As many of you will know, my third novel, What She Lost ,was published in March, and I finished editing the fourth, If I Should Fall, over the summer. It was a great feeling to finish the copy-edits for If I Should Fall just before we went away for a week’s holiday in the Peak District. It was a low-key holiday, partly because I was plagued by sciatica, but I did lots of reading, and although the weather wasn’t great, it was warm enough to sit outside with my pre-lunch glass of wine (lunchtime drinking is The Law when you’re on holiday.)

But as soon as we got home, my thoughts turned to novel number five. I’d had a few vague ideas sloshing around in the back of my mind, so I started to think them through in the hope of getting together a rough outline. But alas, not one of those ideas looks like it’ll work, either because  there’s not enough substance or because the idea is so complex that the plot has more holes than a fisherman’s net.

So I did some more thinking, looked through my old notebooks, and came up with a couple more ideas, only to discover that these were dead-ends, too. So then the panic sets in: I’m not writing! I can’t write – I’ll never write another novel! I’ll never have another decent idea…’

Thing is, I am (more or less) a full-time writer. I do a little teaching here and there, but I don’t have a proper, regular salary, and so I rely on the small income from teaching and writing to pay the bills. Also, I’m not a book-a year- author. I wish I was! Some authors write two or even three books a year, and I am in complete awe of them. But it takes me a year to write a decent draft, so we’re looking at between 18 months and two years before the thing is finished. See why I’m getting a bit twitchy?

My agent advised me to chill out a bit. Read the papers, she said, go to the library, watch TV. I did that for a while, but still nothing was happening.  Then I began to suspect that the very act of ‘trying’ to find inspiration was preventing me from doing so. The panic that I hadn’t started anything new was taking me over, and whole days were passing without me achieving anything at all. I needed something to break the pattern that had developed: look at notebooks, think through the ideas, see that they won’t work, panic, start again…

I decided on a one-night-only trip to the seaside.

Now, me and Himself love the sea. We start to crave the sight, sound, and smell of it when we’ve not seen it for a while (we live in Sheffield, which is a long way from the coast.). We got the train to Scarborough, had a lovely read on the train, then went straight for lunch – fish & chips, of course – and then to our room in  a B&B, overlooking the sea, from where we could both see and hear the crashing of the waves on the shore.

 

Then we wandered down to the beach to watch the tide coming in. The sound was incredible – a constant roar as huge waves hit the seawall and then crashed down onto the promenade with a splat.

There was some pretty hard-core ‘wave action’ going on, and it was glorious!

I stood there for ages, just watching the waves, taking great lungfuls of briney air, listening to that incredible roar, and marveling at the sheer force and power of the sea.

After a while, we went back across the road to the B&B, then sat in the bay window, still watching the waves, until it grew dark and was time to go in search of dinner.

The following morning, we took an hour-long walk along the coastline before heading back home. For most of the time that we were in Scarborough, my mind was quiet, my brain focused almost entirely on taking in my surroundings.

The odd thing is that an idea has now started to hum in the back of my head. It isn’t really even a proper ‘idea’ yet, more of a feeling. But I have a sense of the characters and of the underlying tension between them, and of an overall atmosphere.  For the first time since I started trying to come up with a new idea, I find myself feeling quite powerfully drawn to this one. Maybe it’ll be a go-er, or maybe it’ll fizzle out and die like the others have, but I’m hopeful.  And I’m fairly sure that it was taking some time out and directing my brain towards something completely different – the power and beauty of the sea – that allowed this idea to begin to grow.  So basically, that’s my top tip for those writers among you who are struggling to come up with a new idea: Take a day off and go to the seaside!

That’s about it for this time, but do keep an eye on my Facebook page because in the run up to Christmas, I’ll be giving away signed copies of all three of my novels! Facebook post to follow in the next day or two.

See you soon! x

 

Does anyone else suffer from ‘between-books paralysis’? When you know you should be planning your next novel, but every time you try and think an idea through, you either hit a brick wall very quickly, or you’re daunted by the sheer size of the mountain you’re about to climb.

I’m in that situation right now. Book 4 (STILL untitled) is all but finished apart from the copy edits, but book 5 remains elusive. I have four or five bits of ideas bubbling around in my head, some overlapping, but none clear and solid enough yet. I keep reminding myself that I have to commit to an idea, and then I have to make it clear and solid – it’s not going to magically happen on its own.

But in the meantime I am procrastinating, as authors are wont to do at times like this. It makes me feel guilty – I hate these horribly non-productive periods. A few years ago, I blogged about ways writers can actually justify procrastination – if you’re a committed procrastinator, you can justify anything – and I thought I’d return to that theme now, with a few new tips thrown in. So, in no particular order, here are some ideas:

Watching TV
Choose programmes that can feed your storytelling skills or give you ideas for characters. Films and TV dramas can be great for this, especially as they can demonstrate how to ‘show’ rather than ‘tell’ – note how characters’ actions, dialogue, and facial expressions show what the characters are thinking and feeling.

Looking on Rightmove
Houses can be a great source of ideas, and the way a house looks, both inside and out, can tell you a lot about the people who live there. I love looking around other people’s houses, but I draw the line at posing as a potential buyer so estate agents will show me round someone’s gaff. Rightmove is the next best thing. You can look at any type of home, in any city, in the countryside, on the coast.

I go for the ones with lots of photographs, and I prefer houses that are not empty. That way, you can get ideas from the way the rooms look while people are actually living there. This can be a starting point for a story, or you can use it to develop characters in something you’ve already started. If you’re learning about who your character is by discovering more about where they live,  you’re not just dreaming about what it would be like to live in that gorgeous house should you ever have a spare million knocking around – you’re doing legitimate research.

Looking around the shops
Like looking at houses, this is also justifiable research. What  sort of clothes, shoes, food, furniture, artwork, bedding, etc  does your character choose? From which shops? Does she buy her clothes from Top Shop? Harvey Nichols? M&S?  Or does she prefer charity shops? And is that because she’s hard up, or because she has an alternative way of dressing? Mooching around the charity shops can be good for ideas, too – handling a worn pair of shoes, a well-thumbed cookery book, or a still-perfumed scarf can suggest things about a character that you may not have thought of otherwise.

Going for a walk
Walking outdoors, preferably somewhere green and beautiful, is not only healthy and pleasant, but it’s often a brilliant way of solving problems in your work. There’s something about the action of putting one foot in front of the other that seems to stimulate ideas – right now, I’m hoping it’ll help me formulate an idea for my next novel.

And to be honest, even if it doesn’t help you move forward with your current project, it’s got to be better to be out in the fresh air, preferably somewhere green, than rotting in front of your computer while you stew on your own laziness, lack of imagination, and the certainty that you will never write anything decent again… or is that just me?

Cooking meals for the freezer
If you hate cooking, skip this one, but personally, I find cooking hugely therapeutic, and if I’m not producing any writing, at least I can stash away some ready-cooked meals so that when I do finally get started on my next novel, I’ll have a supply of quick meals in the freezer for those days when I find myself writing well into the evening.

Getting your accounts up to date
In the same vein as cooking while you have time, why not use the time you have now to reduce stress at the end of the tax year? I loathe doing my accounts, and if I’m deep in writing my novel at the time I have to submit my tax return, dragging myself away from something creative and fascinating in order to do something bewildering and boring is virtually impossible. I spent yesterday working on my accounts from the beginning of the financial year. So even if I don’t keep to my plan to record everything as I go along (I always plan to do this but…) at least the first three months are done.

Phoning a (writer) friend
Talking to other writers is never time wasted. whether you’re talking about your process or your progress (or lack of it),  just talking about writing will make you want to get on with it, and bouncing ideas off another writer is always useful, even if it’s just to hear your own thoughts spoken aloud. Sometimes, acting as a sounding board for someone else can help to stimulate your own ideas, too.

Thinking about and promoting your published work
If you’ve already got something out there, why not give it a little boost to remind people it’s there? Has it just had a lovely review you can tweet about? Is it on a special promotion somewhere? While we’re on the subject, my first novel The Things We Never Said is in the Kindle summer sale for less than a quid! (My other books have great reviews, too, and I’m crossing my fingers that What She Lost will be chosen for a price promotion soon.)

Look at the book or books you’ve already written to remind yourself that you can do it, that the random collection of thoughts, character sketches and half-formed ideas knocking around in your brain will eventually morph into a new novel, just as they have done before. Or if you’re stuck on your current project, remind yourself that you’ve had problems in the past, and you’ve overcome them. Remember that time when you thought your last novel was a pile of crap and you would never finish it? Now go read your five-star reviews….

And finally: Reading
We so often see reading as something to be done only during leisure time, but you’re a writer so it’s different. Every book you read is a training session – you’re learning more about technique and craft and storytelling with every novel you pick up. With some books, the main thing you’ll take away is how not to do it, but that’s okay, too. If you have a current work-in-progress, or are thinking about the next project, you can probably include some fiction in your research reading – there’s nothing wrong with benefiting from research done by other authors!

So, I am now going to attempt to follow my own advice. I’ve already done a few of the things on this list, but they’ve mainly been the catching-up-with-other-stuff  ones rather than the imagination and idea-stimulating ones, so I guess I’d better get on with that.

Oh, and there’s one other thing you can do towards productive procrastination – write new blog post…

 

Another long gap between posts. My excuse is that my new baby – in other words, my new book – just recently made its way into the world, so I’m still quite busy promoting it. (Click here to buy on Amazon)

To continue with the analogy, my fourth novel, which I’m currently redrafting, is close to full term, so all in all, I’ve been busy. Right, I’ve had enough of that, now, so I’ll start talking normally.

I wrote a first draft of book 4, as yet untitled, relatively quickly – in four months – and I’ve been rewriting it since the beginning of February. A good boost to the process was a six-day writing retreat at the Arvon foundation’s Clockhouse. away from domestic responsibilities and in the company of three other lovely writers, I got loads done.

Communal sitting room

private study lounge

My task was to make the novel little less dark, so there were new scenes and chapters to write, but I also needed to do some restructuring. To my delight, there was an enormous corkboard in the room. I work on Scrivener, but I still like actual physical pieces of paper on an actual physical corkboard. I printed out my chapter summaries and was able to fit the whole novel onto this wonderful corkboard so I could move stuff around.

The rewriting was going so well, I was fairly sure I’d be finished by the end of this month. But now I’m about to embark on writing the final scenes, I find myself suddenly crippled by doubt and indecision. I usually go for ‘hopeful’ rather than ‘happy’ endings, but my original ending for this book – can’t give details, obviously – couldn’t be described as either.

When I wrote it, I thought it was the right ending for this character’s story – the natural progression for her, given previous events. My character was not exactly ‘happy’, but calm and accepting of how things worked out. But my agent and editor didn’t like it. Let’s face it, they’ve been in the business a long time – they know their shit, basically, so I’d be stupid not to listen. The three of us bandied round a few ideas for an alternative ending, and I set out to do the redrafting with one or two possibilities in mind.

However, now I’m at this stage where I’m trying to actually write the alternative ending, I find I’m horribly stuck, because something is telling me that these alternatives are wrong – contrived. I know many other writers will say I should stick to my original idea. But the thing is, there’s no point in doing that if it makes the book into something no-one wants to read.

So what do I do, people? What is more important to the reader, a truthful but sad ending, or a believable, hopeful ending, that may just seem slightly contrived?

A couple of years ago, I read a book that I loved from the first page and almost to the last. It was brilliantly written, with sympathetic, convincing characters and a page-turning plot. The central character was in severe peril, and I was convinced that something would save her at the last minute. It didn’t. I was devastated. The integrity of the author was flawless – in that situation, at that time, what happened in the novel is almost certainly what would have happened in life. But I went from wanting to recommend this book to everyone, to not recommending it to anyone, because the ending had left me feeling so bleak and I didn’t want to pass that on. (If you’re interested, I blogged about this at the time – you can read the post here)

So you see my problem? I don’t think my ending would be as bleak as this one was, but maybe I’m deluding myself. readers and writers, I’d be interested to know your thoughts on this dilemma! The only thing I can think of to do at the moment is to try and force myself to write one or two alternative endings and see how they feel. I’ve already set one of them up through the novel, but even that feels almost impossible to write at the moment. Arghh!

On a more positive note, there have been some lovely reviews for What She Lost this week:

Amazon reader review

Amazon reader review

Amazon reader review

If you’d like to find out more about me and my work, please visit my (soon-to-be revamped) website or follow me on Twitter or Facebook

A very quick blog post this time, because I’m packing to go to London as we speak. So it was the Sheffield launch of What She Lost at Waterstones on Thursday last week, and I think it went rather well. It was a pretty good turnout of somewhere between 50 and 60 people. Lots of friends, obviously, but also some ‘real’ readers, as in people I hadn’t met before, or who I only knew through Twitter or Facebook – it was lovely to be able to put faces to the names. Continue reading →

Whenever I start a new blog post after a bit of a gap, I feel like I should begin with: it has been eight weeks since my last confession…

Yes, I was quite shocked to see that I haven’t blogged since just before Christmas. My only excuse is that there’s a lot going on in my writing life at the moment.

In my last post, I talked about the experience of writing the first draft of my fourth book surprisingly quickly and receiving positive feedback. A few weeks ago, on a cold and drizzly day at the end of January, I met my agent and my new editor for lunch in a lovely little Bloomsbury pub. we sat at a table next to a blazing log fire and discussed how I might approach the next draft. Continue reading →

Out 9th of March – just over 11 weeks to go…

Newsflash! The Things We Never Said is on a Kindle Monthly deal at just 99p throughout November Buy it here

Well, I did it, I hit my deadline!  I have written a very rough, very basic draft of my fourth novel in a little under four months. To be honest, I could have finished this on Saturday, but I really wanted to put that last cross on the calendar today. Ok, so maybe there’s a touch of OCD involved…

If you’ve seen my recent blog posts or if you’ve been following my Facebook page, you’ll know that I’ve been using some incentives to help keep me going. First, there’s the calendar, an idea I adapted from one I saw in Mslexia magazine. Just print out a calendar, then for each day you hit your writing target (mine was an absolute minimum of 200 words but aiming for 1000) you put a cross in the squeare for that day. So here, a cross means I wrote at least 200 and if I got to 1000, I added a dot.

I also used a reward-based incentive. Assuming this draft would be around 90,000 words (it’s ended up as 81,500) I put 90 small coins in a glass, each coin representing 1000 words I had to write. Each time I wrote 1000 words, I took one of those coins out and chucked it back in my purse, but I also put a pound coin in another class. So I saw the number of words I had to write going down, and the amount of money I had to celebrate completing the draft going up. It’s a winner!

So there’s now £81 in that glass, and me and Himself will be having a night out on it this week. (I think I’m going to have to do something similar to the redraft – got to celebrate the end of that, too.)
Here’s the proof of my wordcount and a sneak peek at the first page:

Of course the other thing that helped was that this time, for the first time ever, I was working from a detailed five-page synopsis– thanks to my agent Kate Shaw for keeping on at me to do this! I found it very difficult – it took several weeks – but I will definitely try this approach again.

Inevitably, things have changed a little from the original synopsis, but the basic story is the same. I’ve changed some character details – occupation, for example. I’ve also got rid of one supporting character and introduced a new one. The other thing that’s different is that a few things I thought I could skim over in a paragraph as back story have turned out to demand full scenes of their own.

What I’ve learned is this: planning a novel out like this is difficult, and there were many points at which I felt sick, certain the idea wasn’t working and lying awake at night agonising over whether I would be able to make it work. But this is EXACTLY what I usually go through halfway through writing a novel anyway. Maybe sometimes an idea doesn’t work, but surely it’s better to abandon a synopsis after a few weeks of work than to abandon 70,000 words after several months, which is what I ended up doing back in June – you can read about it here

So, I feel exhilarated having completed this draft and very excited about embarking upon what I hope will be a decent first draft. I will, of course, keep you posted.

If you’d like to know more about me and my work, or if you’d like to sign up for one of the popular Novel Writing workshops I run with Russell Thomas, please visit my website, and you can follow me on Facebook and Twitter