The Devil’s in the Detail…and so’s the Divine.

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A seal wonders about us.

Sunday 24th July I was in Gweek , Cornwall visiting The National Seal Sanctuary. My current work-in-progress features a boy whose mother is a Selkie so I was pretty keen to encounter more seals. I took films, observed and just plain enjoyed their existence. There is nothing quite like experiencing the movement, the presence, the sheer physicality of another animal. I learned some additional facts – always handy – and two in particular stuck in my mind. I didn’t need to write them down – they immediately fell into place. One – a blue eyed seal has had its sight damaged and two – a blind seal can find fish by using its whiskers.

These are not just fascinating in their own right but have story implications.

The setting of my seal story is a Yorkshire coastal town of my own creation called Scoresby. It is not Robin Hood’s Bay – but Bay town is in its fantasy DNA. I now receive Bayfair by post to keep me grounded in the place of childhood dreaming. I have books on RHB’s history, geology, and folklore as well as that of Scarborough, Runswick Bay and too many more to mention. I know far more than I need to – but far less than I want to.

I hanker after all this in its own right as well as feeding my work, giving it more dimensions.

Another essential aspect of my Scoresby tale is the time period. Write about what you know they say or better still, what you care about – so my imagination immediately goes to the late 1960’s. I found a superb resource in the Yorkshire Film Archive. It has a database you can search by decade and theme, and as a method for immersing yourself in an older world, it takes some beating.

And the joy of all this material; the postcards, the period maps, the blue runnel stone from Staithes; is that I don’t have to think about it as I am writing. There is no need, no desire for distracting trips on the Internet. The most I do is a marginal note ‘Check this’ -and then I have a lovely excuse for later pottering.

True, it is all made -up  – and it is very real.

How do you keep your writing grounded?

No right to be published.

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Where we meet - photo by CrunchCandy

Today ( Thursday the 21st July) was one of the periodic meetings of the SCBWI Chichester twig. We were a mixed bunch: Penny already published, Kathy agented, me with a shiny new Post Graduate Diploma and Neil right at the beginning of his journey. One thing we have in common: we want people to read our work – otherwise we are sending words into the void.

The purpose of our little group, as I see it, is fairly straightforward: mutual support. There is a great sense of energy, which I find particularly stimulating, and plenty of encouragement.

Let’s look at that last word: encouragement. It’s not a blanket ‘there, there, dear, everything you write is lovely and it’ll soon be published’. It means inspiring with valour, the brave spirit in your heart. Going by some of the posts I’ve read about the state of publishing,  we all need valour. We need valour to put our work out there, we need valour to revise it for the umptieth time, we need valour to deal with the rejections which are an inevitable part of our chosen path.

This is where the wider pool of SCBWI -BI and our other writer-support networks come in. We need the on-line stimulus; the face-to -face honesty of critique meets; the CPD of conferences, workshops and retreats. It’s good to know there are others on our side, others who have made it in one way or another, others who can help.

But all this only works if we can give and take in the right spirit. If we are open to analytical and purposeful criticism, if we take care how we handle our colleagues’ feelings, then we will grow as a group. And that nurturing, which may include some pretty tough love at times, will help us all along the road. It will not guarantee a print run. That’s down to us and fate.

I’ll finish with a quotation from Thomas Edison (thank you R. J. Ellory)

‘Many of life’s failures are people who did not realise how close they were to success when they gave up.’

Our job is to keep our pals going.

In concert

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We all need encouragement.

A church with no parish on a wet lunchtime in Chichester – not somewhere you would expect stimulation for writing, perhaps. But experiencing the thrilling She’koyokh klezmer band led me to some thoughts about books, writers and readers.

The band came on stage in fine style. Your eye was taken by the violinist in rich red satin and cobwebby lace, or the clarinettist – a white-suited woman in a glossy black hat. You might favour the django guitarist with Roma-dark hair or the bass player – a Georgian vampire or pirate with his long hair, waistcoat and watch chain. An appearance of otherness, of exciting, glamorous colour, of being more draws you in. That’s what I’d want right from outset in in a book cover – to reflect my individuality of voice .

Then there was the theatre of the performance. It was heightened; it was hyper-real – but not just for show. The two young women duelled across the stage, smiling and reacting to each other’s playing. The young men nodded frowned, responded -there was an exchange going on about the music itself. I would wish that from my writing – to have drama and a certain degree of showiness to pull the reader inside the world I’ve made for sharing.

One of the most popular moments was the opportunity to join in. I had never sung the chorus before – but the melody was familiar enough to follow. It had a shape I could recognise – but enough difference from tunes I already knew to be entertaining. My writing needs to do this on both structural and emotional scales – the pattern of the story telling needs to be there for the reader to follow, and the music to bring their hearts along for the ride.

Finally, there was the exuberance of different traditions brought together: it’s not every day you hear Yiddish sung in a neo-classical preacher’s church. I loved how Greek and Turkish music conjoined beautifully. It brought both vigour and delight. I long for my stories to bring disparate strands together in a satisfying whole.

I believe that’s what in concert really means.

The Song Remains The Same

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Hazel and Emily

The afternoon of 3oth June I had the pleasure of seeing The Askew Sisters at St John’s Church as apart of the Chichester Festivities. They were two lively young women  who played spirited dance music and sang moving ballads and the like. Delightful – and if you get the chance, do go see them.

But one thing stood out – they sprang from English tradition – and I love it, whether in music or stories.

Now the minute I mention an English tradition, there will be hackles going up. It seems almost impossible to mention without anxiety. Will people think I am a racist? Will I be bracketed along with the tweeness of Evergreen Magazine, Ye Olde Teashoppes and endless reruns of Miss Marple? Will I be seen as an obscure collector of folklore obsessively slotting stories into the Aarne–Thompson classification system?

I hope not.

But what I am speaking up for is best expressed by this:

And we learn to be ashamed before we walk

Of the way we look and the way we talk.

Without our stories and our songs

How will we know where we’ve come from?

Show of Hands 'Roots'  - a deeply-felt and much loved song.

We need our traditions – how can you  riff on Jack and The Beanstalk if you don’t know the story in the first place? Ms J K Rowling would lose at least half the inhabitants of the Potterverse without our English traditions.

But there’s every need to avoid overzealous exactitude.

The thing I admired about the Askew Sisters was their reinvigoration of the music. Hazel played the melodeon with the heel of her hand at one point to give an otherworldly sound – not textbook, I suspect – but very effective. I loved The Warsaw Village Band’s punky polkas* ( also ChiFest and brilliant live) and what about the Imagined Village’s fantastic ‘Cold Haily Windy Night’  with Sheema Mukherjee on sitar and Johnny Khalsi on drums? The point is that folk music evolves, new elements come in and add life. Having a tradition doesn’t mean it has to be a form of taxidermy.

So where’s the relevance to writing?

Well, it can hardly be shared experience nowadays – not many pirate adventures like Henry Martin now – unless you’re Somali. But shared emotion – that’s where we meet. We may not have a lover on the deck of a sailing ship as in ‘The Turtledove’ or ‘If I were a Blackbird’ – but we know what it is to miss someone.

Writers convey the feelings of characters in situations they have never experienced and readers imagine them. It doesn’t matter whether it’s a ballad or a book – and the English tradition has plenty of passion in it yet.

[*Yes, I know they’re Polish – but the point about reinventing your tradition is still true.]

Three for tea

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Today was the inaugural meeting of Chi-SCBWI ( Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators – Chichester Branch – or more of a twig). Present were the ever busy and talented Kathryn Evans; published author, Chichester Creative Writing MA graduate and kindly cat carer Penelope Bush; and me. Due to a car disaster, the amazingly prolific Elizabeth Dale was there only in spirit this time.

Our venue was St Martin’s Organic Tearooms. I had never been in this ancient and frankly eccentric building before. Being early, I spent a few happy moments on the rickety staircases and across the amiably sagging floors just looking. It was delightfully quirky: individual and inspiring.

My colleagues arrived. They rather suited the building – distinctive and wonderfully themselves . One published (big in Germany, I believe), one agented and me the one setting out: yet all of us with something in common. We discussed our aims for the group – social, supportive  and a safe place to let off steam. Despite our different lives, we were all aware of the potential isolation of our craft.

OK nowadays we have Twitter and Facebook and all that stuff yet it is all too easy to dwell on things, to imagine, to read subtext in emails that just isn’t there. But face-to-face – lovely.  Genuine warmth and hugs and gentle lifts of the eyebrows that convey so much – and oh-so-endearing moments of uncertainty and mutual support. Not pushing a brand or a self-promotion opportunity. Great – energetic people are energising.

More of the same please- 10 am Thursday 21st July, St Martin’s Tearooms, St Martin’s Street Chichester – love to see more artists and illustrators there.

Who’s telling this story anyway?

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Which voice is best?

First person

As a children’s writer, I find this oh so tempting. Direct and immediate, it’s easy-peasy for me to engage with the reader. Over a longer time my lone voice can grate. It’s hard not to be strident or shrill. I make quite sure the reader can only ever see what I see in exactly the way I see it. Having an older version of myself reflect on my past in a bookend fashion is a useful way round this – often used successfully in ghost stories.

Ominiscient

I am the Great Narrator in the Sky and I can see everywhere. I can look inside all the character’s skulls and tell you what they’re thinking and make it really confusing. I can be just the smallest bit condescending, can’t I, children?

Third person

This writer stands just behind the shoulder of her central character, watching every move the protagonist makes. She reports faithfully on actions and conversations, and is close enough to hear thoughts. It is difficult for her to stand back.

The Great Double Act

The Eric & Ernie of story-telling – or French & Saunders.

She was right there, telling you what happened as it happened.

But there is also the narrator able to summon the whole world, to comment and sum up like the best of teachers.

It is a question of finding the voice that suits the tale.

How do you do that?

And now a word from our sponsors…

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Hipp-O-Dee-Doo-Dah!

This is the joyous name for a collection of very special short stories for children from Bridge House Publishing. Each one has an uplifting theme and all royalties have been donated to Children’s Hospices UK. The delightful cover was donated by Children’s Laureate Anthony Browne, and a heartfelt foreword written by Michael Morpurgo OBE. Special guest writers include Alan Gibbons and Lauren St. John who are both Blue Peter Book of the Year winners.

Readers can enjoy stories by other less established authors including one K. M. Lockwood. Look out for Buraq – a story where I took the ‘uplifting’ theme literally.

I have no shame in plugging this book – go buy it!  Now .

It’s not enough.

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‘S/he writes beautifully.’ So do a lot of them. It isn’t enough.

This tweet by Susan Hill ( a writer I much admire )  gave me to thinking. If beautiful writing isn’t enough – what is?

The loveliness of prose lies in its ability to create atmosphere: the use of music in film would be a suitable analogy. But we have all suffered tedious documentaries where the producers have sought to ‘sex it up’ with inappropriate music and it just doesn’t work. A particular hate of mine is the misuse of orchestral music -in particular Górecki’s haunting and poignant Symphony of Sorrowful Songs – for banal purposes. It is like writing writing the story of Humpty Dumpty to the tune of the Death of Boromir: you are creating the literary equivalent of a round in ‘I’m sorry I haven’t a Clue’.

At their best, both music and prose directly convey emotion with integrity.

Writers generally hope the reader will make an emotional connection with their characters. Is the portrayal of character the essential element? Perhaps not. The hero in The Day of the Jackal has no name and Frederick Forsyth famously asserts that in his books the plot is 80%, leaving the remaining 20% for character, description and dialogue combined. He cheerfully claims, ‘It is all I can do,’ but it seems to be popular.

Not that popularity is all – Captain Jack Sparrow is a wonderful character full of contradictions and surprising subtlety of portrayal – but he’s not enough to carry the whole Pirates of the Caribbean franchise. A story, written or filmed, is more than the protagonist – things must happen.

This leads me back to plot – but if this is not to be a biography, a list of things that they did, then it must have structure. Books worth reading reveal events little-by-little. They often have sub-plots which culminate satisfactorily at the end, and suggest all manner of things running under the surface of the central drama.Yet this too is not enough.

An essential element, perhaps the quintessence as the alchemists had it, is the voice. Ella Fitzgerald sang, ”T’aint what you do it’s the way that you do it,’ and demonstrated that wonderfully throughout her career. For me the voice is the spirit of the piece, some aspect of the author that permeates the whole creation. And I am still struggling to find mine.

Which leads me to ask you, dear reader, what must I grasp so that my writing is good enough?

We need to talk about it.

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First off, I suspect it’s down to how much dialogue says about your characters’ backgrounds . I am scared of consistently getting the register right – the best range of words for the character’s age, social class and period. I am nervous of expressing regional identity – how do I handle my own  dialect without coming across all clogs-and-shawls? I need lessons from David Almond. I’d also love to make my characters so distinct in the way they talk that the reader immediately knows who’s talking .

Secondly there’s the question of subtext. How much should the dialogue reveal what my characters feel? How do I do that without being trite or full of improbable psychobabble? On the other hand  I know it’s good when the underlying emotion is at variance with the spoken word. Then I worry about how to reveal the hidden feelings without confusing the reader. Complex stuff.

A third area of concern to me is the sheer logistics. How to orchestrate a duologue seems OK, though there can be status reversal, but including  more people gets tricky. It’s like maths with ‘perm any three’. Just how many lines of communication can I cope with?

Finally, though I doubt it’s the last word in anxiety, the technical stuff. I can get all in a tizzy about attributions: how much is too much? What about adverbs? They can be deadly – or revealing. Likewise with business – what do people really do when they’re talking?

In short the only way I’ve found is to write it. And then act it out. And the  cringe.

How about you?

Stringing it out…

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As part of  my MA at West Dean College, I am writing episodic fragments of an original novel. Our tutor, Greg Mosse, has referred to them as ‘bricks’. Each one is a self-contained whole that can form part of the larger edifice.

I prefer to think of them as beads, or on a good day, jewels.

I have always liked jewellery. I even started studying jewellery design at Loughborough back in the Cretaceous. Words like ‘pendant’,’ talisman’ and ‘amulet’ are music to my ears – and I rather hoped I might find Firefrost or some other magical stone.

But I think I will stick to beads.

The holes line up allowing you to join them together. If I am to write a first book worth reading, it will have a single narrative thread. I know cleverer people than me can weave many strands into complex webs – but at least to start off with, I’ll go for one bit of band.

My episodes vary in length, colour and shape like faience or toho seeds. I can arrange them in groups to make a sequence that becomes steadily more dramatic – like a graduated row of pearls.

I need to work with all the right pieces and I need to believe I can create them one at a time.

I find I have to revise , to reorganise the pattern. Sometimes there are missing sections – like the  Murano chevron bead that rolled under the workbench. Sometimes a whole section has to be unstrung and redone. But always to an underlying structure.

And the structure has its rules. There are demands of genre – you don’t make short story earrings if your reader wants a an epic lariat. But rules can be played with. The mash-up of expectations can create wonderful things. Intersperse your Native American hair-pipe with your dichroic glass and see what happens. I am popping gargoyles into the world of Jane Austen and Celtic selkies in Heartbeat coastal Yorkshire. Why not?

It is through experiment bounded by a given form that new things can emerge – and its unique quality is the way the maker puts it together. This works as well with a novel as a necklace.