Tag Archives: writing

Caroline Corcoran: Five Books That Changed my Life

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Nearly ten years ago, I started keeping a notebook of every book I read. It’s incredibly geeky, totally pointless (turns out no one has ever wanted to know what book I was reading at Christmas 2015) and I don’t care at all because I love it. 

five days missing , Caroline corcoran

I love being able to look back and see what I read when the Big Life Events happened (I literally have zero memory of the first book in there I read after giving birth. No idea what it is. Not even vaguely). It also means I can revisit and see sometimes what I didn’t see at the time: how the books I chose related to what was going on in my life at the time. Still, <changing> your life is a big ask. I believe books are up to the challenge though. Here are five that did it…

Dear Nobody, Bernie Doherty

Context: I was a very dramatic teenager. If I broke up with someone I went out with for two weeks, I listened to Lionel Richie on my walkman and wept. I kept endless diaries where I wrote my pretty mundane teenage existence into what I see now was the prototype of a novel. I was fascinated by – and still am fascinated by – the depiction of human emotion at its edges. Only one thing to do: seek out the true drama in fiction. I loved a book with heartbreak and chaos and teenagers suffering loss and pain and grief. God, I loved all of it. But I loved none of it like I loved Dear Nobody, where teenage Helen writes letters to the baby she is pregnant with. It was award-winning and groundbreaking and I must have read it fifty times, easily.

I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings, Maya Angelou

“What do you like reading?” asked my then English teacher. I had moved on from that mega nineties shelf of joy in WH Smith – Judy Blume, The Babysitters Club, Saddle Club, every other club you can imagine etc – but I hadn’t figured out yet where to go next. She was a teacher that stayed with you, that English teacher, because she was the first person I had met (barring my chief book buddy Vic) who loved books like I did. Vic and I nodded in wonder when she passed on a list of recommendations to us for real grown up books (I could recite that list even now; it was a holy grail for me) and over the next few years, I read them all. I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings though, was the first and the best. I read it over and over, and I read everything else I could get my hands on by Maya Angelou, this incredible, life-changing woman. She was the first author who showed me what books could do: enunciate thoughts you didn’t know you had, make sense of the world by telling the most vivid truth and teach you about – not to mention transport you to – worlds so far away from your own. More than anything though, Maya Angelou made me fall in love with the unrivalled, crazy beauty of words.

The Handmaid’s Tale, Margaret Atwood

Somebody pointed out to me recently when I posted about writing this piece that when people speak of books that changed their lives, they usually quote books they read in their teens and early twenties and I think they are right. All but one in this list, I read before I turned 25. I suspect that’s because those years are when we are forming ourselves and books – as well as music and film – help us to do this. They show us who we are, who we want to be and what possibilities there are in the world. I would go on to read so much more Margaret Atwood (and to stare at her like she was a pop star heartthrob when I saw her being interviewed once) but this one got under my skin and kick started something in me. 

Gone Girl, Gillian Flynn

I think this was the first proper psychological thriller I read and the start of me uncovering – unbeknown to me at the time – the genre I would eventually write myself. Unreliable narrators, multiple points of view, twists… I adored the whole, all-encompassing experience and after Gone Girl, I read back-to-back psychological thrillers with barely a break for much else for years. Many were brilliant, but this was the masterclass. I still hold Gone Girl up as that holy grail and the most annoying thing: the book I would have <loved> to have written myself. Grrr.

Americanah, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Most of the time, my reading pattern is based on instinct: when I finish a book I know where I need to go next whether that’s a move to something gentler, contemporary, a classic, some short stories, something funny… Every now and again I read a book and all I know is that next I have to read <every single book that author has ever written>. It happened recently with Taylor Jenkins Reid after I read Daisy Jones and the Six, and I did the same with Tana French. But never has it been so mesmerising as it was in the summer of 2014 when I picked up a book I kept hearing about: Americanah. I barely came up for air. I’ve never read a love story like it; I’ve never felt such a strong sense of place, and I spent that summer hovering up everything else she had written. It tracked all the way back to Dear Nobody: I love reading (and writing) about human emotion, and nobody does it like the inimitable Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.

Five Days Missing is out 17 February (Avon, Harper Collins)

How I got a Literary Agent.

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In January this year one of the most amazing things happened to me: I got a literary agent. Having an agent was always something beyond my wildest dreams, more than that, my agent is the amazing Susan Yearwood. Champagne popping time indeed.

I spent the months in the run up to Christmas researching agents and sending off submissions. I went through The Writers’ & Artists’ Yearbook with precision, choosing ten agents to send my book off to. I researched every agent heavily and Susan called to me. There are a few interviews I found in which Susan and her ethos resonated with me. I knew she was The One.  In fact, before her email asking to schedule a call with her, I had a dream she was my agent and we were being interviewed at a literary festival together.

In the end I sent my first novel off to a lot of agents and publishers. I got a lot of good feedback and a few full manuscript requests. I also got a wonderful rejection from Harper Collins, who read the entire thing and sent me four paragraphs of feedback. They even asked me to send them anything else I wrote. In the end Susan passed on my first novel, but she liked my writing enough to ask if I had anything else I could send her. Thankfully I did. I always write a first draft of a book and then get started on another one while I let the other one sit. Then I go back to it with fresh eyes, alternating my drafts. I did not think the other book was ready and had spent hundreds sending it off to a professional editing agency for feedback. By the time the feedback came back Susan had been my agent for three months! It may have been a waste of money, but I have no complaints.

Susan loved the book and took my on as a client after our phone call. I was a true pinch me moment. For anyone who wants an agent and does not have one yet I would say the following things:

  • Write a good book. Send off the first three chapters, along with a synopsis that really grabs.
  • Collate all of the writing you have done and any awards you have won. Write a paragraph about yourself that sells all you have to offer. Covering letters are important.
  • Get a copy of The Write”s and Artists’ Yearbook and research what agents work in your genre.
  • Start submitting.
  • Keep submitting.
  • Take rejection in your stride.
  • Listen to all feedback.
  • Redo your submission to suit various agents.
  • Start writing your new book.

 

Good luck!

 

My Writing Process Ray Star

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Ray Star, author, writer, how I write, my writing processWhat you have written, past and present

I wrote my first story when I was ten, scribbled untidily onto folded green paper, unevenly stapled together with crayon illustrations on every other page. My teacher had tasked our class with writing a story to include three things: a waiting room, a light switch and a wish. I opted to write a tale of a young girl who found herself in a magic waiting room that gave those worthy a wish, if fate called upon them to use the light switch. I received my first A+ and have wanted to be an author ever since.

After my school years, I dabbled in freelance journalism, covering ‘real life’ stories for tabloids and the women’s weekly’s in my twenties but found this mind numbingly painful. To the point, it put me off writing for a while. I ended up starting my own PR firm and then, life got in the way, as it so often does, and my dream of one day becoming a successful author was lost to the 9 to 5 routine and all that falls in between.

It wasn’t until quite recently in 2018 that the idea for a story found me, and it wouldn’t let me be. It would find me just before I fell asleep at night, an array of nameless faces that needed their stories to be read, heard and understood. The title came to me when I was at lunch with my mother one afternoon, and a year later, my first draft copy of Earthlings – The Beginning was ready.

  • What you are promoting now

My debut novel Earthlings – The Beginning, is book one of a YA Fantasy trilogy with a message to the narrative, and launches on August 12th, this year.

Earthlings is the story of a young girl named Peridot, raised with the realities of her world hidden from her by an overbearing mother. One day, a young boy Euan unexpectedly comes into her life only for him to leave as quickly as he came, from that moment onwards, her world is never the same. Peridot leaves the clutches of her mother’s home in the hopes of finding her friend, only to discover all she believed to be true, to be something else entirely. 

We follow her journey into a world filled with magick (yes magick with a ‘K’), wonders and horrors that Peridot couldn’t have fathomed in her wildest dreams – or nightmares. For every step she manages to get closer to her friend, something new and unknown gets in her way. There are many twists and turns in the Earthlings tale but ultimately Peridot’s story is one of finding friendship against all odds and trying to do the right thing – no matter the consequence.

www.raystarbooks.com

  • A bit about your process of writing

I’m going to be completely honest with you – I have no process! I wrote most of Earthlings when I was pregnant with my first born, which was utter bliss. Just me and my bump and a fresh pot of tea, writing away by an open window with the breeze fluttering past to keep us company.

The remainder of Earthlings was written with a new-born, which never in my wildest dreams could I have fathomed would be as hard as it was, but I did it, and then, just to make things that little bit harder for myself, another bump came along. Bump number one is now aged two, and his brother, is eight months.

Writing time now, is done in the rare moments of quiet, which admittedly, are far and few, but when they find me, the story flows and I find ‘the zone’ as I call it, quite easily. Writing is the one thing in this world, other than my boys and a good strong cuppa coupled with dark chocolate digestives, that brings me peace.

  • Do you plan or just write?

Planning to write when you have children, is like planning to have an early night when you have children. It does not happen. It works in my favour to not make plans, and then by not making plans, enables the possibility of that plan taking place… if you follow!

  • What about word count?

For a story to be the best it can be, I have to allow it to flow naturally. If I force myself to write a set number of words, they become in danger of becoming precisely that – just words. I used to set the target of writing 200 words a day but by doing that, I did the opposite. Word counts seem to be counterproductive for my style of writing and I prefer to enjoy the story as I write it, whether its 50 words or 500. The story will write itself if you give it time.

  • How do you do your structure?

Alike the above, I had no set structure for Earthlings, I sat down and wrote the story as it came to me when I was in the moment. Although, Earthlings is book one of a trilogy and with book two, there are specific moments that needed to happen, so I made a point of having a list of key events that I ticked off as they were complete. 

Editing wise; I tend to write a chapter or two, read through and do a light edit, then keep writing. This way, when I come to edit properly when my first draft is complete, most of the leg work is done and the editing process isn’t as daunting.  

  • What do you find hard about writing?

The environmental cost of books plays on my mind a lot. Whilst I’m over the moon to finally be an author, it bothers me that my work comes at the cost of trees. Beautiful beings that have lived on this planet longer than I have are sacrificed for the literature we know and love. This bothers me more than I can put into words. 

My publisher, Chronos Publishing, thankfully, is very supportive of my concerns and has ensured that Earthlings, where possible, is to be printed on recycled paper. However, we were unable to get this secured with one distributor (Amazon) so I have recently launched the #ReadGreen campaign to hopefully encourage Amazon to offer sustainable printing options to the publishing industry.

You can support the Read Green campaign with a simple signature via www.change.org/read_green/ 

I have also pledged to plant 1 tree per book sale via Ecologi to combat any Amazon sales of my book, the Earthlings forest is available to view via my website.

  • What do you love about writing?

Everything. Writing to me, is as wonderous as magick. It is the ability to make your wildest dreams a reality. The ability to breathe life into beings, places and creatures that we dismiss as unbelievable. Pure escapism. If you’re a good enough writer. Anything is believable. If it harm none, so mote it be.

Love and light

Ray Star

@RayStarBooks

www.raystarbooks.com

Earthlings by Ray Star is out now by Chronos Publishing, £8.99

Anna Kent My Writing Process

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Anna Kent, author, writer, What you have written, past and present?

I was a journalist before I became an author, so I’ve written an awful lot of articles for publications in the UK and the UAE, and I was also a columnist for The Telegraph for six years and for Stylist Arabia for a year.

In terms of fiction, I have four psychological suspense novels out under my own name, Annabel Kantaria. They are Coming Home, The Disappearance, The One That Got Away and I Know You.

My fifth novel, called The House of Whispers under the pen name of Anna Kent, is due to be published on August 5.

I’m currently writing my sixth novel. It’s yet to get a title but I’m really excited about the premise!

What you are promoting now?

I’m promoting The House of Whispers by Anna Kent.

Tell us a bit about your process of writing?

I try to treat writing as I would an office job, so I have a strict routine: I put in about three or four solid hours in the morning, then I try to go to the gym or do an exercise class before lunch, then I fit in another hour or so of writing before it’s time to pick up my son from school. 

If I can, I’ll work again in the afternoon but it’s not always possible. I never work at night and I try not to work at the weekend, too.

In terms of the writing process, every book begins with the seed of an idea: sometimes it’s the ending, sometimes the twist, or, in the case of the book I’m currently working on, it was the inciting incident – the event that kicks off the whole story. I try and flesh this out, sketching out how the character will change throughout the story, and working out a plot that will carry that internal change and also allow room for a few duplicitous scenes, red herrings and twists.

I try to use a system where I write scenes on index cards and move them about but, generally, once I’ve got a foggy idea of the story in my head, I just want to start writing. It’s a mistake to start too soon, though, as I invariably then get stuck about 20,000 words in because I haven’t planned enough.

There’s always a point, about halfway or three quarters of the way into a manuscript that I lose faith and start to doubt myself. Writing is a solitary process and it can be a challenge to keep up both the momentum and the self-belief. You just have to push on through and trust the process. Having a good support network of friends and family really helps.

How do you do structure your books?

They’re all different. Most of them have multiple viewpoints because I love seeing events through different people’s eyes. 

In The House of Whispers, interviews with one of the characters are interlaced throughout the narrative, only you don’t know who is interviewing the person, nor why – you just know that something major has happened. The Disappearance started half-way through then tracked back, and it also had two timelines set about 50 years apart. I Know You was told with the benefit of hindsight, which allowed me to do a lot of foreshadowing to keep up the suspense, and The One That Got Away had alternate chapters from the points of view of a husband and wife. 

I do love a clever structure, but they can be very tricky to pull off.

What do you find hard about writing?

The hardest thing for me is trying to come up with that million-dollar best-selling idea: the high-concept story that becomes the most talked-about book of the year!

I also hate it when I get stuck in my plot. It happens at some point in every book, and I’m antsy and stressed until I get through that block and start writing properly again.

Other than that, just trying to be creative, day in, day out, with little or no feedback on how I’m doing, and no colleagues to bounce ideas off. Keeping faith in myself that I can do it. Not knowing if my book is any good or not until I submit it to my agent when it’s finished. That’s tough. 

What do you love about writing?

I love the creative freedom at the start of a new book, when the world really is your oyster. It’s like playing God. You have the power to create a whole world, and to populate it with whomever you like, and to make whatever you want happen to those people. There’s nothing like starting a fresh story. Even better if you know it’s a really fabulous idea! 

Days when the words flow and the story just comes flying out through my fingers are also fabulous. There’s no feeling like it.

 

Ahead of Her Time By Judy Piatkus Book Review.

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It is hard to think about now but female entrepreneurs used to be thin on the ground. Sure we are lucky to have Jo Malone, Anya Hindmarch, Natalie Massenet, Kelly Hoppen and Karen Brady, but before all of them came Judy Piatkus. A single mother-of-three who built a publishing empire with one hand behind her back. Well, almost.

Now Judy has written a book Ahead of Her Time; How a One-Woman Startup Became a Global Publishing Brand and it is the new bible to help other entrepreneurs and people who are interested in business. The book gives a fascinating insight for those who are interested in publishing. Judy did all of this while while taking care of her three children, one of whom is disabled.

I found this book so inspiring that it has made me drag out an old business plan I had and start work on a logo for that, and a new one for Frost. Piatkus books was built at a time when women were discriminated against. We still are, but it has got better.

I implore anyone who is interested in building a business, publishing, or even just loves a story about how someone built something amazing, despite the odds against them, to read this book. It really is brilliant. I will be handing copies out to my female friends. Judy Piatkus truly was ahead of her time.

Ahead of Her Time; How a One-Woman Startup Became a Global Publishing Brand  by Judy Piatkus is an incredibly inspiring book. 

Judy Piatkus did not come from a monied background and began her career as a secretary after failing to achieve a university place. By the time she founded Piatkus Books from her spare bedroom, she was married with a disabled small daughter and pregnant with her second child. Gradually she learned how to be both a publisher and a managing director and to combine that with her family life as she had become a single mother of three. A lot of mistakes were made but she also got a lot of things right. The company prospered, thanks to the risks Judy took in tackling new subjects in the marketplace and also her approach to running the company, which focused on transparency, honesty and trust and was rewarded by the loyalty of the staff, many of whom worked alongside Judy for upwards of twenty years.

In 1979, Judy Piatkus founded what would become a global publishing brand— Piatkus Books — from her spare bedroom.

A single mother, with a child with learning disabilities, at a time when being a self-made woman entrepreneur was rare, Judy defied expectations, influencing, shaping, and giving rise to a new industry of personal growth and development publishing.

 

Long before the bestseller charts were packed with mind/body/spirit, business, and relationship books, Judy created a platform for new, as yet unknown, voices and leading authorities and experts in their fields, including Jon Kabat-Zinn, Mary Berry, David Allen and Brian L. Weiss.

 

‘Ahead of her time’ goes behind-the-scenes and reveals the inner workings of book publishing. Judy details how her combination of financial risk taking, transparent approach in business, and courage to tackle new subjects in the marketplace rather than follow trends, led PiatkusBooks to become a leading global independent publisher.

 

Judy’s memoir is also a fascinating insight into building a company and brand identity and what enables a team and a business to succeed.

 

Judy details her learning experience as an entrepreneur — the triumphs and the pitfalls, what worked and what didn’t, how to reinvent through lean times, learning to be both a publisher and a managing director, and how it felt to overcame obstacles in order to build the career she wanted from the ground up, as a truly self-made woman.

 

‘Ahead of her time’ is published by Watkins Publishing, £14.99, and is available here and from all good bookstores.

 

 

 

Susannah Wise: My Writing Process

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  • Susannah Wise: My Writing Process
      What you have written, past and present

 Like so many authors, I have always written stories, poems, and the beginnings of ‘novels’ that remained forever unfinished. As a young child these were complete with messy felt-tip illustrations and growing up, pieces of my work would appear in the school magazine each term. I’m still not sure of their merit, but Mum always thought they were great, and she obviously wasn’t biased. 

    In my late teens, I found myself in a long relationship with a playwright and screenwriter, and encouraged by him, began a regular writing practice between acting jobs: short stories, plays, more poetry than I can recall; always poetry – I have an engraved Moleskine at home full of these personal noodlings. When I die, I dread to think of my family going through them. 

     In my thirties, frustrated with the quality of scripts I was reading (I am also an actor), I began to write screenplays and comedy pilots of my own. These would garner modest amounts of interest from the powers that be at television channels, but never reached fruition and they are now consigned to my ‘oh well’ drawer.

    In truth, it was only shock, when my father was given a terminal cancer diagnosis back in 2015, that propelled me into writing seriously. I think it made me reassess what my life and what I was waiting for. I tentatively started the novel that was to become This Fragile Earth, and discovered I loved everything about the daily practice of writing: the space and time long-form prose gave me in my head, the agency I had over my characters and the world-building. I haven’t stopped writing since.

     What are you promoting now?

    This Fragile Earth is my debut, and the hardback is out on 24th June of this year. It’s a post-apocalyptic survival story about a mother, Signy, and her six-year-old son, Jed, who following a tragic event, are forced to flee near-future London and travel to the Midlands to seek out the protagonist’s mother. When they get there, however, things are far worse than they could ever have imagined. The book is a grounded science fiction thriller, with at its centre, the beating heart between the two main characters.

If you’re a fan of John Wyndham, or perhaps Emily St Mandel’s Station Eleven, this is the book for you.

Susannah Wise: My Writing Process, my fragile earth

A bit about your process of writing, how do you do your structure, and do you plan or just write?

 I find it very hard to talk about ‘process’ when discussing art of any kind. I know some people are good at it, I’m not. I’ve written three books and for each one the process has been different. With This Fragile Earth the plot came to me quickly over the course of one night. With only a few small tweaks, I set about writing it directly from the ideas bubbling in my head. I already had a decent grounding in some of the themes in the book, although I made up almost all the ‘science’ myself. I even dreamt one of the main coding theories in there! In the course of completing it though, I did more research, attending lectures and reading books on the subject and so on. 

    My second novel, out next year, is a dark comedy about grief. When I set out writing it, I had no idea what it would be about, barring the bare bones. I had no plot, only two characters and not a clue what the ending would be. I took part in the Faber Academy novel-writing course over six months in 2018 and completed an entire first draft. I really loved the ‘pants-ing’ rather than ‘planning’ nature of this book, though it did mean rather a lot of editing once finished, of course!

    My third novel is set around some dodgy goings-on in a small village in Cumbria. Before I began, I had a plot, all the characters, and a location, and wrote out each point at the start. I did research on some elements in the book (I can’t say what they are here without giving the game away!), but the setting is a place very familiar to me, so that helped a lot. A few plot points have moved within the process of writing it, but basically, I am sticking to my initial ideas. I began during lockdown in April last year and am still going strong: I was hoping the first draft would be about 75K words, but I think it will be closer to 100K. Its completion has been hampered by home-schooling, preparing This Fragile Earth for publication, editing my second book, and the fact my partner has been away for seven months for work since January. It’s been slow-going, but I’m hoping the book is no worse for it. 

    I tend to write in the morning for two hours if I can, either at 9.30 straight after dropping my son at school, or after a walk or some sort of exercise, around 11. I find it very hard to write in the afternoon for some reason but will force myself to if I’ve been unable to complete my daily words beforehand. I’m also an actor, and auditioning and learning lines, as well as acting work itself, eats into a vast amount of writing time. Saying that, there is a lot of hanging around when one is filming, so I always take my laptop with me and use the time to catch up on my word count. It’s a brilliant and unexpected bonus and has made me far less resentful about all the ‘wasted’ hours actors endure.

Most of the time I am not filming and will write at the kitchen table (without music) or kneeling on the rug in our living room, using the coffee table as a desk. I get terrible dead feet after I stand up and will often hobble around comically for half an hour trying to eradicate the pins and needles. I have a special foam support for my wrists too, as I tend to get RSI after a long period of typing. My eyes do go a bit squiffy after a long session of intense focus. Basically, I’m falling to pieces.

What about word count?

    I tend to set myself a very achievable 500 words per day (five days a week) when I’m drafting. This will take me around an hour to an hour and a half. Then another hour perhaps of reviewing the previous day’s words. I prefer to set a low bar as I find I work better if I’m hitting my target than setting unrealistic goals, then spending the rest of the day beating myself up for my failures. This helps me stay motivated, which is important when undertaking such a vast piece of work. 

    When I’m editing a completed draft, I can easily spend three or four hours at my desk and hardly even notice where the time has gone. Even more if I have line edits back from my publisher. I once spent ten hours working on notes from my agent. I would strongly advise against this. 

What do you find hard about writing?

Ha. Well, this is a tricky one to answer, because without meaning to sound like a plonker, I really feel – for me at least – that writing is the best job in the world. I guess if I had to say a couple of things, one would be the loneliness (though ironically, this is also one of the things I love about writing). It can be a little isolating spending all day with only the people in your head for company, before going out for a walk alone. Sometimes 24 hours can pass and the only person I will have spoken to is my 11- year-old son. Love him as I do, he’s not a great dinner table conversationalist. 

The other thing I find difficult is the mental responsibility. By this I mean that like the expression ‘this book isn’t going to write itself’, the completion of any book is entirely in the hands of the author. The manuscript sits like a patient pet waiting for attention, but if there happen to be other things going on in life, it requires huge amounts of discipline and mental energy to carve out time to honour this. Some days the words fly out, some they are like sticks in a muddy dam. It’s important to know when to just close the computer and get one with something else

What do you love about writing?

What’s not to love?! I love that no one else is there making me write, it is entirely my own work, that ‘being left alone’ feeling. I love that it allows time for introspection. I gain a great sense of inner peace from its practice. On top of this, having a whole world in the palm of one’s hand is just the greatest feeling. There is huge satisfaction in putting words in order so that they have rhythm and cadence, just like music. The joy when one reads back a passage and thinks ‘hmm, that isn’t half bad,’ is like nothing else. 

More than this though, is the vast pride and sense of achievement from completing a novel, especially when one gets to see it type-set, or in its proof form, or better still the actual finished version. It is an object created outside oneself, to be held in the hands of others, taking them to new places, and will it live on long after the author is dead and gone. I still can’t quite get my head around this concept. 

This Fragile Earth by Susannah Wise is out now in hardback by Gollancz.

 

My Writing Process Michael Arditti

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Michael Arditti , authorWhat you have written, past and present

I am the author of eleven novels and one book of short stories, all of which have either been published or reissued by Arcadia and all of which I’m pleased (and proud) to say are currently in print.

I began my career writing plays for the radio and the stage, the former with more success than the latter, although I had a very happy experience writing The Volunteer for the National Youth Theatre in the 1980s.  Meanwhile, my play, Magda, about Magda Goebbels and Eva Braun in Hitler’s bunker, is to be produced in Latvia this autumn.  Nevertheless, I hate conflict in any form, and I learnt relatively early that such talents as I have are better suited to the reflective, discursive medium of fiction than to the more confrontational medium of drama.

What you are promoting now

The paperback edition of The Anointed, a novel about King David, narrated by his three most significant wives.  The novel came out at the beginning of lockdown last April and, although sales were hit by the closure of bookshops, it was widely and well received, with the Evening Standard describing is as ‘#MeToo meets the Old Testament.’  That somewhat catchpenny phrase neatly sums up the book, in which three women, Michal, Abigail and Bathsheba, who are side-lined and almost totally silenced in the Bible, are given their voices and enabled to give their views of Ancient Israel’s greatest hero.

A bit about your process of writing

I am a ‘morning person’ and write from 6 or 7 am until 1 or 2 pm, with breaks for breakfast, herbal tea (and sugar-free biscuits!).   I very rarely write in the afternoons, preferring to read, listen to music or see friends.  Until last autumn, I worked as a theatre critic and spent three or four evenings a week in various auditoria.  I’m slowly adjusting to the new rhythm of life.

Like many writers, including my hero, Marcel Proust, I write in bed.  I always have done, since for me it offers the perfect mixture of freedom and constraint.  In 2001, I suffered a severe back injury, which has left me slightly disabled, so lying, propped up by pillows, with my laptop carefully positioned, is my most comfortable position.  Friends, who previously thought me self-indulgent and lazy, now think me practical and brave.  A great relief!

Do you plan or just write?

I feel a mixture of awe and envy for anyone who does things that I can’t (from swallow-diving to fixing computer glitches).  The same goes for writers who open a blank page (or a Word document) and write the first sentence of a novel, without having any idea of what the next will be.  In my own case, I need to know the arc of a novel before I can start.  Of course, the characters lead me in unexpected directions, and we all know what happens to the best-laid plans of mice and men.  But I do need to have a plan in place, to be able to deviate from it creatively.

What about word count?

I pay no attention to word counts whatsoever, either in having to complete a certain quota every day or in requiring a book to be a certain length.  Every novel is different.  My longest, Of Men and Angels, is around 180,000 words, and my shortest, The Young Pretender (about the Georgian child actor, Master Betty, which is to be published next January) is 55,000.  But the majority of my books, including The Anointed, are around 120,000 words.

How do you do your structure?

Structure is very important to me.  It should say as much about the matter of a book as the story itself does.  When I mentioned that I always had a plan before starting, I was referring to a structure rather than a plot.  For The Anointed, I worked to a readymade plot for only the second time in my career (the first was A Sea Change, which tells of the ill-fated voyage of the St Louis, a ship taking almost 1000 Jewish refugees from Hamburg to Havana in 1939).   The biblical Books of Samuel follow the course of David’s life from his gilded youth to his despotic old age, although, from my point of view, what they leave out was as important as what they put in.  

Once I resolved to tell David’s story from the women’s perspective, everything fell into place.  Michal, King Saul’s daughter, bears witness to his youth at her father’s court, his early military prowess, and his relationship with her brother, Jonathan.  Abigail, a wealthy widow who facilitates his rise to power, knows him as a skilful (and ruthless) politician, prepared to betray his countrymen to the Philistines, and usurp his father-in-law’s throne.  Bathsheba, the best known of the three (largely because her nude bathing has been a gift to painters down the centuries), encounters him in old age, raping and murdering at will and unable to control his children.  Their stories intertwine and, at times, contradict each other, reflecting the many inconsistencies in David’s character.

What do you find hard about writing?

I could say ‘everything’, although that would be too glib and not entirely true.  Ever since I published my first novel, The Celibate, in 1993, I have met people who tell me that they too would write a novel, if only they ‘had the time.’  I listen politely but wish that they had both more sensitivity and understanding of how hard a profession it is.  It requires both self-discipline and self-confidence.  It is a long, solitary process, at the end of which you can be harshly judged, both privately by friends and colleagues, and publicly by critics and readers.  It isn’t manual labour but it is often utterly draining.  If the writing is honest (as it should be), it can be very painful both for yourself and those to whom you are close.

What do you love about writing?

Once again, I could say ‘everything’ and, once again, I would have to qualify it.  To be able to create a fictional world is a gift and to have the chance to share it with readers a privilege.  Losing oneself in one’s work so that all outside concerns and distractions disappear is the most glorious sensation, bettered only by reading through one’s writing at the end of a chapter and not knowing the genesis of a particular incident or exchange but knowing that it is absolutely right.

The Anointed by Michael Arditti is out in paperback by Arcadia.

 

My Writing Process Kat Dunn

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  • What you have written, past and present

DANGEROUS REMEDY was my debut novel, published in 2020. MONSTROUS DESIGN is the second in the series, out June 2021, and I’m in the midst of writing the third and final book in the series, 

Before my debut I wrote a whole host of finished, part-written and completely abandoned novels, none of which I let myself take seriously.

  • What you are promoting now

MONSTROUS DESIGN is the sequel to DANGEROUS REMEDY, and comes out 10 June 2021. The first book in the series saw Camille, her girlfriend Ada, and their band of outcasts rescue a girl with strange powers from the guillotine in revolutionary Paris. In the second book, the gang is split between London and Paris struggling against Royalist forces that are growing ever stronger. Think duels, necromancy, betrayal, and a cast of queer, found family misfits.

  • A bit about your process of writing

I work a 9-5 day job, so I write evenings, weekends, lunch breaks and early mornings. It’s not always been easy to find the time to write, and I’ve had to put aside other aspects of my life to make it work. But I’ve been writing since I was a small child, and there’s nothing else I’ve ever wanted to do with my life.

I usually have anything from 5-10 ideas fermenting in my head at once, but I try to focus on 1-2 projects at a time. I’ll usually write a draft in 3-4 months, go back straight away and fix all the bits I know are wrong, then chunk it over to someone else (whether my editor, agent, or a friend) to get some more direction for the next round of edits. 

  • Do you plan or just write?

I used to think I was a planner, but the more real planners I meet the more I realise I’m somewhere between planner and pantser.  

It feels like someone’s dumped out a jigsaw puzzle into my brain, and I have some pieces that are obviously corners or edges, or here are a whole heap that connect together to make a building or cloud or something, and then there’s the mess of unknown pieces. So I’ll try to write the bits I know out in a very sketch note form. I like scrivener for this, because I can make a document for each puzzle piece and then start grouping them and moving them around, while making notes of all the things I think should happen in that scene. 

Then writing it is like putting the puzzle together. Sometimes it zooms along, sometimes you realise what you thought was a cloud was actually snow and it’s in the wrong place and you have to pull things apart…. You get the idea. 

  • What about word count?

Apart from a few outliers, I end up somewhere between 80-110k for most drafts. Things grow and shrink during edits, but I don’t have an over or under writing problem. I write the right number of words, they’re just the wrong words and have to go in the bin.

  • How do you do your structure?

I really love books about story structure. I don’t think there are really any hard and fast rules (and a lot of those rules are western-centric and automatically dismiss other forms of storytelling). But I like knowing what sort of patterns are out there, and pulling them apart. 

DANGEROUS REMEDY and MONSTROUS DESIGN are fast paced stories that take place over a handful of days each. I didn’t get to play around with structure too much, but I did use the structure to think a lot about what information I share with the reader and what I withhold until the right moment. I love a good twist and to make them work you’ve got to do a lot of work before you can whip back the curtain and reveal the truth. Having a clear idea of my structure helps me work out where I need to lay seeds. 

  • What do you find hard about writing?

I’ve found it tricky know how to structure stories that are driven by emotions and character over big flashy plots. I’ve been working on a side project where this has been my main challenge and I’ve learnt so much. It’s made me think about my writing in a really different way and prove to myself that even though I’m a published author now, there’s still so much more to do and learn.

I find editing harder than drafting. It stops being potential and starts being a real thing, which will always disappoint me a bit for not being exactly the thing in my head.

  • What do you love about writing?

I had to think about this for a while. It’s like someone’s asked me what do I love about air. I like that it means I can breathe? I’ve been through a lot of difficulty in my life, and for a lot of it been on my own, so writing has been as essential as water or sunlight. It means I can exist. It gives me purpose and meaning and joy. 

If I have to say something specific, I think my greatest joy is when character drives plot and plot drives character in a really effective way – a slow burn character arc that takes a hero to a villain. I love writing in moral grey areas, where good people do terrible things and terrible people do good things.