Imogen Clark's Blog, page 11

September.

HANds up . . .

who thinks the new year starts on January 1st?

Well, yes. technically I suppose there are arguments to support that idea, but for me the new year always seems to begin a little later – in September.

September is the time for new pencil cases, fresh notebooks, and a sparklingly positive mindset and I embrace it with gusto every year. It always feels like a great time to set new goals, make new plans, write new lists and I love it. Is there anything more fun, to my mind at least, than starting something?

Of course, this feeling is a hangover from my school days and it’s curious that, even though I left formal education well over three decades ago, I should still feel the same about Septembers all these years later.

So, with the first of September comes a new sense of things beginning, of new opportunities.

And Yet . . .

September also makes me sad.

The changing of the seasons from summer to autumn is washed over with a sense of deep melancholy for me and I struggle with it every year. If there is a person who loves the summer more than I do then I’d like to meet them and shake them by the hand just so I can feel that they’re real.

I’m sure that my alter ego must be a lizard! As soon as the temperatures rise then I am at my happiest. It can rarely be too hot in England as far as I’m concerned (although I might have to change my planned activity a little) and I spend all winter longing for the days to lengthen. Even when we get those crisp cold blue-skyed days beloved of film-makers everywhere (and really quite rare in my part of Yorkshire) I’m not truly happy. I would always rather be warmed through to my bones by then sun than kicking through autumn leaves or watching snowflakes fall.

So, whilst September is exciting because I see it as the start of something new and exciting, it also marks the end of my favourite time of year and it finds me bracing myself for falling temperatures and the nights drawing in, knowing that it as well as being full of promise and expectation, the month also makes me sad.

THIS year

is stranger still because my two younger children are going away to college leaving me and my husband with an empty nest. This is yet another new beginning for me, the start of the next part of my life. It’s scary and I’m trying not to dwell on it (although of course I’m likely to blog about it once it’s happened) because it feels a bit like grieving for the quarter of a century just gone, but also it’s kind of exciting – just like September ought to be. Who knows what will happen next . . . !

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Home

Home is such an evocative word, isn’t it? And I think it means something different to everyone. For those who have settled a long way from where they started, either by choice or circumstance, it can refer to a country. For others it is the place where they were raised and for many it is the house (or other dwelling) in which they live.

Photo by Julian Hochgesang 

But what if nowhere feels like home?

This is something that I’ve thought about a lot. When I was a girl, my family went through a period when we moved house regularly because of my dad’s job. In the late 70s and early 80s, I attended five different schools in seven years. Each time we packed up and moved on, my brother and I had to resettle ourselves in the new place. I think I got quite good at it. I enjoyed having new schools, new friends and a new bedroom! It was an adventure, each fresh town like a fairground ride that I hadn’t tried out before.

Then, when I was sixteen, we made what would turn out to be the final move to the town where I still live – Ilkley in Yorkshire. (If you’re interested in Ilkley then there is a free PDF about my favourite parts of the town in the Reading Room – just sign up to my newsletter to get the password.) So, you would think Ilkley would be where I think of when someone says ‘home’. After all, apart from leaving to go to university, I’ve been here for almost forty years.

And yet it doesn’t. I still feel like I’m passing through, that I’ll be here for a bit and then I’ll move on to the next place. I don’t consider myself a Yorkshire person either. My husband is from Yorkshire, born and bred, as are my children. My parents and brother live here as do my husband’s family. I couldn’t have a closer association with a place – and yet. . .

When writers have something to say . . .

they often find it working its way into a book. All my stories are about family and have homes at their centre but what if the characters don’t want to be there? What if, rather like me, they feel adrift and ungrounded?

Reluctantly Home explores this issue. In the book, we meet two characters who both felt the need to escape from the place they should call home, only to find themselves, through no fault of their own, thrust right back there again. For them, the word ‘home’ doesn’t conjure safety. They don’t see home as a happy place where they are free to live, laugh and learn, where they are loved, respected, and cared for, even though one of the characters most certainly has a loving and supportive family behind her. Rather, home is stifling, somewhere that is holding them back and preventing them from being who they want to be.

Recently I saw the Oscar and BAFTA winning film Nomadland which is, unsurprisingly, about people who choose a lifestyle that is radically different from the norm. Walking home, I discussed the film’s message with my companion and was not entirely surprised to discover how differently we had each interpreted the film.

They had seen is as a sad and quite depressing story of never being able to put roots down and needing to be constantly moving on, looking for something new. I saw it in exactly the same way, but whilst for them this lack of ties was what made the film quite downbeat, I interpreted this as a positive. The nomads chose to travel, moving on whenever things changed and never staying in one place longer than they needed to to achieve certain goals. What’s not to love about that?!

Basically, we concluded, the answer came down to what an individual is looking for to find contentment. For my companion, it was to feel safe and secure in one place. For me, it was to still feel safe and secure but not to attach that to one particular location.

What I have discovered over the years, is that it’s very hard to explain the need to keep moving to a person who doesn’t feel it. I’m not sure I have done that successfully yet . . . but I keep trying.

Of course, I’m not unhappy in my ‘home’. Ilkley is a delightful town in which to live and bring up children. We have a lovely house which is generally filled with music and laughter, and I’m sure all my children feel grounded and secure. It’s just that I think I will always feel like I’m just passing through . . .

Reluctantly Home is available in paperback, ebook and audiobook.

The post Home appeared first on Imogen Clark.

Something cool in The Reading Room

Hi there

You remember my Reading Room? It’s the the part of my website that you can only access if you’ve signed up to my newsletter?

Well, in there today I am giving away THREE Five Day Guest passes for MasterClass. Masterclass is the really cool site that has fantastic training courses on all kinds of interesting subjects by famous experts in their field – cooking with Gordon Ramsay, make up with Bobbi Brown, thriller writing with Dan Brown. And oodles more.

Anyway, if you’d like to win one then pop in and see what you need to do. Remember it’s first come first served as the passes only run for five more days and time is ticking.

And if you can’t get into my Reading Room then just sign up for my newsletter in the box on the right of the screen.

The post Something cool in The Reading Room appeared first on Imogen Clark.

I knew that was going to happen.

Are you one of those people who can always predict who did it in a murder mystery? Do you tend to spot the plot twists in a drama when you’ve barely set off down the track?

Photo by Johannes Plenio on Unsplash

I’m not like that. In fact, I’ve always been totally hopeless at it, not spotting clues until I’ve virtually stepped in them. But I really don’t mind. When I’m reading or watching a film, I like to keep pace with the characters. I let the story build around me in real time and am generally surprised when the characters are surprised. I even stopped watching my favourite soap opera, Coronation Street, after decades of faithful viewing when the writers started to add signposts so that the audience is always ahead of the characters. That just has me shouting at the screen as I try to warn my ‘friends’ off their proposed course of action, and where’s the fun in that?

But since i’ve been writing

books for a living, I’ve noticed that this has changed. Because I now understand the fundamentals of how a story is constructed, I can spot the building bricks. Instead of approaching the experience as a voyage of exploration as I once did, I find myself thinking in terms of story arcs and inciting incidents.

This is particularly obvious in films which never seem to rarely stray from the ‘How to Write a Story 101’ rule book. This is how it tends to go. Everything is fine. Then something happens to set the protagonist off on a particular course of action. Life gets harder and harder, often with small wins that then get snatched away only to find them in an an even worse position, until finally the protagonist cracks whatever it is and we get a satisfactory conclusion, either happy or sad depending on the film’s genre.

The trouble is, when you look at a story in those terms, broken down into its component parts like that, it loses all its magic. It stops being the adventure that we’re sharing with the characters and becomes something else.

Photo by Almos Bechtold on Unsplash

Of course, there’s always a place for this kind of comfort in stories. That’s what genre is for. If you buy a romance, the cover a delight in pastels with a welcoming bubbly font, and settle down to read, then you’re going to be disappointed if the pretty, quirky, self-effacing heroine doesn’t hook up with the handsome stranger by the end.

And don’t get me wrong!

I’m not knocking those books that give you exactly what it says on the tin. I read them and watch films that are exactly like that. It’s just that I quite like not knowing where I am. I have no sense of direction in real life and I suppose I must like to read and watch in the same slightly haphazard fashion, with every turn of events surprising me. So, now, when my trained eye can spot the tropes and anticipate what will happen next, some of the delicious innocence of just emerging yourself in a story and letting yourself be led along has been lost.

I have come across very few disadvantages to being an author, but for me, this is the main one. How about you? Do you pride yourself on always being two steps ahead of the characters or do you, like me, prefer to be a little bit confused?

In other news, if you’d like to hear when I have posted a blog, then you can now sign up to get a notification by email by filing in the box in the sidebar. Alternatively, if you subscribe to my newsletter then you will hear about the blog, get access to the exclusive Reading Room and get all my book news early. It’s up to you which you’d prefer.

The post I knew that was going to happen. appeared first on Imogen Clark.

Oh, the places you’ll go …

I’m going to Oxford and I am BEYOND excited about it!

It won’t be my first trip to ‘the city of dreaming spires’ as poet Matthew Arnold described it. Around a dozen years ago I went with my husband for a mooch around. We stayed in Keble College in a undergraduate room just for the full authentic experience, and had breakfast served to us in a room that wouldn’t have looked out of place in Hogwarts.

Photo by Ben Seymour on Unsplash







Photo : Keble College





For the whole of the time

we were there my heart was running wild in my chest. It’s one of those places, like Rome or New York that you’ve seen on the screen so many times you feel like you already know your way around. Four of my very, very favourite things to watch were filmed in the city – Another Country, Brideshead Revisited, Inspector Morse and more recently Lewis.

It’s interesting, perhaps, that three of these were programmes I watched when I was teetering on the cusp of adulthood. What they revealed was a world full of beauty and opportunity just waiting for me to discover for myself. Whilst I love the characters in all of them, what seemed to make an even greater impression on the young me was the environment that the characters found themselves in. How could you possibly fail to thrive in such hallowed halls? The Oxford section of Brideshead, for example, is a very small part of the whole, magnificent series, but whenever I think of Charles Ryder it is always in college with Sebastian and Aloysius.

Even now

these programmes are my comfort viewing. I can quote whole sections of each, having watched them all countless times, but I never grow tired of any of them.

When we were in Oxford, my husband and I joked about running into Inspector Lewis, like you do, and then just around the very next corner we came across the film crew. Sadly, we didn’t see Messrs Whately and Fox, but just being near where the programme was being created set me all a flutter. You can see how excited I was just from looking at me!

 

So, when it looked

like I was finally going to be released from a year of being pretty much trapped in Yorkshire, where did I find myself searching for hotels for my first post-pandemic writing trip but Oxford.

You may remember in a previous blog post, I discussed what it felt like for my creative well to run dry over lockdown. Where else to have it refilled than a city that just oozes history, literature, learning and intrigue?

Usually when I go on a research trip I have a story in mind and often I am already in the middle of writing it and so am looking for specific locations to include. But this time I have nothing like that in my head. I don’t even have the kernel of an idea of a book to set there.

I Just want to go!

In fact, I am being pulled so strongly to the place that it is beyond me to resist. I don’t know what I will find, whether it will be the start of a new project for me or just the first, long overdue step back to some sort of normality. All I do know is that my hotel is booked and I can’t wait!

My New Reading Room

In other news, the eagle-eyed amongst you might have noticed a new tab on my website. This is my new Reading Room, but access is restricted, so if you want to be one of the privileged few to get in then you’ll need to sign up to my Newsletter. (Link to your right.)

Until next time . . .

The post Oh, the places you’ll go … appeared first on Imogen Clark.

Oh, the places you’ll go . . .

I’m going to Oxford and I am BEYOND excited about it!

Photo by Ben Seymour on Unsplash

It won’t be my first trip to ‘the city of dreaming spires’ as poet Matthew Arnold described it. Around a dozen years ago I went with my husband for a mooch around. We stayed in Keble College in a undergraduate room just for the full authentic experience, and had breakfast served to us in a room that wouldn’t have looked out of place in Hogwarts.

Photo : Keble CollegeFor the whole of the time

we were there my heart was running wild in my chest. It’s one of those places, like Rome or New York that you’ve seen on the screen so many times you feel like you already know your way around. Four of my very, very favourite things to watch were filmed in the city – Another Country, Brideshead Revisited, Inspector Morse and more recently Lewis.

It’s interesting, perhaps, that three of these were programmes I watched when I was teetering on the cusp of adulthood. What they revealed was a world full of beauty and opportunity just waiting for me to discover for myself. Whilst I love the characters in all of them, what seemed to make an even greater impression on the young me was the environment that the characters found themselves in. How could you possibly fail to thrive in such hallowed halls? The Oxford section of Brideshead, for example, is a very small part of the whole, magnificent series, but whenever I think of Charles Ryder it is always in college with Sebastian and Aloysius.

Even now

these programmes are my comfort viewing. I can quote whole sections of each, having watched them all countless times, but I never grow tired of any of them.

When we were in Oxford, my husband and I joked about running into Inspector Lewis, like you do, and then just around the very next corner we came across the film crew. Sadly, we didn’t see Messrs Whately and Fox, but just being near where the programme was being created set me all a flutter. You can see how excited I was just from looking at me!

So, when it looked

like I was finally going to be released from a year of being pretty much trapped in Yorkshire, where did I find myself searching for hotels for my first post-pandemic writing trip but Oxford.

You may remember in a previous blog post, I discussed what it felt like for my creative well to run dry over lockdown. Where else to have it refilled than a city that just oozes history, literature, learning and intrigue?

Usually when I go on a research trip I have a story in mind and often I am already in the middle of writing it and so am looking for specific locations to include. But this time I have nothing like that in my head. I don’t even have the kernel of an idea of a book to set there.

I Just want to go!

In fact, I am being pulled so strongly to the place that it is beyond me to resist. I don’t know what I will find, whether it will be the start of a new project for me or just the first, long overdue step back to some sort of normality. All I do know is that my hotel is booked and I can’t wait!

My New Reading Room

In other news, the eagle-eyed amongst you might have noticed a new tab on my website. This is my new Reading Room, but access is restricted, so if you want to be one of the privileged few to get in then you’ll need to sign up to my Newsletter. (Link to your right.)

Until next time . . .

The post Oh, the places you’ll go . . . appeared first on Imogen Clark.

Life as a Writer in Lockdown.

It’s Monday 22nd February 2021 and in my part of the world we have been living under some form of restriction, either local or national, since 23rd March 2020. Currently we have been in full lockdown since Christmas and it looks like there will be at least two more weeks before anything is relaxed.

Now, I’m not complaining. I am so fortunate. I have space and family and enough to eat. To that extent, my lockdown has been very easy. My struggles with it relate to my life as a writer.

Photo by La So on UnsplashTHis is a random photo . . .

chosen to reflect pre-pandemic life, a time when we were free to wander, not just around our own countries but others too. It’s a joy, obviously, to be able to explore new places, absorb the sounds around you, listen to voices that you don’t know speaking words you don’t recognise. There are colours and smells and textures that are all new. Often we absorb them as a whole, giving an impression of a new place but sometimes it is the tiny things that we notice and find the most intriguing. Why is that door there, what is behind it, who calls this street home?

The questions that your mind asks are almost endless when things are new and unfamiliar.

And this is my stock in trade. Listening, watching, questioning, wondering. This is what I do every time I leave my house and sometimes one of the questions that I ask myself will stick around and gradually build itself into an idea which, if I’m lucky, becomes big enough to turn into a book.

A couple of months into this pandemic . . .

I started to get bored. I was busy enough. I was editing the book that will be released in April and writing the one after that. All four of my children were at home so I was enjoying having them here, planning meals and activities to keep everyone happy and it was one of the most beautiful Springs I can remember so I was spending a lot of time walking in the beautiful countryside around my home. There were lots of sheep photos taken!

But I was bored.

I mentioned to one or two people how I was feeling and they looked at me as if there was something wrong with me. The initial fear of the pandemic had worn off and we were all being forced to stay at home in the glorious sunshine. It was like an extended holiday with everyone having time to do all those projects that they never usually got round to. If I was bored then that must surely mean that there was something wrong with me.

‘Oh, I”m never bored,’ they said smugly. ‘There’s so much to do!’

Well, I wasn’t sure short of things to do either so I pressed on.

And then finally, around month five, I worked out what it was that was wrong. I had simply chosen the wrong word to describe how I felt. I wasn’t bored. I was under-stimulated!

The artist’s way

by Julia Cameron is a book that many creatives swear by. I’ve read it and as with all books there were a couple of ideas that I took away with me. The main one is the need to fill your creative well. In the book, Cameron suggests that unless you put inspiring things into your brain you can’t expect inspiring creativity to come out of it.

And here was my problem. Yes, I could read endlessly and watch Netflix and follow links on Twitter and explore places on Google Earth and all that has its place. But it turns out that none of it is any substitute for the real thing, for actually touching and seeing and hearing and smelling things for yourself. So, when I said that I was bored, what I really meant was that my world and my experience of it had become two dimensional and that was no long enough to stimulate my creativity.

Having finally worked this out . . .

I felt a sense of relief that I wasn’t actually as dull as the smug, non-bored people had made me feel. I’ve thought about a lot since then and have decided that I need train journeys and exhibitions and new cities and conversations with people that I don’t know to allow me to question and think.

Without these things, my imagination has been ring-fenced by my own life experience and by the echo chamber that it creates. And this is not a good place for a writer.

I don’t know how much longer I will have to stay here but I am drawing up a list of all the things that I want to do when I can leave so that I can refill my depleted creative well which will hopefully then gush forth with new ideas which I can turn into stories. It’s a very long list!

So how about you? What will you do first when you can? Please let me know. I’d love to hear.

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Where do your ideas come from?

This is the most common question that any author is asked. Where do you get your ideas?

Photo by Dstudio Bcn on Unsplash

Mine are mainly a product of what I have absorbed as I go through my daily life (which is why the coronavirus lockdown has been particularly tricky. There’s a limit to how much you can absorb when your life is so very quiet.)

But after reading Big Magic by Elizabeth Gilbert, another possibility presented itself. In that book she tells a fantastic story about how she began to write a novel. As she described the concept, I thought that it sounded very much like another book that I had read, not by Elizabeth Gilbert but by Ann Patchett.

Then came the amazing part of the story. Elizabeth Gilbert’s life got in the way and she stopped writing the book. And at the same time and unbeknownst to her, Ann Patchett started writing it. And I mean exactly same book, with all the same characters and details.

An eerie coincidence?

Elizabeth Gilbert thinks not. She believes that the universe transferred the idea from her, who was not able to use it, to Ann Patchett who was. This explains, she believes, why throughout history there are examples of people having the same ideas at the same time, not just authors but scientists, musicians, screenwriters, just about anyone who is creative.

I was sceptical. I have always been quite a rational thinker and whilst I am open to new ideas, I tend to want empirical proof before I dive in and take them on board. Whilst this was a lovely idea, there was no way of proving that it was true .

And then . . .

Last week I was reading in my copy of The Bookseller, about the new release from a very popular author. Her previous book had been a great success and so I read the details of the new one with interest. And I discovered that it is exactly the same as an idea that I had had. Not only had I had the same idea, but I had written it down, in detail, in my notebook so I knew that I wasn’t just dreaming it.

I did nothing with my idea. Even though I really liked it (and still do) I didn’t have the time when I came up with it to give it any proper thought, so I put it on the back burner to save for later. Obviously the other writer did not and so she got to keep it.

Our ideas are so close that I will not be able to write that story any more (unless hers sinks without trace, which seems unlikely.) That’s okay. I have lots of other ideas. But maybe Elizabeth Gilbert is onto something after all . . .

Photo by Greg Rakozy on Unsplash

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School’s out!

It’s the last day of school for my kids, the end of the weirdest term that I can ever remember. Normally they would be celebrating with cups of hot chocolate in a café followed by the exchange of secret Santa gifts and time spent lolling around in bedrooms laughing about stuff that’s funny when you’re a teenager.

But not this year.

We are in Tier 3 lockdown which means that unless they’re in school (where different rules apply) they can only be with a small group of others, have to be outside and not in their own garden. No cafés ( or pubs) are open and they can’t even grab a pizza together ( unless they want to eat it in the street.)

Of course, they’re used to it. Here in West Yorkshire we have had restrictions on our movements pretty much since March. But, whilst I can spend Christmas reasonably happily with my immediate family holed up in my kitchen and my office by turns, my heart hurts for my kids. You’re only 18 at Christmas once.

Photo by Fabrice Villard on Unsplash

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Inclement weather

I keep a record of the weather each day. It’s not a very sophisticated system, an icon scribbled in my bullet journal, but I do it religiously.

So, I know that for 21 days in November and 13 days so far in December it has either rained or been total grey cloud cover where I live.

All my favourite walks look more like the Battle of the Somme than a path and my heart is as grey as the sky overhead.

I have repeated all the truisms ad nauseam. If it wasn’t wet we wouldn’t have the luscious green. There’s no such thing as bad weather, just bad clothing. It’s only water, etc…

But really, weather gods, is it too much to ask for for a little bit of blue. Or preferably, quite a lot!

And soon . . .

Over my house right now.

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