Writing what you know and omnipresent choughs

I’ve been sorting through the zillions of unfinished stories in my files, and found half a dozen that I’m going to concentrate on for the next few weeks. They’re ones I feel have legs, stories that I want to communicate. They range from 100 words to 3,000 words but they all have one thing in common: they’re reflecting a facet of myself. Heavily disguised, but I’m in there. That’s okay: ‘writing what you know’ is oft-repeated advice, for excellent reasons. 

However, what if writing what you know intrudes a little too much into the setting and colour of your story? I work in the countryside, in nature conservation. Not all my stories are set in this world, but landscape and wildlife and the outdoor world feature strongly in my writing. If there isn’t a character who’s just been chopping wood, there’ll be someone off to survey a quadrat in a chalk meadow when the Inciting Incident happens. If wellies don’t make an appearance, a landrover will, probably with a terrier in the passenger seat.  And at some stage, someone will observe a pair of choughs. The character might see the pair and remark on it out loud; they might hear their call and search the sky; they might see the birds while sitting alone on a rock mulling over a key plot point. But you can depend on it, there will be choughs. They are in Every Single One of the six stories I picked to work on. 

(Here’s a link to the RSPB’s chough page. Irish and British choughs have lovely blood-red bills to match their legs, but the only royalty-free images I could find were of alpine choughs, whose bills are yellow. I’ve never managed to catch one on camera myself; too busy looking up with a grin and saying ‘Look, choughs!’ to my companion or random strangers.)

I’m not going to write them out of the stories I’m working on. They’re beautiful birds. So are the others that sneak in (if it’s a Scottish story, it’s almost a cert that someone will rhapsodize over black guillemots). But I am taking it as an opportunity to set myself a challenge. As I finish each piece and start working on another, I shall use other experiences from my life for background colour, or draw on the worlds that my friends and family inhabit - the more uncomfortable and distant from my current life, the better. I spent four years in my twenties working in a hospital as an audiologist, in a soundproof room with no windows. Horrid, horrid, horrid. It’s unbelievable to me now, and I shudder to think of it; it was a horrible time. Yet there’s a huge bank of story material there just waiting to be plundered. Likewise my sisters’ experiences: between us we’ve got everything from bending the croissants in a French bakery to working in a sexual health clinic.

There's an enormous number of worlds out there, and that's before going into fantasy or science fiction. It’s time to explore a bit more. 

Good news and good news

I've had a brilliant day. First of all, Himself and I spent the day cycling from our home on Anglesey all the way around Snowdon and home again, a loop of over sixty miles taking in Beddgelert and Llanberis. We're immensely proud of ourselves and have been competing all evening with tales of the mightiness of our quads and how it didn't really take much out of us at all (belied by creaking and wincing getting into and out of the post-ride bath). Here's Bike having a rest halfway up from the Nantgwynant valley bottom.

Second, while we were tucking into Pete's Eats' peerless carrot cake in Llanberis, I picked up an email from Gail at 5minutefiction to say that my flash story Alley Cat had been published on the website today and sending me the Amazon gift certificate of £10 in payment. And third, I got home to find a story I'd submitted to the People's Friend sitting on the mat, rejected. Hang on, I hear you cry. A rejection? I thought this was a good day. Well, it is. That was the first story I have ever submitted to a woman's magazine, ever. It's not the end of the world that it wasn't accepted.  I submit things and get rejected like a proper writer; I've grown up at last.

Right, I'm off to spend that certificate on the new Marian Keyes novel!

Two female authors to try

This week I read two books by entirely different women writers, back to back. If you haven't read either of these authors before, I urge you to try them. These books are great introductions to them.

First, Sophie Kinsella's Twenties Girl. You probably know that Sophie Kinsella is the pen name of Madeleine Wickham, who had published several stand-alone novels before adopting the pseudonym for her very different Shopaholic series of novels. Since I finally read the first novel of that series earlier this year she has become one of my favourite authors. Twenties Girl  is one of her more recent novels, which she chose to write under the pseudonym, presumably because in style it is more similar to the Shopaholic novels. And perhaps also because Sophie Kinsella is such a well-known name now.
Don't be deceived by the lightness of touch of her writing. The novels may be humorous in tone - and they are often very, very funny indeed - but they always turn out to be about something other than what you expect. With her first person viewpoint and present tense narrative, you are inside the heroine's head, slammed up against the present, experiencing it all as it happens. Twenties Girl is a very funny and original ghost story, but it's also about mortality and the alienation and helplessness of old age, with two good-old-fashioned love stories wound through it for good measure.

The second one was Anne Enright's The Gathering. This novel won the Booker Prize in 2007 and I'm embarrassed that it's taken me until now to read any of her novels. I was prompted to by a recent edition of Book Club on Radio 4 when it was the featured book.  The story is tragic, centred on the gathering at home in Dublin of a large, scattered family for the funeral of the narrator's brother, Liam, which provokes her to try to pin down and record long-ago, half-remembered events in her childhood which might have started him on the path to his death. The writing is hard and clear; very very funny at times, shockingly matter-of-fact in others. There's no way I can do justice to the book: just go and pick it up. I'm reading her more recent The Forgotten Waltz now.

By the way, I picked both of these up from my local library. If you don't use yours, please try to do so. We must support our libraries!

Why I'm not bothered about my Oomph

When I started this blog I joined Socialoomph, thinking that it might be useful to me at some point in the future. Having had a look its services and an honest look at my writing life, I don’t think I’ll be using it yet. I registered with the free version; the home page lists the features available for free and those that come with the professional version. The free version features are mainly to do with Twitter.  

As I’m still much more of a listener than a talker on Twitter, I don’t feel any need to use this. As far as I can see, some of the people I follow use this, or a service like it, to schedule their tweets so that they are dripfed to followers. Obviously, this is extremely handy to keep your content moving through the twittersphere, or at least it is if you have plenty of stuff to tweet. I’ve been a bit slow and choosy, so most of those I’m following are interesting to me, but I’ve noticed that some people seem to do not much more than tweet lots and lots of quotes. Quote after quote after quote. Interesting enough, some of them, but a bit irritating if the tweeter’s name isn’t @dailyquotes and it’s not what followers are expecting, particularly if some of the quotes start to recycle after a couple of weeks. I do follow one writing quote person, but that was okay as the clue was in his Twitter name. 

Please, if you’re thinking about joining Twitter, think well in advance about what you want to do there and how much you are going to be tweeting. Actually, no, that would be a bit prescriptive, and it’s not what I did at all. But if you’ve had an account for a while and find yourself wanting to dramatically change the style and frequency of your tweets - especially if you suddenly want to bombard them with quotes - then be clear about it for the sake of your followers. Set up a separate Twitter account. Tweet your followers about it and invite them to follow the new account as well, something clear like ‘For hourly inspirational writing quotes come follow me on @mynamewisdom’. Then your followers won’t be surprised or irritated. 

Socialoomph offers other services in the professional version, clearly useful if you generate lots and lots of content and want to keep your profile high across a variety of social platforms, but it’s not for me at the moment. I did flirt with the notion of creating a bicycle quotes persona on Twitter, but to be honest I’d rather be writing or cycling or walking in the free time I have. 

Incidentally, if you do like bikes and quotes, here’s a couple of sites: http://www.quotegarden.com/bicycling.html and http://www.theargonauts.com/coolquotes.shtml 

And my favourite at the moment, which might apply to writing as well:

‘It never gets easier, you just go faster.’ Greg LeMond

Story success and time to write

First, good news: Gail at www.5minutefiction.co.uk emailed me to say she’ll be publishing a flash fiction piece I submitted! It’ll be on the site in mid-October. I am thrilled! My submission record is shocking - I still get crippling crises of confidence, and I’ve only actually ever finished and submitted five pieces of fiction, so I’m delighted with this. ‘Someone looked at it and didn’t think it was rubbish!’ I keep thinking. Ditto with the story that reached shortlist stage in a recent Writing Magazine competition. These are the things that keep me going.

I’ve been thinking about time to write this week, because I’ve had loads of it. Nothing but time. ‘If I had time I’d…’ How often have you heard that? Or perhaps said it? If you’ve been getting serious about your writing - or anything you love doing and want to better yourself at - you’ll know that you don’t wait for time. You make it.

Of course, sometimes, rarely, the world makes something easy for you. For a week, I’ve had the house to myself. Himself went off on a camping trip in Yorkshire, and for a couple of reasons I didn’t accompany him. One, my wallet’s feeling a bit tender, and two, I’m really really enjoying being at home at the moment. We spent nine weeks cycle-touring in France earlier this year and although it was amazing and wonderful and I’d have been happy to keep going, since we came back I have fallen in love with my home and this beautiful corner of the world all over again. 

Because Himself is also my sole source of employment at the moment, this meant that I didn’t have any work. A whole week at home, alone, on enforced leave! Though I didn’t set any special writing targets for the week, I was curious about how much I’d achieve with other obligations and distractions removed. 

The answer is: nothing extra. Not a bit. No extra wordage, no more than the average number of ideas and scribbling. This sounds pathetic on the face of it, given all that free time. Perhaps I should have set specific targets, but you know what? I don’t care. The great carpet of time in front of me last Monday morning felt daunting rather than liberating. Perhaps this raises questions about my staying power, and about how I’d cope if I one day write myself into being a full-time writer, but I’ll say it again: I don’t care. A week like this won’t come around again for years, if ever, and I’ve had a great time: loads of cycling in wind and sun; walking around the paths on the headland that I’ve neglected of late in favour of the bike; working in the graveyard; even a little gardening; the usual amount of writing; sorting out un-needed stuff for a future car-boot sale; washing every textile in the house; tea with a scone and jam and cream in the old drawing room of our nearby hotel; and reading reading reading. I’ve hardly stopped. Novels and notebooks are all over the bed, not just on my side of it. It’s been just lovely.

I love writing. But I love doing other things too. I’m happy that for a week, I’ve had the chance to enjoy being at home, doing exactly what I want, when and where the fancy takes me.

Plodding on

Some weeks it’s just hard. Balsam-control season has just ended - hurray! - and we’re into the post-breeding season work. Brushcutting and raking off rank vegetation on heathlands is hard but satisfying work. Over the last few years the heather and western gorse have been slowly spreading; it's really satisfying to see the tiny feathery heather plants popping up away from the main patches.

I don’t know if the physical tiredness is to blame, but my imagination has just curled up in dark corner and gone to sleep, presenting a moody posterior to me all week. I’ve plodded on with my wake-up scribblings at breakfast and a couple of leaden paragraphs of stories in the evenings, but it’s been difficult. Nothing flows. Every sentence is earthbound, turgid and lumpen. It’s been the sort of week where I’m terrified I’ll die in the night and my sisters will find this twaddle on my desktop and be mortified on my behalf. I can trust them to do the right thing and burn the lot, but the thought of anyone reading what I’ve written this week makes me prickle with embarrassment. 

There’s an exercise I came across in a creative writing book a few months ago. Take a favourite book, open it at random, and copy out about half a page. That’s it. Pencil, pen or keyboard, it doesn’t matter. The exercise is about the physical effort of writing and the time it takes. 

It's one I’ve come back to a couple of times, because it reminds me, in a visceral way, that every author of every book ever written wrote it by doing just that: sitting down and getting the words on the page. On weeks like this, when I’m staring at what I’ve written and the internal editor is saying ‘That is RUBBISH, who are you trying to kid?’, it really helps to picture the authors of the books on my shelves beavering away in their rooms, at their desks, in libraries, at the corner of the kitchen table or wherever they managed to make time and space for their writing.   

They all wrote their books the same way, the same way I'm writing this post. One word at a time. 

Outside the comfort genre

Last night Himself and I watched a film. At least, he watched it; I left about a third of the way through for the bright lights and comfort of the kitchen downstairs. I've never had much stomach for the supernatural in films; tremulous cellos and slowly moving camera shots are enough for me to reach for a large cushion to hide behind. Last night, after the first distinctly weird death (heard, not watched, from behind the cushion) I'd had enough. In our bright, safe kitchen, I put on an 80s radio station and worried contentedly at plot threads in the thoroughly non-paranormal novel I'm writing, while the tastes, smells and sounds of tea, chocolate and ancient pop grounded me in normality.

But the writer had done his or her job.  This morning, I woke up still disturbed. The film's story had one central question: were two people inhabiting one body? Or was it one charlatan, aided in a complex deception by charlatan doctors?  How would the struggle between good and evil, foreshadowed in that first half-hour, play out in the end? Would the heroine's  loving family members - a daughter, a brother, the father who introduced her to the antagonist - be sacrificed during the struggle? The antagonist's story was by no means clear by the time I left: were the powers he seemed to have under his control? The prickly, aggressive host and the benign young man in the wheelchair he apparently becomes - which one will turn out to be the agent of good, or evil?

Though I couldn't face watching it, and it's not a genre I enjoy, my thoughts about the film were the first thing I scribbled on waking this morning, and I'm still thinking about it. This is my aim, and the aim of every writer: to hook readers and viewers even against their will.

It's a bright Saturday and I've got things to write, stuff to do. But I'm going to watch the end of that story. In daylight, with tea, chocolate and cushions at the ready.