Imogen Clark's Blog, page 12

Where do your ideas come from?

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

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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 . . .

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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.

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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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Wassail wassail

I sang Christmas carols today for the first time in 2020.

For context, in a normal year I spend most of December singing carols in various settings – churches, hospitals, schools, old folks’ homes.

Not this year, for obvious reasons.

And this is why today’s little sing was so precious.

Six singers, outside, at two metres distance and singing carols in four part harmony to a small group of pre-school children.

And it was magical.

After 2020, I promise that I will no longer take for granted the simple pleasures in my life.

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Wassail wassail.

I sang Christmas carols today for the first time in 2020.

For context, in a normal year I spend most of December singing carols in various settings – churches, hospitals, schools, old folks’ homes.

Not this year, for obvious reasons.

And this is why today’s little sing was so precious.

Six singers, outside, at two metres distance and singing carols in four part harmony to a small group of pre-school children.

And it was magical.

After 2020, I promise that I will no longer take for granted the simple pleasures in my life.

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Procrastination

On Wednesday I got the editorial notes for book 7.

On Thursday I read them. They were fine. Nothing major to fix.

On Friday I had a video conference with my editor. Nothing to worry about. All edits perfectly doable.

On Saturday I didn’t start.

On Sunday I didn’t start but I tidied loose ends up ready for a good clear run on Monday.

It’s now Monday lunchtime. I have marked up my notes with Washi tape and am totally ready to go.

I have not started.

This happens every time.

And so, I wonder, is procrastination just part of my process?

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Making decisions . . .

Over the last few weeks I have made two decisions that have surprised me.

What they were isn’t that important – they weren’t what you’d call life changing (although both will have important ramifications.) What is of interest, however, is that they caught me unawares. They weren’t what I was expecting, and if you’d asked me what I thought a month or so ago, I would have told you the complete opposite to what I’d say today.

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I always thought I was good . . .

at making decisions. I do it quickly and confidently and rarely do I have to go back and reconsider. And then that decision sets my course for the future. Because I have made it so confidently, I have often thought that going back to reevaluate was a kind of weakness on my part. If the decision was sound enough to start with, then changing my mind has always suggested to me that I’m giving up when the going gets tough. And that’s not what I do.

But when i hit fifty . . .

making decisions started to be a little more troublesome. God bless the menopause eh? It has so much to answer for! It has left some of the most incredibly dynamic women I know standing in front of an open fridge dithering about what to make for lunch as if world peace depended on the outcome. Things that we just took in our stride suddenly became an uphill struggle. Where previously I would have weighed the pros and cons of something in my head and simply jumped one way or the other, I suddenly wasn’t sure that I’d even got the pros and cons in the right columns.

For a while, I stopped making decisions altogether, not trusting myself to get them right. I even had to get my husband to click ‘BOOK’ for me because I didn’t feel competent to take that final, committing step.

I’m beyond that stage now . . .

thank goodness, so questioning my choices these days is coming from somewhere different. You’ve heard, I’m sure, about categorising decisions as coming from either the head or the heart – that idea often encourages you to use your intellect over your intuition to decide which way to go next. I’ve done that too. I’ve worked things out logically, predicted what I want to achieve, and often it’s the head that thinks it can get you there. It tells you to ignore the frivolous heart because chasing rainbows will lead you off down a side street.

But is that right?

now i approach decisions differently.

About five years ago, with four busy kids at home and me chasing my tail in a way that was totally unsustainable I stumbled across Vedic Meditation. I know that some people might say that the universe put it in my path. I struggle a bit with that kind of analysis, but however I found it, having a daily meditation practise turned out to be exactly what I needed at that point in my life and continues to be important to me now.

At some point, my wonderful meditation teacher explained the idea of ‘charm’ to me. I’m not very knowledgeable so please excuse my garbled attempt to explain it to you, but as I understand it instead of trying to think out your plan covering all possible eventualities (something that I had spent my entire life doing) you let the decision come to you. You are led down the path which calls to you, that is clearer, that is charming.

You know when you think you know what you ‘ought’ to do, but your gut tells you it’s wrong? It’s a bit like that. I’m not talking moral decisions here, but choosing which way to move forward. If one route charms you more than the others, then that’s probably the one you should head down, even if your head is screaming its logical objections.

Logically, the decisions i’ve made recently . . .

might not make much sense. Deciding to do the complete opposite would have had an obvious reasoning to it and no one would have questioned my motives if that was the way I had continued to go.

But it just wasn’t charming.

And so, the upshot is that I have rejected what I might have done for clear, practical reasons in favour of things that just feel right to me. Sounds a bit woo woo I know. But actually, I have enough confidence in myself and enough trust in the process to go with the charm rather than the logic and not question it.

And taken in that context, my ‘surprising’ decisions don’t seem that strange any more.

If you’re interested in mediation at all this is where I am learning. And I’m trying to remember that there’s always a different way of approaching things, even if if feels like you’re going against everything you thought you knew about life.

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What do you want to achieve?

Have you noticed how life is all about goal setting these days?

I’m not complaining! It suits me because I am all about goal setting too. I like a target generally, but it’s particularly important as a busy, full-time author with a tight schedule. Without setting out clear goals of what I need to achieve and when, it would be easy to either let time slip away from me, or to get completely overwhelmed by it all. Either way, not much gets done.

I’ve always been a list maker. There’s nothing quite so satisfying as making a solid To Do List at the start of the day and ticking things off as you go, so that by the time you go to bed you have a tangible record of what you have achieved.

But a To Do List might not help you with hitting your goals. For that, I find you need to apply a little more thought. It’s not enough to simply decide what you want to do. You need to also know how you are going to achieve it in simple incremental steps.

“Give us an example please, Imogen,” I hear you cry.

Okay. So, say my goal is to write a bestselling book. ( I know. I’ve done that several times already, but bear with me! ) In order to achieve that goal, I’d need to break it down a bit. To be bestselling, it needs to sell more copies than the competition. That means it would probably need to be quite good, so I might want to do some courses on the craft of writing, read some bestsellers in my chosen genre and then, chapter by chapter put pen to paper and write. And this is when I need something more focussed than a To Do list.

So I’ve been using a Daily Goal Setter which I was kindly sent to test. It started ticking boxes for me as soon as I opened it because it’s such a beautiful object, nicely bound with a tactile cover and thick creamy paper. Gotta love stationery!

Anyway, it has sections for me to write down my long, medium and short term goals – so in my example, the long term goal would be to write a bestseller, a medium term one perhaps to do a course on how to structure a book, and the short term to complete module 1 of the course this week.

I’ve found that breaking things down like that makes them feel much more achievable because I’m slowly moving step by step towards where I’m trying to get to rather than trying to eat the elephant all in one go.

I’m told that it’s also important to remember to be grateful for what we have rather than merely striving to get something else all the time. The planner encourages me to list three things each day that I am truly grateful for. This took a bit of practise, but once I got the hang of it I’ve found that it makes me feel more content. It’s amazing how much I do have to be grateful for, even when I’m at my lowest ebb and all my goals look hopelessly ambitious. Setting out a daily affirmation for myself is similar. It felt a bit contrived at the start, but now I find that it sets the tone for the rest of my day.

I’m just getting to the end of the first month and the planner has space for me to review each week and month to see how I did. Obviously, some things get missed. I have to confess that there has been one item on my list of goals from the start which I’m still moving forward week by week! But at least each time I see it, unticked off, it reminds me to attend to it. And I will . . . eventually!

So, have I found the Daily Goal Setter useful? Yes. I really have. It’s helped me to focus my precious time more effectively as well as working out exactly what I should be giving my attention to in order to take me closer to my goals. And it’s a beautiful object, lovely to handle and discreet but elegant on my desk.

Thank you to Mål Paper for sending it to me and for making me rethink something that I already thought I was quite good at. But that’s how life works, isn’t it? There’s new stuff to learn every day!

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What is the gestation period of a book?

The Last Piece has been out in the world for two weeks now. It’s selling well and the reviews are lovely so it’s so far so good. Last week, a reader asked me how long the process had taken from start to finish. And so, with some digging around in my diaries and a bit of forensic examination of documents and emails, I have pieced together a timeline.

The Idea – Friday 8th june 2018

This is the actual day that I had the idea for the book. I know that because I can clearly remember it landing in my head and I wrote about it in my diary. I was walking to our local cinema to see On Chesil Beach (terrible film – don’t bother) when the concept for a book about a mother and her daughters popped into my head. It’s a ten minute walk and by the time I got there I had all the characters and the basic shape of the story and had to scribble it down in my notebook before the cinema lights went down.

Pen to Paper – Thursday 5th july 2018

One month later I opened a folder for the new idea on my laptop and wrote the opening conversation which I then sent to my editor Victoria in a flurry of excitement. At this point I didn’t yet have anything published with Lake Union. I had signed a three book deal but that most definitely didn’t include this one, so I was getting a little bit ahead of myself!

Victoria never replied to that email, but what I sent her that day is almost exactly the same as the version that was published.

First draft complete – Monday 1st April 2019

I began writing the book in January 2019 and finished the first draft that March. It’d had to wait its turn for my attention. Since I had the original idea, we had published Postcards from a Stranger and The Thing about Clare and I had also written Where the Story Starts. I was now out of contract with Amazon Publishing but angling for a new one. The Last Piece was the book I was hoping would secure the deal.

I sent the manuscript to Victoria.

Offer made – Wednesday 24th April 2019

The call I’d been waiting for arrived just over three weeks later. Victoria rang and offered me a deal for The Last Piece plus two other books and a novella sequel to Postcards from a Stranger and we signed the contract a couple of months after that.

Then the editing began. Between November 2019 and March 2020, the manuscript underwent four separate editing process (as all my books do) and I received the final files in May. The book was finished!

In and between the various edits, we did the cover design and a couple of lovely author friends read the book and gave me quotes for the product page on Amazon. It’s a busy process and there’s always something happening.

publication day! – 28th july 2020

And then the final product arrived in the world, just over two years after I had the original idea. In the intervening period, I had published my first three Lake Union books plus the novella and written another three (including this one) but, despite all that, it’s astonishing how fresh that walk to the cinema still is in my memory. It was the one and only time (so far) that the concept for a story has popped into my head, fully-formed as this one did, and I don’t suppose I will ever forget it.

So there you have it – the gestation period of my book? Seven hundred and eighty two days – just in case you were wondering!

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How it feels to publish a book

You’d think I’d be used to this by now.

Next week my new book, The Last Piece, will be launched worldwide. This is the ninth time that the button has been pressed on one of my books – four times by me as an indie and five times by my publisher – and yet it doesn’t seem to get any easier!

I’m excited . . .

of course I am. I love this novel and the characters that bring the story to life. It’s partly set in Kefalonia, Greece, where I had a wonderful holiday with my family, and is filled with treasured memories. The photo shows the place where a pivotal scene in the book is set and is also where we spent a very happy day messing about on boats.

Kefalonia



yet another part of me . . .

is deeply apprehensive. The thing about books is that people read them. And of those people there will be a number that don’t enjoy it and a proportion of them will tell me and the world exactly how much. This is, of course, their right. If I have the audacity to publish my work and ask people to pay for it, then I have to be prepared to deal with the fact that they might be disappointed. After all, it’s not just cash that gets invested in books. It’s also precious time too.

But the reviews . . .

I can’t tell you how hard reviews are for me. The bad ones can floor me for days, sometimes weeks. The good ones make me panic that I’m going to let people down with the next book. We’re supposed to read them all to see if any themes appear that we can address and correct, but I just can’t do it. According to Net Galley – the site where early copies are made available by the publisher to bloggers etc – there are currently 72 reviews with an average of four stars, but I can only tell you that because I just made myself look, squinting at the page through my fingers as though it was a particularly grizzly scene from a Stephen King novel.

And the ‘what if’s . . .

There were barely any of those in my head when I first started publishing stuff. Who was going to read my books anyway? But things are different now. I’ve sold well over half a million copies in thirty six countries, and with each book that goes out I can feel the stakes getting higher. I sit at my desk torturing myself with thoughts of book club readers in their sitting rooms with a glass of wine in one hand and my paperback in the other.

“Well, it was okay, I suppose, but I liked that other one she wrote better.”

“Yes. You’re right. I’m not sure I’ll bother with her next one.”

I know it’s silly but I can’t help it.

It’s best not to think about it . . .

I know this. I have written a further two books since I typed The End on The Last Piece and I’m halfway thought another. It all feels a very long time ago and nothing to get myself in a steam about . . . and yet.

But this is the game that I’m in. If I want to be published then I have to cope with the fact that people will read what I’ve written. It’s part of the deal! In an ideal world, though, I would finish the book and then never learn its fate. My publisher could come to me a year or so after the event and make a throwaway comment – The Last Piece? Oh yes. That one did quite well. That would be perfect. Then I wouldn’t let the fear of how a book has been received colour what I’m currently working on.

of course, that approach is rubbish. . .

Where is my growth mindset? If I never hear what people like and dislike about my work, how can I ever make things better? Without the vital and precious input from the readers, either in clear reviews or in the less obvious barometer that sales figures provide, how will I ever learn what works and what doesn’t so that I can strive to make the next one better than the last?

So, I’ll celebrate next Tuesday with a glass of something bubbly and then I’ll watch the numbers for a bit, and try to read the reviews, and hope that my skin toughens up so that I’m more ready to take it all on again when the next one comes out next April.

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