Wednesday 27 March 2024

Where to Start, by Claire Fayers

When you're starting a new book, where do you start?

I ask because I recorded a podcast interview with a young reader on Saturday. We were discussing my latest book, Tapper Watson and the Quest for the Nemo Machine, and nine-year-old Jan said he found the book slow at the start but the story picked up when Tapper's space submarine arrived at Earth. This really made me think, because in my many and varied drafts I'd spend a long time bouncing the first chapter from Earth to outer space and back again. In the end, I decide if I was going have a space river filled with memories, I should lead with that. 

According to Will Storr in The Science of Storytelling, you should start at the moment of change. The Hero's Journey template starts with the hero's everyday life before the call to adventure happens. One of my recent favourites, Bonnie Garmus's Lessons in Chemistry jumps in near the end and tells much of the story in flashback.

Thinking about this has made me look again at some classic stories to see where they begin.

Pride and Prejudice - a rich bachelor arrives in a small town, sending the mothers of eligible girls into a frenzy.

The Iliad - The rage of Achilles throws the siege of Troy into turmoil.

The Lord of the Rings - Bilbo Baggins announces his biggest and grandest birthday party ever.

My most recent favourite fantasy ever, Lud-in-the-Mist, begins with a leisurely description of the Free State of Dorimare, close to the Debatable Hills, the border of fairyland. Although there has been no intercourse between Dorimare and fairyland for two hundred years, the author tells us, which subtly suggests intercourse is about to happen and the people of Dorimare won't like it.

The opening of a book has to do so many things: introduce the world and the characters, tell the reader what kind of story this will be, hint at conflict to come. And, of course, it's got to hook the interest of the reader, and there's no more critical reader than a child. 

If you're writing fantasy or sci-fi where everything is different, how do you signal that the change at the start of a story is actually something new for the characters and not just business as usual?

 I'd be interested in your thoughts.

 

 Claire Fayers



 


Friday 22 March 2024

There's a Tiger on the Train, written by Mariesa Dulak, illustrated by Rebecca Cobb, reviewed by Pippa Goodhart

 


My three year old grandson absolutely loves this book, and so do I. It has rhythm and rhyme, naughtiness, peril, fun, and a solidly happy ending, all served up with a lovely rhyming text and beautiful pictures. 

'You'll never guess what happened 

On our trip down to the sea ...

A tiger in a top hat

Came and sat right next to me!

He growled a gruff, 'Good morning',

Took a comic from his hat,

Then disappeared behind it.

'Hey Dad! Did you see THAT?'

But Dad is intent on his phone. He doesn't notice the tiger. Nor does he notice the growing chaos of other animal passengers getting into the train.


Not until the Tiger ...


...  and eats the phone! Then, ...



And at last our narrator child has Dad's full attention ...




A book that pleases on so many fronts. Highly recommended. 



Thursday 21 March 2024

HMRC and writers - if something is wrong, query it.

 This is just a very quick post, but I thought I'd share in case any other self employed writer gets in a similar situation.

As writers, our income can be very sporadic. I know I should have a special savings account put aside for tax as I go along, and I want to do this from now on, but life gets in the way, cars need to be fixed etc, and so over the years I have often tended to rely on tax top-ups from eg PLR payments or my next scheduled advance. 

Two days ago I received a letter from HMRC, and hopefully thought it might be a rebate. I was so shocked to find that it was the opposite. A series of late payment levies had been suddenly put on my account going back to 2020, and I was expected to pay £523 in 48 hours, as in today.

My initial thought was to ignore this as a scam, because I  pay a monthly direct debit, pre-agreed with HMRC, so I knew I had not been late for any payment. However, this was about years ago back in 2020, they had all my details, the correct UTR number, and I had only last weekend read a v disturbing report about HMRC sending such threatening letters to others. (It's worth reading and I will put at the end) 


So I went on the website and there saw these charges HAD been added. I knew it was very recently, because when I knew my PLR payment would be late I had specifically rung up HMRC before Christmas to organise direct debit payments from January, as I knew I could not pay the whole amount upfront. I had discussed what I owed with the advisor, and no mention of penalties from 2020 had been made.


I did what HMRC advised and asked the online help. The AI was useless, just telling me that I had to pay, so I typed in that I needed an advisor. After 16 minutes I got an online advisor, who told me to appeal in writing and send it registered post.  This was one added stress, as we don't have a full time post office any more in our village, I don't drive,  and time was running out. I felt trapped. 


I decided to ring, as that is how I normally sort out tax issues. Some people, once I had told them it WASN'T a scam,  advised me to pay the money and try to claim it back, but I didn't have that much in my account, so I would have to be overdrawn, and I just didn't trust it would be sorted quickly.


I lit a candle and prayed, and waited for over an hour in the queue, and then suddenly was told that they did not have enough advisors and was cut off and to try again.  HOWEVER an alternative number had been given in the periodic answerphone announcements encouraging me to go online for help, and I had jotted it down, so I rang that, and after only ten minutes I got through to an amazing man, who went back though my accounts, saw I had never defaulted, read all the direct debit agreements, and cancelled all the penalties.  He wasn't sure how the mistake had been made, but he thought that  the system had seen I wasn't paying the full amount upfront and assumed that meant I was always late, and so penalised me again and again,  ignoring that I had  always put  agreed arrangements in place when I didn't have money to pay.


I feel so relieved and grateful today and I wanted to share this in case anyone else is put in this position. If you have a problem with HMRC, always phone them, even if you have to wait for over 40 minutes, or get cut off & have to try again - but if you do get through to an advisor, I have always found them to be so helpful and on top of things. The problem is that there is not enough of them, and something seems to be wrong with the system if it can't cope with pre-organised direct debit arrangements, and sends such threatening letters.  Luckily it wasn't for the amounts described in this article, but it was fully stressful enough.


https://www.newstatesman.com/the-weekend-report/2024/03/mr-tinker-versus-the-taxman-hmrc-loan-charge-scandal



Wednesday 20 March 2024

From Back When by Joan Lennon

One of the delights of grandparenting a toddler is rediscovering the books you read to your children when they were tiny and even that your parents read to you. The raggedy ones. The old-fashioned ones. The ones where the author wasn't quite so bothered with word count, and the illustrator had a style that wouldn't fly today. Here's a brief tribute (in no particular order) to just a few of them - lovely to see you again, old friends!

A Little Old Man 
written by Natalie Norton and illustrated by Will Huntington (1959)

Angus and the Ducks 
written and illustrated by Marjorie Flack (1930) 
(and all the other Angus stories)

Hairy Maclary from Donaldson's Dairy
written and illustrated by Lynley Dodd (1983) 
(and all the other Hairy Maclary and friends' stories)

London Bridge is Falling Down 
illustrated by Peter Spier (1967)

Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel 
written and illustrated by Virginia Lee Burton (1939)

What are some of your old friends for small people?


Joan Lennon website

Joan Lennon Instagram

Monday 18 March 2024

Rising like the phoenix

 Recovery from surgery takes time, and I've used this as excuse to spend much of this last month simply researching pieces for my patreon account, Writing the Magic, rather than writing any new fiction. I feel a bit like I've been given a second chance at life, and to celebrate, this is a post all about the magical phoenix, one of my favourite mythical creatures.


According to legend, the phoenix comes from Arabia, where it lives alone in a sacred wood, surviving on nothing but pure air. There is only ever one phoenix alive in the world at any one time, though their lifespan is very long. The earliest mention of the bird is attributed to the Greek poet Hesiod, writing in the 8th century BC. In this extract, the centaur Chiron is instructing the young Achilles:

A chattering crow lives now nine generations of aged men,
but a stag's life is four time a crow's,
and a raven's life makes three stags old,
while the phoenix outlives nine ravens...

Depending on how old you reckon an 'aged man' is, this makes the phoenix's life span very long indeed (my maths isn't good enough to work it out) - though a later 5th century BC account (from Greek historian Herodotus) makes it a mere 500 years:

[The Egyptians] have also another sacred bird called the phoenix which I myself have never seen, except in pictures. Indeed it is a great rarity, even in Egypt, only coming there (according to the accounts of the people of Heliopolis) once in five hundred years, when the old phoenix dies. 


As big as an eagle, and far more graceful, the phoenix is reputed to have glittering purple feathers (the word 'phoenix' translates from ancient Greek as 'purple') with a golden band around its neck. Other writers have variously described it as having red, blue and gold feathers. This is Herodotus's description:

Its size and appearance, if it is like the pictures, are as follows: The plumage is partly red, partly golden, while the general make and size are almost exactly that of the eagle. 

In alchemy, the phoenix corresponds to the colour red, symbolising the regeneration of universal life, and the successful completion of a process. Whatever its true colour, phoenix feathers are said to have the magical property of healing any wound they touch. 

When the phoenix reaches the end of its life, it collects myrrh, laudanum, nard, cassia and cinnamon in its wings, and flies to Phoenicia. Once there, the bird selects the tallest palm tree (interestingly, an alternative translation of 'phoenix' is 'palm tree') and builds a nest from the ingredients it's collected. Settling itself into the nest, the phoenix sings its final, hauntingly beautiful song, until the rising sun sets the nest alight and burns the bird to ashes.


However, as we know, this can never be the end of the phoenix, which is an immortal bird. A tiny grub creeps from the ashes, and grows into a young phoenix. The reborn phoenix then takes the ashes of its previous incarnation and pushes them into a ball of myrrh. Carrying the ball in its beak, it flies to Heliopolis in Egypt, the city of the sun, where it places it on an altar. Having completed this task, the fledgling flies back the sacred wood for the cycle to begin again.

Unlike the phoenix, I won't get to enjoy a new 500 year lifespan - but it's probably time to step out of the ashes and start writing that next book...


Lu Hersey

Patreon: Writing the Magic

Twitter/X: @LuWrites

Threads: @luwrites


Friday 15 March 2024

Writing process health warning: Here Be Metaphors – by Rowena House






Metaphors. They’re great, right? Our first port of call when grappling with complexity.

Soz, but seriously...

How can we describe something as multifaceted as our writing processes without resorting to metaphor? My favourite: writing techniques are tools in a toolbox (Stephen King) which we select at need; as we develop as writers, we build up our available toolkit.

Brilliant. However...

This past month I’ve been looking back at my own process/es and found King’s confident, positive toolbox metaphor more of a comfort blanket than a guiding light [soz, again] since the idea we can confidently grasp the right tool at the right moment demands a) total recall and b) an extraordinary level of objectivity about our own creative practice.

For example, the lens that focussed my debut novel more than any other was defining a binary question to create a spine for the story and keep it on track. (No more apologies, okay, I’m just gonna let the mixing rip.) For The Good Road, that question was: ‘Will Angelique save the family farm for her brother, yes/no?’ At the end of every scene, ‘saving the farm’ was more or less likely. The yes/no question = a perfect guiding light, maintaining coherence and linearity throughout 80K words.

[Apologies to whichever writing guru came up with this binary question storytelling technique. Your name is lost in time to me, but the idea is very much appreciated.]

With the seventeenth-century witch trial work-in-progress, however, I wasted months trying to define such a question and years worrying that I couldn’t – did I have an actual story or nothing more than a dreaded situation? The horror! – then, this week, HUZZAH, a get out of gaol card was delivered by George Saunders straight into my inbox.

As it’s free advice from his public ‘Office Hours’ emails, I’ll quote it freely, too. FYI, I think it will be well worth subscribing to his full Substack and plan to do so when cash is less strapped. [How is cash strapped?] Link below.

Anyway, here he is. How to get out of the self-imposed prison of one's own writing process:

‘Sometimes my ideas about my writing don’t work for me either and have to be scrapped or re-understood. And I really mean that. No matter how confidently I talk about some writing-related concept, they’re all just metaphors.

‘Likewise, when someone offers up a writing metaphor, even if it’s a good one, and rings a bell for us – it’s not the thing itself. It’s not the state one is actually in, when revising well... Reality is reality and concepts are concepts: inadequate word-wrappings, generated out of need, always insufficient.’

If the current method isn’t working, move on, he says. Writing techniques must serve the work; if you’re stuck, if the work isn’t working, then maybe you’ve become a slave to your own – or someone else’s – technique.

‘Part of our job as artists is to always be asking: “Is the metaphor (method) I’m currently using still actually helping me?”

‘How do we know?

‘Well, I try to ask myself, now and then (openly, honestly): “Am I making progress? (Is the work, roughly speaking, longer and better than it was three months ago? Or, even: is it, though shorter than it was three months ago, is it better?)”

What fabulous, practical advice. Thank you, Mr Saunders. 

As I’m pushed for time [?] again, I’ll stop now, but here’s the link to subscribe to George Saunders’ Story Club. It’s £40 pa or £5 a month for full access, with a free option for his regular public posts.

https://georgesaunders.substack.com/subscribe?utm_source=email&utm_campaign=email-subscribe&r=j482m&next=https%3A%2F%2Fgeorgesaunders.substack.com%2Fp%2Foffice-hours-a9c&utm_medium=email



@HouseRowena X/Twitter

Rowena House Author on FB

Lots about The Goose Road on rowenahouse.wordpress.com





Thursday 14 March 2024

Hope in a Garden by Lynne Benton

 In the spring we start to look for signs of new growth, better weather, new hope.  And where better to look than in a garden?  At the moment in England it’s a treat to see snowdrops, crocuses and daffodils pushing their way into the light, giving us hope that somehow things in this increasingly difficult world might improve.


And in each of the three books I want to mention today it is a garden which signifies hope for the child who finds it.

In the first book, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, written in 1865 By Lewis Carroll, Alice has fallen down a rabbit-hole into a strange and rather scary world.  It’s only when she opens a tiny door and sees through it a wonderful garden that she wants more than anything to go through into it.  Unfortunately at that moment she is way too big to go through the door, but she spends the rest of the book trying to make herself the right size to get into the garden.  In her mind it signifies somewhere safe that she can understand.


In the next book, The Secret Garden, written in 1911 by Frances Hodgson Burnett, newly-orphaned Mary Lennox is sent away from her home in the sunshine of India to stay in a big house in Yorkshire with a strange uncle and his formidable housekeeper.  She resents this and is angry and rude, until she discovers a peaceful hidden garden.  It's only then that she begins to realise there could be some hope of a better life here after all.  And when she meets Dickon and her bedridden cousin Colin things definitely start to improve for her, all thanks to the secret garden.


The third book, Tom’s Midnight Garden, written in 1958 by Philippa Pearce, is another story of a child sent away from all that is familiar to a strange place.  Tom resents being sent to stay with an aunt and uncle while his brother has measles, especially when he discovers that his aunt and uncle live in a small flat with no garden, but a tiny back yard where there is nothing to play with and nothing to do.  Then one night, when he hears the grandfather clock in the hall strike thirteen, Tom opens the back door and discovers that the ugly yard has turned into a wonderful garden, and better still there is a girl there to play with.  Her name, she says, is Hatty.  Next morning the garden has disappeared, but the following night when the clock strikes thirteen again, the lovely garden is back, and Hatty is there again, only a little older this time.  And so his stay continues, giving Tom hope that all will be well, for Hatty as well as for himself.


Although there is nearly a hundred years between the first and last of these three books, they all show the lasting fascination a garden can hold for a child, especially one in need of a little hope.

Website: lynnebenton.com