A chart-maker’s tale – by Rowena House

According to the ABBA blog counter, this article seems to be my seventieth on this site. Almost enough words to turn into a book! A vanity project masquerading as a chronicle of real-world (and, originally, as near as possible real-time) dispatches from the creative writing front. It would take a lot of editing, but maybe one day, Meanwhile, thank you to ABBA for being an enduring writerly space.

Over the years I’ve learned enormous amounts from fellow contributors about the ups and downs of a writing life, about books and writers I’d never heard of, about pitfalls of our trade, and listened in on important debates within the world of publishing.

Thinking about a subject for my own blog each month has become an important part of my writing process, forcing me to stop and reflect, to fathom out and record an element of the fitful evolution of Book Two.

One conclusion I’ve drawn from all of this is the value of metaphor as a means to understand what’s going on and also, often, to express whatever I’m trying to say.

The best all-encompassing metaphor I’ve come across for our craft is Stephen King’s ‘toolbox’ of skills, devices and ways of thinking available to us as writers; how better to conceptualize an otherwise bewildering range of choices?

This month I made a mini breakthrough with my own metaphorical thinking about plot and character development. It is rather tortured and provisional, but time is short so I’m leaving it as the long version for now. It’ll probably get edited down into a sentence. Anyhow, here we go…






Once upon a time a chart-maker decided to join a ship sailing for a little-known shore. The chart-maker had dreamed of this country for a long while, months, in fact, or was it years? Now, though, this country felt knowable and reachable, even though it was a long way away. With ample supplies of coffee and tea, chocolate, wine and cake, plus parchment, pencils and ink, they set sail on a spring tide.

As the ship approached its destination, the land beyond the shoreline looked strange and forbidding, its forests impenetrable, but this was a chart in the making, not a map, so the ship travelled along the coast so the chart-maker could see it well enough to draw. Then other mariners could follow their route from beginning to end.

At first the chart-maker worried about these other mariners – would they understand the intricacies of the chart and its beautiful twistiness? – and lost sleep imagining them hating the chart, until at last he-she decided these other people were far away and hard to imagine and could be forgotten about.

The chart-maker settled down to draw.

It was hard work and frustrating. The ship was sailed by an odd crew and a troubled captain, who took them up and down the shoreline, sometimes coming within sight of land, at others times taking them far out to sea. Nevertheless, haphazardly, in fits and starts, the chart-maker recognised the shapes of peninsulas and make sense of the inlets and islands, the sandbanks and reefs.

The captain, it turned out, steered by a compass, an instrument he displayed to the crew, but in the quiet of the night, without anyone knowing (except for the chart-maker who spied on them all) she-he used a star chart to navigate by. But there were faults in these stars, faults the captain knew nothing about, and when they were discovered, insisted nothing could be done to fix them.

The chart-maker watched the captain making mistakes and growing angry, and the ship going off course and running aground, and everyone shaking their fists at the stars. Back and forth they went, up and down, in and out, until a storm (which they all knew had to come) forced the captain to mend his-her ways.

And, Oh! After the storm, the chart-maker saw the coastline clearly. Clearly enough to draw it in bold lines, clearly enough for others to follow them all the way to a harbour that the chart-maker knew from the start would be there but hadn't known how to find.



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A marathon, not a sprint Sheena Wilkinson

a marathon, not a sprint? 

One of the most common metaphors used about writing novels is to compare them to running – it’s a marathon, not a sprint, people are fond of saying when they consider the long painful process of planning, writing and editing a book of maybe 100,00 words.

It wasn't an image that meant much to me. Running wasn’t on my radar. I couldn’t bear to run a marathon or a sprint; I had never run the length of myself since I left compulsory school PE behind in 1987. If I ever gave a thought to marathon runners, it was only to ponder on what a crazy, punishing thing it was to want to do. Not at all like the delightful and entirely reasonable challenge of writing a book. 

But occasionally on my daily forest walks (always when approaching a slight downhill) I would feel the urge to run – only a few steps – to see if I liked it. I did. (At least until the path started to climb again at which point I would go gratefully back to a walk.) On a writing retreat in Shropshire, where nobody knew me, I decided to try running properly. I downloaded one of the many Couch to 5K apps, and off I went.

the forest where I walk and now run (a little) 

 I thought it would be easy. I walk at least five miles a day, often more, in hilly country, and consider myself fairly fit. The first week demanded only 60-second bursts of running interspersed with walking. Surely this would be, as we say in Northern Ireland, wee buns for someone like me? It wasn’t wee buns. The first couple of weeks were as tough as anything I’ve ever done. I was huffing and puffing and looking ridiculous and feeling foolish. The only consolation was that I was hundreds of miles from home and nobody knew me. I could give it up as a bad job and hardly anyone would know. 

But I didn’t want to give up. I used to be a terrible quitter – that’s why I wasn’t published until I was 41, giving up on project after project because I couldn’t stick it out. And someone I loved was training for the Belfast marathon: where I was struggling to run for two minutes, he was doing twenty miles. I gritted my teeth and kept on. Week 3, Week 4. It was getting harder but something was happening. I certainly wasn’t experiencing the runner’s high I’d heard about, but I wasn’t hating everysingleminute. I still lived for that friendly encouraging voice in my ear telling me I only had sixty seconds left, but now occasionally I was surprised by her instead of frantically checking my phone convinced the app had stopped working because I must have been running for H-O-U-R-Sand I was going to die if I had to do another step. (Self-dramatizing lot, we novelists.) 

nice and flat round the lake...

But I am used to things being difficult. To books that won’t behave. To impossible deadlines. To the grinding disappointment of spending two years writing a book that your agent can’t sell. To days when your words plod and stumble and don’t break free. Maybe running was a bit like writing a book? 

I haven’t quit. Running for twenty-five minutes became easier than running for one. I saw my marathon runner complete the Belfast marathon in a fantastic time, and though I’d never aspire to do anything like that, I no longer think it’s crazy. Or at least no crazier than writing a book. 

If a novel is like a marathon, my first couple of weeks were tortured haikus. Even now, the most I have run without stopping is twenty-five minutes. A short story perhaps, and rather a breathless one. But soon I’ll be running for 5K and I now get why people do it.

As for the marathon runner? Funnily enough, he’s writing a book. He'll probably be very good at it -- marathon running has taught him a thing or two.