The Book That Poured Out by Sheena Wilkinson

As I revealed last month, I’m shortly to publish my tenth novel. But First Term at Fernside, published by the O’Brien Press in September, is actually my eleventh published book, and it’s taking me right back to the first one.

In 2007 Friends in the Fourth, based on my PhD about girls’ school stories, was published by Bettany Press, a small, specialist publisher.  Only a few hundred people bought that book, but it led directly to Fernside so I’ll always be glad of it, though at the time, having consigned my PhD to not-always-happy memory and being impatient to be published as a novelist, I found it a bit of a chore. 

When my last book, Mrs Hart’s Marriage Bureau, was published last year by HarperCollins, an interviewer in the Irish Times asked me: Your PhD was on girls’ school stories yet you’ve never written one. Why not? My response was: I’m fascinated by female spaces. My story “Let me be part of all this joy” (in Female Lines, New Island, 2017) is set in a 1920s girls’ school. There definitely is a girls’ school story in me: if any publisher reading this wants to commission one, I’m your woman!

Partly, this was a throwaway remark. But a little bit of me was sending out an idea into the universe to see what might happen… After all, I am a fiction writer: I have to believe in magic. 

And what did happen was that, maybe three weeks later, Kunak McGann, Rights Director at the O’Brien Press, a very well-established and respected Irish publisher, emailed to say: We really enjoyed your recent interview in the Irish Times and were intrigued by your mention of a girls’ school story. We ... would be very interested to explore what you might do with a novel (or series, even?) set in a girls’ school ... 

I replied 21 minutes later. By the next day I had Ideas, and a few days after that I more or less had my school, my main characters and my plot. 

Writing a novel is never exactly easy but I can honestly say that First Term at Fernside is the most fun I have ever had writing a book. In many ways, it was the book that had been inside me for most of my life, since, aged six, I read my very first school story – First Term at Malory Towers, the gateway book for so many school story fans! The story poured out. I wanted contrasting main characters whose fates were linked, so Robin and Linnet are cousins, and initially incompatible. Robin is apparently the perfect schoolgirl – a sporty, popular all-rounder, but she’s hiding quite a lot of worry under her sensible demeanour. Linnet is sensitive and eccentric, desperately at sea in this world of noisy girls. I loved exploring how they each find their own way of being in a community which is mostly benign but which has its challenges. 

 

And of course the writing had its challenges too: the story will be read by children born in the 2010s, but is set in 1925, right at the time when the girls’ school story craze was at its height. I needed to capture the attitudes and reality of that time – it’s very definitely historical fiction and is not pretending to be anything else – while allowing for the sensibilities of a different age. 

 

I was also very aware of being steeped in the traditional girls’ school story and wanting to honour that tradition, without any suggestion of pastiche – rather as my 2014 novel Too Many Ponies had done with the pony book tradition. 

What helped is that the school story has remained popular -- despite attempts by publishers and librarians throughout the twentieth century to outlaw what were often seen as elitist, trashy books, school stories just kept reinventing themselves. Fernside might well owe a lot to Malory Towers and the Chalet School, but it's by no means an outlier in 21st century children's fiction. Robin Steven's Murder Most Unladylike series; Elly Griffith's Justice books; Daisy May Johnson's How To Be books are all examples of recently-written books owing a lot to the school story tradition. Fernside isn't even O'Brien Press's only girls' school story -- earlier this year they published the wonderful TheTower Ghost by Natasha Mac a Bháird, set in a convent school in 1960s Donegal. 

So in First Term at Fernside you’ll find everything you’d expect in a traditional girls’ school story – sports teams and after-lights-out adventures (though no midnight feasts!); friendship and feuds; mean matrons and marvellous mistresses, and a big mystery which the girls have to rely on their own resources to solve. But it’s very much a 2020s book too, with an emphasis on diversity, empathy and inclusion. And like all my books, especially my 1916-1921 Irish trilogy, it’s feminist, with its unapologetic emphasis on female experience. It can’t possibly be anything else: girls receiving secondary education in the 1920s was, by definition, feminist.

So here it is -- the book that poured out of me! I can't wait for people to read it and to discover -- or rediscover -- the joy of the girls' school story. 

 

And will there be any more terms at Fernside? Reader, I do hope so! 

 

 

 

 

 

Enough is enough - by Rowena House

Here we are again, at the end of another difficult year for too many people, including in our industry, where recent ACLS data demonstrate that average author earnings have fallen so low (£7k) that writing books can no longer be considered a career for the majority, since you can’t live on £7k a year, which, in turn, shows yet again that talk about the drive for diversity in publishing is largely make-believe.

We should be out on the creative picket line in solidarity with each other. 

And in support of health workers, academic and railway strikers. And all the families being failed by our under-funded health and welfare systems. And refugees in the Channel. And the people of Ukraine. And Somalia. And, and, and…

But this is a creative writing blog and art is meant to bring light to the dark, so rather than facing grim realities, I want to end the year on a positive note. 

By chance, just before real world stuff stopped me writing for several months, I re-read an online article about the home of a woman who is the inspiration for a major character in my work-in-progress.

Typically for women in early modern times, my heroine gets no mention in the article, but her husband’s will is quoted in a footnote. In it, he expresses his gratitude to the two women who kept him afloat financially throughout his life: first his mother and then his wife, Lady Beth Knyvet.

Coming across this footnote was like finding a gemstone in the mud of the patriarchy.

Those few words, dictated by a dying courtier, are proof that Beth must have been, as I had imagined her to be, smart, independent-minded, and adventurous enough to make her own fortune at a time when married women could not own property.

It wasn’t inherited wealth; her father had bequeathed his fortune elsewhere and her mother came from City of London middling stock. She must have earned her money herself.

I don’t (yet?) know how, but for creative purposes I have invented a career for Beth and linked it to an incident in the life of Elizabeth Stuart, a princess turning sixteen and approaching her marriage at the time of my story.

Neither Beth nor the princess was a victim. They were educated, wily, able. It is a privilege to research their stories and weave them into a fictional history.

This opportunity to imagine other lives and how they might still touch ours is a gift which, at one level, is reward enough in itself, even if £7k p/a is an insult of galactic proportions. 

In a cold and lean Yuletide, with sad stuff to deal with, imagination is something rich to hold onto, a promise of sanctuary and learning, for which I want to thank ... something. The universe. The genes of my ancestors. Luck. The gods.

I also want to thank it/them for the people who made this year’s best moments: my husband and son, lovely Naomi, fab writer friends Eden, Lucy, Tracey and Liz, and for the people who held my creative hand professionally: Dr Kathryn Gray and Dr Min Wild of Plymouth university, and plotting guru Jeff Lyons in California.

And how could I dream without our darling dog, who is always there, and takes me out daily to breath and witness beauty. Thanks, too, for the cat, who’s a pain, but also always here.

To you, I send my best wishes for 2023. Whatever you do with it, I hope it is enough. 

@HouseRowena on Twitter

Rowena House Author on Facebook 

rowenahouse.wordpress.com

PS, the photo is Staple Inn, London, which features in the work-in-progress, but is mostly pictured here because I don't have anything festive on the new computer.

In praise of writing communities & how they saved Chapter 3 - Rowena House

On Twitter last month, inspirational children’s author Sophie Anderson asked, ‘Writers, what is your one most important goal, right now, as a writer?’

            Her question stimulated a fascinating thread of more than a hundred answers, plus side conversations, as writers shared their angst and ambitions – great and small – their hopes and lockdown challenges, and sent support, compassion and understanding to each other.

            The thread began on 27 March in case you missed it and want to read in and experience  that uplifting knowledge that wherever we are as writers, we aren’t alone.

            I thoroughly recommend you do check it out, in fact. Right now, if you like. You’ll find her @sophieinspace.

            And then, if you aren’t diving straight back into your own deep reading or creative space, come back here for a bit of focused rumination on the relationship between chapters, what I learnt during last week’s Arvon At Home historical fiction course, plus more thoughts about the immense value of writing communities in general.

            [Welcome back if you popped over to Twitter. Good thread, huh? Anyway...]

            My answer to Sophie sat at the pragmatic end of the spectrum: I wanted to draft the next chapter of my seventeenth century ghost story-cum-political drama.

            In the intervening weeks, no actual word contributed to that goal, but I did get chapter two polished (well, rewritten) and signed off by two professional authors, the Arvon tutors Manda Scott and Robert Wilton, both of whose books are now high on my TBR list.

            I also learned a great deal from them and my fellow attendees, whose stories are so wide ranging, and their abilities and determination so great, that last week felt like the start of a new and better beginning for my own work-in-progress.

 

            Thinking about why this should be so, when I’ve been working on this story for more than a year, led me to several conclusions.

            Firstly, it doesn’t matter a hoot that I didn’t write chapter three during the course. Fiction writing isn’t a race nor, sadly, is it a job in my case. So, while taking writing seriously is good, deadlines are for people who are paid to meet them.

            Second, chapter two, which I submitted for the one-to-one tutorials, only worked after a lot of thinking, rethinking, and rewriting: line by line, word by word, which eventually transformed, ‘Well, that’ll do for now’ into, ‘Yup, there we go. Ye-ha.’

            It turns out that having professional readers really made me up my game.

            On the whole, I tend to believe that simply being critiqued by writers I trust is sufficient motivation to get it right. And there’s no doubt that kind of feedback is fantastically useful; it’s how I got chapter one done.

            But the Zoom meetings with Robert and Manda added other layers.

            For one things, there was the fear of wasting the opportunity for top-notch feedback. I already knew the chapter wasn’t up to scratch, so why pay to be told something you already know? Also, I didn’t want to come across as an amateur; no one is paying for this manuscript yet, but one day...

            Combined, these factors gave the whole business of getting it right a far sharper edge.

            Editing on the days before the course began felt like being back on the MA’s manuscript mentoring scheme, or awaiting that meeting with a yearned-for agent or editor back in my pre-published days.

            The time, effort and focus that went into editing chapter two, knowing it would be seen by a pro, demonstrated once again a fundamental element in my own writing process: if it’s not good enough, it’s not good enough. So change it.

            And that means planning.

 

            Okay, it can be planning after an intuitive few weeks groping towards a scene with an authentic character doing something significant in a realistic and relevant place. Which, roughly, is where I was before the Arvon timetable came through.

            But it was the act of reframing the entire chapter, rethinking its function, its structure, its conflict, which made it come alive.

            Interestingly, it was restructuring that also solved another nagging problem: the voice of chapter two had been wrong. The language and tone had been too similar to chapter one, and since the WIP is a dual narrative, told in alternate chapters, the voice of each strand has to be distinct.

            Discovering a separate voice for my second lead character, Beth, brought the necessary elements of the voice for the main protagonist, Tom, into sharp relief. I knew, consciously rather than instinctively, what his next scene had to sound like: its rhythms, its lexicon, its nuances and psychic distance.

            (Note to self: a theme of social hierarchy is already emerging in both strands; make it subtle and discrete for each.)

            Nailing chapter two also clarified the sorts of things that should happen in Tom's story as opposed to Beth's, including their underlying preoccupations and the nature of the consequences of events, so that the all-important because of that feels organic and in-character to a reader, not arbitrary and plot-driven.

            And since, in chapter one, Tom internalises his conflicts, coherence suggests that his introspection ought to have knock-on effects in chapter three, raising plot tension or foreshadowing greater jeopardy ahead.

            And with chapter two now driven by Beth’s manipulative interpersonal conflicts, a kinder style of interpersonal conflict in chapter three could provide another contrast between Beth and Tom, while still ringing true for Tom’s more empathic character.

            In other words, getting chapter two right narrowed down the choice of devices to take the story forward, while at the same time making each chapter compliment and contrast with its neighbours.

            This sort of planning isn’t for everyone, of course. I suspect it would drive most intuitive writers into the fridge or the gym.

            But it is in line with advice I read somewhere – John Yorke’s Into the Woods, perhaps – that if Act III isn’t working, you probably went wrong in Act I. So go back and find out where. The hold-up with chapter three might be this same process working at a smaller scale.

            On the other hand, another wise writer once said, Get it writ, then get it right.

            For me, the first time I heard this advice was from the marvellous Sara Grant during a BookBoundUK weekend a shocking number of years ago. Ever since then I have tried to follow her guidance, but have stumbled so often that, deep down, I know that I have to get a scene right-ish before moving on.

            For which purposes, feedback like Manda’s and Robert’s is the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.

            Sadly, it is impractical to go on an Arvon course every few weeks (what a dream!) so it’s brilliant news that last week’s cohort of historical writers wants to keep in touch for mutual support, as so many who’ve experienced Arvon courses do.

            [MA buddies from Bath Spa have kept me going for years, and continue to be a fantastic support, along with Scoobies and Golden Eggers, Sassies now, too, and the Twitterati.]

            What I’m saying, I guess, is something we mostly know, but is still worth celebrating: other writers are motivating, energising, helpful and insightful, as well as being role models for shared anxieties, essential sounding boards and welcome listening posts.

            All hail, writing communities everywhere.

            How would stories ever get written without them?

 

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Website: rowenahouse.com