Charlotte Sometimes - practically perfect

If anyone ever asks me what my favourite book is, I have an answer for them straight away. It’s Charlotte Sometimes by Penelope Farmer. No question. That’s my desert island book, the one I’d keep if you took all other books away from me. It’s a children’s book, ‘middle grade’ they’d call it if it was published now, but to me it’s just what I think of as sitting on the shelves with all the other children’s books, thick enough and with small enough writing that you know you’re going to get a story you can really lose yourself in, but with pictures here and there just to help you along a bit.

When I walked into my new boarding school dorms for the first time in 1975, it looked exactly like this.               (Illustration by Chris Clark)

Charlotte Sometimes is the story of Charlotte who is sent to boarding school and finds that overnight she had slipped back through time and taken the place of Clare, a pupil at the same school fifty years before in the midst of the First World War. No one notices that Charlotte is there rather than Clare (although Clare’s sister has her suspicions), and no one notices that Clare has replaced Charlotte in the 1960s. Night after night, the girls swap places and eventually they work out how to leave messages for one another.

I read this book first when I was about twelve, but it didn’t go straight to the top of my list. Certainly I enjoyed it and the story stayed with me, but I read so much in those days, it was hard to have a favourite. For a long time Alice in Wonderland was the book I would claim as my favourite if anyone asked. I did love Alice, but I think I was choosing this above anything else as a way of being superior to all the people who didn’t think that much about books and would just pick the last book they’d read or the one before that. I knew better, I’d considered all the books I’d read.

But though Charlotte Sometimes didn’t immediately leap to the top of my list, it ticked all the right boxes for me. I loved school books and historical novels, I loved time-slips and magic and inexplicable things. Oh, and I loved melancholy. Charlotte Sometimes made me cry. 

And then, when I’d just about forgotten about Charlotte Sometimes, when I’d begun to read more adult books than children’s ones because I didn’t yet realise that children’s books were my vocation, someone played me The Cure’s haunting song Charlotte Sometimes and that beautiful sadness that is so well-earned by the story came back to me. 

Jacket illustration by Emma Chichester-Clark

I found I was desperate to find a copy of the book. I read it again, nervous that my memory might have mis-served me. But no. It’s every bit as good as I remembered. Haunting, yes, but also exciting and realistic. Charlotte is a very human heroine, full of flaws and worries. I would go so far as to say that Charlotte Sometimes is very nearly a perfect children’s book. It deserves to be up there on the shelves with the classics.

OctoberPrep

The days of October are ticking away.

Half gone already.

Do you know what that means?

It means I’m half done with my NaNoWriMo prep…

(“Nano-what?” some of you say. Here’s the explanation.)

I know I can write 50,000 words in a month. I did it last year. In fact, I’m just now finishing the edits of the book I wrote last November and I’m pretty pleased with it. Strong on plot, I’d say, which is a bit of a departure for me as my characters are spend quite a lot of time drinking tea and chatting. The difference is probably that I’m aiming younger, what’s known as ‘Middle Grade’ even though that’s a reference to the US education system which is meaningless in Britain. Middle-graders don’t have a lot of truck with tea-drinking and chatting in books.

The great thing of course about writing a book that’s strong on plot is that there’s a clear forward pull on the narrative. Every time the characters stop running, you pull the rug out from under them and they’re off again. And for me to keep that much plot going at a rate of 1,667 words per day throughout November, I need to do plenty of planning.

I’ve found that the best way to plan is to ambush myself into creativity. That sounds slightly bonkers written down, but here’s what I mean. I know that my mind is at its most creative first thing in the morning before anything else has come to fill it. I spend a precious half-hour in bed with a notebook and pencil and the cup of peppermint tea my lovely husband brings me. I set a timer and for half an hour I write notes about the book I’m planning. They could be characters notes, plot notes, lists of names or places, lists of possible situations to throw my characters into, questions I need to solve. Anything and everything that comes into my head gets written down. After half an hour I put the notebook aside until the following day and begin the rest of my day. I hardly think about the book at all the rest of the day, but presumably it's all slotting into place as the day goes on because I always have more questions and more lists the next day. Last year I did this every day of October and by November 1st I was champing at the bit to get started on writing. (A side note, I worked out that if I could keep up this 30 minutes a day every day of the year it would add up to over five 35-hour working weeks of creativity – there’s a thought!).

Last year was the first time I’d tried this method and last year my daily notes were quite random. This year, just before the start of October I discovered the snowflake method of plotting so that’s what I’m trying this time. It’s more focused and because it requires you to continually go back to what you’ve planned before and expand, I think I’m going to have sorted out a lot of the potential plot holes before I start. Of course, there are potentially lots of these – I’m having a go at a detective story which turns out to be incredibly complicated… but more of that in another blog.