Writing – My Little Notepad

On rediscovering creativity

Life can get in the way of things, things that are really quite important. Creativity can be one of the first things to go; when you’re tired or stressed, or in pain, or suffering. It seems frivolous. When you are busy thinking about how to get enough energy to prepare the next meal, or if the work will keep coming in, or if the children are happy at school, creativity is waaaay down your list of priorities; so far down that it’s probably just dropped quietly off the bottom altogether, without you even noticing.

Recently I’ve been rediscovering my own creativity. It dropped off the bottom of my own list, for a good few years. When I was a child, I was always doing something creative. Making up stories, creating dolls and their costumes out of paper, playing music, make-believe games, simple daydreaming. And now, some of those things are coming back. I’m playing the piano again, I’m singing sometimes. I’m rediscovering creativity through mobile photography – my #project366 on Instagram. I haven’t done it everyday, but I’ve done it enough that I’m noticing an improvement in my phoneography skills and in my eye for a picture opportunity, and regular bursts of creative impulses firing off in any direction that I will allow. Is that a clumsy metaphor? I don’t know, possibly, but I don’t care because it expresses what’s happening.

I’m also noticing, as I get to the end of my degree (which seemed a thousand leagues away until just recently), that my studies have awakened my curiosities and made me eager to learn. I’ve loosened up my language, switching from the prescriptivism of the Grammar Police to descriptivism and the pure joy of language for its own sake, seeing how it changes and evolves and gets manipulated for our own purposes. I am on track for a good degree classification and a career aim to work towards.

I am writing again. I stopped writing for a long time, and told myself that I’d pick it up again when my degree was over, when my energy levels returned, when I had some motivation again. And now I’m picking up stories that were so close to being finished before being abandoned and I’m dusting them off and seeing what they need. I’m doing Morning Pages every so often – purists would be appalled but I’m doing enough to realise why people rave about the practice. And I have new stories coming into my head and a stack of notebooks to capture them, pin them down and develop them slowly, returning focus to the stories I’m working on, knowing that they’re there waiting for when I’m ready.

I am finding creativity exciting, and that, in turn, is helping me to get through some difficult times. So much so that, despite everything that is happening, I can still see that life is a beautiful, glorious thing.

Newcastle Writing Conference 2015: Do It Yourself Part One.

I went to my first every writing conference at the weekend – Newcastle Writing Conference, arranged by New Writing North at Northumbria University. I jumped at the chance to go because the lineup was just brilliant – the speakers included Meg Rosoff! As it turned out, family worries made the day get off to a shaky start but getting regular text updates reassured me enough to settle down and enjoy the day.

I was tweeting a good bit – with the hashtag #NclWritingConf, if you’re interested – until disaster in the afternoon. My phone battery ran right down. I had stern words with it; I said “Look, I need to tweet this, it’s fabulous and I want to share these nuggets of wisdom”. I cajoled and begged and promised to give it a long lie down in a dark room at the end of the day, but my phone refused to co-operate and the battery died. With my last tweet I pledged to blog, so here I am. Luckily I scribbled loads of notes, so I don’t have to rely on my scatty memory.

Keynote address – Meg Rosoff. I’ll be honest, I have had a MAD few weeks so in between booking and turning up, I’d sort of forgotten the details. I got in on Saturday morning, scanned through the lineup and choked on my coffee – getting to hear Meg Rosoff talk was a massive treat and a real privilege. Her first bit of advice (after a not-entirely-tongue-in-cheek recommendation to throw the computer away to avoid distraction, very apt bearing in mind the digital focus to the day!) was to not be in a hurry. I’d say that I was fairly middle of the road in terms of the age range attending, being in my mid-30s, so I imagine that advice hit home with many, many people. We do have a tendency to think that “if I’m not a bestseller by the time I’m 16 I’m a complete failure” (or is that just me?!) and it was HUGELY reassuring to hear that Meg didn’t start writing creatively until she was in her mid-40s. Her story resonated very much with me, and in some parts it could have been my story (for example, being a precocious reader as a child and thinking it just isn’t worth writing if I can’t write like [insert idolised author here]). Other gems of advice from Meg included the fact that there’s never just one story to anything, and this (paraphrased from notes!):

Think of your brain as a colander. Everything that happens to you goes in the colander and 99% of it goes through. Every once in a while something will stick. For example, if people are in a train carriage going through scenery, every single person will take something different from the scenery; some people won’t even see the scenery because they’ll be looking around, or at their phone. The thing you notice from the scenery, the thing that sticks in the colander, none of it is the same as anyone else’s and that is your strength and your weapon.

It’s not who you know, or whether you “know” plot, it’s about what you have to say that no-one else can. She used the example of her first (failed) submission to an agent, to show that it helped her find out how her brain worked and the kind of things that ‘stuck in her colander’ (the pony book with too much sex. You had to be there.). Meg said you have to write for who you are – although she tried to write a pony book, she has quite a dark brain and that was what she had to write – the rest, as they say, is history.

Another brilliant piece of advice comes from her asking her first agent how to write YA, and this is what she relayed to us: forget about the audience and the rules. “Write the fiercest book you can write and I’ll find someone to read it” was the advice of the agent. Forget the rules and write fiercely – I love this. I don’t think I’ve heard ‘write fiercely’ before and there is something very liberating, very energetic and motivating, about the idea of writing fiercely.

Meg’s keynote address had the absolutely perfect effect of firing us all up for the first panel: How to Stand Out In A Digital Age. The panel was Ben Willis from Transworld, book vlogger Sanne Vliegenthart, author Nikesh Shukla (whose video Meatspace is great fun, highly recommended) and book blogger Simon Savidge. The panel had a variety of approaches to the brave new world of social media but consistently the message is “Be Yourself”. As Ben pointed out, there are loads of different platforms, with twitter, Facebook, GoodReads, YouTube, Instagram, Pinterest, etc – find the space you’re comfortable with and do it well. I’ve had a fairly extensive break from twitter and blogging, both of which I enjoy, and this talk really gave me some motivation to re-engage and enjoy these platforms which I like and IMHO I do well.

Authenticity really came across as an important point. Simon recommended, for book reviews, to put some emotion behind them and show how the book connects with you. As I’ve done a few reviews here in the past this was something I’d like to take on board and do better. Nikesh advised using social media as both a user or content absorber as well as having something to promote yourself – use it as if you had NOTHING to promote! He also recommended simplicity – his Meatspace video he described as “A simple idea that revelled in its own stupidity!” If you can write your idea on the back of a fag packet, it’s worth considering.

Sanne brought a new perspective – vlogging. I’d never heard of BookTube and now I’ve gone and subscribed to a bunch of BookTube channels. She mentioned lots of formats and themes: bookshelf tours, tags, book hauls. I may have to unsubscribe if I’m being consumed with avarice for all of these wonderful new books. Sanne said she basically wanted to join in the community and started making videos. The importance of community was underlined heavily – basically, people want to engage and be part of a conversation and digital media are offering a whole new world of ways in which to do that.

That brings me to the end of Part One – seriously, this event was far too packed for just one post!

Failure & Finishing

Uh oh. That was a bad start to the A-Z Challenge, wasn’t it? When I realised I’d missed C, I thought I’d combine it with D in a post. Then I didn’t get to do one for D either so I thought I’d try really hard to combine C, D and E (while thinking “Oh crikey me how on earth am I going to do that??”). But yesterday was a bit mad too, so I didn’t get that done. Now, there is no way in the world I’m going to be able to combine C, D, E and F so I’m going to admit failure and consign C, D and E to the great blog heaven in the sky.

Failure is a recurring theme – for me and, I imagine, for most people. Things we haven’t done, or haven’t done as well as we could have. I failed to do many things and some of them I’ve made peace with, some continue to be regrets. Failure can be particularly painful when you suffer from low self-esteem as it reinforces the negative impression you have of yourself. It also tends to be self-perpetuating. You fail at something, so you think “I really must do better next time” and not only do you set up another set of hurdles for yourself, you also put more importance on not falling at them. If/when something goes wrong with this new plan, you’ve failed again, you’ve failed worse, and you’re generally a failure at life. So I’ll start another thing, and on it goes. The achievement of actually finishing something is immense, as when I finished my first draft of Skive which is now thoroughly cooled off and awaiting rewrites. But there are still many, many past and current failures drowning out that little success.

Failure is also very much down to perception. I tell myself I’m a failure because I don’t always complete things, I don’t get done the things that I both want and need to get done, and I have unfinished manuscripts or blog challenges or housework. Beloved Husband thinks I have unrealistic expectations of myself and that I’m doing pretty well to keep on top of the house and look after the kids. I think he’s lovely but biased. Another cycle!

I would love to be able to find a way of changing my perception. I’d love to be able to look at my failures and think “At least I gave it a go.” I’ll give pretty much anything a go, which should be exciting and interesting instead of a quick ticket to “Oops, I Did It (Or Rather, Didn’t) Again.” I think it could be helped a lot by realising that nothing is permanent. Because I leave something to one side for now, it doesn’t mean I’ll never come back to it, it just means that now isn’t the right time. My historical novel has been a Work In Progress for about two years now but it doesn’t mean I’ve failed to write it, just that I haven’t finished it YET because it’s not the right time.

At school I was a languages whizz. It was always what I was going to do, I even did the first year of a degree in Interpreting and Translating. Since I did my GCSEs a million years ago I’ve had two huge dictionaries, one in French, one in Spanish, and a few verb books. I’ve never been able to bring myself to throw them away even though I’m no longer considering a career in languages. We had a book clearout the other day and I put the verb books on the pile of books to go. Then I picked them up and thought about one of my big regrets, my failure to finish my degree. Beloved Husband said “You know, you don’t have to get rid of them. You can always take it back up again any time.” He’s right you know, but don’t tell him. I haven’t failed at languages, I just didn’t finish my degree. One of my ambitions is to do an Open University degree in the Arts; I’m keeping my languages books in case some of my modules end up being languages, and I finish what I started.

FINISHED

This morning I finished my first ever draft of a novel. A WHOLE novel. What I wrote. Me.

Ahem.

I know that for real, proper authors this isn’t a big deal – and maybe it shouldn’t be such a big deal? But it really is. Not only am I a bit of a procrastinator, and have all the usual writerly hangups about fear of failure, etc etc, but I have genuinely struggled over the last year or so with life in general and self-doubt and all the rest of it. Anyway, no more, I have achieved my next writing goal and finished an entire novel, and I’m blooming proud of myself.

I’m not sure of the exact word count because a) it needs quite a lot of rewriting and knocking into shape and what have you. It is the epitome of Anne Lamott’s “s****y first draft” but it’s definitely got a decent novel in there. And b) because the last leg was all done longhand in my cheapy, scruffy, beloved reporter’s notebook, so I’m about to start typing it up ready to print out. And from there, I’ll leave it for a few days before attacking it with a pencil and red biro. In the meantime, donning a Real Writer’s mantle, I have a competition entry to write, a new ebook to plan (my first is HERE in case I haven’t mentioned it before…) and my nearly-finished historical to get to the finishing line. And, by the way, this is HUGELY more likely having finished one first draft. So it’s more than likely that in a couple of months I will have TWO finished first drafts of novels and in six months I will hopefully have both rewritten, polished, and out on submission. Which will probably mean many, many anguished blog posts and practising gracious responses to rejection.

So, because I know EVERYONE is agog to know the details of my masterpiece, here you go…

It’s a YA thriller, aimed at the younger end of the age range (around 11-16), and the working title (thanks to the very brilliant MarshallBuckley) is SKIVE. The pitch, developed a little from the one I gave my twitter pals this morning (and, btw, trying to get across the point of book on twitter in as few tweets as possible is brilliant practice for pitching), is…

Nicky skives off the school trip to Newcastle & ends up on a quest for a mysterious artefact, involving supernatural villains & a ghost who can’t quite get over his death.

I have practiced my award acceptance speech and put the champagne in the fridge. All of which are, as well as this blog post, quite obviously new avoidance tactics for starting the revision…

Write A Great Synopsis

2012 is the year I finally finish off my two ongoing WIPS, then begin the ordeal of putting together a submission package and sending it all off. With that in mind, it’s perfect timing that I’m helping Nicola Morgan with the blog tour for her new book, Write A Great Synopsis: An Expert Guide. This short ebook has got some brilliant ideas in for turning said ordeal into something manageable and even exciting. No, really!

Without further ado, let me hand over to the Crabbit One…

Hello, Becca, and thanks for hosting me on the Write a Great Synopsis (WAGS) blog tour. Not that, *cough*, you had much choice…

I thought a sensible thing to do for my lovely blog hosts who want an actual post would be to give each one a different extract from the book. (There will be links to the whole blog tour on my blog sidebar.) So, what will I offer to your readers? Well, in WAGS I have a whole chapter devoted to answering actual questions from writers. I thought I’d give you three of them here.

What if your novel is exceptionally long?

It doesn’t mean that the synopsis should be or even needs to be. If you’ve written Anna Karenina, leave out the farming stuff and that should help a lot. A book that is very long is usually so because there are many obstacles or incidents to get through, in which case not all need be mentioned individually: “Seraphina spends fifteen years on the ranch, working her way through a series of increasingly unsuitable men” is a perfectly adequate way to convey a whole section of your saga. If your book is long because of rich description or characterisation, or farming, that is stuff which doesn’t appear in a synopsis anyway.

Do I really have to include the ending?

Another blog-reader, Laura Mary, wondered whether this is necessary if the ending gives away a vital twist, the knowledge of which will spoil the enjoyment for the reader. Yes, almost everyone agrees that endings must be given in synopses for agents and editors. Yes, it may remove some of their anticipation while reading the book, but they are professionals and they will survive the pain. Besides, if you write your synopsis well enough, they will still get that “Ahhh, clever ending!” feeling when reading the synopsis itself.

What’s more important: content or style?

Neal wondered whether it’s a “judgement call between content and style.” He says, “I’m struggling to work out the balance between making a synopsis a proof of the structure as a viable vehicle for a compelling story, and it giving an idea of style and tone, which seems to me needs a slightly more expansive approach.”

I don’t think the two ever have to be mutually exclusive. I certainly don’t think style and tone require a more expansive approach: they can be conveyed with no extra words, just well chosen words. I do understand the question, though, and can see why writers might ask it. I just believe that a writer who is even asking the question most likely has enough skill to tread the balance and satisfy the needs for both content and style. However, you cannot hope to achieve a piece of flash fiction; a synopsis is a functional exercise, little more.

(Extract ends)

Hope that was useful!

Write a Great Synopsis covers everything about synopsis-writing, clearly and reassuringly. At the end of it I believe you truly will say to yourself, “Don’t panic – it’s only a synopsis!” That is my aim.

All commenters below (by Feb 15^th) will be entered into the Big WAGS Competition, with chances to win a critique of your synopsis by the Crabbit Old Bat herself! One comment per person on each blog – though you can add to your chances by commenting on the other posts on the tour. Details of all stops on the tour will appear on my blog (Help! I Need a Publisher!) as they go out.

Thank you for listening and I do hope I can help you write a great synopsis! For details about the book, including buying options, go here. The link direct to Amazon UK is here.

Thanks again for letting me visit!

Pleasure! Now, off to write…