My first literary grant by Sheena Wilkinson

                                               

Last month I was delighted to receive a grant from the Authors' Foundation to help me 'buy time' to work on my memoir. These awards, apart from their value, offer us important validation -- someone, not our mum, believes in the value of our work and is prepared to help us. Not because they will make money from it, but because they consider it to be of value. 

I was writing a letter to my old teachers (they won't read it; I am so old that they are mostly dead) for an RLF podcast series, when I remembered an episode from primary school days. The school was in a poor area; I was one of the few children with books in my house and aspiration in my heart. One June afternoon, as the end of the year beckoned, my teacher -- sadly I don't remember which -- took the time to tear out all the unused paper in the class’s exercise books for me to take home – piles and piles of wonderful fresh paper for me to write my own stories. 'You'll put this to good use, Sheena,' she said.

portrait of the artist as a young girl 

                                   

Free paper! All for me. And it was that lovely posh creamy paper with proper blue margins, a far cry from the flimsy notebooks I bought in Wyse Byse. As I staggered home under the physical weight of the paper and the weight of expectation -- I mustn't waste this! -- I felt, not like a charity case, but like an artist claiming the tools of her trade. 

It was, I realise now, my first writer’s grant.

And I did put it to good use.

Researching for this podcast made me remember my first literary 'grant'

    

 

Writing non-fiction? Have a meeting with your editor and designer. Moira Butterfield

If you are writing a non-fiction book and you have sold the idea, I’d strongly recommend meeting up in person with your editor and designer. If you can’t – and many of us will be too far away to get to London - I’d try to organize a Facetime session.

I went up to London this week (where inevitably the publishers are based). It cost me a wheelbarrow full of gold but it’s worth every penny to do it if possible (I try to make the trip more cost-effective by planning in an exhibition to see on the same day, if I can – In this case the highly recommended Living on Mars at the Design Museum).

The current cost of a train ticket from Bath to London 

I am about to write a non-fiction book in a pressurized timeframe. I wanted to be sure that the team I’m working with are all on the same wavelength as me.

We discussed the content of the book– already planned but not yet in visual form. I went with specific questions for the designer. How did he think we should approach introductory sections? What kind of features should I build in to the text? In this case we agreed we’d add some cutaway illustrations, which means me providing labels. We agreed on some big images and some much smaller ones, to make for a lively magazine-style layout. I’ll need to be keeping this in mind when I write.

I won’t want to be giving the designer far too much text. That’d be difficult to work with, but equally too little text won’t be ideal either. We’ll need to get it ‘just right’, which means working together on a section ASAP to fix some word counts and features such as chapter headings and sub-headings.

We looked at some artist choices, and our discussions about the way the book would look led us to a choice we all loved – Someone who can do people, landscapes and machines equally, and who won’t be phased by a highly-planned spread. It’s also someone who doesn’t look too retro, because our book subject is very current. Fingers crossed our choice says yes but we have some back-ups, too, thanks to our meeting.

We also chatted about general non-fiction sales feedback the editorial team had been given. That was very interesting and helpful, and not something I would have heard about otherwise.

Finally – and most importantly - we went over the reasons why we are doing the book. They are deeply felt and shared by everyone round the table. We believe in the concept of the book.

I came home feeling that we were a strong team and I hope they did, too. I felt ready for the challenge and excited that they were excited.

Ready, team? Ready! 

Now it’s up to me to write, but I know I have a strong foundation on which to build.

Moira’s non-fiction book Welcome To Our World (Nosy Crow) has been chosen in The Sun and the Mirror as a top gift book for 4+.  Her book on homes around the world has become a bestseller in the US this year– Home Sweet Home (Egmont in the UK. Kane Miller in the USA).

Moira Butterfield

www.moirabutterfield.com

Twitter @moiraworld

Instagram @moirabutterfieldauthor 

A Wise Choice - by Sheena Wilkinson

‘You always had a book in your hand.’

‘You were always writing away.’

No doubt this what relatives will say to me this Christmas, reminiscing about ye olden dayes when we were all younge and merrye. And I will smile and quip that nothing has changed. 

When I was younge and merrye

Last month I gave a talk about Star By Star in the Tower Museum in Derry. I’d spent the afternoon walking round the city walls and remembering my very first time in Derry, a family weekend in summer 1979, when I was ten, staying with Chris and Irene, friends of my stepfather. That weekend in their tiny terraced house in the Bogside has always shone brightly in my mind. 

I remember going outside to the toilet in the back yard; I remember running down the steep street and walking round the walls, seeing the city beneath me and the river and hills stretching far beyond to Donegal across the border. I could hardly believe it when next day we crossed the border and went to Buncrana to the seaside, the most exotic thing that had ever happened to me.  In Donegal the postboxes were green and there was different money and different sweets. There were Troubles in Derry, as there were in Belfast, but I don’t remember being aware of them. 

When I saw Chris and Irene in the audience, almost forty years later, I was touched, and started to reminisce about what had always been a special weekend for me. And then, out of her bag, Irene took a neatly pinned -- yes, pinned, I mustn't have had a stapler -- wodge of pages. ‘Do you remember writing this for us?’ she asked.


This was a collection of stories, written that very weekend, carefully kept by them for nearly forty years.  I have no memory of writing them, but there they are as proof that in between walking the walls and playing on the beach in Buncrana I must have sat down and written. Their house was tiny; I must have written while the four adults chatted and their small daughter toddled and my sister played. 

Looking at the stories now I am struck by how professional I tried to make them look. At school I was doing cursive script, but the stories are printed to make them look more like real books. They are illustrated, as all my stories were – and reader, I take no offence if you are thinking it’s well I had no ambitions to be an artist. Two things stand out for me.

One is that nobody, reading these stories, would guess they were by a girl from a Belfast council estate in the middle of the Troubles. They are aspirational and escapist, rural and middle-class. They are the stories of a girl who has grown up with Enid Blyton and the Pullein-Thompsons. Jan, the heroine of The Lost Pony lives in Cherry Cottage with lots of animals. She copes very competently when she finds the eponymous lost pony, but is not sad to relinquish him to his owners because she has two ponies of her own already. The only note of the 1970s is when she buys Jackie at the village shop; real me would not give up Bunty for at least two years. (The Lost Pony is in fact entirely devoid of conflict or suspense; a weekend potboiler rather than part of my serious oeuvre.)

But talking of my serious oeuvre, the other thing that strikes me is my supreme confidence. Look at that Author’s Note: You have made a wise choice. I wish I had ten-year-old me doing my PR these days. I do remember, as soon as I got home, starting to write a family story set in Derry. No ponies, no kittens, no country cottages. It was my first foray into gritty urban realism. It has not survived. Maybe just as well.