NEW WRITING WORKSHOP FROM KITCHEN TABLE WRITERS

Are you writing bio-fiction or a novel based on real events? Are you writing your autobiography, or wider nonfiction, drawing from your own experiences?

If so, you’ll love the next Kitchen Table Workshop 

It's for all interested writers, whatever stage you’re at:

Writing from Life 

It’s FREE!

Presented live online with a video link 

 co-ordinated by Nina Milton, author of the Shaman Mysteries and many nonfiction pieces. 

Grab this opportunity to get writing, and be critiqued if you wish

To join one of these workshops, just email ninamiltonauthor@gmail.com

Running on the first Wednesday of July:

July 2nd 7pm

Can’t make this date? 

Want to know what this entails? 

Email me for a chat.

ninamiltonauthor@gmail.com

tel 44+7962781146

Discovering Great New Writers–Meet the Womens Prize "Discoveries"

 

Right now I'm furiously reading The Women's Prize 2025 shortlist; six smashing novels by women published last year.  So far, I've only finished one; BIRDING by Rose Ruane, and I loved it, I genuinely could not put it down. This didn’t surprise me; one of aims of the prize is to chose high excellence in writing, but also readable, approachable stories. This allows it to stand apart from other prizes, where winnering novels may be dense, even arcane and seem to deliberately impenetrable. I think you can be profound and sibylline without trying to drown your reader in words. 

Some of the winners remain my favourite novels.

Maggie O'Farrel won in 2020 with Hamnet,
one of my favourite winners. 

The Women’s Prize has been running since 1994, annually awarding a female author of any nationality for the best original full-length novel written in English. Kate Mosse founded the prize, and has always responded to the criticism that women and men should compete directly, by saying… ‘It’s not about taking the spotlight away from the brilliant male writers, it’s about adding the women in.’ In 2023 it was announced that a sister prize, the Women's Prize for Non-Fiction, would be awarded for the first time in 2024, with a £30,000 prize.

And now, the Women’s Prize is also sponsoring new female writers with their new enterprise, ‘Discoveries’, which aims to seek out, inspire and support writers from early writing to long-term careers, with writer development programmes, toolkits, free events and online community create pathways.

Over 80% of entrants to the Discoveries development programme said they felt inspired to take steps towards achieving their writing goals and had gained more knowledge on the publishing industry.

This year, alongside those shortlisted for the main prize, six new writers have been chosen as Discoveries, having finished their novels. They are…

Shaiyra Devi, The Persistence of Gravity

Jac Felipez, A Long Ways from Home

Rosie Rowell, Down by the Stryth

Lauren Van Schaik, Seven Sweet Nothings

Muti’ah Badruddeen, A Bowl of River Water

Sophie Black, The Pass

The Women's Prize interviewed each one and I found so much to honour and to concur with each new writer. A lot of them started, as I did, very young. 

Shaiyra Devi says...I began writing fiction as soon I learned to write, filling a notepad with 1-page stories from the age of 5. At 10, I promised myself I’d write a book, and finished Diamonds & Daggers, an adventure fantasy novel, before 13…
Jac Felipez says...I

have been writing, in different ways, my whole life. From the first story my English teacher praised in front of the class to the novel-in progress..

.          Rosie Rowell says...I fell in love with writing from the moment I learned how to read. 

Lauren Van Schaik says...before I could hold a pen I tyrannically dictated stories to my parents.

And their responses to finding out they were shortlisted were amazing;

Muti'ah Badruddeen was...Breathless. I mean that literally. I screamed so much, I became breathless. I have a weak heart, and I don’t think it has stopped racing since I opened the email. I’m usually more on the self contained end of expression but Discoveries has unleashed the inner screamer I never knew...

Shaiyra Devi was...beyond ecstatic, totally over the moon! 

Lauren Van Schaik was...really honoured that the judges see the promise in this project. I’ve had so much fun writing it and can’t wait to share it even more widely.

Can they offer advice? Sophie Black suggests...To not get bogged down in details and research when you really need to just write – you can look at specifics when you’re editing. It worked like a charm because I’m not even 100% decided on my characters’ names – I only know how they feel and how they’d behave. 

What inspired them? For Jac Felipez...visiting the Lubaina Himid retrospective at Tate Modern in 2022...The exhibition prompted me to revisit the 1980s, a decade characterised by uprisings, radical activism, and vibrant artistic expression. Felipez is writing a contemporary story that connects to the 1980s...

For Saiyra Devi it was... The seed for my current novel sprouted in a fiction writing workshop in my final year of college, and it has consumed me ever since...

Rosie Rowell's idea came from TikTok, admitting...doomscrolling finally pays off!... 

  Muti'ah Badruddeen started A Bowl of River Water by writing about her grandmother's life.

...She was an incredible woman...But the more I wrote, the bigger it got away from the details of her life; coming to encompass, instead, the idea of women who, despite dominant narratives about the period and cultural context, fought in their own way to subvert societal norms that infringed on their autonomy and personhood.  

Lauren Van Schaik's story Seven Sweet Nothings was inspired by a true story... polygamist sect leader Warren Jeffs taking his favourite wives to Disney...while he was a federal fugitive. What happens when sheltered wives are removed from the compound and dropped into our world — or rather, the sanitised, perpetually happy theme park pastiche of it?

Reading about their committments to their writing, their love of fiction, and the inspirations behind the stories was very reassuring. You can find more about them at https://womensprize.com/meet-the-2025-discoveries-shortlistees/

Core Emotional Truth

 

…Emotional truth is elusive and difficult to capture. No standard definition exists. Here’s my crack at it: Emotional truth allows readers to feel a certain way about the experiences of people who may live different lives from them. It’s the lens that allows us to see ourselves in a story that results in a heartfelt connection in a fictional narrative. Emotional truth transcends facts...Writer's Digest. 

Writing fiction? Have you ever pulled back from what you are writing and asked, what does this…my writing…mean? It it making sense to me? Will it make sense to a reader? 

To answer that question, I’d like you to think about the Core Emotional Truth of your writing. This is something that grows with the creation of a story. In other words, you might not recognise such a truth when you start writing––in fact such a truth might not be present when you start writing––but as the story comes into itself (often around the point you might finish a first rough draft), it is something you should think about. 

This core emotional truth (CET for short), is like a golden thread running all the way through a piece of fabric, and like beautiful embroidery it is usually bound up with the passion behind it.

Being passionate about your work will help tighten and bind it. But to create a narrative that really pulls the reader into the text and along the entirety of it, you have to believe yourself in its need to be released out there into the world; to be appealing to readers. Searching for the ‘point’ of what you are writing, so that the reader can understand why they should continue to read, suggests working towards fully understanding what has developed in your story (be it a short story or a longer novel). . You can, if you like, call it your  'Vision', 'Thesis' or 'The Premise'  (and even, perhaps wrongly 'your Theme')…the CET is a central, single concept that sums up your work; your ‘Core Emotional Truth’.

Don't get confused by my used of the word 'truth' here. Novels are inventions, made up in the writer's head, at least in part an invented narrative...a lie. Finding a core truth in such a fabrication is an emotional experience, not rooted in facts––for readers and their writers alike. To gain the readers empathy, there must be some sort of true thing that you are attempting to commnunicate, and that emotional truth will engender empathy and help hook the reader into the story. Most great classics of literature do this perfectly, and it is what they are loved for. 

Most of those great classics can have their core emotion truth summed up in a phrase––at most a couple of objective sentences, preferably in an abstract style, such as an aphorism. This phrase won't necessarily tell us about the contents of the story, or its subject, but about some fundamental truth of life, something that makes us all human. It doesn’t have to be a statement that everyone would agree with, but it must make sense to anyone reading it. Here' we're thinking about a summary of what a story is truly about – the deep core of what it is saying to its readers.

As an example let us think about a book we all probably know in some way; A Christmas Carol. The CET of this Dickens' small masterpiece would not be, for instance,

…Scrooge learns to be a better person when he’s visited by the ghost of his partner…

That’s more of a ‘blurb’ really.  What about...

Financial wealth never makes you happy?

This is separate and slightly different from any themes you've been thinking belong to your work. The themes that run through a short story or novel can be reflected in symbolism within the story. They can usually be summed up in a word or phrase. In A Christmas Carol, the themes might be; ghosts, meanness, poverty––poverty of emotion…These probably will  link with the CET, but can be thought of as far more observable, something that the reader will ‘see’ as they read, and be able to isolate after reader, so, easier to explain to friends or use in a review. The CET is often ‘felt’ rather than discerned. 

I can recall the first CET I 'got' after reading a book. I was hanging out some washing and why ever the book came into my mind at that point, I dont know––hanging out washing is a pretty mindless task, after all. I'd just finished The Inheritors by William Golding, and though I'd enjoyed it and understood its themes of a doomed species, of violence and pacifity, I'd not thought further. Suddenly, as I pulled a peg out of the bag to pin up a sock, I realised how the entire story was explaining to me how people are; how humanity always behaves. In the book, Neanderthals are portrayed in the novel as peaceful, in contrast to the more aggressive Homo sapiens and are at the point of dying out. Now I could see how true that was; over and over, we've killed each other just as the new speces kills out the old. 

Exercise; Find your CET.

What do you believe your own CET might be? Remeber, the truth will grow with the writing of the story, so if you are still planning it out, don’t allow any attempt to be written in stone–– the time to finalize what your story is deeply about is when you have finished at least a single draft. But you can still have a go at developing something, because sometimes, isolating the emotional truth in your story can make the writing of it really zing; once you know what this story means to the world, you can drive towards a satisfying conclusion.

You can bear your themes, characters and plot structure in mind when you to sum up your novel, but be sure the CET is an entirely abstract sentence stating the core values of the book – something objective, not personal – it shouldn’t talk about characters or plot or be at all subjective. 

Writing your CET is amazingly revealing and can help whittle all those disparate thoughts down to a single essence. If often helps open and lift your narrative, so you can write from your heart. This is bound up with the ‘passion’ I spoke about above. Being passionate about your work will help tighten and bind it. But to create a narrative that really pulls the reader into the text and along the entirety of it, you need to let them see the ‘point’ of what you are writing, so that they understand why they should continue to read.

You can also read about the symbols that help form your themes in Kitchen Table Writers click on the links; 

Symbolism in Writing - The Tree

Symbolism in Writing - The Snake

Symbolism in Writing - The Chair

Symbolism in Writing - The Sea

Symbolism in Writing – The Sun

The Absent Heart by Ali Bacon

I've just finished the most marvellous book. What genre would I put it in? Victorian  fiction? Feminist historical novel? Historical romance? Biographical fiction? None of these bland categories do this wonderful book justice. 

The Absent Heart blends elements of fiction with the real-life events and experiences of historical figures. It's based on the lives of three real people, who were linked––in fact, glued––together; the mercurial Robert Louis Stevenson, the beautiful Frances Sitwell and the introverted literary critic, Sidney Colvin. 

Frances Sitwell was an author and article writer, a woman who earned her own living. In her time she was known as…a spirited and intellectual woman, a remarkable personality … the soul of honour, discretion and sympathy … with rare insight into the developments of life’s problems. But Frances was viewed  by Victorian era’s puritanical and ‘polite’ society as rather 'loose'; she had a circle of male friends, and a partner of 35 years whom she did not marry until she was 63.

She'd known Sidney Colvin since she was struggling to extracate herself from her brutal, abusive husband. He had promised himself to her, but divorce was out of the question, and Sidney had money worries. By the time she met Stevenson, she was separated from her vicar husband and staying with her two young boys at her friend's house. It was there she met the very young Stevenson, a raw but vital talent. Frances introduced him to Colvin, who helped him get his writing established and remained his friend until the end of Stevenson's short life. In fact, it's possible the Sidney Colvin was as in love with the flamboyant young writer as Frances was.

It is clear that RLS fell deeply in love with Frances, but she had already promised herself to Colvin. Even so, they met and corresponded throughout his life. She had asked him to burn her letters to him, but she kept all his to her. They are now housed in the National Library of Scotland.

Ali Bacon took those 100s of letters and poured through them, creating a novel out of previously disregarded possiblilities. She has used creative, poetic liberity to write narrative, dialogue, and characterization, filling in gaps and imagining the inner thoughts and emotions of these three lives. This has allowed her to provide a more intimate and nuanced portrait of the historical figures, allowing readers to gain a deeper understanding of the lives, motivationsof all three, and the impact on the world of Robert Louis Stevenson.  

Many biographies have been written about this extrordinary Scottish man of letters, but The Absent Heart offers a clarity which explains some of the hidden puzzlements the writer's life. However, there are three people in this book and Bacon has illuminated the human experience of all of them, searching behind the facts of history. The work she's achieved here is at the same time a massive academic feat, and a scintilating and absorbing piece of fiction.

Ali Bacon was born and brought up in Scotland, and gained her degree from St Andrews University. She now lives near Bristol, but her writing remains influenced by her Scottish roots. After publishing  In the Blink of an Eye ( listed in the ASLS best Scottish books), she turned her attention to The Absent Heart through a family connection to this bebuiling 19th century three-way relationship. She says, 'My maternal great great uncle, Charles Lowe, knew Robert Louis Stevenson at university.'

That was all the start she needed!

Read my interview with Ali Bacon here; https://kitchentablewriters.blogspot.com/2024/08/an-interview-with-author-ali-bacon.html

HOW TO WIN THE BOOKER: Creation Lake by Rachel Kushner

A little hobby of mine is to try to read the shortlist of the Booker Prize and the Women's Prize.  It's fun comparng books and pretending for just a moment that I'm a judge. But to save pennies, I use my library a lot, and one novel on my Booker list was very, very, popular; I've only just received it, ages after the Prize Winning Date passed. 

left: Deccan chronicle---British writer Samantha Harvey's space-station novel 'Orbital' wins the Booker Prize for fiction

I'd already chosen my winner, and just for once, that was the actual winner––Samantha Harvey’s Orbital––an intergalactic story set on a space station, but definitely not a sci-fi, rather, it is almost a poem.

Would reading this mega-on-trend book change my mind?

Creation Lake by Rachel Kushner was the fattest (over 400 pages), and, like almost all the shortlist, responded to and interrogated current themes, particualry our varied human response to the climate crisis, but Kushner uses the thriller genre to stake her claim in this catagory. And in places, it really was quite thrilling, and in all places pretty un-put-downable. 

Rachel Kushner

A jobbing agent with the cover name of Sadie takes a contract with a mysterious employer. She is deliciousy free of moral considerations––she'll sleeping around to get a job done and promises us she'll kill anyone who gets in her way.  She is sent to infiltrate Le Moulin, a group of green eco-activists in Guyenne, south-west France, who almost worship an ageing guru called Bruno who lives in cave and believes we should adopt the lifestyle of his favourite of our great ancestors, the Neanderthals. 

Sadie is acerbic in her mocking of these people, especially Bruno. Shame, she suggests, that the Neanderthals didn't have a mobile link, as Bruno so obviously has when sending his epistle-like emails. As she hacks his emails, she becomes drawn in, enticed by his ideas of simplicity.

But her mind's still on the job. A farming co-op is staging a protest against a local scheme to turn local fields into a corn-based monoculture and Le Moulin is planning to help them. Sadie secrets a gun to one of the more thuggish members, hoping the death of a Paris polititian will fullfil her brief.

Anthony Cummins in The Guardian loved this book, describing it as hugely enjoyable…espionage drama pulsating with twisty revelation and drip-fed backstory, dealing with anarchy, agriculture and prehistory, it adds a killer plot and expert pacing to the reach and sophistication of her previous work, as well as vital fun. 

On the other hand, reviewing all the Bookers in the i Paper, Anna Bonnet's enthusiasm is more muted; Creation Lake was the biggest disappointment on the shortlist for me. It isn’t that it’s a bad book, but though I went in to it prepared to have a lot of fun, overly long passages about the Neanderthals somewhat got in the way. However, it has got some brilliantly dark humour, isn’t short on plot, and has some thoughtful things to say about activism and corporate land grabs. I don’t think it should win, but you can see why Kushner is one of the few women often referred to as a Great American Novelist.

Weirdly, I can see both perspectives, having read the book. While reading, I could not put it down; no wonder the library version was so popular. The final 100 pages, which Cummins describes as…pinballing between peril and farce, are amazingly tense: wall-to-wall entertainment, and a real treat...were a delight to read; hilarious and dramatic, just as he suggests. 

But once I'd put the book down, and mused over the length of it, I began to see its flaws. 

The final excitments of the last chapters felt over-plotted and a little too slapstick for me. 

The idea that Sadie was influenced by Bruno as she sails away into a James Bond type deserted tropical sunset, is slightly fogged by the amount of money she's extracted from her employer and her continued  self-interested stance. 

I always feel mean talking about the flaws in other people's novels. What about all those gaping holes in mine? What about the fact I'm never, never, going to be shortlisted for these big prizes? How dare I criticise a Great American Novelist? 

I'm going to let Christina Sanders have the last word; her blog describes Creation Lake as a …nearly excellent book, but...Where is the follow through? I am left feeling there was so much excellently laid build up for so little reward. The dirty kitchen doesn’t get another mention, the entrapped men fade away. Not sure what happens to the guy in the cave, who really could be interesting but this is not his story and if you want a story about Neanderthals among us I suggest you read Seventh Son instead. 

Well, I'm just reading that, so watch this space for the review!

The other Booker shortlist reviews are here;

https://kitchentablewriters.blogspot.com/2024/12/how-to-win-booker-everett-and-wood.html

https://kitchentablewriters.blogspot.com/2024/11/how-to-win-booker-prize-held-by-anne.html

https://kitchentablewriters.blogspot.com/2024/11/how-to-win-booker-safekeep-by-yael-van.html

https://kitchentablewriters.blogspot.com/2024/11/how-to-win-booker-prize-orbital-by.html