by admin | Oct 15, 2014 | A Good Liar, Cumbria, Fallout, Forgiven, trilogy, Windscale fire
I’m beginning to think of ‘Forgiven’ the second book in my trilogy ‘Between the Mountains and the Sea’ as the middle child, quite quiet, somewhat overshadowed by its more noticeable siblings. The eldest child, ‘A Good Liar’ was the first, long awaited, with a troubled pregnancy and long labour. When she arrived, to quite an elderly mother, she was greeted with delight and some surprise that she had ever been born at all. The youngest child, ‘Fallout’ created less trouble and worry in pregnancy, as by now the mother knew roughly what was going on and felt more confident. This new baby was louder and forced her way into the family with a freshness bordering on the brash.
Child number two ‘Forgiven’ came along quite quickly after her elder sibling but was in turn overshadowed by the youngest before she had found her place in the family. She is quiet, more thoughtful and perhaps too easily overlooked, but has a grace and charm all of her own. Secretly, for a mother must never admit to favourites, I love this middle child the most. She made me cry more as I created her, and still does. There’s a poignancy in the story, as Jessie Whelan faces her darkest moments, and makes the hardest choices. At the end her loneliness seems set to continue as she hangs on determinedly to her independence.
‘Forgiven’, is currently the least popular of the trilogy. It’s relative of course: all three books have been well received and sell steadily, but still boxes of the eldest and youngest books leave the shelves with greater speed, and ebooks sales have the same pattern. That means that some of my readers at least may not have read the full story told in the three books, which I’m sad about. Between my heroine’s early troubles and her eventual acceptance of love the quieter time is being overlooked. Set in 1947 Forgiven in some ways as ‘unforgiving’ as its context: the post-war years in West Cumberland were difficult. On the first anniversary of VE Day one of the local councils turned down a suggestion of a party to celebrate. ‘We’ve nowt to celebrate,’ they said, ‘and nowt to celebrate with.’ Unemployment, poor housing, rationing, coal shortages and the bitter winter of March 1947 added up to a cold, hard few years, before the resurgence into the 1950s. In my village mains electricity didn’t arrive until 1953, and only three years later the first nuclear power station was officially opened by the Queen, to be followed the year after that by the world’s first nuclear reactor fire, which forms the backdrop to the third book in trilogy ‘Fallout’.
History was moving so quickly then that the immediate post-war troubles were almost forgotten. And so it feels with the slower sales of the book that was set in those difficult times. But it remains – I believe – a much better book than its elder sibling, and a necessary precursor to the youngest of the three. In ‘Forgiven’ Jessie faces some of her inner demons and makes her worst mistakes as a mother. Maybe that’s why I have such an emotional attachment to this book, and wonder why it is seems to be attractive than its fellows. Maybe this is what happens with trilogies: does anyone out there know if the middle books of the three do less well?
If you’ve read this far and you’ve not read ‘Forgiven’, beg, buy, borrow or download it and see what you think, even if you’ve never read either of the others. Then go backwards to ‘A Good Liar’ for the backstory and forwards to ‘Fallout’ for the denouement. I love Jessie, and I want to see the middle years of her life, tough though they were, celebrated and enjoyed.
by admin | Oct 4, 2014 | Authenticity, character, plotting, readers, self-publishing
In the world of self-publishing there’s always talk about the importance of a good editor, and what editors can do to improve the quality of your work. Over the past few years I’ve been fortunate to work with an editor who is also a long-standing friend. You might say that having a friend as an editor is as potentially damaging to the relationship as having a friend teach you to drive. Writing a novel is a stressful business, which can cause friction between you as the writer and the editor who might want you to ‘murder your darlings’ – the bits of deathless prose that you want to keep at all costs, even if they don’t work. Or if you are of a more anal disposition you could argue for weeks over the placing of a semi-colon or where to make two paragraphs out of one.
In my case, disagreements between my editor and myself have been mercifully rare. We’ve talked books for a couple of decades so we know each other’s likes and dislikes, and I trust her judgement about what makes a story effective. She knows I’m fairly robust and can take criticism where necessary without flouncing out or getting depressed.
Her role is two-fold. She will be the first person beyond my partner Mick with whom I’ll share the outline of a new book. She’ll see past the messiness and think about the structure and the characters and whether it makes sense and rings true. She’ll point out discontinuities, misplaced scenes, unconvincing plot twists, and she’s usually right. As the writer I can see the action in my head but sometimes I don’t capture it well enough on the page and she speaks on behalf of my future readers, asking for more detail, or less. I need that: otherwise I can make too many assumptions about the readers’ response.
That’s the stage we’re at now with the new book that’s emerging. Starting with a basic idea I’ve been fleshing it out for several weeks now, adding key scenes, fragments of dialogue, expanding from a few hundred words to a few thousand. Currently the draft outline stands at 12,000 words and still I haven’t written any of the substantive manuscript. I’ve learned to be patient, avoiding the first full draft until I’ve a pretty good idea that the basic structure is ready. Of course things will change: it’s only when you delve deeper into the characters and the story that you realise exactly how things might develop. But at this stage talking with my editor about character, structure, and plot development will be invaluable. I sent the draft outline a week or so ago and have come to London for our first meeting about it. Apprehensive? Yes, a little, but that feeling is diminishing as the number of books increases. Now I’m feeling excited, to learn what she thinks and what suggestions she will make.
After these conversations I’ll head home keen to complete the outline, break it down into chunks, re-consider the order and the chapter breaks, do any remaining necessary research and finally get started on Chapter 1. From then on, if my planning and research have been good enough, the chapters should roll on, tweaking the outline as needed as we go. This is the joy of the process, when the blurry image begins to sharpen and fizz with colour and life. This is when I’ll laugh out loud sometimes, or have to stop because the tears are getting in the way. At this stage I try to read everything out loud, listening for the rhythm of the words and the authenticity of the dialogue.
When the first draft is done, back it goes to the editor for further scrutiny, ‘tooing and froing’ between us as the glitches are ironed out. Thank heaven for word-processing and email to speed up the process. Finally after more iterations than I care to envisage right now, the penultimate ms. will be ready for the editor’s line by line scrutiny, to find and correct the miniscule errors that hide in the text. This is when I need to print out to spot the errors more easily than reading on the screen.
That’s how my editor and I work together. Others may do things differently. Professional editing, I believe, is essential. The author is simply too close to see what needs to be seen. My luck is to have found someone with all the necessary skills and who can deal with someone who doesn’t like being told what to do!
by admin | Sep 26, 2014 | A Good Liar, character, historical fiction
I’m ploughing on with the outline of book no.4 and once again trying to think of new and interesting names for my characters. Some of them are already decided, drawn through from the previous books, but others keep changing as I change my mind. ‘Find and Replace’ is very handy at times like this.
Up to now I’ve chosen names in keeping with the Cumbrian west coast locations where the stories are set. I’ve found names on local gravestones, in newspapers of the periods and from people I know. But in the new book times are changing. More cars and greater social mobility have begun to break down the very tight communities and more incomers are around from other areas of the country.
Names do seem to mean a lot round here. They can be a source of jokes and teasing, or shortened to nicknames that stick longer than the name you were born with, some complimentary, some not. Some names, if you’re very unlucky, are truly unfortunate and you wonder what the parents who chose them were thinking of. I taught a girl in school once whose family name was Dyck. To compound the difficulty, the poor girl was named Coral. And the boy from the Hunt family who was called Michael, shortened to Mike….. he had a terrible time.
Dickens has some stunning names, long, memorable and eccentric. I wish I had the courage to follow suit. Maybe what I could do is give one character a name that somehow defines how people treat him and how he responds, which in turn will show the reader something about him.
For names of places, I’m struggling with the same dilemma I’ve faced before, as does every writer of ‘localised’ fiction. Do I use the names of real towns and villages and risk mistakes in geography and history, or do like Hardy and Dorset, describing known places but giving them new names, thus avoiding any need to be absolutely accurate in both time and place? In ‘A Good Liar’ I anonymised one of the communities – where I live myself – but presented others exactly as they were, with their proper names. It was awkward in some respects: I’ve had to deny readers’ requests for a map, for example because the mix of fact and fiction would be too confusing. In other respects, however, getting away from naming real places is liberating. You no longer have to worry about potential insult to the place and its inhabitants, and the need for detailed research fades a little.
The added problem I’m facing now is that there are bad deeds done by some in the story. When nice people populate a named place, that’s fine, but when the people are vicious, identifying the community is less welcome to present-day readers from the same area.
Don’t have to make final decisions yet, and I have a meeting with my editor shortly to discuss the rapidly expanding outline and the pros and cons of the options ahead. In the meantime, I’m trying to be a little more creative with naming my characters, and take as much care with that as I do with their appearance, habits and approach to life. I want to make my characters real ‘characters’.
by admin | Sep 18, 2014 | critique, dialogue, opening paragraph, pace, plotting, point of view, self-publishing, writing, writing workshops
I love teaching, always have, and since 1982 I’ve been working with adults as learners rather than younger students. Having recently struggled myself to learn the basics of starting, finishing and publishing a novel, what I’d love to do now is ‘teach’ some of that to anyone who’s embarking on the same journey. It’s making me think: what would I put in my ‘writing a novel starter pack’?
I’m going back over all the courses I’ve been on in the past six years, to identify the most useful elements and processes and then knit those bits into a structure and time frame that would suit a beginner who might not want to embark on a long commitment, but wants to get a taste of what may be involved before they delve deeper.
From the very first Arvon course I went on in 2008 I learned how to expand the germ of an idea into the start of a story, capture a fragment of that story in a scene, write it as well as I could, read it to others, get feedback and see how that felt. We also learned about dialogue, and a bit about structure. We did the inevitable writing exercises, too, just to get us going and sharing. I could have done with more about structure and Point of View, and maybe fewer of the ‘exercises’ but it was still a wonderful week and I’m still drawing on it years later. Best bits? Dealing with dialogue, and writing a scene for reading out and critique.
At a Faber Academy course called ‘Stuck in the Middle’ I picked up the usefulness of capturing the essence of your story, expanding it into a short synopsis and then have others ask questions and make suggestions. When the people grilling you about your story are as skilled and insightful as Gill Slovo and Sarah Dunant, it’s both intimidating and exhilarating, and I learned not just about the elements of a good story but about myself too, and the confidence it takes to benefit from critique.
Some of the courses to do with publishing have been disappointing: my main memory of a Guardian event at Kings Place in London was of being lectured and feeling patronised by a prestigious agent who, as the New Zealanders say, was seriously up herself. If I had to deal with people like that to find a publisher, I said to myself, self-publishing may be the way to go. Another element of my ‘essentials’ package therefore would be something about the ‘costs and benefits’ of self-publishing, and some guidance about how to set about it if that’s your choice.
My own novels so far have used a strong sense of place, and in my head for this notional workshop is a Venn diagram of how ‘setting’, ‘characters’ and ‘events’ interconnect and overlap to create the basic structure of a story. Maybe I could use that simple idea as the start of an exercise to create an outline, share the ideas, refine them through discussion, build a character or a scene in greater detail and write, read and re-write to see how the editing process works. We could something on Point of View, dialogue, or the 3 act structure, or opening paragraphs, or just flag those up as areas to be worked on at the next stage. Then we could discuss the process of getting from manuscript into print or ebook and how to get people to buy it, if that’s what you want.
Sounds like a plan. Like most first drafts of a teaching plan, there’s probably too much in it, but much will depend on the size, composition and starting points of the group, and the length of time they will spend with you. That in turn is set against how much time and money people can spare for such an experience. I’m sure you could find workshops like this in London, or Manchester or Newcastle or Glasgow but in rural areas like Cumbria we can be frustrated by the time and money it takes to access the learning we want. Going to London by train from the west coast of Cumbria means travel to Carlisle or Lancaster and then a 3-4 hour train ride, too far to travel there and back in a day so the overnight costs are added to the cost of the workshop, taking it beyond reasonable outlay. Key criteria: accessible, practical, experiential, and with a tangible ‘product’ to take away and work on.
So, I shall keep working on my plan to offer a writing workshop in Cumbria with the basic ingredients I’ve found most useful, for a smallish group of people seriously interested in writing a novel, sometime over the next few months, just to see if I can do it and if it works. If I can and it does, I’ll learn how to make it better and do it again. In the meantime, if anyone who reads this would be interested, let me know.
by admin | Sep 13, 2014 | A Good Liar, Authenticity, Explicit details, Fallout, historical fiction, research, Windscale fire
In the great scheme of things, few people really care about absolute authenticity, but I’m one of them. We notice the glaring anomalies, like the plastic water bottle on a recent photo of the Downton Abbey set, but to appreciate much of we see or read in historical fiction we would need to be extraordinarily expert in the details of the period. If hardly anyone will notice or appreciate the details, why do I spend so much time and effort trying to get it right? I do it because I love it; it gives me a smug satisfaction that I can defend the things I’ve portrayed and the words I’ve used. Earlier this week I was reading from ‘A Good Liar’ a conversation between my heroine and her mother about the respectability of the father of Jessie’s unborn child. ‘They live in Mikasa Street,’ Jessie pleaded, ‘They’ve got a bathroom!’. I couldn’t help myself, breaking off from the reading to assure my listeners that the houses in Mikasa Street (built by Vickers in Vickerstown on Walney Island, named after a battleship in the Japanese navy) did indeed have bathrooms befitting the status of the workers to whom they were allocated. I beamed at them, they stared back. I’m sure none of them cared, but I did.
For more distant historical settings, the problem may be less acute, but many readers will have lived through my twentieth century settings themselves and will spot anachronism immediately. I was talking recently about the setting of my third book ‘Fallout’, in Seascale in 1957 at the time of the Windscale nuclear reactor fire. A lady in the audience told me cheerfully ‘Oh, yes, I was there that day’ and told me about watching the smoke streaming from the stack above the reactor building as she walked across the compound towards her office. ‘Which way was the wind blowing?’ I asked, but she couldn’t remember.
The setting for my next book will be around 1970 in the Furness area of what was then Lancashire and is now Cumbria. I’ve already spoken to people who worked in the newsroom of the Barrow-in-Furness newspaper at the time and next week I have a date with an ex-policeman from the same era. He laughed when I told him I was interested in the details of how it was to work in the force at that time: when the details are part of your own life you never think of them as important. But the details in my contact’s memory are gold-dust to me, and I shall listen hard, noting and remembering everything I can. How did the average copper think, talk and act at that time, before all the technological changes we have seen in the past 40 years? How did they relate to each other and to other ranks and parts of the service? Ian Rankin’s Edinburgh detectives call the men in uniform ‘woolly suits’: what were they called by their Barrow counterparts in 1970?
I know already that a large proportion of this authentic detail will never end up in the book. I’m writing a story, not a social history of the police force, and the pace can’t be bogged down by too much unnecessary information. I also know that the little nuggets of truth that emerge fresh and glinting into the text may delight only me and the few others who recognise their veracity. For most readers a few authentic details just add flavour to the image that springs from the words on the page. It could be the smell of something, a phrase or dialect word, a joke, a reference; anything can enhance the picture, like salt in food, taking it from the bland to the memorable. That’s what I’m after when I interview my bemused ex-policeman next week. By the way, all I did was send an exploratory email to Barrow police station: somehow, my request ended up on the desk of a Superintendent whose request for someone to respond carried sufficient authority that I heard back within days.
A year or two back, investigating the disaster in one of the Whitehaven pits in 1947 I came across the actual verbatim record of the enquiry into the disaster held by the National Coal Board at the time. It was tucked away in the archive of the Durham Mining Museum. Reading it was like there being there, and I managed to use just a word or two in the voice of one of the survivors. When the underground explosion happened, he said, they were some way from it but ‘the air fluttered’. What a wonderful phrase. Into the text it went and I love it still. Listening to my ex-policeman on Wednesday will give me the same delight, and hopefully the same treasure trove of authentic detail to mix into the story.
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