'Tis not enough to help the feeble up, but to support them after

- William Shakespeare

Funnily enough, just before notification of Helen MacKinven’s latest blog-post popped up in my in-box, I was browsing through this year’s little brochure for Arvon Foundation Creative Writing Courses. I’m too late to get on anything this year, but there’s one particular course I’d have loved to go on, tutored by Malorie Blackman (‘nuff said), but as I am currently unwaged (by choice) I’d feel guilty spending such a lot of money. The same goes for a creative writing MA, which I’d love to do.

Helen’s blog asked:

    Was your creative writing course worthwhile? Do you feel the need for support from a writing group? How do your family and friends support your writing ambitions?

It made me think. I began to write a comment to add to her blog, but it grew and so ended up on my blog instead!

I’m very lucky with my family support, especially that of my husband, who is tolerating my unwaged state and giving me room to try my hand at this writing game. My wider family also provide support and are proving to be valued readers and marketers of my books. Their clamouring for the sequel to ‘Witness’ has given me confidence that my writing has wide appeal, as I know they wouldn’t bother with it if it were not their sort of thing.

My family support!

As to creative courses, well, I’m a teacher, of course I believe you can be taught something. You can be given the skills, then let loose to see where your creativity and determination can take you.

In July 2009 I went on an Arvon course led by the authors Jill Dawson and Kathryn Heyman. I found this exceptionally stimulating. What gave me the biggest buzz was living and breathing writing with a group of like-minded people. This group proved to be of great support in the ‘you can do’ style of things, and we still meet up a couple of times each year, which has the effect of spurring me on, especially since a couple of folks (Deborah Meyler, Cherise Saywell) have now published great books.

Two life changing decisions came directly from doing that creative writing course. I resigned my job as a deputy head and took off in a small van on a tour of Europe with my husband and dog. At the same time I was mentored by Kathryn Heyman as part of  the Gold Dust mentoring scheme for writers. Jill Dawson likens Gold Dust to a fast track MA in creative writing. I can’t say how true that is, and there’s an interesting blog about it here, but Kathryn certainly taught me much about structuring a novel, tightening up the writing and strengthening the characterisation and dialogue.

I think it’s possible to teach yourself writing, but I am also certain that you can get there by a less tortuous route with a bit of well-placed tuition/direction/mentoring. Someone pointing out the plot holes, the clichés and, in my case, quite how often your characters wink at each other, keeps you on a better writing path.

At the present time, much of my writing support comes from the ‘Writing for Children’ branch of the Cambridge Writers Group. This group is good at critiquing work, and I value their excellent commentary. They also spread the word about writing events in my area and it’s more companionable to attend events with a few familiar faces.

Not all writing groups support in this way, I know. The last group I attended (OK, ran) had less experienced writers as members, and we were rather more the blind leading the blind. Even so, we did writing exercises each week, and that in itself was incredibly stimulating for me and I produced a lot of writing which led to short stories and starts of novels (to be continued at a later date!)

Pieter Bruegel's 1568 oil painting, often called The Parable of the Blind,

Perhaps it depends on your personality. Some people get on better working in their little garrets, agonising over their writing until they produce masterpieces, others find their ideas flow better when they have someone to talk to. I think I am the latter type of writer. As I spend a fair amount of time on my own, sat in my study, I am considering trying to build more online writing support for myself. My writing group meets monthly, and in between sessions I could do with more than my husband to bounce ideas about with and to comment on chapters. He’s a fantastic proof-reader, but he concentrates on the linguistic side and I need people to get into the story. I’ve not found quite what I’m looking for as yet, but hopefully I’ll know it when I see it. Any suggestions would be most welcome.

Where do you get your ideas?

Where do you get your ideas? It’s a stock question when interviewing an author, not that anyone’s asked me yet! However, it’s best to be prepared, so to celebrate the launch of my first novel, Witness, I’ve had a little think about where the ideas for the book came from.

Neil Gaiman says his answer to this question is, ‘I make them up. Out of my head.’ – but admits that it tends to make interviewers unhappy. He goes on to explain that he gets his ideas from daydreaming and asking himself ‘what if…’ questions, which pleased me no end, as that’s what I do.

St Swithin's pre-1880

I can trace my ideas for my first novel, Witness, back 30 years to a post-university stint on a history research project at the University of East Anglia when I was asked to produce a pamphlet about St.Swithin’s Church, also known as the Norwich Arts Centre. St. Swithin’s had an association with the medieval tanner’s guild and this sparked off an interest in cloth preparation, so when I joined a creative writing class in 

St Swithin's today

Leicestershire and was set homework to write the first chapter of an historical novel, I started off with Matthew Reed’s stomach lurching at the smell of urine as he entered a fulling mill on the banks of the River Ver in St. Albans. Editing moved this scene to chapter four, but this was where idea for the whole book started.

The creative writing class got me hooked and when it finished I started a writing group with some of my fellow participants and my historical novel developed. In stowing away on his father’s cart, Matthew’s dream had been to get to London. One obvious place for his father to sell his cloth was Cheapside and during my research I stumbled across an article on an American blog which mentioned the ‘Cheapside Horde’. This remarkable collection, now the feature of a major exhibition at the Museum of London, is regarded as the greatest cache of Elizabethan jewellery in the world. In 1912, workmen demolishing a 17th century building discovered a decaying wooden box beneath a brick floor. Stashed there by some long-forgotten goldsmith, the contents of the box included over 500 pieces of 16th and 17th century jewellery of the type which would have been worn by wealthy merchants and their families rather than the aristocracy.

The Cheapside Horde

The idea of this jeweller stashing his wares under his floorboards took hold in my mind. What had happened to him? Why had he never gone back to collect his box? Perhaps he was murdered and he’d never even told his wife where his riches were hidden, and so my goldsmith, Thomas Hyckes, was created as the maker of this jewellery. In early versions of Witness, I had Matthew and his father, John, examining the jewellery and buying it as a gift for Matthew’s mother, but this got lost in the editing process and instead Thomas Hyckes became the friend in London to whom John Reed could turn when Matthew finds himself in danger. The Cheapside Horde is not in itself mentioned in the novel, but we do see, or rather hear, Hyckes carefully putting his stock away somewhere secret in his workshop on the corner of Friday Street and Cheapside.

As the novel progressed I wanted to learn more about the craft of writing and so booked myself on an Arvon course with the authors Jill Dawson and Kathryn Heyman. We covered a huge amount in our week of workshops and writing, and I learnt a great deal about developing characters and about the underlying structure of a novel. I decided that Matthew was on a journey, both in an emotional and physical sense, and created a map of where I wanted him to travel, which ended up stretching from London to Waltham Cross. I’m a very visual person, and so this map, made up of pages printed from Google Maps and glued together, was where I pinned bits of research associated with Tudor England and places along the route of the Old North Road. Much of this went into the second of Matthew Reed’s adventures, some of it never went anywhere other than the map, but one bit of research which made its way into the first novel, Witness, was about the Eleanor Crosses, which ended up featuring at several points during the novel.

Waltham Cross

Charing Cross

The inclusion of the Eleanor Crosses is largely down to family living near Waltham Cross, where a fine restoration exists of one of the twelve memorial crosses Edward I erected along the route of his beloved wife Eleanor’s funeral procession between Lincoln and London in the 1290s. This cross interested me originally because of its similarity with the one standing outside Charing Cross Station in London, which I had passed on many an occasion during my later teenage years - Charing Cross being my entry point to central London nightlife from the suburbs. In Witness, the Eleanor Cross link begins with Matthew and the playwright, Richard Beaumont, in their scene in at the foot of the Eleanor Cross in St. Albans.

The inspiration for writing can come from various places. Thankfully, writing what you know does not mean that you have to stick to things within your life experience. If it did I’d write mostly about school, children and dogs. To me, writing what you know means using your experiences in your writing. A major part of Witness was written while travelling round Europe for a year in a small van with my husband and our dog. Lots of small details from this modern day trip ended up accompanying Matthew in his journey. I studied a man fly fishing on the banks of a river in Luxembourg, and this, filtered through research on the history of fly fishing, found itself a tiny place in Tudor St. Albans. In Poland most places we camped seemed to have stands of silver birch, and we collected fallen branches for our camp fire. I noticed that when the bark was peeled back it left a beautiful pale pink wood shining beneath. It also left brown stains on my hands. Some of these details made their way into parts of the novel.

Often the ideas you start with spiral off into new places. In fact, it can become difficult to keep track of your research as you flit here there and everywhere, chasing your thoughts. It’s a fascinating process, but there’s an inherent danger of it all taking over your writer’s life to such an extent that little writing gets done. Blogging can be a bit like that sometimes, so I’d better stop now and get back to my last bits of editing on the sequel to Witness. I’ve yet to decide on the title, I still have a cover to produce and I need to get back to writing my Iron Age novel. 

Getting Published Today

No, I'm not actually getting published today - that's the title of an interesting event I went to a few weekends ago as part of Cambridge Wordfest.

Three experts were lined up to speak on the challenges facing aspiring authors:

Jill Dawson, acclaimed author of seven novels, and founder of Gold Dust, a mentoring scheme pairing new writers with established ones.

Nicola Morgan, author of many fiction books and the blog ‘Help I Need a Publisher’, which is crammed full of useful information, plus the odd bit of ‘crabbit’ advice.

Rebecca Swift, a former editor at Virago, now director of Arts Council-funded leading manuscript assessment service, The Literary Consultancy.

The three speakers knew their stuff, and the audience befitted from ten minute slots by each of them, followed by a question and answer session.

Much as you would expect, there were no miracle answers provided. Publishers will only takes books if they think they will sell. They are, after all, businesses and about making money. That’s not to say they don’t love books. They do, but sometimes they will take on the ‘right’ book, as opposed to a ‘good’ book, which is how all those celebs get their ghost written books out there. For more on that read this article by Danuta Kean about why those not so good books can become best-sellers (with some interesting comments).

Publishers dream of a book coming along which is both right for the market and good writing. We all know that great books do get published and the message from the three experts was to make your writing the best it can be, with the hook to convince the sales and marketing team at an acquisitions meeting that your sales will top the charts, or least make their advance back. Nicola Morgan has lots of this in her book 'Write to be Published'. Buy it, it makes enlightening reading for someone new to the game, as does this article on howpublishers make decisions.

I found it heartening that they all maintained that good writing is always going to be important and Jill Dawson said that rewriting is an essential part of getting there and should be looked forward to. Rebecca Swift advised writing from the heart, but all three speakers said that if you engage your head at the same time, there are things writers can do to improve their chances of finding an agent and getting published.

Knowing your genre was seen as vital. Knowing who is writing what for your target audience will make sure you don’t try to pitch your novel only to be met with publishers telling you they have exactly that out there already. It will also help you find the focussed insight that makes your book different from all the others in the genre, while walking along the fine tight rope of keeping it similar enough, since publishers apparently want same but different.

Linked to knowing your genre, was the advice to research who and what agents are representing before sending your manuscript to them. Nicola Morgan warned the assembled audience to ‘beware crappy agents’ and to find out about what clients they have, how successful they are and what experience they have of the publishing industry.

There was a great deal of advice about pitching, and since Wordfest I have spent time working on how to pitch my novel in 25 words, in a short paragraph and in a 2 page synopsis. Indeed, immediately after the event I purchased Nicola Morgan’s book and downloaded her ebook - 'Write a Great Synopsis'. Trying to showcase your writing in this way in not easy and needs to be given as much care as writing your novel. The aim is to achieve something functional enough to show what happens in the story, but with just the right amount about your characters, their flaws, motivations and goals, to make someone want to read about them.

A few words of warning were given to those tempted to self-publish via digital means. While no-one said ‘don’t do it’, they did say that careful preparation and sound editing were required. It was suggested that the time might come when publishers would look for an author having an ebook platform before they would consider them for mainstream publishing. Having the ‘right’ book out there in a digitally self-published form could improve your chances with mainstream publishers, but having something poorly produced, with lots of mistakes, could harm your potential success. Rebecca Swift, will be running a conference in early June about Writing in a Digital Age, which will cover the pitfalls of self-publishing ebooks.

All three speakers mentioned the dreaded rejection letters, saying it is going to happen and you just have to develop thicker skins to that and after, if you do strike gold and get published, to critical reviews.

So a big pat on the back to Cambridge Wordfest for organising such an interesting event. It’s proving to be a joy moving to an area of the country with so much going on for writers. All I need to do now is find the perfect writing group and the perfect critical partner. I’m sure they are out there somewhere round here.

Arvon Inspires

Today I am celebrating being half way through the final edit of my novel and well on the way to sending it out to agents in March. That’s the deadline I’ve set myself before I have to give up the luxury of being a full-time writer and go out and earn some money.

The celebration didn't involve much - just a cup of coffee and a break from editing to browse through the little Arvon Foundation Creative Writing Courses 2012 book which landed on my doormat sometime around Christmas. There are several courses I’d love to go on, but as I am currently unwaged I feel guilty spending such a lot of money.

If you haven’t come across the Arvon Foundation writing courses, you should check them out. They are expensive, so you need to be pretty serious about your writing, or immensely rich, but they are also of the highest quality and I can’t recommend them enough.  

Spending a wonderfully intense week completely immersed in the Arvon experience of ‘living as a writer’, where you are virtually cut off from the outside world, but in the company of like minded souls, was one of the best experiences of my life.  I can’t believe it’s nearly three years since I attended the fiction writing course at The Hurst, in the depths of Shropshire’s ‘blue remembered hills’, which was led by the authors Jill Dawson and Kathryn Heyman.

The Hurst

I was incredibly nervous before arriving on the course, especially since a friend’s husband had been on one and said there was one attendee who would only read out her work from behind a cupboard door. I’d watched Big Brother and the thought of being shut away with a load of weirdos was not what I was paying so much money for. I needn’t have worried. The folks on my course were fantastic and I’ve kept in contact with several of them. I can still remember the incredible buzz the course left me with, and how it was partly responsible for some life changing decisions (see 'About Lesley' for more on those).

Ah well, back to the editing. I'm coming up to a couple of tricky sections and need to decide whether to drastically cut a couple of chapters or to rewrite them into several shorter chapters. Either way needs careful thought if I am going to maintain the pace and keep the sense of the sections. The trouble with this editing lark is that I am at heart a procrastinator hidden behind a veneer of wicked organisation. I have always known I work better to a deadline, so setting my own deadlines is not a good thing. Before Christmas I was allowing myself to be seriously sidelined by new house and new dog stuff, but I am determined to keep on track now, apart from the obvious distraction of writing for this blog!