-quite-right lurking just beneath the surface or questions to be answered draws me in every time! I am an absolute sucker for a dark family secret, a secret map, an ominous portent or the appearance of a mysterious stranger.    

What do you think makes a great first few pages? Have I missed anything off my checklist? And do please read the Bookshelf anthology, I'm hugely proud of my MA classmates and I hope you'll agree that our hard work has paid off.

Alex English is a graduate of Bath Spa University's MA Writing for Young People. Her picture books Yuck said the Yak, Pirates Don't Drive Diggers and Mine Mine Mine said the Porcupine are published by Maverick Arts Publishing and she has more forthcoming from Bloomsbury and Faber & Faber.
www.alexenglish.co.uk

Acknowledgements (at last) in this season for gratitude - by Rowena House

Do you love the final approach to midwinter, with its long evenings & slow dawns? I do. I love the low shafts of light at sunset, and the small, magical rituals of the Solstice.

At this time of year our garden is endlessly busy with birds coming to the feeders, although, sadly, night-time in the valley where I live is mostly silent as the Tawney owls seem to have deserted us. Maybe they’ll return in January, when the vixens bark and dog foxes trot over the crown of the hill.

Meanwhile, the decorations are up, the fairy lights welcoming, and the complicated, long-distance arrangements for collecting and visiting relatives more or less in place.  In quiet moments, the melancholia of another year passing nudges at my elbow, but not for long.

This year, especially, I’m looking back with gratitude to work of the NHS, and the amazing care given to two of the people I love most in the world. I owe King’s College Hospital, London, the Royal Surrey, Guilford, and Derriford in Plymouth more than I can say.

Thanks, too, are long overdue to everyone who has been part of my journey to publication this year, but whom I didn’t acknowledge in the pages of The Goose Road, my debut novel.

This omission was partly because the Author’s Note was already extensive as I wanted to explain the origins of the story, particularly scientific discoveries about the causes of the 1918-1919 Spanish Influenza pandemics, which became secondary to the plot over time, but which, nevertheless, remained extremely important to me.

The other reason I didn’t include my Acknowledgements is because the list of people I have to thank is very long indeed.

High-time, then, to make good on that lapse.

Where to begin? Family is traditional, so...

 

Thank you to my husband and son, and also my father, who were always there, cheering me on, or, just as essential, not there, giving me space to write. (Heroically, they ate a great deal pub food over the years so I didn’t have to cook. Or shop. Or care very much about anything beyond the story.) Ta, guys, you’re the best.

Thank you very much, too, to talented writer besties, Eden & Lucy. Your advice, your intelligence, your creativity, your emotional support - not least in allowing me to let off steam - have been absolutely invaluable, as are your continued friendship and help. (Thank goodness for all-inclusive phone packages, otherwise we’d need best-sellers just to cover the costs of our calls.)

 

The friendship and support of our cohort on the Bath Spa MA in writing for young people has also been sustained, sustaining and fabulous. Thank you Jak, Sarah, Chris, Irulan & Philippa, and our tutors: Marie-Louise, Prof David, Dr Julia, Steve and Janine. Also the wider Bath Spa ‘mafia’ whose words of inspiration, examples of tenacity, and shared knowledge about this roller-coaster ride have kept so many of us keeping on for years.

Then there’s SCBWI-BI. What an organisation! I can’t name every Scooby to whom I owe a debt of gratitude (basically, you’re all brilliant) but I have to say a special thank you to Jan, Candy, Lesley, Yona, Elaine, Jenny and Amelia. There are so many more Scoobies I should include. Thank you all.

And there’s more! Like the lovely people at the Golden Egg Academy, Imogen and Ness, Maurice and Beverley, especially, and fellow eggitors and writers. I wish you all the best luck in the world.

And Team BookBound UK. One weekend together forged years of friendship and mutual practical and emotional support. Hugs to everyone.

A special shout out, too, to Liz, who joined fellow BBer & Scoobie, Tracey, & me in planning a debuts’ book tour, and made our Interesting Times in Scotland a fantastic first occasion. I loved our talks and hope to share more adventures around the UK next year.

There are so many other people I want to thank, like everyone who came to my launch party, and Sarah Mussi, Charlie Shepard, the entire Winchester Writers’ Festival crowd from way back, the York conference, too, Emma Darwin, Histeria (Mwa! Sue and Ally) and, and, and...

Before I stop, a final huge thank you to my superb Walker editors, Mara and Frances, and my fantastic agent, Jane Willis of United Agents. You have been stars in this extraordinary year. I am deeply grateful that, through you, Angelique’s story has travelled the world, and (fingers crossed) will continue to find new readers for a long time to come.

At the moment I’ve stepped back from writing Book 2 for reasons to do with the day job, but on my commute (which, to be honest, is to die for, along winding country roads, close to the sea) I think about my characters a lot: their families, their hopes and fears, and how it’s all going to meld together in a meaningful way in the end.

Sometimes I’m sad that I can’t afford to write their stories full-time any more, but there we are. Needs must. Anyway, in my heart I remain a full-time member of our writing community. A paid-up, card-carrying citizen of the Republic of Letters.

So Happy Christmas, everyone, and very best wishes for the New Year.

Wherever you are on your writer’s journey, I hope Santa brings you an agent, a contract, a lovely editor, great reviews, solid sales, and the time and mental space to continue to do what you love.

PS I had a lovely seasonal cat picture as a sign-off but my broadband link couldn't cope. Soz :-(

 

 

 

Place in historical fiction: some thoughts for Winchester Writers' Festival - by Rowena House

Tomorrow I’m talking about the magic of place in historical fiction at the Winchester Writers’ Festival.

It’s a big day for me as this festival helped me no end to achieve my ambition of becoming a published author, with notes I took from talks by such luminaries as Beverley Birch, Sarah Mussi and Lorna Fergusson still treasured possessions.

It was there I first heard about the Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators and the Bath Spa MA in writing for young people – both of which remain key supports as I move on from my WW1 debut, The Goose Road – while the energy and comradeship of fellow wannabees kept me going when my resolve flagged.

Thus I owe a lot to Winchester, and want to pay that back a little by giving as good a presentation as I can. Where, then, to start?    

Since this is a writers’ conference, I’ll begin with the particular value of getting historical places ‘right’ from the novelist’s point of view.

Place, for me, is the third pillar of story: a solid, knowable anchorage in the storms of imagination. The first two pillars, plot and character, are grounded in place; it is where the story plays out and influences behaviour, thoughts, emotions and events.

Creating credible settings is a core skill for any writer, and also a tool of our trade: a mountain is an obstacle, a secret hideaway the protagonist’s haven from the villain.

For historical fiction, where authenticity is one of the few conventions in an otherwise sprawling genre, place offers additional benefits, too.

First, it is made of the same stuff as now: stone and earth, water and weather. Artefacts come and go, materials too (think of pewter and plastic) but hills and rivers, coasts and even settlements remain.

Second, and perhaps more importantly, human beings have, since time immemorial, shared a common anatomy, including the nervous system.

You and I experience heat and cold in the same way as Odysseus. Climbing over the Alps takes more effort than walking along the shore, just as it did in Hannibal’s time. Hunger gnaws the same way today as it did during ancient famines.

We cannot know the mentality of the past half as well – a fraction, even – as this shared physicality, this visceral, sensory awareness. When we describe a character’s subjective experience of place with apt, original and evocative language, we do so with veracity.

For people who don’t write historical fiction this veracity might seem trivial. But anyone who’s researched the past will know that almost everything about it is contested – from the partial, biased accounts of history’s ‘winners’ to who has the right to retell the stories of marginalised, misunderstood or forgotten ancestors.

Thus any certainties are to be cherished.

 

 

Tomorrow I’ll mostly be talking about realistic historic fiction, rather than fantasy or genres such as historical romance where accuracy about setting isn’t the point.

Yet even at the less literary end of things, place sets the tone. Open your story in a woodcutter’s hut in a Germanic forest and immediately we know we’re in the land of folklore.

Put a beautiful French chatelaine by a mullion window, and a reader will get pretty hacked off if she doesn’t end up in bed with the handsome knight who’s trotting past her castle on his way back from the Crusades.

In my own historical writing I’m persuaded by the argument that place is best seen (and felt, smelt, heard and tasted) through the protagonist.

In my first person narratives, place is therefore subjective, with world-building done through hints and snippets of salient detail, the sort of small things which would be noticed by that kind of person at that point in their lives, and in the particular state of mind the reader finds them.

There are, however, very good reasons for writing about place in other ways, too.

When looking for contemporary models of excellence in omniscient third person narration, I came across this amazing opening for Jeanette Winterson’s The Daylight Gate:

“The North is the dark place.

It is not safe to be buried on the north side of the church and the North Door is the way of the Dead.

The north of England is untamed. It can be subdued but it cannot be tamed. Lancashire is the wild part of the untamed.

The Forest of Pendle used to be a hunting ground, but some say that the hill is the hunter – alive in its black-and-green coat cropped like an animal pelt.

[…]            

Stand on the flat top of Pendle Hill and you can see everything of the county of Lancashire, and some say you can see other things too. This is a haunted place. The living and the dead come together on the hill.

[…]

There is still a tradition, or a superstition, that a girl-child born in Pendle Forest should be twice baptized; once in church and once in a black pool at the foot of the hill. The hill will know her then. She will be its trophy and its sacrifice. She must make her peace with her birth-right, whatever that means.”

Wow. I love it. No one could doubt for an instant from this description of place that a dark, witchy tale is about to unfold.

Compare it to the more traditional (and to me overly prosaic) third person opening to Robert Harris’s Fatherland:

“Thick cloud had pressed down on Berlin all night, and now it was lingering into what passed for the morning. On the city’s western outskirts, plumes of rain drifted across the surface of Lake Havel, like smoke.

Sky and water merged into a sheet of grey, broken only by the dark line of the opposite bank. Nothing stirred there. No lights showed.”

Personally, I think you have to trust that Harris’s story will get better – which it does.

Admittedly, I am a huge fan of Hilary Mantel’s poetic prose in Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies. I used to devour Thomas Hardy, too, and (mostly) remain wedded to literary historical fiction.

But, for me, Winterson demonstrates perfectly that poetry isn’t necessary to evoke an historic place exquisitely – and hook the reader from page one.

 

PS I’d like to thank fellow historical writer for young people, Ally Sherrick, author of Black Powder and The Buried Crown, for putting me in touch with Winchester when she couldn’t make this slot, and to Winchester for having me in her stead. Ta, Ally!

Feminists & debutants: Yay! for the Class of '18 - Rowena House

By this time next month I’ll be a published novelist. What an amazing thing to be able to say! It’s a lifetime’s achievement and a temporary licence to swamp my Twitter feed with stuff about me and my book.

The Goose Road shares a book birthday with Elaine Wickson’s Planet Stan: My Life in Pie-charts. (Who knew pie-charts were comedy gold?) Since I met her at SCBWI-BI’s fantastic debut author boot camp, I’ve drooled over her exuberant website https://www.elainewickson.co.uk/ and laughed out loud at her humour. Planet Stan is going to be fantastic fun.

Ally Sherrick’s The Buried Crown also hits the bookshops on April 5 – a World War II adventure with Anglo-Saxon treasure. What’s not to love? Ally and I met through Histeria, a band of intrepid kids & YA historical novelists raising the profile of our genre to librarians, publishers and anyone who’ll listen. Ally also pointed me in the direction of an opportunity to teach a session on historical fiction at the Winchester Writers’ Festival in June – which I’m doing. Hurrah! It’s my all-time favourite writing conference (soz, Scooby). Ally, I owe you a big bottle of fizz as well as sincerest thanks.

 

April 5 is also publication day for Jess Butterworth’s When the Mountains Roared, another exquisite MG title in the mould of her debut, Running of the Roof of the World. Jess graduated from Bath Spa’s MA in writing for young people the same year as me. Our year – like every other – is an invaluable support network, sometimes called Team MAWYP, at other times the Bath Spa Mafia. Be warned. We’re out there. A lot of us – including two Bath Spa lecturers publishing novels on April 5 – Lucy Christopher, with Storm-wake, and To the Edge of the World by Julia Green, director and guiding light in the creative hothouse that is this MA.

 

This week I’m in London to raise a glass to the success of fellow Scooby boot-camper, Matt Killeen, and meet a lots of writing friends at the same party. Ye-ha! Orphan Monster Spy boasts a stonking premise: Jewish girl spy infiltrates elite Nazi high school for girls. Awe. Sum.

 

Salutations, too, to Walker stable-mate Kelly McCaughrain, author of Flying Tips for Flightless Birds, who deserves a massive readership for both her book, also launched this month, and her honest, wise, charming blog, http://weewideworld.blogspot.co.uk/ Thank you, Kelly. Your words buoyed me no end through a recent patch of the blues.

I could go on. There are so many dedicated, determined, professional authors celebrating debuts this year, like Lucy Van Smit, whose Nordic noir YA thriller, The Hurting, is a lead title for Chicken House at the Bologna Book Fair. Vanessa Harbour’s wonderful horses in Flight. Tracey Mathais, with her UK trade debut, Night of the Party, a dystopian YA political thriller which I think judges the zeitgeist just right. And Liz MacWhirter, whose Black Snow Falling promises themes of feminism, monsters and power seen through the prism of 16^th century magical realism. Talk about tantalizing!

And just behind those of us lucky enough to have got our book deals are excellent writers working with their agents on amazing manuscripts, like MA bestie Eden Enfield and multi-talented creator of #UKTeenChat, Emma Finlayson-Palmer. And tenacious writers who just got their agent. Here’s looking at you, Kathryn Kettle MacDonald. Well done!

The next rung of the ladder is so close, people.

So very best of luck to everyone honing their craft with critique groups, mentors or alone, and still finding time to take part in the super-supportive, informative, kick-up-the-butting, thriving, teeming, healing, online community of writers for young people. You rock. We rock. Being part of this tribe is amazing.

The Goose Road, a First World War coming-0f-age quest set in France, is available now for pre-order now on Amazon, via high street bookshops or through my website: rowenahouse.com