by Ruth Sutton | Mar 18, 2024 | agents, memory, motivation, structure
My last book was written three years ago, and since then I’ve been unsure whether I had either the motivation or the time to write another. In 2022 I wrote a play because I was asked to do so. The writing, followed by taking the play to the stage, took up the whole of that year. 2023 seemed to be a year of travelling, with one holiday and two trips prompted by the need to see old friends. As I get older I’m aware that I may not be able to see friends overseas as often as I once did, and each time may be the last. I didn’t have enough settled time to start a writing project.
As 2024 began, however, the urge to write emerged from its hiding place and began to bother me, I’ve written in one form or another all my life and I enjoy it. Writing produces a level of concentration that blots out everything else, and feels like really good exercise. If I didn’t have a story waiting to be told, what could I write about? It occurred to me that my grandchildren knew me only as their grandmother, which I have been for the past twenty years or so. My life before they came along is largely unknown to them, and I wanted them to know more about it. Why is that, I wonder? Ego, possibly. Or maybe my wish to inform them is just a front: what I really want is to inform myself, to put my own life into some perspective and see what it looks like on the page.
I’ve seen books and courses on memoir writing but I haven’t checked them to see how such an undertaking should be approached. I decided that so long as I was clear about ‘purpose and audience’, as with any good writing, and kept to that, the form would take care of itself. So I accepted my first decision, that my purpose was to inform my grandchildren and that they were my audience. That has proved useful, for the time being at least. For example, having them as my prospective audience has steered me away from too lengthy and detailed a description of how my partner and I began our relationship, which is probably a blessing.
I’ve called the piece ‘Fragments from a Life’ because it is fragmentary. Some things I remember from decades ago as clearly as the day they happened, while other episodes are only a blur, or have been forgotten all together. As I write, details come back to me, and some of them have been so painful that I’ve had to stop for a while, and they have resurfaced in my dreams. I realise that what cements an incident in my memory is not the factual context but what I was feeling at the time. Emotions create the sharpest memories. One example is a road trip across the USA undertaken in the summer of 1977 with my then husband, my sister, and my young daughter. It included some of the most iconic places and landscapes imaginable, but what I remember most is the misery and exhaustion that enveloped me and blotted out almost everything else. It was probably that misery that has prevented me in the years since from making any effort to remember. I’m sure my daughter, who was nine at the time, will recall far more than I do.
I’ve chosen chronology as the simplest structure, whereas it could conceivably have been arranged in themes – travels, work, family, and so on. Those possible themes have been much entangled, however, which probably says something about my life. Work has been the dominating thread, but being a self-employed person for the majority of my working life means that my working decisions have been personal ones too. I see now that I have regularly put my work needs above family needs, and I have some regrets about that.
So far, the ‘fragments’ amount to nearly 20,000 words, and there’s still a fair bit to cover. I have an agent now, fifteen years after I began writing, and she rubs her hands at the prospect of getting my memoir published, but she will be disappointed as I have no intention of sharing it beyond the family. By the way, the story of how an agent appeared so late on the scene is an interesting one, for another occasion.
For now, I shall plough on and keep editing, editing, editing. I’m enjoying it. Maybe by the end of it I’ll feel more inspired to write another novel, or another play. Who knows?
by Ruth Sutton | Aug 16, 2022 | Uncategorized
Hello again, after another long absence!
I’ve been busy this year, but not with the usual activity of writing a novel.
Several months ago, I was commissioned by a project called Deep Time (http.deeptime.uk) to write a piece about West Cumbria’s rich industrial history, and this play is the result. We have our cast, tickets are already on sale from the Beggar’s Theatre website http://www.beggarstheatre.com in Millom.
Rehearsals start next month. Very exciting.
It’s all in the poster…the play tells the story of Friday September 13th 1968, through the experience of a single Millom family. On that day the town’s Iron Works closed suddenly with the loss of nearly 500 jobs, a catastrophe for a small community.
Similar stories could be told in other communities that have suffered such closures as our heavy industry has declined, and they deserve to be remembered.
Buy your tickets, and join us on Friday Nov. 4th or Saturday Nov.5th at 7pm
by Ruth Sutton | Jan 20, 2022 | crime fiction, Cumbria, West Cumbria, writing
It’s January 2022, and it’s been a long time since I posted on my own website. I’ve actually been posting like mad, but elsewhere, on other websites and Facebook pages that I seem to have been dragged into over the past year or so. Time to make amends, and for some reflection on my writing.
The new book ‘Collateral Damage’ is on the website, thanks to Russell who manages that side of things for me, but anyone curious about what I’ve been up to – apart from getting the new book out – would look in vain. My only excuse is that it’s been a very strange time for all of us. Priorities have been challenged and new perspectives emerging that seem to have taken me in different directions. Old routines were dismantled and replaced with new ones.
Even before the world changed and lockdown followed lockdown, I was beginning to ask myself about how many more novels I had in me. The last two, ‘Corruption’ in 2020 and then ‘Collateral Damage’ in 2021, were lockdown projects, ideal to fill the time released by the suspension of other activities. They were both crime novels using the same characters and West Cumbrian settings that I’d used before, which was useful as it reduced the amount of research necessary when some of my usual sources were unavailable. Local History archives were closed and it was less easy to find and talk to people in the pursuit of authenticity. These two books were still written with care, and I’m pleased with them both, but I felt less investment in them, especially compared to the earlier novels. They were designed to fill the gap left in the crime series that began with ‘Cruel Tide’, set in 1969, and ended with ‘Out of the Deep’, set in the autumn of 2001. Between ‘Fatal Reckoning’ (set 1971) and ‘Burning Secrets’ (set 2001), there was a thirty year gap, which needed filling in. Now that’s done, so what next?
The current project is not another novel, but a stage play, about the closure of the Millom Iron Works in 1968. It was prompted by my involvement with a big ‘arts project’ called ‘Deep Time’, which focusses on the industrial history of the West Cumbrian coast. Limitations of time put another novel out of reach, and I decided to go for a play instead. It was time I did some more learning, too – too easy to repeat the same skills for the tenth time. So a play it is. Working title ‘The Day the Iron Works Closed’. World premiere? Millom, September 2022. Watch this space!
by Ruth Sutton | Oct 10, 2020 | book covers, crime fiction, Cumbria, historical fiction, Lake District, Publishing, readers, setting, Uncategorized, West Cumbria
Here it is – the cover of the new book. It’s due out on November 6th 2020, a child of the lockdown, and a good yarn. I’ll add it to my Paypal-linked website bookshop before publication day, and the Kindle version will be available after Christmas. The ISBN number is 978-0-9929314-6-9 if you want to buy it through your local bookshop. Tell your friends!
by Ruth Sutton | May 1, 2020 | drafting, first draft, pace, planning, plotting, structure, Uncategorized
At 7.54am this morning I checked the Tesco online delivery service and to my astonishment, there was a delivery slot available and I got it. 
Not only that, I put in a long list of things we needed and checked out. All done within fifteen minutes, booked, paid for and the confirmation email kin the inbox. For some unaccountable reason this minor lockdown triumph filled me with confidence. I’d managed something that had been beyond my reach for weeks.
Within hours, the optimistic glow of a obstacle successfully hurdled transferred itself to the outline of a new story I’ve been struggling with. I can do this, I said firmly to myself. If I can scale the Tesco delivery mountain I can sort out the flabby middle of a plot which starts well, and could end well, but flounders around in between.
I can’t be the only one who struggles with a muddle in the middle. This is the stage where the story gets complicated, and possible blind alleys are introduced to tempt the reader but end up confusing the writer instead. It’s all very well starting several hares running, but you have to know roughly where they’re going to end up. I thought I’d done that, but going back to the outline after a bad night I realised that there were plot holes all over the place: hence the feeling of inadequacy that a successful tussle with Tesco seems to have cured.
So now I’m back, unpicking and mending the holes, unmuddling the middle and hopefully adding more life and colour to the story as a whole. The great thing about the current situation is that I can slow down and take my time. No point in having deadlines that just fade into the mist of uncertainty that surrounds us right now. This stage of the writing process will take as long as it takes, and when I’m ready, the first draft will roll out as smooth as a good Malbec.
by Ruth Sutton | Apr 18, 2020 | Burning Secrets, character, crime fiction, Cruel Tide, Cumbria, fact-based fiction, historical fiction, plotting, research, stories, West Cumbria
It seems like eons ago that I decided to update my website, in another era, when we could go shopping, and see friends, and even have a holiday. The latter stages of working with my steadfast ‘helper’ Russell – bless him! – have been via Zoom, which was great as we could share what was on our laptops. Then we had issues with the Bookshop to work out and finally, finally, the whole thing was ready.
Russell picked out some of my past blog posts just to get us started, but now I’m writing a new post for the first time in a long time, to celebrate the new site. For a week or two I’ve been wondering how I could write a new post without reference to my novel writing which seemed to be on hold, paralysed by the sudden availability of time that I wasn’t prepared for. But as the first weeks of self-isolation have passed my mind has slowly turned to the idea of a new novel, and worked through the thicket of decisions about setting. The location is a given, it’ll be West Cumbria like all my other stories, but the question has been – When?
As some of you may know, I started some years ago with a trilogy set over twenty years, from 1937 to 1957. Then I turned to crime fiction and began with ‘Cruel Tide’ set in 1969, followed by its sequel two years later in 1971. After that I faced a quandary: I wanted to focus on a female CID officer in the Cumbrian force, but then discovered that there were no females above the rank of DC until the late 1990s, so the 1980s were passed over and my sixth novel ‘Burning Secrets’ was set against the dystopian background of the Foot and Mouth outbreak of 2001, followed by the seventh ‘Out of the Deep’ later that same year.
So, now what? Earlier this year I was favouring writing a ‘prequel’ to the original trilogy, set in and around Barrow-in-Furness just before World War One. That would have necessitated a fair amount of research and primary documentation accessible through the Records Office, but that door closed – literally – as the current lockdown began. So I needed a writing project that could use research already done, filling in some of the blanks in the chronology of the series so far.
For some time I’d wanted to look at the 1980s, a time when policing was changing almost beyond recognition. During that decade the Police and Criminal Evidence Act was passed, DNA testing was first used in criminal prosecution, the Crown Prosecution Service began, and developments in computing revolutionised the gathering and collation of data. There would be many police officers who welcomed and embraced all these changes, but there would be others – inevitably – who hankered for the old ways of doing police business.
Tension and disagreements make for good stories, and the backdrop of the 1980s provided other useful national and local flash points. The Miners’ Strike of 1984, for example, did not affect Cumbria directly as the few hundred miners left in the county voted to keep working, but that decision also would bring with it the kinds of tension that a good story will thrive on. So after much wandering around, I think I’ve decided on the year, and can build my cast of characters accordingly, some of them already established in the first two crime novels, and others in the early stages of careers that we’ve already witnessed in the 2001 novels.
This sounds like a logical thought process, which was far from the case, but now at last I have an idea that might float, and a place to start. New website, new story – a fresh start all round.
by admin | Mar 30, 2020 | first draft
Eighty-five thousand words in, with a plan that looked OK for a while and has now been changed countless times, I’m still unsure how to end the story. I’ve been here many times before, six times before in fact, once for each of my previous novels. Endings are the bane of my life.
Depending on the particular genre you have in mind, the protocols around endings are usually quite clear. Courtroom dramas end with a verdict, psychological thrillers with a twist. Generally speaking, classic crime and police procedurals are supposed to end with the baddies brought to justice, so that readers feel that satisfactory closure has been reached and all is well with the world. So where does that leave me? Perhaps the problem lies in the fact that I’ve never been keen on knowing my genre, or sub-genre, and sticking to it. Or maybe it’s the state of ‘existential angst’ that seems to surround me at present, looking at the political debacle here in the UK and the ghastly POTUS across the pond. For whatever reason, I’m uncomfortable with tidy endings. I want to leave my story ambivalent, uncertain, compromised by the realities of human nature and the vagaries of the legal process.
Leave it, I said to myself; there’s no rush. Do all your edits on what you’ve got so far, and eventually, the last thousand words will come to you. That was last week. This week the deadline for getting the final draft to the editor is that bit closer, and my ‘hurry up’ habit is nagging away even more loudly than usual. I have a holiday coming: do I definitely finish off before the holiday starts, or take the laptop with me and hope that distance and a change of routine will help the last decision? My holiday companion is counselling delay, and perhaps he will be a useful sounding board for the choices I face.
However much time I have, my instinct tips towards ambivalence, and that’s not just because I’m setting the reader up for a sequel. I really believe that the reader should be left with a question, not an answer.
by admin | May 25, 2019 | character, crime fiction, Cumbria, planning, plotting, point of view, self-publishing, structure, success, Uncategorized, writing
When I’m talking about writing, explaining the balance between plot, character, point of view and setting is a helpful starting point for people who haven’t yet thought about how a novel is developed. 
In my West Cumbrian trilogy, the first novels I wrote, setting was the central ingredient. From my research about this amazing place and its history, I began to think about a key character who could carry the story. Having found her, I then had her interact with various other characters. There was some consideration of the plot in the first one, but mostly that developed as I went along, with a fairly quiet conclusion that I felt was an authentic way for the story to end. I didn’t really think about ‘the arc of the narrative’, or how my protagonist might have a ‘journey’.
At some point in those early years of writing I went to a workshop run by Matthew Hall and William Ryan, who had both come to novel writing from careers as barristers. Part of that workshop, introduced briefly but not fully pursued because of shortage of time, was the idea of the ‘Three Act Structure’ commonly used in films. Hall had spent some time doing film scripts and this was the structure he brought to the novel. I’ve included here a relatively simple representation of this notion: check it on Google and you’ll find various more sophisticated models.
I was intrigued by the relative complexity of the ‘formula’ he presented to us, and read more about it after the workshop, but it always felt to me to be too ‘formulaic’, putting too much emphasis on plot structure, leaving character and setting as servants to the story. Or possibly I just didn’t have the patience to think the idea all the way through. My first interest was always in ‘where’ and ‘who’ rather than ‘how’.
When I moved into crime writing for the fourth book ‘Cruel Tide’, I revisited the thinking about the structure as ‘acts’ that build towards a climax, but still didn’t really reflect the formula in what I produced. Two more crime books followed, and the latest one, as yet untitled, is in production. Reflection on ‘structure’ as the first planning tool had faded almost completely over the intervening years. My books are well-received, within the limitations of that self-publishing brings with it. Many of my readers are Cumbrian, who are as interested as I am in the authenticity of the Cumbrian settings. Because I’m self-published I rarely get any professional reviews, or feedback from other professional writers. I rarely meet professional writers as I live in a remote place, a long way from the normal arteries of the publishing world.
Maybe that was why I suggested to the Kirkgate Arts centre in Cockermouth, an hour north of here in West Cumbria, that we should try to bring some Cumbrian writers together to talk about their work, and I would ‘host’ the event, interviewing the authors and sparking discussion among them. Long story short, the event happened last week was great success: three very different crime writers, all successful, with all sorts of exciting projects in the pipeline.
One of them was Paula Daly, from Windermere. 
She writes what she calls ‘domestic noir’, and with such success that two of her novels have been adapted to a 6 part TV drama called ‘Deep Water’, which will air on TV here, starting in August. When the question came up of ‘where do a novelist’s characters come from?’, her answer was very interesting. She starts with structure – just as Matthew Hall had suggested in that workshop years ago. The ‘hero/protagonist’ is the centre of the action and the story tells her story, through various trials and tribulations to a final denouement. The characters all have a function, to support or to impede the hero’s progress, and their roles are planned early on. They are ciphers initially, created to serve the story. Only when the structure is clear are the characters then developed into three-dimensions, with their habits and mannerisms suggested by their preordained function.
Paula was really clear about this, and I was fascinated by her certainty about the importance of this way of working. Her plotting and planning is done in great detail, she said, and the writing itself is the least enjoyable part of the whole process. It sounded as if the actual writing was almost a chore, an anti-climax after the excitement of developing the narrative. She sees the story in a series of filmic episodes, and it could be written as a screen play rather than continuous prose.
Could I do this. Do I want to? The upside is that stories written this way are almost tailor-made for adaptation into films or TV. The setting is almost immaterial: you use whatever setting is most accessible and attractive to the film-maker.
I’m still thinking, wondering whether this approach is possible for me. Do I have the patience do achieve it, or sufficient ambition to follow the rules? Maybe it’s the idea of ‘rules’ that I have trouble with. I have always been a contrarian and maybe too old, or stubborn, to change my ways.
by admin | May 7, 2019 | Burning Secrets, crime fiction, drafting, planning, plotting, Uncategorized
Last week, little more than two months after starting it, I finished the first draft of a new novel. At just less than 90,000 words, it’s currently shorter than some of my crime novels, and my editor may suggest that it needs more depth in some places, more background, more whatever. But that’s the thing about a first draft: you write and write, revising as you go, letting the original plan founder in the wake of what comes out of your head. And when it’s done you stand back and look at it from a distance. That’s the time too when you ask someone else to have a look, as you’re too close to see it clearly.
The draft was zipped off to my editor, after one last re-reading and some tidying up. So now, I wait. It’s a curiously flat stage in the process. Day after day for several weeks I sat at the laptop for every available minute. Night after night details of the plot, unfinished business, unresolved anomalies, all reverberated round my brain.
My sleep suffered. Sometimes by morning I could see a way through to the next steps, sometimes the dilemmas turned out to be non-existent. But the damn thing occupied my head almost without respite until I never wanted to see it again.
And now it’s gone. For a day or two I was still fretting about it in the night, but then that wore off and here I sit, waiting, like a deflated balloon.
I’m trying to do the things I put to one side while I was writing, but nothing feels important enough to bother with. Days that passed so fast are now dragging, not helped by a tendon strain that’s restricting my walking and exercise routines. It’s only a week since let the draft go, but it feels like a month and I’m impatient for some reaction. I know there’ll be re-writes to do, but what and how is still to be decided.
When the last book was heading towards publication this time last year, I asked myself whether I ever wanted to do it again. The same question is on my mind now. I know there are so many other things in life I want to do: getting older certainly adds a sense of urgency. But right now nothing other than writing seems to provide the sense of ‘flow’ in the way that Csikszentmihalyi defined it, a very satisfying combination of effort and focus, that makes the hours flash past. Fell walking comes close, and maybe I need to concentrate on my recovery and get the boots back on. With summer coming, that looks like a worthwhile alternative.
by admin | Mar 31, 2019 | Authenticity, drafting, planning, plot devices, plotting, stories, structure, Uncategorized
The current fashion in crime fiction seems to be for the writer to visualise the plot of a story in terms of a series of gripping scenes. It’s certainly the way to go if you fancy selling to TV. The drama of these scenes can lie in the characters and their individual or collective crises. Or it can rest in the extraordinary landscape, or with a revelation, or twist in the story, or – possibly – all of these at once. As authors we imagine the details that would make these scenes as engaging as possible, but it’s not easy.
The problem lies in the machinations necessary to get your characters into a particular space at a particular time with a worthwhile revelation to share. The frequent victim of this process is authenticity. What we end up with is a story that just doesn’t makes sense.
All writers try to avoid too many coincidences and accidents in plotting, although one or two are useful if they drive the story forward. Similarly, we treasure dysfunctional characters with flaws, because they can be delightfully unpredictable and prone to mistakes, both of which help with the ‘twists and revelations’ issue. Coincidences, accidents and characters’ poor judgements are all OK up to a point, but if overdone can steer a plot towards improbability. The reader may be asked to ‘suspend their disbelief’ once too often, and if the reader is me the story is dismissed as a ‘fix’.
With the first draft of Book 7 rolling along, I’m right in the middle of this dilemma. I have a number of great scenes in mind, and need them to work without stretching authenticity just that bit too far. I’m looking forward to seeing what my editor will think when she sees the first draft in a month or so.
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