This won’t buy baby a new dress

What do you do with all the bits and pieces that you write on random scraps of paper?
Yesterday, I was trying to bring some order to my study/spare room, as you couldn’t see the bed for the file paper, folders, teaching plans, half-finished novels and also bits and pieces that various relatives had been clearing out of their homes this summer.
I will give you a few examples of the aforementioned scribblings and sundry items:

• “Caramels wrapped in paper – six for penny and if you only halfpenny, you only got three”
• "She had a bad heart and she made ice-cream" (both of these are from conversations with Mum about the wee shop she remembers as a child)
• “The Farm Worker on the train”. This was a memory of a random conversation I had while on a train from Leeds to Somewhere Else while a student. I tried to make this conversation into the beginning of a thriller a few years ago but it didn’t work.
• A book review of Binocular Vision by Edith Pearlman which I had clipped from a religious magazine. I keep meaning to order Binocular Vision from Amazon but haven’t got around to it.
• Train timetables
• Lists of things that I may or may not have done (because I’ve just written ‘reply to e-mail’ etc with no date)
• Lists of blogs and books that people recommended that I meant to order or look up and didn’t (see Edith Pearlman, above J)
• Notes from travelling around Ireland with my brother this summer which I keep thinking will make a good feature. However, each time I try to type them up into something breezy and factual (come to think of it, it was very breezy this summer, especially in Ramore Head, Portrush), it just ends up as a short story.
• A request from a Christian magazine to their readers for an article on Christmas presents

I suppose what this really comes down to is focus. Yes, I could go ahead and order Edith Pearlman and read all the blogs and books people have recommended. I could start yet another short story or novel based on one of the random scribblings.
However, as my mother would say, this won’t buy baby a new dress. (Not that there is a baby needing a dress just at the moment but you get my drift).

So now comes the tough part. Which blog do I choose to read regularly? Which book do I order from Amazon? Which random snippet do I choose for the beginning of the next novel or short story?

I’ll get back to you on that one.

ends/24.09.15

Catherine Gaskin

This week, a friend introduced me to an Irish-Australian historical novelist called Catherine Gaskin, who died in 2009. I had never heard of Catherine Gaskin but I Googled her and, interested in what I read about her life and work, I bought one of her most famous novels, Sara Dane, and downloaded it to my Kindle.
Sara Dane is about a young woman sentenced to transportation to Botany Bay for theft, really all owing to a broken romance and a misunderstanding (and having no-one to speak up for her).
I’m about half way through, and you know, Sara Dane has stood the test of time rather well. It’s excellently researched (especially the details of the ghastly transportation ship), all done in an age before writers had access to the internet. Some of the language is beautiful, particularly the passages describing the homestead Sara and her husband build, and the story moves at a cracking pace.
Not all of the story will ‘chime’ with modern readers. I found the main character of Sara Dane a bit cold but you would be, if you had to survive the horrors of a transportation ship on your wits alone. However, given that it was first published in 1955, there is enough ‘grit’ and action to appeal to those of us used to a diet of hard-nosed US crime fiction.
It’s funny, as soon as I mentioned Catherine Gaskin to my aunt, she said that she used to read all her books. This got me thinking about fashions in literature: how writers such as Catherine Gaskin, Elizabeth Goudge and Monica Dickens (you can possibly think of many other examples) have fallen out of favour now but were once in every bookshop in the land.
Catherine Gaskin was also an historical novelist and there are really two layers you are considering when you read historical novelists from a few decades back: the historical period in which their story is set but also the time in which that novelist was writing (in this case, the 1950s). So, for example, Catherine Gaskin would have had to leave the bedroom scenes at the bedroom door because she was writing in a much less liberal climate.
And perhaps this is one of the reasons novelists do fall out of favour: ‘fashions’, tastes and attitudes change and no novelist has a crystal ball and can only write about what they feel and experience at that particular moment in time.
Catherine Gaskin is also listed in Wikipedia as a ‘romance novelist’ and even though that is possibly a fair assumption, I wonder how the term ‘romance’ is often used to downgrade and dismiss women writers (a little like the term ‘chick lit’ today).
And that’s possibly a debate for another day…

ends

Letting Go

I've just realised that it's almost two years since I have published anything on my blog. The fact that I had titled my last post (in October 2013, for heaven's sake) 'Excuses, Excuses' proved to be oddly prophetic.
A lot has happened since then - the demands of juggling two part-time jobs (both of which I've loved) has meant that writing blogs (and writing in general) has tended to get fitted in around the edges. I've also been lucky enough to get some fiction published in a women's magazine, which I'm delighted about.
The Sound of the Sea did eventually get finished and it wasn't until I had some free time this summer (oh, bliss!) that I felt ready to knock it into shape to send to a publisher, though I want to tinker with it some more.
Sometimes letting go of a novel is the hardest part. You know it's not perfect, you know you want to do more to it, yet you know the longer you hold onto it, the more you will start 'thread pulling'. You pull one little thread ("perhaps I should move that scene to an earlier chapter?") and the whole darned thing unravels.
So you know what I did instead? I took an earlier novel and knocked that one into shape instead. The Girl in the Farmhouse just needed a good edit but I had originally written it as an experiment - a short story that kept getting longer and longer and I was never very sure if it was strong enough to stand up on its own two feet.
And you know what? Time had sharpened my editing skills and I was suddenly transported back to the heart of the story, to the original 'magic' that made me keep writing in the first place. I fell in love with the story all over again. I edited and 'developed' the story from the heart and then sent The Girl in the Farmhouse off to a publisher (before I could change my mind and start pulling any of those darned threads).
It's hard, letting go of your babies, wondering if they'll be all right in the big wide world on their own. Now all I have to do is wait...
ends

Excuses, excuses

I spent a glorious week in September at a writer's retreat. I'd never done this before and wasn't sure I would last a day, never mind a week, with just other writers and my fledging novel for company. As it was, I needn't have worried as the week flew by in a flurry of new friends, lots of laughs and 20,000 words added to The Sound of the Sea.
However, I've written virtually nothing on the novel ever since, due to the pressure of the day job and a brand new term's teaching. However, I know these are only excuses. There are two things stopping me writing.
1) I wrote some quite dark passages while I was on the writer's retreat, involving tough 'stuff' that happens to my main character. This was fine in the cosy atmosphere of the retreat but having come back to daily life again, I find that I don't want to finish writing these dark passages and I just want to get to the 'fun' bits, particularly after a tough day at work.
2) I already have, to date, three and a half other unpublished novels (the half is a whole other story) under my belt. Two of these have already done the rounds of literary agents but no avail. One was read by a publisher but rejected. The lily-livered part of me is thinking: why do I want to continue writing yet another unpublished novel?
And yet (there always is an 'and yet' for writers). If I could muster just one tenth of the enthusiasm with which I started writing all these novels, I would have the first draft of The Sound of the Sea finished in a trice.
So maybe it's time to start to 'fool' myself into falling in love with the novel again. I know it's only because I've got to the saggy middle part of the novel, like a cake that has failed to rise in the middle. Maybe I'll start this week by making the following resolutions:
*to write for 10 minutes a day for five days a week
*to write some more fun bits if the dark stuff makes me feel like I'm cloaked in Proustian misery.
ends

'Honesty' of the First Draft

The rest of life has intervened over the last few weeks. The Sound of the Sea has been put to one side for the moment, in favour of the day job and trying to get a few more short stories off for magazines. I was also at an excellent summer writing school, which, as always, provided much food for thought.

On a more populist note, I was watching the Jack Reacher film, an adaptation of one of Lee Child’s novels starring Tom Cruise as Child’s Lone Wolf type hero. What interested me was the interview with Child afterwards, where he talked about the ‘honesty’ of the first draft. And how, when an editor says to him: “Well, it would make more sense if X came before Y”, he argues that things aren’t perfect in real life so why should they be perfect on the page? (I’m paraphrasing here. It was a Saturday night with friends and I wasn’t sitting there taking Teeline shorthand notes).

I’ve been thinking about Child’s remarks a lot lately. The current trend in writing (in creative writing handbooks etc) seems to favour endless re-drafting and editing, moving things around, ditching characters who aren’t working to say nothing of the ruthless cutting of the adverbs (a debate for another blog post, to be sure).

Certainly, I re-draft and edit a lot, especially for the magazine short stories, where every word has to work hard. However, I’m wondering how much of this endless re-drafting and editing is tied in with the advent of the PC? I remember typing up stories on a Rexel electric typewriter in the early 1990s and re-drafting was something you had to do by hand so you had to think very carefully before you started typing, as any changes had to be done with Tippex papers or simply starting all over again.

I wonder too what effect going back to a typewriter (not that I ever would - how I bless electronic “cut and paste”) would have. Would it make me think more analytically about my story and characters before plunging  in?

ends

The siren call of the past

The sunny summer weather has meant a few trips to the seaside. Having got The Apple House (the dodgy first novel) into a much more reasonable shape, I've spent a little time working on the latest novel, The Sound of the Sea, trying to use the aforementioned seaside trips to bring a little colour and life into the story.
The Sound of the Sea has two sections: 'past' and 'present' and the narrative jumps between the two. Well, I hope it doesn't jump, I hope it floats seamlessly, though that's possibly a question for another blog post.
I've just finished reading two novels with 'past' and 'present' sections. However, as I read, I find that one section - usually the 'past' - is more interesting than the present.
I'm also finding this as I write the 'past' sections of The Sound of the Sea. These sections seem more alive and to have more resonance than the 'present' sections. Perhaps that's because the landscape of the past (both physical and emotional) is partly based on my own childhood so they seem very easy to write.
However, the 'present' sections feel a bit clunky - somewhere between a bad chick lit novel and a diary entry after a trying day at work. Paradoxically, I feel this is because the character in the 'present' is too close to me.
So, I'm going to try the following. Now that the main character, Clare, finally has a sense of humour, I'm going to try to give her things that are as unlike myself as possible. I'm going to make her a passionate cook and give her a fractured family and a dodgy husband, who may or may not be all he seems.
I'm also going to give her stuff (that's the literary technical term!) to do, so she doesn't just float around, mooning about the past.
So maybe it's OK to have the 'past' section stronger than the 'present', as long as the balance evens itself out in the end.
ends

Continuity Clipboard

I think that 'overhauling' a novel draft is more a case of trying to make sure that the continuity is consistent. I've spent a few  of my 'writing sessions' this week on The Apple House, the dodgy first novel. Some of these sessions were spent tinkering with an earlier draft, when I had actually made more changes in a later draft, which, because I had forgotten to label said draft correctly, I forgot about.
But I was thinking about once being on a film set and there was a continuity woman with a clipboard, meticulously noting every minor detail so that nothing would jar with the viewer in the final film. I realised, as I noted gaps in time sequences, scenes which were too short, or narrative points of view which just weren't necessary, that when it comes to novels, sometimes it is as simple as getting the 'continuity' right.
Can a short, flimsy chapter be moved to be part of a longer chapter, so that everything feels less 'jerky'? Can I jettison one flimsy narrative point of view, knowing that the story will still be complete without it (and the reader won't get bored reading the same thing twice?). Can a 'passive' scene be replaced by some short, snappy dialogue, to liven things up a bit, so that the poor old reader doesn't fall asleep?
Of course, overhauling a novel draft (particularly one you haven't looked at for a long time) requires a level or organisation that sometimes feels at odds with creativity. It also requires a 'chunk' of time which I don't always have.
So, I'm going to try to keep a note of what page number I'm on, what still needs done and tick off what I've done, so when I next pick up the threads of The Apple House, I'll know exactly where I am.
In theory anyway...