Struggling to navigate the halfway point - Tracy Darnton

DISCLAIMER *Any publisher or editor who [has signed/is contemplating] a publishing contract with me should completely ignore all of the following.

I’m at the halfway point.

Wading through treacle.

Self-doubt.

Imposter syndrome.

The “why did I make this book so complex?” stage.

The “why don’t I write really short books with basic plots?” stage.

The “please, will someone else write my book for me?” stage.

Shall I watch ‘The Wife’ film again?

*Spoiler Alert* I want Glenn Close to write all my books and win the Nobel Prize for Literature for me. I could go to Stockholm again and eat cinnamon rolls.

I interrupt my son’s revision to ask him what cinnamon rolls are called in Swedish. Kanelbullar. That's a nice word. Kanelbullar.

Full-on procrastination cleaning out the fridge, hoovering the cutlery drawer, watching ‘The Thick of It’ on iPlayer, dusting my desk and sharpening pencils.

I am so good at procrastinating.

I am good at something! Yay me.

I take it up a gear.

I count the days before book delivery date and do a pie chart to show how many are possible writing days. I calculate the average word count I need to meet my contractual target. I adjust my figures to allow for sickness, family obligations, a holiday… I wonder if I should have used my A’ levels in Maths and Further Maths in a more constructive way.

I like graphs. I'd forgotten how much I like charts and graphs.

Shall I forget writing and become a statistician? Yes, my life will be so much easier. Won’t it?

I complete a memory research request on voice-recognition. I am delighted that my short-term memory is excellent at discerning chiming bells and voices.  But I worry that I performed badly on today’s long-term test on voices I heard ten days ago. Old voice? New voice?

I interrupt my son’s revision to ask him if I have performed any better than a random monkey randomly answering the fifty-fifty old or new voice questions. He explains probability to me and makes me doubt my aforementioned A' levels in Maths and Further Maths.

I cannot become a statistician after all. I have to carry on being an author.

Also, bad news, I am not as proficient as a random monkey tapping at the keyboard.

I write lists of questions in my notebook to make me feel better about plot holes in my novel.

I give the questions a heading: The Unsurmountables. I like the heading. I picture an action movie with Sean Connery and The Rock.

I check if ‘unsurmountable’ is a word and the difference between ‘insurmountable’. The WikiDiff entry makes no sense whatsoever. I should rewrite it.

I worry about my cast list. Too old? How old is Sean Connery?

1930! Sean Connery was born in 1930. He is too old for my action movie. I shall recast.

I laugh at a tweet with a funny picture from author Marie Basting about two and a half hours writing and her word count has gone up by seven words. Her tweet is longer than her WIP output for the day. I have a brief warm glow that there’s a whole community of #amwriting people out there feeling like this. 

Or is just me? That’s the self-doubt again. I check my word count so far for the day. Marie has beaten me.

I interrupt my son’s revision so he can thrash me at table tennis. I feel slightly better.

I buck up, eat a biscuit, and tell myself that it will pass. 

I pick up my notebook and turn to The Unsurmountables. Jodie Comer. I shall cast her. Boom! I am current and hip. I add more insurmountable questions to the list.

I look at The Truth About Lies on the shelf and wonder how on earth I wrote it and ponder the nature of selective memory that has removed the bad times to make sure it is not my only novel.

Logic tells me this stage will pass again and become a distant, buried memory.

I write this blog.

I sneak up on my novel late at night when it’s not expecting me to put in an appearance. I start typing. I put one sentence after another and watch the word count slowly, slowly grow.

Tracy Darnton is the author of The Truth About Lies, shortlisted for The Waterstones Children’s Book Prize 2019. She has an MA in Writing for Young People.

Poetry Please Help Us! by Tracy Darnton

In a rather busy month, I thought I’d share some rambling thoughts on poetry. 

I’m judging a school poetry competition at the moment which has turned out to be a Herculean task due to the sheer brilliance and diversity of the entries, and it’s made me reflect on poetry and how I react to it - and how it helps me to find a moment of calm and insight.

I still know many of these by heart

I’m a life-long learner and every Wednesday morning I spend a couple of hours with like-minded folk looking at art, literature, film and social history. In recent months, we’ve studied and enjoyed the poetry of Byron, Keats, Shelley, Yeats, Hardy, Heaney, Ginsberg, William Carlos Williams, Rossetti, Blake, Carol Ann Duffy and – too many to mention – and thought about poems within their social context.

What will we make of today’s poetry looking back? According to The Guardian the other week, sales of poetry were at their highest ever level last year. The rise of poetry is one of the unintended consequences of all the current uncertainties in life, the upheaval of Brexit, the cheapening of language and the blurring of truth and lies. As language gets abbreviated into text speak, as words are tossed casually around, there’s something powerful in falling back on the English language and revelling in the rhythms. As we grapple to find some sense in what the heck’s going on in the world, well-chosen lines of poetry can fill that gap.

We can share poetry now so easily on social media, in competitions, poetry slams, open mic nights, YouTube, Instagram. Poets who struggled to reach an audience before can now have millions of followers.  

Advertisers have long recognised that poems have the power to move us and give us that elusive feeling. Who’d have thought a poem could be used effectively to sell something as dry as financial services, a savings account or a mortgage? But the Nationwide Building Society campaign didn’t focus on the endless form filling or being put on hold. Instead, they used poets speaking direct to camera, making us feel about family and milestones in our lives. Centreparcs adverts have used the William Henry Davies hundred-year-old Leisure poem (What is this life, if full of care etc...) and recently the modern musings of a Dad, Mum and teenager ‘This is Family’ campaign which I can’t help but find moving, despite myself.

At the Sassie retreat in December, June Crebbin ran a poetry workshop and it was startling how many of us poured deep-held feelings into such short pieces. June herself wrote a poem in another session which struck an emotional chord with many. It was circulated afterwards to those of us – myself included – who cheerily said we’d like it at our funerals! I marvel at how the arrangement of so few lines – ten beautifully crafted ones in June’s case – generates such a reaction.

So, as I deliberate between the poems on remembering and forgetting scattered across my desk, I have June’s poem pinned up too, as a reminder of the power of words to move us, to give us time out and a much-needed breath in a hectic and confusing world.

Tracy Darnton is the author of The Truth About Lies, currently shortlisted for the Waterstones Children’s Book Prize 2019.

You can follow Tracy on Twitter @TracyDarnton

Book Launch Dilemmas by Tracy Darnton

My YA thriller The Truth About Lies is being published shortly. As a newbie novelist, I worked hard at maintaining suspense, hiding clues, keeping up the subplots and exploring the theme of memory. But it turns out I should also have been thinking ahead to the book launch.

My main comment these days on friends’ finished manuscripts is: ‘Yes it’s a masterpiece but what are you going to eat at the launch?’ Because you need to reference it somewhere in your book from the start. And not just any old food. Preferably food which is quirky, tasty, cheap and not at all greasy to avoid any damage to Waterstones’ stock. Wotsits and kebabs are out. Picture book writers have it much easier than YA authors. Their books are full of pineapples and sandwich tea parties and chocolate.

Memory, on the other hand, is a terrifically rich theme to write about but not visual enough as a good party theme. Brains generally do not appear on T-shirts, napkins, paper plates or indeed (aside from the obvious) food. I know because I have perused strange websites worldwide to no avail. I have finally sourced jellied brains, which I first saw in a jar of replacement body parts at the Wellcome Collection and, er, that’s it so far.

Very boring madeleines

I began to realise my error when I made a list of the food in the book. A noxious green punch with floating jelly eyeballs and a bowl of Monster Munch feature at the party at the pub and later a spag bol that makes someone ill. What was I thinking? No one wants to eat any of that, least of all me. The only sophisticated food reference is to a madeleine cake as a nod to a Proustian moment of remembering. But a) who has actually read Proust? and b) madeleine cakes are pale and boring and need to be dunked in a cup of tea (as even Proust knew).

So, as I was in Scotland at the time, I started planning the next book which I’m writing now. Smoked salmon (ready for delicate cocktail blinis), shortbread and Caramel Wafers have made their appearance along with repeated, yet subtle, references to those lovely chocolate marshmallowy tea cakes wrapped in foil, such as ‘My name’s Steve and I’m a Tunnock’s tea cakes addict’ (chapter 7).

Yummy Scottish treats

However, I was disturbed to hear from author Joanna Cannon at a recent Bath Festival event that she was fed Angel Delight by well-meaning booksellers for 18 months in homage to her book The Trouble with Goats and Sheep set in 1976. (For the young, dessert in the seventies was always synthetic weird blancmange and/or tinned peaches). She is having similar issues with Battenburg cake in relation to Three Things About Elsie.  I’m starting to wonder whether even with Tunnock’s tea cakes you can have too much of a good thing.

Sometimes a cover design can offer a solution. The Truth About Lies cover is marvellously striking but of a mosaic swimming pool. So other than chlorinated water, no major food stuff. My son helpfully suggested I give ‘bazuka that verruca’ samples away with the jellied brains. 

Plus, I now have something new to fret about: my editor made it very clear at the cover reveal that she will not be coming in a swimsuit. I confess I now worry whether anyone attending the launch will be disappointed if I’m not decked out in at least a frilly swimming hat, nose clips and goggles. But maybe that’s why they’re coming...

What’s the weirdest food you’ve ever seen at a launch or book event?

Tracy Darnton’s The Truth About Lies will be published by Stripes on 12^th July 2018. 

Follow Tracy on Twitter @TracyDarnton #thetruthaboutlies