The agony of the re-write.

I’ve been tinkering with ‘Show me more’ for a few weeks now; changing a bit here, re-writing a bit there, but   something just wasn’t  working and I couldn’t work out what it was.  I was moving sections and chapters around to change the pace, as well as re-writing the odd new chapter, but I still felt unsatisfied and increasingly ‘lost.’. That old saying ‘not being able to see the wood for the trees,’ began to feel terribly true.

It was  easy to move things around and pretend that that’s all that was  needed, when in fact the truth was staring me in the face.  The horrible truth was that ‘Show me more’ needed some serious heavy-duty work.  Once I came to that realisation, the fear set in, and with the fear came the though that the best thing to do  was to bundle  the manuscript  into the bottom  drawer and pretend that it never happened.  That’s an easy way out, and one I have adopted twice before with different novels.

But I’ve put so much work into Show me more’ already and I love it so much, and doesn’t the story deserve to be told?  Wasn’t it time for me to be brave?

I spoke to my friend, the writer  Fenella Miller about this, and she recommended whole heartedly  that I re-write ‘Show me more,’  properly, rather than tinker with it anymore.  I didn’t particularly like what she said, but that uncomfortable sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach told me that she was right.

So, I began to re-write, but although I’d come to the intellectual conclusion that I had to do it, I still hadn’t reconciled that decision in my heart.

But then, last week,  something happened that changed that.  A synchronicity happened; not one but two, which made me finally accept this decision both with my head and my heart.

I often listen to the Guardian Books podcast on my daily Nordic walks, and last week I randomly chose to listen to two interviews with writers.  One was David Nicholls, writer of  ‘One Day,’ and the other was Mohsin Hamid, writer of ‘The Reluctant Fundamentalist.  They both spoke about the process of writing, and surprise, surprise, they had both re-written their books completely!!! Not tinkering; not moving bits around; not adding bits and taking bits out, but serious re-writes where they started again with a clean, blank page.

Well, what can I say?  If these two good writers knew that re-writing was the right thing to do, and went and did it, then why shouldn’t I?

Suddenly re-writing ‘Show me more,’ feels like the right thing to do, and although I haven’t got very far, I’m pleased with what’s coming on the page; the worlds have a new freshness and  energy to them… and I’m a sucker for anything I can possibly interpret as a synchronicity!

The right track

2012 began on a high for me as I’ve got a place on the Romantic Novelist’s Association New Writer’s Scheme.  Applications had to be done via email, and the scheme opened at one minute past midnight on the 2nd of January.  I had put the date and time into my phone with an alarm, but there was no chance I was going to forget it.

My family and I were inIcelandto spend New Year with my relatives, and we stayed in a strange little boarding school inReykjavikthat had closed for Christmas.

It was an eerie old place and we were all convinced we would see ghosts but sadly we didn’t.

I was really worried about internet access but the building had wireless connection, but that did not stop me testing and re-testing the connection as I was terrified it would let me down at the crucial moment.

Thankfully it didn’t, and at midnight I sat by my laptop next to the router as my husband and children hovered over me, shouting at me to press the button now!

I had checked every clock on every devise we had with us to make sure the time was right, and as soon as the clock struck one minute past I hit the button. Immediately, I feared that I’d been too quick, but there was nothing I could do about it.  My fortune was now in the lap of the Gods, and I said a prayer to the Old Icelandic heathen Gods, as well as every other God I could think of.

But I need not have worried because later that day an email arrived to confirm my place and it said that all places had been filled by two minutes past midnight!

To say I was jubilant is not an exaggeration, and when I received my welcome pack, the reality hit home that I had become a member of this prestigious organisation.  The RNA has a very busy calendar and I’ve already been to one regional meeting which was great.  Apart from now having the opportunity to meet with other writers and learn from them, the scheme allows me to send in a manuscript to be read by RNA ‘readers’ which are all published writers.  They will then comment on it which will be amazingly helpful as they know their stuff.

Another thing that has happened is that on a whim, I sent ‘Show me more’ to four agents in January, more to gage response rather than expecting anything to really happen.

I was aware that the manuscript wasn’t quite ready, and I’m now beginning third draft which I hope might be the last one, but we’ll see.  Two agents sent standard rejection letters, but the other two sent me personal and thoughtful responses.  Both had seriously considered the manuscript and were very complimentary about the writing and the story, but didn’t love it enough to want to take it on.

One of them asked to see my next book, but I had given an outline of the book I’m planning next.

I was absolutely delighted by their responses, and although they rejected it, these rejections were ‘good’ and made me feel that I must be on the right track.

Wandering heart

The River Colne runs outside the window of my writing room.  Many writers prefer to face a blank wall whilst writing to minimize disruption from the outside world, and in my early writing days I tried that, but it drove me  crazier than I already was.    So now I watch the river from my window.

It’s an estuary river so it’s  tidal which is just fantastic.   When the tide goes out mud appears, and it is  dark and sticky, dirty looking even, black in places, but then, this is Essex.  It’s pretty in its own way but you have to look carefully and patiently and allow it to reveal itself to you.  This isn’t Henley-on-Thames and it isn’t Dedham or anywhere else postcard pretty, but it’s  raw and alive and untamed which I prefer.

When I first moved to Essex I felt sick with longing for  the mountains and the rugged landscape of my home country, but I found that I  had been given a river instead, and it helped lessen my homesickness.  As I got to know the river’s  unpredictability and its changing moods and appearances, I began to fall in love with it.  It became my surrogate landscape, and now I have  as much affection for it as I have for my native landscape.

Rivers, especially tidal rivers, bring bird life. I feel affinity with ravens (as you can read about in previous posts),  and in my youth there was the Loa,   Golden Plover,  who’s first sighting  heralded the coming of  spring, and every summer we  cowered  from the terns as they protected their nests.

Outside my window I watch birds whose names I’m not too sure about; gulls, swans, geese and the different wading birds that  I’ve become particularly  fond of.  The waders look  fragile on their their dainty legs, sometimes yellow and other times red, but they are strong.  I began to think of  the waders, many of whom are migratory,  a little like myself as I too travel  between my two home countries,  and I wondered how the bird found his journey.  This little poem began to form and I hope you enjoy it as much as I enjoyed writing it.

Wandering heart.

Black estuary mud fertile with worms

cockles and whelks

he feels himself getting plumper and stronger

whilst  keeping one eye on the sky

mapping the stars

plotting his way back home.

As the summer  days shorten

the time comes

for his journey to begin

each time like the first,

black beady eyes trained on the horizon

only one thought occupying his mind.

Barely a pebble

his little heart

duff duff

and his wings

duff duff

carry him

across the oceans.

Dizzy with weakness

and limp feathered

through blood-shot eyes

the golden African coast

rises from the sea

the  wandering heart

 reaching home.

Green locusts and beetles

the taste of honey

his feathers warming

and his heart strengthens

under beaming sun.

He keeps one eye on the sky

and as the winds begin to turn

he is already  plotting his way back home.

The ‘sound-bite’ that never was…

Someone pointed out to me that I hadn’t included the ‘sound-bite’ in my last post, but the reason for that is that I simply had not worked one out.  I still haven’t and I’m beginning to think that I never will.  The novel is about the complexities of relationships and human emotions,  and boiling the story of three people down into a sentence or two  is too difficult.

I did think about it a lot though and thinking about something a lot sometimes helps, even though sometimes thinking about something is the worst possible thing to do, but I did and I think that it helped in this case.  I know that all the thinking and scribbling helped because I went to a party the other day and met some people that I hadn’t seen for a while, and of course people asked how the writing was going.  I replied that the writing was going well; so well in fact  that I had completed the novel and had sent it to an interested agent only last week.  I think I forget to mention that in this blog but I will talk about that next time.

After murmurs of congratulations and wishes of the best of luck, the ‘dreaded question’ predictably followed.  I swallowed hard and gave the little spiel I had formulated (and I’m embarrassed to admit, rehearsed in front of the dog, but being a cocker spaniel he is always the most positive audience imaginable.)

I delivered my little speech and found to my delight that no one’s eyes glazed over and some asked more questions and professed that they thought it all sounded very interesting.

So what did I say, you may ask.  Well, I began with saying that my novel is historical fiction set in London in 1849.  It is a dark love/lust triangle involving an upper society couple and their infants’ daughter’s wet-nurse called Melrose. Unbeknownst to each other, both Lady Ann and Lord Cardale are drawn into different illicit sexual relationships with Melrose, which leads them into a precarious situation. Melrosehas her own agenda and when she doesn’t get her way, threatens to expose Lady Ann, as well as Lord Cardale’s pornographic collection.  Lady Ann feels utterly betrayed by Melrose and her husband, and begins to question the value of love and relationships.    Lord Cardale has been spending his time obsessively adding to his illegal pornographic collection but is beginning to wonder if the ‘perfect’ picture really exists, and whether pleasure may lie closer to home.

Lady Ann decides that she will fight Melrose and try to re-claim the husband she barely knows, even if it means that  her own secret are revealed as well as the uncomfortable truth about her husband exposed.  She does, but her actions have rather more catastrophic consequences than she had imagined.

Phew! This sounds rubbish, but it’s the best I can do at the moment.  My excuse is that this is ‘work in progress.’   This is the gist of it at least, although it is rather deeper and darker than this may suggest.  The novel explores a variety of themes but one of the main things it deals with is  how far people go to protect themselves and what they believe to be rightfully theirs; the choices we make when we are really pushed against the wall.

Oh, I forgot to give the title, but I guess that’s another avoidance technique of mine.  The working title was ‘The Secrets of Lord Cardale’, but as the novel is just as much about Lady Ann, I thought that it was rather unsatisfactory, so I though of ‘Forbidden Pleasures: the secrets of Lord and Lady Cardale’, but I’m not terribly happy about that either, so any suggestions will be gratefully received.       

The dreaded question.

I’m having a lot of trouble thinking of what to say when ‘the question’ arises, especially now when I readily tell everyone who wants to listen that I’ve finished writing my book.  ’The question’ is the inevitable one;  the one I should have been able to for-see and should have no problem answering, bearing in mind that I wrote the book, but somehow it stumps me every time.   I mutter and stutter while the questioner looks at me with bewildered dismay, no doubt thinking to themselves; ‘Oh dear, she says she has written a book but she doesn’t seem to have any idea of what it is about!’

But, they are wrong; I do know what the book is about, and if I had half an hour or even fifteen minutes to sit down with each and every person who asks the question, I would be able to answer it very well.  But that is just not good enough is it? People don’t want to stand there in the middle of the Co-Op store, when all they came in for was toothpaste and some baked beans, or during a drinks party when they are desperate to move on to someone more interesting, whilst I ramble on about  characters and plotlines and conflicts.  Their eyes glaze over, unless they are a writer too, and then they might listen with a slightly greater degree of interest.

Whilst I was still writing the book I could evade the question by answering that as I hadn’t decided the ending yet, I couldn’t really say.  I took on the cloak of the recluse writer and simply avoided answering the question, the recluse-ness is a way of being   that comes very naturally to me anyway, but more of that another time.  If the question could not be all together avoided, I would smile benignly and enigmatically and reply that we would just have to see would we not?

I know that I’m not alone in feeling like this and I don’t think it’s an un-natural feeling at all, but the way the world is today, this attitude is probably not helpful in getting people interested in your book.  At the end of the day, I want people to want to read my book and they are not going to want to read it if they have no idea what it is about.Readingthrough lots and lots of book and publishing-related blogs and websites, great emphasis is put on the idea of ‘creating a buzz’ about your book by using variety of social media.  This must  also include talking about your book; selling it, so to speak, and I’m realising that this has to be done swiftly before their eyes begin to glaze and they suddenly remember that they must urgently speak to someone they have just spotted across the room. Hmm. Not easy.

So having realised the error of my ways, what have I done about it?  Well, I have spent the last few days really thinking about what the book is about; attempting to boil it down more and more until only a concentrate or an essence is left. I had already written a synopsis, a horrific process in itself;  both a two page synopsis and a shorter one page one to use when submitting the novel to agents, and I tried to distill this synopsis into a one sentence ‘sound bite’ to offer when asked ‘the question’ and then, depending on whether the questioner is interested to hear more or not, I can elaborate or not.

From movie trailers to politicians, the ‘sound bite’ is king, and whether I like it or not, I must bow to that particular king.

New Evening Creative Writing Course

This autumn I will be running an evening course for the first time as opposed to during the day as I have been doing for the last two years, as I want to reach out to those who are busy during the day and would not normally be able to join my classes and have fun with trying out creative writing.

This course will introduce the elements of short story and fiction writing, and through writing exercises you will practice  how to build believable  characters, plot your story, set the scene, find your ‘writing voice’ and many other things.

We will read and discuss short stories and extracts from longer works to explore the  structure of stories and how they ‘work’.  We will also read  and try our hand at different kinds of Creative Writing such as memoir/life writing and travel writing.

More than anything, you will have a lot of fun connecting to your creative side and allowing your imagination to run wild!

Whether  you are a complete beginner or someone who is already writing, this course is suitable  for  you as each person can go at their own pace and do as much or as little writing as they like.  I have found that there is a certain kind of magic that happens with a group like this, and the support and enthusiasm of such a group group is a big part of the experience.  This is a great opportunity to try out and share your writing, but no-one is forced to share if they don’t want to.

The course begins on the 5th of October, from 8-9:30 pm and runs for six weeks.  Please contact Wivenhoe Bookshop on 010206 824050 to book a place.  I advice that you book early as places usually fill up quickly.

I finished the story but not the book!

I finished my book yesterday! Yes I did, but the event was somewhat less muted that I expected.  I had anticipated my finger hovering over the last full stop, holding my breath, until finally planting finger triumphantly on key.  I then thought I would dance a little or not so little victory dance around my study, not that there is much room, although some hip-shaking could be comfortably performed.

But no, sorry.  I planted the last full stop on the screen and then I stared at it.  I stared at it, wondering if it was in the right place or at the right time, and instead of triumph I was consumed with crippling self-doubt.  I am hyper self-critical at the best of times and a moment like this inevitably unleashes all the doubts and criticisms I have about my writing.  It did not help the situation that my daughter who is my official (eleven year old) cheerleader was away on camp.  Before she left, she made me two posters to encourage me not to give up and keep going with my book, and I have kept my promise to her.  My husband’s and my son’s were pleased in muted bloky sort of way, although my teenage son gave me a big hug which is a triumph in itself, but as my husband pointed out, that although I had finished, I was yet to edit the book and jiggle things around.  I had said so myself, he pointed out,  so, yes, he was absolutely right.

So when I planted that last full stop, I was indeed not finishing the book but I was finishing the story, and there is a subtle difference between the two.  The story has been put down on paper but it is still not in its most perfect form, and it will only reach that when I have shaped and edited it.

My daughter is returning home this evening and I know one of the first things she will ask me is if I have finished the book.  I will tell her that I have because I want to see her eyes light up, and I want to put ABBA on and dance a victory dance around the lounge with her and even bounce on the sofa for good measures.  After we are done, I will explain to her that there is still a lot of work for me to do, but she will say the same thing as she always does; ‘Believe in yourself mummy because I know you can do it.’