Shadowed: published ebook

Shadowed – buy on kindle

  My second e-book is quite different to the first. It was inspired by a conversation with a friend who did some work in a mental hospital, and came across a woman who thought she could see that people were being possessed – her medication stopped her seeing the possessing creatures, but that didn’t mean she stopped believing that they existed. That was a terrifying thought; what would someone do in that situation?

It took about a week to write the first draft, which is quite quick for me. Perhaps a sign that my writing muscles are getting stronger? In the redrafts, I went back and layered in some more ideas about the woman, suggesting that she might be struggling with being a mother and the pressures that women feel to take all their maternity leave to spend with the baby, dealing with the conflict I imagine women feel between a fulfilling career which they’ve loved, and their new role as mother.

I rewrote the ending a few times, including changing tense, narrative voice, and stripping out a lot of event narrative (then I did this, and found this, and tried to do this) in favour of more emotional description and a wider view of her actions, like zooming out. I think that worked much better, maintaining the emotional side of the woman rather than becoming too plot-driven.

Buy it now and let me know what you think!

12 into 13: headspinning review

I hope that, when I look back over my writing career, I recognise 2012 as an important year. I think quite a bit has changed in the way I approach writing, and it’s starting, in small ways, to pay off. If you’d asked me, I’d have always said I wanted to write – but anyone can say that they want to write a book. In fact, I’ve got four half-novels and a dozen quarter-short stories on my hard drive, but very little actual finished work.

During 2012, though, I have finished three short stories, self-published, on kindle, one previously written, and learned how to create e-books, written three articles for The Yorkshire Times and have the full outline of a novel.

Getting confident

If you don’t get your work out there, you’ll never be successful. I can write as much and as brilliantly as anyone in the world, and if I never show anyone other than my boyfriend and mum, I’ll never be a successful writer. Taking steps by reading at the Ilkley Literature Festival, self-publishing (and telling people that I’d done it!) and writing for an online paper all helped me to get more confident with sending my work out. I also submitted entries to four different competitions and three magazines; saly nothing has come of any of that in terms of publication but the point is: I sent it out. I let other people see my work and opened myself up to comment and potential criticism.

Motivation and Inspiration

Living with someone who also actively pursues a creative career is incredibly motivating, and I can’t say strongly enough how much he’s helped me write, by encouraging me to take the time to do it, talking about ideas and the writing process with me, and simply by believing that I can be a writer. I’m also more motivated to make this a regular part of my life because I want to be able to make money from it one day in the not so distant future; I’m still very much figuring out how to do that, but I think that I am more motivated than I have ever been. I also have more ideas – my notebook is filled with snippets of story ideas, and I never sit at the computer and think ‘I don’t know what to write about’. I might not always know what to write next but that’s a different problem!

Spending time reading about writing, reading other authors’ blogs and books, both about their writing process and stories themselves, has also been incredibly useful and something I’d honestly done very little of before, but want to increase.

Getting organised and setting goals

This again is a big one that I’m learning all the time, and living with someone that wants to do the same thing. I’ve always been quite organised in terms of what I need to do, but when it comes to writing I’ve been used to sitting hen the mood takes me, pottering about, playing, writing a draft without really knowing what I’m doing – tinkering, in other words. Playing at being a writer rather than being a writer. This year, though, I’ve experimented with setting different goals for myself – seeing what works best whether it’s time spent, word counts, or stories completed,  and working out how to set goals that I can achieve alongside my full-time job which I also give a lot of time to at home. Getting more organised in how I write has also been important. I have started planning the whole story first – not rocket science, I know, but a part of turning away from the floaty ‘oh, I’ll see’ school of writing to a more professional attitude. It also means I should always know what I   need to write when I open my laptop, because I know what the next scene is, and I’m not wasting time on a story that won’t go anywhere.

I don’t always get these things right – I’m usually too eager to dive into writing without thorough planning –  but I am getting better, and I intend to keep getting better.

Looking forward

While I want to think of 2012 as an important year, I want to be able to look back at 2013 and think: that was the year things started to happen. I want to release a collection of short stories on ebook and maybe use kickstarter to fund a hard copy. I want to be able to find/create book covers for my stories to make them appear more professional and sellable. I want to be able to market my stories, so that I do start to see some money from them. I want to keep writing interesting and curious stories that I enjoy reading, and I can share with other people.

Even if I flounder along the way, Janus should give me confidence – the god whom January is named for was not just celebrated at the turn of the new year, but the turn of the month, week, even day. And so if I miss one goal? I’ll move on to the next.

How to get started on a story

At work this week, following a busy summer that’s left me feeling like I didn’t really have a holiday at all, we’ve been looking at their creative writing. Their task is to build towards a short story using a poem as a springboard for ideas. Towards the end of the week, we came across an interesting stumbling block that made me think a bit more about stories in particular, and what they are intending to write. We were writing the opening of a story
using techniques gathered from other writers, having looked at examples and what we liked in an opening to get us interested. But often, instead of writing a story opening with setting, plotting and characterisation starting to come through a little bit, they were getting frustrated because what they ended up with, when they put pen to paper, was more like a diary. A stream-of-consciousness from the narrator. It takes work to transform that into what they wanted.

(I love this Calvin & Hobbes cartoon!)

What is a story?

One of the first things I did with them was what a story actually is – how do you know, when reading a piece of text, that it is one? The usual answers come up: beginning, middle, end. Character. Something interesting happens or changes. Description not factual. Where it’s published. But we didn’t really touch on narrative voice, not at first anyway. That’s really where this problem came from, I think.

Writing your way in

I do it all the time – which I say, although I’m not sure my students believe me! The first page is clearing my throat. It’s getting to know the way the character thinks, and talk, and their background. But then, you need to get rid of that and step back to find what Emma Darwin calls the psychic distance – that process of being able to narrate instead of simply recounting thoughts. It’s a big change – we as readers move away from the character, but there’s still enough of them present to be interesting and emotionally involved. As a writer you need to decide how far back you’re going – but I think you almost always will move back. Even if your writing remains in the first person, there’s a sense of detachment that comes with narrating your own story that moves beyond pure stream of consciousness. Even SoC novels don’t usually simply recount thoughts – it’s too juggled, too disconnected to follow and makes for a very unsettling and, quite frankly, often boring novel. Reading someone’s thoughts lacks the structure and conflict that story plots need to be successful.

Start at the end

At the beginning of the academic year I was looking for tips from writers and came across one which just seemed perfect:

Start as close to the end as possible – Kurt Vonnegut

The first section of any story is usually background. Usually it’s more subtle than  “I came from poverty and my father was a blacksmith, my grandfather an ironmonger, but I rose above it all to have a glorious career as well as a happy family and gorgeous wife, but now I’m about to risk it all because I made one stupid mistake.” But no matter how subtle, it’s usually unnecessary.

Maybe avid plotters don’t have this problem – they know where they’re starting before they put fingers to keyboard, and they have got to know their characters already. For me, the first section is always about getting to know the character. Who are they? What do they want? How do they talk? Who are they connected to? Those things are important. They give me the sense of person so I know what they will do in the situations in which I place them. You, the reader, doesn’t need to know why they behave that way. You just need to know which, when faced with a choice between kill or flee, lie or tell the truth, they will choose. So that first section, where I spend hours getting to know them? It needs to be cut. In reality, you don’t need to know what my home life was like as a child or why I like pizza. You need to know that I have trust issues and that I hate pizza, so it means something when I agree to go on a date to an Italian restaurant.

That was what they were writing in my lesson. The diaries or thought process was a way of getting to know the characters. You can rephrase it, make it more useful to the plot and keep a lot of the emotional knowledge you gain from those sections but ultimately, it needs creating into more of a story.