Remembering Olenka - The Story of a Friendship

Strawberry Street where Sandra lived.

I've never written about this before but because I've been writing about my childhood in Leeds for my new book, A Proper Person to be Detained, it has become very fresh in my memory. Even though I didn't include it in that book, now, in Easter week, I think the time has come to remember Olenka. This is a long post but it seems like a long story.

When I first knew her, she wasn't Olenka. She was Sandra. Her Polish name was Aleksandra, Olenka for short, but at school she was Sandra Jankowski, just as I was Catherine Lucy Czerkawski. It was only later that we both had the confidence to insist on the female 'a' ending for our respective surnames. I carried on using the English/Irish version of my first names but Sandra became Olenka.

I don't have a picture of her. Not even a school photograph. I wish I had. She was a pretty little girl, with very dark hair and an almost translucent complexion with a rosy spot of colour on her high cheekbones, like a doll. We both had fancy clothes: mine because my mother was a talented seamstress whose sisters worked in tailoring, and Sandra because her mother, Irene, spent all her spare cash - of which there wasn't much - on good clothes for her much loved daughter.

We started school more or less at the same time in 1955. Holy Family Primary School in Armley was a small, very ordinary Roman Catholic school in a not-very-well-off part of Leeds. I don't think we were best friends from the start. My friend at that time was a girl called Christine Danby, but a year or so after we started school, she and her family moved to Drighlington - not too far away, as it turned out, although it could have been Mars for all two six year olds knew about it. Then Sandra arrived. I have a feeling she started school later than I did, but it may have been because there were two 'intakes' at that time, depending on age. While I started in the autumn, Sandra may have started just after Christmas.

Sandra's mother was a widow: Irene (presumably Irena) Jankowski. I never knew what had happened to her father, but only that he had died, possibly as a result of injuries sustained in the war, so Irena was left to bring up Sandra on her own. We were two 'only' children - not lonely, but certainly a little spoilt, precious, and a bit precocious too. Also, we knew that we were Polish and proud of it. In my case, I knew that I was Irish too. And English.

We became friends. Neither of us quite fitted in at school but I think I fared better. I had a strong Leeds Irish mother and a father who was respected (and quite possibly indulged) by the teachers because of his academic prowess coupled with his typically Polish charm. I was seriously asthmatic, and I spent plenty of time at home. There was always somebody to look after me: my grandparents were on hand and my mother helped out in their little sweet shop. It didn't do me any harm. I read avidly and my father taught me the rest. Sandra couldn't skip school. Her mother worked long hours in Armley Mill, and there was nobody else to look after her, so come hell or high water, she had to go, even when she wasn't very well. She had, I think, the reputation for being a 'nervous' child although I didn't find her so. She just wasn't very robust. I was often ill but as strong as a horse.

We spent a great deal of time together, Sandra and I. She lived on Strawberry Street, which sounds prettier than it was. I lived in a tiny two roomed flat on Whitehall Road, next to my grandparents' house, until we moved across the city to a big, chilly, council flat in Bellevue Road. She loved Cliff Richard. I didn't. When we walked down the hill from school past the big cemetery, she would make up stories about the ghosts she had seen there. I half believed her. We shared hopes and dreams.

One of our teachers was notorious for having almost daily tantrums and throwing the furniture - and herself - about, at the risk of her pupils' life and limb. I can still remember the terrible noises, the shrieks and roars that emanated from her classroom. At the end of one school year, just before I was due to go into her class, my dad paid a visit to the school, and - miraculously it seemed to me - I skipped a year and went straight into the next class. Sandra, with no father to fight her corner and a shy, struggling mother, had to face the gorgon. Then my dad got a temporary placement at a scientific research institute in Mill Hill and we moved to be with him. At some point during that year, a rumour from relatives in Leeds reached our ears that quiet, well behaved Sandra had stood up in the middle of the classroom during one of the teacher's all too frequent crazy spells, thrown her books and her chair on the floor, put her hands over her ears, closed her eyes and screamed and screamed and screamed, bringing the other teachers running.

So she moved classes as well, but with far more trauma than me.

When we came back to Leeds, we moved into another chilly flat in Rosemont Road in Bramley to discover that Sandra was living just around the corner in Hough Lane. When we started secondary school, we made the journey to Notre Dame Grammar School, a walk and two bus-rides, together. Irene had remarried a man called Stanislaw Wilk and Sandra had gained a stepfather. Mr Wilk - Mr Wolf in English - was quiet and kindly: a good man who loved his new wife and his stepdaughter and his garden.

We slid back into friendship again. Sandra came on all our expeditions, My dad was keen on expeditions: hill-walking on the moors, blackberry picking, museum visits. We  went to cricket matches at Headingley, and played tennis on the public court in the nearby park. I celebrated various Polish festivals in her house, but most particularly Easter.

Irene Wilk always cooked an Easter feast: feather light yeast cakes with crumble or apple or plum toppings that filled the whole house with their scent, dense and delicious baked cheesecakes, rye bread and frankfurters and sauerkraut, boiled eggs and gherkins and salads of all kinds. There would be pisanki, hand painted eggs that my dad made as well, and the grownups, friends of Irene and Stashek, would drink vodka. These parties were memorably hilarious, warm and foreign, and I loved them.

Sandra and I found ourselves in different classes at Notre Dame which meant that the steady drift apart had  - although we didn't know it or acknowledge it - already begun. I was academic; she was a little less so, but intensely artistic and creative. We both loved to draw and paint and read. Then, when I was twelve, my father, with his new, hard-won PhD in biochemistry, got the offer of a position at a government research institute just outside Ayr. We moved to Scotland and went back to Leeds only a handful of times. Once, in the year following our move, I stayed with the Wilks for a week. It might even have been during the Easter holidays. We wrote to each other, but then the letters stopped.

In the mid seventies, when I was doing my Masters at Leeds University, we met again, just once. Olenka, as she liked to be known now, was living with her boyfriend, while I was still fancy free. She cooked a meal for the three of us. She didn't want to talk about the past at all. We made no arrangements to meet again. I wondered if we even liked each other very much. Now, I chiefly remember how her childish prettiness had turned to a truly exquisite beauty, stunning in its intensity, and how she was planning to pursue an artistic career.

I stayed in touch with her mother, more than with Olenka. Looking back, I can see that Irene loved me very much, but I was young and busy with my life and thoughtlessly selfish. We sent Christmas cards and Easter cards too, in memory of those Easter feasts. I can see Irene now: small, energetic, always cooking or cleaning, always cheerfully, volubly Polish when she was at ease with you as she was always at her ease with me. I've wondered since if she was - at that time anyway - slightly overawed by her own daughter, or perhaps by her daughter's singular beauty.

And then one day, in the early 1980s, I and my partner returned from a weekend away to the dreadful news that Sandra had died, taken ill, quite suddenly, with a bleed on her brain. Worse, her mother and stepfather had been away too, on a long anticipated trip back to Poland. Her funeral was the first I had ever been to involving somebody so young, a contemporary. She had been my first close friendship.

Irene and Stashek are long gone, although somewhere in my box of Easter decorations, painted eggs, fluffy chicks, there are one or two Polish Easter cards with greetings in Irene's familiar, spidery handwriting. Mr Wilk died first, leaving her alone. One year, there was no card from Irene. There was nobody left to tell me what had happened to her.  Their house is still there. I've walked past it, virtually, on Google Maps and given myself a frisson of sadness.

I find myself wondering if, had Olenka still been alive, we might have reconnected on Facebook, shared notes and lives, remembered the terrible teacher, or the expeditions to Bolton Abbey, the cricket matches, the clumsy, giggling tennis, the picnics at Adel Crag and Ilkley, the bonfire nights with parkin pigs and treacle toffee  - or Mrs Wilk's spectacular Easter feasts that every year I think of replicating - and every year, without fail, find that I can't.

Sitting on top of my piano, the piano I've had since I was thirteen years old, is a small, nicely modelled plaster head of a young girl, with her long, thick hair in plaits. It was the last gift Sandra gave me. Before I left Leeds, we were old enough to spend time painting our nails and experimenting with face packs. We pretended to be grown up, but we were still little girls. On Saturdays, we would sometimes go into Leeds, to the shops, more often than not with our parents or my aunts, but we were allowed to browse the shopping arcades by ourselves. Sandra always had plans for the things she was going to buy. She would save up her pocket money, although I think her mother and stepfather would give her whatever she asked for. One Christmas or birthday, when I was eleven or twelve years old, this figurine was her gift to me.

'I bought it because it looks like you,' she said.

And it did.

I've treasured it ever since. I still play the piano and whenever I look up and see this young girl with her plaits, I remember Sandra - Olenka - and the story of our friendship.

.

Working for Free: Factoring in the Fun

One of my most enjoyable events of last year - Grantown.

This is a topic that crops up with great regularity on social media and various other forums when writers and artists discuss the ways in which they are asked to work professionally for nothing except exposure.

And we all know that you can die of exposure.


It's not an all or nothing issue though, which is where the difficulty lies. Recently, I decided to post some information about events on my website. (Have a look at the News and Events page and you'll see what I mean.)

It certainly made me think about what kind of freebies I will and won't do, and for whom and why.

Because I write plays and am still occasionally involved with theatre, I'm on a few message boards for theatre professionals. I am also a member of various social media groups for writers of fiction and non-fiction. Whenever anyone posts a message to the theatre professionals about some unpaid project, the theatrical people voice their objections in the strongest possible terms. The justification is always that 'there's no money in the budget' which implies that there is, in fact, a budget. Just that they thought you would do it for nothing.

Now I don't mean that nobody ever works for nothing in theatre because obviously they do. Amateur, semi professional and community groups abound. Excellent profit share projects abound too, where nobody is making any fortunes but everyone is valued. But where a project has significant funding but those in charge have assumed that actors and writers don't need to be paid, there is a general - and completely justified - outcry.

On the other hand, a recent request on a writing group for people to come and give talks within a setting where everyone else was getting paid, elicited a heap of enthusiastic responses. Why yes, people said in droves. We'll be delighted to travel many miles to your venue and speak about writing. Just tell us where and when.

The contrast between the two groups of people was marked.

The second thing to prompt these thoughts involved a couple of direct requests to me to speak for free. One was from a delightful group, not too far from where I live, and with very specific interests that coincide with mine. Plenty of notice, and a lovely invitation. I said yes immediately. Mostly because I really want to do it. It's an evening event, a short drive away, and I'll enjoy it when I get there. I do a number of these kind of events on a first come first served basis, and they're usually a pleasure.

The other, however, was an invitation to travel three hours there and three hours back to an unpaid event where I would spend a few minutes actually 'on stage'. So that's six hours away from my desk, six hours when I'm not writing, and not even promoting recent work. In professional terms, that means I'm actually losing money. I said no to that one. This is not to denigrate the event, which will be lovely. If I lived in the immediate vicinity, I may well have gone, but the six unpaid hours on the road - even with travel expenses - was the clincher. Some years ago, I attended a literary event with a friend who had been asked to read as part of the programme. I paid my entry fee but - astonishingly - so did she!

Last year, with the publication of my new novel, The Jewel, I did a string of book events and enjoyed them enormously. It was a tiring but rewarding year. Many events were paid but a few weren't, or only involved travel and/or accommodation expenses. But since almost all of them were directed at promoting my book, and since even the unpaid events (or most of them) involved generous hospitality, they were well worthwhile. Between us, we sold a lot of books and I met a lot of wonderful people.

So because it's complicated, I've been trying to hammer out some ground rules for myself.

There are the professional organisations, festivals, groups who ask me to speak for a fee - the one recommended by Live Literature Scotland - and that's great. (I should add here that Scottish book festivals have a nice egalitarian ethos with everyone being paid the same from the most starry bestseller to the first time novelist.)

Then there are the small, charitable organisations and book groups who don't offer a fee but offer a great many fringe benefits: lovely audiences, excellent hospitality, good book promotion and sales. That's fine too, even if the events are quite small. I've had some of my most enjoyable evenings ever in the company of interesting people at not-for-profit events of this kind and from time to time, I've sold an astonishing number of books.

But there are also, sadly, events where you turn up and there has been little publicity and an unbelievably casual attitude to the speakers. Sometimes you arrive to find locked doors and have to wait outside for somebody to open up. Tea, coffee, biscuits: these are surely non-negotiable but they aren't always offered. Proper directions to the venue. Somebody to meet and greet and do the introductions. Predictably, these poorly organised events are almost always events where there has also been 'no money in the budget' etc.

What's the solution? There's no point in throwing out the baby with the bathwater. If you elect to do no unpaid events at all, you might miss the gems such as I experienced last year. If you do too many, you'll eat into good writing time to no purpose. And as a self employed person, remember that time away from your desk isn't just free time in the way that it might be free time for a salaried individual. It's unpaid time away from your business.

So I've reached the conclusion that the fun factor is vital. If you're pondering an enthusiastic invitation and you reckon it'll be a lot of fun, whether or not the potential exposure is good, then go for it. If you're pondering an invitation that sounds so casual that your heart sinks whenever you think about it, think again. Essentially, they have to want you and your work! Not just any old writer!

Above all, learn from experience. As a beginner, you might find yourself saying yes to just about everything on offer. We've all done it. It might be right for you. Or it might not. You have to decide.

Paid gigs are good. Even when they're bad, they're good, because there's money in the bank at the end of them. Often unpaid gigs can be very good too so don't automatically turn something down. It may be that nobody is getting paid, but they'll buy a ton of books and tell their friends too. That's where the fun factor comes in. If the event looks like fun and you really want to do it, then go for it.

But a lack of organisation, a lack of specifics at the invitation stage, tends to mean that the event will be poorly organised and publicised. Just remember that unpaid gigs where you feel you 'ought' to do something, but where you're unappreciated, will leave you thinking, as you drive the long miles home through the sleety night, while the organisers put their feet up with a nice cup of tea, that you'd have been much better off doing the same thing.

Writing a Synopsis for a Novel Submission

Are you budding or blooming? 

I realised recently how few new writers, or even not-so-new writers (I hate that overused word 'budding'. People have started using 'emergent' but I'm not sure that's any better) know very much about writing a synopsis of a novel for a submission to an agent or publisher. I'm not surprised, because it's something I didn't know much about either when I was starting out, and even when I had been writing for some time.

Part of the problem for me, anyway, is that I'm what is known as a 'pantser'. I write by the seat of my pants. I often know the beginning and the end of a novel, but am not certain how I'll get there. I write to find out. If I do know in too much detail, I tend to get a bit bored. Not everyone works this way. I know writers who plot in great detail and writers who even work through a series of ever more complex synopses until the novel takes shape. There is no right or wrong way. Whatever works for you is right for you.

However, if you're intending to make a submission to an agency or a publisher, or even to a competition, you may be asked for a synopsis and the first three chapters of your novel. Sometimes it's a synopsis and a certain number of words. But they will always want the synopsis. So you're going to have to work out the characters, the overall shape of your book, the story you want to tell before you do the submission. Now you may think this is a tall order - and it is. But of course as a new writer, before you actually submit anything to an agency or publisher, you should have finished the novel itself, so it shouldn't be impossible to summarise your 80,000 words into a page or two at the most. The media are very fond of running tales of writers who submitted three chapters to an agency, were quickly inundated with offers to publish, and had to write the whole book in a hurry, but this is as rare as finding a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. It's more helpful to assume that you won't be inundated with offers, but you may be asked for a full submission.

The biggest mistake people make is to confuse a synopsis with a blurb.

A blurb is a teaser. It is intended to whet the reader's appetite, to give just a taste of the tale on offer, but no more. To suggest that all will be revealed later on. It's what you get on the back of a book: maybe the start of the story, a brief but enticing summary of what it's about, maybe a suggestion of a cliff hanger if it's that sort of book, often accompanied by a 'cover quote', either about the book or about previous work. Essentially, it's a tool for selling the book to the reader. The cover may make them pick it up, or click on it - the blurb may help to make them buy it.

A synopsis, on the other hand, is a tool for selling the book to the agent or the publisher, and in it, you need to summarise the whole story, who and what it's about and what the story is, as briefly and as clearly as you possibly can. You don't need to go into too much intimate detail. What we're looking for is the main cut and thrust of the story accompanied by tiny character sketches along the way.  If the plot gets complicated, simplify it, but not to the point where the thread is lost. Clarity is important. Remember that you probably know all about these characters now, but the reader, coming to it cold, doesn't. Try to avoid confusion. But above all, don't hold back. Now is not the time for mystery. Don't hesitate to tell all. If there's a twist in the tail, reveal it. You are aiming to make it lively and involving, but it has to make sense. Imagine a good friend asks you to tell him or her about your novel, not just 'what is it about?' which is a difficult question to answer, but 'tell me the story as vividly as you can.'

So there you are. Next week, I'm going to give you an example. Just for fun, I summarised Pride and Prejudice. I did it from memory, and I did it as though I was planning to submit it to a publisher. Watch this space!

Researching and Writing Historical Fiction - Ten Tips to Get You Started

The Cottar's Saturday Night

Last week, I was asked to give a talk to the excellent Ayr Writers' Club about researching and writing historical fiction. It strikes me that quite a lot of other people might be interested in this too, whether they want to write novels, short stories or even plays with historical settings and themes. So I've tried to boil it all down into ten points: something to get you started while the year is still reasonably new.

1 Do your research. 

This is the key but just how much you need to do varies with the genre in which you're writing. You can do so much of it online now, that the risk is always that the research will take over, because let’s face it, it’s fascinating, and you can get engrossed in it, following one idea after another down the world wide rabbit warren. It’s important to try to immerse yourself in your chosen time and place, although this doesn’t necessarily mean reading dry academic histories. Think about social and domestic history, how people lived and worked, how they dressed and ate. Read letters too if you can find them. Don't dismiss the novels of the period. When I was writing The Jewel, one of my most useful finds was an early novel by John Galt called The Annals of The Parish, an accurate and at times hilarious account of life in a rural Ayrshire parish at just the right time for my novel. This kind of research will also help you to avoid howlers and anachronisms which will throw your reader right out of the world of the story.

2 Know when to stop. (For a bit) 

Research is its own reward and if you're that way inclined (and I am) you can easily get sidetracked by its endless fascination. Sometimes you have to take a conscious decision to stop researching and start writing.The trick is to do enough research so that you can ‘be’ in the time and place of your novel or story as you are writing it but also to recognise that ...

3 You can't know everything. 

Whatever you don’t know will become obvious as you write. Once you have a first draft under your belt, you will be able to check things, find things out, answer your own questions later on. You don’t know exactly what you don’t know until you realise you don’t know it. And that's fine.

4 Use your imagination. 

The questions writers have to ask themselves are: who, what, when, where, how and why. And what happened next, of course. But the question ‘what did that feel like?’ is the preserve of writers of fiction, mostly. Even biographers tend to be wary of venturing on that one, but novelists can go where angels fear to tread. And historical novelists – especially when they’ve done a lot of research – really have to give themselves permission to tackle the ‘what did that feel like’ aspect of the story, because it’s the biggest thing that will stop the factual research taking over and slowing the novel down. You have to try to treat your research lightly. It's the seasoning, rather than the big indigestible hunk of fat in the soup -  and wondering about feelings is one way of making sure that the story is deliciously readable and recognisable.

5 Allow yourself to make things up. 

When the historical record isn’t clear, you can make good guesses from the evidence before you, and since you’re writing fiction, you’re allowed to make things up. Within the bounds of possibility. You have a lot more freedom than a historian. But you should remember that even when you are making things up about known characters, you must consider what might conceivably have happened. If something seems incredible, then it probably is. And if it seems incredible to the reader it will throw him or her right out of the world of the story.

6 Make timelines and check dates. 

Especially when you’re writing from fact, timelines are invaluable. Find out not just what was going on in the wider world, but in detail. Find out what time of the year something happened. What was the weather like? (There are websites that will tell you this and sites that will tell you what day of the week a certain date fell on.) Knowing when something happened in relation to something else will often tell you a whole lot about the why and the how. If you're writing about real people, consider their ages. Often the extreme youth of certain characters tells you a lot about their behaviour or their relationships. In The Physic Garden, Thomas and William are based on real characters about whom we don't know very much except that there was some connection between them. I started out by thinking that an older professor had taken a very young gardener under his wing, as a professional man will sometimes mentor a younger man. Then I found out that they were of very similar ages, and my whole perception changed. They were friends. And the betrayal of that friendship gave me my story.

7 Choose a point of view. 

Are you telling the story as a first person narrative (as in The Physic Garden) or third person (as in The Jewel) - and if in the third person, are you still in the mind and point of view of one character in particular (The Jewel, Jean) or are you omniscient, the all seeing eye, and do you know how hard this can be to handle? If you are going for omniscient third person – you, as the author, seeing everything - you are going to have to be very careful about when and where you switch points of view. If you do it too abruptly, it disorientates the reader. Whole articles have been written about this and there's plenty of advice online, but it needn't be as complicated as it seems. The story itself will often dictate the persona in which it is told. Consistency is the key. 

8 Choose the language and dialect. 

This is closely related to (7) above. In the Jewel, I decided quite early on that it had to be a third person 'he said/she said' tale, but we are pretty much always with Jean in that novel – so it can be her story, but without too many of the challenges of trying to tackle a first person narrative for a genuine Ayrshire lass. Jean's voice was an 18th century Mauchline voice. In my novel, she uses the words and - largely - the patterns of speech you would expect. But the narrative, the storytelling, helps to make Jean accessible to a 21st century reader. As a writer you want to communicate, and you are always juggling marketability, the wants and needs of your readership, with what you want and need to do to make the characters authentic.   

9 Forge on. 

Get that first draft down, come hell or high water. Do Nanowrimo if you want or invent your own. You may find that - eventually - you can stop to polish along the way, but with a first novel in particular, it's important to get to the end, so that you have something to work on. When you are working, day to day, don't stop at the end of a chapter. Stop at a point where you really want to go on.  That way you'll want to start the next day. Once you have a first draft, however clumsy and unsatisfactory, however bad you think it is, let it lie fallow for a while, do some more research if you have to, and then go back to it and begin the real work of editing, rewriting, polishing. It's always easier to do this on an 'entity' - a whole novel - than on a small part of an unwritten whole. Printing out often helps at that stage. I write onto a PC but I often revise on paper.

10 Use Pinterest. 

I sometimes forget about this when I'm doing talks, but it really is an invaluable resource for writers, just because it contains so many wonderful images of costume, fashions, people, places, things - and often with links back to amazingly informative blog and websites. You can also set up secret boards that only you can see - mood boards for your particular project - where you can gather all sorts of images, add to them, go back to them time and again for inspiration, and eventually make them public if you want. Or delete them if you don't. A great resource. 

New Projects

I'm on the cusp of starting a new novel, and it's always a strange feeling. I know what I'm going to write and have even worked on the first few chapters. I've done the research, done the planning, know where it starts and where it's going - although I don't plot meticulously or in any great detail. I have an outline, but I'm the kind of writer who may know the beginning and the end, but not precisely how we get there. I write to find out - otherwise I'd get bored.

The other thing I do is forge on to the bitter end, even if it all goes to hell in the middle. The main thing is to get through it all. If I kept stopping to rewrite, I would never finish anything. That's another reason why I put off starting. Once I really get going, I don't much want to stop, no matter what. My current plan is to finish this first ragged draft by Christmas. Then I'll have a bit of time off for parties and celebrations (and - OK - maybe a bit of work on something else, another project very dear to my heart!)

Once the first draft has lain fallow for a few weeks, I'll go back to it, probably in February, and then start to work on it steadily through the spring and early summer, polishing away. It's the first novel in what I'm hoping will turn into a series. But that's all I'm saying about it right now. Most writers know that if you talk about a project too soon, it all dissolves, disappearing as certainly as fairy gold, leaving you with a few dead leaves!

Writing and Speaking

The Secret Commonwealth, my last stage play. 

Many years ago, when I first started out on this switchback of a writing career, I made the decision to try out all kinds of things to see what suited me best.

Back in the 1970s I wrote poetry and did quite well with it, having a couple of collections published and being invited to do various readings. I also wrote radio drama which was a reasonable way to make a living once you had learned your craft. I wrote original plays but also did dramatisations of classics. And because it was hard to say 'no' to paid work, I also did some writing for schools radio and television, wrote a young adult television series and then wrote a novel (called Shadow of the Stone) to go with the series.

After a while, though, I realised that it wasn't what I wanted to pursue. This isn't any kind of value judgment, incidentally - but we all have our own aptitudes and interests and this wasn't mine. So I moved on, still writing radio drama, but beginning to explore other options in fiction, as well as writing for the stage.

Then it struck me that I was still being asked to talk to writing groups about 'writing for children' even though I hadn't written for children for about a decade. I had to gently and politely suggest that I might be of more use in talking about radio drama, since it was a hungry medium that was willing to engage with beginners and help them to learn a very specific craft.

Cue forward another ten years and I found myself writing less and less for radio, and more for theatre, while - at the same time - starting to spend even more time on fiction, long and short. But by then, I was being asked to speak almost exclusively about radio writing. Since most writers are delighted to be asked to speak about anything, especially when being paid, I carried on doing occasional workshops but tried to point out that my radio knowledge was somewhat out of date, although I still knew quite a bit about writing for the stage. It worried me that I could be giving people the wrong advice, which is often worse than no advice at all. The whole submission and rejection process had changed out of all recognition in the intervening years.

Now, for the past ten or fifteen years, I've concentrated almost wholly on fiction, especially novels, with a some historical non-fiction thrown in for good measure. I divide my time between historical and contemporary fiction. I've had several well reviewed novels published, the last two by the same excellent independent publisher (Saraband) with a third novel due to be published by them later this year and another one in progress even as I write this.

But I'm still sometimes being asked to speak about writing drama. Well, I can do that. But the truth is that I haven't written a stage play for years now. Haven't even tried. It has become incredibly difficult to get any kind of professional production unless you're willing to stage one yourself, with all the time and expense involved. And it strikes me that writing groups would get better value from a working playwright, if that's what they want to know about.

Of course, I'm generally very happy to speak to writing and book groups so this isn't a complaint. It's just that for some years now, I've been working exclusively on fiction. You never say never in this line of work and if somebody, somewhere wanted me to dramatise one of my own novels I'd definitely consider it. I still have those essential skills. But I'm much better value as a speaker if you ask me to talk about historical research for fiction - how much you need to do and when to stop - or the current state of publishing or getting to the end of your novel, or writing convincing dialogue, or using your family history as a source of fiction or 18th century Scotland or Robert  Burns and Jean Armour or using social media or ... well, you get my drift. Any or all of those and more.

Given that many writing groups will be starting their new programmes soon, it's worth thinking about what you want from a visiting writer, and what might be genuinely useful for your members. Sometimes it's our own fault as writers. We move on but forget to 'brand' ourselves in the new way, forget that we need to tell people what we are doing now. Most writers have websites these days or are listed with arts organisations. It's worth checking up on your potential visitor to see what he or she is working on. You're looking for an enthusiastic speaker, somebody to talk about what's obsessing them right now, somebody to communicate not just their skills and their excitement, but also the current state of play in that particular aspect of writing.

A few years ago, I remember hearing a successful television writer delivering a brisk 45 minute talk + question and answer session to a writing group. Afterwards, somebody said to me 'I learned more from that talk than from any book I've ever read on the subject.' She was right. The speaker knew exactly what he was talking about because that's what he was engaged with there and then and it showed.

Do you really need an agent? Six things for writers to think about before writing a hundred query letters.

The Society of Authors will NOT do this to you! 

I’ve blogged about agents before, but it seems worth revisiting, since things seem to have moved on in the intervening period. I’ve had good agents and not so good agents but now I’m not looking for one. To be fair, my ex-agency – the one that actually did a lot of good work for me - still remits my share of royalties and residual payments for past work with great promptness and efficiency. But for some time now, I think that the relationship between writers and agents has been skewed. For a start, there are too many potential clients chasing too few agents and this is partly because of the myth still being perpetuated by most creative writing courses, that you need an agent to find a publisher. The other fiction is that if you get an agent, you will find a publisher. Neither is strictly true.

So here are some things to think about.

1 What, realistically, are you expecting your agent to do for you? Do you want somebody to nurture you, or do you want a productive business partnership? If the former, consider that you will always be a humble supplicant, sending in your latest manuscript and nervously waiting for the response. Bit like Scheherezade, really, and that’s an unenviable, not to say unnecessary position to find yourself in. If the latter – and your putative agent agrees – you might have the basis of a decent working relationship. But really, nurturing is for babies.

2 Your agent is meant to be working for you. Too many agents have lists of requirements for submissions that sound like job specifications. I’ve even seen people advising writers to ‘treat your query letter like any other job application’. But it isn’t, is it? Nobody is going to be paying you a regular salary. This is, of course, a result of the imbalance in the market: too many writers with too little experience, chasing too few agents. But it’s worth bearing in mind that you’re looking at a partnership, and that you have every right to expect a modicum of efficiency, courtesy and commitment. Just as your agent has every right to expect the same from you. Do I have some sympathy with agents? Sure I do. They have to cope with a lot of submissions, including the bottom drawer manuscripts typed in single spacing on both sides of sheets of vibrant pink paper. But this is their job and they're volunteers. Actually, some of them really are volunteers. I just saw an ad for an unpaid graduate internship with a big literary agency and found myself wondering how many of those hopeful aspiring novelists know that they are being summarily rejected by a 21 year old recent graduate with almost no experience of what mature readers might want.

3 Whose side will the agent really be on? They’re meant to be fighting for you, the client. But the reality is that corporate publishers wield a vast amount of power, and an agent will be cultivating good relationships with a certain number of ‘acquisitions’ editors. These editors will, in turn, have to answer to ‘the team’ and a lot of decisions will be dictated by buyers at the big chains. It used to be the case that if one of these major editors loved a book, the company would take a chance with a new writer. Now, an editor may love a book but if it doesn’t have the potential to be mega successful that may be as far as it goes. Everyone is afraid of getting it wrong, and in their shoes, you would probably feel the same. The agent will almost never want to damage the relationship with the editor. So you’ll be told to try again, write something else. But you may also be warned that an informal ‘three strikes and you’re out’ situation exists. By the time you get to your third novel, the editor may decide that she doesn't even want to look at anything from you again. This doesn’t happen so much with small-to-medium independent publishers, which is why so many popular mid-list novels of recent years – and the occasional bestseller - have emerged from micro publishers. But the sad truth is that many agents don’t much like submitting to small publishers. Advances are not high enough to make it worthwhile even though the resulting deal may be worthwhile for you as an author.

4 Who is telling you that you need an agent? You can’t believe everything you’re told. Are agents telling you that you need them? Well, they would, wouldn’t they? If you’re studying for a creative writing degree, have a good look at your lecturers’ back stories. They may be very fine writers, and they may be truly excellent teachers, but do they know anything about the business side of writing? Have they been happily and successfully agented for years, in which case, do they know anything about the downside? Are they bringing in agents to ‘cherry pick’ the top students in any one year, leaving you struggling with a multitude of query letters? And if they are lecturing full time in creative writing, consider that they may well be employed rather than mainly self employed, and may be reiterating the conventional wisdom of writing and publishing as it was twenty years ago. If your creative writing course doesn’t include a sizeable module or part module on the changing business of writing, taught by people who are brought in from the world outside, ask yourself and your university why not.

5 What are the benefits? There are some valid reasons to have an agent, among which might be: access to Big Publishing, (but as we’ve already seen, publication doesn’t always follow) better deals, (maybe) vetting of contracts, (but a good IP lawyer or the Society of Authors will do that for you, and sometimes they will do it more efficiently) and foreign sales. This last is important, and might well be a good enough reason for seeking an agent. But in all my years of being agented, nobody did anything for me with foreign sales. Now that could be entirely down to me. Maybe my books don't appeal to foreign buyers. But I'm unconvinced and if I could find an agent to sell books and plays to foreign countries for me, I might consider signing with them – but for that purpose only. Or perhaps an agent to capitalise on a particular book – a flexible project-by-project arrangement. Do such agents exist? Possibly, but I suspect this is an area that is ripe for expansion. And yes, that would be an interesting development and one I’d be happy to consider. I'm all for a 'horses for courses' approach to writing and publishing. It works in other areas of creativity so why not writing? But I also suspect there would be resistance to it in some quarters.

6 What other options do you have? That question used to be simple to answer, if depressing. None, except for spending a small fortune on some vanity publisher. Now, there are lots of options, but all of them demand a certain amount of application on your part.
You can submit to the many and varied small and micro publishers that accept unagented submissions. You have to be careful. You must have contracts vetted by somebody who knows what to look for before you sign them. The Society of Authors will do this for you in the UK if you are prepared to join, but you can also pay an Intellectual Property lawyer. You may think this is expensive, but it’s not half as expensive as signing away all kinds of rights you never thought about. The truth is that there are a great many good small publishers out there, and many of their contracts are much simpler and far less onerous than those imposed by Big Publishing – so making sure you’ve got it right shouldn’t cost a fortune.
You can self publish with Kindle Direct Publishing on Amazon and elsewhere, onto various other worldwide platforms, via Smashwords or D2D. You can publish Print on Demand paperbacks. You can even go the whole hog and set up your own small publishing business and make a deal with a local printer for short runs of books and pamphlets. You will have to deal with covers and editing and formatting but it isn’t as difficult as you think and there are lots of freelancers out there so you can do what other businesses do and outsource the work you don't want to do yourself. You will have to do some publicity and promotion, but you’ll have to do a lot of that anyway, whoever you publish with. The big campaigns are reserved for the very big names these days.

Or you can do a mixture of both self and traditional publishing. Or you can publish with several small publishers at once.  Even though, in order to do this, you will need what my Canadian friend calls 'inventory'. So you need to get your head down and get writing. But since you might spend two or three years writing query letters to agents, or rewriting your single finely wrought novel to the demands of various agents and editors - you could instead decide to spend those years honing your craft, working on a couple of novels, a small collection of stories, a series of novellas ...and give yourself some options. 

Decisions, decisions.

If you are wildly successful, you will have agents beating a path to your door. If you are moderately successful, you will get a small but steady income and will realise that a book nowadays has a much longer shelf life online than you have been led to believe. A book that might have quietly fallen out of print after a year in the old system can go on selling for many years in the new. You may well realise that you enjoy this whole process and that you don’t want an agent at all. If you are not successful, what have you lost? Nothing is forever. You can take a book off line, rewrite it, republish it. You can work on something else, instead of wasting years of good writing time on rewrites to somebody else’s requirements. You can self publish your first two ‘competent’ novels (as opposed to the novels that should probably never see the light of day) and then you can write something quite new and submit it to an agent if you decide that’s what you want to do.

But the interesting truth is that many people who reach that point are often so comfortable with running their own affairs that they think twice before relinquishing control. Some writers may decide otherwise, and that’s fine too. I'm not here to dictate to anyone. What suits one may not suit another. The point is that the power is in your hands. Think about what you want.

Your choice, your business.

And finally – one other thing you might like to consider, if you’re female: you might want to think about changing your name!

If you've found this remotely helpful, have a look at my Amazon Author Page because the books there reflect my own experience pretty accurately. I'm the same writer that I ever was - perhaps a bit more competent and confident - but I'm both traditionally and self published and very happy to continue trimming my sails to the prevailing wind.

New Way of Blogging for a New Year

The view from my cottage window.

I'm taking a little break for Christmas - and let me take this opportunity again to wish you a very happy and peaceful festival - and a New Year that brings you all you could wish for you and yours.

Oh, and a little publishing success wouldn't go amiss, if that's what you're after. Or a lottery win. That would be nice.

But before I sign off for a few days, I've been thinking about making some changes to this blog - posting more often, but not so many carefully crafted (and let's face it quite long!) posts. Well, maybe once a month. But these days, we seem to be drowning in 'how to write' or 'how to publish' or 'how to find a publisher/agent/the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow' posts. I don't know about you, but I'm getting a bit bored with it all. Besides, this was never meant to be a 'how to' blog although my pretty extensive experiences of writing, publishing and being published - as well as being rejected - may occasionally be helpful if that's what floats your boat.

Anyway - I've decided to do something a wee bit different. During 2015, I'm going to blog as often as I can find the time about whatever takes my fancy. I have two or three big projects on hand. I'll be researching, writing, reading, writing some more, trying to earn a living, trying to earn a better living - as well as buying and selling antiques, which is the other way I try to earn a living. Most of the posts will be shorter - and some will be very short - but more frequent. I hope. Let's see how we get on.

I plan to blog about the difficulties, the disappointments and frustrations, as well as the good stuff.  Or maybe I just mean the realities. And what it all feels like. And why - when  push comes to shove - I've never really wanted to do anything else.

Meanwhile, for a whole week, from 24th December, you can download my big Eastern European historical novel The Amber Heart onto your new Christmas Kindle for a bargain price. You'll find it here in the UK and here in the US. Hope you enjoy it.

www.wordarts.co.uk

Can we all grow up now, please?

Can we all grow up now, please?

I don't know when I first became aware of the treacherous nature of the word 'nurture'. Well, treacherous when applied to writers. But it can't have been all that long ago. I think it may have been in one of the many well -informed comments on the Passive Voice blog. Somebody wrote 'Nurturing is for babies.'
I read it and saw the light.

Last week a few things happened which made me think about it all over again. The word cropped up in an interview with a very big publishing name. She was still talking about 'nurturing' as one of the desirable functions of a publishing house or a literary agency. She could have used words like facilitate, assist, or partner. But she didn't. She used the word 'nurture' with all its implications of cherishing an infant or other helpless being.

At the same time, a few colleagues reported a number of professional exchanges which had been a little less than businesslike, which had involved rather patronizing put-downs. We've all had them. They range from the vitriolic to the thoughtlessly rude: the slapped wrist, the long silence after the carefully framed professional enquiry, the manuscript returned with a curt letter and coffee stains, three years later, by which time it has already been published elsewhere, the endless hedging of bets. This is the unfortunate downside of nurturing. If you allow your publisher and agent to cast themselves in a parental, rather than a professional or client role, they will feel justified in imposing a little tough love from time to time - all for the infant's own good, of course. And they will be outraged, absolutely outraged, when that same infant, aka business partner or supplier elects to stop behaving like a humble supplicant, becomes grown up and businesslike and expects the kind of basic (not fulsome) courtesy which would normally be extended in every other area of life.

But this has implications for us as writers, too. We have to stop being so needy. We have to take responsibility for ourselves and our careers. We have to recognize that there are things we can and can't do all by ourselves - and that this will vary depending upon our level of experience and expertise, just as it does in every other profession. We should be prepared to buy in the help we need without giving away control of our product for a handful or even a hill of beans. If we are contracted to do work, we have to meet deadlines in a professional manner. And we have to maintain a certain level of courtesy at all times even in the face of intense provocation.

In exchange for that, we should demand respect. For the work itself and from those with whom we hope to work in partnership. You notice I'm not saying that we all have to go it alone all the time. We have to find out what suits us, what is the best way of making and then distributing our product - for us. For some people it will involve the pursuit of the traditional publishing deal. For others, it will involve writing for pleasure and disseminating for free. Or writing experimentally, pushing the boundaries without thinking commercially at all. For some it will involve a thoroughly businesslike analysis of the market, a five year self publishing plan and a series of useful partnerships. For others yet again, it will involve a hybrid model. But even this isn't fixed. I have friends who are working happily with three or four different traditional publishers without being tied in to any of them. Others who - like myself - are working on a mixture of traditional and self publishing. People who might like to write both experimental and genre fiction or something in between. There is no single right way. We have to work out what best suits us - sometimes by a process of trial and error.

What we can no longer hope to do, however, (unless we have the luxury of a private income) is to sit in our book lined studies and dabble in a little light writing while somebody pays us handsomely for a slim volume every few years while shaping our careers and generally treating us like a special snowflake who might melt away under the glare of professionalism. If they ever did. Which I very much doubt. I reckon it was always a myth. One of those publishing carrots that justified the occasional stick around the ears.

Time to grow up, folks.

List Making for Beginners: How To Organize Your Writing Life

I'm taking a little break this week from my Canary Isles Odyssey, mainly because I'm so obsessed with my Canary Isles novel, Orange Blossom Love, that I can't find creative space for very much else. Instead, I'm going to be writing about another obsession: lists. A recent excellent blog post by Laura Resnick all about the writing process and how we work as individuals (I can recommend it, especially if you've ever found yourself not so much 'blocked' as 'stuck') mentioned her liking for lists and I immediately thought 'that's me, too!'

I'm a compulsive list maker. A few years ago, I had a conversation with my lovely laid back sister-in-law, in which she mentioned, quite casually, that she 'never ever made lists.' It was my own response to this that fascinated me. I imagined doing without lists and instantly felt queasy. Then I felt a spasm of envy. Wouldn't it be nice, I thought, to be free from the tyranny of the list?  So I tried. I really did. I went cold turkey, tore up my lists. (Sneakily left them on my PC though, just in case.) I lasted about five days. Then panic set in. Just one little list, I thought. But you know how it is? One thing led to another and soon I was hooked, back in full list making mode again.

I sometimes go away for a few days and deliberately leave my lists behind. It's very liberating and I enjoy the break but I can only do it for so long and in specific places. My beloved Isle of Gigha is a pretty good place for doing without lists, a place where mañana is a concept with altogether too much urgency about it. But once I get home, I'm back on them again.

Gigha: a good place for doing without lists.

On the other hand, list making may be a virtue rather than a vice. I'm so reliant on mine that I'm phased by people who - in a professional situation - seem to forget to do the urgent things while concentrating on the unimportant. Don't they ever make lists? Don't they know about organizing and prioritizing? Well, perhaps not. So in case you're a list making novice, and especially if you're a writer and a list making novice, let me give you a few tips from the depths (and believe me they are very deep) of my own experience.

One of our big problems as writers is that we often have an embarrassment of ideas, but don't know which to choose. Or we have said 'yes' to too many proposals and don't know which to work on first. Or we simply have too much to do and find ourselves trying to do everything at once, in a panic. We need to prioritize and the easiest way to do that is by means of a list. Or several lists. Ongoing, organic lists where nothing is fixed. And the easiest way to manage this is on your PC, because you can shift things around. Although I'm a compulsive printer-outer as well. I like to see my lists on paper! You should take a conscious decision to divide your lists into at least two kinds: work and life. If you try to amalgamate the two it will all go pear shaped. Writers love displacement activity and including 'mow the lawn' or (in my case, at the moment) 'sort out the flower pot mountain at the bottom of the garden' on the work list is inadvisable. Work lists are just that - professional projects which involve your business. And if nothing else, the list habit might encourage us all to be more businesslike.

First and foremost, I have a Mega List of planned projects. This includes all kinds of proposals and ideas, everything I may or may not be working on over the next few years, everything from the novel I'm working on right now to the tenuous ideas that intrigue me but may come to nothing. This is a long but fairly uncomplicated list, by the way. I keep detailed notes for each project, not just on the computer but in folders too. I'm paranoid that way. At the moment, my Mega List consists of brief descriptions of fiction, long and short, with one or two non-fiction projects. If I've promised an article to somebody, it might be on there too, but not blog posts like this one. They belong on a different list altogether. I revise the Mega List often and I use it mainly to prioritize but also to sort out my own thoughts about the work. The projects at the top of the list are what I'm working on right now. And they are important to me. The projects at the bottom of the list are interesting but non urgent. I may never work on them, and some of them will almost certainly fall right off the end but that's fine. If I grow bored with an idea, I shouldn't be working on it anyway. Also, outside factors will influence this list. If I find that I have a potential project which is pretty high on my list, and has suddenly become flavour of the year for reasons beyond my control, I can push it up the list. If I'm reluctant to do it, then that tells me something about my own commitment, so I'll think again. I will often add projected dates, but I do try to be realistic. And often - especially at the top of the list - there will be projects which I know will run in parallel with each other so this list will allow me to allocate time to each and to see where I'm overstretching myself. Most of all, this list allows me to focus, set some things aside but remember them and think about them from time to time. And sometimes, for no particular reason other than my own preoccupations, a project will leap over everything else and find itself at the top of the list.

Next is my Things to Do This Week list. 'This week' is a little ambitious, I'll admit. 'This month' would be a better title. This is also a work list, and again the trick is to be realistic in what you can achieve. (I give myself some very good advice but I don't always follow it!) And once more, you need to prioritize. At the top of mine, right now, is 'Short story proofs to be read and sent back' as well as 'Orange Blossom Love, onscreen revisions.' Everything else, including 'For God's sake do your tax returns' can be shuffled down the list a bit, because my accountant has gone on holiday for a few weeks. But he'll be back by the 21st July, so 'You have really GOT to do your tax returns' will probably be top of the list by the end of next week, and I'll bite the bullet and do them.

Finally, for work, I have a Today list and that really is all the things I need to do today in order of priority, including meetings, phonecalls etc. I sometimes allow other things to intrude on this list, but only if they're genuinely urgent and even then I always try to prioritize the work above the household tasks.

Because I sometimes sell antique textiles on eBay to help the budget along, I have an occasional 'Listings list' but the more I self publish, the less I trade on eBay and this is a fairly simple affair. Come October, though, when people turn to eBay for their linen tablecloths for the Thanksgiving or Christmas holiday seasons, as well as quirky gift items, it might grow longer and more complicated.

Besides these, I have a House list and a Garden list and a Shopping list. (I told you, I'm compulsive) The House list involves all the biggish jobs that need doing. This changes - sometimes it's in order of urgency and sometimes, like now, when I'm having a bit of a clear-out, it lists jobs from room to room. It's a very static list! The Garden list is always in order of priority. And yes, sorting out the pot mountain at the bottom of the garden is definitely top of that list. So is the weeding. But even with the weeds it's quite a pretty garden, so the garden list can run and run and run, like the bindweed.

The garden manages quite well on its own!

Recently, I introduced another list. Ever since I started self publishing, I've been uneasily aware that I should be wearing two hats: my publishing hat and my writing hat. My Mega List is a writing list. But this second big list is a sort of Promotion and Publicity list and at the moment, it's in the form of a dialogue with myself. What exactly do I write? What do I want out of the business? What do I want to work on right now? Can I market everything at once? (NO) What's the solution? This has turned out to be the most useful list of all. I don't know where the answers to those questions are coming from, but they have helped me to organize the publishing and promotion side of my business, balancing it with the need to spend the majority of my time on the writing. And it has influenced my Mega List in all kinds of unforeseen but useful ways.

Now it may sound as though I spend all my time writing lists, but I don't. Honestly! Once you've set this up, it only takes a few minutes each day (or the night before) to adjust the To Do Today list, while the Mega List and the Promotion List are only revised once a week - if that. Once a month would probably be enough.

The benefits are considerable - but only if you like lists! You don't forget urgent things. You consciously send non-urgent things to the bottom of the list and stop pretending you have to do them now and using them as displacement activity. You can clarify things in your own mind and get on with what you need to do first. Best of all, you can tick things off!

I do have a small confession to make. I have been known to write things on the list after I've done them, just so that I can have the satisfaction of marking them as done. But I suspect I'm not alone.

So go on, are you a list maker or not? If you are, what's your system? I'd love to know. Why not post a few of your own ideas below!

How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love Amazon (Part 1 - Early Years)

Catherine in Blue Organdie

A couple of weeks ago, I was asked to do a talk loosely themed on 'how I got to where I am now'. Quite apart from the fact that I'm not quite sure where I am now, the actual exercise of looking back over all these years of writing, producing and publishing was a salutary experience. The wonder of it is that I'm still here, still writing. Clearly, it's an obsession. I can hardly remember a time when I wasn't writing, and I definitely can't remember a time when I wasn't happier making up stories than living in the real world.

 I was severely asthmatic as a child. Books, radio and the power of my own imagination were my salvation back then. I've looked at my old school reports and it's clear that I spent far less time at my primary school than I ever did at home. Those were the days when you were kept at home with asthma. The available medication was ineffective and had unpleasant side effects. We lived next door to my grandparents and my mother helped out in their tiny sweet and tobacconist's shop in smoky Holbeck, not far from the centre of Leeds, so there was always somebody to look after me: my mum, my aunt, my nana or my beloved grandad.

Aunt Vera, Dad, Mum and Me

As well as the asthma, I had a string of other illnesses, one after another it seemed: whooping cough, mumps, serious measles, influenza. (I'd like to give them all to the milkman's horse, instead of you, my grandad used to say, only half in jest.) The world of make believe was so vivid, so enticing, that it became a place of retreat for me from the miseries of sickness. Actually, if I'm honest, I hardly remember being ill at all, although I have vague memories of the sense of 'unease' which was always the preliminary to some nasty affliction or other. I do remember struggling to breathe, the hideous, concentrated panic of it. And being delirious, and seeing, quite literally seeing, dark horsemen galloping across the foot of my bed. But I also remember the pleasure of being at home, of beginning to feel better, of being free to listen to the radio and read my books and play complicated and inventive games with my toys. I remember the time my Polish father spent with me, lots of time, even though he was working by day and studying by night. But he always seemed to have time to tell me stories, and draw with me and read to me and make things for me.

Then, when I was twelve, we moved to Scotland where dad had secured a new job in a scientific research institute, and everything changed - except my need for make believe. Nothing in my life till then had prepared me for the cruelty inflicted on an awkward, ugly duckling of an English thirteen year old by her Scottish schoolmates. One with glasses and a Yorkshire accent at that. I didn't help myself much, it's true. I was naive, shy and desperately homesick for Leeds. I suffered two years of misery, leavened only by the bright beacons of vacation in a sea of educational despond. None of it was physical. They just froze me out.They mocked my accent, they mocked the way I looked, they sniggered and passed clever, insulting remarks just loud enough for me to hear them, while I stood like a rabbit, caught in the headlights of their self satisfaction, and all the time, as bullied children will, I blamed myself and told nobody. Afterwards, as an adult, I thought what hell it must be to be a bullied child in a boarding school. At least I got to go home at nights. Sanctuary. Not that I told anyone at home what was happening at school. I used to pray for the illness I had suffered when I was younger, but on the whole, I could breathe more easily in Scotland.

I did very well academically. The classroom was another, lesser refuge. I can remember wishing that we had no break times at all. I spent even more time living inside my head, and I began to write poetry. Things improved during my third year in Scotland and when we all changed schools for our final two years and travelled out of town by train each day. I was beginning to find my place, lose weight, make a few friends, although I was always aware that I didn't quite fit in and possibly never would.

I was still writing. And starting to be known and acknowledged within the school community as the girl who wrote stuff. Then, in spite of a longish spell in hospital with another severe bout of asthma when I was sixteen,  (during which I had a couple of only-half-joking proposals of marriage from two kindly young male nurses from Mauritius!) I managed to get a place at university and set off for Edinburgh where, once again, everything changed. For the better this time.

Next week: Poets and Parties and Protests: Edinburgh in the Seventies.

Dear Emily Bronte - How To Make Your Lovely Novel Better

Last Tuesday, I wrote a blog post for my regular slot on Authors Electric, titled Dear Emily. A 'previously undiscovered piece of literary correspondence', this was a letter from Humongous Publishing (look out for more from this unique company in due course!) asking for edits on Wuthering Heights. Today, checking the stats, I see that there have been more than 800 page views in that short time and a lot of interesting comments, many of them from writers saying the same thing: this was very funny, but all too horribly true.


It was all too horribly true, I suppose, because I lifted a surprising number of the comments directly from letters and emails I have received over half a lifetime of writing and submission. In fact I think I'm about to take a vow not to 'submit' anything - with its sense of relinquishing control to another - ever again. I always think of myself as a forgiving kind of a gal, so I was amazed how - once I began - all of them just came boiling to the surface. 

But it set me thinking. I've also had some good editors and artistic directors in my time, not one of whom would have written anything like this - so what was it about this string of  'helpful suggestions' which rang so many bells with so very many writers?

I think it's something that demonstrates a total misunderstanding of how the creative process works, but we all encounter it from time to time. Good editors will ask lots of difficult questions. But they will always be questioning the book you have written, the book (or play) that exists. They will be forcing you, the writer, to examine it more closely, to find out more, to tell the tale you want and need to tell. Or even more accurately, the tale that wants to be told.

As soon as somebody starts to suggest glib alternatives - why don't you do this? Why don't you do that? Can't you make him or her do this? Or be like this? - the red mist descends. Or it does for me. Because I can't 'make' anything do or be what it doesn't want to be.  

When I was writing Bird of Passage, I spent months knowing that there was something in Finn's background about which he could neither speak, nor even think. It was something so traumatic that it must account for the way he was, in himself and in his relationship with Kirsty. The trouble was, I didn't know what it was and Finn couldn't remember. Some hypothetical editor might have said 'why don't you make it...' but I couldn't do that. I couldn't make it anything. Instead, I had to find it out. And I did. In the middle of the night. I woke up thinking 'oh - that's what it was. That was what happened to him!'

Strange as it may seem, it was as if the story had existed somewhere all along, as an entity outside myself. I don't know whether other writers feel this way, but I suspect a lot of them do. And I suspect that's why we find it so maddening when somebody else tries to manipulate our fictional reality with inappropriate suggestions.

Five Pieces of (Possibly) Useful Advice for Writers

A trio of ghost stories, now on Kindle

I'm increasingly reluctant to hand out any writing advice at all these days - mainly because there is just TOO MUCH of it out there, and so much of what there is, is completely contradictory. And - moreover - being handed out by people who don't know enough to know how little they know. In fact I've realised that although I still love to do talks and readings, and although I'm happy to answer questions to the best of my ability, I don't even like to do 'workshops' any more. There you are with a group of people of wildly differing abilities, all with completely different aspirations, trying to squeeze your own experience into some inadequate one-size-fits-all box- ticking activity. But all the same - it IS possible to give some general advice and I've realised that all my years of experience can be boiled down into about five principles - things that, if I had known, really known about and absorbed and tried to remember, way back then - my writing life might have been made a little easier. Only a little though. When I was starting out, an older, wiser (and very successful) writer said to me 'The only way to learn to write, is to get your head down and do it.' He was right. There are no shortcuts. But for what they are worth, I'm happy to share these five little pieces of advice in the hope that some of them may prove helpful.

1 Play About 

This is especially relevant in these days of formal creative writing courses where students seem to feel (however misplaced that feeling may be) that they have to 'get it right' with an assignment in much the same way as they would have to get a factual essay or dissertation right. Unfortunately, this is never the way most creative writers work. You start with an idea of some kind and then you play about with it until you find out what it wants or needs to be. Play is absolutely essential to the creative process.

2 Allow Yourself to Fail

A brave attempt which fails is better than no attempt at all. And once again, the more we formalise the process, the more the prospect of failure becomes the big bogeyman, to be avoided at all costs. I think it's one of the reasons why I find Creative Scotland's current emphasis on the word 'investment' so worrying. I know they don't intend it to mean that investment is invariably financial and always demands a financial return - but investment and support are two different things, and even if you take the idea of monetary investment or grant support right out of the equation, you are still left with the sense that investment always assumes a return of some sort, whereas support allows for the possibility of trying and failing. The doing is  more important than any end product. It's more important to travel hopefully than to arrive. As a writer, you will start out on far more projects than you will ever finish, and this is as it should be. Trying and failing means that you are learning something along the way.  

3 Make It Real

People are often told to write what they know about, but my qualification to that is that you know more than you think, and if you don't know, you can always find out. Making it real, though, involves more than just research and it's almost impossible to show people how to do it. (If I could, I would be richer than I am right now!)  You can be writing the most wild, off-the-wall fantasy and still make it so real that your reader believes everything, implicitly. Think of Ray Bradbury. He could write about a woman who played the rain on her harp and I still believed in it. Hell, I could see and hear it! Conversely, you can be writing the most everyday domestic story and discover that your readers don't believe a word of it. Beginning writers will often say 'but it really happened like that' to which the only possible, albeit a little rude, answer is 'so what?' You're the writer, and you must be in charge of your own material. Give yourself permission to shape it. Get inside your characters' heads. Above all, inspire your reader with confidence. The answer always lies with you, the writer. If you have created a fictional world which seems as real to you as the world outside (and sometimes even more real than that), then your readers will believe in that world as well. But the only way to achieve that is... well, you could start by paying attention to 1 and 2 above!

Being curious about everything helps!

4 Story Is King

I resisted this for years. But over Christmas, I heard Andrew Lloyd Webber saying it and although I have a few reservations about the ALW bandwagon, I found myself in agreement with him. I wish somebody had said this to me years ago. Forget about the formal intricacies of plotting, forget all those prescriptive pieces of advice about structure. Just tell the story as engagingly as you can. If you get that right, whether you are writing in a particular genre or experimenting wildly, everything else will fall into place. William Trevor's short stories are truly wonderful not only because they tell us so much about what it is to be a human being - which they certainly do - but because they are always very fine stories as well! Make it live, shape it, craft the raw material of reality into something better. Every truly enthralling novel, film and stage play I've ever seen, literary or popular, difficult or easy, has an enthralling story. Kids know all about story. Even when publishers in droves were telling writers that fantasy was dead in the water and sending polite rejection letters to JKR among others, kids were still demanding a magical story. When Harry Potter was first published it was kids who spread the word about it being an enthralling read. They know a good story when they read one and there's no fooling them. (Yet still so many of our critics seem to think that writing for children is a soft option! Nothing could be further from the truth. And I don't write for children. But I certainly admire those who do.)

5 Once You're An Experienced Professional - Behave Like One.

This is possibly my most contentious piece of advice. We writers are notoriously bad at treating ourselves as professionals, even when we are seasoned and experienced, with an excellent track record. I've just been reading a piece about teachers which posed the following questions:

'In what other profession is the desire for competitive salary viewed as proof of indifference towards the job? In what other profession are the professionals considered the least knowledgeable about the job?'

The answer to that would also be writers.

People who wouldn't get out of bed without payment often expect writers to work for nothing. I'm not talking about the freebies we all do from time to time where nobody gets paid, or where you work for a profit share. I'm talking about those gigs you're sometimes invited to do for large commercial organisations where everyone else is on a fair (and sometimes a very fat) salary but where you're told there is 'no money in the budget to pay the writer.' And when you're feeling nervous, watch this and take heart.

If you're going to work for free, do it for yourself, work at something you love, or for whatever worthy cause you subscribe to. For the rest, be aware that a whole industry has grown up which is happy to cast the 'talent' in the role of humble supplicant, grateful for any crumbs of recognition. But only you can do something to remedy that.

Oh - and I've one last piece of advice, which is to treat all advice with healthy scepticism. Even this blog! But do feel free to add your own thoughts in the comments section!

Catherine Czerkawska

www.wordarts.co.uk

List Mania

I don't know about you, but I'm a great maker of lists. In fact I have a folder on my PC titled Catherine's Lists. It contains documents such as a To Do List (work) a To Do List (other) an ongoing Shopping List and a Gardening List.  Before Christmas these were joined by Gift and Card lists. After Christmas, these were replaced by lists of all the little things I hadn't done over the holidays, but now needed to tackle. And now that most of these are out of the way, I'm about to embark on a massive promotion list for my eBooks. And then, of course, there's a publishing schedule to consider as well. Arguably, the most important of the lot.

There's even - I kid you not - a Mega List, which is a sort of list of lists.

And while I'm in confessional mode, I have to admit that I have been known to ADD things to my lists that I have already done, just for the pleasure of being able to cross them off!

My sister-in-law told me last year that she never ever makes lists and never has done. In fact it was plain that she couldn't understand why I would need to. Which makes me wonder - is the world divided into list makers and - the others. And how on earth do they manage?

There have been times when I've decided to go cold turkey and do without the torture and tyranny of my To Do lists. On average, I've lasted about two days. The only time I really do without them is when we go away on holiday. This doesn't work if we're going abroad, because the week before departure is spent in such a frenzy of list making and checking that I need a few days to recover. And before I know it, I'm making a list of all the things I'll need to do when I get home again. But if we're having a few days' blissful break here in the UK, I can manage to be relatively list free, and the relief is exquisite. Unfortunately, by the time we're through the door the lists are crowding my head again.

Yoga helps. Still your mind, our teacher says, and I find that I can and do. And  I once bought a book on Time Management which was so list obsessive that even I baulked at dividing my day into ten minute segments and listing what needed to be done in grids. So maybe I'm not that bad after all.

I did consider making a New Year's Resolution to cut down on my list-making, but by the time I had added a few more ideas,  I actually had a list of resolutions, top of which was not making too many lists.

So do they help, all these lists?

Well, I get a lot done. I feel organised.  And when I'm in the middle of a writing project, a book or a play, it seems quite important to make some kind of schedule and try to stick to it - otherwise it's all too easy to let other things get in the way. You have to learn to prioritise when you're a writer and making lists is definitely one way of working out what's essential and what's not. Although I have to say that when you're on a roll, deeply absorbed in writing or revising, all the lists go by the board, and you do almost nothing else but write, eat, drink and sleep!

Meanwhile, it's rather nice to find yourself on other people's lists sometimes, like this one, by Brendan Gisby on Amazon, and this one as well ! Thank-you Brendan!