Category Archives: Writer Interviews

SISTER SCRIBES GUEST: MERRYN ALLINGHAM ON HISTORY REPEATING ITSELF

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“Researching history… changes our perspective, makes connections.” Historical novelist Merryn Allingham tells Susanna Bavin what she found by delving into the story of the Ottoman Empire.

 

When several members of my book group announced recently they didn’t like historical fiction, I was disappointed. But stunned when one went on to say she couldn’t see the point of history. For me, discovering the past doesn’t just illuminate quirky corners of a bygone age but helps understand the world of today. When I set out to research the background for A Tale of Two Sisters, a novel set in Constantinople 1905 – 1907, it was the nationalism of President Erdogan that I heard in my head, declaiming that Turkey had once been a great power and would be again.

So began my burrowing into the Ottoman Empire, a regime that lasted over five hundred years. The Ottoman Turks were indeed a great power, wielding influence over territories stretching from the Balkan States to the Horn of Africa. A multinational, multilingual empire, that  ended only after the Great War, when it was partitioned and its Arab region divided between Britain and France – helping to explain something of the Middle East today.

My research wasn’t all political. I had my characters travel on the Orient Express – I’d been fortunate to journey on the train myself, to Venice rather than Constantinople. Cocooned in gleaming blue and gold carriages, art deco compartments and mosaic-tiled bathrooms, I stepped back a century. Today the long journey to Istanbul is a once a year event, but in the early twentieth century it was part of the regular timetable and I gave my heroine the chance of travelling alone for the first time time in her life and to an unfamiliar, exotic destination.

I enjoyed researching old timetables, calculating how many days, how many hours, between one beautiful capital and the next – Paris, Munich, Vienna, Budapest, Bucharest – locomotives changing at every frontier, as one national railway system handed over to another. In all, the train covered a route of more than 1,700 miles before reaching Sirkeci station in Constantinople.

Topkapi Palace was my heroine’s destination and I still retain a vivid memory of my visit there. It was one of many Ottoman palaces in the city, sultans moving their court from palace to palace, often in response to external threat. Even though I saw only a small portion of Topkapi, I was overwhelmed by its opulence and beauty.

For this book, I wanted to dig deeper, wanted to know what life was like for the women who lived there around the  turn of the century. I’d read accounts by a number of intrepid female travellers to the Orient – Lady Mary Wortley Montague, Mabel Sharman Crawford, Mary Lee Settle – and been struck that, almost to the woman, their experience ran counter to the prevailing European stereotype of Turkish women as either decadent concubines or slaves.

Women spent most of their lives within the home, it was true, but within those four walls, they had absolute sovereignty. The harem was a sacrosanct space, not just a place where women were guarded, but a place of retreat to be respected. And if they ventured outside, always with a female companion, they were treated with courtesy. It was considered a sin to stare at women in public, for instance, and if a man behaved badly towards a woman, regardless of his position or religion, he would not escape punishment.

The truth, as always, is mixed. The Ottoman Empire was both civilising and brutal. Slavery continued until the last days of the empire, yet it was time limited for the individual and could be a means of social mobility. The children of the court were much loved, but in the early days of the empire, fratricide was frequent – the Ottomans did not practice primogeniture and male relatives seen as a threat to the potential sultan could be executed or imprisoned.

Researching history complicates that first simple ‘take’ on a culture and a period, changes our perspective, makes connections. And, crucially,  illuminates our own troubled present. Worth paying attention then!

THE TRUTH ABOUT BULLYING – ALEXANDER WALLIS

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Jane Cable: Last week I received an email from an author I used to know when I lived in Chichester. I remembered him as a warm and principled man, a youth worker who’d written a fantasy book with a moral message. He’d contacted me to let me know he’d written a novel about bullying, aimed at teenagers and children. Not my normal read, but I clicked the link to I H8 Bullies anyway. Then I clicked on ‘look inside’. I read two pages and I was compelled, yes, compelled, to buy it.

It’s written from the point of view of a teenage lad in rich yet accessible language. The voice rings true. Alex’s blurb says it’s written for kids who don’t like books, and at only 66 pages short I can believe it. I also think it should be compulsory reading. Which is why I asked Alex to write this article for Frost.

 

The truth about bullying is that it can rarely be stopped.

The act of undermining others is a survival strategy – however maladaptive – which feeds vampiric ego at the target’s cost. Its excesses are applauded by those who don’t want to be next in the firing line and whose silence (or laughter) serve to timidly collude. Organisations enable rather than contain its flourishing, hierarchical lines supporting those who narcissistically abuse their power.

Nowhere can bullying be better studied than in a school, where adolescence stirs thicker the drama and thinner the consequences. A fully-stocked armoury is available to the teenager who bullies, from opportunity to physically aggress (within the relatively less punitive micro-society of the school discipline system), to ample places to regularly do it and the chance to capture and further torment on social media.

School anti-bullying programmes lean towards ‘awareness raising’, as if this phenomena is not already deeply understood. Since Goliath took up against David, humans have recognised that superior size, privilege or opportunity presents the risk of some throwing their weight around more than they should.

Interviewing students helped me to better understand the experience from the target’s view. Bullying somehow forces an intense self-examination, our own inner critic immediately jumping ship to add to the gang of detractors. Targeted students were not just conscious of the way they looked, but made to think deliberately of how they walked or talked. Thrown into a deep self-critique which often stemmed from an already sensitive and self-conscious life position.

When I began writing I H8 Bullies, my thoughts were initially on my own school experience, decades earlier. Old school bullying more often took the form of a thump to the ear, a pounding by some bigger boys (which we had sometimes provoked) and, at worst, the wave of a penknife.

Bullying feels more enduring and emotionally damaging now. Social media provides means to shame a person that is only limited by the imagination and which can endure long beyond the school bell. It can follow a person from place to place, preserving images better forgotten.

Sometimes the only factor under a target’s control is how they themselves react (or don’t). The quiet dignity of preserving your own values, even if you are still discovering for yourself what you think and feel. Bullying can rarely be stopped but it can be survived. It is about winning the battle within, and that is what the story of I H8 Bullies is all about.

Alexander Wallis is a youth worker for Sussex Against Bullying and the author of I H8 Bullies.

 

 

SISTER SCRIBES GUEST: R L FEARNLEY ON ELVES, ENCHANTMENTS AND EMANCIPATION

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Becci is a sister scribe from Reading Writers  – as well as being on the committee together and going to  the regular meetings, we like to write together in local cafés. She writes under the name R.L. Fearnley and is a fantasy poet and novelist, performing her poetry all across the country and delivering creative writing workshops in a variety of settings. Her poetry collection, ‘Octopus Medicine’ was published under ‘Becci Louise’ by Two Rivers Press in 2017. She is working on her first novel.

Lonely children love other worlds. I know this because I was a lonely child. I found solace in alternative landscapes filled with dragons, wizards and magic. The idea of riding on the back of a fire-breathing monster was one of the few things that made me feel powerful. I loved the stories of dragon-riding heroes and farm-boys-turned-champions. It made me feel that anyone, no matter how humble and invisible, could have the potential for more. I devoured these stories with gusto; Christopher Paolini’s ‘Eragon’ was a favourite, as was J.R.R. Tolkein’s ‘The Hobbit’ and C.S. Lewis’ ‘Chronicles of Narnia’. Of course, I wrote my own stories too. Looking back on them now, I see a fatal flaw that I was, perhaps, too young or too socially conditioned to see.

Where are all the women in fantasy stories?

To be fair, they are there. You see them in the flowing golden locks of Tolkein’s Galadriel, the serious and distant personality of Paolini’s Aryen and Lewis’ stuck-up, lipstick-loving Susan, where liking make-up is apparently reason enough to get you thrown out of Narnia. Women in fantasy when I was growing up all seemed to look the same. You knew you were reading a ‘strong, fantastical female’ if she:

  • Was an elf of some description
  • Had almond-shaped eyes (whatever that means)
  • Had high cheek bones
  • Had full lips
  • Had ‘ivory skin’ (looked dead or never saw sunlight)
  • Had long flowing hair, usually black or blonde.

Normally, she was tall, aloof and had no sense of humour. She was ferocious with a sword but devoid of personality. She was almost always the motive for action or the trophy at the end of it. She was, actually, quite boring.

I notice, from my early teenage attempts to write fantasy stories, that all the ones with female protagonists were unfinished. I just couldn’t seem to write them. I thought, in my youth, that it was because I liked doing ‘boy stuff’, like climbing trees and hunting insects, so of course I empathised with male characters more. Now, I think I just read very few fantasy narratives in which women were written as if they were real people.

Fortunately, a recent flurry of phenomenal female fantasy writers is challenging this trend. Jen Williams’ brilliant ‘Copper Cat’ trilogy has a fierce, humorous central female character who knows what she wants and goes out to get it. N.K. Jemisin’s stunning ‘Broken Earth’ Trilogy is populated with female characters displaying the range of human strength and vice, and her female characters are almost exclusively of colour (another thing you rarely see in fantasy!) Naomi Novik’s brilliant protagonist in ‘Uprooted’, who’s growth is joyous to witness, also pushes female-centred fantasy to new heights. And I find, suddenly, that I have plenty of inspiration. I no longer read books where I, a woman, am irrelevant. I realise that I don’t have to write ‘women’ in my stories, I just have to write ‘people’. It should not be a revelation to see that these two things are not mutually exclusive. After all, in worlds where anything is possible, why can’t the quiet, plain girl at the back of the class be the one who takes up the sword and slays the troll?

SISTER SCRIBES GUEST: JESSICA REDLAND ON TWO HEADS BEING BETTER THAN ONE

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Writing can be a solitary business. Some writers dip into the general online community for support, others – like the Sister Scribes – get together in a more formal group. This week guest is Jessica Redland, who talks about getting together with her chum, Sharon Booth, to form the Yorkshire Roses.

They say that two heads are better than one and that’s exactly what Sharon Booth and I were thinking when we joined forces in late 2018 to become The Yorkshire Rose Writers.

We’ve been friends for several years, having met through the Romantic Novelists’ Association when we were in the New Writers’ Scheme. Sharon lives in Hull in East Yorkshire and I live in Scarborough in North Yorkshire so we’re well placed for a regular meet-up for tea, cake and a good old writerly catch-up.

Last autumn, over cake, we chatted about our discomfort at promoting our own work but how we didn’t feel this when promoting each other’s books or blog posts. The idea of joining forces was mooted to overcome this and, the more we talked about it, the more it seemed like a great idea. We both write romantic comedies and contemporary romances set in Yorkshire that would appeal to a similar readership so a collaborative approach could be a good way of gaining us both new readers.

Coming up with a name was probably the hardest task. This wasn’t because we couldn’t agree but simply because we couldn’t find something that was quite right. When we finally decided on a name, we discovered that a Canadian website already had it! Back to the drawing board. We then came up with The Yorkshire Rose Writers, the white rose being the county’s heraldic flower, and we both loved it as we felt that this conveyed what we are: Yorkshire-based writers who write about Yorkshire.

We set up a blog and began posting twice weekly with a long post on a Tuesday and shorter magazine-style snippets every Friday. This turned out to be too ambitious with posts being frantically prepared late the night before so we cut this back to one post on a Friday, alternating the style of content. We both contribute each week although we’ve learned by experience that one of us needs to take the lead on the longer posts, writing the start and conclusion, to avoid duplication. It’s all a learning experience but, because we’re good friends, none of these teething issues have been problems. Typically, we just laugh about them. We plan the schedule about 4-6 weeks in advance which means that, if deadlines are looming, we can prepare our part ahead of time or, if not feeling inspired by one of the subjects, the person taking the lead has plenty of notice to write the full post.

We’re on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. Sharon’s brilliant at keeping on top of these, regularly posting new content. I confess to barely adding anything but we’d discussed this at the start and knew that Sharon would need to do the lion’s share of the promotion work during the first year. Sharon’s a full-time author but I squeeze writing around a day job and studying a Masters in Creative Writing so time is a massive struggle. When my Masters finishes in October this year, we’ll share this more evenly. Although Sharon’s so good at it, maybe she’d like to keep this ;-)

We’ll introduce a newsletter and competitions/giveaways later, but we need to do a lot more planning around this. There’s an excuse for more cake if ever I heard one!

So far, our joint venture has worked well and we love working together. We’re both excited to see where it could go in the future. My advice to anyone thinking about such a venture, though, is be really clear on your aims and your time commitment right at the start so you’re on the same page.

 

Jessica Redland on behalf of Yorkshire Rose Writers

www.yorkshirerosewriters.com

@YorkRoseWriters

https://www.facebook.com/yorkshirerosewriters/

 

 

SISTER SCRIBES: SUSANNA BAVIN ON BEING READ TO

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When I was a teacher, I made a practice of reading to the children every day, whether it was a complete story or the continuing story of what the children called a “chapter book.” Often there would be time for both on the same day. The children loved being read to. I remember the near-hysteria that was occasioned time and again by John Prater’s Once Upon a Time, as the young audience glimpsed the fairy tale characters strolling one by one onto the pages; and all those favourites that were loved by class after class, such as Gobbolino, the Witch’s Cat, Red Herring and The Kitnapping of Mittens.

Perhaps my favourite memory is of finishing reading Dick King-Smith’s Lady Daisy to a Year 2 class. There was a moment of breathless silence at the sheer perfection of the ending and then the children burst into spontaneous applause. (Those children will be doing their A levels this summer!)

Frankly, I think that being read to is one of life’s joys. I also think that the pleasure of being read to is something we never grow out of. As an adult, I always have two books on the go – the book I am reading and the one I’m listening to. As well as having favourite authors, I also have favourite readers and there have been times when I have chosen a talking book by an author I have never read, simply because I know I will enjoy the reader’s performance. Yes, reading an audiobook is a performance, a proper acting job, and it takes huge and specialist skill.

The narrator is required to tell the story in a way that conveys character and atmosphere, but without their reading being intrusive. The listener should be absorbed by the story itself and, other than enjoying listening to it, shouldn’t be specially aware of the reader’s voice at the time. Gordon Griffin is the master of this. A veteran of more than six hundred audiobooks, he has a companionable and quietly expressive voice that is easy to listen to.

When The Deserter’s Daughter was published in 2017, the audiobook rights were bought by Isis Soundings and, as a keen talking book listener, I was thrilled to think that my book was going to be recorded. I was curious as to which actress would be chosen. Anxious, too. What if they selected a reader whom I wasn’t keen on? In the event, Julia Franklin was invited to do the job – and I couldn’t be happier. She has been up there among my favourite readers for years and I am enormously proud to have her as ‘my’ reader. Her performances are engaging and unforced, with an intuitive sense of character and timing. I don’t know whether authors are supposed to listen to their own talking books, but I loved listening to The Deserter’s Daughter and A Respectable Woman and am delighted that Julia has added an extra dimension to my books.

 

 

SISTER SCRIBES GUEST: RACHEL BRIMBLE ON WRITING ABOUT STRONG WOMEN

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I first met Rachel when I tentatively joined a new chapter of the Romantic Novelists Association in anticipation of a house move, Rachel could not have been more welcoming and instantly made me feel at home. She manages to combine this open and friendly manner with a dedication to her career that makes her one of the most prolific authors I know.  

 

I’ve always wanted to write, but it wasn’t until my youngest daughter started school full-time that I started to pursue my dream of becoming a published novelist. That was in 2005 and my first book was published in 2007. I was ecstatic!

This book had been through the New Writers’ Scheme which is an amazing opportunity for a full manuscript to be critiqued by a published member of the Romantic Novelists Association. The RNA is an amazing group of female novelists (and a few men!) who support, encourage and applaud romance writers throughout the UK. It is a true honour to be a part of such a wonderful organisation and has almost certainly provided the push needed over and over again when I’ve felt I couldn’t continue to write.

Just recently, I handed in my twenty-third full-length novel to my current publisher (Aria Fiction). I have always loved drawing inspiration from real-life progressive and inspirational women, and this is reflected in the types of heroines I like to portray in my books.

As I write romance, these women ultimately end up falling in love, but it is their journey of self-discovery and empowerment that drives me to write and ensure my characters succeed. The love aspect is merely a much-welcomed added extra!

I write mainstream contemporary romance, romantic suspense and historical romance. My latest series is set in the fictional Pennington’s Department Store in Bath, England. Influenced by my love of the TV series Mr Selfridge and The Paradise, I was inspired to write a series that focused on the women’s issues of the early 20th century.

Once I’d decided on the theme of ‘female empowerment’, there was no stopping my fingers at the keyboard. I am passionate about self-growth, belief and achievement and to write about women determined to make a societal change appeals to me in every way. Book 1 in the series (The Mistress of Pennington’s) is about women striving to make their mark in business amid an extremely male-dominated world, book 2 and my latest release (A Rebel At Pennington’s) is about women’s suffrage and book 3 (hopefully released in the Autumn) is about the stigma surrounding divorce at the time.

As you can no doubt imagine, the research I undertook to uncover the required characterisation and inspiration to create these female protagonists led me to learn about some truly phenomenal women. Discoveries that will stay with me forever. There are so names we are familiar with – famous suffragettes, women aviators, doctors and scientists who all excelled and made their mark at the turn of the century, but there were also many women who remain unknown to us. Or at least, they were to me.

It is these women that inspire my work and the heroines I want to spend months and months with as I pen a 100,000 word novel about their evolving lives. The Edwardian period was a time of great change for women and it’s exciting to be a part of that. I love bringing historic women’s issues to the foreground of my novels and hopefully inspiring a woman in her own life today.

I could not write without women from the past, the present and undoubtedly, the future.

Here’s to the strong women who have gone before us and who continue to walk with us today!

 

Rachel Brimble lives in a small market town near Bath with her husband, two daughters and mad chocolate Labrador, Tyler. When she’s not writing, she likes to read, knit and walk the beautiful English countryside. Author of over 20 romance novels, Rachel hopes to sign a new contract for a contemporary romance trilogy in the not too distant future.

Website: https://rachelbrimble.com/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/rachelbrimbleauthor/?hl=en

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/rachelbrimbleauthor/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/RachelBrimble

 

SISTERS SCRIBES: KITTY WILSON ON STRUCTURAL EDITS

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Hello, it’s lovely to be on Frost again and I thought I’d take the chance to tell you what’s happening in my writing life right now.

It’s been a busy couple of months for The Cornish Village School series. At the time of writing this I’m working through the structural edits on book three, have signed off on the cover for the audio release of book two and received my first copies of the paperbacks for book one.

Structural edits are the first thing that needs to be tackled once you’ve finished and polished the first (second, third, umpteenth) draft and bitten the bullet and sent it off to your editor to see what they think. Because the author tends to be so close to the book, these edits are a vital, objective view of what needs to be tidied up, changed and possibly cut, possibly extended. Chapters may need to be moved or restructured and it usually involves ‘killing your darlings’.

For me, waiting for these is the most terrifying time; I somehow expect them to receive, read and critique my draft within the first fifteen minutes. I fill that quarter of an hour by biting my nails and opening up Indeed.co.uk and looking for jobs. I could definitely be a cast member in the Disney Store (as long as there is no singing required), perhaps that job negotiating exit from the EU would be simpler than any edits I will have to do (this job was advertised during my last panic browse. I considered it). Then I give myself a good talking to about rational behaviour and decide that I could do some housework, change my mind (no need for desperate measures), panic a bit more and start the next book in an attempt to distract myself.

The starting of the next book thing is a jolly good move. It’s my favourite bit of the process – that time where the world is full of possibilities, deadlines are so far away they may as well not exist and you can make anything happen. Once I’d written the first chapter with a vicar (my new hero and I’m already in love with him), a guerrilla yarn-bombing octogenarian and a secret underground dungeon, all was right again in my world. In fact, I was so enthused I almost forgot the dreaded edits. Which were made even more worrisome this time around by the fact that I have a new editor* and I am a little oppositional to change (I still have the screws to my bunkbed that my mother dismantled when I was eight).

When the structural edits did come in I read them, had a mini meltdown and it took a couple of days before I processed the words in front of me – all of which were fair, true and actually very positive. In fact, there was nothing at all that warranted the seismic earthquake of stroppiness I had engaged in but which is, apparently, a natural part of the process, because only after that could I start working my way diligently through her fairly short list of suggestions.

The next phase is the line edits and the proofread, all of which I’m hoping will be completed by the time you are reading this and I should be well on the way to finding romance for my handsome vicar. I enjoy these, or at least I think I do. If you’ve heard screaming bouncing across the British Isles recently then there’s a good chance I was kidding myself. Keep your fingers crossed for me!

All love, Kitty.

*who’s proved to be lovely btw.

 

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SISTER SCRIBES GUEST: CATHERINE BOARDMAN ON CULTURAL BLOGGING

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Catherine was a BBC News Producer for 20 years specialising in Business and Economics with a side line in travel writing for national newspapers, then she had twins.  Now Catherine writes about what she loves, Arts, Culture and Travel on her blog Catherine’s Cultural Wednesdays.  If you are seeking inspiration about where to go and what to see or need someone to write about it, she is your woman.

 

What is it about writing?  I love it.  I adore telling stories.  Yet I am the queen of procrastination.  Tales tumble over themselves waiting to be told.  My laptop awaits.  Coffee, I can’t write without coffee.  Ping, a group chat on Facebook messenger surges into life.  Cheap, cheap, somebody on What’s App has an urgent bon mot. Trillll, a twitter group surges into life.  At last somebody suggests a word race and we’re off.

Writing is something that I have always done.  Long letters to distant friends, fragments of ‘Famous Five’ style stories, breathless accounts of everyday occurrences in my tiny childhood village.  To begin with this need to write beyond the demands of study was a solitary pursuit.  I knew nobody else who scribbled endlessly.  Then I became a journalist, suddenly everybody I knew wrote, cared deeply about punctuation and was certain that they had the makings of a novelist.

After twenty years as a BBC News Producer I fell pregnant with twins and took the Corporation’s kind offer of redundancy.  My life changed, utterly.  Thoughts about writing a witty and engaging account of parenting identical twins in your forties came to nothing.  For two years it was all I could do to keep all of us fed and dressed.  Eventually when a sleep pattern was established that involved both boys sleeping at the same time as each other for longer than two hours, the fog began to clear.

Now my thoughts turned to a blog about what interested me.  Catherine’s Cultural Wednesdays started out as an account of my weekly jaunts out of the house and widened out to include travel.  I published the first post and was then overtaken by fear.  What if I couldn’t write?  What would people think?  Worse, what if nobody read it.  For the next six months I wrote posts and didn’t post them.  Paralysed with fear.

Without the support of friends and fellow writers I would still be writing posts that never got published.  Where did I find my support network?

Put #amwriting into the search box on Twitter and all manner of people pop up.  Daily word races take place.  The same people kept on popping up, so we set up a chat group, called ourselves the LLs or Literary Lovelies.  We went on writing retreats together.  We supported each other through first drafts, agent hunts, publication days.  Well some of us.  The rest of the LLs are proper novelists, I realised that what I like doing is telling immediate stories, fiction is not for me.  We chat virtually most days.

Wonderful though virtual friendships are flesh and bone is important too.  When my confidence was rock bottom, I joined a local creative writing class.  Slowly, week by week my confidence returned.  After a year or so the formal structure of a class was no longer the right format for some of us.  Now a group of us, the EveryGirl Writers, meet every week for two hours just to write, to support each other in our writing.

Telling stories is what I love to do.  The solitary nature of sitting down to write suits me perfectly.  Yet it is the support and friendship of fellow female writers makes the procrastination so much more fun.

 

Catherine’s Cultural Wednesdays https://www.culturalwednesday.co.uk

Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/culturalwed

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