Why do the words flow best when I only have limited time? By Tamsin Cooke

Sometimes, when I write, the words pour out of me as if I’m in a dreamlike state. It’s like my fingers have a mind of their own. They fly over the keyboard and a story seems to magic its way onto the page. I look up at the clock and realise an hour has passed. And when I read through the words, I can’t believe I actually wrote them. They’re good. The scene is almost complete and hardly any editing will be needed. I love it when this happens.

Unfortunately, it doesn’t happen a lot!!!

More often than not, I stare at the computer. No, I glare at the computer. It’s not as if the story isn’t in my head. I know exactly what’s going to happen. I might have just been on a dog walk and a whole scene has played out in my mind, like a TV show. I’ve hurried home, knowing exactly what my characters are going to say, knowing exactly where the twist will be. I’ve grabbed my laptop, ready to dive into the story, my enthusiasm brimming …. except nothing happens.  The words refuse to play. They stick in my mind as if they don’t want to be shared.  Argh!!!

But I won’t take no for an answer! I will write the beginning sentence for the breath-taking scene I’ve just thought up. As long as I get one sentence down, the others will surely follow … but then the words feel wrong and I end up deleting each attempt. 

Before I forget it, I quickly jot down the scene into a notebook, and then decide I must need a break. I could clean the house. Nah, what a ridiculous idea! Instead I make a hot drink and check my emails. I’ll just have one quick glance at Twitter or Facebook before I get back to my masterpiece. I don’t look at Instagram because I can’t get the hang of it. Maybe that’s a good thing – because the next moment I realize an hour has passed. I have been sucked into social media. 

Right – that’s it. I refuse to use the Internet until I’ve written this amazing scene … except I’m not quite sure what has happened in the world today. What if there’s been some catastrophe that I need to know about? Does the world need me to save it? (Not that I have delusions of grandeur!) And so, I take a quick peek at the Guardian and the BBC website. Phew – we’re all still safe.

Then I clench my fists and know that now is the time to get back to my story. First, I must make another hot drink. Sitting back at my laptop, I force myself to write. I don’t care how bad it is. I will edit it later. Ignoring the awful words trickling out of my fingers, I write and write. Unfortunately, I am not one of those gifted people, who can type while looking at the screen. I need to see the letters on the keypad. Therefore, when I eventually look back up, I find lots of red squiggly lines. Oh well, at least I don’t have autocorrect – otherwise the whole thing would be indecipherable. Like my texts before I edit them!!!

I start correcting the spellings and as I read through my pages, I’m astonished to discover it’s not quite as bad as I first thought. OK, some bits are truly horrific, but I can change them later. And then, finally, the rest of the words start to flow; the scene in my head begins to materialize. I want to do this all day. At this rate I’ll probably finish the entire book and be submitting it well before the deadline.  My agent and editor will be amazed.

But then l glance at the time and am absolutely horrified. I have to stop right now. I’ve got to pick the children up from the school bus.

I stare forlornly at my screen.

Oh well, at least I know what’s going to happen in the scene. As soon as I can, I’ll get back to it. The words will flow ... I try to ignore the niggly feeling that it took me AGES to get into it.

It’s a cruel trick. Why do the words flow best when I only have limited time? 

Tamsin Cooke

Author of The Scarlet Files Series and Stunt Double Series

Website: tamsincooke.co.uk
Twitter: @TamsinCooke1 

Time to Write by Vanessa Harbour

L to R Gordon Smith, Antoinette Moses,
Melvin Burgess and me
Photo courtesy of Gordon Smith

Recently I had the pleasure of appearing at the Fly Festival of Literature for Young People. Before our event, Antoinette Moses, the brilliant organiser, author and lecturer, Gordon Smith, author and patron of the festival, and I were sat together having a wonderful natter about writerly things, as you do. The subject of finding time to write came up and it made think… a lot. Antoinette was very strict; she always writes a thousand words every day. Gordon admitted he used to write for many hours every day, but since having children it wasn’t quite so easy. This I could empathise with. I have periods of time when I can, like Gordon, write for hours on end, but then there are other times when I find it almost impossible to squeeze in even ten minutes, let alone finding time to write Antoinette’s thousand words.

Driving back to Winchester from Norwich I contemplated the idea of time even more. Time is so precious and time to write even more so. There is so much pressure on us that eats away at this precious writing time. It is almost impossible to be ‘just a writer’ these days. In 2018 ALCS produced a report which highlighted how an author’s income solely from actual writing had dropped to £10,437. With the best will in the world, this is not a salary anyone can realistically live on. (The government’s national living wage equates to £15,269) Consequently, the majority of authors are having to supplement their income through having another job, doing events, if children’s writers they might be doing school visits – though we all know due to funding cuts those are getting few and far between too, writing articles, anything that might bring in additional funds. These all require time and effort that take writers away from writing.

Personally, I have two jobs as well as being an author. I am a senior lecturer in creative writing at the University of Winchester and Head of Academic and Business

Preparing to do a Skype
event

Relations/Mentor and Workshop Leader at the Golden Egg Academy. I love these jobs as it means I get to work with people who love to write. However, it also means my head is often full of other people's works. During a recent marking period, I looked at nearly 300k words worth of work belonging to others, including my external examining work. That is not including my Golden Egg work. It is in these moments that it can be particularly hard to find the time to write. I have had to develop strategies in order to deal with all the words belonging to others floating around my head. I have written about it here. Basically, it is all about emptying those words out of my through freewriting before writing, literally vomiting on the page. Or refocusing by reading a different format, for example reading poetry before I write prose.  

Add into this mix the fact that being an author itself is time hungry. Gone are the days of writing your novel, handing it over and disappearing back into your ivory tower to write your next one. Now there is all the social media activity, maintaining your website as well as the events. Don’t get me wrong I do enjoy these, but they take time, a time when you could potentially be writing. I do have to be strict with myself over Twitter, for example, or I would be on there forever as there are some wonderful people on there. Fabulous teachers and librarians, other authors and aspiring writers, who are all fascinating to talk to. But conversing with them doesn’t give you time to write.  It is about prioritising. I allocate certain times of day for social media and use scheduling tools such as Tweetdeck to help me manage my time better and so that it doesn’t become overwhelming. However, I still feel I am not doing enough and not making enough connections. It is such a difficult thing to balance.

Also, when considering actual writing time, it is not just about time for putting words on a page. It is allowing time for pre-writing, latent processing where you are mulling ideas and plot issues over, doing research, world building and creating three-dimensional characters. There is so much more to writing than putting words on a page.

Time for latent processing

Going back to the wonderful Antoinette and her determined thousand words a day. This is something I am going to give a go at. I am very conscious that when I don’t write my mental health suffers, so I think I might also be helping myself by trying it. I have always been a bit wary of being determined to write every day because of that sense of failure if you don’t achieve it. However, listening to Antoinette talk about it, I realised that it didn’t matter what words were written, it was the fact you were writing that was the most important thing. This really inspired me as it felt less pressurised. It would mean that it didn’t matter how tired I was, or how full of other people’s words, something would come out of it. I already carry a notebook always to jot down moments of inspiration as they come, and I am going to make more use of that. I am going to take snatched moments to write as well that can feed into the focused thousand words. As Antoinette said, ‘It’s all about habit.’ I am going to create this habit as I think this will help me timewise in the long run. I’ll keep you posted, and we’ll see how I get on. I am looking forward to it. I also hope you all find time to write, feel inspired and a little less pressurised. 

Vanessa Harbour

Author/Lecturer/Mentor

Flight - Firefly 2018

   

No! Time, Thou Shalt Not Boast That I Do Change - Catherine Butler

Children’s books are among the most likely to be “updated” to reflected current social mores. Many of us can probably cite books that have been changed in this way, for example to remove racist language or change words now seen as unacceptable for other reasons. Even Enid Blyton’s unintentionally risqué Dick and Fanny from The Magic Faraway Tree were muted to Rick and Frannie; and poor Titty Walker from Swallows and Amazons was unceremoniously renamed after a root vegetable in the 2016 film version.  It happens.

Other kinds of updating, though, are differently motivated. It sometimes happens that I’ll be reading a modern edition of a book first published in, say, the 1940s or ’50s and clearly set in that period, only to hit my shins on a reference to someone spending “10p” on  a snack. “Why are they using decimal currency in a pre-1971 world?” I wonder, startled by the fictional world’s sudden incoherence, before realising that of course it’s the work of some modern editor, smoothing the path of young readers as assiduously as any sweeper in an Olympic curling squad by ensuring that they never bump into unfamiliar terms or concepts. If a child today were to read a reference to “two shillings” they might not know what it means – and this, apparently, would be a disaster. The thought of children not understanding is strangely unsettling to some publishers; but as Diana Wynne Jones once noted, “children are used to not knowing”. Coming across new information in a book is neither an unusual event for a child, nor something likely to ruin the experience. They might even learn something that way.

Not all inconsistencies of this kind are introduced by publishers, though. What about the ones that come from writers themselves? It happens most often with long-running series. William Brown remained the same age for decades, even as the world around him changed – much like Bart Simpson more recent years. Of course, I understand the reasons – being ten years old is the essence of both characters, but their authors didn’t want their surroundings to look old fashioned to contemporary readers. Still, am I the only one who finds it a little hard to process? Who gets the occasional bout of existential vertigo?

Perhaps we can make a special case for the Williams, Barts and Dennis the Menaces (or Dennises the Menace?) of this world. But what about series that have a real forward movement, in which characters get older, but that still introduce changes of this kind? Take Lucy Boston’s Green Knowe books, which I’ve just been rereading with great pleasure. In the first, The Children of Green Knowe (1954), the protagonist, Tolly, is seven years old. In the second, The Chimneys of Green Knowe (1958), set just a few months later, he is mysteriously nine. Whether other people have noticed this “error” I don’t know, but I think it may have something to do with the four-year gap between the two books: Tolly’s age is running to catch up with that of his readers.

The series was concluded by The Stones of Green Knowe in 1976, some 22 years after it began. In that book Tolly is still a child, but he is described in a way that suggests he is dressed in the 1970s standard of jeans (it’s hard to be sure because the point of view is that of a boy from the house’s Norman past): “He was dressed in tight trousers of something like blue linen but very faded and patched in different colours.” I can see why Boston might have wanted to make the book feel contemporary, but especially in a story about time slips it’s disconcerting to find that we have segued unannounced from the 1950s to the ’70s, but that the main child character has not aged – or, at any rate, not by 20 years.

Some school writers keep their characters the same age perpetually: Billy Bunter is always the Fat Owl of the Remove, for example. Others, from Elinor Brent-Dyer to Enid Blyton, made their characters get older, by following them through their school careers. This was also of course the route taken by J. K. Rowling, but Rowling arguably innovated in keeping pace with her target audience in the style of her writing: the first Potter book may be suitable for 11-year-olds, but the last is very much YA. One golden generation at least, born around 1986, was coaeval with Harry Potter and was able to read about him more or less in “real time”. (True, Harry’s seven years at Hogwarts took ten years to appear in print, but let’s not split hairs.) An even more hardcore application of the same technique is Alan Garner’s Boneland (2012), the final book in his Alderley trilogy about siblings Colin and Susan, begun more than half a century earlier with The Weirdstone of Brisingamen (1960). Just as J. K. Rowling made her Harry Potter books grow ‘older’ with the ageing of her protagonist, so Garner too – but to a far more extreme degree – had Colin grow, into a man in late middle age, the protagonist of a book unlikely to enjoyed by anyone but adults. If you were the right age for the Weirdstone when it came out, you may have been the right age for Boneland too, 52 years later. But it’s an extreme solution.

An alternative strategy is to let the calendar run, and to move the story’s focus from one fictional generation of children to the next. For example, Susan Cooper’s The Boggart (1993) and The Boggart and the Monster (1998) told of the eponymous creature’s adventures with a family of Canadian visitors to Scotland. In her recent and very enjoyable The Boggart Fights Back (2018), however, the child protagonists of the earlier books, Emily and Jess Volnik, have grown up, and the adventure introduces a new pair of children, Allie and Jay. The antagonist of The Boggart Fights Back is a vulgar, self-praising American tycoon called Trout, who wants to build a golf resort on the Scottish coast, which makes it feel quite contemporary in ways that for the moment I can’t quite put my finger on… There is no sign that Mr Trout has presidential ambitions, so perhaps after all this book is just a little bit behind the times – but it must have been very cathartic to write!

How long does it take to write a book? - Clementine Beauvais

During school visits, different age groups have different favourite questions. Primary school children want to know what your favourite books are and how old you are. Teenagers are dying to hear how much money you make and if you're famous (or, failing that, if you know any, like, really famous authors). Adults will bully you until you tell them what you should do to get published. Kindergarteners will need to know if you have a cat, if your dress is scratchy, if it hurts your hand to draw all the covers, and they will probably ask a question that's not actually a question, in the form of 'My nan's got a fireplace'. But two questions recur across all age groups.

The first is the much-bemoaned 'Where do you get your ideas from?' which I actually do find interesting when it's connected to a particular book. The second, whose agonies are less often discussed, is -

How long does it take to write a book? 

What do you, dear colleagues, reply when you're asked that one? I always launch into the same, ten-minute-long, painstaking explanation: that writing a book isn't a linear process; that ideas might swirl for years in your head, sometimes disappearing for months at a time, and then coming back from their holiday with a new tan and interesting new things to say; that writing itself is a difficult process to measure exactly, because you might start by binge-writing 30 pages, abandon the project for a year, start again, stop, delete, start again, etc.; that you never (well, at least I never) spend whole days writing in neatly-packaged Pomodoro units that can be conveniently added up; that even after the manuscript is delivered, editing may take many more months, but then again it's not a full-time thing; that proofs, blurbs, cover checks, associated blog posts and signings are... kind of part of the writing process too; that the length of the book itself isn't a reliable indicator of how long it took, nor the quantity of illustrations; that some scenes may be written very fast and others really slowly; that much time is spent deleting, and then how do you count that time? Pieces of string, etc.

Oh the look of boredom on people's faces every time I deliver that answer. Oh the number of swallowed yawns, of glances at the clock. It's almost like their question has mutated into another: for goodness' sake, woman!!! how long can you drag an answer about how long it takes to write a book???

Once, for a change, I tried being Gradgrindingly factual about it. When I was asked "How long does it take to write a book?", I just replied: "A year and a half."
Some of the children said: "Wow."
I said, "Does that sound like a lot, or not much?"
They shrugged, and, looking like the matter interested them extremely little anyway, they said, "I dunno."

_____________________________________

Clementine Beauvais writes in French and English. She blogs here about children's literature and academia. 

A Traveller and Time - Catherine Butler

My day job is a lot of fun, sometimes. Recently I was delighted to hear that a PhD student of mine had passed her viva, having written on the subject of Spanish translations of Captain Underpants. This July, she’ll be formally given her doctorate in the echoing environs of Bristol Cathedral, where an abstract of her findings will be read aloud to the assembled congregation. I’m very proud of her.

Now, one or two of you may be thinking, “They give degrees for that?” Perhaps you are already searching for the address of the Telegraph letters page and setting your green fountain pen to caps lock. But hold on a moment! The subject isn’t as straightforward as it may first appear. Dav Pilkey’s Captain Underpants books were written by an American, and owe a lot to such distinctively American features as their elementary school setting, comic book format, celebration of gross-out comedy, and so on. Translating them into Spanish isn’t just a matter of changing the individual words, it’s a complex negotiation between cultures. What makes perfect sense in the USA may make very little in Spain. For example, in the Captain Underpants books there are plenty of jokes about how awful the school cafeteria lunches are (something that transfers well to the UK, where comics like The Beano mined a similar vein for many decades); but in Spain, where they take food seriously from a young age, the school lunches are excellent, and jokes at their expense are likely to fall flat.

What should translators do in such a situation? Should they attempt to change the text to make it more understandable to its readership – for example by changing specifically American references to equivalent Spanish ones? Or is it better to preserve the original’s American-ness, which may indeed be part of its attraction in the first place? What about puns and wordplay that don’t transfer easily to the new language? And illustrations, which may be too expensive to change? What if the Spanish simply don’t find fart jokes intrinsically hilarious? Perhaps their attitude to what children’s books are for is different, too. It’s not a simple matter.

I’ve just returned from Japan, where amongst many other pleasures I was able (through a mutual friend) to have supper with Mihoko Tanaka, the author of a book on the way that the Japanese adopted and adapted British children’s fantasy after the Second World War. I’d long since been intrigued by the presence of British children’s books in Japanese culture, from Alice on. They crop up regularly in the films of Studio Ghibli, which adapted not only Mary Norton’s classic The Borrowers (1952) as Arrietty (2010), but Joan Robinson’s rather more obscure When Marnie Was There (1967) for the studio's final film in 2014. Being an admirer of Robinson’s book I was delighted by that choice, but having encountered few people who’d even heard of it in the UK was surprised by it, too.

Tanaka’s book unravelled that mystery for me, and told me a lot more besides about the importation of the British timeslip fantasy into Japan from the 1960s onwards. The charge was led by Philippa Pearce’s Tom’s Midnight Garden (1958), a book that had a huge influence in the country. Tanaka traces both the way that it established a cultural niche for time slip fantasy in Japan, and how it was inevitably changed in the process of negotiating the culture, mental categories and of course the language of that country.

There were numerous problems. Despite being an ancient culture Japan has relatively few old buildings, and this is especially true of those in domestic use. Their habitual construction in temporary materials such as wood, along with the depredations of earthquakes and war, meant that they tended not to last as long as the stone and brick constructions of the West. The idea of slipping back through the centuries to the same old house, as so often happens in British time slips, was therefore less easy to put into practice. Besides, after the War the past was for many in Japan a painful place rather than one ripe for nostalgic exploration. The drive to modernise was at least as strong there as it was in the era of brutalist concrete architecture in the UK. Not only that, but the very different tense system of Japanese made some of the temporal transitions in the British originals hard to render effectively, while the language's tendency to shy away from congregations of abstract nouns made discussion of time theory relatively difficult to effect in a readable and elegant way.

I could go on: I find this kind of thing fascinating, personally. But for those of you who are bilingual (or even polyglottal), or who have been involved in the translation of children's books - your own or other people's - I'd be interested to hear your stories and perspectives on the difficulties that can arise when one tries to take a story out of one culture and implant it in another.

Not All Moments Are Weighted Equally - Heather Dyer

©Liz West

Time (in novels, anyway) can be condensed or drawn out for effect. Sometimes we might want to use a ‘scene summary’ in which we sum up a large expanse of space and/or time in just a couple of sentences: changing seasons on the farm, a normal day at school, a boring few days during which nothing much happens. Going into more detail when nothing much is happening would bore our readers. Words are expensive, and we need to gauge how many to invest.

Other moments are more valuable because they’re more significant in terms of plot and/or character development. They’re worth spending more words on. Occasionally, a moment that lasts less than a second in ‘real’ time, is so important that, if it was a goal, we would be watching it played out in slow motion.

Look at the famous last paragraph of James Joyce's  short story, "The Dead", and see how a few seconds during which nothing much happens outwardly, is expanded on and explored in great detail:

A few light taps upon the pane made him turn to the window. It had begun to snow again. He watched sleepily the flakes, silver and dark, falling obliquely against the lamplight. The time had come for him to set out on his journey westward. Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, on the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.

Here, the reader can feel the same incredibly complex, almost impossible-to-articulate emotion that the protagonist feels. It’s done indirectly, through showing what the character is looking at and what he’s thinking about.

But can complex emotions also be conveyed indirectly in books for children, where the characters and readers are so much less sophisticated? I think so. Here’s a moment that I’m wrestling with in my own book for 7-11 year olds. Hannah is torn between climbing aboard a magic carpet, or staying safely on her side of the window. Only one second of ‘real time’ passes:

Hannah hesitated. Ever since watching Aladdin, she had longed to ride a magic carpet. Once, she had even sat cross-legged on the oriental rug in the hall, and commanded it to take her to the Taj Mahal. But nothing had happened. Now, at last, she had her chance – but the gap between the carpet and the windowsill was just the wrong distance. Hannah could see the flagstone path below; it would be a long way to fall. 

Getting into Hannah’s head at this precise moment allowed me (and, I hope, the reader) to appreciate how torn Hannah is between security and freedom, bravery and cowardice. These, I realized, were Hannah’s ‘issues’. These issues revealed the theme of the book, and pointed me in the direction of her character development.

1. What a character is looking at can serve as a symbol or metaphor for their feelings or the situation. 
2. A character’s thoughts might recall a previous incident or another subject that throws light on the current situation. 
3. A character’s feelings are best shown by describing the sensations in their body, or by allowing the reader to feel the same emotions by showing them exactly what the character is experiencing. 

If we pause to unpick the important moments, they may reveal (to us and to our readers) the deeper themes contained within them.

Heather Dyer - children's author and Royal Literary Fund Consultant Fellow

• For enquiries about creative writing workshops for children or adults, or editorial services, go to www.heatherdyer.co.uk
• For enquiries about academic writing workshops, go to:  http://rlfconsultants.com/consultants/heather-dyer/

'On Why I’m not a Pilot'

by Wendy Meddour

Yesterday, a local reporter interviewing me at toddlers asked me the question everybody thinks:

“But you have 4 young children. When on earth do you find time to write?”

I wanted to say something profound or glamorous, like: "I have a wonderful nanny called Beatrice Lightheart who does most of the menial tasks." Or, "I share a delightful singing governess with a family called the Von Trapps."

But instead, I told the truth.

“Sleep deprivation,” I said.

Now, I'm not as impressive as Cindy's son (see the post 3 below). But I have exchanged sleep for writing. And it shows. (Well, my Mum says it does – but I have a sneaking suspicion that this is just age and I’m about as good as I’ll get). But it also shows in my work: my first ever book is full of broken nights: sleep walking, night-feeds, yawns, siestas and general, unadulterated exhaustion . . .

(Disclaimer: Any apparent publicity about Wendy's

debut novel - due out on Feb 2nd - is solely the result

of her severely disrupted sleep pattern.)

I smiled at the reporter and rubbed my eyes. “Lack of sleep helps the creative flow,” I said.

The reporter looked rather unconvinced as a small person threw a dinosaur in my coffee. (The small person was of course mine).

Now, I know that sleep deprivation isn’t completely advised. In fact, it’s decidedly not. (I believe it accounts for quite a lot of health-related conditions – depression, anxiety, stinted tissue repair, that sort of thing). And I wouldn’t exactly recommend it. But if you’re doing it anyway, (with 4 young children, it’s kind of a ‘life-style’ choice), then isn’t it best to put it to good use?

My best-friend (or am I too old for those?) is married to a pilot, and she tells me that I’m writing "in the Window of my Circadian Low." Isn't that wonderful? It makes my nocturnal scribbling sound so grand. And wait, it gets better!

If a pilot has to report to their place of work before 6am (disturbing the rhythm of their natural body clock), then they have been scheduled in a W.O.C.L .

And if they are scheduled in a W.O.C.L twice in a row, then they are not fit for duty (F.F.D). A double W.O.C.L , which I will refer to as a ‘wockle’ from here on – (poetic licence and all that), results in 36 hours off! Yes! 36 HOURS OFF!

That is why I’m a writer, and not a pilot. (Well, that and the whole ‘flying license’ and ‘skill’ thing). I would NEVER be fit for duty because I am constantly writing in my ‘wockle'. Or should that be 'wockling'. Not once. Not twice. But pretty much every night.

There’s only thing that really scares me. What if wockling is what makes me a writer? A good night’s sleep could mean the end of my budding writing career!

That’s why I need to ask you all one question. Please be honest. I really need to know....

Can a writer write well if they’re completely FIT FOR DUTY?

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