Happy 5th book birthday to The Goose Road - Rowena House

Since September last year, I've been dodging and diving to keep a creative space open and safe from intrusion, as so many of us do and usually manage against all the odds. 

This month, though, KER-BLAM! 

Just when I thought I'd ducked and dived enough, something I ought to have anticipated snuck out and did for the creative writing PhD, the work-in-progress, and the headspace for this month's ABBA post.

Gutting, but sometimes you just gotta back off.

So here instead of a blog is a link to one of the first interviews I did about The Goose Road, which celebrates its fifth birthday on April 5th, plus the First World War picture of a girl from Etaples, northern France, whose smiling face is (for me) Angelique's, the heroine of the story. 

Good luck to everyone fighting the creative fight. May you outsmart life's nasties and bask in the joy of your stories.

https://authorallsorts.wordpress.com/2018/04/05/book-birthday-the-goose-road-by-rowena-house-interview-by-kerry-drewery/

 

 

 

@HouseRowena on Twitter

Rowena House Author on Facebook

rowenahouse.wordpress.com

Back to basics: suspense - by Rowena House

‘Suspense happens in the stillness of your story, in the gaps between the action sequences, in the moments between the promise of something dreadful and its arrival.’

The value of this advice from thriller writer Steven James came home big time the other day as I yawned my way through a film on Netflix featuring a young Laura Croft overcoming one gigantic calamity after another without the benefit of an actual plot.

IMHO, the scriptwriters should have taken note of Mr James’s view that, ‘Contrary to what you may have heard, the problem of readers being bored isn’t solved by adding action but instead by adding apprehension. Instead of asking, “What needs to happen?” ask, “What can I promise will go wrong?”’

Personally, I’m going to nail ‘What can I promise will go wrong?’ above my writing desk. Here’s the link if you’d like to read his article for the Writers’ Digest in full:

https://www.writersdigest.com/write-better-fiction/6-secrets-to-creating-and-sustaining-suspense

As well as a planning tool, I found it an excellent checklist of techniques to shoehorn suspense into a dragging scene. For example...

 

Applying his advice to ‘include more promises and less action’ injected much-needed adrenalin into a reworked opening for the work-in-progress: a night-time chase through the moonless, torch-less streets of 17^th century York.

Counter-intuitively, editing out most of the action and focussing on the protagonist’s psychological reactions to his sinister pursuer highlighted the drama of the moment far more than choreographing the pursuit itself.

Analysing why the edit worked better than the original plot- and setting-based scene flagged up an unexpected answer to a question that’s occupied me a lot this year. That is, what are the limits of intuition when planning and drafting a novel?

Specifically, at what point does the practical business of putting words in order demand answers to fundamental questions about genre, psychic distance, voice and point-of-view?

In practice, adding suspense imposed a voice on the scene, one that created intimacy with the protagonist and bought the psychic distance closer: we’re inside Tom’s head, experiencing his fear.

Was that planned or pantsing? Neither, really. It was a matter of making a creative decision, then seeing where it led. In this case, technique + intuition = an editable scene. Ye-ha.

Googling ‘suspense’ threw up more generic advice, like ‘building suspense involves withholding information and raising key questions that pique readers’ curiosity.’ https://www.masterclass.com/articles/how-to-create-suspense-in-writing

A lot of blogs refer to Alfred Hitchcock’s model of suspense, a ticking time-bomb under a table, where the audience can see the bomb is about to go off but the characters at the table can’t. Here’s a nice piece using this model to talk about the difference between surprise and suspense: https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/728496-there-is-a-distinct-difference-between-suspense-and-surprise-and

Robert McKee in Story uses different terminology for these techniques. He says suspense builds when “characters and audience move shoulder to shoulder through the telling, sharing the same knowledge’ and neither knows how events will play out. This builds audience empathy with the protagonist; we care about the outcome of the story as well as being curious.

McKee calls the next step up (where the audience knows about a danger before a character) dramatic irony. ‘What in Suspense would be anxiety about the outcome and fear for the protagonist’s well-being, in Dramatic Irony becomes dread for the moment the character discovers what we already know and compassion for someone we see heading for disaster.’

For film-makers, it’s relatively easy to share ‘hidden’ knowledge with an audience through the omniscient eye of the movie camera. For the novelist, this technique begs questions about viewpoint and the number of narrators, since a reader can’t know more than a first person protagonist, or a very close third, unless you allow for prologues or other ‘telling’ devices.

And there we are, back to the basic questions I’m still asking about the WIP.

At the moment, it’s being told in close third person present, with multiple viewpoint characters, so McKee’s dramatic irony is an option. More importantly, however, the opening scene must engage empathy and pique curiosity, and suspense was definitely the missing ingredient in its earlier iterations.

It’s been fun as well as useful to go back to basics this month, rediscovering things I’d forgotten and stumbling across the new. I’d love to hear how and where you use suspense, and if it comes naturally to your storytelling.

In the meantime, happy writing – if lockdown allows.

Website: rowenahouse.com

Twitter: @HouseRowena

 

PS I did a live interview about The Goose Road for Hillingdon Libraries on Armistice Day. If you fancy a gander, I’ve posted a copy of the recording onto my Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/rowenahouseauthor

 

 

Reminiscing - by Rowena House

Between deadlines and family contingency planning for the covid-19 epidemic, my March blog about historical research is still languishing on the drawing board. Soz. Here instead is an article first published on March 18, 2018 on The History Girls’ blogsite just ahead of publication of my WW1 debut novel The Goose Road. It’s one that still means a lot me. Stay safe. 

At the going down of the sun and in the morning, we will remember them

At the start of the centenary of the 1914-18 war I had a notion that we would by now, as a nation, have found some sort of collective closure on the individual suffering of the dead of the Great War, and be ready to move on, to toss their bones in the air as it were, and free the spirits of the fallen to join with our distant ancestors.

As a writer, I agreed with Pat Barker’s comment that World War I had “come to stand in for other wars … it’s come to stand for the pain of all wars.” Our stories might be about that particular conflict, but the larger subject was war itself.

Researching and writing my own First World War novel, The Goose Road, dented that conviction. Wherever I looked, the power of individual suffering endured and the personal stories were endlessly shocking, intimate and enthralling.

I fell under their spell time and again while listening to the first-hand accounts of veterans of the Western Front, their scratchy voices forever locked in a sound archive, or when reading a collection of letters home, or interviews granted to earlier researchers. I’d suddenly be caught unawares by a moment of humanity or courage, or dark gallows’ humour.

Occasionally an old soldier would admit to cruelty. More often they shared memories of the drudgery of the trenches, punctuated by terror. To walk those trenches – or at least one of the few fragments that remain, in Beaumont Hamel, say, zig-zagging through a meadow – is to walk in a haunted place.

Near Verdun, there’s a hill called Mort Homme. The name isn’t connected to the 1914-18 war, although the WW1 artillery battles fought there between the French and the Germans were so fierce that engineers found afterward that meters of the entire hilltop had been blown off. Local farmers still aren’t allowed to plough its soil because of the human remains.

The French memorial to the fallen of Mort Homme: “They did not pass”

When researching closer to home I found that WW1 objects as well as places had the power to take my breath away. Once I was in the Royal Artillery Museum in Woolwich Arsenal, investigating a particular week in October 1916 and a specific section of the Western Front near the occupied French town of Peronne. The archivist bought me out a trolley laden with original material from that time and that place, on top of which was a small moleskin notebook, written in pencil by an English major, the pages still stained with the mud of the Somme. I sat and stared at it for ages, feeling as if the battle itself was within touching distance.

Just before I returned for the second of four research visits to France, my mother died unexpectedly. It was a release: she’d been ill for a long time. Among the heirlooms she left to me was a forget-me-not locket with a photograph of her father, Frederick Clarke, in his WW1 uniform. A stern old lady stares out of the locket’s other frame – my great-grandmother, Selena, I believe.

The memorial, cemetery and ossuary for the Battle of Verdun

Mum also left me a heart-shaped locket, which I think must have belonged to Selena as it contained the pictures of two uniformed soldiers, her sons. One is Frederick, who served in the 10^th (Irish) Division as a medical clerk and stretcher bearer in the Dardanelles in 1916 and later in Salonika. The other is Frederick’s older brother, Thomas Clarke, a private in the 19^th King’s Liverpool Regiment, killed in action on the Somme, on July 30^th, 1916.

Private Thomas Clarke, 19^th King’s Liverpool Regiment

I’d never seen Thomas Clarke’s picture before I inherited this locket. Mum thought he’d died near Ypres, and as far as I know, until my husband tracked down his regiment’s military records, no one in the family knew the details of his last day. The official War Diary and Intelligence Summary of that engagement is chilling:

“29/7/16 battle position in the MALTZ HORN TRENCH.

30/7/16 BATTLE began. Zero hour 4.45 am. The Battalion reached its objective, but suffered heavy losses, and had to evacuate its position owing to no reinforcements. At 12 noon the roll call was 7 officers and 43 men.

Total casualties were: Lieutenant-Colonel G. Rollo wounded.

KILLED. [Six officers named]

WOUNDED. [One officer named.]

WOUNDED AND MISSING. [Three officers named.]

Total casualties in Other Ranks: 425, of which 76 were killed, 172 wounded, 177 missing.”

Barry Cuttell’s account of that morning in 148 Days on the Somme is more detailed: “Morning mist prevented communication by visual signals, and almost all underground cables had been damaged. The only way of relaying messages to divisional headquarters was by runner, which would be a dangerous task once the fog had lifted as the runners had to cross the open ground between Guillemont and Trone’s Wood, over which German machine guns … enjoyed an excellent field of fire.

“While waiting for zero hour, 19/King’s Liverpool were subject to High Explosives and gas (shelling) … The 19/King’s in the centre was also badly hit by enemy fire, only a few men reaching the road. A little further north, a company of the 19/King’s succeeded in getting forward towards the south-eastern entry to Guillemont.” But later that morning, “Under the impression they were cut off, the 19/King’s withdrew from the edge of Guillemont.”

Thus out of 486 soldiers of the 19^th King’s Liverpool Regiment who advanced at dawn on that summer’s morning, north and east from the Maltz Horn Trench towards the German artillery and machine guns, only fifty remained standing seven hours later. The rest were wounded, dead or “missing”, that is, their bodies were either too badly mutilated for individual identification or otherwise unrecoverable from the battlefield.

The rolling fields where Thomas Clarke fell were bronzed with ripening wheat when I saw them, flanked by the once devastated trees of Trone’s Wood. My husband, a former Royal Marine, returned there on July 30^th, 2016, to pay our respects, both on the battlefield and at his graveside in the Bernafay Wood cemetery. Perhaps his locket – the brother to the forget-me-not one I inherited – is buried there with him.

Website: rowenahouse.com

Twitter @HouseRowena

                               

Je ne regrette rein - by Rowena House

A year ago, I wrote a blog for lovely Chelley Toy on the five best bits about being a debut author, and the five worst. It wrapped up two weeks of bouncing around social media, celebrating the arrival of The Goose Road.

I’d planned to update that blog here today: twelve months on, my debut year. You’ve seen something similar a zillion times before. But I hit a brick wall almost at once.

Nothing seemed to have changed to warrant an update. The best bits are still great: it’s magic to hear someone say that Angelique’s journey touched their heart; I love being part of our supportive writing community; I’m still thrilled Walker bought into my creation. Oh, and sales were good. Not Sunday Times’ bestseller good, but I didn’t write a dud. Phew.

Re the bad bits, the money still sucks, but even that has lost its edge. Average author earning below minimum wage? Anyone manning the barricades? No? Right you are. Chin up. Here’s ten reasons to be cheerful, instead:           

Stories floating in whatever extraordinary space imagination resides.

A research trip to Paris in the August heat. Familiar cafes, moonlight over the Places des Vosges. A host of characters spied out of the corner of one’s eye…

Lunch with your agent in Soho, chatting about possibilities.

A publicist getting in touch with good news.

Fancy notebooks.

A folder entitled new ideas.

A writer friend phoning out of the blue.

Darling dog noisily licking his chops, hoping more biscuit will fall off your writing desk. Something good to be read.

Time enough to start over again. Touch wood.

In other news, I’ve just written a job application. It took 48 hours and, frankly, isn’t as good as it ought to be for a professional wordsmith. The job isn’t likely to come off, but would be brilliant if it did.

And that’s it really. My debut year. Life moving on, family matters taking precedence, being an author popped on the shelf, just for now, you understand, next to my book, sitting there all proud and pretty.

If the sun were out on this cold, grey April day, I’d probably be making like Tigger even now. In the meantime, as Edith said, Non, je ne regrette rein.

Twitter: @HouseRowena

Website: rowenahouse.com

Acknowledgements (at last) in this season for gratitude - by Rowena House

Do you love the final approach to midwinter, with its long evenings & slow dawns? I do. I love the low shafts of light at sunset, and the small, magical rituals of the Solstice.

At this time of year our garden is endlessly busy with birds coming to the feeders, although, sadly, night-time in the valley where I live is mostly silent as the Tawney owls seem to have deserted us. Maybe they’ll return in January, when the vixens bark and dog foxes trot over the crown of the hill.

Meanwhile, the decorations are up, the fairy lights welcoming, and the complicated, long-distance arrangements for collecting and visiting relatives more or less in place.  In quiet moments, the melancholia of another year passing nudges at my elbow, but not for long.

This year, especially, I’m looking back with gratitude to work of the NHS, and the amazing care given to two of the people I love most in the world. I owe King’s College Hospital, London, the Royal Surrey, Guilford, and Derriford in Plymouth more than I can say.

Thanks, too, are long overdue to everyone who has been part of my journey to publication this year, but whom I didn’t acknowledge in the pages of The Goose Road, my debut novel.

This omission was partly because the Author’s Note was already extensive as I wanted to explain the origins of the story, particularly scientific discoveries about the causes of the 1918-1919 Spanish Influenza pandemics, which became secondary to the plot over time, but which, nevertheless, remained extremely important to me.

The other reason I didn’t include my Acknowledgements is because the list of people I have to thank is very long indeed.

High-time, then, to make good on that lapse.

Where to begin? Family is traditional, so...

 

Thank you to my husband and son, and also my father, who were always there, cheering me on, or, just as essential, not there, giving me space to write. (Heroically, they ate a great deal pub food over the years so I didn’t have to cook. Or shop. Or care very much about anything beyond the story.) Ta, guys, you’re the best.

Thank you very much, too, to talented writer besties, Eden & Lucy. Your advice, your intelligence, your creativity, your emotional support - not least in allowing me to let off steam - have been absolutely invaluable, as are your continued friendship and help. (Thank goodness for all-inclusive phone packages, otherwise we’d need best-sellers just to cover the costs of our calls.)

 

The friendship and support of our cohort on the Bath Spa MA in writing for young people has also been sustained, sustaining and fabulous. Thank you Jak, Sarah, Chris, Irulan & Philippa, and our tutors: Marie-Louise, Prof David, Dr Julia, Steve and Janine. Also the wider Bath Spa ‘mafia’ whose words of inspiration, examples of tenacity, and shared knowledge about this roller-coaster ride have kept so many of us keeping on for years.

Then there’s SCBWI-BI. What an organisation! I can’t name every Scooby to whom I owe a debt of gratitude (basically, you’re all brilliant) but I have to say a special thank you to Jan, Candy, Lesley, Yona, Elaine, Jenny and Amelia. There are so many more Scoobies I should include. Thank you all.

And there’s more! Like the lovely people at the Golden Egg Academy, Imogen and Ness, Maurice and Beverley, especially, and fellow eggitors and writers. I wish you all the best luck in the world.

And Team BookBound UK. One weekend together forged years of friendship and mutual practical and emotional support. Hugs to everyone.

A special shout out, too, to Liz, who joined fellow BBer & Scoobie, Tracey, & me in planning a debuts’ book tour, and made our Interesting Times in Scotland a fantastic first occasion. I loved our talks and hope to share more adventures around the UK next year.

There are so many other people I want to thank, like everyone who came to my launch party, and Sarah Mussi, Charlie Shepard, the entire Winchester Writers’ Festival crowd from way back, the York conference, too, Emma Darwin, Histeria (Mwa! Sue and Ally) and, and, and...

Before I stop, a final huge thank you to my superb Walker editors, Mara and Frances, and my fantastic agent, Jane Willis of United Agents. You have been stars in this extraordinary year. I am deeply grateful that, through you, Angelique’s story has travelled the world, and (fingers crossed) will continue to find new readers for a long time to come.

At the moment I’ve stepped back from writing Book 2 for reasons to do with the day job, but on my commute (which, to be honest, is to die for, along winding country roads, close to the sea) I think about my characters a lot: their families, their hopes and fears, and how it’s all going to meld together in a meaningful way in the end.

Sometimes I’m sad that I can’t afford to write their stories full-time any more, but there we are. Needs must. Anyway, in my heart I remain a full-time member of our writing community. A paid-up, card-carrying citizen of the Republic of Letters.

So Happy Christmas, everyone, and very best wishes for the New Year.

Wherever you are on your writer’s journey, I hope Santa brings you an agent, a contract, a lovely editor, great reviews, solid sales, and the time and mental space to continue to do what you love.

PS I had a lovely seasonal cat picture as a sign-off but my broadband link couldn't cope. Soz :-(

 

 

 

Back to Basics, thank goodness - Rowena House

The morphing of Book Two continues apace. From its first iteration as a first person present 12+ adventure set in Paris, with a girl protagonist, it’s now told from a male point-of-view, third person past, a psychological romance set in central France. Still wartime. Still evolving. Zero words written since the last ABBA blog. And that’s fab.

Fab because it’s freeing. Creative. Fun. Energizing.

Going to sleep, I stand in my protagonist’s stiff army boots, midpoint across an old stone bridge, watching the girl - still Manon - throwing sticks for her dog.

The bridge leads from a forest where his unit is camped into the shaded streets of a cobbled country town, with water-stressed plane trees and a shallow, slow river skirting around it. In my story, it is forever summertime.

As yet I don’t know the name of this town nor exactly where it is. Maybe, like the village in The Goose Road, the reader won’t ever know its name. But I will. I must.

The stones on the banks of the river are white, the water is green.

 

She’s an outsider. He even more so.

 

It is his problem that intrigues me most, although I am still asking fundamental questions about him, such as how his distress motivates him into action. Is the relationship he is (subconsciously) seeking to escape more important to him than his unfulfilled desire for Manon? Is there something concrete he wants as well? How determined is he to survive the war?

Broadly, I know what forces of antagonism push back against him, but the sequences of events are still fluid and evolving. For example, I had the set up in Act 1 nicely mapped out until a couple of days ago, when a better Inciting Incident popped into being while I was stuck in traffic on the A38. This incident has delicious possibilities for the ‘quest’ at the heart of Act 2 without destroying the essence of the ending in Act 3. So now I’m boiling everything down to the bone again to see what needs fleshing out.

Once that’s done, I’ll try nailing down the opening scene (which for some reason I still have to write first, despite all the mental plotting) and then play with a few later scenes (a night in the wilderness, perhaps) to understand the chemistry between my lovers.

I sort of know the progression of the big reveals as well. Slow. Painful. Shocking reveals. Sooner or later, however, I will need to test whether all these months of dreaming are actually heading towards a workable plot.

For this I have a ready-made American exercise, one I found online years ago. It’s a template for a one-line premise, the sort of thing one needs for an elevator pitch.

To my shame, I failed to take a note of the name of its originator, so if you recognize it, do let me know whose it is. I hate to steal other people’s ideas without giving them credit.

The example they used to illustrate an effective one-sentence premise came from Jaws: “When a man-eating shark menaces a small coastal town dependent on tourism, the cautious, outsider chief of police is forced to team up with a self-obsessed skipper to take on the creature man-to-man.”

Thus the premise line describes the central, character-based conflict that is the ‘spine’ of the plot. The template looks like this:

When Event A provokes the [two adjective] protagonist into action, s/he does B with deliberate intent in order to achieve their goal, until the major force of antagonism within the story forces them to do C, leading to a life-changing choice & final confrontation.

The aim of the exercise is - as far as I remember - to make writers think in terms of a one-sentence pitch from the get-go.

During the development edit of The Goose Road I found it very useful to focus my thinking in this way. The one-line premise became the grit around which I crystalized a binary, yes/no question which I addressed in pretty much every scene.

For The Goose Road this yes/no plot question was: Will Angelique save the farm? Every story event made it more or less likely she would succeed in this (universal) quest to save her home. Character questions then flowed from this plot question, including: What one thing could make Angelique fail in her quest? What single strength will get her through?

Even though I want Book Two to go into far greater depth than my debut in terms of characterization, I think that asking simple, clear questions like these of the plot will (eventually) be a jolly good thing.

 

 

PS I’ll be talking books and writing at Waterstones, Argyle St, Glasgow, at 6.30 on Friday Nov 2nd along with fellow debuts Liz Macwhirter and Tracey Mathais, then we'll be at Edinburgh Blackwell’s on the 3^rd. Just finalising whether Saturday is a 2 pm or 2.30 pm start. Details on our Twitter feeds. Mine’s @HouseRowena.