Five women forgotten by history

I'm attracted by the stories of lesser-known people in history, left out of the established historical record because of their race, their social status or their gender. Here are five examples of women marginalised by history whose lives were fascinating, and whose achievements were astonishing. One of them, Aemilia Lanyer, is the inspiration for my novel Dark Aemilia.

Trota of Salerno was a 12th century Italian medical practitioner and writer. She was famous in her own time, but her work was forgotten until the late 20th century. Her treatise On Treatments for Women was incorporated into the Trotula, which was a compendium of three different works about women’s medicine by three different writers. There are only a handful of copies of her authentic work. No other information about her life has survived, but we know she wrote the Practica secundum Trotam ('Practical Medicine According to Trota'), which covers a variety of different medical topics, from infertility and menstrual disorders to snakebite and cosmetics.

Aemilia Bassano Lanyer, the first woman to be published professionally as a poet in England, was born to a family of Jewish Venetian musicians who played at the court of Henry VIII in the sixteenth century. She was the mistress of Lord Hunsden, the Lord Chamberlain, for six years. After that, she was married off to a cousin, and lived in Westminster. In 1611, she published her proto feminist poetry collection ‘Salve Jesu, Rex Judaeorum’. She is thought by some academics to be the mysterious ‘Dark Lady’ to whom William Shakespeare addressed his later sonnets.

Excerpt of a miniature portrait of Aemilia Lanyer

Painted by Nicholas Hilliard (d. 1619) (Source Wikimedia) 

Maria Anna Mozart was the sister of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. When she was seven years old, her father Leopold started teaching her to play the harpsichord. He took her and Wolfgang to cities like Vienna and Paris where they performed at court. In the early days, Maria sometimes received top billing, and she was noted as an excellent harpsichord player and forte pianist. But when she grew older and was of marriageable age, she was excluded from these performances. There is evidence that Marianne wrote musical compositions, as there are letters from Wolfgang praising her work, but none has survived.

Maria Anna Mozart, Anonymous, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maria_Anna_Mozart 

Mary Elizabeth Bowser was an an American freed slave who worked as a Union spy during he Civil War. Bowser was highly intelligent and had a photographic memory, and posed as 'Ellen Bond', a slow-thinking servant. She worked at functions held by Varina Davis, the wife of the Confederate President, Jefferson Davis. Bowser eventually worked in the Davis household. She memorised all the paperwork she saw and the conversations she overheard, relaying this back to the Union side. Bowser was eventually found out, but before she fled she attempted to burn down the Confederate White House. After the war ended, the federal government destroyed any records of evidence of espionage in order to protect those involved. Bowser did keep a journal about her life, but was lost in 1952. There is no record of her later life, or her death.

Irena Sendler was a Polish nurse and social worker who served in the Polish Underground during World War II. As head of the children's section of the resistance organisation Zegota in German occupied Warsaw, she helped smuggle some 2,500 Jewish children out of the Warsaw Ghetto, providing them with false identity documents and housing outside the Ghetto. She was eventually caught by the Nazis and sentenced to death, but managed to escape execution and survive the war. In 1965 she was recognised by the State of Israel as Righteous among Nations and honoured by the Polish government for her humanitarian work.

Irena Sendler, 1942, Wikimedia commons. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Irena_Sendlerowa. 

Keeping a notebook

How does an idea become a story? It’s hard to define or describe the process. The relationship between creativity and physicality is one that we sometimes overlook. But the physical process of writing is essential to the development of fiction. The brain/hand connection is as important to a writer as it is to a tennis player.

What exists in our imagination is usually formless and confused until it has become in some way physically real – at which point we may find that other ideas attach to it. Some writers carry ideas round in their heads for months – but I can’t be the only person who thought they were doing this, only to discover that the idea had disappeared. Obviously there are different ways of keeping track of our thoughts. A note on an iPhone may be all that’s needed to record the passing moment, or pin down a sudden inspiration. But perhaps we are losing something if we turn our thoughts into instant electronic data. The notebook, tried and tested for centuries, is an invaluable tool. Not only is it a repository of ideas and experience, it can also help generate lateral connections.

Essentially, a notebook helps us to focus on our immediate responses to the world. Writing in the preface to A Writer’s Notebook (Heinemann, 1951) novelist and short story writer W. Somerset Maugham says: ‘When you know you are going to make a note of something, you look at it more attentively than you otherwise would, and in the process of doing so the words are borne in upon you that will give it its private place in reality.’ (Maugham 1951: x)

Kafka's notebook with words in German and Hebrew
Vessel to Vessel, The National Library of Israel Collection

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Kafka%27s_notebook.JPG

Habit is also important according to Virginia Woolf. In A Writer’s Diary (Hogarth Press, 1953) she says: 'But what is more to the point is my belief that the habit of writing thus for my own eye only is good practice. It loosens the ligaments. Never mind the misses and the stumbles. Going at such a pace as I do I must make the most direct and instant shots at my object, and thus have to lay hands on words, choose them and shoot them with no more pause than is needed to put my pen in the ink.' (Woolf 1987: 22)

For most writers, a notebook is the closest thing we have to an artist’s sketch book, and the equivalent of a studio. Instead of an atelier of half-finished canvases, splashed with paint, we have jottings and scrawled sentences which catch at our vision of life, and can sometimes contain passing flashes of inspiration that would otherwise have gone forever. Unlike sketchbooks, they are rarely beautiful in themselves, although there may be beautiful things in them.

Bruce Chatwin, photographed by Lord Snowdon, 28 July 1982, Wikicomms, Fair Use

Does the quality of such notebooks matter? At worst, an expensive notebook can tempt us to write self-consciously, or pretentiously. I used to think the travel writer Bruce Chatwin was guilty of notebook narcissism. In his memoir The Songlines (Penguin 1987) he writes: ‘I made three neat stacks of my “Paris” notebooks. In France, these notebooks are known as carnets moleskines: 'moleskine', in this case, being its black oilcloth binding. Each time I went to Paris, I would buy a fresh supply from a papeterie in the Rue de l'Ancienne-Comédie.’ (Chatwin 1987: 160) These notebooks went out of production in 1986, but a Milanese publisher brought them back into production in 1997 using Chatwin’s term ‘Moleskine’ to give credibility to the brand. They are now ‘design classics’ which potentially adds to their dubiousness as the tools of a writer’s trade. But – confession time - I now write in a Moleskine notebook myself.)

The writer Ailsa Cox stresses that the notebook should help us connect with the energy of lived experience Writers like Katherine Mansfield fuelled their intensely observed short fiction by making bright, immediate word sketches, using sensory observation to record the minutiae of the ‘ordinary’ world. In Writing Short Stories: A Routledge Writer’s Guide (Routledge 2005) Cox explains: ‘Notebook-writing doesn’t have to prove anything or be shown to anyone. Mine’s indecipherable anyway.’ (Cox 2005: 49)

Although habit is important, writing in your notebook shouldn’t be an oppressive duty. The spontaneity essential to the best short story writing is best fostered if you write in your notebook regularly, but not slavishly, Cox believes. ‘The idea is to liberate your creativity, not restrict your own freedom. Write whenever you find an opportunity. I have to confess I have sometimes started scribbling during an especially mind-numbing meeting.’ (Cox 2005:50)

Perhaps the most important function of a notebook is that it is portable, and you can almost write in it off-guard, without worrying about the quality or quantity of what you produce. So the notebook is my ally in the struggle to improve as a writer, and to feed my imagination with fresh ideas. I write on trains, in cafes, parks, at the seaside, in the kitchen, anywhere. There is always something there when I close the book that didn’t exist when I opened it.

(A longer version of this article was published on the Thresholds website, University of Chichester http://thresholds.chi.ac.uk/do-you-need-to-keep-a-notebook/)

Six top tips for summer writing

FreeImages.com/Jenny Rollo

1.       Start early – beat the summer heat. Set your alarm for no later than 8 am and postpone all your household or admin jobs until the afternoon. Keep your mind as free as possible before starting work, and get down to it as soon as possible after you get up. The author Monique Roffey writes as soon as she wakes up when she is working on a novel; the mighty J.K. Rowling works in bed first thing.

2.       Set yourself achievable goals. Be specific and realistic. Can you really take the NaNoWriMo approach and write a entire novel in August? Seems unlikely – and their word goal is 50, 000 whereas you will have to craft at least 70,000 to reach conventional novel length. It might be better to work on one short story, or two produce two or three good chapters, or to resolve an issue that you haven’t had head space to address before.

3.       Choose the right place to work. It may be that you have a quiet office in the house (we currently have builders next door so I am feeling the pain here). Or it may that you have a café or library where you can work well. Wherever it is, make sure that you spend at least three hours a day in that place, writing, and only writing.

4.       Say ‘no’. I very rarely tell anyone I am not meeting them/taking something on because I’m writing – it somehow has the same effect as saying that you are staying in to wash your hair. People feel snubbed, weirdly, because the convention is that writing should be your lowest priority in the modern, speed-driven world.  But I have a range of substitute excuses, usually to do with my (admittedly demanding) day job, or family stuff (and there is admittedly also plenty of that). Whatever reason you give, just say ‘no’. Don’t feel pressurized to fit in barbecues or building a new extension on your house. This is your summer of words.

5.       Be active. This may sound contradictory, but do also make time to move about. A writer is not a brain on a stick, and getting your blood circulating helps your brain to work. There is also a weird connection between creativity and walking. Virginia Woolf was a great fan. Ernest Hemingway used to go hunting after putting in a morning’s writing. There is no need for that.

6.       Read. There is also a lovely connection between reading and writing. The voice and created world of another writer is inspiring and curiously restful. Choose the right author – you may not want to immerse yourself in the work of the prize-winning writer whose book was published this year to wild acclaim and is writing in your chosen genre. You’re only human. Read nonfiction, poetry, an established classic. Read like a writer, seeing how they have addressed the problems and challenges you are facing in your own draft. And read like a reader, paying close attention and letting the writers take you where they want you to go.   

How to write a novel inspired by Shakespeare

My novel Dark Aemilia is based on the life of Aemilia Lanyer, the first woman to be published professionally as a poet in England. Aemilia is one of the women who may have been the Dark Lady to whom Shakespeare dedicated his most passionate but troubled sonnets. In my story, I assume that not only is she Shakespeare’s muse, but also the true author of one of Shakespeare’s most famous plays – The Tragedie of Macbeth. 

Günther Hofmann, Verdi's Macbeth, 1972, Meininger Museen/

Theatermuseum, Walter Hinghaus

There are several ways in which Macbeth inspired the story:

Theme: the destructive power of ruthless ambition; violence begetting violence; the drive to subvert established hierarchies.

Plot: the smooth efficiency of a plot in which temptation is followed by wrong-doing which causes alienation and retribution. A perfect balance between freedom of choice and tragic inevitability.

Atmosphere: the sense of evil that haunts ‘the Scottish play’; the dark power of witchcraft; violence and murder; the bleakest aspects of the natural world.

Language: the use of imagery and stark, vivid language to convey the fearful, deranged perspective of the protagonist.

Gender: the fact that, in spite of being excluded from positions of influence, women are a potent force in the power play between men.

William Shakespeare, The Chandos Portrait 

National Portrait Gallery – Portrait NPG 1; William Shakespeare .

And I'm not the only author to be inspired by the work of Shakespeare:

•  Ambition is the driving theme in Moby Dick, by Herman Melville (Macbeth/King Lear) Melville’s Great American Novel draws on both Biblical and Shakespearean myths. Captain Ahab is ‘a grand, ungodly, god-like man…above the common’ whose pursuit of the great white whale Moby Dick is a fable about obsession and over-reaching. Just as Macbeth and Lear subvert the natural order of things, Ahab takes on Nature in his determination to kill his prey - and his hubristic quest is doomed from the start.
  
•  A Thousand Acres, by Jane Smiley (King Lear) Smiley retells the story of King Lear in modern day Iowa in her Pulitzer prizewinning novel. The novel is set on a thousand acre farm which is owned by a father and his three daughters, and told from the point of view of the oldest, Ginny. Instead of dismissing the two older daughters as wicked and grasping, as Shakespeare does, in her novel Smiley explores the family secrets that underpin the drama, and shows the significance of the land itself. 
• The Black Prince, by Iris Murdoch (Hamlet) This is a brilliant depiction of obsessive love, though its plot is a typically convoluted Murdochian creation which is inspired by Freud and Plato as well as Shakespeare’s Hamlet. It tells the story of a twisted friendship between two writers, and features some cheekily cross-dressed sex scenes in which Julian (a young woman) dresses up as the gloomy Dane. Murdoch is strongest on the unpredictability of love, and the black comedy that can result. 
• Brave New World, by Aldous Huxley (The Tempest) Huxley makes numerous references to the work of Shakespeare in this dystopian novel, and the title is taken from the Tempest: ‘O brave new world, / That has such people in 't!’ Like Caliban, John ‘The Savage’ is an outcast, despised for his appearance, and Huxley is exploring ideas about the power of art and the nature of humanity as Shakespeare does in this haunting and, possibly, final play.
• Wise Children, by Angela Carter (The Taming of the Shrew et al) Twins, doubles and paradoxes abound in Carter’s last novel, as they do in the works of Shakespeare. The story of twins Dora and Nora Chance explores ideas about paternity and incest, and the novel is written in five chapters like the five Acts in a Shakespeare play. One of the themes is ‘high art’ versus ‘low art’ and Carter jokily refers to Shakespeare via Kiss Me Kate, a populist adaptation of The Taming of the Shrew. 
• The Daughter of Time, by Josephine Tey (Richard III) Richard III gets a sympathetic makeover in Josephine Tey’s 1951 whodunnit, which reads like a cross between Rear Window and Time Team. Detective Alan Grant, confined to bed after an accident, begins to take in interest in the much maligned king after studying his portrait.  Although clearly Richard III was a real person, the false picture we have of him was originally created by Shakespeare, Tey argues. He created a pantomime villain and child murderer in order to curry favour with his Tudor patron, Elizabeth I.

How to write a novel when you literally have no time

I just Googled this sentence 'How to write a novel when you literally have no time'.

And I couldn't find anything - so here are some thoughts in case you have just Googled the self-same thing.

All too often, my time frazzles away, consumed by the day job. You probably know all about this.

If you aren't writing enough, is it because you don't have time, because you don't think you have time, or because you can't think?

The Thinker https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:The_Thinker,_Rodin.jpg

The modern age is full of manufactured distractions, the aim seeming to be to not-think, and to sustain the habit of not-thinking for a lifetime.

Often, the advice to new writers is to write, but what is the point of writing if your mind is a snarl-pit of the small stuff?

But then again, if you write, honestly, without inhibition, for long enough, thinking will follow.

So.

Stop starting at the internet.

Turn off the computer. (When you have finished reading this blog post, I mean.)

Look out of the window.

Or stare at the ceiling.

Do this for five minutes.

Then write for five minutes.

By hand, with a pen, like some ancient scribe.

Do it for a week.

Then see how you feel.

I will do the same and report back in seven days. (This is my very busiest time at work so an excellent time for such a challenge.)

Five reasons to enter the Bridport

The deadline is looming  for the Bridport Prize. So stop whatever you are doing right now, find a short story, polish it up and enter it.  Because you might win if you enter, and definitely won't win if you don't.

Of course it's true that any competition is a lottery to some degree. And how can you judge one story against another when each one is unique? But this can work both for you and against you. Two of my frankly not-all-that short stories were shortlisted for major prizes early in my writing career (for the Ian St James and the Cosmopolitan prizes) and frankly far better ones have done nothing since. The boost - both emotional and professional - when you win or are placed in a major competition far outweighs the mild disappointment of being overlooked.

Photo by Photo by rahego, via Flickr Creative Commons /http://www.archivehunter.com/about-2/

Here are five reasons for entering:

1. If you don't enter you won't win. (Recycling the content from above for reasons of emphasis and thrift.)

2. Even getting shortlisted for a big prize can get you noticed. I got my first agent from being short-listed for the Cosmo prize - although the actual story never got published.

3. It's a deadline. Writers need deadlines, otherwise we sink into the Slough of Despond wearing faded pyjamas.

4. Entering competitions forces you to think about the current market for short fiction - at least, it should do. (Or current context, if you think the word 'market' is a little harsh and vulgar and you are producing Art.)

5. Professional writers are Submitting Machines. Everything that you have written that is halfway decent should be submitted somewhere. If it gets turned down for one outlet or competition, enter another, submit again. Don't be emotional about it, don't feel let down if nothing happens - submit, submit and submit again.

So get those words sorted now. And if you want more information about other competitions, here is Paul McVeigh's excellent blog which lists upcoming opportunities.

And here is another useful list from Christopher Fielden.

Breaking the rules - use that adverb

Poor adverbs! The consensus in some quarters is that anyone who is not paring their work down to post-Carveresque minimalism just doesn't have a clue. Verbs must stand alone. Adverbs must be shunned at all costs. If there are any adverbs lurking in your draft, you should get the Adverb Exorcist round to seek them out and sent them into the outer darkness, where everything is spinning ceaselessly, timelessly, eternally in a terrible miasma of adverbial overwriting.

There ARE 'rules' in writing, as in all artistic disciplines, many of them based on conventions. (Stories are about change, dialogue shouldn't be expositional, main character should drive the plot, for example.) And there are always writers who set out to break the rules and subvert expectations. All good so far. But there is another difficulty, which is that some 'rules' turn into an orthodoxy.

Some agents take a dim view of adverbs, which is bad news if you have submitted a script which breaks this particular 'rule'. Recently, I heard that one agent say they would bin any submission that had an adverb on the first page.

So I'm posting three openings that this agent would presumably have had to jettison, were they to come her way. All three novels are seminal works which have been praised for their literary merits as well as being best sellers. One of them has been awarded the Pulitzer prize.

The author contemplating the plight of adverbs

1. 'It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in a possession of a large fortune must be in want of a wife. However little known the feelings or views of such a man may be on his first entering a neighbourhood, this truth is so well fixed in the minds of the surrounding families, that he is considered the rightful property of some one or other of their daughters.' (Movie adaptation clue: Keira Knightly.)


2. 'When he woke in the woods in the dark and the cold of the night he'd reach out to touch the child sleeping beside him. Nights dark beyond darkness and the days more gray each one than what had gone before. Like the onset of some cold glaucoma dimming away the world. His hand rose and fell softly with each precious breath. He pushed away the plastic tarpaulin and raised himself in the stinking robes and blankets and looked toward the east for any light but there was none. In the dream from which he'd wakened he had wandered in a cave where the child led him by the hand. Their light playing over the wet flowstone walls. Like pilgrims in a fable swallowed up and lost among the inward parts of some granitic beast. Deep stone flues where the water dripped and sang. Tolling in the silence the minutes of the earth and the hours and the days of it and the years without cease. Until they stood in a great stone room where lay a black and ancient lake. And on the far shore a creature that raised its dripping mouth from the rimstone pool and stared into the light with eyes dead white and sightless as the eggs of spiders. It swung its head low over the water as if to take the scent of what it could not see. Crouching there pale and naked and translucent, its alabaster bones cast up in shadow on the rocks behind it. Its bowels, its beating heart. The brain that pulsed in a dull glass bell. It swung its head from side to side and then gave out a low moan and turned and lurched away and loped soundlessly into the dark.' (Movie adaptation clue: Viggo Mortensen.) 

3. 'I see...' said the vampire, thoughtfully, and slowly he walked across the room towards the window. For a long time he stood there against the dim light from Divisadero Street and the passing beams of traffic. The boy could see the furnishings of the room more clearly now, the round oak table, the chairs. A wash basin hung on one wall with a mirror. He set his briefcase on the table and waited.' (Movie adaptation clue: Tom Cruise.)

Three extracts, three questions:

1. Can you name the three novels?
2. Can you name the three authors?
3. What are the offending words?


Photo pause:

Light dawns, courtesy of Georgia O'Reilly

Okay, so the novels are Pride and Prejudice, The Road and Interview with the Vampire, and the authors are Jane Austen, Cormac McCarthy and Anne Rice. 

And the words in question? In running order: 'universally', 'soundlessly' and (two for the price of one from Anne Rice) 'thoughtfully' and 'slowly'. 

Worth bearing in mind. My own rule is that if you are using a word in your writing, it should be working hard enough to earn its place.  But that may be too prescriptive in itself. 

The adverbs that fall foul of the pared-down prose police are only one kind of adverb, too. Here is an overview from Cambridge Dictionaries online, just so you know.

Five tips for autumn writing

My day job is teaching creative writing at the Open University. So like many teachers and academics I am a tiny bit like a child, in that I measure out my life in terms and school holidays. (Possibly in other ways as well, such as being institutionalized and inclined to stare out of the window...)

Also, my allegedly adult children are now at uni, so this is a time of persuading them to register for their course, paying accommodation fees, and driving them to the far corners of England (Nottingham and Liverpool) so they can be institutionalized there and stare out of their own new windows, killing time.

As a writer, it's good to feel that there are new beginnings, and as the Life of the Mind is pretty formless, left to itself, the whole Back to School thing can be quite therapeutic. Here are five autumnal tips for this annual rebooting:

1. Declutter. You may not have a school uniform to put on, but it's useful to clear the decks, make sure your filing system isn't collapsing on your desk or crowding out your brain.

2. Organise Check out any writerly deadlines that are coming up, such as competitions, calls for submissions or open mic events.  (BBC Short Story Alert! Check out this link for more information.)

3. Take some exercise. Being a writer needn't mind living a life that is sedentary to a toxic degree. Ernest Hemingway wrote standing up, clearly ahead of his time. Go for a walk, run, swim, waddle - anything to get out of the house and get moving. Take a notebook or your phone and make notes as you go. If walking as an aid to writing was good enough for Virginia Woolf, it is good enough for me.

4. Do it. Yesterday I wrote 800 words entirely by accident. Just doing it frees up loads of time that is wasted in procrastination, and leaves more space for the day job. Joking about the tasks you get done while not Doing It is futile. No one needs the backs of their radiators to be dust-free.

5. READ. Find the best book you can, and lose yourself in it. I am re-reading 'Wide Sargasso Sea' by Jean Rhys and it is totally inspiring.

World Book Day 2015

What is World Book Day for? Why do we need it? What difference does it make to promote the idea of books in a world throbbing with electronic communication? Are paper books really better than Kindles and e-readers?

These are just some of the questions I was asked by the 19 radio journalists I spoke to today.The idea was to promote the work of the Open University (where I work as a creative writing lecturer) and alert people to the fact that reading breeds writing, and writers need to read. (A concept that doesn't convince some creative writing students, though in my experience the more talented the student, the happier they are to read Other People's Books.)

So here are some edited highlights from today:

World Book Day celebrates books - and reminds people that they exist. It's aimed at children,and was set up by UNESCO eighteen years ago, but it's just as vital for adults to lose themselves in a good book. (And the expression 'lose yourself' is telling - total immersion in someone else's story to the exclusion of everything else is an experience no one should miss.)

 But there is so much to distract us in our 24/7 world, and reading demands more of us than slumping in front of the TV. (Unless you are watching Wolf Hall, of which more later.) So it's sometimes a matter of delayed gratification, or staged gratification - effort is needed to get a return.

Children are more likely to develop the reading habit - and keep it for life - if the adults in their house are readers too.

It's not just a case of reading Dickens or some fat tome - though personally I love Dickens - but finding a book that suits your mood and your interests. Crime, romance, historical fiction, non-fiction - there is so much to choose from. And you can learn, yes, but book are also there to entertain.




And are paper books better than e-readers and Kindles? No, but they are special. There is something about reading a tactile book, being able to smell the pages and sit with it propped in front of you in a cafe, or fill it with post it notes, or (shock horror) write (in pencil) in the margins, that connects you with millions of readers over hundreds of years.

Finally - we live in an age of wonders and horrors, but I am still not sure we have achieved anything more astonishing than being able to communicate an imaginary world to someone else by making marks on paper.

Career tips for writers

Image courtesy of Pexels https://www.pexels.com/search/writer

If you want to make it as a writer, you need to forget about getting rich

quick, being the new J K Rowling (or E L James, put the fluffy handcuffs

away), winning the Man Booker or being on Desert Island Discs. The

surest way to succeed is to set achievable goals, work towards them every 

day and start right now. 

Here are my top ten smart moves for writers who want to get published

and stay published: 

1.   Write as well as you can  - and aim to get better. Develop your  'practice' as a writer and write at least 500 words a day. 

2.   Be proactive and network, both online and face to face.

3.   Keep up to date with new developments in literary agencies  and publishing houses. Get free emails from The Bookseller

4.   Set up your own blog and author page on Facebook, and set  up Twitter  and Tumblr accounts.

5.   Go to conferences and festivals and find out what is going  on Example: The Winchester Writers' Festival is particularly  useful for new writers.

6.   Read your work out at open mic events and at festivals.

7.   Enter short story completions, first novel awards etc. Submit   work to the literary press, both online and in paper format.

8.   Find a day job that is compatible with writing, not too horrible and which you can use as a source of material.

9.   Learn to manage your time and energy effectively.

10. Enjoy your writing  – you are an artist!

Dealing with rejection

I have been rejected many, many times in my career as a writer - it's all part of the territory. (I know that's a cliche, but that is sort of my point.) And there never comes a stage when you are immune to it. Two years ago I couldn't even get agents to read my third novel, even though my first two novels had been published by Penguin Books. 

I can't say it gets easier, but the longer I go on, the more confidence I have in the fact that my writing is worth something, and that I know what I am doing. Each rejection is a learning experience, and as you go on you take from each knock back what you need. My very first agent told me my very first book draft - 100 pages of a novel - wasn't up to scratch. (It wasn't, and my next effort, though also unfinished, was a considerable improvement.) 

Photo courtesy of Steve Baker https://www.flickr.com/photos/littlebiglens
Creative Comms 

Rejections I have had since have taught me about publishing. It's a business, and a pretty challenging one at that. Publishers want books they can sell. They aren't sure how to get hold of these. The books that sold well last year must have got something right, so they would like you to write a book similar to one of those. (But not too similar - a touch of originality is allowed.) They are in the business of trying to second guess what cannot be second guessed, the whims and fads of readers. If I was a publisher, I would probably ask for the same thing. 

I used to value my writing only on the basis of what other people thought of it. I didn't really know what I thought of it myself, and was fuelled by desperate hysteria. But the harder you work, the more you assert your own value, your own set of judgements. Some agents and professionals will give you advice that is gold dust. Some will give you advice that is worthless. Be prepared to rewrite and revise work that needs it. Be prepared to defend the artistic integrity of work that doesn't.

Boyhood - the imaginary truth

I'm interested in the way that storytelling in film relates to storytelling in fiction - and was blown away by the of intensity of  Boyhood. It exploits the cinematic medium brilliantly - film can't get inside people's heads as fiction can, but it can do things that fiction can't. Showing the passing of time over more than a decade was utterly compelling.  

All fiction writers and fiction film makers are playing a game with truth, imagination and the willingness of readers or audiences to suspend their disbelief.  Here's my article in The Conversation about why Boyhood has more truth in it than 'true stories' like American Sniper and The Imitation Game. 

Getting on with it

There is an awful lot of advice out there about creative writing. Some useful, some not so useful. Much of it is being offered by people who have never been published - whether that is a bad thing I don't know. Some very good writers have been passed over by Publishing Land and some very poor ones given book deals, loads of publicity and big prizes. (No, I'm  not going to say who I mean here, but if you read widely you will have a few suggestions of your own.)

I've been published, I've been Not Published, I've been in various states of discouragement and general lack of self belief in the 25 years or so since I first got a short story in a magazine. (In fact, it's 28 years - I published a short story called 'Santa at the Beach' in a 'style magazine' called Fairly Serious Monthly in 1987.) I am an Official Veteran. 

Anyway. Some advice from the coal face as I resume work on my fourth novel: Get on with it. However slow the progress, some progress is numberless percentage points more productive than no progress at all. Cue for picture of slow but gradual progress, with nice view.

Image courtesy of  Phil Richard, https://www.flickr.com/photos/philwirks
Creative Commons 

Not very erudite, and I'm sure Stephen King, Graham Greene,Virginia Woolf, Gertude Stein and various others have put it far more elegantly, but that is my advice. To you, and to myself. (Bearing in mind I haven't even blogged for two months exactly! What the hell is going on? With that in mind I will be posting every week until I go to a writing retreat - of which More Later...)