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. 

Musings on Editing my Work in Progress

I’m trapped upstairs in a spare bedroom today, sitting with the dog curled up beside me and listening to hammering, sawing and a few expletives coming from the chap fitting my new flooring downstairs. It’s not conducive to writing. I can’t even get on with editing, since my master document is on the main computer, which has been dismantled and put away from all the work. Tip for other novices – back up to a memory stick every time you make any changes.

I could do some ironing - the pile is a teetering metre high, but the weather is too warm. Who wants to cloud themselves in steam on such a nice day? I’m not sure I’d even fancy the sauna on a spa retreat. Besides, ironing will always be one of many last choice activities – up there with bungee jumping, horse riding and queuing for theme park rides. I could sit and relax in the garden, or should that be ‘chillax’, a word in the news this week. No, I don’t think my skin would stand up to the heat and it feels wrong to be out there while the flooring guy sweats over his work.

The ironing pile

So I’ve decide to reflect on the whole process of writing and editing my novel. I began my work in progress (WIP) when the tutor of a creative writing evening class set the group homework – write the first chapter of a historical novel. I was teaching the Tudors to my primary class at the time, so decided on a setting in the late Elizabethan era and aimed it at my bright readers. I began with the stench of urine – ‘that’ll hook the boys’, I thought.

I took 20,000 words of my WIP to an Arvon course on fiction writing, and used it as the basis of a one-to-one tutoring session with Kathryn Heyman, where it became evident that I needed to focus on structure and develop more of a plan for the story.

I know everyone works in different ways. For me, ploughing straight in and getting a feel for the story was important, but eventually I needed a much clearer idea of where it was going. I had to get the foundation working. Kathryn advised me to think of it in scenes, which help me, and I set about producing a plan along the lines suggested by Jim Smith in The Writer’s LittleHelper.

In developing the story arc, the urine chapter moved to chapter four, and my main character developed goals to drive him through the story, with accompanying external barriers to drop in his path and trip him up along the way.

By this time I had given up my day job and was travelling around Europe in a small van with my husband and dog (Charlie Dog Came Too), spending time writing while my husband pursued healthily active pastimes.

For my whole year of travel Kathryn Heyman mentored me through the GoldDust programme. We concentrated on story and scene structure with the aim of making the writing as strong as possible, looking at:

• Keeping tight to the main character’s point-of-view and ensuring that his motivation within each scene was relevant to his story goals.
• Maintaining a good pace, with a balance of narrative, dialogue, and introspection.
• Avoiding clichés of action and thought, and ‘ye olde English’ dialogue.
• The old chestnut of showing rather than telling.
• Making the emotions of the characters believable. 

    Through the whole of this writing process I was also editing, since I was producing 20,000 word blocks to send to my mentor. This was an ongoing process of refining the writing at paragraph, sentence and word level, trying to:

• Vary my sentence length.
• Avoid repetition of the same word or phrase – for me that involved removing quite a bit of winking and rolling of eyes.
• Minimise passives and weak words. I’ve gone through for these common five words you’re told to edit out – very, really, just, quite, perhaps – but I’m still trawling through for ‘filter’ words such as to see, to touch, to think, to feel.

I am nearly there. I’ve been nearly there for two months. Once this flooring is down I will go all out to get right there – wherever there is.

Editing my Novel

I have been editing my first novel since moving from a village just east of Leicester, to a village just south of Cambridge at the end of August 2011. I am about three-quarters of the way through, which is behind the deadline I set myself when I had my last mentoring session with the author, Kathryn Heyman, in January 2012. Family and friends keep asking me why I am still editing, why haven’t I managed to finish it, they were expecting it to be published by now… How to explain to them? Anyone who has been there, writing their first novel, knows only too well how long it takes, and that it is just one rung up the long ladder towards maybe, just maybe, being published.

I don’t think I’ve been overly slow with the editing. Not when you consider that at the same time I’ve moved into a new home and trained a new puppy. I started off really well, since the first few chapters had gone through the mentoring process twice, which is probably better than going through an editor.

Pommie the puppy has consumed some of my editing time

Being mentored, having my writing looked at and commented on by someone who is highly accomplished and whose opinion I trust, has been so worthwhile. Kathryn Heyman, part of the Gold Dust mentoring scheme, is both supportive and enthusiastic, constantly urging me towards better writing as she pours her treasures into my lap, gently addressing issues such as pacing, structure, characterisation and using passive constructions. I know that using her detailed notes as I edit has lifted my writing. It hasn’t helped speed me up though.

Okay - it’s my fault that I chose to completely rewrite some chapters. For me that meant writing in longhand in my notebook, in first person, present tense, and then typing it all up in third person, past tense. Don’t ask why! I must just be a masochist. It was something I started doing with Kathryn, to help me keep close in on the main character’s point of view, while at the same time keeping the action immediate. The writing in longhand developed because we were travelling round Europe in a small van as I wrote and didn’t always have electricity, and I found that writing in my notebook made me get on with producing the first draft without constantly stopping to rework it. All of this worked for me, and I kept it up for the rest of the book. Around chapter 30 I stumbled across a section that was still in the first person present that I’d sent to Kathryn. I’d somehow missed that bit.

Checking and rechecking historical details has delayed me somewhat, and I am now debating whether or not to have an author’s ‘historical note’ at the end. I think I will, if only to point out that I know Waltham lock was destroyed in 1592, when I have it in use in 1594. What can I say? I wanted to have my characters go through the first pound lock in England, and they had to do it after the death of Christopher Marlow, for reasons I might explain in the sequel.

I have also got delayed through looking at the etymology of some word choices. It’s not that I’m trying to write in ‘Tudor speak’, but sometimes I’ve had a character use an unusual word in dialogue, and my husband, who’s proof-reading for me, has made a comment about whether the word existed or not. I was traipsing into central Cambridge to check out words in the Oxford English Dictionary, until I made the discovery that a Cambridgeshire library card allows you to use the online OED for free. What a valuable resource that has proved to be!

Most days I have got stuck in to editing, working my way through 4 or 5 chapters in a good week. There have been slack days too. One of those, when I felt as if every creative bone had been plucked from my body, I slumped over the keyboard and just edited my use of commas in dialogue. I know, it’s riveting stuff this editing, isn’t it?

I am through the trickiest parts of the editing now, so hopefully, even with the constant banging of builders in the house, I should make good progress towards the end. I am troubled by still not having a title though. The one I thought of early on in the writing process keeps coming back to me. It’s just a pity that it was used for a children’s historical novel set in the reign of Elizabeth I, written by Geoffrey Trease in 1940. 

Guess what? Same genre, same period, same target audience.

In between ploughing on with the editing I have also been seduced into some ‘now the end is in sight’ activities, such as compiling lists of agents who might accept an author aiming at the young adult market, and composing a letter to those agents. I’ve also got my eye on the synopsis, and have been doing some Googling around the issue of how long it should be, what sort of style to go for etc.

It can be quite a lonely task, sitting here, writing or editing, and not knowing whether I’m doing it ‘right’, so it was lovely to meet up with some of the good folk I met on the Arvon course three years ago, which started me out on this novel writing lark and introduced me to Kathryn Heyman. I was pleased to find out that my fellow ‘Arvonites’ were in much the same boat, a few were further ahead having got published or bagged themselves agents, but most were still editing, or in one case rewriting their novel as a screenplay. It was all somehow reassuring and refreshed my determination to keep at it.

I haven’t yet typed ‘The End’ at the bottom of the manuscript, but I’m close to taking that deep breath before starting on the round of letters to agents. Oh, I tell you what I have been doing though – making notes for the sequel. Yes, it’s true. Well, you’ve got to chase that two-book deal, haven’t you?