Tag: writing

Plans for Summer

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It feels like this summer has been a long time coming. Now it’s here, I feel the usual panic at spending my time wisely. It is tempting to just lounge about and recover from the last term but before you know it, the weeks have been wasted and it is time to  go back to school.

This year, I have a lot of plans. First of all, I’d like to get Choose Yr Future into some sort of first draft. At least, it all needs to be written, even if I am still playing with the structure. (The structure is giving me particular trouble and I have already changed my mind twice about this.) Then will come editing and beta readers but I envisage that will be nearer the end of the year.

An even bigger task is to try and move away from teaching. Even supply teaching takes up too much free time, especially if you get a long term contract which happened to me in the last term. And even if the planning is less, it is still exhausting. And stressful, let’s not forget that. So, a change is required. 

It’s hard to know what else I could do. I’m sure I have transferable skills but the main problem isn’t knowing what they are but what I might want to transfer them to. Of course, there are opportunities to work online and I am investigating those. 

First up though, a much needed few days away. A chance to clear my head. Hopefully I will come back full of energy (which is sadly lacking at the moment) and with a fresh sense of focus. 

 

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.

 

 

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.

Keeping it small

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I’ve never been very good at writing short stories. The smallness of the idea never seems to last. Choose your future started life as a fairly simple idea about a woman having a melt down in a supermarket because she couldn’t cope with the perfection of the genetically modified tomatoes. Once I started to write it though, it very quickly grew to the current 60000 words of a novel. The universe very quickly expanded outwards – like universes tend to do, I suppose. Because it is set in the future, I suppose there are details and ideas that I wouldn’t have to deal with if this was set in the normal reality of everyday life and this is pushing up the word count.

Now I am concerned that I have too many ideas. I’m already thinking that my first edit will be a drastic one, hacking away all the ideas and characters that do not work or are unnecessary. At the minute though, I am willing to let it expand. It might sound ridiculous  that I would let it grow to untold size in order to crop it at some point in the future. All I can say is I cannot tell at the minute which branches it will be that are culled and which will be allowed to stay. I have to let it sprout with absolute freedom. Only when I have seen the whole will I know about the various parts.

 

 

Choose Your Future – New Project Excitement

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Blimey, it has been busy these last few days. What with exam papers to mark and supply work going haywire, I seem to have been nowhere near my computer lately. At the same time, I am enthusiastically scribbling chapters of a new novel at any spare moment – on the tram or train, before I go to sleep and over breakfast. No moment can go to waste.

As I mentioned in an earlier blog, this will be a different genre and style from Shattered Reflections although some of the concerns are the same – sexuality, gender, power and violence – but also adding in other of my pet concerns such as the nanny state, reality TV and the class system. It will be set about 150 years in the future which is fun as it allows me to create a whole new world. In fact, as I am grumpy and given to moaning about everything, it is definitely not an issue finding things to write about. In fact, it is more difficult trying to rein myself and keep to the subjects that I have so far planned for.

I am toying with the name Choose Your Future but this has already changed a couple of times and will probably again. (I didn’t settle on Shattered Reflections until quite near the end of the writing process.) Certainly, it will be a title about choice as that is a major theme. I have written about 40000 words so far (more, actually, as that is the total from what I have had time to type up. There are notebooks waiting for that privilege).  At the current rate, it shouldn’t be too long before I have a first draft although that is just the first step in a long process of editing and reading, it is still quite exciting.

New Challenge Needed

On By kepagewriterIn 30 Day Book Challenge, Updates and informationLeave a comment

Well, the 30 day book challenge is finally over. A sigh of relief then, definitely. But also the certain knowledge that I would like to keep up the blogging pace and I would now have to think of my own subject matter. No fun, this having to think lark.

So I would like to say two things in this blog. The first is a great big thanks to all of you who have liked my posts and those who have started to follow me during this last month. It is incredibly flattering and always a surprise when people like my posts and I never really expect it. I can’t imagine why anyone would want to see the inside of my head on the page. Sometimes I don’t even like it in there all that much. So, thank you all.

The second thing is I am looking for a new blogging challenge. Something similar to the 30 day book challenge which was good because it wasn’t reliant on my finishing a book under a time scale. If you know of anything like this, please let me know and I will consider doing it.