Louise Dean's Blog, page 11

I Write Because...

I write because:

Life is complex and I am always trying to make sense of it.
I like to entertain, be useful and have a role.
I think I like being the centre of attention.
I also hate being the centre of attention.
I’m not great at acknowledging pain in real life but I find I’m excellent at acknowledging it on the page.
Writers are interesting.
Reading is empowering.
I have a hunger to be known and understood.
I have a desire to make connections and feel less alone.
I cannot not.

I’ve found writing is best if:

I don’t think about my mother reading what I have written.
I don’t think about prizes, chart positions or reviews.
I do think about being honest.
I redraft and edit as I go along.
I am disciplined and write regularly, by which I mean every day.
I risk being unpopular, so I don’t chase a tide of popularity in terms of genre.
I don’t copy other authors’ styles.
I challenge myself.
I doubt myself.
I believe in myself.

I’ve managed to write 21 novels in 21 years because:

I’ve been given the opportunity to do so, it would be madness not to.
I find writing the most consistently fulfilling experience of my life.
I am incredibly disciplined.
I have the good old-fashioned quality of being hard-working.
I don’t care what others are doing, I’m only in competition with myself.
It’s my job, and a great job. Why would I take a year out of a great job?
I constantly challenge myself in terms of new ideas and genres, so I don’t bore myself or my readers.
Being busy is important to me. Being idle fills me with dread and horror.
I have a lot to say.
Writing for a living was my dream, I am living the dream!

Adele Parks is the author of 21 novels, all of which have been bestsellers. She has sold over 3.5 million UK edition copies of her novels and her books have been translated into over 26 languages. Lies, Lies, Lies was shortlisted for the 2020 Fiction Book of the Year in the British Book Awards. Lies Lies Lies and Just My Luck were Sunday Times #1 bestsellers.

Her new novel Both of You published May 2021 was described by Lisa Jewell as: ‘Yet another stick of literary dynamite from Adele Parks: chilling, gripping and entirely unputdownable’.

Adele will be joining us as our guest for a live session on her writing craft and process for all members of The Novelry on 14th June. We can't wait!

Mike Gayle and All The Lonely People.

From the Desk of Mike Gayle.

It used to be the case that whenever anyone asked me about the research I’d undertaken during the course of writing one of my novels I’d say something debonair like, ‘My life is my research!’ I’d raise an eyebrow as if to make it clear what an incredibly interesting person I was, constantly having adventures and living life to the full. The truth of the matter however is that I’m actually quite boring really, and even worse I prefer it that way. I like my drama to exist only inside the pages of the books I write. Real-life drama isn’t really my thing, at least if I can help it.

I’m telling you this as a preamble to what I’m going to say next which in short is this: All The Lonely People took a lot of research. When I first came up with the idea for this story one of the things I knew I wanted to explore was a long life lived from beginning to end. In the past I’ve tended to write stories about particular key moments in a character’s life: the weekend of a particularly tricky birthday, the months following the reintroduction of two old school friends after a long absence, two siblings coming together having spent a lifetime apart. But in All The Lonely People I wanted to examine a character’s story from beginning to end as a way of thinking about how people become lonely.

To start with I had an image in my mind of a home. At first, that home only has one person in it, then that person falls in love with another and there are now two. From the love of those two people comes another person, and yet another, until finally there are four people in a house where once there was one. But the story doesn’t stop there no matter how much we’d like it to and so for Hubert (because of course, it is Hubert I’m talking about) the home gradually begins to empty. First, Rose leaves to go to university, then David follows to live his life, and then finally (and, most heartbreakingly of all) Joyce leaves too until there is only Hubert left.

I knew this was the story I wanted to tell, the story of how someone’s life fills and then empties again. But to tell that story would require me to dig deeper than I ever had before, to push myself far outside my comfort zone. I’d never written a historical novel before. The farthest I’d ever gone back to was the Seventies, the decade in which I was born. To write this story I was going to have to travel back twenty years before my birth to a time I had no direct experience of. In short, I was going to have to do some research.

My first port of call was my parents. That said getting any relevant information out of them wasn’t the easiest of tasks. They were consistently vague about all manner of questions and it was quite hard to pin them down. They were good at the early days, telling me wonderful stories of life in Jamaica, but they seemed to falter when it came to talking about life in England. At first, I wondered whether it was a memory thing, after all, they’re both in their eighties now but having spoken to friends whose parents are of the same age as mine and also immigrants, I’m beginning to think that something else might be at play. I get the feeling that this haziness is simply down to the fact that from the moment they arrived they were so busy working, struggling to make ends meet, make a life and survive in a strange and often hostile country that much of those early days is just a blur to them.

Thankfully, however, there were plenty of other rich resources available. Mother Country (Edited by Charlie Brinkhurst-Cuff and published in the UK by Headline) was particularly helpful. Subtitled, ‘Real Stories of the Windrush Children’, it’s a wonderful collection of first-person stories told by the children and grandchildren of those that came from the Caribbean to England in the 40s, 50s and 60s. Other useful references for me were novels covering the period of Hubert’s arrival in the country. Particularly helpful was The Lonely Londoners by Trinidadian author Sam Selvon (1956) telling of the experiences of Moses Aloetta in post-war London and Andrea Levy’s Orange Prize-winning tale, Small Island, offering as it does a fascinating insight into the lives of people like Hubert.

If my children had informed me they were watching YouTube videos for ‘research’ before I started writing All The Lonely People I would’ve been highly sceptical but it turns out that the online platform is another superb resource for research. Where else for instance would I have been able to find footage of rural Jamaica in the 1950s, a blue beat dance from the same era and Pathé newsreels created for UK consumption about the Empire Windrush, the ship which carried the first arrivals from the Caribbean who had been called to “the mother country” to help with England’s labour shortfall following World War II? Pathé newsreels entitled, “The Jamaica Problem,’ and ‘No Colour Bar Dance,’ are particularly eye-opening about the blatant racism faced by the newly arrived West Indians. The films are at once hilarious and depressing which is no mean feat, take a look and you’ll see what I mean. 

The four-part documentary series, Windrush, produced and directed by David Upshal and originally broadcast on BBC2 in 1998 to mark the 50th anniversary of the arrival of the Empire Windrush is essential viewing. Its scale and depth greatly informed the creation of Hubert and his environment and I urge you to track it down and watch it. It really is worth your time.

While the majority of my research shocked, saddened and angered me, there was a lot that put a smile on my face too. Listening to the Windrush generation talk directly about their experiences in their own words, I couldn’t help but notice how despite all the difficulties they faced they never seemed to let things get them down, they always found a way to keep going. And it was this spirit, more than anything that I wanted to capture in Hubert Hezekiah Bird. I wanted to create a character who, though he faces sorrow, pain and problems, finds a way through it all and ultimately leaves the world a better place than he found it.

 With our thanks to Mike Gayle who is joining us as our guest for the Live Q&A with our members on Monday, June 7th at 6 pm BST. See you there!

Story Ideas.

From the Desk of Harriet Tyce. 

Whenever I do an event, I wonder if this will be the time I’m asked how I get my ideas. It hasn’t happened yet – maybe it’s perfectly obvious how I get my ideas. I was a criminal barrister, I’ve written two books with criminal barristers at their heart. But I’ve still had to come up with different stories for them, different settings. And even if I know one part of the world, the rest is still a mystery.

Every time I’m confronted with the blank page at the start of a new project, I panic, not sure where I’m going to find inspiration. Every time I approach the end of a draft, I panic again, wondering if I’ll ever be able to think of a new idea.

The thing is, I always do. Inspiration’s to be found everywhere. The books I read, the television shows I watch, the conversations I overhear. The true crime stories I read in the Daily Mail online (they give a lot of detail which isn’t always reported elsewhere). These aren’t the only source, though. 

There’s also all the reading I’ve done throughout my life, starting from the very beginning. You might not think the books I read as a child might have relevance to the dark psychological thrillers I write, but if you peel off the skin, dig under the flesh, the story bones have more in common than appear at first glance. It was no surprise to me to discover that the Classic Course at The Novelry, the course where our authors' stories start, begins with a section on fairy tales as 'story starters'.

Fairy tales end with a wedding. The wedding is the goal, the endpoint, the last of the thirty-one stages identified by Vladimir Propp in his Model for the Study of Fairytales. Popular princesses have evolved over the years from the ultra-passivity of Sleeping Beauty – Princess Merida from Brave and Elsa from Frozen to name but a couple of recent examples – but if you were to ask someone for the beats of a fairy story, my bet is that nearly every single person would say that there was a big fat magic wedding at the end.

Psychological thrillers couldn’t be more different. To misappropriate Chris Whitaker’s brilliant title 'We Begin at the End' (an equally brilliant book), they begin at the end. After the confetti’s been thrown, the frilly dress has been folded up into a bag and put away. That’s where the stories of domestic noir start. And while you might not think the genre has much to say to the world of fairy stories, go a little deeper and you will see that the worlds of crime fiction and fairy tales have more parallels than you might imagine.

Take Bluebeard. The prototype domestic noir, seminal to the genre, spawner of numerous retellings, from Jane Eyre to Rebecca to Lolita to The Book of You. Even Stephen King’s The Shining. My first novel, Blood Orange, has more than a nod to it, starting as it does behind a locked door where secret things happen. Bad things. Come to that, so does my second novel The Lies You Told, which features a locked room at its very core.

‘La Barbe Bleu’ was first told by Charles Perrault in Tales of Mother Goose (1697). It’s the story of a man’s courtship and his marriage to a young woman whose desire for wealth conquers her feelings of revulsion for blue beards. He gives the keys to every room in his house, but before going on a journey, tells her that while she can open every other door, she is not to enter one certain little room. What does she do next? What I would do, and most likely you as well. She goes straight to it, opening the door, and finds a pool of blood in which are reflected the bodies of Bluebeard’s dead wives hanging from the wall. Terrified, she drops the key, staining it with blood, and when Bluebeard returns, he sees that she has broken his rule and gone into the forbidden chamber. He’s about to execute her when she’s rescued by her brothers, who ride to her rescue just in time.

This is psychological thriller 101. ‘A story that turns on weighty events in one partner’s past, on the perils of uncovering secrets, and on the quest for intimacy through knowledge’ (Maria Tatar) – these are the beats that reverberate under every good domestic noir.

Let’s have a closer look. Jane Eyre – Jane is repeatedly told by Mr Rochester and Grace Poole that she should keep away from the hidden corridor in which the first Mrs Rochester is housed. Rebecca? The first Mrs de Winter is both locked away as a secret in Maxim’s past and yet haunts every part of Mandalay, kept alive by the sinister Mrs Danvers. As Tatar describes Humbert Humbert, he’s a ‘European bon vivant whose “wives” are all dead by the time he suffers a coronary thrombosis in prison’ arriving in Lolita’s town ‘as a kind of Bluebeard figure who proves fatally seductive to both women residing in the house he enters’.    

Moving into contemporary fiction, there are a multitude of novels based explicitly on retellings of the story. The Wikipedia page under Bluebeard shows twelve versions of the story from Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber onwards, and that’s just in literature, mostly stories that feature the word Bluebeard in the title. Then there are the stories that refer only obliquely to the tale, though follow its tropes faithfully enough. Take the film Get Out as an example, with the monstrous Rose as a Bluebeard figure, described by Maria Tatar in an article for Harvard as ‘a monster straight out of our culture’s master horror-narrative, with its classic tropes; a secluded mansion with a dark place inhabited by a brooding homicidal maniac.' Also consider Fifty Shades of Grey, Christian Grey a shadow Bluebeard for our troubled times.

And that’s the point I’m getting at. These stories that we have heard in our childhoods are deep in our bones. As source material for our own work, they operate on a multitude of levels. We can take them directly and appropriate them for our own, as has been done to great acclaim by writers like John Connelly (The Book of Lost Things) or Sarah Pinborough (Poison, Charm, Beauty). Or we can approach them with our eyes half-shut, borrowing core aspects without adhering religiously to each beat.

Vanessa Savage, author of the crime novel The Woods, makes the point in a recent blog post that stripped of their magic, what you’re left with in many fairy stories is a classic crime story. She breaks down the story of the Little Mermaid thus:

‘She gives up everything for her obsession, and he falls in love elsewhere, she becomes unhinged to the point of wanting to kill the man she claims to love… This is the perfect psychological thriller.’

So fairy stories are really crime fiction. Crime fiction leans heavily on fairy stories. As Marina Warner puts it, ‘Working with a plot, a character, images and motifs already familiar to the intended reader or audience gives freedom to retaliate, protest and reinvent.’ Every retelling is a new story that brings in new readers, casts new light onto the subject.

It’s not just Bluebeard, not by any stretch of the imagination. Take the idea of changelings. Sophie Hannah explores this trope in her breakthrough psychological thriller Little Face, in which the mother Sophie is presented with a baby that she swears is no longer her own. Joe Thorne’s The Hiding Place explores the return of a missing child when the older brother finds himself terrified of the girl who has returned, supposedly his sister. Rosemary’s Baby and The Exorcist both dive deep into the idea of demonic possession of a baby. Little Darlings by Melanie Golding plays explicitly with the concept to terrifying effect.

The trope of the woods as a dark place of danger and transformation cuts through both fairy stories and crime. Think about John Yorkes’ seminal work on narrative, Into The Woods. The journey through the woods is how the character will find themselves, either for better or worse. And what more classic a fairy tale dilemma than losing a child in a wood, one of a parent’s greatest fears? When writing Blood Orange, I did this quite unintentionally, when I set a scene up in Hampstead and had the child Matilda go missing in a game of hide and seek. I wasn’t thinking about the tropes I was exploiting – I wanted to create a moment of maximum drama so that tensions within the protagonist’s marriage could be brought to a head.

‘A crisis moment always embodies the worst possible consequence of the decision taken when the initial dramatic explosion occurred… this decision inexorably brings the character face to face with their worst fear: the obstacle that is going to force them to face up to their underlying flaw.’ John Yorke

In my novel, Blood Orange, Alison’s worst fear is that she is going to lose her daughter, although it takes actually losing Matilda for her to confront this fear and face the truth of the situation.

And temptation – the compulsion that drives us all to break a command. Don’t open the chamber, Bluebeard’s wife is told. Don’t touch the spinning wheel, the prohibition given to Sleeping Beauty. Alison knows she shouldn’t have more than one drink at the start of Blood Orange. In The Husband’s Secret by Liane Moriarty, the protagonist finds a letter written by her husband, only to be opened in the event of his death. Even though he’s very much alive, she opens it, and chaos duly ensues. All of them transgressive women, breaching the interdict that’s been laid upon them.

You can take this wider still. One of the stock features of domestic noir, of psychological thrillers, is that of the woman who won’t do what she’s told, who won’t conform, who isn’t a good enough mother, who isn't a chaste enough wife. In a great piece in The Atlantic in 2015, Koa Beck writes:

'These ladies scheme, swear, rage, transgress, deviate from convention—and best of all, they seldom genuinely apologize for it. It’s the literary equivalent of the feminist catchphrase originated by Amy Poehler: “I don’t fucking care if you like it.” More than being “unlikable,” these female characters directly challenge the institutions and practices frequently used to measure a woman’s value: marriage, motherhood, divorce, and career. They defy likability in their outlandish occupation of the roles to which women are customarily relegated—mother, wife, daughter—resisting sexist mythologies and social pressures.'

From some of the reviews I’ve received, it’s clear that Alison’s transgressions, her failure to resist temptation, can cause readers to feel ‘morally distanced’ from her. That was a comment we actually received from one potential publisher. But I see her breaking of the rules as the thing that brings her character alive in all its glorious, flawed humanity. And let’s face it, if Bluebeard’s wife had done what she was told, there’d be no story!

As we write, we’re unconscious most of the time of the material that we’re exploiting, building on. Making our own. Sometimes it’s direct, which can bring huge disappointment. I woke once with a brilliant plot in my head, writing it down eagerly. It took a couple of hours for me to realise I’d regurgitated Gone Girl in its entirety. This kind of theft is clearly not on. But all the years that we’ve spent reading, being told stories – these clearly leave their mark.

Inspiration can be found practically everywhere. It might look like a children’s story, but children have less fear than us, they are more able to look directly at the heart of good and evil, calling it out for what it is. Children’s stories are dark as anything.

'When I allude to “The Little Mermaid” or “Bluebeard” or “Cinderella” we know where we are. This knowledge excites a desire to know more and know it differently.' Marina Warner.

Whether children’s or domestic noir, horror or thriller, when the story begins a familiarity resonates deep inside us as a reader, a frisson, which conversely frees us up to hear what new approach is about to be taken.

As Veronica Henry said in her blog for us at The Novelry, it's the challenge to write something that’s the same, but different. This isn’t a challenge just for an author writing their next book, it’s a challenge for us all, to catch hold of the old tropes, the repeating motifs, and make them new, make them our own, using the same notes, but playing a new tune.

We should never be scared that our inspiration will run out, that we won’t ever have another idea again. The next story? It's deep in our bones. 

With thanks to our author tutor Harriet Tyce. Choose Harriet as your tutor and co-pilot when you join us on The Book in a Year plan. Your year of writing with us at The Novelry begins with discovering the tales that most intrigued you as a child, pairing them with your own unique experiences and interests to create a powerful story in the first stage of the process writers old and new describe as 'mind-blowing' and 'life-changing.' Join us for The Book in a Year and have the time of your life. Now available worldwide in our easy payment plan in instalments.

Writing a First Draft.

 

From the Desk of Emylia Hall.

This is not my first draft rodeo... (not that you’d know it).

‘The first draft of anything is shit,’ said Ernest Hemingway. I’ve always liked this line because it’s a great equalizer: we’re all capable of writing terrible first drafts. And it’s freeing too: it’s about getting the words down, generating material, discovering the story … no pressure to be anything more than that.

Nevertheless, whenever I turn in a first draft, I still always think … but what if, this time, it’s not? What if it is, in fact, nearly there? Just needing a nip, a tuck … and we’re good to go? And although all my experience tells me this will not be the case – that this is almost never ever the case for anyone – I find myself absurdly hoping anyway. Because, typically, I’ve finished that draft on a real high, a crescendo of energy and inspiration – and every ounce of my own disbelief is suspended by this point too. I’m deeply in it.

This last time, just a few weeks ago, I typed the words ‘The End’, even though no novel closes that way, because I wanted to feel all the intensity of that final flourish. Then I snapped shut my laptop and walked down the stairs to join my family, feeling faintly heroic – hell, not even faintly, fully – and poured myself a large glass of wine. Collapsed on the sofa. Glowing.

My husband started reading my draft the next day (and here I’ve consciously flouted our rule at The Novelry of never showing your raw work to anyone: The Big Edit is, instead, the guide you need). He’s been my first reader for all of my books, and we’ve come to an understanding: things will get ugly – he’s too blunt, I’m too thin-skinned – but it’s worth it in the end. This time, I was delighted when he got down to reading it so soon. I busied myself playing Lego with my son, one ear cocked, all the while, for any sounds of his enjoyment (don’t ask what I was expecting here … the odd guffaw? A fast intake of breath?). At one point I even absented myself to scroll through the manuscript on my phone, trying to see what section he might be reading at that very moment, if he might be getting to one of the ‘good ones.’  When I couldn’t bear it anymore, I poked my head around the door. ‘How’s it going?’ I asked, and my voice came out wheedling, dripping with need.

‘Well, I’m on chapter three and you haven’t irritated me yet.’

I laughed heartily – and walked away with a veritable skip in my step. I hadn’t irritated him yet! Joy! At this point I’d take any compliment, however backhanded. Because, too, I knew what he meant. After four published novels, two more in drawers, I know the holes I write myself into by now. And I can even joke about it (how big of me!)

But an hour or so later – after more Lego, more self-serving enquiring – things had changed. I can’t remember what he said, but it was purely critical; something about character or story that wasn’t working for him. And just like that, my wick was lit. ‘Stop! I don’t want to know! Just give me 24 hours, 24 hours of thinking this novel might actually be perfect as it is!’ And I was stomping, seething. Laughably so, of course, because hadn’t we been here plenty of times before? And what did I expect anyway? But ego can be such a fragile thing. We agreed that he’d continue to read, but just not voice any thoughts until I was ready to hear them. And I would stop with the asking; stop looking for a pat on the head and a cookie and to be told that, actually, it was perfect, just a nip and a tuck and …

Fast forward a couple of weeks and I had feedback from two other writer friends, as well as my agent. I was now under no illusion that the book was nearly there. It would need considerably more work, just like all first drafts do. And the way that I felt about this work-to-be-done seemed to vary from day to day. On one bright morning, I dropped my son at school and instead of hurrying back to my desk, I kept on walking. I stopped for an almond croissant and coffee, and then again to pick up some lunch supplies, and headed out from the city to wide open green space. With no one around but the odd dog walker or jogger I talked to myself, inhabiting different characters from my book, untangling what they thought and who they were deep down (this is, I’m sure, a predilection from childhood, when I used to stalk the edges of the garden, head bent, ever-murmuring). With all that motion, all that freedom – physical as well as mental – I started to feel emboldened: to feel up for this next draft. I was excited by the possibilities. I stayed out for hours, on a hillside that felt more like a mountain, so beautifully removed from my day to day that eventually treading back down onto the old familiar routes of the city made me feel like I was returning from a far wilder space: that of the imagination. When I got home, I sat out in the garden with a notebook and filled it with pages of jottings, energy and intention in every stroke of the pen.

The next day, what was my first thought upon waking? God, there’s a lot of work ahead. And this thought stayed with me the whole day, bearing down on me with a physical weight. I started to tell myself a story (occupational hazard) and it went like this: I’d used up all my energy in getting that first draft down, that was the problem, what with the 6am starts, the pushing through home-school, the juggling of work, the dark winter lockdown months, there was nothing left in my locker, nothing left for this next draft, zilch. And here’s where the fantasies started to edge in … what if I just… left it? No one was making me write this novel, after all. I have no contractual obligations. And then the question: why are you even doing this anyway? What do you want from it? 

One of the things I find eternally fascinating about the novel-writing process is that we simply can’t escape ourselves. I don’t just mean in the words we put down on paper, but our attitude, our approach, our relationship with our own creativity. And not just creativity, because the minute we’re writing with publication as a goal, then there’s a whole host of other factors to stare down: the possibility of failure and of disappointment is every bit as likely as the chances of reward; writing of the movie business William Goldman said ‘nobody knows anything’ and surely it’s true of publishing too. So, it’s about our relationship with uncertainty as well. And understanding our motivation – what we really, really want from this writing lark – goes a long way in helping to manage our expectations and organise our ambition.

The stakes are raised with a second draft. It’s no longer about just getting a story down, writing a novel-length narrative, typing ‘The End’ – it’s about conscious betterment. We proceed on the basis that we understand there is work to be done and that we will gain something of value by undertaking that work: artistic satisfaction, evidence of mental agility, proof of commitment, and, perhaps ultimately, if it’s our endgame, publishing success (but nobody knows anything, right?). And we all know that the moment we set our sights on achievement of any kind, we must also make our peace with the possibility of failure. It’s at this stage in the process that we should become not just writer but reader too, and in order to pull this off it means training an objective and interrogative eye on our work. And the more prepared we are to entertain wild possibilities, the better. Because here’s the thing: our novels can still be anything – anything we want them to be. All we need to do is have the bravery to imagine it and the strength to get it done. And to me it’s always felt physical, the rewriting at this point. Every significant change I make feels like it requires a deep breath, a flex, and then … in.

At The Novelry, we advise at least a month’s break after completing a first draft. A big part of this is about replenishing our depleted stocks and gaining emotional distance. If I’d tried to start editing on the same day that I was still mentally running through all the feats it’d taken to get the damn draft down in the first place I’d probably have started peevishly spouting Kipling (‘watch the things you gave your life to, broken/ And stop and build ‘em up with worn-out tools’) and then collapsed over my keyboard because I just didn’t have it in me after all.

So instead we replenish, read, recharge. We carry our notebooks and scribble down thoughts in a free-flowing manner. Thus energised, we’ve a better chance of quietening that sabotaging inner voice – the one that only ever wants us to play safe, and maintain the status quo – and slowly we’ll begin to feel ourselves opening up to the thought of the great wide unknown, and all the possibility it holds. We’ll start to feel curious about our own work-in-progress, for we’ve begun to create a world, it’s already part-made, it didn’t exist before and, with our focused attention, it could become fully realised and maybe even something quite beautiful. And now? Well, it’s game on.

It’s at this point that I like a sports-movie-style pep talk. I think of Al Pacino in Any Given Sunday, as he addresses his losing team, the Miami Sharks, in the locker room, ‘We can fight our way back into the light, we can climb out of hell, one inch at a time.’ Progression by inches. That’s a sentiment that’s perfectly in tune with what Anne Lamott says in Bird by Bird (one of my favourite books on writing craft), where she tells us that she keeps a one-inch picture frame on her desk, to remind her that all she ever has to do is:

‘...write down as much as I can see through a one-inch picture frame. This is all I have to bite off for the time being.’

So, I make lists of what I know I need to fix in the next draft. And I tell myself I’ll pick them off one by one. Inch by inch. Still on a sports tip I think, too, of Friday Night Lights, and Kyle Chandler as Coach T, saying ‘clear eyes, full heart, can’t lose.’

So, I vow to try to be clear-eyed: objective and cool, appraising. I’ll keep a full heart, to feel connected to the essence of the story I want to tell and to see big changes as opportunities. And I’ll tell myself that if I do both of these things to the best of my ability then, simply, I can’t lose; it will always be time well spent, knowledge gained, and, as George Saunders says (writing in The New Yorker, My Writing Education: A Timeline):

‘we have to learn to honor our craft by refusing to be beaten, by remaining open, by treating every single thing that happens to us, good or bad, as one more lesson on the longer path.’

One of the benefits of working with tutors at The Novelry is that we all have lived experience of the pain and the pleasures of this process. Whatever problem you encounter, you can bet we’ve met it too. Whatever you’re feeling about your work, we’ve almost certainly felt it as well. In that spirit, here’s a list of observations, and some of the things I know I need to fix at my next draft – and, yes, they’re all things I should have known from the off. But whoever does? Because that would be unnatural in a first draft, wouldn’t it?  Just ask old Hem.

The character who most resembles me has the least purpose in the narrative. I can remember thinking, just a few lines into writing the character in question, ‘ah yes! Now I’m on safe ground!’ With her, I felt like I’d hit my stride and for the first time, I felt at home in my own novel. But that sense of familiarity was a misnomer because unlike other characters I’d consciously designed, this young (ish) woman was given no job to do, other than be herself (her lovely, likeable, charming self! Haha). When it came to appraising her value, I was deeply biased. 

 

The characters that are least like me, on the other hand, are the ones that have the most vigour and vim. By not trying to make them anything akin to likeable, I’ve made them entertaining and interesting instead. 

 

I wrote out my story without enough thought for the reader. For instance, I, the author, knew who would ultimately be redeemed. I knew who was actually a nice guy, despite their behaviour to the contrary. I knew who we needed to worry about, and who we didn’t. But, apparently, I kept this knowledge so much to myself that I didn’t give half enough signals to the reader (and we’re not talking conscious sleight of hand either – more of an, er, misinterpretation vibe).

 

A lot of my characters sound the same. There’s not enough differentiation between young and old. Almost everybody is liable to use an expression that I might use myself; no one is safe from my own speech habits.

 

I repeat descriptions. Three different people in the manuscript feel, at one time or another, a panicky sensation in their chest akin to birds flapping their wings. I mean, come on! But hey, it’s a first draft. This is what a first draft should be. Lots of flapping.

 

I take leaps to suit my own ends. Stretch plausibility. Reluctant to spend time on non-inspiring research – like an element of institutional procedure, for instance – I make something up that fits the plot. I can already hear the future Amazon reviewer (if I’m lucky) correcting me in no uncertain terms – and likely with great wrath.

 

There are not enough twists and turns: especially at the end, where things happen too quickly, and in too straightforward a fashion.

 

The stakes could be higher.

 

The word count could be lower (cut, cut, cut).

 

And on and on and on.

 

It’s around this time that I sit back with my notebook and I ask myself ‘Why do you want to do this again? Because, you know, nobody else really cares if you do or don’t. This whole endeavour is on you.’  And cue the fleeting fantasy of just closing my laptop and quietly walking away. ‘But I care,’ I counter, then louder, ‘I care.’ Until I’m thinking it so loudly that I’ll continue to hear it through most of my waking thoughts, and probably in my dreams too – which is just the way I like it. But getting to that point? Well, it’s a journey. One that will include, Any Given Sunday movie-style, fighting my way back into the light.

Inch by inch.

How to Write a Bestseller and Make Tons of Money.

How to write a bestselling book and make tons of money by Meg Rosoff, who once wrote a book that sold a couple of million copies and made her tons of money, but has been unable to repeat that trick since, damn it. 

Always start your blogs with a list. Everyone loves a list.
Know your craft. If you can’t write to save your life, it’s just plain logical to choose another career. Unless you’re Dan Brown, Jeffrey Archer, E.L. James or any of the other richer than Croesus so-called writers whose ability to put together a coherent sentence is dubious at best. AT BEST.
Any book that takes ten years to write is probably a disaster. Personally, I tend to believe this and suggest to people that if they’ve been suffering over a book for way too long that they ditch it and start again. JRR Tolkien would disagree (Lord of the Rings, 17 years). As would JD Salinger, Donna Tartt, Margaret Mitchell and Ezra Pound, who reputedly spent fifty-seven years writing The Cantos. Which yeah, yeah, is a work of genius we’re told, but still. Fifty-seven years? I don’t think so.
Writing should be joyous. Ha. Ha. I have had many joyous moments in the writing of novels. I have had transcendent and ecstatic moments. I have had moments so thrilling, I will remember them for the rest of my life. But 96% of the time, writing a novel is just hard slog. I remind anyone who will listen that much of writing a book can be compared to digging a hole. With a spoon. In February. It’s difficult, miserable and most of the time you just want to toss the uncooperative bastard into the sea. But then, becoming an Olympic athlete isn’t a walk in the park either. Think of all those decades trying to do a flip on the balance beam. Unfortunately, that thing your parents told you (unless you’re a millennial, in which case apparently your parents were too busy buying you a place at Harvard to talk to you) about having to work really hard to achieve your goals was mostly true. There are exceptions. My first novel (How I Live Now) was one of those rare novels that just came flowing out fairly painlessly. Seven of the following eight, however, made up for it by being various degrees of nightmarishly difficult.
Send your finished first novel to your friends and family and get their opinions. Unless you’re really, really lucky, your friends and family will turn out to be worse than useless when it comes to reading a manuscript. They will want you to like them so they will say they love it. They will have mediocre taste in books, so they will say they love it. They will be afraid of insulting you, so they will say they love it. What you really want is someone who does not care about pleasing you. You want someone who draws lines through whole chapters and writes BORING in the margin, who tells you your main character is unlikeable and that they can see your ending coming from ten miles away. My husband and daughter happen to be quite good at being appallingly rude to me. As is my agent. And my editor. I love getting their notes. Constructive criticism is the way to go. Always.
Reading and writing is the best way to become an author. Well, fooled you here, I totally agree with this. It may not be true, and you may have some great examples to prove that it’s not true, but I don’t care.
Kill your darlings. I ask you, what does that even MEAN? Sure, sometimes you have to get rid of a character or a chapter or a paragraph you once thought was brilliant. That’s all part of self-editing. My darlings, however, are two hairy lurchers, and I totally refuse to kill them. Though I’d be lying if I said I’d never been tempted.
You’ll never get published if you don’t have connections in publishing. Read my lips: All. Agents. Are. Looking. For. The. Next. JK Rowling. All of them. Without exception. They don’t care if you’re related to Martin Amis, Mr Harper Collins, or the Archbishop of Canterbury. Unknown is fine. Of course, you have to write a good book. That’s the tricky bit.
Write from your heart, your soul, your gut. And then just hope and pray that your gut knows what it’s doing.
There is no single right way to write a book. Anyone who says otherwise should not be teaching your creative writing class.

With our thanks to Meg! (And, at The Novelry, as our writers know, the mantra is – 'tools, not rules!')

Meg Rosoff is best known for the novel How I Live Now, which won the Guardian Prize, Printz Award, and Branford Boase Award and made the Whitbread Awards shortlist. Her second novel, Just in Case, won the Carnegie Medal. She is the author of nine novels, four middle-grade books, and four picture books for children.

She will be joining us for a live session on Monday May 24th at 6pm open to all members. See you there!

Here is The Guardian's Review of Meg's 'easy-to-write' bestseller back in 2004, which you may find instructive and illuminating. I have marked up in bold the elements which may have contributed to its success, and those of you on The Classic Course with us will recognize the three key components of a 'classic' – immersion (voice), magic, and life and death stakes:

'Rarely does a writer come up with a first novel so assured, so powerful and engaging that you can be pretty sure that you will want to read everything that this author is capable of writing. But that is what has happened with Meg Rosoff's How I Live Now, which, even before publication, is being talked of as a likely future classic.

Though billed as a book for older children, the novel is full of shocking events - underage sex, with a whiff of incest, appalling violence. But younger readers, with their relative lack of experience and greater insouciance, may well be less troubled by these things than the many adults who will also read the book.

How I Live Now is the first-person story of Daisy, a smart, stroppy, self-absorbed 15-year-old who arrives from New York's Upper West Side to stay with her English cousins. The four cousins are romantic, bohemian and enjoy an eccentric, faintly feral pastoral idyll of an existence in a rambling English country house, mystically in touch with nature and, indeed, with Daisy.

One of the twins, Isaac, talks to animals; Piper, the girl, knows how to get honey from bees and watercress from a running river. ('What about a meandering river?' Daisy wonders to herself. 'This is one of the things I most dislike about nature, namely that the rules are not at all precise.')

And Edmond, who has 'eyes the colour of unsettled weather', is so much her soulmate that he can get inside her head, even when they are far apart.

'It would be much easier to tell this story,' Daisy explains, 'if it were all about a chaste and perfect love between Two Children Against The World At An Extreme Time in History, but let's face it, that would be a load of crap.'

As Daisy and Edmond fall in not-so-chaste love, her Aunt Penn, who appears to be some sort of international peacekeeper, is summoned to Oslo in an attempt to avert the threatened war. (The action takes place in a kind of parallel present or near future.) The unworldly, though not entirely innocent, English children and their sophisticate cousin are left to fend for themselves as the fighting breaks out. Initially, they experience the war chiefly as a glorious absence of adults.

It is Daisy's voice - spiky, defiant and vulnerable - that makes this novel; it also ensures that it is so compelling and delightful. Although Daisy can be an unreliable narrator, especially when it comes to things she's not much interested in, such as the details of war, she is also utterly trustworthy.

She is a character we are permitted to see from many different angles - as hurt, but also cool, ironic, downbeat and superior; as an infuriating anorexic; and as resourceful, self-deprecating, funny and determined.

The latter qualities turn out to be rather necessary, because Daisy and her youngest cousin, Piper, are evacuated, moved on and eventually have to try to trek back home cross-country to find the rest of their family without being killed by one side or the other.

As Daisy notes: 'In order to survive Piper and I needed to have a plan, and I was the one who was going to have to make it because Piper's job was to be a Mystical Creature and mine was to get things done here on earth, which was just how the cards were dealt and there was no point thinking of it any other way.'

Even though the details remain vague, the war is fiercely imagined, its interpretation through the offhand eyes of a child making it oddly more horrific. The first bomb goes off, Daisy informs us, 'in the middle of a big train station the day after Aunt P went to Oslo and something like 7,000 or 70,000 people got killed'.

The violence remains largely in the background until near the end, but touches the children in unexpected ways: emails bounce back, telephones stop ringing, cows develop mastitis because there's no electricity to milk them. 'What impressed me,' Daisy says vaguely, 'is how simple it seemed to be to throw a whole country into chaos by dumping a bunch of poison into some of the water supplies and making sure no one could get electricity or phone connections and setting off a few big bombs here and there in tunnels and government buildings and airports.'

How I Live Now is a book written out of an apprehension of how terrible the world is, but also out of its potential for magic. Rosoff has great imaginative reach; her voice is so finely tuned that I instinctively trusted her, from the opening page right up to the wonderfully equivocal ending.

With its lack of punctuation, its muddled tenses, its breezy tone concealing an absolutely stricken state, this is a powerful novel: timeless and luminous.'

(Geraldine Bedell)

 

Take a look at our magical Classic Course, the place to begin writing your future classic here. Happy writing!

Writing Historical Fiction.

 

'The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.'

L.P. Hartley

From the Desk of our Tutor Kate Riordan. 

I always think it’s strange when people say ‘Oh, I don’t read historical fiction’ with a look of mild distaste.

That look generally means one of two things: that a story set in the past will be irrelevant and impossible to relate to, or that reading it will feel less like entertainment and more like school.

But how can history be irrelevant when it’s made us what and who we are today? To dismiss historical fiction is to dismiss the human experience. As for the entertainment factor, think of Bridgerton, adapted for Netflix from the books by Julia Quinn. 82 million households streamed the series in its first month. Sexy and frothy and fun, it’s about as far from dry and dusty as you can get. It wasn’t just the bodice-ripping people seemed to enjoy either. Its evocation of a society that put a huge emphasis on appearance, conformity and notoriety also spoke to a modern audience.

For me, as a reader, being taken back in time is the ultimate escapism, and much more tantalisingly exotic than a book set thousands of miles away. Elon Musk will probably get to Mars if he throws enough money at it, but he ain’t going back to the 1920s or the 1530s. So, the reasons for reading historical fiction seem pretty obvious. What is admittedly a bit more tricky is the writing of it. If you’ve got a historical novel on the go, or you’re about to start one, there are some questions you’d do well to ask yourself before going any further.

The first is why. Not just why are you writing historical at all (do you have something new to say?) but why that specific period in time. This is especially pertinent if you’re setting your story in the recent past. Why choose the nineties over now? (And yes, classing the nineties as historical makes me feel ancient too.) Is it because your plot falls apart in an era of mobile phones and the internet? That probably isn’t a good enough reason.

Is it because you were around then, and you want to relive your past? That isn’t reason enough on its own either, and I say that as someone whose most recent novel, The Heatwave, is partly set in 1993, with a teenage character who is the same age I was then. My initial justification for this was a desire to get all those little details right, which would create an immersive and nostalgic experience for the reader. This turned out to be true: lots of readers of a similar age liked that aspect of it. But I needed a deeper reason, too - and I found it in another character, Elodie: a child incapable of feeling fear and any real emotion, who seems to enjoy inflicting pain. If Elodie had grown up in contemporary New York, she’d have been whisked off to therapy immediately. Instead, she is growing up in rural France in the seventies. Elodie’s mother is told she’s imagining things, that her daughter will grow out of it, that the danger she presents to her little sister is harmless sibling rivalry. This leaves the family isolated and helpless, which ramps up the tension and significantly raises the stakes.

The second question is related to why, and it's when. Think about what the period you're choosing has to say about how we live now. When you write historical fiction, you're setting up a dialogue between the past and the present. If you do have a theme, and you want to make a point about how much certain things have or haven't changed, it would seem best to be sly about it and choose a period that is quite starkly different in certain respects. The bonus of writing historical fiction is that you have a 'ready-made' world, so unlike with fantasy or sci-fi, you can work with a set of knowns, and so can you readers. Is there a time and place for your current idea in progress which is just right to say what you want or show an absence or a surfeit of something important to your story?

A critical issue for the budding historical writer is research. One of the more surprising pieces of advice I find myself giving is, ‘don’t go overboard’.

What I really mean is, don’t let the research take over. If you have exhaustively studied a particular period for a decade, it’s going to be difficult to leave enough of it out so that it doesn’t suffocate your story. All those facts you’ve squirrelled away are going to want their moment on the page and this is when you have to be extremely self-disciplined (or get a tough editor).

If you’re not sure how much detail is needed, try moving a scene to the present day. If your protagonist is being kissed by someone for the first time, is she noting what iPhone her paramour owns? Is she wondering if he’s on a 24-month contract with EE? You need to strike a balance between your reader’s comprehension of a time they have no first-hand experience of and a story that feels naturalistic. Beware of clunky exposition, especially in dialogue, at all times. And if it doesn’t advance the story, leave it out.

Really, the ideal combination is to know a lot, and then have the confidence to leave most of it out.

The same applies at sentence level: you only need a hint of old-fashioned language. Always avoid going the full Dickens. This way, your recreation of the period will feel innate rather than show-offy. Instead of your reader picturing you beavering away at the British Library, you will disappear entirely. The reader, in safe and invisible hands, will relax happily into the story. Your historical setting will become, for a little while, real.

And now a special note for those basing their stories on real events or people (this also applies to those writing memoirs): never forget that life is messy, repetitive and often dull. It doesn’t have a nice logical arc. I always keep in mind that line from Alan Bennett’s The History Boys. When fed-up A-level student Rudge, practising for his university interviews, is asked how he would define history, he replies, ‘It’s just one fucking thing after another.’

That is not how you want your story to turn out.

On a similar note, something is not just interesting because it’s old. As with sci-fi and speculative fiction, even the most intricate world-building needs story-telling to become a novel. We still have to care about the characters. Everything else can be looked up on Google.

Of course, and as I touched on with Bridgerton, the best historical fiction manages to be true to the period while also whispering subtly to our contemporary preoccupations and fears. Think of Hamnet by Maggie O’Farrell. This is a book about loss and grief set in a time of plague, which happened to be published just as a strange new virus tipped into a full-blown pandemic. Of course, it was written well before anyone had heard of Covid-19, but you get my point.

If your story can offer a new angle or fresh context on an issue that persists today, you’re well on your way to creating something pretty special.

 

Kate Riordan is one of our wonderful tutors at The Novelry. Read more about her novels and find out more about getting coaching from Kate here.

If you're writing, or thinking about writing, historical fiction or a biography, we can offer you our warm support and enthusiastic guidance. Founder of The Novelry, and Course Director, Louise Dean has written historical fiction, read History at Cambridge, and has a particular interest in historical fiction. You can book a free 15-minute chat with Louise Dean or Kate Riordan to talk about your novel here.

With our Book in a Year® plan we will lead you through scoping out the idea for your work, through to writing a first and second draft ready to submit to our literary agents who specialise in historical fiction.

Managing Evil in Fiction

From the Desk of Polly Ho-Yen.

How do we ‘manage’ evil in the stories we are telling?

Writing for children means I often write with children. When I’m running writing workshops in schools, I have the pleasure of hearing the hugely inventive story ideas stewing in children’s heads, first hand. They’ll tell me their premise – a group of chickens take over the world, a scientist creates a formula that turns people into robots, a banana goes on a rampage - and I’ll ask why? Why do the chickens take over, why does the professor do this, why does a banana decide one day, enough is enough...? The typical response I’ll get, with an 'isn’t it obvious' shrug, is: ‘Because they’re evil.’

We feed children tales of good versus evil from an early age, through fairy tales and superhero stories. ‘The Baddie’ has become shorthand for evil, and children are incredibly familiar with the concept and more than confident to employ it in their own story writing. It’s us, adult writers, who hesitate when we turn our attention to the subject.

If we’re writing for children, should we encourage children to view characters, and therefore people, as evil? Is there a limit to the kind of evil that young readers can handle and how can you tell when evil is ‘necessary’ within your story for a reader of any age? How will evil be managed in a story and what’s the best way to approach ‘a baddie’ meeting their comeuppance? And, if you’re writing for adults, are the same considerations relevant?

When I wrote my debut middle-grade novel, ‘Boy in the Tower’ – my premise being ‘The Day of the Triffids’ for children – I unwittingly side-stepped a lot of issues around evil as the central driving force of the story. The building-destroying ‘blucher’ plants in my book, have no motivation other than to survive and reproduce. They’re not evil, they’re just plants. It just so happens that their presence is contrary to modern living – London is destroyed by the bluchers growing, spreading and taking hold.

But there’s a part of the story to which some of my young readers are drawn which touches on a darker example of the human experience. Children often want to know more about Ade’s mum. Ade, the young boy who narrates the story, describes how his mum is not like others because she’s not able to go outside. He ends up caring for her more than he should do at his tender age, and when the bluchers take over, he decides to stay with his mum in their tower block rather than leave, as everyone else is doing. My readers ask me what happened to her: how did Ade’s mum get into the position where leaving her home makes her so fearful, it feels impossible for her to do?

In my mind, Ade’s mum had been the victim of a random attack and this triggered an episode of poor mental health which led to her developing agoraphobia. I wasn’t sure if it was appropriate to include the details of the attack and wondered if it was too dark, too close to elements of evil behaviour, for a middle-grade readership. It’s always worth cross-questioning yourself about any element of the plot: Is this important to the story that I want to tell?

I like to consider this question in two parts – first, is it essential to the plot? If the behaviour or event feels a shade ‘too evil’ for the readership, are there alternative routes that will still serve the plot? Second, is it important to the story that you want to tell?

This is when you, the author, have to dig into what your story means for you. It might be that killing this particular darling doesn’t alter the way that you feel about your story or it might be a sticking point. It’s worth asking yourself why it is a sticking point, if that’s where you end up. Sometimes by digging there, you discover what's foundational and what's more like a stud wall.

In ‘Boy in the Tower’, the storyline of the attack was something that personal to me as this kind of attack had happened to someone very close to me; a random assault, with no explanation for why it had happened. There was a part of me that wanted to write about it because it was a terrifying experience that had left an impact. But I also felt that it did a huge amount of critical work addressing character and why Ade and his mum become trapped in the tower when the bluchers take over. The more I interrogated the storyline, the more I felt sure this was the story that I wanted to tell.

In my first draft, I didn’t write in any clues about what had happened to Ade’s mum. I imagined the backstory off-page but was wary about how to deliver it. When my editor asked me to consider including a little more, I decided to write in a scene of Ade’s mum coming home injured and added in a conversation where she mentions it that Ade overhears. As I was telling the story entirely from Ade’s perspective, I was able to benefit from the bonus of a limited first-person narrative - that he doesn’t understand what’s happening to his mum and so the reader gets the same limited information. I purposefully wrote these additional scenes in sparse detail. I still wondered about including the additions but my editor and I judged that by giving just a hint of what happened, we’d leave the reader to make the decision about what they thought had occurred. When I talk to children about these scenes, I feel that this was the right decision. Some of them hit on it and we can then discuss what’s happening; while others read past it, they know they don’t want to linger there.

Though I was writing for children, I was reminded of the same technique when I read Meg Hunter’s cli-fi debut ‘The End We Start From’ - a story of a first-time mother who gives birth as floodwaters enclose around London. Interspersed with lyrical excerpts of early motherhood, the narrator relates disturbing events that unfold as life changes for everyone and the race for survival pushes people to their darker side. Hunter writes about this so sparingly that as the reader you sense that the protagonist can’t quite face the awfulness of what she’s experiencing: 

‘Panic. Crush. G. Panicked. Crushed.’

‘I want to write about the checkpoint quickly. Get it over with.

Theyforceusoutofthecarbabieswillmakeussafedoesn’tseemtruetheyareroughwithusandtheysearchustheymakeustakeourclothesoff.’

I found that filling in these blanks, in my reading of this story, made me feel quite unnerved as I too didn’t want to fully imagine the reality of this. 

So, if there’s a darker element of evil in play that you feel is doing important work, you can allow the reader to fill in the blanks by design; employ a limited first-person narrative or even a close third and keep details measured to handle difficult circumstances with sensitivity. Hand the power over to the reader to take it further - or not.

There was an additional factor at play that I believe helped ‘Boy in the Tower’ feel manageable for a child reader - the blucher plants. I was writing a world like our world but the blucher plants were the difference. This fantastical, sci-fi element flagged it firmly as fiction and so acted as a kind of safety shield for the portrayal of the dark events that unfold.

Look at some of the most famous antagonists, the all-time great forces of evil - Lord Voldemort of ‘Harry Potter’, the White Witch of ‘Narnia’, Sauron of ‘The Lord of the Rings’ – and note that they all appear through the lens of fantasy. This allows for a clear distancing from the reader’s real world; though these characters are frightening, you’re not going to meet them on your local high street. They’re otherworldly and the reader is therefore subconsciously protected from them. Only in the later Harry Potter books does Voldemort starts to cross over into the Muggle world and then the threat really starts to feel terrifying in a way that the earlier books where Voldemort was contained to Hogwarts and the wizarding world never did.

A further development in the later Harry Potter books is how much we learn about Voldemort. In the early books, he feels more of a one-dimensional ‘baddie’ but in the final books, we learn his story, we see him as a child and we come face to face with the events that led to him becoming the Dark Lord. We come to understand why he chose his path. Interestingly the new live-action Disney movie this year is not ‘The Hundred and One Dalmatians’ but ‘Cruella.’ It’s all about how a young, talented grifter named Estelle becomes the villainous Cruella de Vil. (Similarly, Joker, the movie, deals with the development of the baddie in Batman.)

The attackers in ‘Boy in the Tower’ don’t appear on the page and I don’t give any detail about why they did what they did. But, as with the real-life attack of my close friend, my mind wanders to fill in the blanks here too – I imagine what would lead someone to violence of that kind: what pressures were they under, what was their state of mind, their history? I’m not sure I’m actually a fan of creating straight-up antagonists in my middle-grade fiction but if there are characters who act upon their dark side, I’m interested in exploring what got them there as J.K. Rowling did for Voldemort. Returning to asking yourself ‘why?’ is the most useful exercise when you’re testing a story idea and/or a character for holes. OK, the chicken/ scientist/ banana is evil – but why are they evil? How did they get there?

Turning to an example of how evil behaviours are explored and explained in adult fiction, I’d like to consider my fellow tutor at The Novelry Harriet Tyce’s superb debut ‘Blood Orange’ – a gripping domestic noir thriller that’s sold over five hundred thousand copies to date. In ‘Blood Orange,’ we see how acting upon dark desires and impulses becomes a driving force for both the antagonist and the protagonist, Alison. From the first scene, the reader is questioning the ‘goodness’ of Alison. On a night out, she is unable to resist ‘one more drink,’ then the lure of an affair and is found by her husband and young daughter passed out in her desk chair at her office the next morning. I don’t want to give anything away but let me just say the reason behind her behaviours feel fully understandable as the truth behind what was happening to Alison is finally revealed.   

The ‘reveal’ for many thrillers is often the unveiling of the identity of the antagonist and the reader needs to acclimatise evil with a character that until that point seemed perhaps beyond reproach. Again, without spoiling this read for you, ‘Blood Orange’ handles this masterfully not only by the tight plotting and rich characterisation but by Alison’s consideration of this metamorphosis:

“I never saw the shadow in him, not until it was too late. What I’ll never know is how long it was lurking before it started to take form and emerge from the darkness.”

I think there needs to be some consideration of why evil has risen up in a character to make a story stronger and plausible - even if, in my case with ‘Boy in the Tower,’ it happens off-page. As with any character that we create, understanding their motivations fully is what will make them feel truly real and understandable to a reader.

Isn't this, after all, how we process 'evil' as we mature? Can we lead our readers through the process and help the abhorrent become more manageable? Is that not, essentially and at heart, part of the larger purpose of fiction, to 'only connect'?

One final aspect of ‘Blood Orange’ I want to mention is the way that the antagonist meets their comeuppance. It’s entirely linked to what they were inflicting upon their victim and though it perhaps couldn’t be further away, genre-wise put me in mind of the brilliant denouement of the fantastic antagonists created by Roald Dahl. Dahl created characters that may have shades of caricature but who certainly could be real, possibly you could meet them on your high street, and it is through a combination of humour but ultimately their comeuppance that Dahl handles evil within his stories. Their undoing goes hand in hand with the evil we encounter from them. Call it perfect justice, the author gets to plays God.

The Twits in Roald Dahl are a vile pair who meet their end because they are fooled into doing a never-ending headstand – the treatment they were forcing upon the monkey family to make their upside-down circus. Miss. Trunchbull is made to feel the same level of fear which she inflicted upon all the children at her school. And note how in the stories that involve children being seriously injured or fatalities, fantasy looms again: The High Witch is turned into a mouse, the children-guzzling giants are imprisoned with only snozzcumbers to eat.

A satisfying punishment for an evil antagonist therefore often means exposing their weakness which they’ve previously been wielding as a weapon. For instance, in ‘The Hundred and One Dalmatians’, Cruella De Vil’s obsession for fur and her utter disregard for life drives her to steal dalmatians to make the ultimate fur coat. But by the end, the dogs escape and destroy every single fur she owns. She flees in search of a warmer climate; she is literally unable to find warmth anymore - anywhere or from anyone.

I’ll leave you with one more example: a Young Adult book, Kevin Brook’s devastating and deeply affecting ‘The Bunker Diary’ which breaks the mould on every front. It won the Carnegie Medal in 2014 and caused waves for the shocking nature of its story. I mention it here thinking about the upper limits of how evil is portrayed and how Brooks approaches this. In ‘The Bunker Diary,’ a group of six people, including a teenager and a nine-year-old are kidnapped and then trapped in a bunker. There are places where Brooks leans towards sparse detail in his writing to effect and it is written in first person but there’s no element of fantasy here. We never meet the person who’s inflicting the torture upon this group, let alone understand them and they do not meet any kind of reckoning at all. Clearly, this was the story that Brooks wanted to tell. It took him a decade to get published and he says of this journey: "I knew I could have got the book published years ago if I'd rewritten it - toned it down, changed the ending, explained a lot of unexplained things - but to me that would have meant writing a different book, a book that I didn't want to write." 

As I turned the final pages of ‘The Bunker Diary’ and it became clear that an escape would not be likely, I was struck by how the kindness that the characters display towards each other felt more than poignant, it was powerful. Far more powerful in fact than the inherent evil in the actions of the faceless ‘Man Upstairs’ who had engineered the situation.

“Fairy tales do not tell children dragons exist. Children already know the dragons exist. Fairy tales tell children that dragons can be killed.”

G.K. Chesterton 

Without the presence of an element of evil within a story, we would also be without the transformative power of goodness. We’d be unable to explore how the qualities of selflessness, kindness and connection act as evil’s antidote. As in ‘The Bunker Diary’ this doesn’t mean something mawkish in the least – it’s at its most affecting when we are shown it simply, through the actions of characters towards one another in the face of, and in spite of, a great evil.

Perhaps it's Brooks gritty exploration of evil in ‘The Bunker Diary’ that demonstrates his strength as a writer and  won him the Carnegie Medal.

Consider too this last thought about the management of evil in stories from one of our writers here at The Novelry, Kate Harvey:

“We all need to shine a light into our shadow side. It’s the only way to release ourselves from it, and stop acting from it. Bringing it into awareness it can be harnessed, rather than acted from - and put in books. It is often the supposed squeaky cleanest of us all that often end up the most perturbing: politicians, priests, police, lawyers - they want to maintain the good image to others and to themselves (or god) but sometimes at great cost to others as the shadow remains out of awareness. They are not whole but split. The unaddressed shadow side will still sneak out. I’m a therapist and the worst therapists are the ones who have not done work on their shadow side (although that's why they make us have lots of therapy!) I suspect it’s the same for writers.”

Facing up to our shadow sides through writing is an incredibly valuable tool for life. It might sometimes appear as a convenient plot device to drive story forwards (and it does!) but it also helps us to manage and face the evil tendencies that lie within us all.

Our handling of evil in stories gives us the opportunity to handle these behaviours in ourselves and others. 

To summarize:

- Interrogate your plot by asking yourself: is this important to the story that I want to tell?

- Handle dark elements by employing techniques to allow readers to ‘fill in the blanks’: limited first person or close third-person narratives and giving purposefully spare detail

- Ask yourself how and why a character becomes ‘evil’

- Fantasy can be used as a safeguard to explore the actions of evil characters

- Consider how an evil antagonist might meet their undoing through their own design

- Address the balance – here’s the evil, so where’s the good?

Happy writing,

 

Polly

Whether you're writing for children, young adults or adults, enjoy the wise advice and encouragement of our tutor Polly Ho-Yen when you work side by side on your story with an author at The Novelry.

Veronica Henry on Trusting the Process.

Veronica Henry is the bestselling author of romance novels and a journalist whose first novel was published in 2002. Her novel 'A Night on the Orient Express' won The Romantic Novel of the Year Award in 2014. Her new novel 'A Wedding at the Beach Hut' is published in May 2021. Members of The Novelry can look forward to an uplifting Live Session with Veronica on 10th May and hear more about what she's learned about the process after writing 22 novels! (Writers of The Novelry – look out for her 'hero book' in this piece - psst, by the primroses...)

From the Desk of Veronica Henry. 

Just before Easter I pressed send on my 22nd novel. That’s roughly 2 million words I have sent out into the world over the past twenty years. I guess I must have learned something about novel writing in that time, yet I feel as if I know nothing. Because here’s the thing – it doesn’t get any easier. (Sorry!) And nor should it. It’s not supposed to be easy.

Writing a novel is a complex, tortuous, emotionally exhausting process that takes everything out of you. Oh, and solitary, which is the part I find hardest. I’ve never been that comfortable in my own company. It’s also very difficult to be objective about what you are writing. Is it derivative? Predictable? Pretentious? Simply dull? Which is why it’s important to remember that being published is a team effort, although the first part of the journey is done very much alone

There are a few things I have learned about my process, though. Pitfalls and patterns and phases which I have learned to recognise and embrace. Accepting that these are part of the writing journey has made it a little easier, a little less daunting.

My brief to myself with each book is to do ‘the same but different’. An infuriatingly glib phrase that I first heard when I was a scriptwriter on Holby City. Each episode had to contain all the thrilling ingredients that drew the viewer in, jeopardy and emotional impact and humour and camaraderie and tension, but also had to be fresh and unique. But the phrase is a useful tool for me, to check in with what my readers are expecting and responding to. I analyse my Amazon reviews to see which words and descriptions come up – both positive and negative – and this helps keep me on track.

Starting a new book is like going to a party. There are all these new people to meet, some of whom you feel you might know a little and others who are complete strangers. You circulate amongst your characters, getting to know them and their mysterious ways, and how they interact with each other. And as the party progresses, secrets and surprises emerge, and your impression of each character changes. The person who seemed so scintillating at the start of the party/book turns out to be a crashing bore, whilst the little mouse in the corner has hidden strengths.

This is why I have learnt not to be too prescriptive in my plotting, for someone will rock up and change the plan. I’m lucky to have worked in television for so many years that my brain naturally shuffles everything into something resembling a narrative structure as I go along – mental muscle memory learnt from story-lining endless episodes of Crossroads (I know, I know). But every now and then I stop and check in with where the story is heading. I like to have an end-point to aim for, and there are usually two or three set pieces that I want to include, so I re-assess my material and recalibrate it, weaving in any new character dynamics or plot twists. 

I love it when things change, though, because that’s life, isn’t it?

You think you’ve got a plan and then you meet someone or go somewhere or see something and before you know it, you sell your flat in Belsize Park and go and live in Lisbon. It’s important to keep an open mind while you are writing, and embrace the flashes of inspiration that pop up when you least expect them. Even if that means going back and changing what you have already written.

With every book I write, about thirty thousand words in, a completely new idea jostles in, all pointy elbows, shouting ‘It should have been me!’

Every time I think it’s not too late to change horses, that I can drop what I’m writing and embrace this Shiny New Stroke of Genius. Just as I’m about to put in a call to my editor, I remember that this always happens. It’s a temptation thrown up by my subconscious because I know that the really hard work is about to begin. That I have got to dig deep to bring the story I am writing to life. And I remind myself that if I change tack, the same thing will happen with the Shiny New Stroke of Genius. So I put it to one side, jotting it down carefully in my ideas notebook. If it’s any good, it will still be a Shiny New Stroke of Genius in nine months, when I come to start the next.

So my plot evolves as I write.

I think of it as a road trip. I set the narrative sat nav, because I need to get from The Beginning to The End, but along the way, I might go a bit off-piste and take the scenic route. I do always get there eventually. Sometimes I get lost. Sometimes I end up going down a dead-end road. And that can only mean one thing; cutting.

I’m a massive fan of cutting. Cutting is writing. A lot of writers seem to view cutting as some kind of failure on their part, or a massive waste of time. I see it as an essential part of the process; recognition that something hasn’t quite worked; a necessary act of bravery.  And never a failure, for you will have learned something about your plot, your characters and your writing along the way. The words and the time are never wasted, even if they end up in the bin. Two books ago I cut forty thousand words out of my first draft. The moment I’d pressed send to my editor I knew they had to go. I knew that excising them would address every issue I instinctively knew my editor would have. And I was right.

Writing the second draft was tough, for not only had forty thousand words gone, but the rest of the material was affected. Yet I could never have written the book I ended up with, without writing the words that ended up on the cutting room floor. The words weren’t bad – in fact, I loved writing that strand, but it didn’t belong in the story I was writing. So kill your darlings, but thank them too, for the work they have done.

There will also always come a point in writing a book where I start to loathe every character, every subplot, every word. I hit rock bottom, whirling about in a morass of self-pity, wallowing in imposter syndrome, imagining my editor and agent looking at each other saying ‘Will you tell her, or shall I?’ It happens every time. For familiarity breeds contempt. It seems to come at the point where the characters are all bedded in, the story is nicely underway and I know exactly what’s going to happen. Of course, I’m bored with it! There are no surprises – for me. Just a big old slog to the end. 

This is the time when I step away for a few days and take my book and me to Relate for a long hard look at where we are in our marriage. I re-read everything I have written so I can fall back in love with my characters, because if I don’t love them, warts and all, then nobody else will. And I always re-read my original pitch to my editor at this point, to remind myself what it was that inspired me about the story and lit the spark. And then I go back in, refreshed, determined to make this tricky relationship work.

Because the most important thing about writing a book is to enjoy it.

I allow myself a certain amount of doubt and insecurity, because asking questions is what makes you push yourself harder. But there comes a point where too much weeping and wailing is self-indulgent. I have my favourite acronym – JFGOWI – just f**king get on with it. I want to relish every encounter; rub my hands with glee at the prospect of writing the next reveal; gasp at the final denouement. I want a little tear to trickle down my cheek as I wrap up my tale, accompanied by a sigh of satisfaction, foreshadowing the reaction of my reader.

And if I get into a real morass of doom and gloom, I re-read a bit of Riders and imagine Jilly Cooper chortling away to herself, pecking away at her typewriter, a dear little jug of primroses on her desk and perhaps a glass or two of Chablis to fuel the muse. Because if you don’t enjoy writing your book, no one’s going to enjoy reading it. That is for sure.

I’m starting a notebook for book 23 today. I’m writing my mantras at the beginning.

Love your characters. Kill your darlings. And JFGOWI.

Sarah Winman on Still Life.

Sarah Winman is the bestselling, prize-winning author of When God Was a Rabbit,  A Year of Marvellous Ways and Tin Man. Her new novel Still Life is published in June 2021. Still Life is a beautiful, big-hearted, richly tapestried story of people brought together by love, war, art, flood... and the ghost of E.M. Forster.

Sarah will be our guest for a live session for members Monday 6pm BST, 26th April. Come and meet her then!

From the Desk of Sarah Winman.

I’ve just finished my book Still Life.

The editing, the copy- edit, the three rounds of proofreading, and the recording of the audiobook. All done now. It’s out of my hands.

And for the first time I can feel the letting go; that weave of mixed emotion that shifts into the void. What I’m mostly left with, however, is the marvellous adventure of it all. One that started in 2015, when I was having a late lunch in a Florentine restaurant.

I was alone, left amongst the detritus of other people’s feasting when I looked up at the walls and noticed photographs of Florence underwater. The images were so incongruous that I actually thought it might be Venice. But no, it was definitely Florence, in the grip of what I came to learn was the devastating flood of 1966. The waiter brought out a couple of books to show me and talked to me about the mud angels – the young men and women who came to the city to clean up in the aftermath.

It was the first time I’d heard about this and as I pondered the enormity of it, that familiar little voice entered my guts and told me I was going to write about this one day. Absolutely not, I said. (My usual response when a story finds me). Yeah, just you wait, said the voice.

In the meantime, I got down to complete Tin Man. By the time I made a start on Still Life it was 2018, and a significant political event had occurred in this country: the Brexit referendum. The divisive rhetoric weighed heavy on me and as I sat at the desk, I made a decision that the tone of this new book had to be one of joy and entertainment.

It was the first time I’d ever been so conscious of tone. I’d never thought too much about it before, as it had always been instinctive.

And yet it is tone that gives us a taste on the opening pages of what to expect. The words chosen, or how we use them; how these will make a reader feel. It indicates what the book is at its heart. And so, tone became the engine.

It lifted the words and the story, and it lifted me too. And some days, the joy felt abundant and a little magical, and added a serendipitous element to the creative task of research.

With eighteen months to go, three slight problems: I’d never met a mud angel. I still knew very little about the ‘real’ Florence. And my knowledge about Florentine art was pitifully scant, something that desperately needed to be rectified, as my main protagonist turned out to be an art historian.

Acupuncture. I am a big fan. And there I am lying on the treatment table as a handful of needles stick out of my head. The practitioner Cristina – who just happens to be an Italian – asks me how the book is going? I’m not sure, I say, and tell her that I need to find an art historian who went to Florence as a mud angel and who maybe never left.

One moment, she says. And I watch her go to her phone. She tells me she is texting her friend Monica who knows everyone. By the end of the treatment her phone pings. It is Monica. She says she may have found me someone... Stella Rudolph.

Art Historian extraordinaire, one-time mud angel who lives in San Niccolo, was the woman she’d found.

The next day, I left for Florence.

I stood outside the Galileo Museum in a shaft of May sunlight and telephoned Stella who’d been expecting the call. The following morning, bringing gifts of red wine and prosecco, I met the woman who would be the key to unlocking the story. We sat in her dark studio surrounded by books and masterpieces and I loved her immediately: Youthful, charming, intelligent, and eccentric.

I have no idea what Stella made of me, at first. I think she thought I was an art history student, and a bit annoying, and she kept sending me off to places I had no interest in. She was an esteemed academic working on a monograph of Carlo Maratti and her language was academic, and I soon realised that I needed to ask the questions that bypassed the academic mind and went to the heart of who she was. I started simply. I said, What do you think of Michelangelo, Stella?

She looked aghast – and slightly pityingly - at such a basic question on such a basic subject. But then she paused and said, ‘Oh, he was an earthquake.’ And there it was – A sentence that could only have been spoken by someone with decades of knowledge and experience. And from that moment, Stella gave me my character Evelyn.

(As a footnote, I came to realise that Stella wasn’t a particular fan of Michelangelo. Or of Siena, come to that).

I went back to Florence four times after that initial week and followed her about whenever I could. We had coffee together, lunch, wine, dinner or we’d simply wander. With notebook in my hand, I couldn’t get her words down quick enough. Her in the doorway of San Firenze church – ‘Perfection, perfection, and majesty! High relief, altar, high relief, altar, confessional, confessional, confessional.’

I asked her questions about beauty, about nature in respect to art. About gratitude and enrichment. I asked her about certain statues or paintings and always led the conversation with the idea of response, or feeling, or why something was lauded over another. We talked about the flood, a subject that changed in its telling every time. We talked about Fellini and the effect the films had on the times.

I’d wait for her in the vestibule of the old palazzo where she lived, and the cool stone was heavenly in summer and frigid in winter. Clack clack clack the sound of Stella down the stairs – Hello my dear! You’re home! and her words echoed in the space, and we’d embrace and there was the faint whiff of cigarettes that she tried to hide, but which I thought was divine.

I adored her.

With my book to be delivered in August 2020, I was booked to head back to Florence in May that year. But, of course, I couldn’t, as the world went into lockdown. I phoned Stella every couple of weeks to make sure she was ok. Often there was a heaviness to her voice as she described the city cloaked in beauty and dread.

Stella died in May that year.

The circumstances remain unclear. She was one of a kind, a little bit magical. And I am forever grateful to have met her. She lives on in Still Life.

Erin Kelly on the Connection Between Music and Writing.

Erin Kelly is the author of eight novels, the bestselling author of psychological thrillers. Her sixth novel He Said/She Said spent six weeks in the Sunday Times top 10 bestseller list, and was a Richard & Judy Book Club pick (as was her first novel and her seventh novel!) Her latest novel - Watch Her Fall - will be published April 2021.

Erin is our guest author for a Live Session with our writers at The Novelry on 12th April.

From the Desk of Erin Kelly.

I have always loved my headphones. From the moment I got my first off-brand ‘Walkman’ as a little girl, everything I’ve done, everywhere I’ve been, every stage of my life from schoolgirl to student to young woman, from cassette player with foam headphones to Discman to iPod to smartphone has had a soundtrack only I know about.

Memories are tied to albums: George Michael in Rome on a school trip, Nick Cave in Portugal (irony!), Joanna Newsom on the train to Brighton on the ways to visit the man I would go on to marry. Music was how I untangled my thoughts, got ready for things. It was a constant.

The last decade have been my books and babies years, and music has been a part of them, too. I soon found when I started writing fiction that if I was stuck I was far more likely to find the solution wandering the park or pavements with a song in my ears than I was scowling at a blank page and a winking cursor. Not necessarily songs that went with the books but sometimes they were. I listened to old rave when I was writing He Said/She Said to bring me back to what it was like to be young and foolish.

Then a couple of years ago, I moved house, my routine changed and I started listening to spoken word rather than music on my long walk home from my kids’ school, craving the undemanding company that spoken word brings after a morning of shouting at them to put their shoes on. I liked listening to ideas being tossed around without the pressure to contribute something intelligent myself. I liked reading audiobooks without having to sit down. Before I knew it, twelve months had gone by and I, who used to live for new music, had barely listened to any. When I tried to listen to a new album, or even an old favourite, it was like the music part of my brain was broken.

And there was a corresponding blockage in my writing, too.

I couldn’t find my way into my book, no matter how many long walks I went on. I knew it was about a woman who had an affair, that it revolved around a production of Romeo and Juliet somehow, but I couldn't work out the connection. 

I could cover five miles and come home with my head not rinsed clean but more crowded than ever. I didn’t make the connection for a long time. I was putting the wrong kind of noise in my head.

So I banned myself from listening to any spoken word and tried to reconnect with music. I pulled out favourite records old and new by Laura Marling, Leonard Cohen, Kate Bush, Suede, Perfume Genius, Bat for Lashes. But I found that the lyrics were too much. I favour singer-songwriters with real narrative, yetvery time I was about to grasp a thread of my story, I’d be distracted by the lyrics. So I changed tack, this time going for songs where the lyrics were impressionistic and blurred: Agnes Obel, My Bloody Valentine. Better, but I still didn’t feel that connection.

And then came the music score that saved my life.

I started to listen to Swan Lake because I had an idea that it might be the right ballet. With its themes of betrayal and doubling, jealousy and control. I idly thought it might give me a bit of inspiration. No notes, no story except the one the ballet and the one in my head. At first, nothing happened. But then eventually something did. It was as it became more familiar, as I anticipated the next variation and discovered a new detail. (Did you know that Swan Lake almost didn’t happen, the first time around? They took it down because of bad reviews, then brought it back again and I think it’s because this is music that could not die. Someone decided that. And good: it’s now one of the  most performed ballets in the world.)

I listened to the Swan Lake score in its entirety five days a week for the best part of a year. I watched lots of performances of it too. At first, I would listen to it to think about high points in the story: here’s where the prince comes in, here are his emotions.

I’d find myself thinking of the plot points in my book: which dancers would be on stage? And towards the end, I’d start to think about my book. I was in a really intense relationship with this piece of music. I got angry if my phone rang while I was listening to it. I’d walk into the house, switch from headphones to speakers in one fluid movement because I couldn’t bear for it to end. I found that over the course of a year Watch Her Fall started to shape the book, so I would be imposing my own characters’ journeys. There’s a moment of betrayal in my book that perfectly corresponds to the moment of realisation in the book. Two people not sure if they are reading each other’s signals right, tiptoeing around each other, well that’s the prince when he first sees the swan. And the ending – which is the ending I am proudest of, which is the only thing that I needed – those lines, yeah. I would catch my breath, wondering if I could really bring myself to do that to my characters. (Of course, I could!)

Now I listen to the odd podcast but I won’t ever forget to listen to music first and foremost.

I’m in lockdown at the moment so opportunities for long solo walks are limited but they are stacking up. I’m working on a new book now, which is a kind of family saga that starts in the early 1970s and I’m making a playlist of all of the stuff my parents listened to when I was little. It’s taking me back.

Like books, music will take you somewhere. In a year where none of us has been anywhere, I can’t think of anything better.