A Five-finger Exercise for Writers

When I was  a small child, just starting school, my favorite moment in each day was the one, after we’d finished our tea, when my father went into the front room. He’d say to me, ‘don’t pull the curtains and don’t switch on the light.’ Then he’d sit at his piano in the last of the evening light and play; Chopin waltzes, Mendelsshon’s Songs without Words, Beethoven sonatas and pieces from the shows. I would dance around the room for hours, my skirts twirling, my arms doing what I thought might be pointy ballerina movements. 

Then the big day came, when Daddy said he would begin to teach me the piano. I was so excited; as far as I could see it would be no time at all before I would be playing like him. Why, I did so already, racing my hands over the keys and swaying my body like a professional pianist. So it came as a bit of a blow when I realized even five-finger exercises were baffling and onerous. It took me a long time to play my first Song without Words; three decades to be exact.

Writing a novel is a bit like learning the piano; a lot harder than you might think. Bill, a writer who I'm mentoring at the moment, wrote to say...When I started the journey, my initial objective was to write a novel. I, like many people, didn’t understand how difficult this task was. I originally thought that having a good idea and a vivid imagination was all that a person needed. The rest was just a matter of course and would happen naturally and with the minimum of effort. I now appreciate how just what a difficult task it is to write a novel. Anyone who completes a novel, let alone has it published, has my total admiration.

Spot on, Bill. Writing a novel is like inventing an entire new life...many people’s lives, actually. If you’re into fantasy, you’ll be inventing new worlds, as well. How could that possibly be easy? Certainly, having a mentor who can support you in those first stages when it all seems a complete mess - when even the five-finger exercises of writing feel onerous - can help enormously. Bill wrote; When you are placed with a tutor there is initially, a certain amount of natural apprehension. You’re faced with another lengthy and unknown learning process. My initial feeling was that the way ahead seemed insurmountable. I’d spent a few months standing still and had reached a non-constructive plateau without any end in sight. It felt I was drowning in a sea of uncertainty. You reassured me that I was not alone with this problem and that most novice or indeed many professional writers suffered this at one time or another during their writing career. The way through this dilemma and off the plateau was to keep on writing. 

Naturally, a writing student should expect a little more than simple words of encouragement I hope to give practical, technical and creative advice that will move the student’s work properly forward. They should be able to see through the confusion in a way the poor old writer can’t - they’ll be too busy looking at the wood, while the tutor will be viewing the trees and hopefully recommending a better planting and growing order for the forest. 

But it’s important for the mentor to stay enthused and energetic, as it’s likely that the writer will sag and droop, especially around the middle of the novel. 

Your enthusiasm for creative writing is infectious...Bill said in his letter...and I can honestly say it rubs off and has bolstered my failing spirits. Creative writing is not the easiest thing in the world to study but having an excellent tutor has made it a bit easier. Many thanks for your time, advice and patience over the last year or so.

Aw, nice of you to say so, Bill. I’m just so proud of the way this student’s writing developed, which is far more to do with the concentration and energy he gave the project; it’s the writer who needs the time and patience, to be honest. Without that, it’s unlikely they’ll get further than playing chopsticks.

I'm lucky enough to have a wonderful set of mentors; the literary agency I'm with. They don't just turn my work around, and send it off to editors with a hopeful covering letter, they constantly work with me to get my novels to a perfect pitch. Like Bill, I'm no better at seeing the trees in my own writing…I fancy almost all professional writers find it hard to find a navigable path through the thickest parts of their novel's woodland – at least during the first drafts. Maybe this is the reason many second novels get slated by critics and readers alike; 'just not like the first, great book', they'll cry, and I'll be thinking, 'didn't their agent read it over and comment on it, offer some advice?' That's when I know I'm so lucky to have great agents. 

Bill (and I) make this process sound so arduous, so hard to achieve, that novice writers reading this may wonder if they’re not put off trying, just a little. Bill says, The journey, I feel, has been an exceptionally hard but enjoyable one. I’ve tried to put into practice everything that you have suggested and I feel that my writing has not just moved forward but taken a considerable leap…

Bill hasn’t quite finished his novel yet, but now he’s got the confidence to write by himself. My final advice to him was to stop redrafting and get on with the writing. Working through a writing course always results in a lot of redrafting. It’s the quickest way up the learning curve. But once the foundations and basic skills are laid, I suggest that people tackling a long project just get on with it...one word, then the next, then the next until the next two words you write are ‘the end’. Only then can you redraft with any clear understanding of what the book looks like and says.

One thing I can reassure him on – and all the writers who are in his position that read this blog – it does, slowly, get easier. Tiny step by tiny step, you start to work things out on your own, spotting what's wrong in time to get it right, learning to take that step back and look at the forest, see how it's growing.

Thanks, Bill, for letting me quote parts of your letter in this post, and good luck in your forward endeavours...may your words always sound like songs.

To learn more about my mentoring programme, go to KITCHEN TABLE NOTEPAD PROGRAMME

STARTING TO WRITE: Questing your Plot

I've been writing for the Open College of the Arts Creative Writing Degree again.

This time, I've been looking at plotting stories.

Plots are sometimes defined as quests, but you can invert that; your first quest is to find your plot.

All good quests need a map, and so do you. Not just any map, either – a treasure map, which will hide the plot secrets, lay the clues, and guide your reader through the dangers and dramas of their journey to a wealth of satisfaction at the end.

I have a foremost tip in the quest for the next plot idea…

But you'll have to read the original blog to find out what that tip is, and the other practical, questing suggestions I've found useful myself, such as wall charts…

Click here to go to the Open College of the Arts Blogsite to read all 

Holiday Poems

Did you notice I'd been away? I've just got back from France, nicely tanned and full of thoughts on poetry. Holidays are such a good excuse for writing a poem – loads of new things to see, feel, taste, hear, and think about…plus all that extra time on your hands with nothing better to do than sit in the sun and write. Here are a few of the poems I have written as I holidayed around the UK and Europe. I hope you enjoy them, and that they inspire, or re-inspire you to write your own holiday poems.

Snowdon, Wales

When we set off

The sun was settled hot over the castle ruins

And the lake, agate-thin, had a rhinestone surface.

Halfway up, 

 Clouds.

Not fluffy cotton wool puffs,

Just unrelenting mist.

 We saw no more than

The crumbling path

 And our worn walking boots.

The peak arose, unexpected, 

Catching us short – shocked – 

A final scramble. We reached the summit.

I put my hand out to touch the cairn – yes!

The terminal made us weep fog-tears. 

   Tiny trains lifted their sardine loads, 

Shedding them straight into the concrete caf.

We were wet through to our aching thighs

Starved for the sandwiches  

Crushed and damp from their momentous journey,

But the staff stalk between the plastic tables

Alert for contravention of cafe rules.

We bought thin coffees,

 Gobbed our illicit food

With jerking eyes,

 Like mountain birds.

Mediterranean Storm

All night, the silent storm 

Has flickered across the horizon,

Silhouetting the perfect geometry of the earth.

Lightening running in lines and sheets, 

Proving the world is round.

All night the storm is an on and off parade,

Flickering like a silent film with erratic highlights

Or the boy with a torch under bedclothes that promise glossy dreams of breasts.

The slashing of heaven, the deadly spear of a fierce god sent crashing down, 

To puncture the sea as he will, when he chooses.

All night it persists,

Clouds tossing war at each other, 

Hurling insults as quiet as white noise,

While above, the stars blink,

Tiny statements of unaffected continuity.

All night – will it never stop?

Somewhere, thunder deafens ears and children scream their fear. 

Waves take the fishing boats until they are mountain goats, 

All hands to secure their harvest of ancient things,

The men shiny with rain in their scale skins.

But here, the storm is soundless,

A punctuated brilliance that illuminates the clouds

That dance like grey ghosts,

Phantoms that change their shape, 

Conjoin as they please, become one, or many,

Unravel or thicken or slide away, silent like the storm.

I watch until dawn.

I sit silent in my tower by the sea until the sky pales, 

The slow expansion of light sucks away the noiseless force, 

Until, diminished by the day, the flash is no brighter than the flicker of an oiled wick.

Blinded by the sun, 

It is gone.

In the Dublin Museum, Ireland

In the Dublin Museum,

Among the cornucopia of treasures,

The late Neolithic spear-head,

Honed to perfection,

Carved with utmost care.

Each flint dislodged to form

Lethal edges of symmetrical

Beauty

And a polished point

Bitter as a needle.

When the knapper stood back

To examine his work…

Elegance combined with utility,

Speed combined with precision…

Did he fear the first beads of molten ore

As they ran together and set hard?

Did he long to own the newest feats of engineering – 

The golden torc,

The bronze axe – 

Or did he lament the passing of this craft 

As the relentless pulse of technology move on.

Did he join with others of his trade

And protest the disappearance of their trade?

When did the last apprentice graduate

In the benign skill of 

Knapping flint?

Skara Brae, Orkney Isles

Whether I am in the hills
Hunting boar,

Or on the sea

Hunting fish

Or in the fields

With the barley or the beasts,

When the sun moves down,

I begin to think of Cadd,

Too heavy now with our second child

To stray far from the house.

I think about how the fire will be blazing

Before I reach the outer wall,

How, as we crouch to share out the shellfish catch

She will be heating the water and tearing herbs.

The day has been cloudless across the sea.

My face is burnt with sun and wind

My hands chilled as stone.

I stride through the passageway and Nitta comes running,

Grasps my knee, hugs and giggles.

She is the one that swells my heart.

When I went to find a stone for my mattock,

Nitta followed, singing to the flowers,

Gathering purple, yellow and white.

Cadd sat with her and named their gifts –

Which plants ease pain, which brings up a fever.

She spoke them after, like an echo of the cliffs,

With such clear intent 

It brought more water to my eyes

Than the passing of the Old One

Five moons ago.

The sun will go down red tonight,

As if bleeding into the hills.

After the fish is baked on the stones of the fire

And we are warm and replete,

I will take Cadd out.

We will lie on the soft heather and stare at the sky.

I will tell her the stars 

Are like the flowers of the land.

Both are scattered and purposeful and named.

And when she speaks them in her voice,

High as a bone pipe,

I will not mind if water comes again to my eyes

Spanish Song

 Heat virgin olive oil in a heavy pan,

Chop onion and gently fry

Crush garlic, but add later in case it might burn.

Heat the grill for the sweet peppers to sear…

 To sear in thirty degrees, 

Lay out the tropical towels 

Smear with factor ten in case we might burn

Add four thin bodies to the heat-swirled beach.

Add four thin pork boneless steaks to the pan.

Seal juices while peeling red peppers

Once they have blistered. Slice finely. 

Grind in black pepper, oregano seasoning…

Season for the murmurs of summer, 

For the glitter of the wide sea,

The screech and splash as the children leap,

For the sleepy Spanish tongue; those sun-dried sounds…

Drain and slice a jar of sun-dried tomatoes

Toss into pan the tomatoes and the peppers. 

Cover and simmer for twenty minutes

After which add twenty olives to salt the dish…

Salt in your hair and the feel of sand

Where the bar of your flip-flops grinds between your toes

Coming up the hill from the beach, stepping over wild thyme

Under the acacia trees into the marble chill of Los Arcos.

Chill the wine in the marble cooler,

As you lay out the ceramic you bought in Valencia.

Sweet pepper skins lift; gift-wrapped in scarlet tissue 

Spoon out the cerdo espanol and fluff up the rice

Long evenings, filled with fast guitars,

Smells of ceno from the next apartamento 

Twirl round the table to Flamenco,

Fast guitars and Spanish song.

Giant's Causeway, Northern Ireland

Out of the flat, black sea

Strides Fionn Mac Cumhail

His massive head 

Rises from the waves,

His vast shoulders

Shine with sea-brine.

In his one hand, he carries the sword of his people.

In his other, the spear.

Taller than two men, he is, 

As he emerges from the ocean 

And takes long steps across the Causeway,

Each hexagonal pillar lightly taking the ball of his foot.

It is said that he left his boot 

On the shore strand,

And his eye on the cliff,

But I think that Fionn lost his head 

At the Giant’s Causeway.

Only an old fool in love 

Would dream that

The fairest maid in all Ireland

Might choose him,

For all his wealth, prestige, power

And might on the field of battle,

Above Dairmuid,

The young upstart bound by geis and honour.

So, Finn reaches the cliff and 

Roars his displeasure on his land,

Scanning the horizon.

But the lovers have vanished,

And already sleep on their stony bed.

Faro Island, Portugal

She said; 

It’s a long road, straight, you can’t miss it once you’ve turned the roundabout.

She said;

Go over the bridge. That’s what makes it an island. 

 She said;

You’ll see where to park. You can buy an ice cream.

She said; 

 No one stays long.

She didn’t say;

Walk along the leeward side, facing the mainland, you won’t see a soul all the way.

She didn’t say; 

Climb over the brackeny dunes and walk back along the beach with an Atlantic wind in your     hair.

She didn’t say;

The moored boats are like jewels and the birds are wishes that can fly.

She didn’t say; 

You’ll think the little houses are shuttered against the winter until someone cries ‘Carlos! Comida!’

 She said to tell her what we thought of Faro island.

 We told her we liked the ice cream.

Dumb and Dumber...a Moving Experience

We first saw the cottage we bought in West Wales in a snowstorm, and fell in love with it instantly A solitary sheep grazed in a small field. We could see miles of white countryside and the house was built of local pink and yellow stone with black slate. There was room enough to keep hens and grow food. We made an offer and started packing our things. 

Even so, everyone we knew was very dubious. "Won't it be lonely," they asked. "So far from your friends?" 

And, even more worrying, "The Welsh don't like the English. They won't talk to you, unless they're ripping you off."

This concerned us, and, just to get going, we made sure we used an English furninture removal firm to get our belongings from English A to Welsh B. Two skinny boys successfully loaded the contents of our last house into their van and taken it into storage. They seemed okay, but it turned out they were two of the biggest nincompoops known in the trade.

We went ahead to repaint the interior, and lay some flooring, and once we were ready for our furniture to arrive. We rang up and the boys…let’s call them Dumb and Dumber, because I wouldn’t like to reveal their true names…and asked for delivery. ‘Is seven am is okay to arrive,” they asked. “Because once we’ve finished the job, we’ve finished for the day; the earlier the better.”

Our new home

We said that was fine, but did they realise it was a three-hour drive from the depot to our new house? “You’ll have to leave before the sun is up,” I told them. 

“No problem,” came the cheerful reply.

Rather over-optimistically, we set the alarm for half six but after waiting an hour, we were taking bets on when they’d arrive. At ten to nine they rang to say they were just driving out of the depot; they’d had a few jars the night before...it was a bank holiday, after all... 

Our hens

Our next call was at midday. They were in the small town just fifteen minutes drive away, where their van was more or less stuck in the side roads.”Don't use the weak bridge!" I yelled down the line. "Why aren't you on the bypass? Why did your satnav send you into the town?”

Sheepishly, they explained their satnav was on their mobile and, (probably because of the few jars the night before) they’d forgotten to charge it up. I gave them the simple directions; thirty minutes later we had a call from two (rather beautiful, it transpired)  young Welsh girls out in their car. Hopelessly lost, Dumb and Dumber had stopped them to ask directions. The girls knew the area well and steered them in. Thus, our whacking removal lorry finally arrived behind a small, red mini. The lads jumped out and instantly asked where they could buy fish and chips; after a night on the tiles and a long drive, they were famished. We offered to get food for them if they would finally start work.

The first thing that had to be unloaded was the garden equipment, and we suggested they backed towards the field gate and took everything for the garden into the field. This, they managed without incident, but they had chosen to drive into the field and when they attempted to reverse out again...they discovered the van had gouged itself into the dry soil. They were stuck. Soon, they couldn't move forward, either. We put grit, then blankets and finally, in desperation, large planks of wood under the wheels. A smell of burning erupted from the rear tyres but the lorry didn’t budge. Dumb and Dumber were well and truly stuck. 

“Call the AA,” I said. But they blanched at the suggestion. The removal firm might find out just what they’d done!

Finally, I walked the 300 yards down the road to introduce myself to Denise and Dave, our nearest neighbours, and ask if anyone local had a tractor. 

 “Gino,” they suggested. “He’ll come out.”

The Italian Chapel, Henllan Ceredigion

I’d already heard of  Gino. He was the owner of a local restaurant, and of Italian descent. His father had been an Italian prisoner in Wales in the second world war, in a POW camp that was only 3 miles from our cottage. I've since been there, for it has the only Italian Chapel in the UK in which services are still performed, and it is beautiful. 

While they were happily sojourning in the Welsh countryside, quite a lot of the Italian soldiers fell for local girls and never went home, and Gino’s father was one of them. Like his dad before him, Gino farmed a dairy herd from which he made the most wonderful Italian ice cream (especially the pistachio). Jim drove off towards the restaurant which was half a mile from our home (half a mile that is a great walk when you’ve had a bottle of chianti) and in seconds, it seemed, was back with a short, heavily built man of around retirement age on a massive tractor. When I offered him a cuppa, he said, "Just a quick one, if you don’t mind, I’m about to start my dinner." Only a true (new) friend would come out as his dinner (cooked by Mama, as well!) was put on the table. I wanted him to talk on and on; I was fascinated by his accent which was English with a blend of Italian and Welsh. 

Gino hooked the lorry to his tractor and had it out in seconds. From then on, the move went smoothly. Our happy pair - Dumb and even Dumber - downed their fish and chips and went away with rather red faces (I hope), leaving us to fully understand just what a great place we’d shipped up in.  Our clothes were already on their hangers, the takeaway had been delicious, the Welsh sun was shining over the valley and the view from the garden was outstanding. Most important; we had already learnt that the neighbours were wonderfully friendly. Thanks to our Dumb and Dumber removal guys, the auspices for life in West Wales were perfect.

Our view

Dracula, or The Un-dead, by Bram Stoker

'Read Classic', an occasional series of posts from 

Kitchen Table Writers, looks at Bram Stoker's Dracula

I was holidaying in Whitby when I first realised that Bram Stoker’s Dracula was a surprisingly modern novel. I’d watched the Hammer film versions of the book in my misspent youth and they left with the opinion that the book was a bit of late Victorian gothic horror, no where near good enough for me to need to wade through all that gore. But every Whitby bookshop had a copy of Dracula in its window, and naturally, I soon succumbed, reading it on the top of blowy cliffs and in the shelter of the beaches below. I took it on every walk, along with my butterfly identification book.

We did a lot of walking that holiday, passing the whaling arch on West Cliff, which Stoker would have passed too, with his family, when he holidayed here in June 1890. He stayed at Royal Crescent and it was there I discovered just how inspiring his time in Whitby must have been. Bram Stoker had found his inspiration. Standing in the crescent, you have a view of the North Sea, past sloping green cliff and grey sands. Across the river estuary are the imposing ruins of the Abbey, which must have been at least as gothic then as it is now.  The churchyard of St Mary lies below, the location of a vampiric attack in the second half of the story. As twilight falls, bats begin to swoop into view.

Mina, one of the two young female characters in Dracula, voices Stoker’s thoughts on the town: Right over the town is the ruin of Whitby Abbey, which was sacked by the Danes, and which is the scene of part of "Marmion," where the girl was built up in the wall. It is a most noble ruin, of immense size, and full of beautiful and romantic bits; there is a legend that a white lady is seen in one of the windows…

Bram Stoker also spent time at Whitby library – he made notes from 'An Account of the Principalities of Wallachia and Moldavia’, in which he must have seen the name ‘Dracula’ for the first time. The fifteenth-century Vlad Dracula (Vlad the Impaler) was as bloodthirsty as his fictional counterpart, impaling his enemies on long spikes and nailing turbans to the scalps of foreign ambassadors. Stoker gives his reader the historical allusion that Count Dracula is the descendant of Vlad – in his Author’s Note he explains that the documents assembled in the novel are real. Even as I read this, before starting the novel, I was reminded of the hype around The Blair Witch Project, and saw how astute Stoker was as a writer. 

He’d called this story The Un-dead for all the time he was writing it. Just before publication, he changed his title to  the wonderfully charged-up name of the antagonis. This  may have changed its destiny, although ‘un-dead’ remains a popular trope today, especially in Young Adult literature.

I began my holiday read, and soon found that it was not at all like the Hammer Horror version…or for that matter like Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992) which I found almost unwatchably hammed up. Dracula contains elements of the conventions of gothic fiction…dark-shadowed, cobwebby castles juxtaposed with vast remote landscapes and vulnerable, virginal girls threatened by black-coated evil-doers… but Stoker contrasts his Transylvanian castle with parochial Whitby and the bustle of London in the 1990s.

Starting with that holiday in Whitby, Stoker used a wide range of research methods and a clear understanding of modern character development to write the story, but a stuck with the traditional gothic novel structure; diary entries, letters and newspaper cuttings etc. It opens with the most famous section of the book, Jonathan Harker's Journal, which recounts his visit to Transylvania as a lawyer helping the count through his London property transaction. Harker falls under the spell of the Brides of Dracula and succumbs to the vampire’s influence. This opening feels like it has an impossible resolution and I turned the pages as fast as any modern thriller, needing to know how he could possibly escape with his life. At that point, I had no idea how many other characters would not escape with theirs. The novel keeps twisting and surprising us, as Dracula, on his way to London aboard a ship (hidden in a coffin) is washed up in Whitby and escapes in the shape of a black dog, and we’re introduced to Renfield, who is incarcerated in  a mental asylum where he lives on a diet of flies and spiders.

Stoker's masterpiece was part of a fin-de-siècle literary culture obsessed with crime – this was the time that Jack the Ripper stalked Whitechapel – and sensationalism – these were the original ‘naughties’. The book strips away the layers of late Victorian anxiety such as loss of religious traditions,  colonialism, scientific advancement, plus a growing awareness of female sexuality and a continued fear of homosexuality.  The book is a mirror in which generations of readers have explored their own fantasies. 

Maurice Richardson described it as; a kind of incestuous, necrophilious, oral-anal-sadistic all-in wrestling match, and no one could argue with that (or prevent themselves from rushing to read such a book).

You can read Dracula for free online here.

Thank you so much,Indie Shaman for your kind and detailed review of In the Moors, the first book in the Shaman Mystery Series.

And, there's a Book Give-away alongside the review, with a copy of In the Moors up for grabs. To go Indie Shaman's Facebook Page for further details.

In the Moors is a dark thriller, dealing with chilling serial crime but, due to the skill of the author’s writing and the humour and engaging character of Sabbie Dare, it is also a highly enjoyable read that is very difficult to put down once you pick it up.

In fact the main issue for me was reaching the end of the book and wondering what I could read next that would match up to it. Fortunately there is a book two and three in the series (although I started the series by reading book three, so also can confirm you can read them in any order). And hopefully Milton will continue the series with a book four.

Very addictive and highly recommended!

To read the entire review click here

Or, why not read the this most recent issue of Indie Shaman, in which my article on 'The Red Lady of Paviland' features alongside other excellent articles? You can find out more here.

Or