March 7th, 2012
Pssst….this is an old post from my previous blog, but due to popular demand I’m re-posting it. So there you go.
HELPFUL WRITING MANTRAS
1. Stop editing, keep writing.
2. Stop criticizing, keep writing.
3. Stop self-distracting, keep writing.
4. Stop Facebooking, keep writing.
5. Stop whining, keep writing.
6. Stop reading, keep writing.
7. Stop doubting, keep writing.
8. Stop wondering whether you really are a writer after all, keep writing.
9. Stop stopping, keep writing.
10. Start believing, keep writing.
Posted in: Carolyn's Blog by Carolyn Jess-Cooke on March 7th, 2012
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February 27th, 2012
I’ve been thinking a lot about the phrase ‘how to write a novel’ and how attractive that is – indeed, many University Creative Writing courses are so named, suggesting that many an eager writer is keen to fork out large sums of money to discover the magical formula to writing a novel. And that’s fine.
But I’d like to suggest that a novel is instead *grown*. Yes, yes, there’s bucketloads of writing involved. Of course there is. But developing an idea for a novel and bringing the thing to a finished and publishable standard is much more like growing something, with all the attendant metaphors that ‘growing’ throws up.
One of the most frequent questions I get asked about THE GUARDIAN ANGEL’S JOURNAL is how I came up with the idea for it. I felt I couldn’t quite give a straight answer to that because, on the one hand, the idea seemed so forceful at one stage that I felt it had almost imposed itself on me, like a guest arriving unannounced and thumping the kitchen table for tea and biscuits. On the other hand, when I look back at the time of my life during which the idea took shape, I’m inclined to say that the initial stages of its development were akin to something rattling around in a vacuum cleaner, gathering bits of lint. I was working full time in a job that stressed me to my limits, I had two children aged one and two years old, and my stepbrother was killed in action in Afghanistan. Perhaps understandably, my memory of that time is rather sketchy.
But there *did* come a point with the development of the novel that it was suddenly there in my head, strong and demanding to be written. But even at this stage there is more growing to be done. There is more cultivating and nurturing of the idea, even when you think its finished. Right up to the point the book is printed, it continues to grow.
Taking a few steps backward: the very first strands of thought that lead to an actual idea are the *seed* of the book. In my case, I wanted to write about guardian angels for absolute ages but could never find the right idea (or the confidence) to produce anything I felt was strong. What I hadn’t realised was that this tender little seed needed certain conditions in which to grow. To drop the metaphor for a moment, I needed to actually *do* something with the idea. I needed to give it attention, mull it over in my mind, consider different possibilities for it. What made the difference in the case of THE GUARDIAN ANGEL’S JOURNAL was, by and large, a question that I could not answer easily. The question – what would I change I could re-live my life? – required the act of writing the novel to answer it. So in my case, the pot of soil into which my little seed was dropped was a burning unanswerable question.
And there it remained for some time. I went to work and slogged through sleepless nights, and I thought about this idea I’d had and watched it sit there in the pot of soil and occasionally I’d water it by thinking about the world of the story. So, I had a guardian angel as my protagonist. What was her name? When was she born? What was her world like as a guardian angel? What *rules* did I need to invent?
I nearly gave up at the thought of the rules. As an academic (at the time) I thought I’d have to drown myself researching every cultural and religious and social perspective on angels until I got it right. As it happens, the great thing about being a novelist is you can actually use your imagination and just, ya know, make it all up! So that, I guess, was like discovering the simple act of moving the plant pot into the sunlight. Et voila, the first peep of a little green shoot from beneath the soil.
So I had my angel with her watery wings – one of many ventures into the depths of my imagination – and she had a name. Now what? I started writing out sketches of her world in her voice. All in longhand, and all in pencil. On days when I felt particularly bold, I used pen. You can’t ask too much from a seedling. This is probably not the sort of thing University courses mention. Many authors discuss a similar aspect of the process when they say things like ‘never share your new ideas with anyone.’ It used to sound quite pretentious and precious to me, this business of reticence. But actually, it’s wise horticulture. One’s little seedling may will wither when one blabs the idea to someone, precisely because you always expect some kind of reaction. If the person’s reaction is negative, the little seedling will invariably wilt. If the person’s reaction is positive, said seedling may dry up. This is something to do with the false belief that the *growing* process is over, when in fact it has hardly yet begun. There is an awful lot of nurturing and indeed protecting required at this point. So no blabbing. Just continue to water.
At this stage it can feel like nothing much is happening. Just a little bit of green, when in fact you’re hoping for a long-stemmed blazing strelitzia or such like. You look at your pathetic little pot and wonder if this seed was the wrong one to sow. Maybe you should try a different one in a different pot? It won’t be the last time this question arises, but you keep going anyway. You got this far. More thinking and scribbling. More querying the idea, more listening to music that makes you think of the tone of the potential story, more mulling over the ending.
As for sunlight, pick your spot carefully. It’s a bit like the protection bit, only you’ve got to guard against your own criticisms. Too much worrying and fretting and asking too much too soon can shade the seedling in doubt. Fear causes total blackout.
If you’ve played your cards right, one day there’s a stem. An actual stem, with a bud on the end that has prised open just enough to reveal a deep red hue inside. You’re on the brink of an actual flower.
Galvanized by this, you plunge right in and write hammer and tongs. You produce the opening chapter in one night, the second the night after, and so on until you have the actual, legitimate opening of the book.
This is what happened with both THE GUARDIAN ANGEL’S JOURNAL and THE BOY WHO COULD SEE DEMONS. When I wrote the first chapter of the latter, the final sentence was a big hook for me to continue. It was like seeing one petal of the flower unfold. I wanted to see the rest. Despite all my tentative, gentle cultivation, I hadn’t expected to see the first petal so soon. It was thrilling and sudden. So I kept going. At each stage of the bud’s opening the flower looked different, mysterious. It looked different at various times of day. I knew the drill – sunlight and water, as straightforward as sitting down at my laptop and typing what I felt came next – so I went on and on at it until the whole flower was visible.
And even then, there can be much pruning involved until the bloom is ready.
If I ever return to teaching creative writing at University, I will arrive one day holding a small pot of soil. I will hand out trowels and lead students from the lecture hall into the nearest greenhouse. In any case, I’m sure the experience will be memorable.
The key ingredient in this process is careful attention. Sometimes the bloom never appears. Sometimes the little seedling does indeed wither despite every best effort. But it’s too tempting to believe that it can all happen without the seed, without the soil, without water and without light. It takes all of these. Right until the end.
Posted in: Carolyn's Blog by Carolyn Jess-Cooke on February 27th, 2012
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February 23rd, 2012
I did an MA in Creative Writing back in 2001. For the most part, it was fundamental in forcing me to take my writing seriously and considering it as a realistic career move. It forced me out of that no-good habit of ‘writing when I feel like it’ and writing to a deadline. It got me used to criticism (sort of) and feedback from my peers. We had talks from loads of professionals, including Colm McCann and JK Rowling’s editor. I even graduated.
But.
Not once did anyone mention anything about tax strategies. Not once did anyone mention the sheer mountain of admin I’d have to climb. I’m not complaining, here. I’m more than glad to be a full-time writer. But here’s a list, compiled roughly in order of weight/time suckage, that tends to make up writing as a career.
1. Sending forms to the HMRC.
2. Chasing the HMRC for my tax exemption certificates for foreign royalties.
3. Meetings – with my agent, editor, commissioners, accountant, and so on.
4. Replying to emails and phonecalls.
5. Author events – readings, signings, what have you. In the months before and after a book comes out, this is probably no. 1.
6. Social media. Tweeting, Facebooking, blogging. Also known simultaneously as empirical research and frittering away one’s precious time on the internet.
7. Visiting book shops and surreptitiously manoeuvring the sole copy of one’s book to the front of the shop.
8.Quantitative/qualitative research. This may or may not involve sitting in Starbucks flicking through a magazine.
9. On the train inadvertently listening to an argument conducted via mobile phone about socks.
10. Arranging childcare and other administrative element of work/life balance so that one can carve a writing day into one’s week.
11. Spending said writing day tending to sick child/husband/self.
12. In an attempt to correct the damage inflicted by a largely sedentary career, some form of reluctantly-executed exercise.
13. Reading reviews on Goodreads/Amazon and feeling sick or elated. Or both.
14. Plowing one’s way at a snail’s pace through the inevitable ‘to be read’ pile of novels and poetry collections.
15. Reading/judging poems/stories for competitions.
16. Worrying about state of economy/publishing industry/housing market/one’s career.
17. Compiling reports/commissioned work/reviews/blurbs/feedback etc.
18. Spending one’s writing day rearranging one’s work space/laptop files/Twitter profile/life.
19. Procrastinating.
20. Hunting for one’s muse at the bottom of a Diet Coke can.
21. Scribbling ideas that come to nothing.
22. Inadvertently deleting an entire chapter for a new novel that can’t be remembered nor found anywhere on one’s hard drive.
23. Standing in a long queue in PC World with busted laptop only to be told it can’t be fixed.
24. Finding the right “writing music”.
25. Finding the right “writing drink”.
26. Finding oneself on Google looking up holidays to California and, more realistically, Devon.
27. Signing for Amazon deliveries. Spending the next few hours pouring over delicious new books.
28. Missing Royal Mail/UPS by a nanosecond and therefore schlepping all the way to the sorting office to pick up what turns out to be mail for someone else.
29. Writing invoices.
30. Wrestling with printer.
31. Queuing at PC World with said printer and listening to life-story of fellow queuer.
32. Bartering for a replacement soon-to-be-returned-again printer from kindly PC World folk.
33. Pondering the existential dilemma of broken printers and what this means about me as a person.
34. Writing character interviews.
35. Writing synopses for new books that change dramatically with each writing day, until they are eventually scrapped altogether.
36 (or about no. 1001, depending on how no 35 goes). Writing – the sort that flows, works, and prompts a good night’s sleep.
Have I got this about right? How is YOUR writing going?
Posted in: Carolyn's Blog by Carolyn Jess-Cooke on February 23rd, 2012
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February 17th, 2012
I took my life in my hands holding the competition last month for a proof copy of THE BOY WHO COULD SEE DEMONS. My son saw my dedication to him in the front pages (or at least, he recognised his name) and held on to my copies for dear life. He would have slept with them if I’d let him. Bless.
Don’t be fooled by that angelic smile. You see the grip he’s got on that book? What it took for me to bribe it off him, I won’t tell you.
Anyhoo, we got ourselves a winner for the comp. I had LOADS of entries, thank you all kindly for spotting Ruen’s name, and sorry to disappoint so many, but I can only have one winner and it’s Cathy White. I’ll hold another competition closer to publication day. For now, though, purrllease make sure you check out the book trailer competition, it is awesome. In fact, please share it, won’t you? I need a great book trailer for this book! I’m counting on you!
Which reminds me: here’s a peek at the cover for the Italian edition which, unlike THE GUARDIAN ANGEL’S JOURNAL (in which almost all my foreign editions used the UK cover), is entirely different. I love it.
In other news, I have a title for my new poetry collection, which is coming along nicely. It’s MOTHERHOOD AS AN ORANGE. No cover image for that just yet, though I have a suspicion it might have an orange on it somewhere. I so loved the cover of INROADS, which featured a photograph by Jamie Baldridge. I think this one might be a bit different, though. Will keep you posted about publication details. So far, I’ve got poems from the collection coming out in The SHOp and Magma, and I’ll also be reading at the launch of the latter at the Troubadour, London, on March 5. In the area? Do come and say hello!
I’m leaving you with my Poem of the Week, right here. Nope, I didn’t write it. Helena Nelson at HappenStance Press sells be-oo-tiful poem cards (including one of my poem, ‘Yesterday, I failed‘) and she sent me this poem card as a gift. It’s stuck to my fridge so I can read it every day. Very necessary. Do purchase if you can think of someone else who might need this stuck to her fridge/stapled to her sleeve/written on her forehead.
‘Til next time!
Posted in: Carolyn's Blog by Carolyn Jess-Cooke on February 17th, 2012
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February 9th, 2012
Well?? I know I do, but unfortunately I can’t enter this particular competition because it’s about my book, The Boy Who Could See Demons (it’s out in May, don’tchaknow). Not only do you get the chance to win £100′s worth of books, but the competition gives YOU (yes, you) a chance to be involved in the book’s launch in a really cool way. Like, a book trailer kind of way. A book trailer that will be posted all over the internet to promote the book. I LOVE book trailers, so I think this is amazing. Click here to find out more!
Or, here’s the link:
http://www.piatkusbooks.net/calling-all-aspiring-film-makers/
Good luck!
Posted in: Carolyn's Blog by Carolyn Jess-Cooke on February 9th, 2012
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January 26th, 2012
Today I came across a book (or rather, a manuscript) I wrote waaay back in 1990, when I was a young ‘un. Like twelve years old. This wasn’t my first attempt at writing. I’d been hammering away at my grandparents ancient typewriter for years and was delighted to receive a brand spanking new ELECTRONIC TYPEWRITER (woooah!) for my 12th birthday. But then I started grammar school, where they had five – FIVE! – shiny Apple Mac computers – the type that looked like this -
They also had a laserjet printer. I remember thinking I’d died and gone to heaven. Or that I was in some kind of technologically advanced nirvana when I slotted in my floppy disk – you know, the new kind that wasn’t actually floppy – and opened up all seven of my manuscripts on screen. It was a very exciting time.
(My kids still look at me funny when I wax lyrical about the days of cassette tapes and black and white televisions. They must think I’m about a hundred years old.)
Anyhoo, these computers just about rocked my world. I stayed behind after school most days so I could seize upon the opportunity to write. I’m sure my friends thought I was a bit weird. My home life wasn’t awesome, either, so I killed two birds with one stone. This was one of the outcomes of that time:
I chuckled a little when I saw the computer graphics added to the text, like this one of a wine glass and some grapes – completely unrelated to the text, but Clipart was a far cry from typing on a typewriter (which involved nothing more glamourous than corrector fluid and chafed fingers…)
Next time, the novel I wrote (or typed) when I was 10, a sort of ‘Lovely Bones’ tale called ‘Teen Ghost’…
Posted in: Carolyn's Blog by Carolyn Jess-Cooke on January 26th, 2012
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January 4th, 2012
Possibly one of the best ways to be roused from one’s sickbed is the postman delivering the bound proofs of one’s second novel, titled The Boy Who Could See Demons. Look at this beauty:
Oooohhhh…….
Aaahhhh….
Did I really write a book this long? It’s much thicker than I remembered…..
Notice the graphics of dogs and cars and music and onions? Have another look:
They all refer to the plot. But THIS here’s something I’m particularly proud of:
Ignore my chipped nail polish. Ahem.
My publisher was kind enough to allow me to include my composition for a piece of music that’s mighty important to the story in the opening pages of the novel. Isn’t that cool?
So, now that I’m out of my sickbed I may as well do something useful. I know, let’s have a competition!
All you have to do is spot the name of Alex’s demon on the cover of these bound proofs and email me your contact details (and the demon’s name, of course) at my contact page. Sometime around February or March I’ll select a winner at random and send a signed copy of one of my bound proofs of The Boy Who Could See Demons to you in the post.
Good luck!
Posted in: Carolyn's Blog by Carolyn Jess-Cooke on January 4th, 2012
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January 2nd, 2012
Well a very happy 2012 to you all! I hope it has thus far been your best year yet.
I also wanted to apologise in a grovelly and not-my-fault fashion to those of you who had subscribed to my other blog, The Risk Taker’s Guide to Endorphins. It would appear that my domain subscription lapsed, and soon after sitemeter alerted me to some strange activity in distant lands a new site popped up at my old domain name, titled – rather imaginatively, don’t you think? – The Risk Taker’s Guide to Endorphins. I’m currently disputing the use of my old blog title but it would appear that this new site has binned my blog archives entirely. So I’m posting here one of the more memorable posts from that blog. Fare thee well, old blog!
Here’s a little recipe I like to share with my creative writing students:
Forget homemade cake. Betty Crocker cake mix produces the best cake in the world. No need for a flour tornado and mounds of butter: just add an egg, splash of oil and water, give it a stir, and after half an hour in the oven, you’ve got Nirvana in a dish.
Interestingly enough, there’s no need for anyone to have to add more than water, but the Betty Crocker company found that early sales were bombing. Why? People wanted to contribute to the cake. Yeah, they wanted a short cut, but not too much of a short cut. They wanted the ‘I made this’ factor. Hence, the egg. Once people could start adding an egg or two to the mix, sales rocketed. And so, nearly a century since the company started, we still have Betty Crocker on our shelves at Tesco.
There’s an important analogy for writers here: let the reader add their egg. Let them get involved, contribute, work stuff out, make their own connections. Don’t tell them too much. Give them a way to put their hands around the dough of the plot, give it a good knead, feel its texture. Let them make shapes with it before rolling it out. Don’t roll it flat for them. Let the reader pummel the dough with their own life experience, emotions, interpretations. Allow the work to breathe, expand, cool, set.
As a writer, it’s important to think of the reader. Not necessarily in the commercial sense. That comes later. But good writing involves the reader; it gives the reader a way in, a chance to contribute, a feeling that they belong.
You might say that a good piece of writing is a soft, spongey cake. Not a burnt offering.
Posted in: Carolyn's Blog by Carolyn Jess-Cooke on January 2nd, 2012
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December 18th, 2011
Hello there. Terribly sorry it’s been so long, but I’ve been attempting to write a novel over these last 7 weeks amidst a Sisyphean cycle of household illness. Nonetheless, the battle has been victorious – I have finished the first draft of my new novel, which I’m currently calling THE SCATTERING. I have yet to send it to my agent and editor, and as such am hoping they like it as much as I do.
This novel is a reworking of a previous novel I wrote way back in 2008 when I was on maternity leave with my son. I had two children under the age of 18 months and I suddenly understood the importance of my relationship with my mother-in-law. I relied on her desperately to look after my little ones when I needed a nap, or when I needed to write – a need that kicked in around 4 weeks after giving birth. So off I went, several times a week for about three hours at a time, pounding at a laptop I’d borrowed – from my mother-in-law, I might add – and writing what was my first ever novel. My practice novel, I call it, titled ‘Trial & Eire.’ Perhaps unsurprisingly, it was about the relationship between a young woman and her mother-in-law, only the wife had been widowed, and the mother-in-law was resolutely odious.
I plodded on at the novel for about 5 months without any plan of where it was going, bumping into characters as I went, following my main character and antagonist around and generally enjoying their antics. At the end of it, I had 100,000 words of tangled fragments of something I felt was generally unsatisfactory. I sent off the first 50 pages to a couple of independent publishers, both of which pressed me to send them the rest of the novel, but I felt there was no real novel. There was just a jumbled collection of notes. And of course, when the idea for The Guardian Angel’s Journal struck in May 2009, ‘Trial & Eire’ was plonked in a bottom drawer.
Interestingly enough, I had intended T&E to stay in the bottom drawer for keeps. I really believed it was unfixable, too chaotic to rework. But roll forward a few of years, and my mother-in-law – who read the first draft of the book and absolutely loved it – is still harping on at me to finish it. She goes on about it so much – and to everyone who will listen – that I roll my eyes when she brings it up and wish she’d forget about it. It was a practice novel, I tell her. It was 100,000 words of cutting my teeth, so to speak. But the voices of the widow and her mother-in-law never left me. Their characters were so strong that I felt I knew them, and – weird as it sounds – I started to miss them. So when NaNoWriMo rolled around this year, I had a think about what I could do to fix T&E. After all, I had deemed it unfixable. I returned to the previous draft and, with a gap of over 3 years and 2 other completed novels by which to glean a different perspective, began to see the wood for the trees. I saw where I had gone wrong as clear as day – I had taken the premise and smothered it with too much other stuff. Too many characters, too many plots. Too much happening and not enough focus on the central idea, the relationship between the widow and her mother-in-law. I think I had lacked the confidence to develop this relationship, believing instead that I had to pepper the story with a myriad of plotlines worthy of Eastenders. It’s interesting to look back on early material like this – I wonder how many budding writers receive countless rejection letters because their novel suffers from the same flaw.
THE SCATTERING is a work I’m happy with because it does what T&E did not – it explores my characters, mines their relationship for the plot instead of circulating a plot around the characters. Revisiting my characters was just fabulous – once I worked out what was going to happen at the end I just let them get on with it. At one point we all ended up in Dresden – not literally, of course – and it was so surprising and intriguing to write in this way, to create a flexible plot structure that retained my focus on the outcome but allowed the characters to develop organically.
But had anyone told me a year ago that I would rewrite T&E, I would have told them – absolutely not. Don’t you know that book’s unfixable? How many unfinished drafts do YOU have that you think are unfixable? Unfixable, really? I wonder.
Merry Christmas!! I hope it’s your best one yet. x
Posted in: Carolyn's Blog by Carolyn Jess-Cooke on December 18th, 2011
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November 19th, 2011
Well, we’re 19 days into NaNoWriMo – there are many of us fallen by the wayside, no doubt, but many still plowing on and, if you’re like me, extending your deadline a little. I’m sitting at just under 30k, but am aiming to complete a first draft of around 80k by Christmas.
I’m really enjoying writing my novel, BUT – and there is a huge BUT here – it has been haaaarrrrrrdddd…. At times the 2000 words a day regime has felt like a logistical impossibility. At the beginning of the month I was like, ’2000 words a day? Pah! A mere 2-hour trot!’ Now, having faced the onslaught of days that just get busier and busier, nights with a screaming child that render me soggy-brained and incapable of spelling ‘apple’ the following day, I have respect for 2000 words. RE-SPECT.
Still, I AM enjoying what I write, what is half the battle. I have toyed with the notion of writing the words ‘it doesn’t matter if it’s rubbish’ in black marker on my laptop, because sometimes that’s the only kind of mantra that enables those 2000 words to get out of my head and to the screen. And often, what I expected to be drivel is surprisingly decent – or, at the very least, fixable.
And – the sword of NaNoWriMo – I’m constantly writing ideas in a notebook. Those little scribbles are like seed bombs, exploding into scenes and character development that ultimately push my word count forward.
Keep going! I’ll see you on the other side. x
Posted in: Carolyn's Blog by Carolyn Jess-Cooke on November 19th, 2011
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