Liz Fenwick's Blog, page 19

Emirates Airlines Festival of Literature - Heritage Evening with David Nichols

I wasn't sure I would be able to stay awak having landing at 1 AM and had a wonderful time in Sharjah during Education Day but boy was I happy I'd had a double espresso and attending last night's session with David Nichols.



First the setting...coming down the to the boardwalk the venue was beautifully lit up and the sound of Arabic music filled the air. Carpets and cushions line the way and people we sitting relaxing watching Emirati men sing and dance. It created such a lovely feeling as we walked down the red carpet into the 'heritage' venue.



So here are my hastily scribbled notes of Rosie Goldsmith in conversation with David Nichols author of ONE DAY...(as always these are just my notes...and will not be represent what I could capture when not laughing :-))



Rosie Goldsmith and David Nichols


-He's working or not as the case may be on his 4th novel

- writing novels took him by surprise as he wanted to be an actor and spent years trying

- this is his first trip to Dubai



Rosie asked if he still recognized ONE DAY as it has taken off? He replied yes and that he still loves the book but this is the last event he is doing with it as his focus. He needs to move on. In his house he has packed away all copies as they are distracting him from getting on with book 4.



-his first book, STATER FOR TEN did well in the UK but didn't travel. His second book THE UNDERSTUDY didn't do as well and he expected ONE DAY to continue the downward trend.



- ONE DAY was pleasure to write.



- He hasn't written fiction now for three years other than a short story



-ONE DAY is like 20 snap shots, a love story in 20 photos...it's about friendship and it's a social & political novel



- he loves the hidden significance of St Swithan's Day



- for a screen writer structure is everything...before dialogue and action must come structure which is not the case with novels. About half way through ONE DAY he shared it with ket people and they told he needed more exposition in it so he rewrote at the stage.



- he is trying to improve as a novelist



- of any character he's most in Ian



- everyone journey into writing is unique



- he pointed out that there is an in-built hostility to university student in the UK. There is no sympathy for them and for actors and so some of TV ideas were turned down



- STARER FOR TEN is a coming of age story



- he finds now trying to write book 4 he is becoming self-conscious about writing



-Screenplay writing is different...something a bit lazy in adapting the a screen play - the genius is already there- this work is more editorial - it's a privilege and you get to keep all the brilliant bits



- all adaptations have a little bit of the writer in them as the you get to chose what bits go in



- he loves Rom Coms and sites Much Ado About Nothing as his favourite



- Mismatched couples create great friction in a story



Rosie asked how he kept is the love story of ONE DAY from becoming too sweet? He replied  that he undercuts, keeps a meanness, a darkness/bitterness, an irony that makes them more enjoyable and more meaningful.



In the Q&A session here were the key points...

- always tries to write the best book he can

-he writes to be read

unlike many other writers of popular fiction he gets reviewed

- he's worried about book 4 because it needs to be different but not too different

- planning is less fun but the planning for ONE DAY had to be quite rigorous because of the structure and in the end it was quite close to the plan

- it took him two years to write it

- his key tips for writers was to print the book off..hand write the edits and then retype the whole book...when it's on the screen and your editing it's too easy to say 'thanks okay, it will do and ignore it' if you are retyping then you look at every word..



The Queue for David Nichols' signing


Well, that's the it for now...hope to be able to bring you more tomorrow depending on access to a computer (I left my brain behind in London...did I say brain I meant laptop)....

The RNA RoNA Awards and Education day at the Emirates Airlines Festival of LiteratureJust what Jill mansell is doing

Monday was the RNA RoNA awards and today was Education Day at the Emirates Airlines Festival Festival of Literature...and i'm not sure where i am....



Good guess what Jill Mansell was up to...




But here are a few of the out takes from the photos i took on Monday...the rest are here.



My killer heals


Jane Wenham Jones and Judy Astley




Today i have the pleasure of running two creative writing workshops in Sharjah for the Education Day. It was such fun. The girls were interested and I loved the questions they asked....

The Orion Author Party and Salmon Fishing in the Yemen

Wow. Sitting on the sofa this morning suffering only slightly from an over indulgence of champagne and star struckedness (not a word but describes my state last night).





Katherine Webb's and Julia Silk's fabulous shoes.


This is Nina Douglas' picture
First I only took one photo...I was too busy people watching. There were around a thousand people mixing around the dinosaur skeleton in the Natural History Museum. By luck I found my agent, Carole Blake, who knew everyone and was even mentioned in the speech by Ian Rankin. He was lovely when I met latter and chatted about how he never shows anyone his first drafts because they are terrible and filled with things...go and get some lunch...I can't remember this character's name. I was really good to know  that the gods write sh*tty first drafts too.





Julia Silk took this photo of Essie Fox and me
I spied Julian Fellows in the crowd. Spoke with Francesca Simon about her visit to the Emirates Airlines Festival of Literature last year and Anthony Horowitz joined in the conversation saying what a great festival it is. I caught up with friends...Essie Fox, Kate Harrison, Veronica Henry, Ruth Saberton, Jean Fullerton, Nina Douglas, Erica James, Shelley Harris, Kate Mosse, Liz Thompson and JW Ironmonger.



I met more agents last night than I knew existed...



It was an amazing evening...after an amazing afternoon which was a private screening of Salmon Fishing in the Yemen. Between the author party and the screening I wondered if I had dropped into someone else's life....





Veronica Henry, Anne Seba and Paul Torday
The private cinema was straight out of a film set with red leather seats and a screen bigger than the one in the Flroa Cinema in Helston....and it was all for me, well, me and about twenty other people. I hadn't read the book so didn't know what to expect (DH had read the book and he loved it). Salmon Fishing in the Yemen is now top on my TBR.





Erica James and Paul Torday
Without ruining the film...it was delightful and I loved it. I couldn't imagine how Ewan McGregor could play a geek but it does so beautifully and believably. Emily Blunt is perfect. I found myself laughing through most of the it. It's a film that lifted me like the The Kings Speech did...it just has that wonderful feel good factor. Joy is the word that comes to mind.





Paul Torday, Anne Sebba and moi (not sure who is the man in the background)
I was a bit better taking pictures of the screening...What was the last film that made you smile?

The Dreaded Question - What's your Favourite Book?

As I mentioned yesterday, I was interviewed for radio about the upcoming Emirates Airlines Festival of Literature...which was scary enough in itself but then the lovely Lucy asked me...what's your favourite book???



How can I answer that? It can vary from day to day or from period in my life....how do you define favourite book? The one that lives in your head and that you escape to during quiet or stressful moments? The one that has altered your world perspective? The one with the hero you never forgot? The one with the heroine you always wanted to be? The one that took to you to a place you always wanted to go? The one where you learned so much it hurt?



Put on the spot (yes, I know I should have anticipated this question) I answer Katherine by Anya Seaton and Leo the African by Amin Maaloof. And they are two of my favourite books...but there are so many more for all of the reasons above.



I could have said...The Daughter of Lir by Diana Norman or Constance:A Story of Early Plymouth by Patricia Clapp (note to self - must find a copy of this for DD) or Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain, or Regency Buck by Georgette Heyer, The Red Tent by Anita Diamant...the list could go on and on...



What are your favourite books and why?



And because I think it's one of the best first lines ever...from Leo the African...



'I, Hassan the son of Muhammad the weigh-master, I Jean-Leon de Medici, circumcised at the hand of a barber and baptized at the hand of a pope, I am now called the African, but I am not from Africa, nor from Europe, nor from Arabia.'



Note: will be running a contest for free tickets to my session...(description session here) - First Fictions at the Emirates Festival of Literature. Details to follow...

Reading and Books Set in Cornwall

First I'm not sure if I've posted this before but it's certainly worthy doing so again. Over on Read_Warbler's blog, she has a wonderful list of books set in Cornwall here.



And this leads me on to reading of which I have been doing a fair bit- both novels and research. I tend not to read novels or more correctly more recent ones when I am writing a first draft for fear that the writer's voice or style will creep into my head and then into my work. However when I'm rewriting/editing it's different....so recently I have read some fabulous books - THE SOMNAMBULIST by Essie Fox, JUBILEE by Shelley Harris, HARNESSING PEACOCKS by Mary Wesley and a book I won't name. I won't name it because I didn't like it. I made me angry. I found the writing sloppy and the head hoping annoying and plot trite. It held me back on other books for a long time. I could only take about ten pages at a time and at one point I threw the book out of the bath and across the room. Yes, it made me that mad...



Now I know you are wondering what book and what writer but I won't say...you are also wondering why I persevered???? Well, this book has sold in the shed loads as have all this writer's books. I felt there must be something to learn from it aside from how not to head hop....



Let me jump away for a second...because in Harnessing Peacocks there is some head hopping but it didn't upset me - the changes were pretty well signalled without me having to go back a reread the paragraph to find out which head I was in...so let's just say that it was head hopping well done, but when rating the book on Goodreads I gave it a 4 even though I loved the story....



So I found myself wondering does head hopping bother most readers? Do they notice? Is it just a thing that pisses off writers like me? I have tried to remember my reading days pre-writing to see if I can remember if it upset me or pulled me out of the story....and I can't.



Let me just say...I love books with multiple points of view, but not in the same scene... or page but definitely not in the same paragraph....but I may be alone in this. Also I found it frustrating investing energy in minor characters whose head I was in for maybe three scenes then they were never heard from again (there has to be another way to get that information to the reader in my opinion)....enough said...



Now, I had to stop reading another book recently but not because it was bad...in fact it was the exact opposite....just too good and written in first person and that's what I'm trying to rewrite August Rock in so I'm afraid I will try and copy the excellence and fail....I will tell you this book though - Julie Cohen's THE SUMMER OF LIVING DANGEROUSLY. It will have a wait a bit more until I am sure of my voice in the first person...



On a final note...I was interviewed for radio here in Dubai regarding the upcoming Emirates Airlines Festival of Literature...and they asked my most feared question which I'll blog about tomorrow.



Oh and it's so exciting...on Monday evening I'm going to the Orion author party!!!! Will try and take pictures to share...just not sure what I'm going to wear yet and oh, what shoes to wear.....

Raw Beauty

This morning we went on a desert drive in the Liwa area which is south of Abu Dhabi near the Saudi border. This place sits at the beginning of the Empty Quarter and some 700,000 sq kilometres of desert...I can't even think that big.



What a can think about is raw beauty. Pristine. Soul lifting. As we careened up and over dunes and across sabkhas (salt flats) we were the only intrusion on the landscape. So many times I have been in the desert and seen human detritus marring it's beauty, but at least here man leaves nothing but a few tire tracks...



There are three types of sand in this part of the desert...white from sea shells, red from iron oxide and black from carbon, Each one shading the dunes as if an artist had spent hours highlighting the undulations. As we stood and watched the wind spun the sands creating new patterns...in the distance the sand look smooth but up close the sand separated into waving lines and ridges....underneath a sand stone of sorts that crumbles in your fingers yet carries the weight of dunnes as high as 300 or 400 metres.......

Another Step on the Road to Publication of The Cornish House

The Cornish House proofs on an Emirates flight to Dubai
On Monday I collected the final proofs for checking...gulp. The Cornish House will go into production soon and come the other side a real book.



It's a weird moment filled with excitement and dread. Why dread? It's the fear I referred to the other day. That it's not good enough. It's also strange to begin reading the book again. I haven't done any more than give the first few pages of the bound uncorrected proof copy more than a glance. So in truth I haven't read The Cornish House since I went through the copy edited version back in October/November. This is good as I should come to the book with fresh eyes....



I'll let you know how I feel about the book when I've finished this step...and I'll be blogging shortly about how it feels for people to be reading the book and some of the feedback I've received. Most worrying though is DS2 took a proof copy to read...not sure what a 17 yr old will make of it or more correctly what my 17 yr old son will make of it....most worrying really.

How Do You Know When Your Work Is Good Enough????

I was writing an article for the March edition of VIVA magazine listing my tips for getting published. One of the things I mentioned was don't send the work out too soon. So how soon is too soon and how do you know????



Lying in the bath yesterday, I was planning the day which included a trip to Waterstones. I wanted to buy Shelley Harris' debut book JUBILEE. I'm really looking forward to reading this...because back when I went to the York Festival of Writing in 2010 she was there. Now that in it's self is not enough to 'sell' me a book, a book I paid the full £12.99 price for....



Now regular readers of this blog will know that this conference was a break through for me in many ways and I only realized yesterday in the bath that Shelley provided one of the most important parts...how do you know when your book is good enough????



One the first night about ten unpublished writers read some of their work...what an insight. I have forgotten all the other writers except Shelley. The passage she read held the audience spellbound. The imagery is still with me. When she finished every agent in the room approached her. Yes, it was that good. It had that undefinable quality...and I knew in that moment that I wasn't there...yet.



Now I'd been writing and submitting for five years at that point, but that was the moment when I stopped. It was crystal clear what was good, no not just good but superb. I wanted that, well, not that exactly but I wanted that for my writing. I knew I had to dig deep to find it...



Now, seeing your own work with such clarity is hard, but if you imagine standing in front of a couple hundred people and holding them spellbound with the images you have created then you begin to get the idea....Shelley's work stood so far above everyone else who was brave enough to read that evening...I was deeply grateful I wasn't one of them.



So when you are wondering if it's ready, if it's good enough...think of reading it to a large audience who are judging you....can you capture them? Does you work have the spark? If you have the opportunity to listen to writers reading their work out - go...develop your inner critic then apply it to yourself



I know that when I began I was desperate for feedback, for validation that i could write... but it was only when I was in York listening to Shelley that I knew I had jumped too soon before. I knew that I needed to push myself further and in that moment I began to see my writing more clearly...



But the funny thing is...i still don't think it's good enough. But that's a good thing. It makes me keep trying harder...

Twitter...

I've put a little post about Twitter and promotion at The Heroine Addicts blog.

A Tale of Two Prologues - THE CORNISH HOUSE and AUGUST ROCK

Now I know I've posted about this before but it has come up again on twitter because I axed my prologue again in the rewrite process....No, I can hear some of you cry and hurrah from the rest.





So I thought I would share my thinking...as muddled as it is. First though let me state that as a reader I kinda like prologues but as a writer I'm not to sure.





So both THE CORNISH HOUSE and AUGUST ROCK have had prologues, in fact AUGUST ROCK has three different ones. The most recent prologue for AUGUST ROCK died this morning when I 'merged' it into chapter one, scene one. AND no, I didn't just relabel it. 





When I met with my brilliant editor Kate back in Decemeber to talk about what i was doing with August Rock we spoke about pov. I knew with certain clarity that AR needed to be written in first person but THE CORNISH HOUSE was written in third...another story on that another time...





So I had sent her before the meeting a few chapter rewritten in first to see if she was 'cool' with it...she was but the prologue wasn't right. She knew why I wanted it there but the voice was too old. The heroine Jude is supposed to be 13 in the prologue....





I went away from the meeting thinking - worrying I know...it should be a doddle to make the voice more youthful. Well, it wasn't. Believe me I tried. The reason it wasn't ...because what I wanted to convey wasn't what a 13 year old girl would think or see even if she was mature....





That left me with a problem. I needed that prologue because without that knowledge the bomb that drops in chapter one scene two wouldn't have the impact I wanted....





Well, I chewed on that for a week...and finally I realized that by sacrificing my best opening linse ever ...The incoming tide lapped over my red toenails and wet the brilliant white lace of my wedding gown. Tears caused it all to blur to pink. I hate pink not that anyone had cared or had listened.





I could do this. I had to start the story sooner and build those thoughts (the important bits of the prologue) into something that was happening right then and there...





So i sacrificed my best opening (although those words are now later in the chapter) and altered the timing of the scene (only by ten minutes)and was able to to lose the prologue and I think it's much better for it....





My experience of prologues was slightly different for THE CORNISH HOUSE. But again it involved some of the best writing I have ever done (and now no one will see!). I can't tell what it was, but I needed that scene right there at the start of the book to focus me while I rewrote it. By putting it at the front I couldn't forget it and nor could my heroine Maddie. 





Confession to make. I did try after that rewrite to put that scene in other places later in the book, but in the end the emotion was the page without the need of it...in fact I think it's stronger because it isn't there.





So prologues....ask yourself ..

Why? What is the scene doing? Teasing? Relaying important info? Character stuff? Foreshadowing?





Once you know the purpose you then then ask if there is a different way to achieve your goal...then ask is it a better way? If yes, then ditch the prologue and kill those darlings....What's your take on prologues?