Wise words

'I cannot help thinking that to entertain is sufficient ambition for the novelist, and it is certainly one which is hard to achieve; if he can tell a good story and create characters that are fresh and living he has done enough to make the reader grateful. You will not have failed to notice that many novels are written which have every possible excellence and yet are quite unreadable. I hope you will not think it a willful eccentricity when I tell you that I look upon readableness as the highest merit that a novel can have.'


W Somerset Maugham

Filling the blank page

'You have got to believe in the project, the book itself. You have to find the WILL, and then the energy will follow.'


Lorrie Moore


Working on my novel last week, I came a bit unstuck. I'd been on quite a roll up to that point, sitting for hours at a time and loving the process of re-drafting and reading bits out loud, trying to hear what worked best. I think it's because the original draft of the novel did actually start off pretty well, and that's what encouraged some agents the first time round to ask for the full manuscript. But then, a few chapters in, it flounders....and so did I. Now I know this is good news in one way, because it's clear to me now in a way it never was before that some of my writing is forced, unauthentic and frankly, pretty crap. But it seems that my roll has creaked to a slow-down, and here's where the hard graft begins and I have to painstakingly delete pages and pages of this nonsense I once believed was so well written. And from the blank page, I need to begin all over again.

However, I take heart from the quote of Lorrie Moore's I read recently. Because I DO believe in this project, I truly do, and I honestly believe this is a story that needs to be told. A couple of weeks ago a friend lent me a DVD called 'La lengua de las mariposas' (The butterfly's tongue), a moving story set in a Spanish civil war in a Galician village. It is about the relationship between an inspiring teacher and a young boy and how the boy has to betray his teacher when war breaks out. Although my Spanish is pretty rusty, the film had me weeping my heart out by the end. I kept thinking how could this have happened? Civil war must be the ugliest of conflicts as its pits people against one another who were once as close as family, even family members themselves. Anyway, my point is that the will to write this book is 110% within me, now I need the energy to make this will a reality to help me fill that blank page.

As I type this, my little boy aged fifteen months is sitting opposite me in his high chair guzzling chopped up banana and squishing it between his fingers before chucking it around the room. Even if I never get this book published, one day I want him to read this book his mama wrote and sense that this was a story I believed in.

Nervous energy, breathing and hula hooping

Maya having a go at hula-hooping at Shambala Festival, 2011

I have a bit of a problem. I think I've mentioned this before, but when I sit down to write I have a huge amount of nervous energy in me. Partly it's because I am like a child before their birthday party: hugely over excited. And partly it's because I don't know quite how to get going again after a week away from my characters and the story they want to tell. I know that on occasion this nervous energy simply hasn't dissipated and it's been horribly counter-productive with me doing a bit of writing, then quickly checking my email, then doing a few more lines, then getting up to make a coffee, then playing a few notes on the piano, then sitting down again and doing some writing whilst fiddling with my hair - aaaaaaaaaggghhh! This is NOT good.

So today I tried a different tack. I could feel this energy fizzing all around me as I sat down to write and I thought NO - this is my day, my precious day to write and I really cannot spend half of it making coffee and bashing out a few unsatisfactory chords on the piano. So I tried an exercise that comes from my book 'Writing begins with the breath' which suggests that you spend a few minutes on the floor on your back, palms up and eyes closed, breathing deeply. According to the author of this book (Larraine Herring), this posture helps stimulate the imagination and 'because you're on your back, your heart is open, allowing you to experience both vulnerability and surrender. Your body is experiencing a place of safe openness - a place of trust from which you can dare to risk.'


Well, I definitely liked the sound of that so I gave it a go and then managed to get up and have a good hour of utterly uninterrupted and very satisfying writing (I know, this doesn't sound like much but for me it is!).Inspiration comes from different places for all of us, but for me, it definitely comes from that still, small space of calm, so perhaps I ought to be doing this more often.

After an hour I got very cold (this is another problem I have, because when I'm really into my writing I honestly don't think, fingers aside, that I move a muscle) so to get my circulation going I put on some loud music and did five minutes of hula hooping! I know this sounds a bit nuts but it is my latest craze and I love it. So let's see if this is something I can do every thursday - calm breathing at the start of my writing day and then hourly hula-hooping breaks!

September Beginnings

There's something about the month of September - the leaves changing colour and starting to fall, being able to see my breath first thing in the cool mornings, the start up of the school run - that always makes me feel like I'm  going back to school. It doesn't matter what age we are, I think we never quite lose that back to school feeling and sense of new beginnings that comes each September.  So here I am, on my sacred quiet thursday (kids with my ma), and my new challenge is stretching out ahead of me and I'm very, very excited about it.

I've talked before about my novel set in Granada during the Spanish Civil War - well, I've started the process of going back and editing the story I wrote pre-children. I've got a great big door stopper of a book about the civil war out from the library (a little light night reading?!) and am starting to listen to radio programmes and watch relevant films about that period. This is going to be a huge undertaking as I know now that this novel virtually needs re-writing from start to finish. When I wrote it originally, I was living in rural Suffolk and was utterly absorbed by it - I remember having conversations in my head with my characters whilst I was raking up the leaves in the garden - seriously! I can't quite imagine how it's going to work out this time around as I need to put my family first. However, I know I'm definitely not the first woman to write a novel with a swarm of little people around her legs and I am hoping to rise to the challenge. Can't wait!

Shambala Creativity

I am very excited about heading to Shambala Festival the day after tomorrow. I always leave Shambala feeling inspired and energised and head full to bursting with ideas. Anything seems possible after Shambala. And although the weather forecast is looking far from promising, I'm going to get my welly dancing boots and rain coat on and dip into that infectious creativity that lurks in every hedge, treetop and umbrella.

Book nests and publishing success

I bought this gorgeous card in the V&A reading rooms the other day. I think I have fallen in love with this place. They call it a bookshop and bar and encourage people to come in, buy a glass of wine or cup of coffee and then wander round, pull out a book and take a seat on one of many chairs and sofas scattered around. A very bold move on their part I say, because they may just get someone clumsy (like moi) who sprays a dozen droplets of wine on brand new pages. But good for them, because independent bookshops need to branch out and think of these quirky ways to lure book buyers away from the big chains.

On another note, I have very happily had a short story published this week in Prole Books. I wrote this one a while ago and stubbornly kept sending it in to places despite being rejected many times, because I kinda liked it. And I'm pleased to say that being stubborn has gone my way this time. It's called 'Song of Saira', is set in 1970's London and is about the relationship between an mysterious Afghan refugee and a young photographer who discovers the Afghan girl through a photograph.

Clare the wonder woman

I have a deliciously unexpected day to myself. I had a 24 hour tummy bug yesterday and thought I'd better cancel teaching for today in case it carried on....but it hasn't! And as it's thursday and my mother is looking after the children, this means I can do all my wonderful geeky writing things to my heart's content like submitting stories and poring over my Mslexia mag and reading lovely little titbits of literary tweet gossip - bliss! The floor that needs to be hoovered and the washing that needs to be hung up and the mountain of laundry that needs to be sorted can damn well wait.

On my writing travels this morning I also came across a lady called Clare Kirkpatrick who is a freelance writer and breastfeeding counsellor and co-edits a very interesting site called Women's views on news,a site dedicated to a female perspective on current affairs. Oh, did I also mention she has four children? Or that she suffers from depression? (How refreshing that she is being open and honest about it). And did I mention that she home-educates her four daughters? Yes - HOME EDUCATES. The reason I am getting my knickers in a twist here is that I just do not understand how this woman manages to write a wonderful blog + home educate FOUR kids no less + do tons of other writing + cope with depression. Blimey. Clearly there must be times when the picture is far from rosy for her but still, she actually DOES it. And here's me with just three children (definitely not home educated, as much as I love the idea of it), part-time TEFL teacher, scratching out a few sentences here and there, who admittedly suffers from bouts of horrible insomnia but all the same....am I just not managing my time right??!

Clare claims in her blog that she's no super-mum, but I'd beg to differ. Clare, you ARE a super-mum, in fact you are wonder woman incarnate. I could go on about this all day...but then that would be my gold-dust free day taken up.

Inspiration

'Inspiration doesn't descend like a lightning bolt from the gods. Inspiration comes instead from a steady breath, a solid foundation, and a commitment to the process. From a grounded breath, freedom blooms. From a grounded breath, your stories and poems can dance themselves awake on the page.'

Laraine Herring, from 'Writing begins with the breath.'

I am very interested to discover that the etymology of the word 'inspiration' is rooted in the idea of breathing. A stereotype of artists of all types conjures up the tortured soul, waiting for inspiration to come and grasp them and shake them into creative motion. But it's an interesting question this - whether inspiration comes from without or within.

 I don't doubt that there have been people over the years for whom the source of  inspiration has come from some outward divinities. I remember hearing a wonderful story about a writer many years ago in deep South America -  I forget the name - who was gripped by a physical presence of words that tumbled into her, almost like a giant ball of ideas and inspirations. And she just had to run, run, run as fast as her legs could carry her, in from the fields to get a pencil so she could write the words down, before the huge ball of energy and words was pulled out from the other side of her and would continue its journey till it found someone else. A fabulous story, but pretty rare! For many people who follow a creative path, inspiration comes more often from that still, quiet place within us. And as the breath anchors us to the present moment, there is so much that it can teach us.

I've just started reading the book that I took the quote above from, and I'm interested to see where it will take me and my writing (not that I'm actually getting round to doing any writing at the moment - grrrr! - but I'm thinking about it ALOT!)

Look no further than your own family....

When I was about eight years old, I won a competition with the Puffin Club in which we had to send in a story in which we wrote about an unusual or wacky family. My tale was a thinly veiled account of my own clan - pretty easy for me to write in many ways. Which leads me to this......

This is Matala, a pretty little fishing village in Crete. Photo taken circa 1967. Now, pan the lens round to the other side of the bay...

If you look carefully you can see some caves in the rock face. The caves date back to the neolithic era and were used, apparently, by the ancient Greeks to bury their dead. Let's zoom in a little...

In this photo, you can just see a couple of people sitting in front of a cave with a towel hanging up behind them. And if we zoom in even further...

...here we see a group of young people who inhabited these caves from 1967 for a couple of years. Some came for a few nights, others stayed months, charmed by the crystal waters and simple way of living. The girl standing at the top is my mother, and right below her, with the short hair is my aunt. 

Now all this is amusing, but what makes it a far, far better story is that last weekend, almost 42 years after these young people stayed in the caves, they had a reunion back in Matala! Yep, my mother too. The Greek tourist board have gone to town promoting the reunion, calling it the 'hippie festival' and it was a long weekend of revelling, music and memories for 40 of the 'ex-hippies'. Click here to see some of the promotion for the festival.

Priceless. I can't wait to hear some of my mother's stories when she gets back. Now if this isn't novel material, then what is?

Some positivity in the doom and gloom writing market

Yesterday evening, my husband and I did a rapid swap over of the children at Waterloo Station as he was going to take them home again whilst I had a rare evening out. I'd decided to wear a dress in celebration of the fact I had some time to myself, and it wasn't until half an hour or so later that I realised that one side of my dress was splattered in dried food (from where I'd whizzed up some food for my baby before leaving) and the other side was stained with coffee (sleep deprivation has turned me into a serious coffee addict) - ah well, it's a mama's prerogative to be forever on the grubby side.

Anyway, my evening out was at the Orange and Grazia Writer's Evening at the Queen Elizabeth Hall on the Southbank. It was chaired by the novelist Kate Mosse and included two published novelists, both in relatively early stages of their writing careers, one of the top publishers from Penguin and a well-respected literary agent. The discussion involved advice on getting published, writing tips and general information on the current market. I'd thought before going that I may come out of the hall feeling a little gloomy, because I constantly read about the dire climate and stagnant market for aspiring writers. However, I am very pleased to say that I came away from the evening feeling encouraged, inspired and positive. Yes, of course it's hard to get published and of course you need a whole lot more than luck to get noticed, you need some serious talent, but nobody ever said that anything that's worthwhile is easy. But the message I got was that both agents and publishers are looking for new talent and stuff does get picked up off the slush pile - if it's good enough. And that's the big IF, but I for one am raring to go.