Sanjida Kay's Blog, page 17

Seeds of Change

SEEDS OF CHANGE – Many of our most beautiful plants have come from far-flung lands, brought to us by intrepid Victorian explorers. It was their dare-devil stories that inspired me to write my third novel, The Naked Name of Love, about a Jesuit priest in pursuit of a rare lily in Outer Mongolia.

But I never considered that many of our most brilliant botanical finds made their way here in the hulls of ships as ballast. Ballast – the mud used to weigh down trading vessels when they docked – was picked up from countries all over the world and then dumped near Bristol’s Floating Harbour. And so we ended up with seeds from Africa, Asia and the Mediterranean sprouting here in the south-west. Artist, Maria Thereza Alves, has created a a floral tribute to our city’s trading history: on an old concrete barge floating off Castle Park in the heart of the city, she’s planted seeds that reflect the global routes travelled by Bristol merchants.

It’s a collaborative venture with the University of Bristol’s Botanic Garden and the Arnolfini. I visited recently – such an amazing contrast between the city-scape and our exotic heritage! Glorious magenta amaranth has almost taken over – originally from Africa, India and South America, it produces a dye and the seeds are high in protein. Corn marigolds bloom at the edges of the ship, brought here from Europe – and figs from Asia are starting to fruit. My five-year-old loved the squirting cucumbers, whose seed pods exploded pretty spectacularly over some of the visitors. Nigella and flax have stopped flowering; instead their alien-like seed capsules littered the boat.

Bristol – as I discovered when I was researching my non-fiction book, Sugar: The Grass that Changed the World, was one of the two leading ports in the slave trade. Replacing a cargo of human beings on one leg of the triangular route, resulted in a large amount of ballast. It’s bitter-sweet to think that not just parts of our city, but our flowers too, are a legacy of this heritage.

I hope you get a chance to see the Floating Seed Ballast boat – let me know what you think!

Writing Short Stories

WRITING SHORT STORIES – I judged the Bristol Short Story Prize for the second year running. This year there were 2,420 entries from all over the world. My fellow judges – agent, Rowan Lawton, radio producer, Sara Davies and writer, Nikesh Shukla – and I read forty stories and chose the twenty that will feature in the next anthology as well as the winner, second and third place.

And today the short list of those twenty stories we chose has been announced!

Bristol Short Story Prize, Spike Island, Bristol; Saturday 25th October 2014; ©Barbara Evripidou/2014

Since this is my second time judging, I thought I’d share with you my ten tips on writing short stories.

Short stories are short! Every word counts – keep cutting. Don’t say anything extraneous.
Beautiful prose might make me weep with joy or jealousy – but they’re called stories for a reason – you need one. See 3.
Just because they’re short doesn’t mean you can dispense with the central tenants of fiction: you still need a plot. In the best short stories, you can still have an inciting incident that kicks off the plot, three acts, a climax, crisis and a resolution.
You need a good beginning. I want to want to read past the first paragraph.
The biggest problem most short stories I’ve read have is the ending. Or lack of it. You need a proper ending – don’t let your work peter out. Or your middle go saggy.
Fantastic characters can make or break a story. You don’t need reams of description or oodles of flashbacks – less is more – we can flesh out the characters in our imagination, but your story still needs to be peopled with well defined persons. Speaking cracking dialogue.
You might think it sounds clever and the reader can work it out for him or herself – but if what you’re trying to say or show is too tangential or insubstantial or obscure, they won’t get it.
Show don’t tell. But see 7.
So many short stories are about coming of age, adolescence, death and social media. Can you write about something else? Please? Just kidding – but if you do follow a well worn path, make it truly your own. See 10.
Don’t be obvious, be original.

And here are five bonus tips from my fabulous fellow judges:

11. Everyone: Think really hard about the ending. It can be open if we can imagine what it might be, but you still need to have control over the ending.

12. Sara: If you write in the voice of a young person, you’ve really got to hit the nail on the head.

13. Sara: Your characters need real depth. Many short stories this year were let down by characters who were all surface. It’s not just about doing, it’s about being. You need to drill down, give your characters substance.

14. Rowan: Don’t open with your protagonist waking up in the morning. (Sara: Unless he wakes up as a cockroach)

15. Nikesh: Short stories are about precision, confidence and control, which you get by editing. Don’t submit anything ten minutes after finishing.

For expert advice, though, my friend, Tania Hershman has co-edited a book with Courttia Newland called Writing Short Stories: A Writers’ and Artists’ Companion, published by Bloomsbury.

With last year’s winners…

Bristol Short Story Prize, Spike Island, Bristol; Saturday 25th October 2014; ©Barbara Evripidou/2014

What are your top tips for writing short stories? Who is your favourite short story writer?

Summer Thrillers

SUMMER THRILLERS – It’s almost time to hit the road – we’re heading to France – so I’m hoping to chill out by the pool with a stack of great books, a croissant or three and a carafe of wine. Yes, some chance with a five year old!

In case you’ll have more time to read than me over summer, here’s some recommendations for thrillers you’ll want to pack in your suitcase:

Apple Tree Yard by Louise Doughty

Yvonne Carmichael has a high-flying career as a geneticist, a beautiful home and a good marriage. But when she meets a stranger she’s drawn into a passionate affair… This is a taut, brilliant and brutal thriller, about the dangers women face when they think they ought to be able to have it all in a society that dislikes powerful women. The language is spare, precise, perfect, and I love the inclusion of science too. As Hilary Mantel says, ‘There can’t be a woman alive who hasn’t once realised, in a moment of panic, that she’s in the wrong place at the wrong time with the wrong man.’

Daughter by Jane Shemilt

A year ago, Jenny Malcolm’s daughter, Naomi, went missing. Jenny, a GP and her neurosurgeon husband, are devastated. As they search for Naomi, Jenny discovers that those who are closest to you are often the people we know least well. Pared down, yet evocative prose – and I like the time slip between the present day and the past, when Naomi first goes missing. A brilliant literary thriller about the pressures women face whilst trying to juggle a career and look after their family.

 

 

The Headmaster’s Wife by Thomas Christopher Greene

Arthur Winthrop is a middle-aged headmaster at an elite prep school in Vermont. When he’s arrested for an act that’s incredibly out of character, the strait-laced, married headmaster confesses to a much more serious crime – a passionate affair with a scholarship student. But can Arthur’s version of events be trusted – or is the reality more complex and unnerving? The Headmaster’s Wife starts out as a taut thriller, and turns into a profound meditation on grief. Beautifully evocative, Greene has captured both the essence of maple-covered Vermont, and the Lolita-esque predatoriness of a disturbed mind.

Remember Me This Way by Sabine Durrant

Even better than her earlier thriller, Under Your Skin is Durrant’s latest novel. A year on, Lizzie still feels traumatized by the death of her husband, Zach. She misses him…so much so that she sees him everywhere. Gradually, as we learn more about their lives, we discover what a horrible hold Zach had over his wife. Lizzie starts to question whether Zach really is dead…or if he’s planning a terrible revenge. Wonderfully atmospheric and evocative of Cornwall, where part of the novel is set.

 

 

Just What Kind of Mother Are You? by Paula Daly

I think we’ve all had nightmares about our children disappearing. But what if you were supposed to be looking after your best friend’s thirteen year old daughter and she disappears? Even worse – she’s not the first child to have been taken – another girl was abducted a fortnight before. A down-to-earth portrayal of a mother, Lisa Kallisto, in a terrifying situation, set in the Lake District.

Don’t Stand So Close by Luana Lewis

Traumatized by her final case as a psychologist, Stella only feels safe hidden away in the isolated house she shares with her husband, Max. Then one night, in the middle of a snow-storm, a teenage girl appears and begs for shelter. Stella lets her in, but the girl, Blue, is not as weak or lost as she first appeared. Stella tries to make her leave, but the damaged teenager has a few truths she wants to tell. Or are they lies? A tense and claustrophobic thriller.

 

 

Someone Else’s Skin by Sarah Hilary

Detective Inspector Marnie Rome may be brilliant at her job, but she has a shocking secret that could derail her. Rome and Detective Sergeant Noah Jake are sent to interview a resident in a women’s shelter. When they arrive, they find one of the women’s husband’s has been stabbed. In their search to discover who is the culprit, Rome and Jake uncover some dark and twisted secrets: nothing is quite as it seems on the surface. A pacy, hard-hitting and violent crime novel with a strong female DI.

What are you taking to read on holiday this year?

Crimefest 2015

CRIMEFEST 2015 – The most powerful thing a writer can do is to get a character to lie to herself.

Julia Crouch

This year I attended Crimefest, a literary event for crime fiction and thriller readers and writers. Here’s a brief snippet of what went on…

The Other

As a mixed-race writer, I’m acutely aware of skin colour. There’s always someone in my novels who isn’t white – Levi in my new thriller, Bone by Bone, is the key mixed-race character. I describe everyone by their skin colour and ethnicity.

So it was interesting listening to authors on a Crimefest panel – ‘Writing as the Other’ – discussing characters who are somewhat different to them. These authors were all caucasian and a similar age but wrote about people of different races, sexes and ages to themselves. Leigh Russell writes from the point of view of a young black man, Ian Peterson; MP Wright has a main protagonist, JT Ellington, who’s Barbadian; MR Hall is a 40-something divorced woman, coroner Jenny Cooper, in his crime fiction and MJ McGrath’s hero is an Inuit woman.

All the writers said they felt entitled to write about anyone they chose and they did so by using their imagination, doing plenty of research and being sympathetic to their character. For instance, Matthew Hall grew up in an all-female household but he does get his wife to check practical details (she objects to him writing ‘blouse’ for shirt!). Mark Wright worked with people from the Caribbean in his former job, and Melanie McGrath travelled across the Arctic with the woman who inspired her protagonist, Edie Kiglatuk.

All the writers felt that, in spite of superficial appearances, they shared core values with their key characters, which, let’s hope, they don’t share with the serial killers, murderers and drunk detectives who also feature quite heavily in crime fiction.

I start with a good opening scene and a great location and then I figure it out as I go along.

Lee Child

Genre in Fiction

What’s the difference between crime fiction, thrillers and psychological thrillers?

I went to a couple of panels on genre at Crimefest 2015. Typically in crime fiction, the worst has already happened: the novel opens with a body and the plot is an attempt to find out what happened, how and why. In a thriller, the ‘bad thing’ hasn’t happened. The novel starts with a good situation that worsens.

A thriller usually features professional operatives (think spies, MI6, hired assassins) and has a global reach, whereas a psychological thriller has normal people and a domestic setting. In a thriller, there is a clear and present danger; in a psychological thriller, you don’t know what the danger is or if it even really exists. It might all be in the protagonist’s head, as Sabine Durrant, author of Remember Me This Way, suggests.

My thriller, which comes out next year – Bone by Bone – and the one I’m writing now, are domestic noir, which I like better as a description of the psychological thriller genre. As the title suggests, the setting is domestic. My novel doesn’t start on a happy note, but the ‘bad thing’ hasn’t happened yet. One tiny mistake leads to another so that there’s an escalation of tension, a heightened sense of claustrophobia and you know that something terrible might happen!

Mind you, as it’s set in Bristol, around Halloween, I’d like to create a whole new sub-genre called Bristol noir!

What’s your favourite psychological thriller?

Hiking for Writing

HIKING FOR WRITING

All truly great thoughts are conceived while walking.

Friedrich Nietzsche

I’ve just got back from a long weekend hiking in the Lake District. We were blessed with amazingly beautiful weather for the start of April and climbed Scafell Pike. Not content with that challenge, we zipped up Scafell…and then had quite a long walk with achey knees down a scree slope to get back to Wast Water.

I love walking – whether it’s up a mountain, round a lake, popping to the shops, or up and down Bristol’s steepest hills. So I was interested to read Mark’s Daily Apple blog on Why These Nine Famous Thinkers Walked So Much. William Wordsworth, who famously climbed many of the hills in the Lakes, used his walks to compose his poems – the act of walking was ‘indivisible’ from the act of writing. Charles Dickens found writing quite difficult and used to walk 20-30 miles a day to get some relief from his work. Soren Kierkegaard deliberately used walking to help him mentally compose paragraphs and think through new ideas. He said:

I walk myself into a state of well-being and walk away from illness. I have walked myself into my best thoughts, and I know of no thought so burdensome that one cannot walk away from it.

For me personally, walking is a release from, ‘the psychological burden of remaining still.’ It’s fantastic exercise, it allows me to get a dose of nature (climbing Scafell I saw buzzards, crows, larks, stonechats and wrens), fresh air, sunshine, exposure to the elements. It helps me step away from my work and see the Big Picture and to plan. Usually I walk with a friend and I’m inspired by him or her and relish their conversation – or else I’m with my four-year-old daughter, appreciating her quirky, fun-filled take on life. I’m able to approach my own work with enthusiasm afterwards.

Above all, walking allows me to think about my writing: my characters, tramp through thorny plot problems, see the trajectory of my novel. However, to do this, I need to walk in silence and without a companion – so one of my aims in the future is to try and build some walks into my life that are solitary: hiking for writing.

Do you walk? What do you think about when you walk?

 

What I think about when I think about holidays…

WHAT I THINK ABOUT WHEN I THINK ABOUT HOLIDAYS … – We’ve just got back from our annual spring holiday in Trelowarren, Cornwall. I love holidays! I believe they’re absolutely crucial for boosting creativity. To be honest, I didn’t once think about the thriller I’m writing at the moment – but I hope I’ll approach it with vim and vigour and some fresh ideas when I get back to working on it. What the holiday allowed me to do – by stepping away from my daily routines, minor stresses and familiar environment – was to give me the space and time to think about the Bigger Picture.

Normally I try and read as many novels as possible when I’m away (although that can feel like work!) but this time I read some non-fiction books. I started off with Better than Before: Mastering the Habits of Our Everyday Lives by Gretchen Rubin, which is about how to be more productive and happier by changing your habits. I loved it so much, I read Rubin’s first book in this series – The Happiness Project: Or, Why I Spent a Year Trying to Sing in the Morning, Clean My Closets, Fight Right, Read Aristotle, and Generally Have More Fun. So now I have a list of new habits to help me Be More Productive and Have More Fun!

Rubin is a big advocate of scheduling to enable you to form a habit and it was only when I’d finished creating my schedule that I realised I’d missed off the thing I like to do most – read! I read for research in my novel-writing time, I listen to thrillers (also work!) whilst I’m exercising but I don’t make time to read purely for pleasure. I still haven’t figured out where to fit Reading for Pleasure into my packed itinerary. But the amount of new tips, ideas and inspiration I picked up just by being removed from my daily life was invaluable.

Everyone needs a break so they can see the whole wood instead of the bark of a single tree: if you haven’t got a huge amount of money, a house-swap, a house-sit, Air B&B or camping are great options. As an aside, we’ve two staycations to save money. The first one was amazing: we’d just moved into our house, we were child-free; we filled the fridge full of nice cheese and wine, bought flowers, washed all the sheets and towels and did lots of incredible trips (have a look at my blog about Bristol). The second one wasn’t so much fun: my daughter was three. It kind of felt like a normal week looking after her but with my husband sitting on the sofa watching mountain bike videos.

Ah well, need another holiday to figure out when to Read More!

What do you think about when you go on holiday? What are the biggest benefits of holidays for you?

Back to Work

BACK TO WORK – The school term has well and truly started. Instead of buying new pencils and a satchel, I’ve redecorated my office. I’m lucky enough to write at home and have my own room: where you work has an enormous effect on your productivity and creativity.

These days the trend is towards open-plan offices but research shows that they have an adverse impact on your output. It sounds obvious, but the best office is one where you are physically and psychologically comfortable and which functions well for all the tasks you’re assigned. Dr Craig Knight, a psychologist from the University of Exeter, says that designing your own workspace can increase health, happiness and productivity. He adds that plants boost creativity by 45% and productivity by 38%. Fortunately, I love plants!

I like a minimal, well-organised space so that I can think, I won’t be distracted and I can find things if I need to! My office is almost entirely white but with splashes of colour and beautiful wood. My desk, floor and skirting boards are ethically-sourced oak and my cupboard is made out of white-washed driftwood. A large desk allows me either to concentrate on writing at my computer without heaps of clutter or to spread out my plot notes or the timeline of my novel.

I keep my reference books next to me, as well as shelf of all the books I’ve had published (eight so far, plus a couple of encyclopedias I’ve contributed to!).

Lots of drawers allow me to file things away so I don’t get side-tracked. A cosy sofa is the perfect place to curl up and proof-read – and doubles as a train/plane/imaginary continent when my daughter is in here with me.The cushions are made from traditional Mola embroidery, which a Kuna tribe from Panama gave me when I stayed with them.

Smell can hugely effect our working performance via the emotion and learning centres in the limbic region of the brain. Ruth Mastenbroek led a team from the British Society of Perfumers to create a scent, called Ascent, that’s designed to boost brain activity. It has notes of peppermint for concentration and citrus for its uplifting power. I burn Bay & Rosemary by St Eval, as it’s fresh and invigorating, and their Sandalwood candle to wind down in the evening.

I love art but I want the pictures in my office to be reflective, calm and inspiring and since I’m obsessed with flowers, I’ve gone for a modern, botanic art feel. The prints (on the left) are by the enormously talented Hannah McVicar, daughter of herb grower, Jekka McVicar. My brother, Patrick O’Connell, is a brilliant photographer so I’ve printed some of his photos of my daughter too.

I always make sure I have great coffee – I love Extract, a fairtrade, ethical roaster based near me – to get me going in the morning – but I often escape to cafes to work too since my office doubles as a guest bedroom-cum-laundry – and there is never any cake.

Where do you work best?