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Into the light

5/11/2018

Like a satisfying story, the journey to selfhood often entails working through conflict. Sometimes, it’s only through opposition that we begin to discover our own values and beliefs. This can be frustrating to witness in others, especially those for whom we’re responsible: think of the tantrumming toddler or the belligerent adolescent. But, while others can guide, prompt and set boundaries to prevent us harming ourselves or others, we must all forge our own paths to the someone we become.

6 Comments

Literary ambition: A Ladder to the Sky & Less

20/10/2018

8 Comments

Fictional writers can be tricky on the page; sometimes I suspect a character’s assigned the job because the author’s unfamiliar with more run-of-the-mill kinds of work. But, like anything else that’s slightly iffy, if you’re going to go for it, it’s best to go for it big time. That’s what Irish writer John Boyne does with his larger-than-life antihero Maurice Swift and American Andrew Sean Greer with “failed novelist” Arthur Less, both simultaneously managing to address the wider issues of human vanity and what constitutes a well-lived life.

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Not all may have prizes … but how does funding play a part in who enters the race?

16/10/2018

8 Comments

With the Man Booker Prize winner announced tonight, my fingers are crossed for Washington Black, although I’d raise a cheer for either of the other contenders I’ve reviewed (The Mars Room and Milkman). Right now, my thoughts are also with those authors who not only don’t succeed in dazzling the judges, but don’t even get the chance to step onto the stage.

You’re familiar with those email scams, aren’t you? Congratulations, you’ve won a prize! Just send us a cheque to cover administration costs, and we’ll deliver it. Feels good, doesn’t it? Until you wonder whether the winnings will cover your fees. But that wouldn’t happen in the literary world, would it? Awards are dispensed purely on merit, surely? No paying for prizes there?

8 Comments

Taking our characters to work

10/9/2018

6 Comments

If there is one area where struggling-to-be-noticed writers have the advantage over those who’ve been published since they were barely out of school, it’s our inside knowledge of the world of work. Coming to writing later in life, or merely being part of the majority unable to support themselves through writing, we have the experience to bring our characters’ jobs alive. But there can still be challenges in taking our characters to work.

For example, while setting your novel in your current workplace obviates the need for a research trip, you might have to smooth some colleagues’ ruffled feathers once the book is out in the world. From another angle, if you’ve gained your work experience in settings crowded with colleagues, you face the challenge of rendering it authentically without overwhelming the reader with an overabundance of characters.

6 Comments

Pushing through the publishing bottleneck: is there an ingredient X?

1/9/2018

19 Comments

Yesterday, on the last day of meteorological summer, I shelved my 100th book for the year. But even a reader as voracious as I am will never find time to read all the books she might enjoy. While the superabundance is great for readers, it’s less so for writers competing for their attention and time. However big and colourful our books, we’ve only one shoal in a pond so extensive we may never see, let alone touch, its banks.

19 Comments

How to have a fruitful research trip

19/8/2018

4 Comments

Your characters are acquiring quirks and foibles. You’ve got an arc, however wobbly, from beginning to end. A couple of twists are lurking in your sleeves and you’ve got a sentence, or maybe more, that sings. But your setting’s an empty stage, or weighed down with enough clutter to break the boards. Perhaps it’s time for a real-world site inspection visit to check out what your novel does and doesn’t need. Read on for my reflections on how best to go about it, stemming from my (not-so-)recent trip to Cumbria to soak up the atmosphere and check a few facts for my hopefully third novel, Matilda Windsor Is Coming Home.

4 Comments

What’s behind those overambitious targets and self-imposed deadlines?

11/8/2018

12 Comments

The happier my life’s become, the less inclined I feel to take a holiday. Why go to the trouble of packing a suitcase – or worse, boarding a plane – when you’ve got (almost) all you want at home? Five nights’ in Cumbria seeing friends and family, and researching my possibly third novel, back in April, have furnished a perfectly adequate change of scene for this year, along with a three-day non-residential music course next week.

12 Comments

The toddler in my laptop

3/8/2018

8 Comments

Imagine a virus has attacked your vocal chords, when your livelihood – not to mention your sanity – depends on clear communication. You can create sounds, but they are incomprehensible to others – a jumbled babble. Then, one day, as you jabber in frustration while preparing your children’s tea, your toddler’s voice rings out, perfectly articulating what you were trying to say.

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Celebrating the small successes

28/7/2018

6 Comments

I concluded a recent post on mourning our writerly disappointments with a reminder that we need to celebrate our small successes too. But do I heed my own advice? Well, maybe sometimes, but standards can slip. If we’re not careful, our small achievements can be diminished by our much bigger ambitions. We need to beware of viewing them as if through the wrong end of a telescope. But how to make them matter without aggrandising every little thing?

6 Comments

Shiny new novel versus shiny new car: no contest!

23/7/2018

6 Comments

Three years ago today, we got a new car, all shiny and factory fresh. My husband went along to collect it without me as I had far more exciting things to do. It was publication day for my debut novel and I was basking in the early reviews and congratulatory tweets.

My husband was a little embarrassed to arrive at the dealership to be greeted with a large sign welcoming us both. And although you can’t giftwrap a car, they’d done the next best thing and perched a huge bow on the roof. I think the sales staff were disappointed when he declined their offer to take his photograph to commemorate the occasion.

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Part-time mourning for writerly disappointments?

20/7/2018

15 Comments

The writer’s life is rife with disappointment. One of the main factors differentiating the successful from the unsuccessful is not the degree of failure they encounter, but the ability and willingness to scrape oneself up from the ground and carry on. But how do we do that? The blogosphere thrums with posts on adopting an almost military discipline, but that’s not right for everyone. It’s not right for me.

15 Comments

Come into my cave! #amwriting

24/6/2018

4 Comments

As Britain hurtles towards the cliff edge of Brexit, and the President of the United States pays compliments to a dastardly dictator while referring to migrants as animals, it’s as if we’ve learned nothing from the run up to the Second World War. If politics were fiction – if only! – we’d be approaching the crisis point known as the cave.

4 Comments

On Underneath’s first birthday, I’m confessing a guilty secret underneath

25/5/2018

6 Comments

I have a guilty secret pertaining to abortion. Not that I’ve had a termination myself; I have a far worse confession to make. In those long-ago days when we paraded our objections on the streets instead of Twitter, my first ever protest march was against abortion. In my defence, I was a brainwashed Catholic teenager and I’ve been doing whatever I can to atone for that sin ever since.

6 Comments

GDPR chaos and confusion

21/5/2018

5 Comments

Apart from weekly 99-word stories and checking the edits for my forthcoming anthology, I’ve rather neglected my own fiction in recent weeks. Partly because it’s planting and sowing season in my vegetable garden (a.k.a. feeding the slugs); partly because I’ve been grappling with the new General Data Protection Regulations which will become EU law later this week.

5 Comments

What’s in a name?

24/3/2018

10 Comments

Despite some concerns about how I prioritise my time, I recently allocated several hours to a task that is either brilliantly forward thinking or the biggest waste of time since ironing underwear (not guilty: I struggle even to assemble the ironing board). In the process of editing the short stories in my forthcoming collection, Becoming Someone, I altered the names of a few characters to avoid duplication. So far, so sensible. But I couldn’t leave it at that. I also trawled through my debut novel, Sugar and Snails, my second novel, Underneath, and my current WIP, with the aim of abolishing overlaps across my published work. Is this evidence of a professional approach to my writing or an overly obsessive and perfectionist personality?

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In a word: Asymmetry & Magnetism

18/3/2018

2 Comments

I couldn’t resist pairing these recently published, unconventionally structured, debut novels about relationships: their intriguing one-word titles are almost interchangeable, with Alice in Asymmetry magnetically drawn to (and later repulsed by) her much older lover and the mother-daughter relationship explored in Magnetism inherently asymmetrical. My reading experience of both was mixed, strongly engaging with the second halves significantly more than the first. See what you think.

2 Comments

Cultivating desired habits with if-then plans

15/3/2018

20 Comments

Pi-day yesterday reminded me of my post last summer reporting on my audit of time spent at my desk (as, thanks to the wonders of Excel, I showed some of the results in a pie chart). Since then, without consciously making any changes, I’ve been fairly content with the proportion of my time I allocate to fiction, but I did give some thought to how I might cultivate desired habits if things should slip.

20 Comments

Learning to write

23/2/2018

17 Comments

School was a shock. Where did all those children come from? Would I wet myself or brave those dark outdoor loos? As a timid child, and an obedient one, the structure of the classroom seemed easier to manage. And yet.

The teacher stood at the blackboard etching row upon row of noughts and crosses in coloured chalk. We sat at desks, copying the figures into our books with fat wax crayons. This was school? At home, colour meant drawing however the inspiration took me. Already programmed in compliance, I crushed my creativity along with my rage.

17 Comments

People studies: Sight & Consent

19/2/2018

2 Comments

Although these two novels couldn’t be more different in tone – the first a literary exploration of a young mother’s development; the second tricksy thriller – I can’t resist pairing them for the other factors they have in common. Both feature thoughtful, philosophising, unnamed narrators; both take as their subject matter how we explore the inside and outside of other people, and ourselves. Both are ambitious and unusual in their approach; both are the author’s second book and a cracking read.

2 Comments

Every word counts #roughwriters #blogtour

12/2/2018

29 Comments

A couple of months ago I was privileged to attend a meeting of a local writing group in their “invited author” slot. As well as speaking about my own writing and journey to publication, I was asked to set a writing exercise. Given that I’d inadvertently begun both my published novels with a character descending a staircase, it wasn’t difficult to find my prompt, to which the writers responded admirably. But, as a practitioner of the 99-word story, I thought I could give them a little more by modelling writing less.

29 Comments

<<Previous

Into the light

Literary ambition: A Ladder to the Sky & Less

Not all may have prizes … but how does funding play a part in who enters the race?

Taking our characters to work

Pushing through the publishing bottleneck: is there an ingredient X?

How to have a fruitful research trip

What’s behind those overambitious targets and self-imposed deadlines?

The toddler in my laptop

Celebrating the small successes

Shiny new novel versus shiny new car: no contest!

Part-time mourning for writerly disappointments?

Come into my cave! #amwriting

On Underneath’s first birthday, I’m confessing a guilty secret underneath

GDPR chaos and confusion

What’s in a name?

In a word: Asymmetry & Magnetism

Cultivating desired habits with if-then plans

Learning to write

People studies: Sight & Consent

Every word counts #roughwriters #blogtour

2018 Reading Challenge

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