Who, What or Where Influenced your Writing?

Wycombe Library as I knew it

Books have always been a source of inspiration for me. Great literature is like soul food for the imagination. It can take you anywhere at any time, no journey too long, no obstacle too great, no limits, no boundaries. Can I imagine a world where there are no books? NO is the simple answer. When I was a kid, my family couldn’t afford to buy books, (don’t worry, I’ve made up for that big time!), so the library was where I got my weekly fix. My town library during my teenage years was a place of huge inspiration. It was full of books by writers I had heard of and many I had not. 

Wycombe Library now

I made my way round the whole library, reading good fiction, exceptional fiction, high-brow to low-brow, from JRR Tolkien, CS Lewis, John Wyndham, Agatha Christie, Jane Austen, Tolstoy, Zola, the Brontes, Edgar Allan Poe, Maupassant, Stephen King, Dickens, Erle Stanley Gardner, John Creasey, Denis Wheately (I told you I read everything!), to John Fowles. I had wide and varied tastes – I still do! Although I never dreamt of being a writer then, I soaked up words like they were going out of fashion.

Penn Bookshop

Some of the thousands of books in Penn Bookshop

When I was about sixteen, my dad and I discovered The Cottage Bookshop in Penn – a second-hand bookshop stuffed full of shelves, nooks and crannies, bursting at the seams with books upon books upon books. I practically moved in, losing hours in that place. I didn’t know then that Terry Pratchett had also spent hours and hours lost in the book alleys of this very bookshop when he was a kid. The Cottage Bookshop was the inspiration for L-space (library space) in Discworld. Pratchett often returned to the shop during his career, and launched his Johnny and the Bomb there in 1996.

Ian Fleming

Stephen King was inspired by writers such as Richard Matheson, Shirley Jackson, H P Lovecraft, and Bram Stoker. Arthur Conan Doyle was inspired by Edgar Allen Poe. Ian Fleming's James Bond was apparently inspired by Dennis Wheatley's Gregory Sallust series.

Tolkien was a huge inspiration for me – he led me into the endless worlds and possibilities of a genre I came to love.

So, it’s no surprise then that the first thing I ever wrote was a fantasy epic – complete with its own world, full of many lands, populated by a diverse range of people and creatures. There were several maps, drawn to scale. And hundreds of thousands of words: the trilogy had to be divided up into six parts. The manuscripts have been filed away. Every few years they get dusted off and reread before going back in the drawer. I may do something with them one day... I can’t say that my recent works have been inspired by one writer or a few writers in particular. That’s one I’ll have to mull over.

              

So what, who or where has inspired you to write?

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The Randomness of Inspiration by Savita Kalhan

One of the most common questions a writer is asked is: where do you get your inspiration from? I would answer that, for me, it is completely random. Triggers have included flyers, little snippets of songs, newspaper reports, a book, a picture, a line from a film or an overheard conversation, not that I make too much of a habit of eavesdropping. It’s endless and it is random.

The inspiration for The Long Weekend was very direct. I had seen a flyer that was sent home from
local schools warning parents that a driver of a flashy car had been seen outside schools and had tried to snatch a child. It triggered an idea that became a story.

For other manuscripts the answer has not been so direct. It has been as mundane as watching a rerun of a Jason Bourne film, which made me wonder what it would be like to wake up with no memory and inspired my teen thriller, Memory Loss Boy. Or as heart-breaking as when I first saw the image of the toddler washed up on a beach on a Greek Island, which inspired my short story, The Death of Princess.

Recently I was asked to write a short story for an anthology with a particular theme. I didn’t have any ideas of how to begin it, but in the gym one morning with my headphones plugged in, listening to a random selection of music, I caught a single phrase from a rap song. The song has been around for over a decade, and I usually don’t listen to rap lyrics, but just at that moment the phrase caught my imagination. It was a great working title and with that I sat down and wrote the story. The finished short story bears absolutely no resemblance whatsoever to the rap song, by the way, and it’s quite likely the title will change too. My short story for teens and young adults, Aladdin's Lamp, was inspired by an article about the criminalisation of homosexuality in India. The story is published in Stories from The Edge. 

Walking along Dollis Brook

Just as the process of being inspired to write a story is pretty random, the absence of inspiration can be pretty disheartening. I’m sure most writers have their own ways of dealing with it. Setting the pen down, or closing the laptop is usually my starting point. From there it may involve going for a walk along Dollis Brook and reading, which soon moves onto spring-cleaning, hoovering, doing the washing and gardening. All these things can become convenient displacement activities when the words are not flowing the way they should. 

Garlic and Onions - enough for a year.

Four varieties of potatoes

My allotment has always been my go-to place when I’m stuck or in need of inspiration. I don’t always do writing related thinking there, but it’s a place where, while my hands are busy yanking out those weeds or digging over a plot in preparation for sowing, the mind wanders freely.

Strawberries - soon!

It’s important to remember that it’s not always about the daily word count, although it does lend focus to aim at a particular number much in the way a deadline might focus you. When I’m in the full flow of writing a book, I aim at a 1,000 words per day. At the end of the day I might have gone much further, or fallen short of the target, but that’s okay as there’s always tomorrow.

The other thing I do when inspiration has deserted me is to write something else. I have a whole collection of opening paragraphs, half-written stories in various genres, story ideas, and short stories. A cupboard full of manuscripts is better than one manuscript because there’s more chance that one of them might see the light of day. 

So where do you find your inspiration, and is it as random as mine?

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The Limos Circle The Block, by Susan Price and Andrew Price

                Hi again!

     There's such an atmosphere here at the launch for Three Billy Goats Gruff!
     The limos are circling the blog and we'll soon be welcoming our first star!

     And wait!
     A limo is pulling up!

          I can't see who's getting out yet....
          It's sure to be someone exciting!
          It's - it's - 

 
                                         Ooh, I'm thrilled!

It's the Bridge!

I was another bridge, further down river, but the part was written out.

That's how it is in this business.  

I was the original bridge too far and one of the bridges of Toko-Ri.

You don't see me. I was behind a building.

Who is this arriving?

Can it be - ooh, can it be Great Big?

      Oh, girls, he's so dreamy. For a goat.

      Laters!

Click here for next episode. 

Art work: Andrew Price

Does a book have its own gender? by Savita Kalhan

In his just published non-fiction book, The View from the Cheap Seats, Neil Gaiman includes an essay in which he says that books have sexes,  genders. 'They do in my head, anyway. Or, at least the ones that I write do.'

The gender of the book often has something to do with the main character, but not always. If you've read Gaiman's Stardust, he says that he considers the book to be female, even though the main character and hero of the book is male. Coraline  is a female book too, in his mind, whereas Neverwhere is male.

So it's not necessarily to do with the type of book - a book for girls, or a book for boys, or to do with the protagonist, the gender of the main character. Reading on in his essay it became clear that even a book with a male protagonist could be female. Partly it's to do with whether Gaiman considers that it is the male or female character(s) who have been assigned greater depth and complexity, or whether they behave, and are described in much more "stock" terms. 

I've read and enjoyed both The Graveyard Book and The Ocean at the End of the Lane. Both books feature a male protagonist. In The Graveyard Book - it's Nobody Owens, Bod, with Silas as his ghostly guardian; so is the book male? And in The Ocean at the End of the Lane - the main character is a man who returns to where he grew up for a funeral and while he's there he walks the path back to a farm at the end of the lane and a significant time in his childhood. He remains unnamed, unlike his best friend, Lettie Hempstock, her mother and grandmother, and the evil Ursula, who threatens to destroy him. The female characters are very strong, central and pivotal to the book. So I'm guessing the book is female...

When I write I don't think: 'I'm writing a book for girls', or 'I'm writing a book for boys'; nor do I mentally  assign a book a gender, or really even think about it in those terms. When I think about the books I've read, I don't think of them as possessing a gender as such either, or possessing characteristics you might associate with a particular gender.

In The Long Weekend, about two boys who are abducted by a monster, I would in Gaiman's terms see it as being male. But that's probably because apart from a mother and sister being referred to by the main character, there are no female characters in the book. This is in hindsight and not how I would ever see any books I've written. Also, I don't think Gaiman is saying that specific books would appeal only to a specific gender.

It's a different way of looking at writing, at how you write, and how you envisage the book you're writing. It works for Gaiman, but it doesn't work for me, and it might or might not work for you. It's like how you start a book. For Gaiman it's never about the blank page. It's about the opening or the character, or a scene, images, location, and an idea of how these all come together.

Where I wholeheartedly agree with Gaiman is when he says that 'Novels accrete,' and when you're writing the best feeling is most definitely when you feel like you are the first reader, then the writer.

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Judging a Book by Page 112 - Savita Kalhan

There's a new book prize I read about recently: Le Prix de la Page 112. It was inspired by a line from a Woody Allen film, Hannah and Her Sisters: "Don't forget the poem on page 112. It reminded me of you!" The book referred to in the film was a collection of poems by E. E. Cummings. So the judges of the French prize, Le Prix de la Page 112 are asked only to read page 112.

The theory behind this prize is that page 112 represents the critical point in a book where the reader's attention could potentially lapse.

“Everyone neglects page 112,” the organisers of the prize write. “That’s why we chose it. Our logic is simple. If a remarkable page 112 is rare, then we are permitted to hope that the novel in which it appears might also be remarkable, from beginning to end.” If a novel has a beautiful 112, the jury will read the rest of the book.

The Long Weekend

Openings of books are agonised over, honed and polished by the writer, and then by editors, so that they are as perfect as can be. So the hook is usually perfectly formed and the reader ensnared ‑ at least for the first chapters. Most readers would read on a bit further, giving the book a chance, before putting it down if it no longer holds their attention, but if they have made it to page 112, then, it's thought, they are likely to continue.

So I've been looking at page 112 in various books, and I had to check out page 112 of The Long Weekend too of course. I'm happy with page 112, and it has one of my favourite lines on it.

City of Thieves

 David Benioff's, City of Thieves, was lying close at hand, so I read page 112 of that too, and based on page 112, I would definitely have wanted to read the book, which I have and thought was brilliant.

A Fine Balance

This is page 112 of A Fine Balance by Rohinton Mistry, one of my all-time favourite books. I found myself continuing on to read the next page without thinking. So the sign of a very good page 112, I guess.

With the whole of the IT system in Barnet down and librarians unable to access the library catalogues, order or reserve books, looking at page 112 seems like an interesting activity to try out with my teen library group with the books on the shelves in the library. Rather than looking at the cover, reading the blurb and reading the opening pages, we'll be reading page 112 to see if this is a book that grabs us, and if page 112 is blank, then we'll just look at page 111 or page 113.

Julia Kerninon with her page 112

This year's winner of Le Prix de la Page 112 was announced on March 30th. Julia Kerninon won the prize for her novel, Le Dernier Amour d'Attila Kiss, but I'll have to wait for the translation to read page 112 for myself.

So what are your favourite page 112s?

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Fears, Phobias and Things that go Boo in the Night - Savita Kalhan

I have lots of fears and phobias, some rational, some irrational. Here is a (by no means comprehensive) list of some of them: dizzying heights, sheer vertical drops; wasps, bees, hornets, well almost anything that buzzes and gets anywhere near me; enclosed spaces like tunnels and caves; dark places – even a deserted street at night, which is more frightening because it is deserted, and then, bizarrely, becomes even more frightening when you see a lone figure walking towards you; cemeteries, at night; the woods, at night, but also in the daytime if they’re deserted. Yes, there is a general night/dark theme going on here, and a fear of bumping into someone when no one else is around. People do go for walks on their own all the time. But not me.

Although, while in Rome this summer, I actually wanted to go to a dark, enclosed maze of tunnels of death, but didn’t have time. So the Catacombs will have to wait - for a research trip for the next book perhaps...

I have lots fears and phobias where those came from, and I haven’t even started on the nightmares. I’m sure everyone has irrational phobias and fears, and some rational ones too, but I think I have more than the fair share. Am I unusual? I don’t honestly know. I’ve asked family members about theirs, and I do seem to have far more than they do. They tell me it’s down to my ridiculously overactive imagination. They tell me I’m far too superstitious, and suspicious, and that I always see the worst possible scenarios and imagine the worst possible outcomes.

Life would be so much easier, and far less scary, if my imagination wasn’t so overactive.

But I guess I need it to be that way. I’ve found a way of using it in my writing. Writing about them has not made the fears and phobias lessen in any way. They’re still very much present. I just wonder what would happen if I underwent hypnosis to sort out some of them. How would it affect me? How would it affect my writing? Would it become less dark? Would I find myself drawn to writing humorous light-hearted, heart- warming fiction? I did try my hand at writing that way, but it didn’t last long. It didn’t feel right and the words didn’t flow with the same ease.

The book I’m working on at the moment is getting very dark. You’re probably not surprised to hear that if you’ve read The Long Weekend. It’s not an intentional thing. It’s just the way the book is flowing.

I would still love to be able to make teens and young adults laugh when they read my work, than cower and cry, but I fear that may never happen...

 

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Loughborough University Literary Salon 2014 by Savita Kalhan

I was invited to take part in Loughborough University’s 2^nd Literary Salon by Kerry Featherstone, lecturer in English. Industry professionals were invited: Walker Books and the literary agents from DKW, and another author – Maxine Linnell. The subject of the Salon was: Writing YA Fiction. We were each invited to speak, followed by a Q and A session, and, at the end of the evening, there was a Round Table. The audience comprised students, lecturers, authors and anyone in the local area interested in Teen/YA fiction. There was a great turn out and an interested and involved audience, with lots of discussions.

My talk focussed on the realities, good and bad, of being a children’s writer in the modern world, what an average advance might be, royalties, the changes in the publishing industry, and my experiences of being a teen/YA writer. I tried to give a balanced view on how difficult it is to make a living from writing, how a children’s writer today has to wear very many hats, know the industry and know how it works, while not neglecting the most important aspect of being an author: writing a book. I was a little surprised by how many students of creative writing were unaware of the realities of being a children’s writer.

I hope I didn’t put them off wanting to be writers!
 
The round table discussions focussed on various issues, including age banding in children’s books, the changing reading habits of children and teenagers, and diversity in children’s books. Bali Rai joined the round table and talked about how he and Malorie Blackman have been discussing the lack of diversity in children’s literature for many years, and how little has changed in that time. I’ve blogged about diversity in Teen/YA lit here on An Awfully Big Blog Adventure here and on The Edge Blog here, and for Teen Librarian Monthly here. Reading David Thorpe’s interesting post on yesterday’s blog, made me wonder about the diversity in the ethnicity of the children who had entered the 500 word story writing competition where 118,632 entries were received.

The Literary Salon was a very good event for students who were interested in pursuing a career in writing. They got to meet a publisher, agents and writers, and to put questions to them. It was the kind of event I would have loved to have gone to when I first started writing and knew so little about the publishing world.


Book Trailer for The Long Weekend

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Black and White and Everything In Between by Savita Kalhan

According to a study by the Cooperative Children’s Book Center at the University of Wisconsin, of the 3,200 children’s books published in 2013 in the US, just 93 were about black people. The UK fares little better by all accounts.

Leila Rasheed has blogged about the importance of non-issue based children’s books featuring children from ethnic backgrounds, and why she finds it hard to write about non-white characters.  http://leilarasheeddotcom.wordpress.com/2014/03/20/permission-to-write-my-experience-of-being-a-british-asian-reader-and-writer-of-childrens-books/

Tanya Byrne has written about this on the Guardian books blog where she calls for more books featuring children of colour. https://href.li/?http://www.theguardian.com/childrens-books-site/2014/mar/20/tanya-byrne-top-10-black-characters-in-childrens-books?CMP=twt_gu

The dearth of non-white characters was raised by Dean Myers, in his article: Where are the People of Colour in Children’s Books. http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/16/opinion/sunday/where-are-the-people-of-color-in-childrens-books.html?_r=1

And then again by his son Christopher Myers in The Apartheid of Children. https://href.li/?http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/16/opinion/sunday/the-apartheid-of-childrens-literature.html

There is now an increasing debate and demand for more diversity in children’s literature to reflect our increasingly multi-ethnic and multi cultural society.

Almost thirty years ago Verna Wilkins set up Tamarind Press in an attempt to redress the lack of books with children from non-white backgrounds being published in the children’s market. But ‘mainstream’ publishers have yet to catch up, and there is clearly still a huge lack of such books.

As a British Asian, who is 100% Indian in terms of heritage, but who is essentially more British than Indian, and as a big reader during my childhood, it was always a surprise when I found a book about a child who shared my skin colour. A nice surprise. Yes, often those kids were beset by problems such as racial abuse and stereotyping, but that wasn’t a problem for me because growing up in the UK at the time did in fact necessarily involve having to face those issues to a greater or lesser degree.

What bothers me now is the fact that, as all of the above authors have pointed out, there are still very few books that feature children of colour, whether or not they are issue-based or are 'normal' non-issue based stories .

Children are growing up in a society which is far more culturally mixed and diverse. But, for today's children, not much has changed from when I grew up, in terms of seeing and reading about a diverse range of children like themselves and their friends in literature.

That’s a problem.

I completely agree with Malorie when she talks about diversity of multi-cultural voices in children’s literature being of paramount importance, not least because it would promote awareness and understanding, and tolerance.

On a personal level, as a writer, I have written books featuring all white characters. People have often said that The Long Weekend could have been written by a white Anglo-Saxon. That’s fine. I find it quite amusing. It’s my fully Indian name on the spine. In another novel, Amnesia, the main character is an English boy, but his best friend is Indian and his girlfriend is half Italian. The book I have just completed is about an Asian girl and features predominately Asian characters of different backgrounds. I don’t feel that because I’m Asian I have to write about Asian characters all the time, or that I should feel obliged to.

What’s important in children’s literature is that a diversity of characters in terms of ethnicity and culture is depicted, and that their voices are heard, and that a child is no longer surprised when they find more than one book featuring someone of their ethnicity, culture or colour. Sadly, that’s not happening yet.

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The Long Weekend Book Trailer

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Inspiration - Where do you find it? by Savita Kalhan

Children have often asked me where I find my inspiration and the answer is never a simple one word response. Inspiration can be found in so many different places that sometimes it’s almost impossible to answer the question without waffling on or sounding as though inspiration and ideas for books really can easily be found anywhere and therefore I’m never stuck for a story idea.

 As it happens, it’s fairly rare that I do get stuck, thankfully, because I got into the habit of writing down story ideas as they’ve occurred to me, even when I might not use them for a long time.

An item in the newspaper or a documentary on TV can trigger an idea, a character, or a storyline. Sometimes it’s a story someone has told you, a conversation overheard in a coffee shop, or even an idea that occurs while standing in line in a queue.

Places can definitely be inspiring. Last autumn I went to the ancient Nabataean city of Petra in Jordan, somewhere I had wanted to go for a very long time, (probably since I first watched Indiana Jones!). It was an amazing trip. We travelled down from Amman on the old King’s Road along the silk route, taking in the highest point in Jordan, the city of Petra and then eventually on to the lowest point of Jordan, the Dead Sea. Unlike Indiana Jones, I had no inclination to gallop down the Siq in Petra, but wandered down it at a more leisurely pace on my own two feet.




On Mt Nebo

At the Dead Sea

Dead Sea salt formation

The highest point in Jordan



The Siq

John William Burgon’s 1845 poem Petra was inspired solely by a description of Petra. He had never seen the city.

 

It seems no work of Man's creative hand,

by labour wrought as wavering fancy planned;

But from the rock as if by magic grown,

eternal, silent, beautiful, alone!

Not virgin-white like that old Doric shrine,

where erst Athena held her rites divine;

Not saintly-grey, like many a minster fane,

that crowns the hill and consecrates the plain;

But rose-red as if the blush of dawn,

that first beheld them were not yet withdrawn;

The hues of youth upon a brow of woe,

 

which Man deemed old two thousand years ago,

match me such marvel save in Eastern clime,

a rose-red city half as old as time.

 

But equally an idea for a book can be triggered somewhere far more mundane – when I’m working on my allotment, or gazing out of my kitchen window at the view of the woods.

A personal experience or an event, a photograph, a picture, a piece of music, a name, the list is endless, and the story ideas can be too.

The question of what inspired a particular book is far easier to answer. The inspiration for The Long Weekend came from a flyer that went round local schools warning parents that a big flash car had been seen outside schools and had tried to snatch children at pick up time.

 

And, as with John William Burgon, you don’t have to see something with your own eyes for it to inspire you to write.

 

 

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