Tag Archives: Ada Bright

My Writing Process – Ada Bright

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First, thank you very much to Frost Magazine for inviting me to be here, specifically during this week which is quite a big deal for me!

My name is Ada Bright and I am a writer born, raised, and still living in Southern California.  I make a point of it because I’ve learned that alot about me can be traced to this little factoid. I am laid back about life and stressed about that three pounds I gained in 2017, I don’t own a coat that can withstand temperatures below 68 degrees Fahrenheit, foodie menus float my boat, and I am very leary of how you store your dishes considering the fact that I’m ready for the earth to roll and shake beneath my feet at any moment. Also, I’m married to a very cute, blue-eyed guy who gave me no blue-eyed children (0/3), I have a photography following, and my mother lives with me and still does my laundry (but none of this stuff can be blamed on California living).

Today, September 12, Canelo Digital Publishing is releasing a book I wrote with British-born-and-raised Cass Grafton called The Particular Charm of Miss Jane Austen. It is the first book we’ve written together, but it’s sequel will follow shortly behind – being released in November of this year. The tagline for our first book is “a comedic tale of time-travel and friendship” and honestly, that about sums it up. Cass and I have been friends for nearly two decades and the many varied and often hilarious differences we’ve discovered in how our two cultures have shaped us is as much at the heart of this book as our love for Jane Austen’s novels.

Even as we work on the marketing for these novels (and start outlining a third in the series), I am also working on a romantic mystery set right in the US. This is quite a shift to try to work alone. I realize that what Cass does effortlessly (keep in mind the structure and order of the story throughout) I struggle with. My natural rhythm of writing is to compose a scene in my mind almost entirely, then write it all on the page in one quick lump of words (after that initial rush, I’ll slowly revise everytime I read through it). Therefore, I jump around from scene to scene as the inspiration strikes. Since I don’t have Cass to give me order, I’ve been meticulously writing scenes on sticky notes and moving them around on the floor to figure out the order they need to go in. It’s been fun and overwhelming and a bit of a housekeeping mess, but I think, in my own meandering way, I’ve found a way to thread it all together. 

Writing is like that for me. I write because the words give structure to my mind. I wrote as a child to understand my feelings and my choices. I wrote as a teenager to entertain my peers with “friend fiction” (Yes, that boy at the mall who took your lunch order did fall in love with you immediately! Or, even if he didn’t, I’ll write a story that will make you feel like he did). I write today because I hope that what makes me feel excitement, joy, and love will entertain others as well. 

Thank you again for having me, Frost Magazine! 

 

SISTER SCRIBES: CASS GRAFTON ON HOW 200 YEAR OLD SISTER SCRIBES HELPED FIND A CHARACTER

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Writers have various ways of defining the characters in their books. When one of your characters is, or was, a real person, however, surely it’s so much easier?

Well, that depends on whether you’re sensible and choose someone about whom there is a wealth of fact available, along with authenticated portraits or photographs. If you’re not sensible, and I’m sure you can tell where this is going, it’s not quite so easy.

I co-write with my friend, Ada Bright, and because we have to ensure we’re imagining our characters with the same face and figure, we usually turn to the great Oracle that is Google Images for their appearance. This works brilliantly, unless your character is Jane Austen.

There are a few portraits that claim to be of Jane, but only one showing her face is authenticated. It’s a small pencil and watercolour drawing by her sister, Cassandra, and said by one of Jane’s nieces to be ‘hideously unlike’, whilst others claimed ‘perhaps it gave some idea of the truth’. Faint praise indeed.

Needless to say, as the only authenticated image, it has been widely used, mainly in an increasingly prettified form over the years, most recently on the new ten-pound note.

We were left, therefore, with written accounts of Jane Austen’s appearance. These vary in the eyes of the source, but there are some common similarities: she was tall and slender, her brunette hair was long but cut short around the face to form curls, as was the fashion at the time, and she had hazel eyes, full cheeks and a clear complexion.

This helps our imagined physical manifestation of Jane. But what about her personality?

One of her brothers, Frank, then Admiral Francis Austen, wrote of her in 1852:

‘She was cheerful, not easily irritated, a little shy with strangers. Her natural reserve was sometimes misinterpreted as haughtiness. She was kind and funny, never failing to excite “the mirth and hilarity of the party”.’

Letters, therefore, became our best source. Jane and her beloved elder sister, Cassandra were incredibly close. Even as a child, their mother claimed that ‘if Cassandra were going to have her head cut off, Jane would insist on sharing her fate’.

Jane and Cassandra enjoyed a healthy correspondence when apart. Although we can ‘hear’ Jane’s voice through the characters of her novels, in her correspondence she is very much herself: open and honest, her wit to the fore, and clearly set upon entertaining her sister even as she wrote about mundane things such as the weather, the neighbours and the price of bread, including:

‘Next week I shall begin operations on my hat, on which you know my principal hopes of happiness depend.’ (1798)

‘I do not want people to be very agreeable, as it saves me the trouble of liking them a great deal.’ (1798)

‘I will not say that your mulberry trees are dead but I am afraid they are not alive.’ (1811)

‘He has but one fault, which time will, I trust, entirely remove – it is that his morning coat is a great deal too light.’ (1796)

‘She looks remarkably well (legacies are very wholesome diet)…’ (1808)

Although Cassandra destroyed many of Jane’s letters shortly before her own death, we are grateful to her for passing so many on to family members. It is thanks to her that we were able to develop Jane’s character, and we hope we did her wit and zest for life justice in our books.

 

Sources: Jane Austen’s Letters (4th Edition – 2011), collected and edited by Deirdre le Faye; A Memoir of Jane Austen, by James Edward Austen-Leigh (1870)

 

 

SISTER SCRIBES GUEST: ADA BRIGHT ON BEING A CO-AUTHOR

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I’m delighted to welcome my very good friend and fellow co-author, Ada Bright, to Sister Scribes. Ada is a novelist and a photographer, a wife and a mom and a very picky eater. She has lived in Southern California her whole life and says she fits into a good number of the stereotypes of the area, including being pretty laid back, considering anything below 65F as frigidly cold, and being unfazed by any earthquake under 5.0.

Over to you, Ada!

 

Thank you to Cassandra Grafton for inviting me to be a guest on Sister Scribes.  I was going to quip that we really are “sister scribes” since we co-author novels together, and we are unofficial family, but then I was imagining Cass reading it and injuring her eyes because she rolled them so hard… and I wouldn’t want to be the cause of something like that!

My best memories of childhood are from when I was living fictional stories by reading books. The characters I read about and re-read about were so much more formative to who I am than my early peers.

Writing became a natural next step for me. By writing extra scenes or character studies, I could hold on to the world I loved longer. My desire to write novels came more recently, but stemmed from a similar core. I simply wanted more.

Of course, impatience is not usually a good trait for a writer. But, in my case, I got  very, very lucky: I’d already met Cass. While we share a similar taste in stories, our writing is very different. I write in bursts that push the story forward, she composes a scene and always seems to have a handle on just exactly where our characters, our plot and even the reader are in their experiences at any given moment.

While we specialize in different areas, when we co-write, there is not one sentence that is purely one or the other of us. We write alone during our respective work days (which are 9 hours apart, since Cass lives in Switzerland). That means we usually start by waking up to a new scene from the other partner that we will begin by editing. Once we edit the new material, we either ask for a call to clarify what we’ve read or what we need to write next or we just continue on.

So many times, while talking about our first co-written novel The Particular Charm of Miss Jane Austen, I say how much I love co-writing with Cass – I mean, what writer wouldn’t want to hand off a scene that isn’t working to someone else and have it come back polished?! But, the further I get on in my solo novel, the more I realize that this experience of creating a shared world with someone has been a learning experience beyond measure.

As hard as writing can be, Cass and I have created a system that is, with all its ups and downs, fun. I have often joked about how I would leave text in the middle of the manuscript that said something to the effect of “Cass writes something brilliant here.” It can be a crutch, most definitely, but eventually, each writer will have taken a turn at being the hero even if the night before their entire scene ended up in the bin.

What I couldn’t have predicted is that seeing how Cass untangled us taught me both to recognize my negative patterns and also to learn ways of getting myself out of the ditches I’d written myself into.

Last year, Cass and I signed with Canelo Digital Publishing, and we’ve just finished writing our second novel together, which will be out later this year. No matter where our single careers take us, I will always be game to join our words together to create the voice that is both of us but not quite either of us.

Thank you for having me, Sister Scribes!

 

You can find Ada and Cass on their Blog, Tabby Cow: https://tabbycow.com

Alternatively, Ada can be found on:

Facebook Ada Bright

Twitter @missyadabright

 

BUSINESS OF BOOKS: READING AWAY

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Jane Cable catches up on some reading

Those of you who follow this column will know that I struggle to read while I’m writing, so holidays are the best time for me to catch up with the books I’ve been squirreling away on my Kindle. My recent trip to the US was good in that there were long flights, but bad because once we were there we had such a busy schedule it was hard to squeeze in too many pages.

Nevertheless, I did manage to finish a few, mainly those by authors I know (you make promises and fell obliged – in a good way, of course). Others like screenwriting bible Save The Cat deserve an article all of their own, but here are some thoughts on the fiction I managed to chomp through.

The Particular Charm of Miss Jane Austen by Ada Bright and Cassandra Grafton

It clear to see that this is a book that was written for fun, with many personal quirks and touches and as such it’s very much a tale of female friendship which reflects the real one between the co-authors. But it’s much more than that; it’s also a romance with a mystery to solve and the history surrounding Jane Austen is impeccable researched.

Set in modern day Bath at the time of the annual Jane Austen Festival the plot revolves around the time-travelling author who gets stuck in the twentieth century – with serious – and hilarious – consequences. I’m delighted to say that the book has just been acquired by Canelo and will be re-issued next year.

Sadie’s Wars by Rosemary Noble

I’ve known Rosemary for a number of years through Chindi Authors, but I have never before got around to reading one of her books. Sadie’s Wars is her latest – and technically third in her Currency Girls saga – but don’t let that put you off because it works well as a standalone novel.

The book goes back and forth between Australia before and during World War One and England during World War Two. Although both eras are beautifully drawn I found I related to the English story far more and it is a truly beautiful one. Rosemary captures the privations of the era so brilliantly and the love story Sadie finds in her later years is warm, real and lacking in sentiment.

The Cornish Village School – Breaking the Rules by Kitty Wilson

I’m not always the biggest romcom fan, but Kitty Wilson’s writing genuinely makes me laugh out loud. It’s the small observations, the turns of phrase – the genuine frustrations people feel when faced with contrary small children and difficult adults. And of course I was drawn to these books, not only because Kitty is a friend but because they are set in Cornwall.

Although inhabited by the cast of characters necessary to create romcom chaos and alchemy, the village of Penmenna itself feels pretty real. It’s not a tourist trap, it’s the Cornwall I’ve come to know and love since I’ve been here, with scruffy pubs full of genuinely eccentric locals who later career home down tiny single-track lanes and by some miracle get there unscathed.

The book is the first in a series and last week the next one – Second Chances – appeared. And it’s even better than the first.