Is any of our writing ever wasted?

I originally wrote this for the Authors Electric blogging group to which I belong, based around a bit of de-cluttering over the Christmas holiday break: emptying lever-arch files full of research no longer needed! The size of the piled-up notes, articles printed out to re-read and study more carefully, and story plans was as deep as a stair… not a waste of paper, but just amazing to see what it takes in raw material to develop an idea…

And now I’ve thrown out the image so… 2 lever arch files stuffed full… and my imagined characters, in childhood…

Summer term, the mid 1970s. Two small girls who’ve reached the top of the village primary school, lie on their stomachs at the back of a large Victorian house, staring down into a basement room. The house, suitably converted, is the local GP surgery, the basement, one of the consulting rooms. Jenny has brought her soon-to-be stepsister Daisy here to view the place where her mother (who’ll soon be Daisy’s stepmother), works. They watch, full of curiosity, as Jenny’s mother examines a young woman, whom they recognise as a shop assistant from the local town. Until, discovered by the receptionist, they are roundly told off…

This passage was written as the opener to a story which takes up these two characters some years later. Jenny is one of the central players in a complex story involving the two girls in some risky occurrences, a medical mystery, and romance. At the time, it seemed to fit perfectly as the reader’s introduction to several central characters, giving a portrait of Jenny as a child consumed by curiosity, and of Daisy as someone she won’t allowed to forget. But it was axed by happy mutual agreement when I worked on the draft manuscript along with a literary consultant.

Another vivid scene introduces our reader to Jenny’s fellow protagonist. We meet Max, aged about thirteen, in his father’s gloomy study, dark velvet curtains partly closed. He is in trouble, along with some friends, for using an antique microscope to repeat a well-known historical experiment. Max’s father, a church minister, is so outraged at what they’ve done that he has lobbed the innocent piece of scientific equipment through the window of Max’s attic bedroom, before punishing his son.

Rewritten in historic form, and later in the book, that scene was retained as an iconic family memory. And the manse where it happened has now been a setting in three stories. I know that big granite house somewhere in the north-east of England so well that I could conduct you around it, from the hall (with coat stand and special home-made rack to store skateboarding helmets and knee pads), past the study and the formal living room (opposite doors in the passage) to the big family kitchen–breakfast room (Aga and pine table large enough for a family of seven), and the family room with piano and doors opening onto the garden. I know the veg patch and the treehouse and their stories. Another house I know well is the converted chapel (with artist’s studio), where Jenny grows up far in the west of Cornwall, the clifftop blackberry plants, the coves and the zawns, the landscape of her childhood. They are ‘home’ in the minds of the chief characters, even though the descriptive passages have long been dropped.  

Recently I even threw out, in an attempt at decluttering, four fat lever arch files full of articles I’d downloaded, printed out, and mined for information necessary to understand   and describe the scientific mystery which the young people in my story attempt to unravel. In the writer’s mind, old writing can live alongside her characters, especially if she chooses to write a series and (far from being wasted hours) it remains fresh and accessible, even when the scenes it was created for never become part of a book.

And of course, as we write and rewrite, our characters may get up to all manner of activity which, again, never sees the light of day beyond a few weeks or months of existence as a precious computer file, now deleted.

The odd thing is, they can be retained in our memories. The writer can picture the scene even if it has been eliminated from the character’s life — it hasn’t from the writer’s!

Memory, imagination, creativity are wonderful and curious things. Do you have characters or incidents or even plots retained in your mind, a world built in words and pictures but eventually consigned to the recycling bin? We may know how our characters reached the point where they enter the plot — the reader may have only hints of childhood, university, first love, prior career, the the influence of siblings and environment — vital to the outworking of their developing characteristics, interests, skills or psychological problems — and these have all been developed and then dumped in the process which some people call “murdering your darlings” — but were those extra writing hours a waste of time?

Tell me the truth about love…

Writing is a process. That’s kind of obvious: but the interesting thing about writing, (or any creative process), is the inevitable interaction between us, the creatives, and the work, as we move through that process.

This blog is based on one I wrote earlier (in 2013). I was moving towards the completion of a first draft, but hadn’t been able to pin down the final pages. How exactly to say au revoir to my characters, and leave my readers with that sense of both satisfaction and longing for more…

Paragraph two began: Yesterday, I completed my second editing of the draft of Baby, Baby’s follow-up: a sequel which takes Max and Jenny into the stormy waters of modern marriage, parenthood, and professional careers. I had one last scene to write, and I knew I’d been putting it off. Well, yesterday was the day after I’d completed the first draft of my latest WIP – the next book in the series… and in taking a break before plunging into first edits, I was doing some desktop tidying-up, and found this – some musings on a word we use and use and abuse daily.

Location location: Oxford, where Max and Jenny move in the second book… the science area from the University Parks

Working through the draft, there’ll be alterations to make, to bring the whole together leading to the revelations which were the goal from the beginning… With The Labyrinth Year, it’s a peaceful resolution, another labyrinth, this time on the beach.  And what got me there as now was a strong desire to have done with shuffling details and a big push towards the pre-planned finale.

But love remains central to the series’s plots, though in another way.

Writing a series, characters move on and grow. The idea was born in Cornwall, where this one ends – and moving from idea to text, early on a character called Max began as a research scientist, a charmer, slightly sinister, very ambitious, and  amoral. He soon morphed, and split. The name attached itself to a very different male protagonist. The character became John Guthrie, mostly-absent father to Jenny, the female lead. Love is at the centre of the plot: but do John and Max love Jenny? Does she love either of them? And why?

I love my family, my garden, my cats, and I love chocolate. Or rather, I love the taste and the feel when I eat chocolate. A piece of chocolate completes a meal: does love complete something?

 Is it that these guys needed/wanted Jenny, to complete themselves?

Max ‘fell’ in love with Jenny: Jenny thinks she loves Max. She was impressed, flattered, and saved from homesickness and the ignominy of doing the heel trick right before her college interview. She could disappear, in ancient, romantic, historic, drily-academic, super-scientific, audacious Cambridge, from damp, dreary, West Cornwall where nothing happens and everything remains traditional, in 1984. She truly loved him.

Sennen Beach, West Cornwall, a sunny day

Max is constrained by his religious background and culture. Taught that love is receptive, open to others, incarnated in service. Jenny begins by perceiving Max (along with Cambridge) as her saviour: she needed him! So do her hormones, her ambitions, her expectations.

But initially, he let her down…

Jenny’s stepsister Daisy meanwhile feels the world owes her: after all, when she was a small child, her mum disappeared at Glastonbury Festival, taking her love along with her. Adopted by Jenny’s middle-class, conventional, GP, mother, expected to appreciate how this women gives ‘love’, Daisy thinks her early deprivation justifies her angry feelings, and kicks against convention.

While Jenny’s dad, John Guthrie, plays with his daughter’s emotions, by giving her academic chances. Is he trying to make up for removing himself from her childhood when he divorced her mother? His clients want a baby, so much they will pay what they can’t afford, and suffer any pain and indignity of treatment. In return, when they get the baby, they love the doctor who made it happen. He receives affirmation.

 Each set of parents claim to ‘love’ their adult children, ‘want the best’ for them… and think they know what’s best. What exactly compels Max and Jenny to continue their relationship, despite parental disapproval? Raging twenty-something hormones? Rebelliousness? Is this love?

Daisy’s rebelliousness, and a gap year job at Guthrie’s research lab lead her into a situation which brings Jenny and Max back together. Though in return for being in relationship, they must both give up something they hold dear, part of themselves, part of their childhood, their upbringing.

So, all of these scenarios, involving wanting, desiring, craving, and getting, are described as driven by love.

For book two, the stage was set, the continuing the story of love. In book three (hopefully moving towards its adulthood in publication) there’s love in friendship, as their daughter Alice recalls her teenage year of first public exams and personal formation… Writing is a process, and as the song says, Tell me the truth about love…

Taking off my Hat to my Younger Self

Dot Matrix printer: remember them?

(This was first published as my contribution to the Authors Electric blog for the month of June 2021)

Yesterday our usually human-oriented, friendly cat spent eight hours lurking under the sofa bed in my ‘den’ (or writing space), which doubles, with the sofa in its bed pose, as a guest bedroom.  For him, ‘lockdown’ was most definitely over: a small fast-moving human creature, whom he had forgotten about, was again whooping and shouting around the house…

         I could agree with the cat. Lockdown provided a quiet routine life, when writing could be fitted into the daily round of on-line shopping, exercise classes, meetings and chat. Ever since my husband’s office sent everyone off to work from home (16 March 2020) this routine has given our cat ‘sit-on time’ around 10.00am, as we three met up for our tea and biscuits morning break, and again around 4.45pm for tea and a slice of toast (the cat of course had cat kibble, if hungry, but the specialness of these times isn’t food (forhim), it’s that he can sit on a lap, one of his very favourite things). 

In fact, lockdown has given our cat a new interest: observing and researching human life. He finds all of it extremely diverting, if mysterious. He’s an eager participant (or tries to be) at Zoom/Teams meetings (along with other cats), watches a cultural television programme with deep concentration and puzzlement, and always turns up hoping to join my weekly on-line Yoga sessions… but enough of cats, except to say that having hunted all over the house for him, I discovered him under the sofa bed, having squashed himself flat, and beaten the record of the Lakeland cat which Beatrix Potter observed as having sat on the lid of a basket for five hours. After such a feat, he was extremely hungry, and ate two suppers while I began preparing ours.

That cat who sat on the basket for 5 hours (from The Tale of Benjamin Bunny, one of my favourites as a 4-year-old)

My observation meanwhile was to feel like taking off my hat to my younger self: during this last lockdown, we’d discovered, lurking in some box in the attic, a collection of about ten short stories written by that younger self. Some printed by our first, dot-matrix, printer, on recycled paper bought from one of the then-new ‘fair trade’ catalogues, now yellowed with age. These were from that now-taught-as-history-in-schools date of 1989 — remember what you were doing then? Although I know women who write now while raising a family, as Mum to three children, then aged 12, 8, and 8 (twins), I wondered where they find the time? Making supper for two, I recalled cooking meals for 6 (including my mother who was living with us) back in the 1980s.  

Whatever, the discovery has kicked off a lockdown project: to edit and publish my stories from 1989 to just the very beginning of the 2000s as a collection, a historical looking-back through the last 20 years of the 20th century, when life was simpler.

All the elements which drive my present writing and interests are strongly present in those stories, but with a different, more innocent slant. Back then, I’d had a few articles published but hadn’t even thought of writing a novel, or had any ambition about ‘writing’. The articles concerned, at a non-specialist level, socio-political attitudes. But in the stories, characters swirl through a world of their own personal discovery based around their relationships, mostly heterosexual, mostly concerned with a spot of romance, dreams broken or dreams achieved — mostly lessons learned, sometimes strangely magical. They chronicle the background of the world of my University years, dotted all over with the friends I moved among: artists (I’d hang around their studios, envying them the apparent freedom studying Fine Art), or medics (how on earth had they known to apply for this so-adult subject, what was it like to be on the wards discovering the realities and responsibilities of clinical medicine? Like me, they were barely into their 20s). One story at least points forwards to my first novel Baby, Baby, which takes look at the ethics of artificial reproduction. 

The early stories point to a then-unrevealed future: soon after (1992) I went back to academic study, and took a certificate course in Social and Political Science, ending up specialising a bit in medical sociology, widening and probably liberalising my knowledge. Through that time, more stories evolved. Where did the time come from?  We had reading, and essays, and there were now pre-teens and teens in the household! 

Now this discovery has spawned a new project: edit and publish them. Western Europe was still moving through days before urban terrorism, “Brexit” and the pandemic. What considerations governed decision-making in ‘normal life’? The news has uncovered sex abuse and corruption, campaigning has brought to light so many diverse communities and issues purposely hidden away by past generations — LGBTQ+, same-sex weddings, Black Lives Matter, anti-Colonialism, the Windrush scandal, the climate crisis, the Grenfell Tower… the list is far longer. For readers, novels as well as non-fiction abound to devour, and to inform. For writers, such rich seams of information, discussion and opinions offer an invitation to juggle (seriously) with the controversial, to inform or appeal to the public imagination. Normal life — without a pandemic — isn’t normal any more (if ever it was).

If the cat could understand, what would he choose? I’ll take my hat off to all today’s fiction writers who try and achieve writing seriously while raising a family. Today it is exhausting to be a Granny and to attempt to write a novel.

The perceptive feline himself… figuring out what’s on the TV…

Writing that Inspires

(re-blogging my November piece for Authors Electric)

Writers need to keep reading – possibly a meme – but also, wise words. What better way to learn the art of good writing than to read much, and widely, from childhood onwards? Though whether that list on an Amazon page, ‘people who bought this also bought’, (or however it’s phrased) give much guidance that the books mentioned there will also please and entertain the reader of the main book featured is much guidance, I doubt. Because inspiration is a strange thing. In answer to a question (on Facebook, some years ago) ‘Waterstones Invite Readers To Share Books That Changed Their Lives’, I have a record that I responded, ‘A Thousand Splendid Suns’.

A book which inspired me, a book whose title intrigued me as a child…

I had recently consumed A Thousand Splendid Suns hungrily, page after page. Hosseini grips his reader with a powerful range of questions, emotions, attitudes, not only with page-turning plot. He lets you see a person in a certain light: then turns on another, and your view is totally different. Both are ‘true’, even though both are ‘opposite’. And the end, in a satisfying way, is actually fairy-tale in its simplicity and happiness, a final feel-good factor after all the angst. That works: the reader is left on a high, rather than ‘and that was a sad book’ or ‘well he  couldn’t decide so left it open…’ Hosseini is a master. In his next novel, And the Mountains Echoed we are shown, sympathetically, a sensitive, thoughtful Afghan-born doctor’s reaction to a wounded child in a Kabul hospital. She had been horrifically wounded in body and emotions: not by war, but by her jealous uncle’s violent attack on her family. We agree with the guy’s feelings, thoughts, and actions… at the same time, we are turned off by his cousin the wideboy’s behaviour.

Hosseini then tells the story of when the two guys returned to their homes in California. And the situation and future of the child are skilfully revealed in, at the last, a couple of sentences, maybe a short paragraph and in very telling words.

As a reader, you find yourself carrying this ending around with you, until you realise, yes: that is being human. That is how people are. Action, however crass the actor is, gets things done…Here is a writer who has his finger on the pulse of who and what we are, all of us, rattling around this world. Trying or meaning to do good. Or the opposite. Or being indifferent. Unfaithful. Caught up in a life too busy.

A Thousand Splendid Suns didn’t only grab me because it’s feminist, and written by a guy,  although the way he manages this is pretty insightful. It isn’t solely because it informs me about a culture very different to my own. Which is, it seems, always in and out of the News, having a long history of being a football kicked around by the surrounding countries and cultures, and some very far away. It’s these and more: Hosseini never ever uses clichés: whether of thought, situation, metaphor or phrase.

Also, and incidentally, when I was a small kid, there was a book in the family bookcase which had grabbed my attention by its title: *Conflict Angora to Afghanistan. For a moment, imagine a six year old: I knew what angora was, because I had a cherished angora bolero (there’s two lovely, non-English words held together by description, and belonging to two very different cultures!).  I wore this proudly birthday parties. It was the softest woolly garment imaginable.  It was angora… but what was Afghanistan? And how did that title all fit together to make sense?  And to add another couple of long-ago lurking child thoughts, I’ve always felt a kind of a pull towards the exotic, since I’ve a small, Greek-island, heritage, and a love of Oriental carpets.

But to return to the grown-up world: reading A Thousand Splendid Suns changed my life because the experience underlined my determination that it is possible to write about parts of your own, possibly obscure, culture in a way that challenges readers with the universal, every-culture, questions. And appeals, because of that, to the universal reader. It gave me faith that I don’t have to write what’s in vogue if I want to be read. Hosseini writes powerfully, insightfully, and gets inside the problems of being a human being: I am challenged to do that too.

Inspired to explore my culture

Above all, his writing skill challenged me to aim the highest I can, in whatever I write. To scatter the big questions across the page within the context of a story. To talk to the people out there, reading, about their own humanity while entertaining them with the questions, anxieties, and events through the lives these particular weird characters. That’s what the best traditional stories do, what Hosseini does, and what I try to do.

* https://www.foreignaffairs.com/reviews/capsule-review/1931-07-01/conflict-angora-afghanistan  https://www.buddenbrooks.com/pages/books/28214/rosita-forbes/conflict-angora-to-afghanistan

Described as ‘the… adventures of a well-known traveller’, Conflict Angora to Afghanistan by Rosita Forbes (note, a woman), is a book, published 1931, which traces and comments on events sadly similar to an area of the ‘Middle Eastern’ world which continues to be troubled by war and conflict. I’ve no clear idea why we had it but there could be several reasons for the interest.

(Note: I believe he’s now gone back to practicing medicine, since he feels he has no more to say to say through fiction: now there’s something to consider. If we are ‘stuck’ or have no further burning ideas – then is it maybe time to stop, rather than to force oneself onwards, and write lesser books?)

Reading, Writing, and Always being Kind…

(My July contribution to the ‘Authors Electric’ blog, reproduced here) “Be kind” 

A few weeks before lockdown, a well-known celebrity took her own life, leaving a note advising others to “be kind”. This may or may not have been the source of advice which circulated, as we began to live shut away from crowds, and thus places of business and pleasure, that we should now do “Small acts of kindness” to neighbours. An effort to create some coping mechanism, some feeling of community, and hope, and to take us out of ourselves.

Well-meaning but in danger, as the words became a meme, of joining with those BBC News tropes of “unprecedented”, “uncharted waters” and “strange times” which, while describing something, also managed to describe nothing. How, exactly, do we perform “little acts of kindness” when all are separated and not to get together? Of course, we do find ways… What I’m saying is, stand back and think — is it worrying that we need to be told? Is it sobering that normally we don’t do these?

Lockdown has become a meme – a subject overdone – yet lockdown is different for everyone, and has provided the chance for reflection to a society which doesn’t reflect very much. On to the next thing, and let’s hope for excitement — as was said of Millennials, “they don’t want material goods like their parents do — they want experiences”.

A Change of Reading

One small change I found myself led into was reading matter. As an avid fiction fan, my habitual reading has being in the area of long, moderately challenging novels.

Not the popular Hilary Mantel ones (though many began lockdown with reading her latest). My taste has been a tour of novels by non-British, non-white writers whose cultures I don’t know with the histories and religious bases which formed them. Kamila Shamsie’s Home Fire, Leila Aboulela’s Bird Summons. I returned to reading Barbara Kingsolver, her latest two novels, (Unsheltered and Flight Behaviour) exploring in fictional form the effects of climate change. My lockdown change was a desire to turn to lighter novels, and to actually enjoy a “cosy mystery” set on a Greek island, (Murder your Darlings) and a diary-style account of teaching in a secondary school, tragi-comic and firmly set in today’s Middle England (Miss, What does Incomprehensible Mean?) . Challenged by having the time, I watched TV’s adaptation of Normal People, and the sociologist in me kicked in to consider its meaning. Another contemporary romance, Mix Tape, had also caught my attention, and I thought that these two stories, both published as books in the past five years, demonstrate the truth of the “plus ça change” nature of human beings and what they expect from a romance novel…, and this between couples from opposed cultures, although all Western and all-white.

A Challenge on Content

Interestingly, in both stories attraction is strong and physical, taking place initially at school, cultural differences are of class, both “girls” have difficult abusive homes, both “boys” loving and nurturing ones. Both girls “escape” to a new life where they blossom. Both boys have not known the extent of the abuse the girls had suffered. Both couples keep their relationship a secret from the abusive home. Are these the present day memes of romance novels, I wondered? Mix Tape — taking place in the late 1970s — ends with reuniting the couple, whereas Normal People, a millennial tale, ends with parting for career reasons.

But then, I read the book. Memes they may be, but Sally Rooney’s story tells more than can be conveyed by the dimly-lit, meaningful looks of the TV adaptation convey. The inner lives of her protagonists, troubled by doubt around issues of identity and worth, weave in and out of this on-off relationship and give, albeit in unrelenting flat prose, what is not there in the dialogue. The tragedy of the romance between two school misfits is that each has been unknowingly the other’s tutor in adolescent development. And the ending, a disappointment to many reviewers, is indicated (though not overtly stated): as adults they — or certainly Marianne has — achieved the ability to do without the other.  Whereas in Mix Tape (set in the late 20th century) the protagonists are all set, at the end, to elope together, leaving marriage partners and grown children behind.

An indication that the meme has moved on from romance to a reality where the individual’s own career trumps caring about a person close to themselves, and self dominates over all human relationships? Or have they merely matured, rather than “using each other”? A point to consider for my review, on my website.

Reading romance novels, albeit serious ones, makes me wonder about how much the romance genre meme is an indicator of the health, or not, of a society. And put my own work under the spotlight: does my work (novels Baby, Baby and The Labyrinth Year) fall into “unshelvable” due to a low ratio of sex to other issues of the couples’ daily lives?

Is this because it shows too much of how they carry out the scientific interests and work which holds them together as much as physical attraction, how they work on a mystery together, and raises ethical and religious questions?It had seemed at the time of writing these weregiving the reader some stronger food than simply the sugar of the sex drive. And it was all part of the learning curve of my two young protagonists. Or, is my story-telling simply outdated as we move onwards?

A Chance of a Future

Well that is what I’ve learned, and shall we keep up the “little acts of kindness”? Many of us have learned, as the roads quietened and there was nowhere to go except our own gardens and the nearest walkable park or common, to slow down and appreciate the natural world. My hope is that we’ll continue to and live with an eye on the survival of more birds in our gardens, more wildflowers on the verges, and more insects to pollinate them. And of course the range of readers, like the range of books, is infinite, and the human psyche does actually often return to what’s easiest. Maybe I’ll write the action next, and leave out the romance?

And so, shall we all continue to be kind?

(…and by the way, what am I reading now? Another ‘cosy, light’ book, Stranger at St Brides, by my friend Debbie Young, and  Sally Rooney’s first, Conversations with Friends... plus ca change…)

Crashing out – is our language reflecting a more violent and impatient world?

Language is definitely a living, lively thing. But living and lively suggest the dance of words and meanings across the centuries, gathering as they go, changes of usage, suitability, and popularity, and welcoming and including immigrant words from our near neighbours and from across the globe. What is shaping English in the 21st century though? It’s a society which desperately needs to slow down, breathe deeply, and consider opening its heart and mind to seeing the good in others rather than the excitement of indulging prejudice and extremes. But instead violent catch-all metaphorical phrases have barged in, replacing relatively informative, longer, adjectival phrases.

photo by  vanveenjf-mS2ngGq6VO4-unsplash

As a writer, I don’t welcome this trend. Excuse me if I’m over-reacting, but don’t  these over-used examples demonstrate the genre, masculine, clearly the stuff of male-directed fiction? Turbocharged, a car crash, skyrocketing, spiralling out of control, crashing out of Europe.  And the latest, horribly shocking, and abhorant, as I heard on the radio recently, used like this: ‘we can’t throw Ireland under a bus’.

Based in technology, these phrases recall the sound of clashing metal, the stench of spilling petrol and burning oil, an attack on our fragile human bodies, total destruction. It’s all about large machines destroying things, and is often, even usually, applied inappropriately. For example, we might call Boris Johnson “Turbocharged”, or the economy “Spiralling out of control” but these phrases tell us nothing about the real character of the person who has become our Prime Minister, or about a situation except that it is urgent, exciting, and destructive. As for a car crash, is  this really necessary to  describe, for example, a teenager’s GCSE results? Or losing that house you so wanted to buy? And it is surely devastating to those who have experienced the real thing to use such a terrible scene of injury and suffering as a mere metaphor to bump up the drama of a business disaster?  As for crashing out of the EU, isn’t there perhaps something  frivolous in using ‘crashing out’ to describe what should (if it happens) be a serious, world-changing, political move?

Nouns have recently begun to replace phrases: physicality, positivity, viscerality, musicality. Yes, you can make one word do here – just add ‘ality’. But much more pleasant to keep physical, visceral, and musical, and place them in a phrase or sentence which harmonises (has harmonality?) with your description of the writing which you are describing? There’s a noun we use now, commonality, meaning that two (or more) things have something in common. One word is easily missed by anyone who has a problem with hearing.  Conflating a short adjectival phrase, (here “have in common”),  into a single noun could even be understood as a form of discrimination.

I wonder if these language changes have happened because we want to hurry up and get the talking over? We can’t be bothered to put together a longer sentence, it’s easier to seize upon a noun. This new 21st-century style is widespread, used verbally by broadcasters and written in newspapers and other journalism. I’m happy with the historic and inevitable shifting of language and ways in which we express things, and am no “grammar Nazi,” but I’m sad that the combination of these violent metaphors and the new adjective-to-noun formation is adding hurry and thoughtlessness to a society which already can’t even sit down to drink its coffee, but must carry a hot drink in a paper cup as it rushes towards the office, careering towards marketing more goods, growing the economy, and meanwhile destroying the planet.

Perhaps we could make the move to slow down by using language more gently and thoughtfully, and actually turning daily verbal and written interactions into a more pleasant read. Who else would join me in cutting out the petrol, and reducing the CO2 emissions in our speech?

For a quieter, more thoughtful, entertaining read, try my poetry… Available from my website: https://hodgepublishing.co.uk/

 

Are you still writing??

Beginning to settle on the storytelling for the next book, my idea for the opening page is a girl on a train…

“Are you still writing?” Friends – especially the long lost who reappear, visiting – sometimes ask. The answer– yes – looks untrustworthy, since the third book in the Mullins family saga series, hasn’t yet appeared, and number two, The Labyrinth Year was published in 2014.

‘So – are you?’

My “Mullins Family – book 3″ hasn’t yet appeared for unavoidable reasons: health, computer problems, politics. I’m picking up from there, publishing a selection of poems, ironically perhaps relating to those years 1997-2007. and redesigning (with a designer) the Hodge website. Some writers, either by contract or by their own choice, must aim to turn out a book a year. Their readers expect it. Are these always a good read?  Maybe. Or maybe not. Even within a genre, (and genres which follow must-have elements and expectations, such as ChickLit, fast paced thrillers, cosy crime, police procedurals), there’s variation. It takes committed, well informed, professional writers, often with a background in journalism and no “day job” to do a really good job on a yearly basis. My kind of thought provoking books will always take longer, involving research, time to mull this over, and integrate it into a plot with a story arc and satisfying conclusion.

So, I’d thought, ten fictional years forward for each novel. Book two is set in 1997, that’s then a leap forward – to 2007.  Enormous social and political change took place in those ten years. Pre-millennium, governed by Tony Blair’s New Labour, life was very different. We were on the edge of the financial crash but most of us didn’t know.

Pre 2000, we were warned to fear the “millennium bug” which could potentially ruin computer systems. Thanks to hard work from techie people this didn’t happen. But instead, terrorism struck in 2001 –  9/11 shocked and rocked the world. And catapulted the world into a different era. Followed by, in 2016, the idea that we should leave the EU in a process called “Brexit”.

Pre-2000… post Brexit…????

Quite how life in 2007 would speak to us today, when our minds are filled with wars, terrorism, paedophile scandals, Brexit negotiations and now knife crime, what would be exciting about the year before 2008?  Even post 9/11 and the London bombs of 2005, it was still a time of innocence compared to today’s news. Even adding a dimly growing awareness of Climate Change … Book 3 is now set in 2017.

My heroine is a Millennial, Jenny and Max Mullins’s daughter born in 1992, a five year old in 1997. We find her, Alice aged 25, in tears as she travels by train, her mind full of memories… She has recently opened a box and found items she’d saved back in 2007, aged 15. What these memories are should unfold as the story moves along, and we learn of the personal tragic end to that year for Alice. The climax of the idea for 2007… but not the same book…

It’s going to stretch my imagination, and my research capability, to get inside Alice’s mind, but it is an exciting prospect. Have you a book within you, disrupted by political change?

Live… Lose… Learn… poetry by Mari Howard will be available later this year… look out for it soon on the new Mari Howard Hodge website…

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The writer, the Sussex Chair, & Brexit

Maybe it is the time of year: after the solstice, a time of hope or after crazy Christmas, a time of space. For whatever reason, the collective spirit has lightened, even though the world still seems to be at war with itself. A friend who was in deep gloom over Christmas and New Year writes that her depression has lifted, another of that how being “stuck” in her writing, composing a silly poem about that has freed her up again, and I’m  being weirdly inspired by a chair.

The chair has always been in my family, it was in my room as I grew up. We inherited it from my grandparents, and it just looks like an ordinary upright chair with a rush seat. Apparently it came from artist’s studio, which kind of gave it a romantic feel when I was a teenager, and somehow it seems to have followed me around and is still in our house today. It’s in the room where I paint. A couple of years back, I put the chair in a painting of a child in a strop, an artistic child whose foster mother only understands pink and spangly girls, but this is a denim jeans, creative small girl who hates her pink bedroom. Although she isn’t me, I understand her. The girl is Daisy, known Daze, a character in my Mullins family series, currently two novels Baby Baby, and The Labyrinth Year.

In June 2016 we went on holiday to our favourite place in Cornwall, and the sun shone as we picnicked, on 23rd, with crowds of others at a picturesque typical Cornish cove… When we came home, the painting wasn’t working. I simplified painting the chair, leaving out the essence of the design. I was also really stuck with the third novel, had problems with my computer, had a nasty illness, decided the website needed a make-over, submitted to gloom and pessimism.

And here’s the thing: today I discovered this is actually a ”Sussex Chair”. The spools on the back are central to a design otherwise characterised by simplicity and practicality. It’s a well known William Morris ‘arts and crafts’ design (though ours is a version without the arms). The story – that it came from an artist’s studio – fits with the period it was made.

Strangely that lifted the gloom: knowing I have to make a proper drawing of the chair, do the  intricate and worthy task, a work that takes time and care. It’s a kick-start to getting the novel writing going, and it’s come alongside finally having the website and computer problems solved.

Odd how a chair can call you back to creativity.

Writing my series in Winter

The large pond at our local Nature Reserve, a photo of the resting and waiting which sums up winter. I’m so glad Christmas and New Year are gone now, and we begin looking up towards the longer days and the creeping up of  new shoots and signs of spring!

A few days ago, some writer friends were talking about writing for Christmas in the summer months – I am trying to write about summer as nature is lying low under frost (and hopefully not more snow!) and low cloud. It’s cold, damp, and horrible  here: the pond surrounded by thick, dark, mud, the trees bare except for the clinging ivy, the reeds broken, brown and collapsed.

Meanwhile, the volunteers who care for the reserve have (and are) running work parties to cut, prune, and plant … out there in warm clothing, hats, boots, gloves … And their work will encourage birds (already just beginning to practice their mating songs), butterflies (maybe there are crysalis/pupa hiding cosily amongst the apparently dead vegetation, or the piles of lopped-down logs), I know there are eggs of a particular butterfly somewhere in there, safely waiting … It’s all poised, even as we hurry by, nipped by a north wind and frozen by the incredible damp of living between several rivers …

Yesterday afternoon I walked through the sticky mud, under the low, grey sky, along a waterside path … and yes, this swan couple are back to dating, having driven away last year’s teenage brood … signs of spring, fertility, and the return of warmth to the sun, and colour to life!

So glad I am writing about my characters in summer … the long, damp summer of 2007 … when there is mystery, distress, and growing up to be done …

 

 

 

The Fun of Writing a Series

The fun of writing a series – my fellow author and member of Alliance of Independent Authors Francis Guenette’s blog post a few weeks ago inspired me to write about fun of writing a series. Francis had asked whether we as readers were ‘fans of serialised fiction’ – did we enjoy reading or watching a series or prefer one-off, ‘stand-alone’, stories? My response was that I love reading a series and I am enjoying writing one, (the Mullins Family Saga – if I’d known it was to become a series, though, I would have given Max Mullins a more noble, memorable, surname perhaps! Dashwood? Or Mac-something?)

Examining the subject, it is fun, but it also creates its own drawbacks.

For example, November is Nano-month: many writers will use ‘NaNoWriMo’  ( National Novel Writing Month) to scribble down the basics of a novel, in the form of chunks of unedited script, on a daily basis throughout November. Why November? Well in the northern hemisphere November can be the dreariest of all months. After the beauty of October days, with bright sunshine and the trees in their autumn colours, November brings the true end of the year in our gardens and countryside, shorter days, long dark nights, increasing cold. And it is not yet Christmas, so, how to keep going? For writers, hunker down with storytelling.

For a first-time attempt at the long haul of a novel, Nano offers a solution to the question ‘how do I get the first 50,000 words down?’ But for the long-distance series writer, the attraction of ‘just keep going’ will never work. Once you have novel number one published, you have your characters in situ, and they must now develop in believable ways, following up the first story with what they really might do next.  You have family history, you have disputes to carry through or to resolve. You have consequences and memories.

And, that’s also the reason to move into a series. Exploration, and taking things further within established constraints. Seeing if they learn from experience, if they cope with new circumstances … That is the fun of it. And, therein lie the restraints.

After Baby, Baby, will Max and Jenny stay married, given the vast differences in their childhoods? And if so, how and why? How will their kids turn out? How do their careers and ambitions develop? What will crazy Daisy do next?

Even though I don’t subscribe to the rather romantic idea ‘the characters tell me what they will do next’, I have found, working on story number three, that there are some threads leading from past events into a future which I had not exactly planned, or planned at all. In The Labyrinth Year, two of the characters are growing closer as the book progresses, and now 10 years on from there, they are still in touch.

This was ‘never meant to happen’. It is enormously exciting to follow and see where it may go. And, it demands a whole lot of research …in unexpected areas.

On the other hand, they look to be making a bid for the centre stage, not where these two were planned to be in this story. Do some characters ‘come to life’ without the author’s orchestrations? Romantic whimsey, or psychologically predictable? What do you think?

Baby, Baby, and The Labyrinth Year (The Mullins Family Saga, books 1 and 2), published by Hodge Publishing, are available in paperback (or on Kindle). Find more about them on the Hodge website: http://hodgepublishing.co.uk/

Read Francis Guenette’s blogpost on being fans of serialised fiction here