Category: My Writing

The Editing Balancing Act

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Editing of Choose Yr Future is going well. Well, I think it is. Well, it’s going anyway. I seem to be adding as much as I am subtracting which is a little annoying as the main aim in editing was removing flabby, unnecessary detail (at 144000 words, I was hoping to trim it down a bit. Which I am doing but who can tell whether what is added now will be deemed excess weight next time.

This is the balancing act of editing well. Taking the garden shears to your prose can be extremely satisfying and I have been groaning inwardly at some of the more flowery sentences. But even as I’m wielding, I wonder am I taking it too far. Perhaps it will die, unable to sprout anew. So I find myself adding new shoots here and there. To balance it out, you know.

This is the part of editing that is difficult – how do you know that you are making the right choices. Of course, nothing is deleted permanently. I studiously keep every copy. When I go through the printed out pages and make alterations, sometimes by the time I go to make those changes on the computer, I have changed my mind again. Either to leave it as it was or do something different again.

A lot of these changes sort themselves out. This will not be the last edit by any means. And then there will be beta readers and professional editors and hopefully eventually something publishable will emerge. It’s a long road but at least I am making progress along it.

 

 

 

Blog Post No. 101

On By kepagewriterIn My Writing2 Comments

Okay so really this should have been written for the post before. 100 posts. Nice and Neat. But I wasn’t concentrating and so didn’t realise I had written 100 posts until after I wrote the previous post.

Anyway, this is my 101st post. It is a milestone, I guess and seems quite surprising as I can’t even begin to recall what I might have written for a 100 different posts. I would have imagined that it would have taken longer to reach what seems like quite a high number although in reality it has involved blogging little more than twice a week.

I would like to say thank you to all the people who follow the blog and who take the trouble to comment or to like my posts. It is always a surprise to me that people might find the random things I have to say interesting and I still get excited about each new comment and like.

I’m look forward to the future and writing the next 100 posts. Thanks again for reading.

 

The Best Laid Plans…

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At the beginning of the summer I posted that I was going to have a busy and productive month or so, writing and job hunting. I guess I should have known better than to make my plans public as the fates felt compelled to conspire. Just about 24 hours later, my husband announced that he had a lot of holiday to take and he thought it would be good to take it now while I was off. I knew immediately that I would not get much done.

So instead of long peaceful hours at the computer, we had trips to see family in Newcastle, trips to see friends in Aberdeenshire, brewery trips and jaunts off to see bands (Brendan Benson in Manchester was particularly good.) We went to the cinema and the pub a lot. We caught up with some of the films that I’d recorded on the freeview box. And I barely read or wrote anything.

Not that it wasn’t good, you understand. Often my husband works long hours and weekends so it was good to have him all to myself. I don’t want to sound like I didn’t enjoy myself. But I am used to having the summer to myself and being able to get on with whatever I want to do.

Still, he is back at work now and I have sorted the structure for Choose Yr Future and I can see what I still need to do and what needs to be removed. It is funny how storylines sometimes take on a life of their own. Now I need to do some serious pruning. I’m looking forward to getting my head down and getting out the red pen.

Anger is an Energy

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I’ve been thinking a lot about anger since I finished I Can Make You Hate by Charlie Brooker. Specifically my own anger. I do believe that if you are intelligent, you should be angry. At the state of the world today. So many things make me angry that if I started to list them, this post would go on for days.

I have also been thinking about how this fuels my writing. Or at least, it is fuelling what I am writing now. That is the advantage of writing speculative fiction. I can take my annoyances and take them to the logical extreme. The only problem is where to stop. At the minute, I have more ideas than I could possibly use. Which is good I suppose, as it could mean a series rather than just one book or maybe a different book set in a different future.

The main thing that is making me angry at the moment is education and this is definitely going to be included in Choose Yr Future. It was with a sense of dismay that I listened to the news that children could be ranked at age eleven. Apparently this will raise standards. All I can see that it will do is pressurize children and make some of them give up at the tender age of eleven. And of course, inevitably, the posher schools will come out of this at the top of the pile.

It seems to me that children – particularly working class children – are being failed by our current system with its emphasis on exams and testing. All they learn is how to pass tests.  Often you don’t remember what you have learned for a test afterwards as the test was the point, not the learning. The creation of academies, the ridiculous standards that Ofsted uses to judge teachers and schools, the lack of money and Gove’s depressing new curriculum, all of these things are destroying the education system in this country.

In my future, there will be a huge gap between the richest and poorest schools with only those who able to afford it progressing through the system to university. (With the huge amounts needed to pay tuition fees, I can see a return to further education for the rich only. I’m not sure I’d have made it to university under current conditions.) The result of this will be the poorer schools having less money, less equipment, only the newest teachers and therefore, a poorer education. The result of this would be that pupils from these schools would only have the opportunity for jobs such as working in a shop, serving the rich families, clearing rubbish, jobs that other people do not want to do. They wouldn’t be educated for as long because why bother. Jobs that require further education would only be available for the rich with their better schools and more experienced teachers. It wouldn’t take long for this self-fulfilling prophecy to take hold. You don’t have to spend all that long telling people they are worthless before they start to believe it. It would be a return to a nineteenth century style of education. Before the idea of education for all. I do not think it is melodramatic to suggest that it is in this direction that the current education system is heading.

 

 

A Year Already

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I can’t really believe it. A year since I first wrote my first blog. I can’t decide whether that seems like an awful long time ago or if it has flown by. Is it possible for both of those statements to be true?

In terms of my writing and this blog in particular, it seems like a long time ago. When I look at my early posts, they aren’t terrible by any stretch but I wasn’t sure of my own voice. I wasn’t really aware of my audience.

In terms of my fiction writing, I have published Shattered Reflections, had some good reviews and feel like I can call myself a writer now. It is strange, how it feels now to be writing Choose Yr Future. It’s no longer a secret thing. People ask me how it’s coming along. Not only that, it’s no longer just for me. Potential publication. Less hypothetical than before. It makes it more serious, I suppose but that is a good thing. It’s less like a hobby, more like real work.

Of course, time has flown by at it’s usual speed – too quickly. Too often, I am writing at the end of a long day. I don’t necessarily believe that you have to hit a quota everyday. I do try to write everyday but sometimes that comes down to ensuring I have a note of all the possible ideas that have come to me rather than lovingly crafted sentences. But there is not a moment when I am not thinking or planning and as long as I make a note, I know that I will get it written eventually.

So I can’t help but wonder what the next year will bring. It is certainly exciting. With the six weeks holidays coming up, I should get the first draft of Choose Yr Future finished. (Also on the cards, a career change. Teaching is eating up too much of my time. At least part of the summer needs to be spend trying to find something new.) And then it will be editing, beta readers all the way through to a final draft. I can’t wait.

It’s been a dry month

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June has not been a fun month. And I feel as though I have got nothing done. Of course, this is nowhere near the truth. I have done an awful lot. Those exam papers didn’t mark themselves. What I mean is, I’ve done very little writing and even less promotion.

I have managed to write one more chapter of Choose Yr Future. But it was in between marking or when I was tired and if truth be told, it probably isn’t very good. I also have a lot of notes written down hastily when an idea would strike (why is that never when you are sat at your computer trying to write?) which hopefully will still make sense when I get round to fleshing them out.

I have done very little online. The most obvious victim of this was my blog. It had been very much neglected, poor thing. Sometimes I wish I was in more of a routine with blogging, y’know writing a blog every Tuesday, Thursday and Sunday, or whatever. But the nature of my day job makes that sort of routine very difficult to keep to.

However, I have now got some more time – hence the three blogs in a week catch up – and soon I will be on school holidays with whole weeks worth of free time to use up on promotion and writing. Hopefully, I will have a first draft by the end of it.

 

The Real World Keeps Getting in the Way

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It has been a month of getting very little done. After a very productive April, I have had a really annoying May. The real world keeps intruding into the world of writing which is just rude, if you ask me.

First of all, I was in Newcastle, helping my mam after a knee operation. This meant ten days without the Internet and without really getting any writing done. This last was due to the fact that I like to write on my own and I never really was. So I maybe achieved an hour at night when I was tired, most of which was rubbish which I immediately changed. Although I did manage to finish reading The Female Malady by Elaine Showalter which is part of my research for Choose Yr Future so that was productive. (It isn’t all just about words on the page, I have to remind myself.)

Then, back at school, we got the call from Ofsted which meant that all spare time was spent preparing for that. An Ofsted inspection is incredibly stressful even if you aren’t seen – which I wasn’t this time – and I spent the weekend after in a haze of tiredness and so again got very little done.

Last week was half term, a time when I usually catch up a little and rest a little. Foolishly, I agreed to do some one to one tutoring over the holidays as extra cash is always welcome.  However, it soon became clear that I would get nothing else but lesson planning done and I regretted my decision. I’ll just have to hope that all the notes I’ve made when I have an idea will still make sense when I eventually get around to writing them in full.

Unfortunately, it will probably be the summer before that happens. From next weekend I will be marking exam papers for the next three weeks and that is incredibly time consuming. Its hard balancing the need to make money with having the time to write and sometimes it feels like the scales are tipped the wrong way constantly. At least I can see a time on the horizon when I can write and when I can catch up with myself a little.

No More Mr Nice Guy

On By kepagewriterIn Becoming a writier, My Writing1 Comment

A recent four star review of Shattered Reflections on Amazon said that although a lot of the characters were not nice this made it a better story. This review pleased me as it suggested that he had understood what I was trying to do. Making characters likeable is not something I have ever been concerned about.

It is certainly true thatShattered_Reflection_Cover_for_Kindle even the more appealing characters in Shattered Reflections have a nastier side. Jamie Hartnell, one of the main characters, begins the novel as a studious, sensible character. If he had remained that way throughout the novel, he would have been pretty one dimensional and no one would have cared about him. However, when it is discovered at school that he is gay and his so-called friend George starts to make his life a misery, I felt it was realistic to show the changes in his personality as he became more defensive and so very angry. His relationship with his mother also deteriorates, something he feels particularly angry about. He could not remain the same, no one could go through that and still be the same person.

At the same time, I do not believe that having characters that are irredeemably evil is any better or any less one dimensional. George could be seen as the villain of the piece but he was struggling with issues of his own relating to his sexuality and I wanted to make it apparent that this was the reason for his violence. Even the most terrible of characters – Patrick Bateman springs to mind – have to have something to keep the reader interested. For example, while obviously Bateman is not likeable, it is possible to feel concern for him and understand that he is trapped in a system that alienates people so much that they consider murder the only way they can be noticed.

Finally, I wanted to write a novel that was quite psychological and while it is written in third person, it is always from the various characters’ points of view. I think that if you could genuinely see inside other people’s heads you would find that most people have a less than likeable side. Most of us think things that we would never share and part of being a nice person is not sharing them with others. However, when you are writing from a character’s point of view, you cannot afford to leave such thoughts out. It would be dishonest and you would be left with those nice, one-dimensional characters that make for such bad fiction.

 

80000 words so far.

On By kepagewriterIn My Writing, Updates and information2 Comments

Over the last week, I have been reading over the 80000 words that I have so far written of Choose Yr Future. I decided to read through even though it is not finished because I felt, on the one hand, I was getting lost, and on other, my ideas were spiralling out of control. Getting to grips with my original ideas seemed like a good idea. Some of this was written quite a while ago when I was editing Shattered Reflections so I wanted to see if it all still fitted together.

I don’t work in a linear fashion. (That’d be too easy, right?) It has always been the same for me, whatever I have written, essays, lesson plans; I just don’t seem to be able to work in a straight line. Now, don’t get me wrong, I know where this is going and I do have a plan of events and also other things that I wish to include. But the story will be told from different viewpoints so if I get going with one of the characters I might write all of the events that they are going to narrate, rather than the events in chronological order.

As you can imagine there are endless possibilities for confusion with this method. But I am satisfied that it will all come together in the end. It always does. And it is good, I think to remind yourself of what you have done and where it is going.

It is interesting that some of the oldest bits of this writing are definitely the worst. They explain straight off to the reader what I have expressed more subtlely in other places. It will involve more re-writing then I might have envisaged at this stage. Ultimately though I am pleased to have done it, to see which ideas work and which don’t means I can focus my attention now instead of waiting until the very end.

So, a lot of work still to be done but this is the part that is the most enjoyable so I don’t really mind.

Writing Letters Home – a story set in the trenches

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I first read poetry from the first world war when I was in sixth form (more than 20 years ago now). I still remember reading some reading some of the poems for the first time and being impressed by how vividly they had captured the atmosphere of the horrific nature of trench warfare. Lines have  stuck with me –  ‘You are too young to fall asleep forever, and when you sleep you remind me of the dead’ from The Dug Out by Siegfried Sassoon, for example, is a poignant reminder of how close the soldiers were to death on a daily basis. My favourite Owen poem was Strange Meeting which has the soldier meeting the enemy he has killed in hell with the famous line ‘I am the enemy you killed, my friend’, although I loved all the Owen poems that we studied.

The era has held its fascination for me and I have read some of the classic literature set in that time, Strange Meeting, Birdsong, The Regeneration trilogy, for example. So when recently my A Level class had to write a story based on a war of their choosing, I decided that I would also try to write a story and I would set it in the first world war. They had to first of all find style models and read as much from their chosen era as possible, in order to gain an idea of context. They had to keep a diary of what they read and what they gained from it.

It was interesting to work so rigorously through the steps of research into writing and producing. I must admit that my normal habits were a lot less organised. I made lists. I made notes. A habit I have tried to keep to although there is still part of me that thinks that I should just be able to keep it all in my head. I read more poetry, more novels. I knew exactly where I was going.

The resulting short story – Letters Home –  owes a lot to the poetry of Owen and I tried to uses some strong imagery to describe the daily horror of life in the trenches. It also owes a debt to Strange Meeting by Susan Hill which is one of my favourite novels. The novel is about the friendship between two contrasting men in the trenches which ends with one of them missing in action. This was the inspiration for the relationship between Mark and James in my story, one of whom is open and friendly, the other more reserved, finding all relationships difficult. I decided to take this a step further than Hill and have one of my characters be unsure about his sexuality. In fact, it isn’t even as conscious as that. He is unable to acknowledge any of the feelings he has for James but also does not wish to return home to the girl who is waiting there for him.

In the end, what this exercise taught me is that influence and inspiration can come from two places – from factual knowledge of a given time and from reading fiction of a similar style or set in the same era as what you are trying to write.

Letters Home is up on my website under short fiction if you would like to read it and give me your opinion.