Remember, remember.

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This week’s blog is later than usual due to the absolute lack of internet at The Hurst in Shropshire. It was a great week full of workshops and advice from the lovely Linda Newbery and Celia Rees around the creation of YA fiction. One of the great bonuses was the opportunity to have work read and a tutorial from each of these successful writers.

I had my slot with Linda early on – she was as encouraging and helpful as I expected, and has helped me tighten up the beginning of my Scoresby story. It was much appreciated. The chance to ask for Celia’s expertise came on Friday. Truth told, I was a little anxious about this: she had been quite forthright in her opinions all week and I suspected sh.

Nonetheless, I asked her to give my structure the once over – and she was kind enough to offer to read an extract too. I know from my feedback from Ellen Renner some years ago that honest advice is much more useful than cosy niceness. It might be pleasant to be reassured how good your work is – but it won’t advance your understanding much.

So I went and I listened and I learnt: curiously I was more interested in the things she saw needed changing than praise (though that was relished). The stand-out piece of advice, the rocket that soared over the whole bonfire of pertinent observations was:

Don’t get hung up on the ordinary stuff.

Now the immediate context was the overlong first section of my book. Celia explained that although competently written, elements of this detracted from the true story and should go. They were relatively pedestrian and it was time to murder a few darlings.

But there was more to this. Throughout the week, it became clear that quite a few of us often wrote what we felt we ought to, rather than what truly excited us. When we babbled on about our enthusiasms, or better still, wrote using them, our work came alive. So why on earth weren’t we using our true voices?

So the message I’ve taken, burnt into my understanding like the trail of a sparkler, is that mining the resources inside myself will develop who I am as a writer. I’ve never been what you might call ‘normal’, and it’s always ended in tears when I’ve tried to be. Let others write realistic contemporary urban: I’ll stick to my own variety of weirdness.

Passing it on

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I’ve been away to Turkey on an activities holiday. It’s one way of counteracting that dreadful complaint ‘writer’s bottom’ and a good way of meeting new people. During introductions,  it usually got round to what you do for a living.  I decided to be bold and admit I write for children. The response was gratifying – it has to be said this was the middle classes at play – people were interested.

In particular, one family wanted me to chat to their son, Lewis, about his writing. As an ex-teacher, I couldn’t resist this appeal for help.

Now I have to admit this wasn’t entirely altruistic. I had taken my business cards and was quite happy to self-promote. As we all know, word-of-mouth is the best advertising. I had Kate Mosse’s voice in the back of my mind:

Never fail your constituency.

Not only that, but I have a viva voce to go before I complete my MA at West Dean and all practice is good. Explaining what I do and why clarifies things for me. As Frank Oppenheimer said:

The best way to learn is to teach.

So, not only did I enjoy reading Lewis’s high quality and instinctively dramatic work and the opportunity to hold forth, it was useful to me to examine what I had really learnt. Thus I am delighted to be asked by Greg Mosse to support the new MA students on a Tuesday: that’ll sharpen my ideas up.

It may be sentimental but the thought occurs to me that knowledge is like love – the more you share it about, the more you have.

Sense of Place

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When scouting for a new novel, or just out and about, I love to collect sensual details.I enjoy experiencing the feel of clambering up ancient marble and hanging onto broken tiles incorporated in the masonry of an abandoned Ottoman castle, the pungent almost medicinal smell of the arid scrubland and the squidgy icing-sugar dusted pleasure of lokum.

I aim to use this sort of detail to locate the reader in a specific place quite economically – without breaking their concentration on the point of view character. The details must be integral to the action of the character, or they become distractions, mere showing-off. So describing a decayed, hand-built door with its intricate handle that our heroine goes through is legitimate – but one that she just passes – no.

I could also use the physical sensations encountered in a given place to add to the mood of a scene – the so-called  ‘pathetic fallacy’. A character on the run across the maquis above the Gulf of Izmir will feel the harsh spines of the grey thorns and perhaps bark their shins on a rough volcanic outcrop.On the other hand, a reflective moment might give them chance to appreciate the red lanterns of autumnal pomegranates and feel the tiny downdraught of a hummingbird hawkmoth.

The details have to be those that the character focuses on in accordance with their emotional state.

Another use of the specifics of an area is to suggest back-story. When showing the initial status quo of the central character, elements of their past can be summoned by the location. Jason Goodwin does this successfully, and in fascinating detail, in his Yashim books – both for Yashim and Istanbul herself. Similarly inherent conflict with secondary characters can be shown – the house with the rusting bike chucked up on the stone walls of the old town as against the modern apartment close to the new marina.It doesn’t take a great deal to suggest differences in culture, social status or wealth.

But the aspect of location that really matters is its relationship with plot. I need to seek out the geography of action: those things that the heroine could experience, those things she might do. I might have her sodden by unexpected rain whilst minding her mother’s stall in the Friday market – the pide is ruined and there will be trouble, or she collects broken boxes after the street market and breaks the thin wood across her knee to feed their fire because the Anatolian winter has come early.

All these things, however exact they may be, are only any use if they add to the story. If it doesn’t help tell the tale, it’s only padding.

I need to be a magpie,collecting the shiny and the attractive everywhere I go – but I need to realise only some of my hoard is true treasure.

Ghosts

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I’m not scared of negotiating with the dead.

In this spectred Isle

There are ways of seeing memories

of the lost melted into air,

There are ways of seeing Mrs Hurst, dancing

on a cold mountain,

There are ways of seeing a headless horseman

through the mist in the mirror.

At the break of dark

in grey granite haunted houses

I hear a swift pure cry

and I breathe in.

I am the visionary on the secret path to

the shadowlands,

Calling a dead man and

writing down the bones.

 

‘Tis to die for.

 

K.M.Lockwood 2011

No such thing as ordinary

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Even as a baby at his uncle Amos’s printworks, David Almond had been attracted to words.But when he thought of becoming a writer, he found the neatness of printed books intimidating.

It looks so perfect – I’ll never do that.

He was an ordinary kid from an ordinary family in an ordinary street, he said. They had a few books and he would borrow from Felling Library: John Wyndham, myths and legends, Enid Blyton.

I used to think that writers had perfect minds.

But the books we see: Skellig, My Name is Mina,The true Tale of the Monster Billy Dean, started life as scruffy notebooks full of scribbles, doodles, and wonky fragments of handwritten text.

My books begin with a mess – more like the mess in the inside of my head.

He encouraged his young audience to play, to scribble and daydream and doodle. To let this thing called imagination run off in all directions. To learn to write by writing.

An empty page is like a sky – waiting for something to happen.

As well as the inspiration, there was honesty too. He got thirty three rejections for an adult’s novel he had spent five years creating and often carries a file full of rejection slips to talks. But he kept on writing. Wrote another book. Skellig.

The world is full of people who say, ‘Ah, you can’t do that.’

His face told you what he thought of nay-sayers.

He spoke of the barminess of English spelling, of the wonders that lie inside our heads and the really important things that the old myths tell us about ourselves. He spoke proudly of young people who read and write, of getting the mess in our heads down in straight lines on the page and the amazing things that happen as you read.

He wanted us all to enjoy the words on the page as sounds as well, as the words that people speak.

As he carried on, became his ten-year-old inside self going ‘Yes!’ because his name was in print; the boys on the front row uncrossed their arms. They listened and  responded, lost the shell of being blasé and became engaged.

If that’s ordinary, I really, really want to be ordinary too.

I’m just wild about Barry…

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We live in interesting times, Barry Cunningham asserted at the inaugural Hampshire Writers’ Group meeting on Tuesday 13th September 2011. Difficult not to nod agreement at that.

The electronic revolution means writers and publishers must pull together, not apart, he added. No problem – how could I not want to work with a man whom Barbara Large first met dressed as a giant friendly Puffin?

Although he admitted publishing was an unlikely cross between librarianship and gambling, the publication of children’s books has a serious purpose. The writer is ‘the secret friend of children’ to quote Cornelia Funke. We are there for them on the bus, we are them when they’re bullied,  we are there when life is too much – we provide other worlds to escape to, other ways of being.

His aim is to reach out to the bookhuggers, to connect with the emotional world of children’s reading – and so is ours.

How can we do this?

Our use of story, humour, credible dialogue, precise physicality and – food. Children have not changed since the Narnia books on that front. Kaye Webb believed you could tell one big fib – and after that the rest had to be consistent. Nothing to disagree with there.

And where to find the source?

Write for your inner child. That means reaching deep inside yourself to excavate the truth – and a great deal of trust in your editor.’Your family won’t know you as well as I do.’

Well, Mr Cunningham, I am up for that.

Facing the Truth

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Today, 3rd September 2011, I went toPallant House Art Gallery’s Open Day. This was an ‘artist’s date’ to use Julia Cameron’s term. Having reached the end of the first draft of my novel for the MA, my inspirational well was bone-dry.

I needed to make the most of it, so I took my time and explored David Jones’ Xtension exhibition and other artists’ work. The thing which struck me was the unashamed truthfulness of the best artworks. In ‘Icarus in Brighton’ there are beautiful nymphs or goddesses, the pier, the fallen young man – and a coke can. This ‘outsider artist’ showed what he saw in his mind’s eye.

I compared the ships of the naive artist Alfred Wallis with the other works of the St Ives artists represented in the collection.For me, his work has an unselfconscious strength. He wasn’t looking over his shoulder, wondering what critics might think. He created. That’s all.

I coughed up my £2.50 and went to see the Frida Kahlo & Diego Riviera Exhibition. I loved how Frida painted her own moustache with the same care as the lace round her neckline. She showed faces with warts, scabs, pouts and unplucked eyebrows.

Her husband said it all:

‘She tears open her heart and her chest to tell the biological truth about what she feels.’

As a writer, I aspire to such honesty, such ‘telling it as it is’. I think of Rembrandt’s later portraits – who would not aim for such truthfulness of compassion?

So that is my justification for observing closely a family drama played out in a cafe. I noted down the expressions, the phrases and the actions in order to convey emotions truthfully as I see them. I shamelessly dissected what was going on, remaining uninvolved and dispassionate ( I recall Kahlo trained to be a doctor). The point of such apparently callous behaviour is to get at the truth.

Squeamishness in a surgeon is something to be overcome – and I think it is also in a writer.

Mapping out the territory

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Swaledale Barn by Andy Coulson

A few years ago, we went on a giant pub crawl around the Yorkshire Dales. There was lot of laughing, rain , sheep, quaffing, rain, sheep, drystone walls, scenery and rain. My part in this adventure ( Four Go Mad in Swaledale sort of thing) was to mark out the route. Continue reading →

Sea glass

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Sea Glass by Alibee

Have you ever wondered at those TV archaeologists who pick up a tiny fragment of coarse pottery and declare that it’s a Bronze Age grog-tempered sherd – with absolute certainty? Now it maybe that these pieces have been planted to make them look clever for the camera – but I’ve seen it in the field so-to-speak at the Coppergate dig in York ( now the Jorvik Centre) . They are certain.

It’s down to ‘getting your eye in’ – recognising those tiny clues which convey exactly the right information. The same applies to sea glass hunting:

  • the minute differences between areas of shingle which will be productive and those which won’t
  • knowing  that beyond a brief poke with your toe, digging is a waste of time
  • learning the sound of the tides which will throw up more treasures

All this comes with acquiring  knowledge,  making comparisons and putting in lots of practice. Just like writing.

BUT

what about those disappointing days? The wading through treacle, can’t remember another word for ‘twist’, six hours to write six hundred word days? No apparent reason behind them – a failure of the scientific method with having no control over the variables. I sometimes wonder if it is phase of the moon.

Well, the point is to keep searching. To go down every day and look. Sometimes I get only a splinter or two – bits of characters’ speech or a glimpse of a scene. Other days  I might find  a bit of gorgeous Bristol Blue – rare but gorgeous – like when a sub-plot all falls into place. or  it might be a slab of soft green – like a good solid chapter.

Who knows? I won’t find it if I don’t look.

Town

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Ludlow Castle by Rachel Clarke

I much enjoyed the first episode of ‘Town’ with Nicholas Crane. I appreciated  how he used the history and geography of Ludlow to deepen our understanding of its current success. For me, any book is better with a sense of the history and geography of its setting.  I love books with maps and chronologies. I want to believe there were reasons the first settlers chose that spot, and places where decisive battles took place or people worshipped – no matter how imaginary the setting.

But I also appreciated how he looked at the council estate and the amateur boxing club as well as the listed buildings and farmers’ markets. He didn’t just stick to niceness and Michelin starred restaurants,  nor was he condescending. He gave a good ( if a little short) portrait of the difficulties and vigour of life on the ‘wrong side of the tracks’.

Today I went to Emsworth. This is a not-dissimilar town in Hampshire. Here the ‘other sort’ live on the opposite side of the by-pass. In the main town, the plummy ones hang round outside artisan bakeries  and the tattooed people come through the underpass to investigate the charity shops. Wandering about waiting for my bus and observing made me think how a writer could use this. I came up with one thought.

Drop your characters in it.

Stick’em in the wrong milieu. On one hand, you could end up with some strong plot drivers. They experience life on the other side – does it lead to fear and panic; embarrassment and humour; class-hatred and slow-brewing revenge, or envy and aspiration?

On the other, you could reveal character. How do they react to other social conventions; are they ready to adapt or condemn? And how do people from another social class see them? All very indicative – without you ‘telling’ a thing.

You could do both.

Not to mention the dimensions of time and space  you could play with. Lots of fun to be had in town.