Great opening lines
MARION ROSE
“The monster showed up just after midnight. As they do.”
When I read this book a few years back, I didn’t just gently weep, I lay on the sofa and howled. Don’t think I can go to the film…
A MONSTER CALLS
A novel by Patrick Ness
From an original idea by Siobhan Dowd (who died, and so the baton – her idea and thoughts for this story – was passed on).
Endings
JUDY CUMBERBATCH
I’ve always thought that the most difficult part of writing a story is getting the first chapter right. It must draw the reader in, give them enough information but not too much, create a memorable setting, bring the characters alive and give the plot enough impetus to hold the reader’s interest and make sure they continue to the next chapter.
However over the last couple of weeks I’ve been wrestling with ending a book. I don’t mean finding the perfect end, the twist that will make sense of the rest of the book or the right way to resolve the story. No, I mean ending the writing process, taking my hands off the keys and telling myself that I have finished this particular piece of writing; it is time to move on to something else.
I find it a very difficult thing to do.
I have been made particularily aware of this on my most recent project, as it has been a collaboration. The person, I have been working with, comes from a very different background, with a much more pragmatic approach to writing.
So when is a story finished?
I suppose, in my head, I have the notion of the perfect, a piece of writing so polished, that it cannot be improved upon in any way at all. I tell myself that this is what I am working towards, as I edit and re-edit, write and rewrite, change, punctuate, delete, copy and paste over and over again,
At the same time, I also tell myself that every deletion and rewrite is an additional guarantee that the story will not only be accepted by a publisher but go on to win the Carnegie Book Award and be picked up Disney and turned into a multi-million pound franchise. To ensure, a bidding war among publishers, all I have to do is rewrite a particular phrase or sentence, even if the rewording is merely changing an ‘and’ to a ‘but’. I am therefore loathe to let the work go, in case I have missed that surplus adjective in the fourteenth chapter in my frantic reading and rereading of the text -a suplus adjective that will spoil any chance of getting it published.
Of course, I am deluding myself in all this.
There are other reasons for delaying finishing.
By refusing to accept that a piece of writing is ready to be read by others, I am postponing any critical reaction or rejection. Every re-edit is a precious moment gained, in which I can avoid sending the story off to my agent and getting a negative response.
The writing process is full of hope. At the start, you hope the story will come alive sufficiently for you to stay with it. As you continue writing, you hope it will be enjoyed. At the finish, you hope it will be published, be reviewed and be a success.
But once you have packaged a story and sent it off, reality sets in. You can still hope but there is nothing more you can do. Except accept the probable rejection when it comes as sanguinely as possible.
Avo-cado surprise!
MARION ROSE
I’ve just been on my longest school visit ever, although it wasn’t a visit in the usual sense. This trip was to a small primary school in Mohali, northern India. I went there as a trustee of the UK charity that helped found it. If I was going to fundraise and advocate on its behalf, I wanted to understand more about Bright Sparks School. While I was there, I also did some sessions with the kids, using my own and other people’s books.
The children live in a shanty town called Mohali Colony. Their parents are mostly labourers or roadside fruit & veg sellers. The kids come to school in their (donated) blue uniforms, from ramshackle homes built on rough ground beside a sewage-tainted river. Their only clean water comes from standpipes in the street. Mostly, each family lives in one room.
The children speak a mixture of home languages: Punjabi, Hindi, other state languages, and English – this being the language they speak least confidently. I had taken some bi-lingual picture books with me, and they were even more useful than I imagined. One of them was ‘Handa’s Surprise’ by Eileen Browne (once a member of this writers’ group!) with dual texts in English/Punjabi, and English/Hindi. It’s a story of an African girl who sets out with seven fruits as a gift for her friend. On the way, various rascally animals steal the different fruits…
I read this book with all five classes in turn. With the younger ones, the teacher read the Punjabi or Hindi page first, and then I read the English. In the older classes, the children read the Indian languages and then learnt to read aloud the English with increasing confidence. All the classes enjoyed recalling the words for the eight animals and eight fruits featured in the story. Surreal scenes in my life now include the memory of standing in a room full of Punjabi kids, all chanting avo-caDO! avo-caDO! – this being a fruit and vocabulary item previously unknown to them all.
Before leaving, I offered to hold a whole-school session using this story. The older kids would do the readings in Hindi and Punjabi, and after, they would all sample and vote for their favourite fruit. The day before, I went to a wholesale fruit market in search of the now much anticipated avo-cados. Sadly, none were available. But later in the evening, my host family kindly took me across Chandigarh to a specialist shop where we could buy some. We also bought some other unusual vegetables to take home with us, like rocket and pak choi.
But, when I arrived at school the following day laden down with all the fruits, I found to my horror that the avocados were not there. Like Handa in the story, I had somehow lost them along the way. To everyone’s polite dismay, we had to use the ubiquitous kiwi fruit as a stand in!
While the staff were cutting up the fruit in the school kitchen, one of the younger boys appeared amongst us. Without being asked he just set about peeling and preparing the pineapple for everyone. His parents, of course, were fruit sellers. There were many times during my stay when I was struck by the sheer competence and can-do approach of these children. I saw older boys – again unprompted – helping younger children with their unfamiliar shoe-laces on sports day. The classrooms were often cleared of their wooden folding furniture, quickly and safely, by the kids themselves. On visits to their homes, I found them cooking family meals, doing the family wash by hand, sewing and cleaning and looking after siblings, all while their parents worked.
Of course, these are not necessarily the activities I think the children should be doing. Quite the reverse. One of the reasons for the very existence of Bright Sparks School is to give these kids a space in their lives where they can be children, learning and playing, and leaving those adult responsibilities aside. But, I was still impressed by the way in which kids from such precarious backgrounds shared the limited resources and cramped spaces in this little school, and supported each other with great good humour and only the occasional spat.
The avocados did turn up. I’d left them behind at the shop(!). They were sampled by everyone the day after I left. But apparently the favourite fruit was still the one voted for on the day of the readings and the fruit feast. And the winner was… mango. A fruit and a word with its origins in the nearby Himalayas. So no-one had any problem saying that!
https://www.justgiving.com/fundraising/Marion-Rose2
Literature, representation and disability
KATHARINE QUARMBY
I recently delivered a speech at Nottingham Festival of Literature on this interesting subject – how disabled people are represented in literature. The speech is in four parts, and I’ve also embedded links to the speech, which I then recorded later, on my Soundcloud account, where you can have a listen here by clicking on the Soundcloud link.
A quick run-down here:
First of all, I looked at representation of disabled people in classical times. I then moved on to look at representation in medieval times and up until today (yes, a whistlestop tour!) I also looked at the theories of representation, before moving on to where we are now. I examined identity politics, about which I have some reservations, and I looked at the current theme of cultural appropriation, and how it links to disability representation. I want to see disabled writers venture forth from the haven of the first person account, and write more sci-fi, historical fiction, thrillers and so on, not just criticise what non-disabled writers have to say. As the writer, James Baldwin says: ‘My position, though, is that I will not tell another writer what to write. If you don’t like their alternative, write yours.’ Read his full interview, here, in the Paris Review, it’s a wide-ranging and thought-provoking read, and I agree with much of what he says.
My speech is available below as a transcript as well. In it, I draw on research I conducted on literature, art and representation for my first book, Scapegoat: why we are failing disabled people. It’s still in print if you want to buy it.
Spooky Ride
JOHN O’LEARY
Happy Hallloween! Here’s a video of Spooky Ride, my first ever pop-up book, published by Tango Books way back in 2001. Spooky ride was the start of a long and fruitful relationship with Tango Books that still continues. The paper engineer for the project was the very patient Matt Johnstone whom I bombarded with questions at the time. It wasn’t until pop-up book 2 that I took on that role myself, picking it up as I went along.
I’d see
n a funfair ghost train in Finsbury Park and wondered how that could translate into 3D book. The final book has one continuous train track running through holes in the pages, out the back of the book, round to the front and back in again – so you can read it over and over and over and over… My brief was to base the illustration style a little on ‘Funnybones’, keep the colours pure and make it scary! – well, sort of, it’s a children’s book.
The Infinite Quest For a Signature Style
SELINA MOORE
The question on how to develop my own illustration style has never previously been an issue I’ve needed to consider. Working in the animation industry I’ve always enjoyed matching appropriate styles to each brief, in much the same way that when writing I would specifically choose individual voices for different stories – in each case there is to me a correct and natural ‘fit’ that will breathe life into the project. I love working this way, working methodically through the reason and motivation for a thing, I feel as though I’m unravelling a strange organic puzzle.
I love to play with different illustration styles. Here are three different interpretations of a character.
So making the move into illustration for children’s books presents an entirely different and unforeseen problem – this is an area where a signature style is usually considered beneficial – as the calling card by which illustrators are recognised and as the reason why people will buy their artwork. And working this way goes against all of my natural instincts.
There’s also a sense of pressure when I try to commit to a single style –its a creativity killer. Searching the Internet for solutions I found the regular mantras:
“Stop worrying about creating a personal style. It will come once you stop looking for it”.
“Follow what your hand wants to draw”.
But after working in the animation industry I’ve accumulated a variety of art knowledge, theory and experience and my aesthetic tastes vary. Do I really still want to draw only what my hand wants to draw? The concept of ‘style’ throws up so many questions -and I found discussion on the subject vague and confusing. Finally, I realised what the problem was. I couldn’t find a solution until I answered the obvious question:- What is ‘Style’?
I discovered a really thoughtful breakdown of style by Sycra Yasin. He considers that artists really mean two separate things when discussing style – ‘Inherent Style’, – derived from our innate way of doing things and our influences – and ‘Manufactured Style’ – a style arrived at through trial and error, iteration and deliberate choice making. Yasin suggests that all artists exist somewhere on this style spectrum and then opens up the debate into issues of stylisation Vs realism and how we arrive at those choices. I recommend this as an incredibly useful watch for anyone interested in parsing the artistic process.
As for me, breaking down the process helped resolve my dilemma. I’m limiting my range to include a few, complimentary styles. I’m aiming for cohesion while still allowing the room I need for experimentation. And most importantly, I’m going to stop worrying about it now!
Our Public Libraries Need Help
ELIZABETH HAWKSLEY
Tony Brown and Elizabeth Hawksley with some of the donated books
I am a huge fan of public libraries; I’ve had a library card since I was six. Nowadays, they offer you far more than just books. With my library card, for example, I can access the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (the DNB) or read The Times or The Guardian online, and much more. And libraries are currently suffering from ferocious budget cuts.
So, when I became the UK Children’s/Young Adult Book Review Editor for the quarterly Historical Novel Society Review, I decided to offer the ex-review copies to my local library. Every few months, when my floor round my desk has once more disappeared under books, I email Tony Brown, the Stock and Reader Development Manager of Islington Borough library, label the email: Books looking for a good home, and send him a book list. Would he like any of them? So far, he has always said, ‘Yes, please,’ to the lot.
I always get far more books than I, or my wonderful stable of reviewers, can review; often because they are not actually historical (a dragon on the cover, for example, is a giveaway; or the recent book where Lady Jane Grey’s husband has become a horse; or a book featuring jokey zebra gladiators) or where I’ve been sent two or more copies of the same book. So Tony gets an eclectic mix.
Here are six examples of recently reviewed Historicals which I hope other readers will now be able to enjoy in my new list of books for Tony.
Yokki and the Parno Gry by Richard O’Neill and Katharine Quarmby
Illustrated by Marieke Nelissen
Yokki and the Parno Gry by Richard O’Neill and Katharine Quarmby is a traditional Travellers’ tale with delightful pictures of their everyday lives. It is about the power of the imagination to help in times of hardship and it’s aimed at children of four plus.
And I Darken by Kiersten White
And I Darken by Kiersten White, the author turns Vlad the Impaler, the 15th century Transylvanian warlord, into a girl, Lada. Lada must fight to succeed her father and ruthlessness is the key to her survival. As the reviewer wrote: This is not a book for the squeamish. For girls, age fifteen plus.
Nancy Parker’s Diary of Detection by Julia Lee
Nancy Parker’s Diary of Detection by Julia Lee is a murder mystery set in the 1920s and our heroine is a housemaid who can’t spell. I thoroughly enjoyed this lively story – and the amount of work poor Nancy has to do is 100% accurate for the period. For girls of ten plus.
Rugby Player by Gerard Siggins
Gerard Siggins is a well-respected Irish writer follows the adventures of the 21st century young rugby player, Eoin Madden, with a gift of seeing ghosts from Irish history. Rugby Flyer features real life Prince Alexander Obolensky who became an Irish football legend in the 1930s. A great read and boys of ten plus will love it.
These Shallow Graves by Jennifer Donnelly
These Shallow Graves is set in New York in 1890, where young socialite, Jo Montfort, uncovers the truth about her father’s untimely death. The reviewer praised this book for depicting a realistic late 19th century New York, with a believable heroine struggling with the restrictions on a well-brought-up young lady’s behaviour. This is a young adult novel but my guess is that it will be a crossover book.
Hell and High Water by Tanya Landman
The publisher’s publicity department actually sent me three copies of Tanya Landman’s Hell and High Water! And I can understand their enthusiasm. It concerns a mixed-race boy in 18th century England, struggling to find his place in the world. Landman doesn’t pull her punches about the ignorance, corruption and bigotry of the time. Aimed at both sexes, age twelve plus.
What I enjoy about the Historical Novel Society is that I can keep up with what’s out there and what publishers are looking for. Children’s/YA novels are changing all the time; boundaries are being pushed; and difficult subjects, like race, are tackled openly which would previously have been mentioned more obliquely. Modern children’s Historicals can be challenging as well as terrific reads.
There is a real variety of books for Tony to choose from.
True Life Stories about Mixed Race Britain
ODETTE ELLIOTT
Most of the time I make up stories and concentrate on fiction. However, for about two years I worked on a Memoir about our younger adopted son, who joined the family when he was nearly four years old. The whole Memoir has not seen the light of day. In other words, I have not found a publisher, but I was happy to have a short extract published in an anthology edited by Dr. Kate Massey.
“Tangled Roots – True Life Stories About Mixed Race Britain”.
My true-life story is one of at least twenty five varied and moving stories. It is entitled ‘A Rock for Jah’. It tells about the first time we saw Jah. He was with a short-term foster family, where he had been staying for eighteen months, which was far longer than planned. The family was wonderful and they had been preparing him to move on to a ‘forever family’, but it must have been difficult for a little child, not quite yet four years old, to understand why he had to move onto an entirely different family again.
The reason why I called my story “A Rock for Jah” is because the first time he saw my husband and myself, we showed him a photo of our other three children. It was a holiday snap of them sitting on a big rock in Scotland. Jah examined the photo solemnly and he then pointed out something nobody else had observed – a little rock next to the big one. “There’s a Rock for Jah” he said. It was moving to witness how deeply he wanted to belong somewhere. He had spotted this tiny rock where he could ‘belong’.
Jah’s birth family was partly African, partly from the West Indies and partly white British, so clearly his story belongs in a collection dedicated to multicultural Britain. However, we had already adopted a son from a Caribbean background and we were already a mixed race family before Jah joined us.
The back cover of the book, states “12% of UK Households are mixed race, although experts estimate the actual number of mixed race people may be more than two million – double official figures..”
The collection is described as “a shockingly honest, funny and heart-breaking collection of memoirs revealing the human dramas behind the phenomenal success of ‘mixed Britannia’.”
You can find out more about Tangled Roots on the website www.tangledroots.eu.
Once I realised that I was not going to get my Memoir published, I started writing a blog – Adoption Reflections. It is a very interesting way to communicate to others around the world. More about this in my next Buzz About Books blog post.
Society of Authors management committee elections
KATHARINE QUARMBY
I’ve added my election statement for the Society of Authors management committee below. There are some very good other candidates and I look forward to a fair election.
Because of space I wasn’t able to include details of my committee and campaigning work. I am a member of English Pen and the NUJ. I am also a long-time co-ordinator of the Disability Hate Crime Network, and have served on a number of expert committees arising from my investigations into violence against disabled people. They include an expert committee advising the Equalities and Human Rights Commission on its inquiry into the same crime; the Crown Prosecution Service National Scrutiny Panel on Disability Hostility and the National Police Chiefs’ Deaf and Disabled Forum.
Here’s my statement for the Society of Authors – if you are a member, please consider voting for me. I would like to serve to support the Society of Authors in its important work lobbying those in power to help creators carry on writing; in being an outward looking organisation, as free as is possible from internal disputes and supporting writers to become better at what they do through training and networking.
“The Society of Authors is well-placed to campaign for the power of stories – and the authors who write them.”
I have written or contributed to twelve books, ranging from three non-fiction books based on campaigning journalism (one of which has not yet been published in the UK), books for children and Kindle Singles, both fiction and non-fiction.
I became a member of The Society of Authors soon after my first book, Fussy Freya, Frances Lincoln) was published in 2008. I’ve attended some fascinating talks and the SoA has suggested useful changes to draft publishing contracts. It also provided me with a much-needed Authors’ Foundation grant in 2012 to finish my second non-fiction book, No Place to Call Home: Inside the Real Lives of Gypsies and Travellers (Oneworld, 2013). That grant enabled me to drive to isolated Traveller sites, visit families bereaved by hate crime and witness horse fairs and religious meetings. Most importantly, it gave me the time I needed to put down on paper some of stories about which I feel very passionate – those from people whose voices are not often heard or who are wilfully misunderstood.
For me, the core mission statement for the SoA is all about getting stories published, voices heard. The Society has reformed itself and become more responsive to its members. Now I think we need to work together and face outward, because stories and authors are vital and must be protected – from politicians and even those in our industry who do not always treat us fairly. The Society of Authors needs to build on its reputation for safeguarding and defending authors’ rights. We face continual challenges – from changes to copyright and unfair contract terms, lower revenues and pirating of our books on the Internet and new threats such as Universal Credit for many low-paid writers. As a long-term union member, in the NUJ, and as a former parliamentary researcher, I believe we are stronger if we work together, using a range of tactics, from lobbying to deploying social media tactics and other forms of peaceful protest.
However, we must be positive too. Globalisation has brought disruption to our industry, but it has brought opportunities too – self-publishing, for example, and a range of new stories from refugees and others. If that much used word, diversity means anything real, it means a commitment to communicate a wider range of stories. Those include narratives from older and disabled people, younger people, or people who have arrived from abroad, as my mother and grand-mother did, post-war from Yugoslavia, carrying one book of fairy tales in the one suitcase they could bring with them. James Baldwin called writers ‘disturbers of the peace’ who revealed society to itself and made freedom real. That’s a daunting, if exciting challenge – but one for a management committee that is looking outward – to create a broader, fresher literature.”
ENDS
Scraps of paper worth their weight in Gold
MEGG NICOL
I was at a superb talk given by Dr. Eva Griffith at the London Metropolitan Museum, about ‘Shakespeare’s Rivals’ a few weeks ago.
During it we were allowed to look at the documents of the period, which were sometimes just little pieces of paper, that when pieced together told some of the social history of the time. I was hooked.
Old pieces of paper intrigue me. The official name of course for those scraps is ‘ephemera’ described as ‘transitory written or printed material not meant to be retained or preserved’. You know, those are the bits that turn up years later in forgotten diaries like bus tickets, shopping lists, scribbled lyrics written after a break up.
I have one piece of paper that was so important to me that I’ve have kept it ever since I was twelve.
It came with me when as a child we immigrated to the States and then I brought it back again still intact years later when we arrived home to The Isle of Bute in Scotland again.
My treasured item was a postcard of acknowledgement from the publishers Blackie & Son Ltd, to say that they had received my work.
Imagine this…. aged twelve I’m sitting at the kitchen table scribbling in longhand and whizzing through a dozen school jotters to create my book called ‘‘Adventure Isle”. (For those who might be moderately interested it was an adventure in Enid Blyton style with lots of descriptions of food…just the way she did it) When it was finished I went to the local printers to see if I could get someone to type it up for me but it was too expensive so I wrapped all the jotters up lovingly in a brown paper package and posted them off.
One week later the mail arrived and in it was a postcard. It simply read:
“Blackie & Son’s Publishers acknowledges the receipt of ‘Adventure Isle’ by Margaret Nicol”
For me this was a magical moment. I was a writer and I could prove it!
The postcard was my trophy and I’ve kept it ever since just to remind myself that’s who I am…in case I forget.
Buzz about Books 