Tag Archives: ideas

Life between worlds – writing a novel

notebook, pen, laptopYou can get a bit lost in writing a book; it’s a long process and quite isolated too. You spend a lot of time with your characters, immersed in their world. Sometimes the real world is a welcome relief, sometimes it’s an irritating distraction. At times it can seem quite distant. The story grows and develops; it follows you even when you’re not actually writing. Your protagonists and antagonists feed you information, not always at the most opportune moments (mine often decide that the best time to tell me something vital is when I’m driving, usually with nowhere I can pull over to scribble it down). It’s as if you’re living in two different realms at the same time, each as tangible as the other.

You try hard to get the writing right, to let the characters have their say but also to keep the story flowing the way it should be. You cheer when it goes well and the words pour from your fingertips; you groan, procrastinate and drink far too much tea when the plot sticks or your characters decide to go off and do their own thing without telling you. And they do do that. Without so much as a ‘by your leave’ and then you find that they’ve changed the timeline or reconfigured the plot without so much as even conferring with you or asking what you think. Well, why should they? You’re only the author after all.

Eventually, eventually you get to the end.

Of the first draft.

But that’s not the end as a writer. Because the first draft is the basis but it always needs lots of work; editing and reworking paragraphs and dialogue, adjusting timeline inconsistencies, ensuring continuity of all sorts of things from the colour of people’s eyes to who has a dog and who likes what music. And then there are the typos and the grammatical errors and the repetition of words and phrases that need to be corrected.

So you plough through again, rewriting, amending, tightening up the prose and getting it closer to how you know it needs to be. And when you’ve finished the second draft, you go through it all again a third time, just to make sure.

Phew!

You’d think that’d be it then, wouldn’t you?

Alas, no!

It’s usually when I’ve got to the end of the third draft that I ask my lovely band of pre-readers to read through it and feed back to me anything that doesn’t fit right or hold true, anything that seems superfluous or out of place, anything that they think needs altered or adjusted. With these invaluable critiques it’s time for – you’ve guessed it – draft number four.

By the end of the fourth draft, hopefully the manuscript is as near finished as possible and as good as it’s going to get. This is usually the point where, having been living and breathing it for however long and having read and reread the story countless times, I usually think “This is complete and utter rubbish. Why did I bother? I might as well just dump it in the recycling bin and do everyone a favour.”

At that point I know it’s time to consign draft four to my virtual drawer and ignore it for a month or two. When I come back to it, it’s usually not as bad as I’d thought. Usually needs a few tweaks but generally it’s OK.

That’s the scary point. Time to unleash it…

Happy New Year – How Time Passes

Happy New Year. May love, light and magic surround you always.

And now… a little thought about time…

multiple pocket watches

Photo by Guilherme Nicholas

You have been prescribed TIME. Please read these instructions carefully.

What TIME is for:

TIME works by progressing a life. This facilitates a multitude of possibilities for EXPERIENCE, and the related benefits of GROWTH, HAPPINESS and KNOWLEDGE.

How to take TIME:

TIME is administered as a single dose, its slow release mechanism ensuring continued cover until death.

What you need to know:

There are no rules. Time affects everyone differently. Make the most of it and try not to worry.

Warnings and precautions:

Apply common sense to situations that require it. Whimsy will take care of the rest.

Possible side effects:

Beauty, books, dreams, family, friends, good health, hugs, illness, laughter, learning, loss, love, opportunities, sadness, stress, silliness, wrinkles.

Some side effects are more common than others and some are more pleasant than others. There are many more (unlisted) that may occur depending on your personal reaction to TIME. Please do not be alarmed when you are affected; they are all transient.

Final note:

TIME is a precious resource. Please do not waste it.

The Magic Oxygen Literary Prize

MOLP posterMagic Oxygen, as you will be aware if you have clicked on ‘My Publisher’ at the top of this page, are the wonderful people who have published my books. But unless you have visited their website you may not be aware that they take pride in having a much fairer and greener ethos than most other companies out there. And they are very keen on encouraging creativity, wordplay and storytelling (most usually accompanied by a lovely cup of tea and some biscuits.)

This is why in June this year they launched the Magic Oxygen Literary Prize, a competition with two categories, short stories up to 4000 words and poems up to 50 lines. Each category carries a first prize of £1000, with a second prize of £300, a third prize of £100 and two highly commended prizes of £50. All the winning entries will be published in an anthology. Not only that but, true to their ethics, they have pledged to plant a tree for every entry they receive, to create the Magic Oxygen Word Forest.

It’s only £5 to enter and is open worldwide to anyone over 16. And it doesn’t close until 30th November 2014. So pick up your pens and get writing. Get your entry in! You’ve got nothing to lose and everything potentially to gain and what’s the very worst that could happen? You’ll have helped to grow not just a tree but the amazing and wonderful art of words.

For more details about the Magic Oxygen Literary Prize and further information about the Word Forest, go to http://www.magicoxygen.co.uk/competition/

Good luck!

The Origin of Stories

Pen and writingAt the risk of sounding quite crackers, my stories usually begin when a character walks into my head; they always have a story attached. They are often associated with a particular place as well. They mooch around for a bit and eventually become insistent that I write them down – often then the story continues to develop from there. The writing process occasionally drives on to the end (deadlines can be handy), but more often than not continues in fits and starts over a variable time frame. Continue reading

Science or Mystery?

Test tubes UnicornMaybe I have a subversive streak, but I actually really like things that can’t be explained. Studying science at school and then physiotherapy, everything had to be proven, results had to be reliable and repeatable, all techniques had to be justified; the best and most efficient means to an end. And while this is absolutely desirable and necessary in many, many fields, it kind of knocks the wonder out of life a bit. I want the best of both worlds; I’m greedy I suppose. There are so many bizarre coincidences and odd happenings that we experience in life, and most of the time we measure them against our known parameters and come up with the most likely, logical explanation. But sometimes I think what if there is something else going on? Some other force at play? And as well as scaring myself silly, ‘what if’ is a very good place for a story to start.