Halloween thoughts - by Rowena House

A post about different approaches to non-fiction as art gave me a fresh perspective about my seventeenth-century witch trial work-in-progress this month, and how unknowable historical facts blended with memoir in a type of speculative writing that is both fiction and something else.

The article was by Sean Glatch, an American educator and writer whom I’ve quoted here before. I’ve put the link at the end because it’s rather long.

In it he says, ‘Speculative nonfiction describes nonfiction that heavily incorporates speculative elements ... It’s kind of like educated guessing. The writer uses what they know to guess at what they don’t, using invention, wondering, and speculation to uncover deeper truths.’

Drop the ‘non’ before ‘fiction’ in this quote and that’s what I’ve been doing for the past six years or so, uncovering what I think is a deeper truth within a witch trial pamphlet: that is, it takes serious critical thinking to reject the orthodoxy of one’s times, so I shouldn’t be too quick to judge the pamphleteer who inspired my protagonist.

This echoes the last post by Mr. Glatch which I quoted here in August about the generated idea within a story: something inspires you to write it, but then you discover something else.

For me, the something else was how good our brains are at forming and holding onto irrational beliefs. When those beliefs are backed by the force of religion, political orthodoxy, and social norms, it takes courage and a lot critical thinking to reject them. 

 

I tested this hypothesis against my own past experience as an economics journalist working within powerful media and governmental organisations. For example: orthodox western economics insists that growth is a social good – the ‘right’ way for people and countries to escape poverty – regardless of the fact that it also exhausts irreplaceable natural resources like forests or fossil fuels, doing irreparable harm to the physical world on which we as a species depend for our survival.

Rational? I think not. Point that out, though, and you’re some kind of eco-freak.

Point out that a ‘witch’s’ cat or dog isn’t a demon conduit for the devil’s power and you’re also out of a job, right?

There is no way of knowing if the real pamphleteer on whom I based my character sincerely believed in witchcraft, nor if the trial judges did, or the jury that heard the cases, or the original pamphlet’s readers, or the poor souls who went to the gallows for impossible crimes.

But as Halloween approaches and witchy things are a bit of fun – or grounds for a feminist retelling of a shameful period in our history, one that tragically echoes in too many parts of the world today – I do hope people will also think about superstition rationally, and false beliefs in general.



Link to 'Making Art from Life' by Sean Glatch

https://writers.com/feature/making-art-from-life?ck_subscriber_id=1593143874&utm_source=convertkit&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Making+Art+from+Life+-+23709393&fbclid=IwY2xjawVEcdxleHRuA2FlbQIxMQBwZG9mAXNydGMGYXBwX2lkEDIyMjAzOTE3ODgyMDA4OTIAAR7KEhVZyeKeDniR0rX7EJ-wE_QBgxeaeCUIKDzX0ppOQ2FzGLGk3EHMZEql_Q_aem_rQ3HiCb3M1lzpbabFWDdKw

Hunting the Generated Subject - by Rowena House

It’s the last lap, the final six weeks of a six-and-a-half year creative writing PhD, which, terrifyingly, has taken up (or, at least, often took over) one-tenth of my lifetime.

I’m line-editing and proof-reading at the moment, ten pages a day of an 80K manuscript, cut down from 87K at its longest. It’s mad to try to do both at the same time, but that’s how it’s turned out and by this stage I’m not questioning my process, just getting on with it.

Hopefully, I’ll have time to read it through again on the iPad in a different format as reformatting always seems to throw up those glaringly obvious typos that have slipped past me, oh, probably hundreds of times.

I’m getting all sorts of deja-vu with the comparable stage of editing The Goose Road, my debut for young readers. Like asking, where did I put that sentence I liked so much, and really worked? And, for goodness sake, what on earth were you on about there?

There’s also been a nice moment of circularity or closure this month. 

Right at the start of this project, when Arvon began online masterclasses during Covid lockdowns, I listened to author Hisham Matar recommending that we stay open creatively during our first drafts (which I’ve taken to mean over multiple drafts) so that we don’t get trapped by our original idea and fail to access our deeper level of intuitive invention.

That became a kind of mantra for this novel: stay open to whatever comes along. 

 

 

Then, on August 7th, an email came in from Writers.com, an American organisation which I often find useful and thank very much for all their inspiration. This email offered up a notion from poetry which struck a chord. The article is by Sean Glatch, whom I’ve quoted here before, and is titled, Writing Titles of Poetry: How to Title a Poem, which has a lovely internal rhythm, which I guess is the point.

Mr. Glatch quoted Richard Hugo’s The Triggering Town, which he called ‘a great grounding in the craft and mindset of poetry writing’. To quote him quoting Mr. Hugo:

To Hugo, all poems have two subjects:

· The Initiating Subject: the topic, idea, or thing that led you into writing a poem.

· The Generated Subject: the subject that the poem discovers or was actually, secretly, about the whole time.

I really like this idea. It makes a whole lot of sense. For the work-in-progress, a seventeenth-century witch trial was the initiating subject, and the importance of writing to critical thinking is the generated subject.

Looking back, I realise I spent a lot of time in the early years trying to think up a generated subject, to plan it, to plot it, to do exactly what Hisham Matar said you shouldn’t do. It’s the theme thing, innit. We’re supposed to know it, but if it’s the storytelling that generates it, how can one plan it?

They say that writing a novel is new each time around. If there is another one in me, I’ll try very hard to remember this lesson and stop hunting for a theme and let it wade out of the story sea in its own good time.

All the best, everyone. Nearly there. 

 

A witch subplot in hindsight – by Rowena House

One theme that seems to have been consistent in my ABBA posts over the past few years is how slow progress has been on Book 2, which are famously tough to write, my seventeenth-century witch trial work-in-progress proving that general point.

But...

As my characters and I approach the last two months of this being a PhD work-in-progress, I can also see how their stories came on in leaps and bounds in the past twelve months, including a scramble to finish Draft 3 of the main plot last month, hence the lack of an ABBA post from me in June. Apologies.

What changed? 

One simple answer is the end of the PhD. Who doesn’t work better with a deadline?

But the story hasn't simply ended; it has changed fundamentally from the first draft, completed in April last year when I thought the main plot was the entire story, just one with a massive hole in the middle where a woman’s story should have been, my main protagonist being a male pamphleteer. 

The feminist subplot told from a woman viewpoint arrived in a rush in June 2025 for reasons I’m analysing for the critical commentary on the novel at the moment. Some of these reasons have to do with grief, which I’m not ready to write about just yet, but as I analyse the process, I’m seeing parallels with The Goose Road, my children's debut, written with the massive benefit of the collective effort of Bath Spa’s MA in writing for young people, for which I still can’t thank everyone involved  enough. Doing this one without such support has definitely made it far harder.

The first big hurdle with The Goose Road that other people couldn't help me with was the enormity of the First World War as a subject and a feeling that I needed permission to write about it. With Book Two, the ‘witches’ story wasn’t mine to tell, either. 

Taking Wilfred Owen’s war poems with me to key WW1 locations in France gave me that sense of permission in 2014; I was honouring the past, not invading it.

Now, I wonder if it was the understanding that I think I've acquired from years of researching, writing, and thinking about witch trials that gave me permission to enter the witch suspects’ dungeon this time around.

 

 

For example, last year, when writing about finishing the first (partial) draft of Book Two, I noted:

‘The biggest creative eye-opener of finishing the full draft was an entirely unexpected release of pent-up creative thoughts which arrived in a rush AFTER I spent a week tweaking the resolution. Years of fiddling with single-sentence commercial pitches fell away, replaced by a solid plot one-liner (15 words). 

'More importantly, a character one-liner arrived out of the blue, too, which, with hindsight, I can see is the heart of the story, the universal wood hidden within the story trees. The specific character journey on which I had been fixated turned out to be a metaphor for something simpler.’

That one-liner: a young man overcomes group-think and regains his humanity. The driving force behind his change of heart: writing about flawed prosecutions forced him to think critically.

Really, that’s my story, too. 

Writing about a specific set of witch trials forced me to think critically about the how of witchcraft belief rather than dismiss it as archaic nonsense. Applying social psychology theories to my pamphleteer explained his belief system, to my satisfaction at least.

The link with the here and now therefore became the slender nature of the gap between seventeenth century mindsets and the irrationalities of our times, which seem to me to be no more than a variation on a theme. A notion which seems to have been the key to unlocking herstory (versus history). 

 

Next month, I’m booked into a remote Dartmoor inn for four nights to re-read her story to see if that creative rush still makes sense. I’m hoping her subplot won’t need more than a line edit/proof read. But then again, maybe I’m forcing myself into that position by not giving myself enough time to do much else with it. Like ruin it! We’ll see. I’ll be back from the moor in time for the next ABBA blog and will let you know how that plan worked out.


Rowena House Author on Facebook

rowena.houseauthor on Instagram 

 

Chips away: the new metaphor – by Rowena House

For years now my favourite writing metaphor has been the sand castle one. Your pour your words into a sandbox called Draft Zero or just Draft if you’re feeling optimistic, and when the box is full of story, you start shaping it into a wondrous castle for however long it takes.

This month, though, I’ve met the marble block metaphor. The idea that a story is a thing waiting to be revealed as the writer chips away at it. My process has never felt like chiselling before. Nothing was found; it’s all been built.

Why the change? Feedback on the development edit AKA Draft Gazillion of the seventeenth-century witch trial work-in-progress which my supervisors read (it’s a creative writing PhD novel) for the first time in April. Amid kind words, they said (in subtext) that Act 2 Part 1 was a pup. 

‘One more run through ought to do it,’ they suggested.

Then I had a good close look at what I’d sent them.

How? After YEARS working on my wordsmithing, how can I have got it so wrong? I coined a new editing acronym for the margin: CUT. Complete and Utter Tosh. [Actually, it was CUS, but this is a family-friendly blog.] So, chisel out, spit on the hands, cut, cut, polish and cut in pursuit of Draft Gazillion + One AKA Development Edit Mark 2.

The sensible editor bit of the brain said I needed a Book Map (copyright The Golden Egg Academy) or similar (copyright Book Bound UK), charting the whole thing.

But you know how some writers hate writing synopses? It’s book mapping for me. However sensible it is, I loathe it. There are at least three versions of a map for this WIP languishing in various folders, to which I dutifully added another this month, then ignored it. 

What I did instead was analyse each CUT chapter to see for myself what ailed it. Result: I think it’s a combination of slow pace, unclear progressions, and hidden rising stakes. Which are all sort of saying the same thing. Tackling them individually seemed simpler, however,

Thus, 1.5K words are gone and I’m only half way through Act 2 Part 1. I also buffed up cliff-hanger chapter endings and changed chapter breaks so they could all end at a cliff-hanger.

It’s also been good to have a run through for micro-pacing, achieved by tightening sentences and making sure, e.g., that they end on the most powerful word.

For progressions, I’m trying a sentence-based system, too, copy-and-pasting key passages, with their respective page numbers, to track my protagonist’s state of mind and make sure it is progressing in a logical way. By shuffling back and forth between them, altering phrases subtly or wholesale as I go, I think I’ve now linked them together and arrived, ta-dah! at the turning point of Act 2 part 1. Which is the chapter I’m chipping away at now.

Raising stakes is proving trickier. For this WIP, I’ve used a hierarchy of needs system adapted from John Truby’s Anatomy of Story which in turn borrowed from Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. (I might have got Truby’s title wrong. Anatomy of Stories? The Story? Sorry, in a rush today.)

Tom, my protagonist, starts in survival mode, protecting his physiological needs: shelter & his livelihood. He then tries to catch a criminal, then faces incrementally-rising moral jeopardy until he finally challenges institutional corruption.

For me, the rising stakes are inherent in this pattern and therefore readable in the subtext. That’s where my instinct says they should stay. If the reader knows from Act 1 that Tom is out on his ear if he messes up the Inciting Incident task that’s been set him, why repeat it in Act 2? And isn’t moral jeopardy by definition a higher stake than keeping your job?

My very clever beta readers didn’t seem to think so. Thus, it’s hammer and chisel to the fore, hoping they’ll be able to see it once I’ve chipped away at more of the dross.

 

 

Rowena House Author on Facebook and Instagram for the WIP

Stuff about my debut, The Goose Road, at rowenahouse.wordpress.com  

Hurrah! A milestone passed - by Rowena House

Hurrah! On April 7th I got to type The End at the end of an 87k-word development edit of my witch trial work-in-progress. That is, a year and a day after I finished the first full draft and (whisper it) six years after starting this project.

Actually, it's cheating to say it’s done as the new subplot still needs developing, but it was a big enough milestone to warrant a series of pub dinners with my other half, culminating (tonight as I type this) in a family dinner in a local restaurant with fantastic views over the south Devon coast.

A huge thank you to my wonderful son and his lovely partner for arranging it.

So, what’s next?

A six-week cooling off period for the manuscript before the subplot development edit and whole manuscript line edit during which I’ll edit down nineteen thousand words of codswallop written last year and nominally entitled a PhD critical commentary on the novel.







Luckily, my faithful Elements of Reasoning, a gift from my dad in the 1980s, is already suggesting a logical structure to this commentary that might – might – help massage the codswallop into something less rambling. And it’s always better to edit than stare at a blank screen. Isn’t it?

Meanwhile, I treated myself to Richard Cohen's journey into writerly minds as an escape from depressing academic histories of witch trials. Happily, Cohen flagged up something I hadn’t realised: both plotlines for the WIP turned into ‘rebirth’ stories in Christopher Booker’s schema of seven basic plots.

I’ll have to re-read his tome – or rather, the relevant chapter/s – after being disappointed to find on first reading (in circa 2021) that I didn’t seem to be writing one of his universal stories. It’s comforting to think my witch suspects unconsciously wandered back into that fold as, tbh, I still find it difficult to be certain I’ve written a story, rather than storified history, albeit with extra bits of herstory.





Then in May, I’m off on an Arvon course at Lumb Bank about getting published in 2026 which I’m hoping will lift the gloom that squats over the whole business of querying and submissions etc. In my dreams, there’s a friendly little independent publisher somewhere that still does hardbacks.

Anyway, sorry this is another short diary entry. It’s laundry time if I’m going to have anything clean to wear tonight. And we’re out of bread and milk. And it turns out to be lunch time. Breakfast? Oh, well. 

Happy writing life, one and all.

I'm still raging over on Twitter @HouseRowena. As Rowena House Author, you'll find me playing with photos on Instagram and diarising the WIP on Facebook

Rethinking The Hag - by Lu Hersey

 When you think of the word 'hag', what image does it conjure in your mind? The wicked, nightmare crone of fairy tales, probably. But in reality, throughout most of history, by my age I'd be classified as a hag. It's a word defined by most dictionaries as 'an ugly, old and unpleasant woman'. Only a reasonably supportive bra and good modern dentistry saves me (and even then, I probably fit the bill). 

During the notorious witch trials, a high proportion of the women strangled and burnt at the stake as witches were simply old, post-menopausal women. Toothless and wrinkly, no longer of any interest to men, unable to easily support themselves financially, and often with only a cat for company. Ostracised by society, they were more likely to voice their opinions freely (the modern version would be giving fewer fucks). Frankly, I fit at least two of those categories. I'd have been strangled and burnt, for sure.

Even today, old women garner very little respect in society. No matter what knowledge or wisdom they've gained from being around for so long, they don't look great, and they're largely ignored. It's still OK to treat them with contempt. I recently read former gynaecologist Adam Kay's autobiography, This is Going to Hurt - in which he devotes at least half a chapter to his intense dislike of doing operations on older women, in detail. No sensitivity reader needed, apparently. Old women, like people with ginger hair, are still apparently fair game for society's derision and snide remarks.

Of course old men don't look great either, but far fewer were burnt as witches simply because they were cantankerous, old and ugly. No one derides them for having age related prostate problems or wrinkly old bollocks. And they can still garner respect for some reason, however nasty they might be. Look at Rupert Murdoch. 

Anyway, to get to the point - isn't it time we change society's attitude to old women? We need to portray a society where old women aren't all blood-thirsty, embittered old hags who want to cook children and render their fat down to make mysterious potions. (Although I wouldn't want to entirely exclude this kind of activity - after all, it is coming up to halloween.) But we need positive portrayals in children's stories, alongside the evil hag. Include old women simply as people who've been around a long time and have seen a great deal - who might even be able to tell you something life changing. A nugget of invaluable information that transforms your future. Whatever. I try to include at least one in every book I write.

And that's the end of my rant for today. Now pass my broomstick, I'm going out.

Lu Hersey

https://www.patreon.com/Writingthemagic

twitter: https://twitter.com/LuWrites

Blue Sky: https://bsky.app/profile/luwrites.bsky.social