When Writers Play - by Rosalie Warren

How often do you play? In your work, I mean? In your writing, if that's what you do?

Most writers start out, I think, by 'playing' at writing - however young or old we may be at the time. In those early days, writing is probably a hobby - perhaps an escape from real life in the form of a dull or demanding job and/or a challenging home life. At the beginning, we are often bursting with enthusiasm and ideas, and what we lack is the space, time and (perhaps) expertise to get them into shape.

If we persevere and have a hefty dose of luck, we may end up earning something for our efforts. In the past, if not so much so today, some writers could make a part-time or even a full-time career out of it. If they were very lucky, they might even become rich, though of course most never did, however good they were.

The danger is that as our writing careers progress, it's so easy to lose that intial sense of fun and play. Writing becomes the thing we have to do - either to please a publisher or even just ourselves. I'm all in favour of self-discipline - the 'sit down at your desk at 9am (if only!) so the muse knows where to find you' and the 'minimum word count per day' frame of mind. Mostly, these things work for me. But it's when I lose that sense of play that trouble looms.

I've experienced this before, way back in another life, when I studied for a PhD and then became a researcher and, eventually, a university lecturer. As a student, my research was mostly fun. OK, I was lucky - I know that PhDs can sometimes be a terrible slog. But I happened upon a topic that fascinated me, had a good supervisor and made encouraging progress from the start. My main problem was combining this with caring for two young children. Not easy, but still, on the whole, satisfying and fun.

The fun continued when I gained an EPSRC research fellowhip for three years to do postdoctoral research. In fact that was eaiser, as it was actually a 2-year fellowship spread out over three years, which suited me fine.

The trouble started after that. My marriage broke up, which didn't help. I spent a year looking for a job in the city where my ex worked so my children could see us both. After months of struggling to get by, doing tutoring and gardening and PhD supervision, often all at the same time (well, in the same morning, anyway), I managed to get a lectureship at a unviersity. Perfect - except that I was now so busy, with several hours' commuting each day, a high teaching load, masses of admin, supervising students, giving pastoral advice, etc etc etc - my research slid into the back seat. It was no longer fun - and all my creativity dried up. It became something I had to do - in order to keep my job - and something I had to do well. In the odd hour or so between other commitments, I had to come up with earth-shaking new projects and theories. Hmmm....

The human brain just doesn't work that way. Or mine doesn't. A move south (the children older now) and a new job helped a bit at first, but the pattern was soon reestablished and the commute even longer. What's more, I now had an invalid mother-in-law waiting for me with all her demands when I got home - and two teenage step-children. Then my mother died and my father (110 miles away) became very ill. Something had to give and it was my health. I had a breakdown and was very lucky to be offered early retirement on a small pension, which put me in a position (just) of being able to fulfil my lifelong dream and spend my time writing.

That was wonderful - and still is. But just recently, six years on, writing has begun to feel like work. Like something other people expect of me, rather than a game I play because it's fun. And yes, there's bound to be some of this. I have obligations to my publisher and I want to help and encorage other writers as much as I can. And anything worthwhile is sometimes sheer hard slog. But I'm very wary of losing that sense of play.

Last week, after a month or so of hard work, I decided to give myself a few days off. Just a couple of days' messing about at home, not trying to do any writing at all. I even gave myself permission to stay in bed all day (bliss!) Catching up on reading, listening to Radio 4, dozing on and off...

Heaven. And then, after an hour or so of this, a little idea popped up, which I hastily scribbled down. After half an hour's scribbling I got out of bed and transferred it to my computer.

I kept writing until 11.30pm and at the end of the day I'd done 6500 words (very unusual for me! Possibly an all-time record. Usually 2K a day is my maximum for new work).

It all goes to show - take the pressure off and the ideas will bubble up. Maybe not always, but often.

Of course, finding time to play is not easy, for many people. But if we can - and if we can give ourselves, even occasionally, whole mornings or whole days just to mess around, with permission not to produce anything - who knows what might happen?

Man is most nearly himself when he achieves the seriousness of a child at play.
— Heraclitus 500 BCE, philosopher

The creation of something new is not accomplished by the intellect but by the play instinct.
—Carl Jung


Happy playing!
Best wishes
Rosalie

My blog http://rosalie-warren.blogspot.co.uk/
My website http://www.rosalie-warren.co.uk/
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Robots here we come! Writing for 7-9 year-old girls and boys - by Rosalie (or Sam) Warren

All signed up and ready to go!

I must say, I'm excited about my new series, recently signed up with Phoenix Yard Books, who published my Coping with Chloe last year. The series is aimed at 7-9s and it's all about robots - well, one robot in particular, who comes from Sydney, Australia and has somehow ended up in the home of Noel, a ten-year-old Coventry boy who was expecting a state-of-the-art wheelchair and instead took delivery of a robot.

The idea is to have an exciting story interspersed with plenty of robot facts - of the kind that will, I hope, appeal to the age group in question and, with luck, will pull in some reluctant boy readers. It's for this reason that I have acquired yet another name - the author of the books will be Sam Warren - the younger, geekier brother, perhaps, of Rosalie!

I'm thrilled about the series, but what's making me most excited at the moment is rediscovering AI (artificial intelligence) and robotics - subjects that have lain dormant in my brain for several years. Way back... too many years to count... I did an MSc at Edinburgh University in Artificial Intelligence and fell in love with the subject, which surprised me by focusing more on the way humans do things like learning, understanding, language processing, vision, etc, than on the machines. Or maybe that was the aspect I paid most attention to. I soon became sidelined into linguistic semantics and ended up doing a PhD on the subject of 'then'. Honestly. I knew more about 'then', for a while, than most other people on earth. I can see you're impressed (or possibly not...). I do still feel a little glow, however, every time I use the word.

But 'then' is a long way from AI and robotics, and even when I took up a lectureship at Birmingham University in the School of Computer Science, most of what I did involved linguistics (by that time I'd moved on to metaphor) and teaching various programming languages, some of which still haunt me in my dreams. (I did learn to match up the brackets, though. Helps enormously with proofreading...)

So doing the research for WIXI Robot has involved me in an exciting few weeks of catching up - reading everything I can about all that's happened in the 'field' since I slid through the gap in the fence. I'm particularly interested in the progress that robots have made in learning to speak with humans - some, but, as the guy on telly used to say, not a lot. Language understanding is, for a myriad fascinating reasons, one of the hardest tasks in AI.

I've also been thinking about some of the ethical questions concerning the possible intelligent robots of the future and this ties in, too, with the sci fi novel for adults I've just finished writing.

It's an odd feeling, when disparate parts of your life suddenly come together. Not unpleasant, necessarily, but somewhat scary. Like introducing your boyfriend to your parents for the first time. The bit of me that did AI has never met the bit of me that writes novels before. Hey Sheila, meet Rosalie. And Sam...

Did you know that Leonardo da Vinci designed robots - a robotic knight and a lion? Or that some robots run on human excrement? Or that tiny robots called nanobots can enter the bloodstream and attack cancer cells? Or... no that's enough for today. But if you have 7-9 year-old children or grandchildren (etc), or if you teach that age-group, I'd love to know what you/they think of the robot series idea. We haven't finalised all the details yet, so your ideas are welcome. And I'll tell you more about WIXI Robot soon.

Best wishes,
Ros/Sam

Rosalie Reviews (blog)
Rosalie Warren website

Pearly Gatekeepers by Rosalie Warren

In one of my recurring nightmares, I'm ascending the golden staircase that leads up to the pearly gates, and there stands St Peter in his robes and spectacles, frowning.

I clutch my bundle of documents, all 12 point Times New Roman double-spaced (or should that be single-spaced, where the synopsis is concerned? Or 1.5? I've consulted a bunch of archbishops on the matter - no one seems to know. Not that it matters to them, they're already in the system...)

I've counted my words, headed my headers and footed my footers. My printer's been well fed with the choicest cartridges and the smoothest, whitest paper money can buy. I've defined my genre and 'placed' myself with respect to other authors, though I haven't mentioned Charles Dickens, George Eliot or JKR. My pages are pristine, my sentences grammatical, my metaphors well-chosen, poignant and surprising (though no longer so surprising, after nine revisions, to me).

I hand over my submission with trepidation.

St Peter casts an eye over Chapters 1-3 of my life. Shakes his head, tuttting solemnly. 'Typo on page 2,' he intones. 'I'm afraid this is completely unacceptable. We can't consider anyone who has a typo on page 2 of their life story. And this is even worse - an exclamation mark on page 4!'

Chapters 1-3 are dropped (passive alert!) carelessly to the ground, which I notice is soggy and slush-like, consisting as it does of a thick layer of decaying manuscripts. St Peter glances at my letter and gives another frown.

'I didn't mention that my children love my work,' I venture (no, sorry, I say. One must never use a different word for 'say'). 'Nor did I tell you anything about my garden, my goldfish or my penchant for golden syrup sandwiches.'

'Adverbs...' intones St P. 'Three of them. To say nothing of four adjectives in the first two paragraphs of your synopsis.'

I bristle. 'There may be the occasional adverb, but only where strictly needed to make my meaning clear.'

'Strictly?' bellows St Peter. 'That's an adverb if I ever heard one. Save it for those dancing programmes on TV. I've sent devoted believers to hell for less.'

'But surely...' I adopt a pleading tone. No, make that a wheedling tone. 'St Peter, please. I've spent a lifetime honing and polishing my life story. Is there nothing I can do to get you to read it - so you can actually judge my life on its merits rather than on my comma use?'

Another bellow. 'Actually?'

I see my case is lost.

But no. All is not lost, even though I just repeated the word 'lost', after only a couple of sentences. I hurry (is it OK to say 'hurry'?) to the library, which fortunately (gulp!) for me is one of the old-fashioned kind that (a) still exists and (b) has books, including a large stock of how-to manuals for budding writers.

And I see where I've been going wrong. Long before I started to type my synopsis or concoct my letter. Long before I even began to compose my draft. The potions! The ointments! The fragrances. The offerings. The slaughter, the sacrifice. The call to prayer, the prostration (just checked and yes, it does have an 'r'...)

I've been doing it all wrong. My day needs to start with 5 hours of prayer to the God of all agents, to the Lord of blog posts, to the ancient guardians of the publishers' domain. I have not been sufficiently 'umble. No postcards of cute kittens or bottles of wine, apparently - but a lifetime of praise, prayer and devotion and then, maybe, at the end of it, good St Peter will let me into Agent Heaven.

Or maybe I'll choose to stay in agent-less hell, where I actually seem to be doing OK.



Best wishes
Rosalie

PS No agents were harmed (I hope) in the writing of this post. I don't have anything against agents anyway - it's the screeds of advice on how to appease them that sometimes get my goat...

Blogging at Rosalie Reviews
Author of Coping with Chloe for age 11+
New series for 7-9s coming soon!