Where did I go?

This morning I ran beside a rough green sea.  The sun was out, which made it easy, and the wind was sharp, which did not.  It blew at me so hard it seemed I would never get to the place where I tend to turn, the arbitrary yellow line drawn on the pavement that means I’ve reached the halfway point.
When I started to run, it was in the woods.  Two years ago, I had a long residency at Yaddo in upper state New York, and I ran around its lake, dodging ice and snow and watched as spring came slowly, slowly.  (Here’s a post I wrote about starting late as a runner, and all the things Yaddo taught me that I’ve tried to keep, with differing degrees of success.)  One year ago, I was running pretty well, thinking every year I’d get that little bit better, that little bit stronger and faster – and then a bit of news changed every direction I had set for myself and changed all the courses.
One year and one week ago, I landed in LA to sit with my mother in the hospital, to walk beside her metal bed as it wheeled down the corridor for the first of her 10 radiation treatments, and to be with her for her first round of chemotherapy; there were meant to be 3.  A radiologist said she “had months” and the oncologist wanted to “find the source” so that they could best treat it, though no one seemed to be under any illusion that they could “cure” her.  At 83 with cancer in her bones, they were only looking to give her a little more time to get ready.  As it was, she lasted 30 days.  Some of those days I missed, thinking we had those “months” ahead.  I flew back to file my taxes, for goodness sake, and for other commitments that, with hindsight, I could have cancelled easily.  You cannot know what is coming, even when someone tells you there will be time.  And, all of a sudden, it has been a year.

Where did I go?  I have not been here.  I have been somewhere far away, deep inside my head, but today the sun was out and I felt as if I were back in my skin.  It’s new skin now.  Rawer and thinner.  The wind can blow right throw me.  My body is full of new and surprising sources of pain, as is my heart.  (My back went out at the end of December, a little past the halfway point of last year, when I should have been turning around and running back.  It taught me a lesson. There is nothing like lying on the floor with your knickers around your news to remind you that, sometimes, you have to ask for help to get back up.)
I have asked for a lot of help this year.  Not enough, maybe, but far more than I am accustomed to.  I’m made of Puritan stock; we endure.  I benefitted from asking for help from old friends, distant cousins, chiropractors and psychotherapists. The School of Life taught me artful lessons in calm and resilience.  (What I thought was resilience was endurance.  We should not seek to endure, I have learned, but to thrive.  I have learned how resilent I am.)  I am grateful for wise teachers, generous writer-friends, and kind people able to overlook my crazy – or to sit with my crazy and let it be.
At the halfway point today, I turned around and found the wind was at my back.  And suddenly, it was warm and calm, and the run for home was light.  And I felt nothing but gratitude for being on my feet.  And I don’t know where I’ve been for the last year, but I feel as if, right now, I’m here.

 

 

Coming Out

My writing life is quiet.  Most days I’m found trudging up and down the garden path from the house to the Blue House, my little writing hut.  For me, writing happens when nobody is watching.  It is the silence behind social media.  It is the dark side of the moon.  But sometimes, even a quiet writer like me is coaxed back out and into the light.
Recently, I had the great fortune of travelling to do some writing with my favourite group of writers, The Prime Writers, at the wonderfully monastic Gladstone’s Library.  Accustomed to workshops as I am, I know the power of writing in good company, but we were not there to share work.  We were simply there, in silent companionship, each of us battling away at our own works-in-progress.  Here’s what a few of us have had to say about the life-giving power of retreats.

IMG_0055I was also very pleased to be invited to read my Costa Short Story Award shortlisted story, The Night Office, at our local university for World Book Day.  It is very public to share work, to read out, and it is such a joy to do so after so much silence, particularly as my story tells that of a cloistered nun who is screaming inside.
Screen Shot 2016-03-12 at 10.20.42Lastly, I was included in a new Popaganda podcast from Portland, Oregon, a throwback to talking about cults in the way I did, a lot, when Amity & Sorrow was first published.
(You can also listen to interviews on cults in popular culture and a tea cult – no, really!) I’m two books away from those bound sisters now, in my busy head, but it was a luxury to remember how they started, how I started, and to feel how far I’ve come, even though, most of the time, nobody can see it.

 

 

Library Love

My favourite library is always changing.  When I was small, it vacillated between the hushed dark of the Sierra Madre Public Library, with its polished wood shelves and its stern librarians, and the tiny, mobile library at the edge of the parking lot in a small town in the High Desert, where I most found myself.  There was no hush here.  You could hardly fit more than one or two readers inside.  The air was filled with sand dust and the librarians let me take out a shopping bag full of books at a time, when they realised I could come in only once a week or so.  It is not a huge achievement to say that I read the entire children’s section, and then moved on to consume their gothics – it is thanks to the librarians of Lucerne Valley that I found Mary Stewart, Phyllis Whitney — and Charlotte Bronte – and then on to their thrillers, their mysteries.  They did not censor reading.  They encouraged experimentation, even though their stock was extremely limited, and they often thanked me for “rotating” what stock their way, by checking things that that, perhaps, few had.  It’s long gone now, but libraries will always be my safe place.  Here, in London, it is still the same.

WelcomeCollection_ReadingRoom_SCP_7a-1500x938Here in London, my favourite library is a far cry from a dusty desert.  Whenever I can, I trundle in to the wonderful Wellcome Collection, to stare at their collections, which include “medical oddities and artefacts”, gape at the magnificent new Reading Room, and then plug myself in at a long table in the Wellcome Library.  Here’s a little more about it, on The Prime Writers site:

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Three cheers for libraries – hip hip!

Costa Short Story Award 2015

Pleased as punch to be on the shortlist for this year’s Costa Short Story Award, which is judged anonymously and voted on by the public.  We’ve all been under strict instructions to keep it a secret, but here’s the news in The Bookseller and  The Guardian:

Screen Shot 2016-01-19 at 09.41.09

CScreen Shot 2016-01-19 at 09.47.04ongratulations to all of the shortlist:  Rupert Thomson, Annalisa Crawford, Erin Soros, Niall Bourke and Danny Murphy.  Voting is closed now, but if you’d like to take a look or a listen to all of our short stories, here’s a link (scroll all the way down to the bottom to find mine, The Night Office, read by the lovely Kate Dyson.)

Now, as the invitation to the swank awards ceremony states Dress:  Formal the really big issue is – what is a writer to wear?!?

Thanks to any of you who voted!

Writing Resolutions

imagesHave you made your writing resolution yet? Yes, I know we’re well into the new year.  Ical says we’re nearly halfway through this month of resolutions called January, and the fab Prime Writers have been posting one writer’s resolution every day.  While many have been pledging to stand up more, to leave our desks and live a little, today’s resolution is mine.  Want to know what I plan to do more of? Pop on over to The Prime Writers and see!  You’ll also find a great new two-part blog on finding more time for writing – another great resolution.

On resilience and gratitude

IMG_5371Today is a good day.  It started with a cup of tea and a good, long run by the sea.  I haven’t been much of a runner lately, because I have been so tasked with editing.  And because I haven’t run in so long, my iPod ran out of juice two songs down the road.  Disaster!  Typically, I run and write to music, the same music, again and again, as if I can conjure some spell to keep me going, keeping my fingers and my feet in constant motion. Today, there was nothing but my own huffing and puffing and the scud of my feet, until I realised I could also hear the sea, grey waves on the shingle, sounds ordinarily shielded by Elvis and the Doobie Brothers in my ear. The wind was still, the sun was bright, the dogs were curious. And maybe the silence made room for thankfulness, for instead of chanting along to Genesis, I was thinking about the long hard run we do as writers.  How easy it is to lose momentum, lose our footing.  We stumble, we run out of steam.  Today reminded me how thankful I am for the running, for one foot in front of the other, and for the writing, one word after the other, even when the running and writing are hard. We trip up.  We fall.
This fall I have been working on resilience, getting back up on my feet. I have been talking classes and talking to people about how to bounce back/bounce forward and, initially, to look for ways to thicken my skin. Of late, it has felt far too thin.  Any wind could blow right through me. blow me down.  I realise I’m more fish skin than leather, when this industry requires we wear vinyl, Teflon, bubble wrap, aluminium, chain mail, Kevlar.  The other day, I was told that I’m porous and, now, I think that’s no bad thing.  Most humans are, when they’re vulnerable.  Writers (and humans) have to be porous enough to let all the feelings pass through, to turn soft bellies out to the world even at the risk of being kicked. Today, I’m thankful for thin skin and flexibility. Knees that bend, fingers that type, wrists and hips and feet and limbs that take me where I want to go, even when the road and the writing are hard.  The seasons change, and so do we.  Today, instead of turkey eating, I’m sitting down to write with a cup of tea, as I would on any ordinary, but wonderful, day.

The Writes of Women

If you don’t know Writes of Women, the fabulous blog by Naomi Frisby, or @Frizbot on Twitter, you are in for such a treat.  These thoroughly comprehensive collections of the best writing by women in the media are my go-to source for news.  A celebration of book reviews of women writers, LGBTQIA, women of colour, women in translation, working class voices – this blog really does have it all.  Naomi is a tireless champion of women’s voices, and this week I’m very pleased to be there, too, as I was on Rebecca Mascull’s site.  Here’s the link – give her a read, won’t you?

True Grit

Screen Shot 2015-09-30 at 09.23.12I’m a Prime Writer.  This past month, I’ve been the guest curator for The Prime Writers, a lovely collection of writers who are all “in their prime”, meaning we all published our first novels over the age of 40.  So what?  Age is just a number, and we are a nice contrast to all those “best of” lists for those under 40 or 30 or 12.  (The Telegraph’s even in on the act, citing Mary Wesley – and the Prime Writers.)
In today’s blog post, I wrapped up a series on “what made a difference” – what were the most important steps that got our writers from aspiring to published.  Was it pursuing an MA that led them to an agent?  Was it a professional course that got them to an editor?  There are links to the whole month’s worth of blog posts about all the different ways we got to where we wanted to be, but, in this last post, we also talk about maybe the most important writing tool of all – grit:   the ability to keep going, even when it looks like you’ll never finish your book or find the team who can help you realise your papery dreams.  True grit.

On Theme with Julie Cohen

photoFirst, she greets us with Hannibal Lego and reminds us it’s Snape Sunday.  It can only be Julie Cohen, whose workshop on theme, last in the weekend of the wonderful Festival of Writing 2015, is designed to help a writer to identify the theme in her novel, develop it, and focus her entire novel around it.  There are two schools of writers: some who think a lot about the book before beginning to write and others who simply begin.  Julie says, “When I try to write a novel, I often start with the theme first. I put it on a Post-it, put it up so that I see it all the time, and then it brings everything back to it. If I’m trying to think about what happens next, then I know. It informs everything I’m doing.”  Chuck Wendig disagrees.  He says theme is very specific, but Julie finds her more general approach more fruitful.  “So many workshops are about specifics,” Julie says.  “This workshop is about the abstract, about finding something very abstract and then applying it to your work.”  As writers, we often have core themes. I certainly do, ones I return to, again and again, no matter the setting or characters I use.  As writers, if we share core themes with other writers, they will still be ours, because we are all so different.  We see the world through such different eyes.

What is theme?  
The emotional core of the book
The question you’re asking by writing your book
The main idea you’re exploring
The focus, not necessarily of action, but of feeling or ideas
The pivot upon which your book turns

How do you figure out the theme of your novel? Find one or two abstract nouns. (Chuck Wendig says it should be a sentence, and not a question, but Julie is, reassuringly, more generous.)  In her novel, Dear Thing, Julie’s theme was parenthood, which gave Julie her characters and her settings and her situations, as well as her language and imagery, symbolism and metaphors all centred around parenthood, carrying and being barren, raising and rejecting.
First, she offered an exercise for us to find the themes of our novels, asking us to think about: the main characters’ conflicts and desires, the premise of the novel, title and first line, the novel’s main emotions, the idea/problem we were most interested in, and the resolution.  She noted some common themes: Identity, Finding one’s place in the world, Overcoming the past, Justice, Loss; and said that, often, theme is reflected in a piece’s last line:
“There’s no place like home.”
“After all…tomorrow is another day.” (Adaptation/change.)
“It’s a sin to kill a mockingbird.” (Empathy)
Next, we were asked to take a blank piece of paper, or use Scapple as I did (as with their other marvellous programme, Scrivener, you can use it free for 30 days on trial) and put the single word we’d chosen in the centre.  Next, begin to add words around your theme, the ideas the theme conjures up.  Using parenthood as her theme, Julie quickly added words around it, from all the kinds of parents there are to states of parenting, “anti-parenting”, having and losing children, being unable to parent, not knowing that you have a child.  From here, she could apply these states to creating characters and subplots as well as to design the locations specific to her theme, from the school gates to pregnancy yoga.
Why is focusing on theme important – and how does it make for a better novel?  When a book is filled with theme, it is clear and focused.  It is satisfyingly whole and will help to make endings feel “right”.  When theme creates secondary characters, it gives them purpose as the novel is able to look at the theme from multiple points of view.   rs_1024x605-141212114211-1024-harry-potter-snape-lily-potter.jw.121214(Take Harry Potter.  He is able to vanquish Voldemort because of love, and Voldemort cannot understand Harry’s power because he had no love.  And, by the end, we can see that the much-maligned Snape did everything because of love, for Lily Potter.)  Theme helps to refine your hero’s conflicts, making them deeper and more personal.
Chuck Wendig says you should be saying something with your novel – a message to the world. So the reader walks away with this belief.  I walked away with a new theme for a book I’m struggling to get right.  Understanding my theme for this book, as separate from the core themes I’m always looking at, allowed the mists of ideas to clear and for me to see what it is I’m trying to do, so much so that I was up at 4 am, writing a new scene in the style I mean.  It is said that whatever gets you up to write won’t have to be changed, is right and will stick.  Here’s hoping!