Tiny pieces of fairy tale

I’ve got a new book out. Snippets is a book of 22 very short stories that look into the spaces left for the reader or listener’s imagination in traditional fairy tales. They’re moments that delve into character or sensation or motivation. Sometimes they follow the letter of the traditional story and sometimes they ask questions about it or provide answers to questions that lurk beneath the surface.

 

How Snippets came to be

A few years ago I set myself a 500-words-a-day writing challenge. 500 words a day is a pretty easy challenge most of the time. It’s about half an hour’s writing time for me. The trouble is, sometimes you’ve got to a point in your work-in-progress where you don’t want to be adding 500 words a day to it. And sometimes the day gets away from you and it’s ten thirty at night and you still haven’t written your 500 words. I started doing writing exercises from books but they weren’t exactly what I wanted. So instead I wrote down a whole lot of things I thought I would like to practise writing – jealousy or tension or fear or the antagonist’s point of view. Every time I was stuck for what to write for my 500 words I picked something from the list and I picked a fairy tale character and I started to write. Soon I found I wasn’t looking at the list at all. And I was writing the stories every day. Often a new idea would come to me as I was waking up and I’d grab my laptop and sit up in bed typing.

 

My first encounters with fairy tales

I have always loved fairy tales. When I was growing up I didn’t own a lot of books. My mother is a library-goer, so we went to the library every week and had the glory of choosing four books from the library shelves. We moved around quite a bit, but whatever new library we went to, there was a shelf of fairy tales and myths and legends right next to the children’s section. I know now that fairy tales are next to children’s books in the Dewey Decimal System, but at the time what it meant to me was that the fairy tales were special. On each visit I would take three novels and a book of fairy tales. Library-lovers of my age would recognise those fairy tale books: Ruth Manning Sanders Books of Princesses and Trolls and Wizards, illustrated by Robin Jacques, and the ones called ‘Favourite Fairy Tales told in …[some country]. There seemed to be an endless supply. At home, I had a collection of Ladybird fairy tales, sadly long since sold to a second-hand bookshop to feed my appetite for new stories. I had an LP of a dramatised Cinderella to play on our radiogram – it was something like a pantomime with Buttons and comedy Ugly Sisters and some very cheesy songs. I also had a 45 with a fabulous version of Sleeping Beauty, with music from the ballet and a terrifying wicked fairy, Carabosse, with a ‘retinue of rats’!

 

Why fairy tales appeal to me as a writer

There’s a world of fascinating, erudite study of fairy tales that I’ve scarcely scratched the surface of. For me, fairy tales are the essence of story. You may have seen some of Jan Pienkowski fairy tale illustrations about the place since his recent death (if not, go and look him up). These black silhouettes of characters moving across coloured backgrounds are, for me, what fairy tales are like. Fairy tale characters are puppets, who either have no names at all or else have generic names like Jack or Ivan or Gretel that appear again and again, or symbolic names like Cinderella or Little Red Riding Hood or Beauty. Fairy tale plots may be full of incident, but the essential through-line of the plot is straightforward – they’re about seeking your fortune, coming up against an enemy, finding a husband or a wife. The teller can do anything with these stories, that’s the point. That’s why they endure and why they reappear again and again in different forms. They’re different from myths and legends because those are anchored to real places or specific characters like King Arthur or Cucullin. I’ve always considered them different from authored fairy tales like Hans Andersen’s or Oscar Wilde’s because there’s no room in those stories for anything beyond what the author has told you (unless you change the ending totally and make a weird uncomfortable mess like Disney’s Little Mermaid). Having said that, I’ve read that even some of those I think of as authorless aren’t really. No matter, for me fairy tales are made for retelling, they’re made for the teller to make them their own, to act out the parts, to do the voices for the three bears or threaten the pigs “I’ll huff and I’ll puff.” They’re made for storytellers to pick apart and weave into new stories that have a satisfying familiarity about them. They’re made for me to sew my own tales into.

 

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 You can read a Snippets story that's not in the book here. 

You can get a copy of Snippets on Amazon http://authl.it/c5p?d 

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Go to https://ko-fi.com/clairewatts to read a new Snippets story every month. 

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Inspiration?

A new creative idea goes round and round in your head like a worry. Not quite like a worry, of course, because round and round with a worry is unproductive and feels bad. With a worry, the more you let it fill your mind, the more the same stuck thoughts seem to come around without solutions.

 

But as a new creative idea goes round and round, it expands and develops; it puffs up like candy floss spinning in a tub, no, solider than that, it grows paths and bridges and sometimes dead ends. It’s a gorgeous thing to have a brand-new creative idea growing in your head. You want to nurture it, to obsess about it. It pops into your mind at the oddest moments. You play with it in the moments before you sleep and when you’re not quite awake.

 

But – and it’s a big but – there’s a moment when you have to pin your New Idea down. If not, it will disappear into the ether. You’ll remember the flavour of it, but you’ll never capture the excitement. Write it down now, before it’s gone. No matter that you’re working on something completely different. No matter that you haven’t a clue what to do with your new idea, that you don’t know what it actually is.

 

Set your notes to one side. Carry on with what you’re working on. Once the notes are on the page, your head will quiet. The New Idea is silent for now.

 

One day, when you come back to your New Idea, you’ll find that pinning it down has turned it into something different. It’s a bunch of notes on a page. It’s not flying anymore. Some of the magic has worn off. You’ll need to turn it over and inspect it to see if you can find the embers of the magic. You’ll need to push them around to see if the embers will spark. And then, if they do, you’ll need hours and days and weeks of solid work to turn the Idea into something you can show other people.

 

And maybe, if you do your job well, your New Idea will catch light in the mind of your reader and the idea that went round and round in your head will fill theirs. A gift from your mind to theirs.

Nonfiction for children – where to start

It’s been a while since I started writing a new nonfiction book for children. I’m about to start on a new one and, to be honest, I’m feeling a little rusty. So I thought I’d talk myself through the planning process in a general way and perhaps that would be useful to other people as well as to myself.

 

So, where do you start? Let’s assume you have a topic already. Either it’s something you feel there’s a need for a book on or something you’re passionate about and want to share or maybe a publisher has commissioned you to write a book on a particular topic. That last one is the way most of the nonfiction books I’ve written have come about, though this new book I’m embarking on is all my own idea.

 

So you’ve got your idea and now you need to ask yourself a series of questions. A lot of these reflect the way primary school teachers begin project work, gathering children together to find out what they know and what they want to find out.

 

What are children likely to know already?

Obviously, you’re guessing here, but looking around at TV and films and books and computer games should give you some idea what sort of basic knowledge children are likely to have. If you were going to write a book about Vikings, for example, you might assume that children may have come across the Vikings in Cressida Cowell’s books or the films of them, and so know that the Vikings lived somewhere cold and had cool ships. Of course you also have to be aware that children may ‘know’ things that aren’t true (like that Vikings had dragons).

 

In a way, this question is a bit misleading. It’s not exactly about what children know, it’s simply about the fact that they know something. You need to come to the subject as though children know nothing because of course there will be gaps in their knowledge and you can’t possibly know what they are. Perhaps it is better to ask a different question:

 

Why have they picked up this book?

What is it about the topic of the book that has made them reach for it? Will it tell them more about something they know a little bit about? Will it give them exciting things to do or make? Will it clarify a topic that can be worrying? Does it promise to reveal great secrets or thrilling facts?

 

The point is that at the outset you need to put yourself in the child’s position. Why would they pick up this book? What are they going to get out of the experience of reading it?

 

So once you’ve got that sorted out, there are some further questions to answer:

 

What are the key facts about the topic you must include in the book?

 

What is the most exciting information you must include?

 

What information would make great illustrations?

 

And of course, all the time you’re gathering and sorting information, reading serious grown-up books on the topic, looking at how other children’s writers have approached it, searching the internet and second-hand bookshops and museums for quirky nuggets of information. And once you’ve gathered all you need, then it’s time to sort it.

 

Not an easy process. With a narrative nonfiction book it’s a little easier; then you’re telling the story of something, propelled forward by the passage of time. But with an information book it’s rather harder. You need to think of it as a story anyway in that one thing should lead to next. Starting with the basics – what, when, where – generally works. Or referring to the child’s experience of whatever it is and then building out. The book will naturally go off in different directions from whatever the starting point is, but I think it’s important to bring it all back together again at the end. With a history book you can do this by talking about what is left behind, the archaeology or influence on life today. Sometimes it’s possible to look to the future of your topic – though that can date the book quickly. Or finish by bringing it back to the child reader with things they can do now they’re in possession of all this knowledge. It’s tricky, this finishing off business, but important to make a satisfying reading experience.

 

So that’s it. Best get on with it, eh?

Blank sheet

 

I’ve just finished writing something.

 

I say just, but actually it was a good week ago now that I sent it off to someone to read and drew a mental line under it. One day I may have to work on it again. (That’s a good thing, it means it’s going further along the line to publication.) Or that might be it: a dead end. Whichever is the case, just now, for me, it’s done with. Now that I’ve patted myself on the back for getting to the end (always congratulate yourself – writing a whole book is a magnificent achievement) and dealt with all the things I’ve been putting off in order to get finished, it’s time to start something new.

 

But what?

 

I have projects I’ve set to one side because I didn’t know how to proceed with them.

 

I have whole books that might need some more work or might be right for now when they weren’t right back when I wrote them.

 

I have abandoned plans and pages of notes.

 

I have ideas that have stalled because I need to do lots of research.

 

I have brand-new ideas that are still floating around in my head.

 

What to choose?

 

The answer might be to work out exactly what sort of book people would want to read, if such a thing were possible, and then write that book. It’s probably a very sensible idea, and certainly how a publisher’s marketing department would like things to be done. All the commissioned books I’ve written originate from a publishing company’s idea of what people want to read. But working out what people want to read isn’t a science, or else there would be no surprise bestsellers. All of the books I love most have a spark of originality that would never have come from the author studying the market and writing what they thought people wanted to read.

 

So I am led to the conclusion that I need to work out what I want to write for myself and just hope that it’s also what the market wants and what readers want.

 

I think I’m ready for something brand new. I’ve been polishing and snipping off loose ends for months now. I need to start to weave the threads of a new creative puzzle.

Why I love my crit group

 

I’ve done a lot of different things to support and improve my writing over the years. I’ve read books, I’ve been on courses, I’ve attended conferences, I've set myself challenges; I’ve tried different methods of organising my time, of structuring my planning, of generating ideas; I’ve worked with a mentor and had beta-readers read my work.

But the single most important thing I’ve done is to join a critique group.

I love my crit group. It’s been over a year since I’ve seen them in person and I can’t tell you how excited I am to see them again. Next month! I’m counting the days! I’m not going to go so far as to say that this is thing I’m looking forward to most about lockdown being over, but it’s right near the top.

Of course we’ve met by Zoom, which works to a certain extent, but you miss the ebb and flow of an in-person meeting. The formality of a Zoom meeting doesn’t really lend itself to the wide-ranging chat that stretches the beginnings and ends of our in-person meetings – you have to talk one at a time because it’s difficult to read each other’s cues in the way of a normal conversation. Plus most of us have already spent enough time with computers each day.

The thing about a crit group, above all, is the intimacy of it. This group of people know your work and you know theirs. You know when they’re struggling and why; you know when they’re excited about something new or because something’s going well. You present your work to them and ask, “Does this work?” and you trust their honesty and their kindness to provide you with feedback that will allow you to move forward.

How do you get to that point? It takes time. It’s always tricky when a new person enters the group. You don’t know them, they don’t know you. They’re exposing themselves, heart and soul, to a group of people who are already tight-knit. Everyone has to go gently, gently, until you begin to have an understanding of each other.

Once you’ve got that understanding, this is the group who will tell you what you’re doing wrong and you will take it from them. They will be your cheerleaders when you’re getting it right. They will understand your writing dilemmas and dreams better than your nearest and dearest because they are writers too.

And this is the group who you will be sure to thank in the acknowledgements of your book (and your Costa acceptance speech… and when the film of your book gets an Oscar…)

Thirteen ways to end a chapter

While it can be tempting to keep on writing with occasional line gaps for changes of scene and time as Terry Pratchett did in his Discworld novels, it’s not really fair to child readers (or adult readers-aloud) not to have regular chapter endings. (In fact even Terry Pratchett's children’s books are divided into chapters!) One of my 'big picture' tasks when editing a first draft is to look at how the endings of each individual chapter are working and see how the chapter endings vary as the story progresses.

The most basic rule of ending a chapter is that it must encourage the reader to carry on reading. The obvious way to do this, of course is with a cliffhanger. But ending every chapter on a cliffhanger is exhausting and monotonous. The trick is to vary between ending the chapter with:

a feeling of disorder This is could be a huge cliffhanger or just enough to signal a coming dilemma or threat.

a feeling of order This will give the reader a feeling of closure, the idea that the plot has forward momentum and things are on their way to being sorted out.

There are all sorts of ways to break that down further, but here is my own list of thirteen ways to end a chapter. Some types of ending are conducive to a feeling of disorder, some to order and some work equally well either way.

1. Obstacle: a barrier to change or forward movement is presented (disorder)

2. Question: a question is posed by a character or the narrator (disorder)

3. Choice: a choice is presented or a decision must be made (disorder)

4. Mistake: a character (or the reader) realises that a mistake has been made (disorder)

5. Disappointment: a plan goes wrong (disorder)

6. Arrival: a visitor or message or movement to a new place brings either disappointment or hope (disorder /order)

7. Departure: someone leaving or movement away from a place brings either disappointment or hope (disorder /order)

8. Revelation: a character or reader learns or understands something (disorder /order)

9. Confession: one character reveals something that will bond or separate characters (disorder /order)

10. Door: an opportunity for change or forward movement is presented  (order)

11. Plan: a plan is formed (order)

12. Hope: things appear to be going in the direction the characters desire (order )

13. Reflection: a quiet moment usually following action sequence; possibly a statement by the character or narrator about the story’s theme (order )

Searching for silence and stillness

 

My time is squeezed at the moment. From having no shape at all apart from what I imposed on it, my day is now divided up by other people’s timetables. I’m going to school every day. I’ve been a supply learning assistant for several years, but when I get asked to do it, it’s mostly too short notice and I have other things on. But just before Christmas I was asked to go and help in school when the new term started, and I thought, why not? I’m not going anywhere, nothing is happening. A week later, it was announced that the school wouldn’t reopen after Christmas. So I spent the Christmas holidays assuming that I wouldn’t be needed. But as it turns out, they do need me. The teachers aren’t coming into school, they’re doing all their teaching online, but someone needs to be there for the kids who need to come to school and one of the someones is me.

 

I thought about taking a break from my writing. After all, I have no deadlines, no one’s depending on me getting anything finished. But I had a plan and I hate to set aside a plan. So, I thought I’d try working very early each morning. I haven’t had a desk in our house for a couple of months since everyone came home, but if I got up and worked first thing, I thought I could get an hour at my old desk before it was time for its current occupant to clock in.

 

And so I got up, I fed the dogs, I made myself a cup of peppermint tea. I kept the lights dim in the kitchen; I switched on only the desk lamp in the living room. I sat at the desk with my tea and I started to edit chapter one of my rough first draft. Working first thing is not new for me. I’ve long grabbed my laptop from beside my bed, set a timer and let the words flow through my fingers for an hour. That time in the morning my brain is fluid. The ideas come and my inner critic is silent. I can write to a plan or I can write freeform. Just a little later in the day I find myself at the mercy of hunger or I find I need to tidy things away, do chores, organise things before I can settle to do creative work.

 

I knew that writing in the early morning worked for me. The question was would editing work? It’s a very different skill, after all. There’s problem-solving involved and you need that inner critic up and firing. That first morning when I turned on the desk lamp and started in on chapter one, I took it very gently. Just read it. Just comment. Don’t start with anything sweeping. And the happy answer is that yes, I can edit first thing in the morning too. It’s extraordinary. When my alarm goes off I simply sleepwalk through all the things I have to do. Ten or fifteen minutes later, I’m at the computer and I just fall straight into the manuscript, picking up where I was the day before. I hear the bin men, I hear the dogs moving around, the family getting up, but the door between me and them is shut and they don’t disturb me. I immerse myself in the words on the page, I question them, I move them about, I polish them; I find gaps and I fill them; I find waffle and I excise it. I give that manuscript my all until my timer goes off, then I shut down the computer and go and get in the shower. I don’t give the manuscript another thought until I’m at the desk the following morning.

 

I’ve been searching all through this year for physical and mental space to do my creative work in my busy, full household. I’m used to working in silence and stillness and there’s been very little of that here. But through this new turn of events I’ve found my silence and stillness. It’s a joy.

 

Retreat!

Retreat: (noun)
3. The act of retiring or withdrawing into privacy or into some place of saftey.
4. A place of seclusion or privacy.
OED

There is a house in France that feels like home to me. Though it doesn’t belong to me, I have a key and I know that whenever I want to go there I can. My family and I have been going on holiday there since, well, since before we were a family. As time has passed and I have moved house and my parents and friends have moved house, this has been the most constant place in my life.

But things change and now the house is to be sold. It’s taking a while, but a couple of months ago I realised time was running out for me to do something I have always promised myself I would do – to go there alone to write. I’ve written there before, writing time set aside during holidays, and once for a week with a writer friend, but never alone. Two weeks all alone? I’d be lonely, they said. Won’t you be scared? Won’t you be bored?

But I wasn’t lonely. I wasn’t scared or bored. It was the most extraordinary thing to have my brain emptied of all the things I usually have to think about for other people, of having to walk dogs and clean things and cook and make money and pay bills. Because of the time difference all the TV programmes I might have watched were on late so I didn’t watch TV. This is the essence retreating, of course – the putting aside of everyday life. It is utterly relaxing. I thought about my work, I read a little, I daydreamed, I slept, I ran. I wrote. I wrote. I wrote.

The lovely annexe where I worked

I had planned a new book. Three thousand words a day was my aim. In two weeks – let’s call that twelve days to allow for travelling – that would make 36,000 words. That’s a good start on a book that might be around 50,000 words in the end. First drafts just have to be hammered out. They’re always terrible, but once the words are on the page you can start sculpting them into something better. My plan was very precise – divided into scenes on a spreadsheet with only two or three places where I had written ‘[they go from A to B somehow]’. I plot using the snowflake method with some slight variations. I find this allows me to build my plot in an orderly but creative way. What I didn’t know is exactly what the tone of the book would be or what the characters would be like. I find these are the things that come as I write if I know where I’m going with the plot.

So, day 1, I got up and went for a run. Then I showered and had breakfast. I made coffee and carried it round to the little annexe to start work. It was eleven o’clock by this time and I was irritated with myself for not getting started sooner. How was I going to write 3,000 words a day if I didn’t start until eleven? I wrote for two hours. I had some lunch and sat in the sun (oh how the sun shone those first two days!) and then I wrote for another two hours.

I had written 5,000 words.

A fluke. Must be.

But the next day and the next I got 5,000 words on the page. I kept up the same routine. Four hours of writing, sometimes five, a couple of hours of some other type of work a bit later. On day 7, I wrote the final words. The book was 35,000 words long. Obviously, I thought, as I packed up that day, that was just a start. I would need lots of polish and there would be plot holes that needed work. So on day 8, I reread it and made notes. The beginning needed changing. It always does. There were a couple of other places which didn’t quite work. And lots of other notes of course. But it wasn’t bad. Four more days of revising and then another read. I couldn’t quite believe it.

Lovely evening walks - though I ended up covered head to toe in bites!

The sun shone... some of the time

Of course I haven’t read it again yet. Perhaps I’m wrong. Perhaps there are giant plot holes. Perhaps the plot is derivative or dull. Perhaps the characters are feeble. But I don’t think so. I think this book is nearer to done than any first draft I have done more slowly. In a month or two, when I can read it as though someone else has written it, I will bring it out and work on it again. I’m hopeful.

Retreating is extraordinary. Of course not everyone is lucky enough to get the chance to do this. I know I couldn’t have when my kids were younger and I’m privileged to have access to such a wonderful spot to hide away it. But even without being able to retreat completely, I think this experience demonstrates the necessity of clearing mental and physical space for writing so that when I write I can focus on nothing but my story. Just got to work out how to implement that now…

All locked up and ready to leave