Hello!

I am new to the Blogworld, so please be patient with me!

I intend to use this blog to document my attempts at getting Tollesbury Time Forever published. Any comments would be very gratefully received, good, not so good, humourous, boring - all is fine with me! And if any of you out there can give me some leads....

Will do my best to update regularly and, who knows, Tollesbury Time Forever may one day be published! But if not, well that's ok. I really like it and the messages within it that create the acronym FRUGALITY -

Forgive everybody everything
Recognise beauty wherever it be
Understand the nature of loss
Give love wherever you go
Anger devours the soul
Look deep or don't look at all
Imagination is life
Trust everyone for, at heart, everyone is good
You are wonderful!

So there you go and here we are.

This is all very strange...

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In the beginning, I started out producing what I would have described as intensely psychological prose, creating entirely interior worlds, interior dilemmas, inner struggles... It seemed almost writerly. A chapter would involve one person, walking in a park, thinking. Or perhaps only sitting on a park bench. Perhaps this was because the thoughts came to me that way, and I didn't quite have the wit to dress it up more. This, I might call the Insight stage. Irony, hey.

I grew past it, in time. I started having two or even three people in a scene, even interacting sometimes. This, finally, was proper writing. They began to talk to each other, sometimes at length. They were (sort of) demonstrating things, through dialogue at least. No longer did the author clumsily illuminate via his eighteenth century narrator. Sometimes the characters even misunderstood each other, or talked across each other. Or were unreliable in their knowledge. I felt advanced.

But a different kind of pattern emerged. Each chapter, it was politely pointed out to me, is just people talking. Yet again. They were right, naturally. What was actually happening? I counted ten chapters in a single novel that each consisted in some part of two people talking at a checkout (mostly in coffee shops, but also, through a burst of wild imagination, in a supermarket).

Conversation isn't action, of course. Only action is action. Which is not to say a building blows up in every chapter, but at last I am deleting entire chapters that had seemed integral only months ago, and expressing a good thing once instead of a dozen times. It's the same thought that has football managers screaming at their daft winger to stop turning the defender and just bloody cross the ball.

I wonder what the next stage is?

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Every now and again an aspiring writer says in my hearing that they're afraid to revise a piece too much, in case they "lose the freshness". And there are understanding nods round the writers' circle or the class, while I try not to say that if the piece as it stands is freshness, then give me over-ripeness any day. Instead I gently explain that there is yet more which could be done to the piece (any piece), such as X and Y, and if Y then Z.... and indeed all those and more must be done if the writer's ever going to learn enough to get their work anywhere near publication.

But a few times I've heard of an agent or editor saying the same sort of thing of one of their authors, which has surprised me much more. Why would they suggest stopping work if there's any possibility that the novel could be better? But presumably they have seen books which have been spoilt by over-working, which have "lost the freshness" as they see it. So I've been thinking about what's going on.

They say that the actresses who can play Juliet well are either fourteen, or over thirty, and I think that's relevant.

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This has been a summer of contractions and a contract.

On August 1 at 6:16am hubby and I gave birth to Amelie (7lbs 11oz) and a few days later I signed a contract for Novel Two (Novel One is currently on the backburner). If truth be told, the novel was far more painful and laborious, despite mum having hyperemesis from hell (extreme sickness) for nine months. The book took around two years from start to finish, whereas my labour (as a first timer!) was four hours and up until the last eighty minutes or so, relatively painless which I attribute to my chiropractic treatment.


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Well, well, well, it's that busy time of year again. Here's some of what I'm doing, alongside writing a novel, teaching for the Open University, blogging, tweeting, cluttering up the forums at WriteWords... and occasionally remembering to breathe and feed the family. If you're free and feel like coming along, do come and say hello:



HAVANT LITERARY FESTIVAL

FACT AND FICTION: the role of the historical novelist Thursday 22nd September, 7.30pm, United Reformed Church Hall, Havant

How can history be used to illuminate the present? Why did Shakespeare ruin the reputation of Richard III? These and many other questions will be discussed by Stella Duffy, (Theodora; Empress, Actress, Whore), Emma Darwin, (A Secret Alchemy), and Michael Arnold, (Traitor's Blood). Books will be on sale for signing by the authors at this event.



UNIVERSITY OF GLAMORGAN

THE MOOT COURT READING: Emma Darwin Friday 30th September, 6.30pm, The Moot Court, Ty Crawshay, Treforest Campus, Pontypridd

The first of a new series of public events at the University of Glamorgan. The residential workshops of the MPhil in Writing were the birthplace of Emma's own debut novel, The Mathematics of Love. Emma returns to read

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Dear Jerusha: Can you have an opening chapter in the point-of-view of someone who isn't the MC? [Emma notes: that's main character, not master of ceremonies] I'll try to explain. My opening chapter is in the point-of-view of a doctor. Her patient, James, is a main character, but is unconscious after an overdose of illegal drugs, and the scene is with James's family, in the hospital. The whole scene is from the doctor's point-of-view, but one of the family there, Edward, is also a main character. The reason I did it this way is because I needed a negative view of James, before the novel gets into why he is how he is. But a couple of my writers' group have said that it could be confusing or wrong-footing to have a chapter, especially the first chapter, in the point-of-view of a character who isn't important all through the novel (though she does appear again). And someone else has said that I definitely shouldn't do this, because it's important that the reader empathises with the MC, and to show the MC in a negative light makes that harder.

Writers' Groups, eh? Who needs 'em? [Emma notes: me] I really like the sound of this, if it's handled right; it introduces us to an important group of people, and expresses the dynamics of them, at a really crucial point, all in one. A first chapter - among many other things - is teaching the reader how to read this novel, but if the book uses several points of view, perhaps in separate chapters, then I would argue that there's no reason you can't use the doctor's here. In a narrative in third person there is, by definition, a privileged narrator who can admit the reader to any mind or point of view it chooses. There's also a long history of using a point-of-view character to tell someone else's story: Wuthering Heights, for example, and to some extent The Great Gatsby. And the really cracking story which won Second Prize in the Frome Festival Short Story Comp, "Mr Plumb" by Stanley Walinets, did exactly that. It was very successful, and it made me realise that it's a rather under-used technique. (You can read it and most of the others here, by the way. Highly recommended.)

What I would say is that you'd need to be careful not to get us too involved in the doctor's own life and mind,

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There’s a wonderful book called 29 Gifts. Have you come across it? It’s written by a young American woman called Cami Walker who was diagnosed with MS a month after her wedding. In pain and despair, and barely able to leave her flat, she was given the following ‘recipe’ by an African medicine woman: Give 29 gifts in 29 days. And if you miss a day, go back to the beginning. The gifts included a tissue for a friend in tears; giving away a bouquet of flowers she’d bought for herself, stem by stem, to strangers; giving a shell she’d found on the beach to a little girl. The point of all this was that in giving a gift each day, her energy turned from focusing on pain and difficulty towards the power to make a difference.

What is this to do with writing, I hear you ask?



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As a teenager, I read Steinbeck's 1939 American novel, The Grapes of Wrath , for which he won the Pulitzer Prize, with astonishment. Steinbeck's empathy with an 'underclass' was almost unknown in English novels, where working class characters were used for comic relief or appeared as villains. There were plenty of servants, of course, since most novels were set in middle or upper-class households.

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The weather has changed. Being away, I didn't see it happen here, but I'd imagine it's much the same anywhere you go. I return from holiday to find a cooler, windier, wetter London. Trotting round my neighbourhood the colours have changed, and its not just that the housing estate has been repainted in battleship grey.

In the Eurostar magazine on the way home an article heralded the change in seasons with the suggestion that autumn is the start of the cultural year en France, unlike ever-dynamic, always on London. I'm not so sure we're any different. The Wednesday writing group I go to has been low in numbers all summer, and suddenly in September the attendance has doubled. The deadlines of literary competitions seem to cluster around October and November; perhaps if you're interested in these things, now would be the time to prepare for them. The signs are everywhere.

I'm sure real writers don't ever slack in summer, even if real-world writers do. At least we're finally liberated of the fantasy that we might just spend the day lying in the park instead.

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I'd recommend homeswaps to anyone who needs a nudge to keep their own place up to scratch. Another advantage is you get to investigate a range of reading matter that's in situ, so to speak.

My recent homeswap with my nephew and his family in my home town of Preston can roughly be summed up as: 'We got the rain; they got the riots'.

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