Writing Diary: June

I wish I could harness the flavour of energy I give to my garden in my writing. Both require a combination of knowledge, creative flair and work. In both, you’re working within boundaries: your soil, climate, aspect; form, audience. Both throw up frustrating challenges that set you off course: slugs, frost, disease, inexplicable death; blocks, lack of break-through, poor sales, lack of focus. Both require bouts of solid toil and constant tinkering.

I came to gardening gradually. It was no great passion at first. I had a flat; it had a garden. Gardening was part of doing up the flat, then it was part of the housework. But it grew on me. We moved to the country and rented a house which had been a farmworker’s cottage. No one had ever done anything to the garden that cost any money. There was grass; there were damson trees. We rotavated, grew vegetables, put up playthings for the kids. I grew things in pots, things I could move to a house that we owned. Then we bought the house. The following spring we planted tiny sticks that would become a hedge and little bendy trees. Gradually, gradually over the years, I’ve dug beds, added more trees, put in a patio and paths.

I find it quite easy to take the things that don’t work out in my garden with equanimity. Lovingly nurtured seedlings chewed to nothing by slugs overnight: oh, well, start again with something slugs like less. Camelia not quite the right colour when it finally comes into bloom: no problem, wait until autumn and move it. I can look at my garden with pleasure even while assessing all its imperfections. When a combination of plants turns out to be just right, I’m thrilled. When something’s less than perfect, I look at it calmly and I make a plan. When something’s coming on slowly, I enjoy the suspense. I don’t care that it’s never going to be a show garden. It’s mine, I made it and I love it all.

Writing isn’t like that for me. I’m after perfection and I want it right now. When something isn’t working right I worry about it, I lie awake trying to puzzle it out. I’m reluctant to give up on things that may not be working because it seems like a waste of my previous work. I can’t be calm about it. I want to get to the end and then I want other people to see what I’ve done and think it’s fabulous.

Maybe that’s the difference. I’m treating my writing like a show garden. I want it to be perfect and weed-free with everything in the right position, perfectly in bloom. I want it to be finished. A real garden is never finished and so there’s no pressure in it. I don’t want to write with no end in view the way I garden – I’m always going to aim to finish a book and have it enthusiastically received by an audience. However, I’d like a little more of my mellow gardening energy to feed into my writing – embracing the puzzles and the setbacks, calmly setting about working out how to improve things, accepting that sometimes some things just don’t work and now and then sitting back to take a look at what I’ve done and being happy with it.

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My new book, Snippets, is available now.

For a taster tale, you can read a Snippets story that's not in the book here.

You can get a copy of Snippets on Amazon or if you’d like a signed copy send me a message on Twitter, Instagram or Facebook. 

Go to https://ko-fi.com/clairewatts to read a new Snippets story every month. It’s free, but you can support me with a donation if you like.

You can also find me on my website clairejwatts.com

Writing diary: May

I’ve been pottering along working on the same book since the beginning of the year, going more and more slowly. I started the year with a very full plan and then wrote every day, first by hand and then typing up what I’d written. This was a lot of work, but I thought it was cutting out a stage of drafting by making me really think about what I’d put down on paper as I typed it. However, I think now that there’s something larger at stake with the book, a fundamental thing in the plot that I thought was minor but which is actually right at the heart of it. What this means, I think, is that before I am done with this first draft I need to examine one particular central adult character and their motives and see how this links in with the plot and even more importantly with the central child character and their actions.

This realisation is kind of a back-to-the-drawing-board moment. It’s daunting and makes me question the whole premise of the book. However, I think these are often the moments from which the best ideas are born. This is when you, the writer, realise what the story is trying to tell you. Of course, not all stories necessarily need to tell you anything, and what this particular story tells me may not be what it tells my reader, but the story has to work for me first.

I’m not sure what the best way to go about examining this character is. I think probably to start with I’ll read what I’ve written and make some notes about her motivation and character. I’ve started doing this already, but I was considering lots of other elements at the same time, so I haven’t been consistent. I think at the moment this character starts out being one kind of person when you only hear about her and then when she appears in person she seems rather different. Then I’ll have to set out to answer the questions I’ve raised. Or possibly I could write from her point of view telling the story of what happened to someone else. I don’t generally like writing extra bits that I know will definitely not be part of the finished book, but – hey ho! – sometimes you’ve just got to do it. The other thing that can work for me is to talk it through with someone else. At least, that usually works for plot – talking sparks ideas for smoothing out plot knots. I don't know if it would work for character.

In the meantime, the new idea that’s edging into my mind seems so much more appealing than slogging away at this one. I don’t really know anything about this idea, except that it’s historical and to do with fear of nuclear war. A friend of mine who tells me she never throws away anything printed that comes into her hands lent me a copy of the original Protect and Survive booklet from 1980. Honestly, it makes my head spin. Did the government actually believe the advice they were giving would protect anyone? Was this what scientists were telling them? 

What seems extraordinary to me now is that I lived through this period and simply didn’t think about it. I had other existential worries – I suppose most teenagers do – but I guess I must have trusted that governments would not be so stupid as to blow each other up. What a dope!

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My new book, Snippets, is available now.

For a taster tale, you can read a Snippets story that's not in the book here.

You can get a copy of Snippets on Amazon or if you’d like a signed copy send me a message on Twitter, Instagram or Facebook. 

Go to https://ko-fi.com/clairewatts to read a new Snippets story every month. It’s free, but you can support me with a donation if you like.

You can also find me on my website clairejwatts.com

Reading children’s books and childhood reading

 

Of the twenty-seven books I’ve read so far this year, fifteen were children’s books. I read a lot of children’s books, mostly because I find them satisfying, but partly, of course, because I’m interested in how and what other children’s writers write. Do all children’s writers feel this way? I would be surprised to learn of any writer who didn’t read a good deal in their own area of work, suspicious too of their reasons for writing for a particular market if books of that ilk didn’t interest them. I suppose some maverick genius might manage to write a perfect book for children or a perfect romance or a perfect thriller without ever looking at an example of the type of book they were writing. It just doesn’t seem very likely.

Three of those twenty-seven were books about children’s books – there’s a whole world of writing around children’s books once you start looking: writing craft, criticism, history, memoir – plus articles and reviews. And when you can’t summon up the energy for an actual book there’s kidlit Twitter. I follow a lot of people who are engaged with children’s books and to be honest I would have given up on the shouting match and sales pitch that makes up most of Twitter long ago if it weren’t for this entirely wholesome and knowledgeable community.

I fell upon another rather fascinating thread on Twitter when Sophie Anderson (@sophieinspace) mentioned that she would not recommend the majority of the books she read when she was a child to children of today because there are so many brilliant more relevant texts available and many of the ‘classics’ pushed on children are racist and sexist. I understand where she’s coming from, but as ever it’s a matter of who is introducing reading matter to children. Most adults are not particularly interested in children’s books. They can’t be expected to know what is current and relevant. What they know about children’s books is based on books they knew and loved as a child and what the supermarket and the display tables in bookshops are shoving at them. Most primary school teachers can scarcely keep up with all the demands of their jobs, let alone manage to become well-read in the latest children’s books. For all these reasons, of course people keep sharing ‘classic’ children’s books with children. I think there’s probably also a tendency to think that these books have stood the test of time so they must be good and that, since they are classics, they must be ‘safe’. None of which is necessarily true. Reading possibly problematic old books with a child and sharing problems in them is one way forward, but I think really the best thing is to give children lots of opportunities to choose for themselves. Learning to look at book covers and blurbs to help you decide if a book will suit you is a skill. So is choosing to read something new and then deciding that it doesn’t suit you. This is, of course, where a well-stocked library comes in. *sigh*

All this led me to think about my own reading choices as a child and who and what influenced them. 

What there was in the library mostly dictated what I read. I didn’t own a lot of books but my mother took us to the library every week. Occasionally she’d point out something there she’s enjoyed as a child (that’s how I came to Elizabeth Gouge) but mostly it was just me and the shelves.

I read all the classics, What Katy Did, The Secret Garden, Anne of Green Gables, every Nesbit I could get my hands on, influenced largely by BBC serialisations, I think. There was modern stuff too, Helen Cresswell’s Lizzie Dripping, I think Tom’s Midnight Garden and The Borrowers. From the cinema, I came to all the Mary Poppins books, so much stranger and more mysterious on the page.

One very strong memory is of a serialisation of Elidor on the children’s radio programme which was all we had by way of English language media when my father was based in Germany. It was mind-blowing and led me to the rest of Alan Garner.

When I was about eight, a friend of my mother’s who reviewed children’s books came to stay, bringing me a stack of new paperbacks, eight or ten new books all at once. It was glorious. The only one I have left is the rather wonderful The Saucepan Journey by Edith Unnerstad. I think this is the moment I started wanting to own books. After birthdays and Christmas I would head straight for a bookshop. And oh, the joy when I discovered a local second hand bookshop – a big pile of books for scarcely any outlay, lots more classics because they’d be in hardback which, to my mind, meant they must be superior.

The only influences I remember from teachers was when we listened to a recording of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe which led me to the rest of Narnia and another teacher lent me a book called Well Met By Witchlight by Nina Beachcroft when I missed her reading the end (I tracked this book down a year or so ago and it wasn’t nearly as good as I remembered, but it was a huge influence on the direction of my childhood writing).

Then there was my friend Miranda. Her mother knew a lot about children’s books somehow. Through her I found K M Peyton and Barbara Willard at just the moment that I was tiptoeing around the edge of adult novels, because British publishing was still only toying with YA back then. 

So back to the question of whether I would share classic children’s books with children. Personally, no. I take great pleasure in buying books for all the children in my present-buying sphere. I like to share new and interesting books they may not have come across. I wouldn’t stop a child from reading classics, but I’d let them arrive at them for themselves. Direction is great and if there are knowledgeable teachers, librarians and family who can direct a child to their next favourite book, fantastic. But failing that guiding hand, what they need is plenty of choice.

 

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My new book, Snippets, is available now.

For a taster tale, you can read a Snippets story that's not in the book here.

You can get a copy of Snippets on Amazon or if you’d like a signed copy send me a message on Twitter, Instagram or Facebook. 

Go to https://ko-fi.com/clairewatts to read a new Snippets story every month. It’s free, but you can support me with a donation if you like.

You can also find me on my website clairejwatts.com

Writing Diary: April

You must have a social media presence. Publishers expect it, readers expect it.

So they say.

But what exactly is it for?

It is so you get noticed? Who is going to notice you on Twitter or Instagram unless you find yourself a niche as the amusing dog-owner or the person who always posts pictures of fabulous libraries? Does anyone actually want to know what I think about anything? Do I want them to know? Can I be bothered to figure out what Tiktok is and whether it would be any use to me?

Is it so people can find out about you? I suppose… I’ve heard people swear they’ve got writing or editing jobs through Twitter or LinkedIn but I find it hard to imagine how that comes about.

But nonetheless, everyone tells you it's necessary. All the writers I know use social media in some form or another. Most have a website. As for me, I blog reasonably regularly. I try to stick to things I think might be useful to other writers or things that I think are interesting about my work. I share my blogs on social media and a handful of people read them, some of them my family. I use Instagram, mostly to share whatever I’m reading and sometimes things I see on my walks. Facebook is for what I’m reading. I don’t really know what to do with LinkedIn but I’m on there too.

The thing that’s been nagging at me for a long time now is a website. It seemed complicated and possibly expensive. What would I put on it? What would people want to know? Who would search for me? I looked at a lot of other writers’ websites. Hmm. I could do this. A lot of the pages weren’t that different from this blog.

Some pictures.
A list of everything I’ve done.
A link to this blog.
A list of workshops and events I could provide.
A contact page.

I started to play around.

And then I stopped. The free trial was over. Was I going for this – in which case please pay – or was I just going to let it drop (again)?

And then, right then, you know what happened?

I did an event through a friend of a friend and someone said to me, “I searched for you on the internet but I couldn’t find you.” Well, they hadn’t looked very hard. I have a very common name, it’s true, but if you google me my Twitter account comes up on the first page and if you look up ‘Claire Watts writer’ pretty much the whole page is me. So presumably that means I am doing something right.

However.

What this person actually wanted to find wasn’t they little bits and pieces you find on Goodreads or my Amazon author page. They didn’t want to read what I’d said on Twitter or look at what I’d been reading on Instagram. They wanted a website dedicated to information all about me.

So I paid the money and published the website. I have no idea how to get the website onto that first search page, but it’s easily findable through all my other socials. Perhaps someone will find it and give me some work or book an event. Or perhaps someone will just decide to look me up and find out more about me.

Have a look. You'll find it here: https://www.clairejwatts.com

 

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My new book, Snippets, is available now.

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

You can get a copy of Snippets on Amazon Or if you’d like a signed copy send me a message on Twitter, Instagram or Facebook. 

Go to https://ko-fi.com/clairewatts to read a new Snippets story every month. It’s free, but you can support me with a donation if you like.

Writing Diary: March

 

When I last wrote this diary, I’d just got to the end of the first draft of my new book. Finishing that draft coincided with my getting something else I’d written back from my agent with lots of things to do and think about, which turned out to be perfect timing. The thing about first drafts is that you really need to write them and then turn your back on them. ‘Drawer time’ some writers call this. What it means is that you get your mind completely free of it, so that when you come back to it, you view it with fresh eyes. You can see what’s great, what’s less than great, where there are holes and inconsistencies. Drawer time is an essential part of the creative process and having something else to immerse your creative self in totally during that time is a perfect way to unshackle yourself from the draft in the drawer.

 

Did I throw myself into working on the book my agent sent back to me straightaway? No I did not. I griped and complained to myself about what they thought needed to be done to it. I asked writer friends for their opinions about the comments. I asked my agent for clarification on some points. I resisted and resisted. These changes were IMPOSSIBLE! They’d make the story into something else entirely! It wouldn’t be my story anymore. I reread the book from beginning to end. I calmed down a bit. I thought about it for a few days, a week. I did all the other things on my to-do list.

 

Then I started with the changes that made sense to me, the ones that were easy to do and wouldn’t have a knock-on effect elsewhere in the book.

 

Then I spent a good bit of time on the beginning. The first 5,000 words are key. Many of the people who are going to be involved in buying and marketing your book will never read beyond those first 5,000 words, so they’d better be hooky as hell. Mine needed more tension, more threat. I tend towards subtle, which has its place, but maybe not in these first 5,000 words.

 

I came to the big problem, the thing that according to my agent and their industry reader knocks my book from realistic YA speculative fiction into sci-fi: the inclusion of teleporting. My feeling is that it’s such a minor element in the book that it can't change the nature of the book. The way people travel is very important to the world-building and in this particular context, I needed something as near instantaneous as possible. But could I have almost instantaneous travel in a ‘realistic’ way? I just couldn't see it. So I wrote a list of possible ways to doing this by advancing technologies we have now. I came up with a solution. It’s not as elegant as teleporting and I’d argue that it still seems a bit sci-fi, partly because I had to give more explanation of how it works, whereas with teleporting, well, everyone knows how that ‘works’.

 

More reading, more tweaking. Another beginning to end read-like-a-reader read. And now the book's with a couple of useful readers for comments before I finalise the changes and send it back to my agent to see what they think.

 

Which means it’s time to open the drawer and take out that first draft again. I’ve read it through. There’s everything I expected: parts that work and parts that don’t, a big hole where I somehow missed out a scene that was on my plan, some overlaps because I wrote out of sequence. But, you know, it’s a great story. The beginning and end are in the right place. All the people are there. I can see where I need to build on it. Drawer time, folks – it’s invaluable.

 

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My new book, Snippets, is available now. 

 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 

Or if you’d like a signed copy send me a message on Twitter, Instagram or Facebook.

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

It’s free, but you can support me with a donation if you like.

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 

Or if you’d like a signed copy send me a message on Twitter, Instagram or Facebook.

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

It’s free, but you can support me with a donation if you like.

Writing Diary: February

 

I started working on a new book on January 4th, with the aim of writing a thousand words a day five days a week until I was finished with the first draft. I had expected this to take me until near the end of March but I discover to my surprise that this first draft is coming out much shorter and I’ll be done with the initial writing by the end of this week. On reflection, I’m not sure why I ‘m surprised; I’d divided the plan into scenes and I’ve written one scene of a thousand words or more each day. True, I’ve added in a couple of extra scenes along the way, but basically I’ve run out of scenes.

 

Even though I’m finished putting words on paper for this first draft I haven’t actually finished with it to the point that I’m ready to set it to one side. This one is far too scruffy for that stage. I like to play around with different working methods. The act of putting a first draft into big blocks of words on a screen can be extraordinarily tedious. Some of it sings at once, of course, but for other bits you’re simply working out how to move your characters from A to B or what they should be doing to break up their conversations. I find that varying the method I use to write means I’m not completely comfortable with the writing and that keeps it from being dull (mostly).

 

This time my new method was to write by hand first and to write out of sequence. Before the start of each week I’d write a list of the five numbered scenes that I was going to write that week, picking them randomly from my detailed plan. Then each morning I’d get out of bed, check the plan and write for an hour. That was usually long enough to write a scene. I generally write in pencil but I decided to use one of the fountain pens I own and never use instead. I discover that writing with a fountain pen is extraordinarily pleasing. The nib floats across the paper.

 

After the hour of writing by hand, I’d get up and dressed, possibly run, and then sit down and type up what I’d written. But of course, I wasn’t typing word-for-word what I’d written at all. I was refining and reordering, adding in things I’d thought of as I ate my breakfast, smoothing out knots, occasionally checking facts. The typed-up scenes mostly fell at around 1,000 words. I suspect when I come back to look at them again I may find that some seem rushed and others stretched, but the aim was to get words on paper My idea was that by handwriting first and then typing up I’d get through two draft stages in one go and I think it’s worked.

 

When I’ve finished writing all the scenes at the end of this week it’ll be time to go back to the beginning and sort out the unevenness created by working piecemeal. I know there are places were one scene overlaps with another and there are probably gaps too. There are things I invented in later scenes that I’ll need to add in earlier. I suspect there’ll be plot holes because it’s quite a complicated plot and I know there’ll be places where I need to let my character have some fun with her situation and others where I need to scare her a bit more It’s a long way from being a finished first draft. But the hard bit, the big chunks of words on paper that tell a story, that’ll be there. The rest is much more fun.

 

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My new book Snippets: Tiny Pieces of Fairy Tale is available now.