Catherine Banner's Blog, page 6

the ingredients of a writer's apprenticeship

I have never formally studied writing.It's strange, because this happened by accident - I always intended to. When I was nineteen, finding myself in the unusual position of having written full-time for eighteen months, I did some hard thinking about the kind of writer I wanted to be in twenty years' time and decided to go to university. I applied at the time for both Creative Writing and Literature courses. However, at that stage what I wanted was to understand my place in the whole continent...

'but I have my ups and downs': virginia woolf, a writer's diary

Nearing the halfway point of my current book last week, I happened to pick up my copy of A Writer's Diary by Virginia Woolf, which I hadn't opened for quite a few years. I read half a page and was instantly immersed. I ended up reading it cover to cover. It's an immediate book, put together out of the raw material of Woolf's personal diaries, which she wrote rapidly and with an honesty which is sometimes painful to read even almost a century later. As she put it herself in the last entry for...

update: what i've been doing in april

This spring has been a busy one so far, and I'm pleased to say that the first draft of my new story is starting to look more and more like an actual book. Since I haven't written an update post in a while,I thought that I'd share a few of the things I've been doing (mostly sitting at my desk writing, it has to be said, but to liven it up I've also added pictures!):

The month began with a milestone: I finished drafting Part One of my new book. On the 2nd of April, I sent it to my agent, S...

writers and their pets

So apparently this is National Pet Month, and I've surprised myself and somehow acquired a pet of my own. This is Little Bear. He arrived yesterday, with good timing: today I turn 25, which seems a good time to embark on a new beginning. There's a long tradition of writers and their animals, though I don't know if any famous historical author was moved to write about a hamster. But Elizabeth Barrett Browning had her spaniel Flush, Virginia Woolf had her dog Pinka, and Lord Byron kept Br...

exciting developments with my new book and some thoughts on agents

I'm just back from London, where I had a meeting with my agent, Simon, to discuss my new book. Good news - he likes it! More than that, he was pretty excited about the whole project. He instantly understood what I was trying to achieve, and was keen to read the rest. So I thought I'd share the news, which is a massive relief after months of working on this book.

As well as praise, my agent had some excellent suggestions. He has a great gift for seeing a project as a whole and winnowing out wha...

(re)writing

I'm often asked how many drafts a book goes through before it's published. There are actually two separate editing processes involved in writing a book. The one that most people are familiar with is the work an author does with a publisher's editor. This is what turns a manuscript (a novel the author thought was finished) into a book (a novel which is actually finished!). However, before a piece of work even sees an editor it will already have been rewritten, probably several times.The major...

what I've been reading so far in 2014

After so many posts about writing, I thought it was time for a post about reading! Back in November, I shared my reading list for 2013. There were a few things I noticed. Firstly, although I'd read plenty of books, most of those books were novels - there were very few short stories and memoirs on the list, hardly any non-fiction that wasn't research-related, and no new poetry. This is a common trend in our reading; it's certainly reflected in the way in which these books sell compared to nove...

writing notebooks

Among writers there is a long tradition of keeping diaries and notebooks, and it's fascinating how differently writers use them. For some, the notebook is a place to do exercises and warm up the mind ready for a day of writing. Other writers do all their work in notebooks, while still others use them to keep track of the important facts relating to a piece of work, for example the dates of birth and details of characters, the timeline of events or the connections between settings.

It can be fa...

the challenges of writing about the past

How does a writer approach the past? This is a question I've been asking myself a good deal recently. The new book I'm working on takes as its material both the recent past, events which are reference points in my own memory, and the further-off past, which I haven't experienced first-hand at all. Nearly all novels are in some sense historical, though they may not be labelled that way. Since stories deal with cause and effect, with the development of events, you are forced back into at least...

researching a book

Since September I've been working on a new project. This new book is a departure from the writing I've done so far, not only because it's my first novel for adults but also because it's a historical novel, taking place in various European settings. So even when the book was mostly just a web of fragile ideas, I knew that a large part of the work I'd be doing in order to bring it to life would be research.

Researching a book is an absorbing process. There's something quite magical about beginni...