The words on the page — somewhere (Anne Rooney)

Last month I blogged about the untidiness/tidiness of writers' work spaces; this time it gets personal, with a peek inside some notebooks and drafts. I'm still on the side of messy, no matter how hard I try. But there are people who are even messier, which I find encouraging.





Not my role model. Lewis Carroll even ruled margins in his notebooks and then kept within them. Freak.

 

Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath. So efficient that he seems to have written it in the G section of his address book. Must have had an extensive address book, as it's not a short novel.

George Orwell, Nineteen Eight-Four. Pretty messy.

















But Orwell isn't a patch on Flaubert. He wins, hands down for L'Education, as he appears to have crossed the whole thing out anyway.

Karl Marx gets a special mention as he left a few words in tact.




It's not just the manuscript. You get a second chance to be messy when you mark up the pages (or used to; Adobe Acrobat doesn't offer quite the same potential for scribble and scrawl).





This is James Joyce. Bet his editor was pleased. Not.


 







Few of us have marked-up, handwritten manuscripts of our books these days, which is a sad loss for future scholars. But must of us have notebooks at least. Where do yours fall on the spectrum from Carroll to Flaubert/Marx?

Anne Rooney
Out soon, Arcturus, April 2019:

What is it with Authors and Stationery? by Jo Franklin

It is a truth universally acknowledged that authors are totally obsessed with stationery. I mean seriously, hopelessly, dangerously obsessed.

Notebooks and pens are the tools or our trade. Even with computers, tablets and phones, authors often need a piece of paper to scribble something down on. An overheard conversation on the bus. A curious conjunction of a piece of litter and a park railing. A cute dog watching the world go by from a seventh floor window. Writers are curious and observant and need to capture those observations before they vanish into the ether. So every author carries a notebook around with them.

My favourite handbag notebooks are like a passport and come from Muji. They are slim and easily slip into my bag. I use them to make notes if I go to a seminar, scribble plot points that come to me as the tram hurtles round the bend towards the next station or even to write the latest list of items I desperately need from Rymans.

I also try and keep a notebook for each project I'm working on. These are the well recognised hardback notebooks made by Moleskine or Leuchtturm. I use the A5 size as they are big enough to fit lots of words on the page but not to big to be intimidating. An empty page can be very frightening for an author. The larger the page, the more words are required to fill it, so in most cases I stick with A5 maximum.

My project notebooks often don't get filled to the end. I begin religiously making notes in the way that I think proper authors do - yep, seven books in, I still have to convince myself daily that I am as much a proper author as Stephen King or Michael Morpurgo. Notes on character, notes on setting, research notes. To be honest, I rarely go back to them. But like writing down revision notes, the act of putting pen to paper ensures that the information seeps into my brain in some form of other, ready to reappear in a different form at a later point.  As my project progresses from being a bundle of ideas to an actual piece of work, I forget about my smart hardback book and move onto something cheaper.

I use a disposable notebook to write my first drafts. I always write long hand in the first instance and once I get going, my thoughts tumble out of the tip of my pain at great, illegible speed. I cross things out, leave sentences hanging unfinished and write the same thought six different ways at times. I find a spiral bound A5 notebook is best for this phase of writing. For some reason, I like the continental grid style so I tend to buy these notebooks from Lidl. The paper is good quality but the books inexpensive (99p) and I get through about twenty a year. As soon as I have typed up today's chapter, I rip the pages out so that I have a blank page ready to write on the next day.

Larger format notebooks feature in my life too. I use them when I want to make BIG plans. I use BIG writing and draw scruffy pictures that could be buildings or people or arrows or anything or maybe nothing. I think visually even though I have no skill as an artist. Expressing myself in big writing seems to unleash my creativity when an idea is still tiny and new.

My passion for stationery, led me to set up a website www.paperspenspoets.co.uk with Anita Loughrey where we explore the relationship between writers and their stationery. Everyone has their own quirks and preferences and the articles make fascinating reading.

Do you have a notebook obsession? Which brand? Format?  Or is colour your thing?

My name is Jo Franklin and I am a stationery addict.

THAT NOTEBOOK AND POCKET THING by Penny Dolan

As I type, there’s news of a certain department store’s going gender neutral with its children’s clothing display, together with a buzz about clothing companies that offer gender free clothes for adults.  

As a beloved work colleague used to say, “What’s not to like?”   

Clothes are something where it's good to have choice. 

For example, from what I’ve seen on social media, over the last while, children’s authors and illustrators have begun to really Dress Up for public appearances, almost cos-playing characters from their own books, which is often incredibly cute and lovely and, most importantly, very photogenic. 

Lots of fun too, although I do, slightly, worry that the Publicity Department's passion for authors in costumes could suggest that the characters within the pages aren’t quite interesting enough anymore  but that may just be picky me.

However, when a writer’s not Busy Appearing, other rules come into play. One of the delights of ordinary life and free-lance working is that you can wear what you want, even until it is threadbare. (Hint: you may well have to.)  

I think that genderless clothes make great work clothes. 

Who doesn’t want garments that give you room to move, to reach and do things? Who doesn’t want colours that are subtle and easy to wear, made in fabrics that feel good but need minimal attention? Clothes that help you do what you need to do, where ink and paint won't do damage  and you can give your mind to your work?? Nobody!  

(Especially if you can also wear that daintily drifting tutu, if you choose to?)

 Unfortunately, this leads me to my great gripe:

THE CASE OF THE MISSING POCKETS!

Why oh why are the pockets in many women’s clothes so tiny? Why are they no use for anything but the minutest of notebooks, if that? And that’s assuming the pockets are not vestigial flaps, there for the look of it?  Finding useless pockets in women’s clothing makes me feel very un-empowered.

Here - and please don’t mutter any Freudian interpretations at this point - is my version of what life is like when you try using women-sized-'n-styled pockets.

You, the quiet writer, are out among people in an everyday kind of way. You have a jacket on. You spot some interesting thing you really want to note down at that moment, especially if your memory is like mine. Immediately, if you are wearing most women’s jackets,  you have to struggle in a lopsided way to drag your notebook out of a tight fit in the one possible pocket where you’d could have crammed it.

Unfortunately, this action  

a) alerts everyone around you to your cunning note-book intentions when you’d prefer to be secret and subtle. So you can’t write now. Sad face.

and/or

b) invites interested questions to which you must think up creative answers that drive that once-useful observation right out of your head, and maybe listen to  someone’s idea for a best selling book . . etc etc. Polite face.

and/or

c) risks making you seem incredibly pose-y, which is hugely awkward for all concerned and puts off any new friends. Or relations. Totally embarrassed face.

I should add that you, dear woman writer, may also have struggled to find your pen in another miniature pocket, and to find your glasses so you can manage the teeny-tiny handwriting that will fit the teeny-weeny pages of that neat little girly pocket notebook.  Grrrr.

My gripe is that clothes for men usually have plenty of good-sized pockets that make carrying notebooks an easy task.  Any “writer” character on screen – Larry Durrell, for example -  can, almost in a single practiced move, whip a notebook out of a well-worn jacket pocket and jot down a few golden observations. 

Heavens, a whole stationary company was founded, and flourishes, on this notebook-to-hand principle.

 

“What About A Handbag?” comes a Lady-Bracknell kind of cry.

Alas, even then, gender difference comes up for the woman writer. 

What kind of bag will it be? 

Probably not one big enough for a an infant v. manuscript swap. 

For the most part, in magazines,  women can clutch handle-less handbags that hold keys, card, mascara and tissues and that's all. They can wield rigid royalty-approved slabs - or they can carry handbags so voluminous one has no chance of finding a notebook without half-climbing inside among the other needful items and being pulled back out by the ankles. A handbag is not the same as a good pocket at the hip.

There’s that whole “how do you carry the bag?” issue too. The best writer’s bags, in my opinion, are hands free; designwise, they nudge towards school bags and rucksacks and man-bags. 

Once you have un-flung the bag from your weary shoulders, found a chair or floor to rest the sack upon, opened up the sections and discovered the hidden interior pocket where your notebook was hidden all this time, such bags may be excellent items.

 Yet, by now, that elusive, critical note-taking moment – the one I originally mentioned - has passed on  . . .

. . . And an empty page can be what you get when your clothes don’t have good note-book-sized pockets.

Obviously, one can extract a slim mobile phone and tap away circumspectly, or mutter notes into it endearingly along with traffic noise, but, to me, that’s not the same thing as being able to use a notebook. 

Writing by hand is something that I enjoy and value - as are doodling, scribbling, sketching, mind-mapping and all sorts of other pre-writing activities - and for those you need good-sized notebooks, and such notebooks therefore need really good-sized pockets, whatever and whether your gender. Hope some clothes designers and shops and stores are reading this post. 

Listen, dear people, big pockets are great. They work.  Please may we have some? Okay?

Thanks for sitting here with today’s grumble. I feel a bit less cross now, though I suspect some of you may have no idea what I’m going on about at all . . . 

By the way, I did think about starting a Campaign for Really Amazing Pockets, but wasn’t sure the acronym worked in the way I wanted. 

Penny Dolan

SCHOOL'S OUT! Or is it . . . ? by Anna Wilson

In January I wrote about the joys of giving children notebooks and letting them run riot with their story ideas. Since then I have met many teachers and parents who have done just this. They have told me how wonderful it is to see this space being used. The freedom to write or draw whatever the child wants has fed into stories she or he has often then gone on to polish in class in structured writing time. (This has not, of course, always been a direct result of my post – many teachers and parents were already giving their children the chance to explore their writing in this way.)

I would not be blogging about this again, were it not for something I witnessed on a long train journey last week; something which had me thinking again about how constraining we can be in our approach to our children’s education and the damage that can be done when pleasure is forsaken in favour of ticking boxes and getting things ‘right’. And, perhaps more importantly, when this approach leaks into home life.

A mum got on the train with her two small daughters, whom I guessed to be about five and six, and her son, who, I thought, looked about eight. They settled into their seats and the mother brought out some pens and pencils, paper and notebooks.

The little girls immediately clamoured, ‘I want my notebook!’ ‘I am going to write you a story!’

How lovely! I thought. What a great way to spend a few hours on the train.

‘Yes,’ said the mother. ‘You each have twenty minutes to write a beautiful story, and then I will read it and check it. Now – remember I want to see “wow” words, good punctuation, proper spelling, neat handwriting and lots of interesting verbs and adjectives—’

The boy groaned loudly (or was it me?) and put his head in his hands. ‘I don’t WANT to write a story!’ he complained. ‘I don’t like writing stories and I am no good at them.’

His mother placated him with promises of chocolate biscuits if he would only ‘be good like the girls and write for twenty minutes without making a fuss’. His sisters were indeed already scribbling away and reading aloud what they had written, eager to share it with their mother. She praised them and told them to keep going for the full twenty minutes.

What is it with this twenty minutes thing? I thought. Maybe she is desperate for a bit of peace and quiet. Don’t judge! You were in this situation not so long ago yourself: long train journeys with young children are tiresome and they have to have things to do otherwise you go crazy and so do they.

The boy then handed over his story. His mother, glancing at it, said, ‘Well, that’s not very interesting, is it? You haven’t used good connectives, there are no “wow” words, your handwriting is messy and you just haven’t made an effort.’

Pretty harsh, I thought.

Then came the killer blow.

‘You really have got to start making an effort with your writing, you know,’ the mother went on. ‘Next year you will have to write for twenty minutes and put all these things into your stories. You have been on holiday for a week already and you have done no writing. You must promise you’ll concentrate on this for another twenty minutes, or you will be no good at this next year.’

I must confess that, at the time, I wanted to lean across and engage the boy in conversation. I wanted to ask him if he liked reading and, if so, what kind of stories did he like best? What about his favourite films? I wanted to get him chatting about his likes and dislikes and encourage him to scribble them down, to use this precious ‘writing time’ as a chance to let his brain go wild. I wanted to tell him that it was OK to do that, and that afterwards he could go back over his story and concentrate on the connectives and the punctuation and the neat handwriting. I wanted to say that all those things his mother was talking about were indeed important, but that perhaps the reason he hated writing so much was that he was struggling with remembering the rules; that if he could forget the rules to start with, he would then perhaps find he loved writing stories, and that he had piles and piles of them to tell. I might perhaps have added that, as a published writer, I would be paralysed if I had to write a clean first draft from the off which obeyed all the rules of Standard English . . . 

Of course I didn’t. I did not want to upset his mother – after all, it was none of my business. In any case, on reflection, it was not her behaviour with her children that upset me the most, rather the fact that she clearly felt anxious that her son was not up to scratch with his English. Indeed, she was so anxious that he improve that she was insisting he work on it over the summer holidays, and work on it in the exact same way he is required to at school. She was armed to the hilt with educational jargon and was turning this terrifying arsenal on her weary son.

I was an editor before I was fortunate enough to develop my career as a writer. I know as well as anyone the importance of good grammar and correct punctuation. I appreciate clean, clear writing and a well-structured plot. I know good dialogue when I see it. My own children will roll their eyes and tell you that I am the first person to howl at the misuse of the apostrophe on a street sign or restaurant menu. Of course I can see why we have to teach these things and why parents should care about their children’s level of competence in English.

However, it makes me extremely upset that an obsession with such technicalities has the potential to wreck a child’s love of their own language. When you are as young as that little lad, creative writing should be fun, shouldn’t it? Leaving aside the dubious value in making your child work over the summer holidays in such a joyless way, I found it heartbreaking that the mother seemed not to see the potential for fun in giving her son a notebook and letting him run riot with his imagination before giving him guidance and advice on how to hone his ideas. Even more heartbreaking, though, was the thought of how anxious the woman seemed to feel about her son attaining certain targets in the academic year to come. She cannot be alone in feeling this.

I only hope that, come September, her son will find himself fortunate to have one of the many inspirational teachers we have in this country who are still in love enough with their subject to occasionally throw out the rulebook and teach from the heart instead.

www.annawilson.co.uk

The Seven Stages Of A Book - Lari Don

A book goes through many different stages as it travels from the writer’s mind to the reader’s mind, and the writer’s relationship with the book changes at each stage.

This week, I’ve experienced one of the major shifts in my relationship with a book: when it goes from being something I have the power to change, and becomes something I can no longer change, but must now start to promote. And I think I find this shift the most terrifying of all.

But looking up at my shelves, some with only a few sheets of scribbled paper, and some creaking with heaps of notebooks and piles of manuscripts, I realise that I have a book at almost every stage here in my study.

When I’m writing, I go through seven stages of a book, which may be conveniently Shakespearean, but does seem to accurately represent my writing process. I wonder if other writers recognise these stages?

# 1 The thrilling moment when the idea for a book emerges, which may be the only moment the book is ever entirely perfect!

# 2 Thinking and scribbling and considering: ‘what is this story about?’, ‘what am I trying to find out?’, ‘who are my characters?’, ‘what are the big questions?’, ‘what happens next?’ ‘how will I ever defeat the baddie?’ This bit is incredibly exciting, filled with possibilities.

the scribbling stage

# 3 Actually sitting down and writing it. Finding the story and putting it into words. For me this usually involves lots of self-imposed deadlines, late nights and ignoring my family. I find this bit exciting too. (I realise, writing the stages down like this, that I find every stage of writing a book exciting. I suppose that’s why I’m a writer…)

# 4 Turning the story into a manuscript. My first and most personal edit - lots of reading out loud, and cutting the word count by massive slashing and burning. This stage is perhaps less heart-thumpingly exciting but it is very satisfying.

 # 5 The real editing, with an actual editor. This stage can be emotionally draining, but by this time I can also see the original idea turning into a book that other people can read. Which is, of course, quite exciting!

the proofreading stage

 
# 6 Proofreading of the layouts. I did this last week, for my next novel Mind Blind. This stage is both exciting and chillingly terrifying. Any silly little mistakes I miss here will be printed in real books to be read by real readers. Which is a great incentive to keep your eyes wide open and focussed as you proofread!

# 7 Finally, the shift I’ve experienced this week: the shift from the writer creating a story to the writer promoting a book. I’ve stopped meeting new characters, and started having meetings with marketing people. I’ve stopped writing the story and started looking for extracts of the story I can read at book festivals, I’ve stopped thinking about chapter length and started thinking about ‘content’ for websites.

Can you tell I find this final stage a little less exciting? But really, this should be the most exciting shift of all. This is the bit where I look ahead to the story being read by readers, and that is, after all, what really excited me right at the start when I had the original idea, which got me scribbling, which got me writing, then editing…

Anyway, even if I will spend the next few months promoting this teen thriller, I’ve also just had another idea. So I’m starting a new relationship, with a new story and some new questions and new characters, and perhaps that relationship will go all the way too…

Lari Don is the award-winning author of 20 books for all ages, including a teen thriller, fantasy novels for 8 – 12s, picture books, retellings of traditional tales and novellas for reluctant readers. 

Lari’s website 

Lari’s own blog

Lari on Twitter

Lari on Facebook

Space to be Me - Anna Wilson

A couple of weeks ago, I was chatting with a friend about how to encourage children to write creatively. The topic came up because she was concerned that her seven-year-old son had been put off writing stories at school.

Her SEVEN-YEAR OLD son . . .

I was pretty horrified to hear her say this, not only because at the tender age of seven a child is coming home and declaring that “English is boring” and “I hate writing stories”, but also because I have known this child since he was a baby, and the minute he could string a couple of words together he was telling stories. He has the gift of the gab and a way with words that has always astonished me. At three years old he was already telling long and involved stories which kept me hanging on his every word, wondering what on earth he would come up with next, and making me laugh a lot along the way. So when I heard that this child no longer enjoyed storytelling, I had to ask why.

“He finds it paralyzing to have to remember where to put the finger spaces, full stops and commas,” my friend said. “And he hates the fact that joined-up writing is more highly prized than the content of the story he wants to tell. By the time he has struggled through following all the rules, he has forgotten what he wanted to write in the first place or has lost interest altogether.”

Of course he has!

“Take him to Paperchase, buy him a notebook of his choice and a really nice pen or pencil and tell him, ‘This is your own private writer’s book. It's your space to be you! You can write exactly what you like in it, draw pictures, whatever. I promise no one will correct your spelling or tell you to join up your handwriting or argue over commas. Just go for it.’ And tell him it's what I do and that I wish him good luck with his writing!”

A couple of days later I received the following email, which my friend has agreed I can share with you. I felt a little tearful when I read it.

“Just wanted to say that I gave both my sons a notebook, inspired by what you had said about writing. They both used to write lots of stories, but I realized that they hadn't for a while and that X in particular had been getting upset about how hard he found joined-up writing. When I said to him that he could write whatever he wanted in it, and he didn't have to write neatly or properly he literally danced round the room! He did his disco moves in excitement! That night he wrote two stories, one entitled "My Mum is growing..... round the middle", about a Mum who got too fat (she got obsessed with special offers) and exploded in the Prime Minister's house. The other was about an alien who visited two boys in class to help them with their hard Maths questions, then they let him stay and took him round school. It was quite a revelation, so thanks for the lovely idea. You are now a superhero in the eyes of my 7-year-old nutter!!”

When I asked if I could use this email as the basis for my next blog post, my friend replied:

“Quote away! I have never seen a little boy so chuffed! He did a new disco move as he said "no capital letters" one disco move, "no joined up writing" another disco move "no full stops" another disco move, it was hilarious! Apparently finger spaces are worth having though. He was so excited he told his dad all about it when he got home, saying, ‘It's amazing Daddy! I can write what I like and it doesn't matter if it's messy etc.’ Thanks for inspiring me!”

I feel as though these emails should be included in a manifesto of some kind . . .

Hurrah for notebooks and the space to be me! (And as for that story about the Mum who was obsessed with special offers, I might just ask if I can "borrow" that . . . )

Find me on the web at http://www.annawilson.co.uk

Writing Britain - Dianne Hofmeyr

What is landscape to a writer? Waterland, Wuthering Heights, Far From the Madding Crowd are novels I read a long time ago without ever visiting the terrain and yet the landscape seeped into my consciousness… strong, powerful… never to be forgotten.  If we start with books read from childhood, the list might go on forever of experiencing a landscape for the first time through the eyes of a writer. And this is what makes the new exhibition at the British Library: Writing Britain – Wasteland to Wonderland, so fascinating.

Anyone who is slightly voyeuristic (what writers aren’t?) will find the exhibition utterly intriguing.  Access to so many writers’ journals, diaries, notes, sketches, edits, proofs and musings, is the height of voyeurism. In the dimly lit quiet rooms it’s like being a ghost peering over the writer’s shoulder.

Fortify yourself. The exhibition is huge. But as writers or lovers of books, you’ll be richly rewarded. It moves from rural dreams, to the satanic mills of industry and from wild places to water lands, the city and places beyond the city to show how stories are shaped not just by the physical but the imagined physical. If you have an idea of the extent of the exhibition beforehand, you can set the pace. A break in the middle for lunch or coffee is a good option. The dim lighting, lack of bright visuals and... odd to say as a writer – the predominance of text and need to be up close to each glass case to read the words, even the stance of reading standing upright, make it tiring. But the rewards are there.

As I experienced the swirls and loops and fluid flow of ink from Wordsworth's pen, Bronté’s neat and spidery hand, Katherine Mansfield’s firm script in her Suburban Fairy tale, Angela Carter’s italic in her manuscript for Wise Children, the neat child-like hand of Lewis Carroll in his Alice’s Adventure Underground and the fat cursive letters of Virginia Woolf writing her newspaper as a child – it occurred to me that I’m becoming unused to deciphering and reading real handwriting. Will our children’s children lose this skill entirely?

But it’s not just the script and inkblots that makes this all so personal. It’s the very true feeling of knowing how the writer has anguished and altered the words – drawings by John Betjeman overlaid with words, Thomas Hardy’s handwritten insertions on the proof copy of Far from the Madding Crowd, JK Rowling corrections to Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone. And what must come as comforting to any writer the huge red crossings-out of James Joyce on a handwritten page of Ulysses where the amount of red far outweighs the written word.

It’s a heady mix. Interviews with writers talking about landscape, recordings of writers reading their work, poems of Sylvia Plath, Fay Godwin’s haunting photographs illustrating the moorlands Ted Hughes describes, Wordsworth writing of his sister Dorothy on their walks, ‘She gave me eyes. She gave me ears.’ The Waterlands of Swift and the Wessex of Hardy are conjured up alongside the Willesden of Zadie Smith and the bleak visions of modern urban life as seen in the stark opening lines of J.G. Ballard’s Crash:

Vaughan died yesterday in his last car-crash.

It’s an exhibition that needs revisiting and each time I’m sure a new hidden gem will emerge.

What for me was one of the most moving exhibits was Liz Matthew’s 17 metre concertina book, Thames to Dunkirk, with the names of the Little Boats that went across to Dunkirk written into the water of the Thames combined below the with the words from Virginia Woolf’s The Waves in calligraphy done with a piece of Thames’ driftwood. It seemed to show not just the spirit of those men in the small boats but also the spirit of writers who dare. 

What writer's landscape has affected you most?

www.diannehofmeyr.com