Hampshire Writers' Society

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  • Turning Creative Ideas into Page-Turning Storytelling – Clare Morrall

    Report by Lisa Nightingale

    Clare Morrall

     

    ‘A novel is an enormous project taking up a vast amount of your thoughts and time.’ says Clare Morrall, Shortlisted Booker Prize writer of When the Floods Came.

    Astonishing Splashes of Colour, her first book took five years to AstonishingSplashescomplete. Not because the commitment wasn’t there, more because it was. When her children were still young, Clare became a single mother, therefore writing had to fit with her life and her work. She was offered a room in a friend’s house one afternoon a week in which to write. Sometimes this time was lost to her. ‘One thing about using a room in a friend’s house – you know you have to get on!’

    Clare’s starting point for each of her novels is something small, unusual and usually not obvious. The starting point for Natural Flights of the Human Mind was a thought that came to her when looking at an advert for a holiday home – What would it be like to live in a lighthouse? This grows into the novel – Why would you choose to live in a lighthouse? Why isolate yourself?NaturalFlightsoftheHumanMind

    At the start of her writing process, Clare doesn’t know how her story will end. Throughout the project, she continuously is asking questions of it, the answers to which provide the action and ending. Her novel is a growing discovery and the end will not show itself until half way through.

    ‘We all write from within ourselves’, she says, ‘If you have a story to tell; build a fictional world around it. But beware, it can become obvious when a writer has based their story on themselves’.

    A reader needs to be able to identify with their characters. Having sympathy for a character isn’t the same as liking them. A writer needs to ask ‘Why’. No one knows the background to anyone else’s actions. Why does the baddy do what they do?

    Dialogue is often underestimated as an aspect of bringing your characters to life. The AftertheBombingway the character speaks identifies them. Writers need to be wary of the danger of all their characters sounding the same. When writing After the Bombing, Clare read many war time reports in order to gain an awareness of how people of that era spoke. For WhentheFloodsCameWhen the Floods Came which is set in the future, she studied the history of speech which brought to light the way old sayings resurface over the years.

    Plot moves the story along and the narrative arc certainly helps here. However, to over plan can make a writer’s life boring.

    Action is also necessary and the trick is to interweave it as the story progresses.

    Structure, like plot is more of a feeling. Try physically holding a book; your hands can feel where you are; you will be able to think ‘I’ve come to the bit when something’s going to happen.’

    Once she has started on a novel, Clare sticks with it. No, she never rewrites the start. She may edit and move sections, but never completely rewrites it.

  • Turning Creative Ideas into Page-Turning Storytelling – Chris Cleave

    Report by Lisa Nightingale

    Chris Cleave

    ‘It never occurred to me not to be a writer.’ began Chris Cleave award winning author of Everyone Brave is Forgiven.EveryoneBraveisForgiven

    Thanks to his mother who filled their home with books his discovery that he loved writing came at just age six.

    At seventeen, he submitted his first book to all the agents in London. A short story about a man roadtripping across Mexico eating only what he found at the side of the road. Chris had never been to Mexico and of course being only Seventeen couldn’t drive. The book was rejected.

    Following the birth of his first child, he found that the issues such as human rights which as a teenager had been at the forefront of his mind were now burning in his heart.

    IncendiaryThe next novel he wrote, Incendiary was published most successfully. His next three novels followed suit.

    ‘As I’m among friends ….’ He said feeling that as writers we would make more use of his sharing his experiences of research and his own writing journey.

    Chris doesn’t start a novel with planning, narrative curves and character arcs. He starts with a question:

    Can you ever recover from a broken heart? – Incendiary TheOtherHand

    How far would you go to help a stranger? – The Other Hand

    Isn’t it wrong to strive for and achieve your dream by crushing those of your friends? – Gold

    He then interviews the people and the ‘life’ that will go into the book. ‘Let them talk to each other’ he tells us.

    In the case of Gold, Chris spoke to athletes, daring to ask the questions that other might shy from. He found excitement when their answers came so different to what was expected. Talking to your subjects gives you a deeper insight into their behaviour patterns than any other form of research.Gold

    Only then does he interweave the plot.

    The mantra that he has adopted whenever he begins to write is to cross a boundary. So he writes as a woman or a different culture. This forces to keep the story away from himself. He finds a true story and using fiction reports back on it.

    ‘You’re only really listening to the conversation when you’re not in it.’ He says and imparted two strange tips for finding out how people really speak. 1) Disguise yourself as an IPod listener on the top deck of the bus, but don’t switch your IPod on. Instead listen to the conversations around you and 2) read Dating sites.

    Having learned his lessons which are securely sealed in his ‘big, brown envelope of Bitterness’, Chris never uses a setting in which he hasn’t spent a lot of time. See the vista that the character will see or stand in their footsteps. This exercise will raise questions of its own. Questions that you would never have known to ask had you not been there.

    Chris is deeply thankful that he and his Clinical Nutritionist wife are able to ‘tag team’ their childcare needs allowing him valuable research and writing time.

  • Allie Spencer’s Route to Publishing Via Winchester Writers’ Festival

    allie-spencer[1]I always wanted to be a writer and, whether it was university essays, short stories or legal pleadings (I’m a lawyer by trade) I have always put pen to paper in one form or another. The idea of writing a novel, though, was rather daunting. As someone who read a lot of novels, it was probably inevitable that sooner or later I would have a go but…well…they’re quite big, aren’t they? And don’t they take a long time to write? Then, after a bit of research, I discovered that all people initially want to see of your novel are three chapters and a synopsis – and that instantly seemed a lot more manageable. So, with an idea in mind and a rough synopsis beside me, I booted up the laptop, opened a new Word document and typed ‘Chapter One’ at the top of the page.

    Writing the novel was easier than I’d imagined. The flaw was that once I’d finished it, no-one seemed to like it. In fact, after the blood and – literal – tears sweated over it, the poor thing was roundly rejected by every single agent in the country. One publisher did ask to see the full manuscript but, after due and weighty consideration, they rejected it too. However, I’d been well and truly bitten by the bug and I duly began Book Two. Around this time, I heard about an event in Winchester called a ‘Writers’ Conference’ (now the Festival of Writing). Here, I was told, you could not only attend classes and workshops but you had the opportunity of pitching your work directly to agents and publishers. I signed up for a Saturday session and the most extraordinary things began to happen. I saw an agent and an editor who were both very enthusiastic about Book Two. Crucially, this gave me the confidence I needed to press on, get it finished and begin the submission process all over again. This time, the outcome was completely different: twelve months later, I had secured an agent and, the year after that, I had a two book deal. tug-of-love-150x243 ‘Tug of Love’ – formerly known as Book Two – went on to win the Romantic Novelists’ Association award for the best debut and was shortlisted for the prestigious Melissa Nathan Award for Comedy Romance.

    The Winchester Writers’ Festival, though, is about more than publishing deals. Being an author is a lonely life and it is all too easy to let doubts creep in about your work or for you to feel isolated and unsupported in what is a highly competitive industry. Coming to Winchester allows you to be part of a writing family; a family where people want the best for you and will do what they can to help you succeed. Each Festival I have attended – whether as a delegate or, later, as a tutor – allowed me to come away recharged and enthusiastic. It is about meeting kindred spirits, finding your tribe and, most importantly, it is one of the best ways I can imagine to get your writing journey off to a flying start.