Category Archives: Writing

My Writing Process – Ian Wilfred

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Do men write romance? They certainly do, as Romantic Novelists’ Association member Ian Wilfred proves. Ian’s characters are instantly relatable and he has a knack of choosing gorgeous settings, from Tenerife to Greece to his native Norfolk.

On top of all that, Ian is one of the most supportive authors you could wish to meet. Which was just one of the reasons Jane Cable invited him to share his writing process.

Tell us a bit about you?

I’m 50+ but in my head I will always be 39. I live on the Norfolk coast with my husband and west highland terrier and I’m a member of the Romantic Novelist Association. My first book was published in 2013.

What you have written, past and present?

I’ve written and published five books. In the first four all my leading characters were women over 50 who are starting again and leaving the past behind, but in this year’s summer book, My Perfect Summer in Greece, Cheryl is a much younger heroine and this was lovely change

What you are promoting now?

My new book Time To Move On, which is out on 24th September. It’s the story of Billie coming to terms with her divorce and being made redundant, and moving to Norfolk from London.

What’s the most important thing about your process of writing?

I love to write every day even if it’s just a few hundred words. I have to keep the story fresh in my head.

Do you plan or just write?

I plan a lot more with each book I write and for me this seems to work better each time.

What about word count?

I don’t give myself a daily or weekly word count but I do like to do 40,000 words a month for the first draft. Then I take two months to rewrite and rewrite before I send it off to my editor.

How do you do your structure?

I don’t plan that – it just sort of happens. I have a beginning, a middle and an end in my head and off I go.

What do you find hard about writing?

Everything! Each book is a learning process with many mistakes made over the years, but you just have to move on and know you’re improving.

What do you love about writing? 

The characters. I love the first draft when they are in your head and you can’t wait to get them on the page and bring them to life.

Any advice for other writers?

I get asked this a lot and I always give the same two answers; write every day, and read and watch every article Milly Johnson has ever done on writing tips. She is the best for advice.

You can follow Ian on Twitter @IanWilfred39. He’s great at sharing news from a wide range of romantic novelists. 

 

SISTER SCRIBES GUEST: CATHIE HARTIGAN BEHIND THE SCENES AT CREATIVE WRITING MATTERS

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I am so happy to introduce you all to Cathie on this month’s Frost. She is responsible for taking me under her wing at my very first RNA conference and was one of the very first people to ever read my work and encourage me to keep going. She is part of the Creative Writing Matters team who support writers in so many ways; mentorship, teaching, handbooks and the running of renowned competitions such as The Exeter Novel Prize.

 

Does creative writing matter? Yes, a great deal to us.  Margaret James and Sophie Duffy and I have been working together for nearly a decade now. As teachers of creative writing, and because a student’s success is as thrilling as one’s own – well, nearly – we encourage our students in any way we can.

What did they want in a textbook? What would really be useful for them? Would our experience as competition judges as well as teachers be of help? Margaret and I spent a year consulting them before we published The Creative Writing Student’s Handbook.

A dream for most novice writers, is that they should do well in a short story competition. I was thrilled when the first story I sent out bounded into a shortlist. What joy! More successes followed, but then, so did no listing at all. I soon discovered that just because it may not have done well in one competition, doesn’t mean to say it won’t succeed elsewhere. How many entries, who is judging, and whether there’s a strong entry or particular subject that resonates with the judge(s), all are factors.

During my years as a music teacher I was often charged with putting pupils through exams, and my sympathetic cup ran over on many occasions when I saw the terror with which many faced such trauma. But my goodness though, didn’t they all try harder when the exam loomed. Most got exponentially better!

On the back of my experience, I had the notion to hold a tiny competition in a creative writing class. The result was the same. Suddenly, all those last minutes unedited stories were tidied up. They took notice of the word count, the spelling and grammar, and familiar topics were rethought. I was surprised and delighted. Unlike music exams or driving tests though, entering a writing competition it isn’t a do or die situation. Okay, a particular judge may prefer another story, but it is possible to give of your best by crafting your story days or weeks previously.

Sophie won both the Yeovil Novel Prize and the Luke Bitmead Award, the latter leading to the publication of The Generation Game. Margaret was shortlisted for the RNA Romantic Comedy Award with The Wedding Diary, and for many years, had been the administrator for the Harry Bowling Prize. My short stories were being regularly listed and my debut novel, Secret of the Song was shortlisted for the Hall and Woodhouse Dorchester Literary Festival prize. Competitions were something we knew about. It wasn’t long before we realised that our fair city of Exeter was missing something – a novel prize. Seven years on, we can celebrate the publishing success of many fantastic writers who either won or were listed.

One of the lovely things about being a competition judge is being continually amazed by the extent of the human imagination. The sheer variety of subject matter that people choose to write about is extraordinary, but weird doesn’t necessarily triumph over the ordinary. The ability to move, surprise, make us laugh and/or cry will raise a story above the rest, but how or why isn’t easy to quantify.  Difficult choices have to be made. Sometimes there is a stand-out winner, but not often. Obviously, it’s nice to do well, but any listing is significant. A good record of success, at whatever level, shows commitment as well as quality.

Cathie Hartigan is a musician, novelist, and the founder of www.creativewritingmatters.co.uk and the creative director of www.exelitfest.com. Her second novel, Notes from the Lost will be published in October.

 

My Writing Process – Roger Bray

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I was raised in Blackburn, Lancashire and served for ten years in the Royal Navy before coming to Australia in 1983, after I returned from the Falklands. Writing is something I have always enjoyed and fiction was a favourite.  I loved being able to write anything within the bounds of the particular subject and not be restrained by anything except my imagination.  One restraint I did learn at school was other people’s perceptions of what is age appropriate for a juvenile to be writing.  Apparently graphic death scenes weren’t. 

My writing stayed in the background for many years until I was invited to write short stories for a couple of magazines which were well-received.  I then dabbled with a novel for a couple of years before getting into my stride and writing my first publication The Picture.

At the moment I am halfway through my fourth novel, currently untitled.  It is a story set in the UK and across Europe and deals with sex trafficking and organised crime from the perspective of an investigative journalist who is fighting his own battle with past tragedy while trying, against his better judgement to report what he has found.

As with all my novels I come up with a very broad idea of where I can see the story going.  I write and rewrite parts and scenes in my mind until I see a path then I commence.  That is how far I plan, maybe I’ll do some research at the start to get me on the right track but broadly speaking, once I start I write linearly.  I stop and research as I go and edit sections before moving on.  My word count is whatever I manage for the day but overall I aim for 90 – 100,00 words for a novel +/- as the editing progresses from me to beta readers and to my editor.

My basic day of writing would be re-read what I had last written, editing as I go.  I find this gets me back into the moment.  I then continue and write until I run out of steam or find myself veering off or woffling to pad out the chapter.  Either way that is the end for the day be it 3 or 8 hours later.  Rinse and repeat the next day until finished.

The hardest part of writing isn’t any sort of blockage, though they happen but I tend to get over them by just writing — sitting down and writing, getting words onto the page is, I have found the best solution.  Even if what you have written isn’t great it gets the process moving along and gives you something to edit.  It is difficult to edit a blank page.  The hardest part for me is staying within the storyline.  I have some great ideas which, unfortunately, don’t fit the arc, but I can waste hours trying to make them fit because I think they are so good — usually mistakenly.

In my current novel I have edited the first 2/3 of the novel to delete some of these great ideas I had but have turned into a bit of a millstone later on, something I have to be firm about.

I find the least enjoyable part is the whole process from writing The End onward.  There are lots of moments of doubt once I release my latest to a broader audience (broader than me and my wife’s cat).  Is it great or is it rubbish?  Typos – the bane of my life, plot holes or bits that grate when read?  All these things need identifying and fixing.  Nothing wrong with having any of them, that’s life as a writer but the process of sorting it out is no longer writing, no longer imagination and art.  It’s a drudge.

Any advice I can give? Keep going — you don’t fail until you stop trying.  Writer’s block?  No such thing — keep writing through, it, you can edit rubbish, you cannot edit a blank, tear stained page.

Website https://rogerbraybooks.com/ 

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

Twitter https://twitter.com/rogerbray22 

My Writing Process – Milli Hill

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What you have written, past and present.

I have written two books, both about childbirth. The first, a ‘how to’ manual called The Positive Birth Book, is a guide for pregnant women on how to approach birth differently, reframe it as a positive experience, and have a positive birth in any circumstance. The most recent, Give Birth Like a Feminist, is a call to arms, exposing the misogyny and power imbalance at play in the modern birth room, and giving women information about their choices and rights so that they can take a more active role in their birth. I also write opinion articles and features for the Telegraph, Guardian, ipaper, Independent, Mother&Baby and more! I started out as a blogger when I was taking a break from my work as a therapist due to having two young children. My blog became really successful and through that I got work as a journalist, and now an author.

What you are promoting now. 

Give Birth Like a Feminist, which came out on August 22nd.

A bit about your process of writing. 

I do a lot of thinking before I start. Maybe over days, or months, or during a dog walk, or in the shower! Then I usually make a spider diagram with the key point at the centre and all the other points coming off it. This sounds terribly organised but it’s normally done on the back of an envelope with a child hanging off my leg with the key aim of preserving the thoughts before they are lost! Then when I get the time to write, the ideas are all there, laid out for me. Getting to my desk is hard with a large family, and I also struggle with my inner critic / imposter syndrome etc, so the whole things becomes like a sort of inner dialogue between the part of me that believes in myself and my ideas and the part of me that says I’ve got nothing of interest to say. Those two parts of me argue for quite a while and then the confident part sort of grabs the reluctant part by the scruff of the metaphorical neck and frogmarches her to the desk. At which point I usually get on with it. I take a long time over what I have to say and am a perfectionist. Someone once described my writing as sounding ‘effortless’ which I took as a great compliment but it really could not be further from the truth!
Do you plan or just write?

I do both. I usually plan the skeleton but then putting on the flesh is the ‘just writing’ part.

What about word count?

I’m used to writing articles with a word count of around 800 to 1000 words and I think that’s a really nice bite size amount to get something across in. Even in a 10000 word book, breaking it down in your mind into chunks of 1000 words is a great way to keep it manageable both for you as a writer, and for your reader. I’m very conscious of how busy the world is now and how you need to get your ideas across quickly and in a way that feels accessible. And if you can just write 100 really great, thousand word pieces, then, bingo, you have a book. Effortless!

How do you do your structure?

I’m a big fan of circular structures by which I mean making a point / telling a story, or a joke etc in paragraph 1 of an article, then taking the reader on a journey through the next 8 paragraphs, and then coming back to the reference you made in paragraph one but somehow showing a development, growth, transformation has been make during the piece. On a larger scale you can do this in a book chapter, and then make an even bigger loop around the book itself. So you can have some nice loops within loops.

What do you find hard about writing?

I find it hard full stop, but also strangely compulsive! It’s like any creative process really, there is always that ‘void’ where it feels impossible, I totally hate that feeling of the blank page, the flashing cursor of doom etc! And as I’ve said, the mental battle of finding my voice is also deeply irritating! I also really miss the time when I was first writing my blog and could be more creative. Now I often feel I’m writing to order with article commissions etc and that kind of sucks the life out of it a bit. One day I really want to write fiction and I’m really looking forward to that!

What do you love about writing? 

I love the moment where creativity springs into life and the ideas start to flow and you know your fingers are knocking out killer sentences! I love reading something back and being surprised that I wrote it – this often happens to me! I think, oh, that’s actually really quite good! Did I write that?! That’s a really nice feeling. And I also like reaching other people through writing. Having my latest book published recently has been really fun in terms of being able to have conversations with people about what I’ve written and hear their feedback. The actual process of writing is quite isolating which I quite enjoy but then it’s nice to come and dance in the sunshine a bit afterwards!

Advice for other writers. 

If you are starting out a blog can be great – I was disciplined with mine and made myself do one post a week for quite a long time. I got better by doing that and I also learned a bit about what people enjoyed and wanted to read because of the instant feedback you get on a blog. Reading other writers you admire can be very inspiring too. But wherever you are up to as a writer, the main thing (and every writer knows this but it’s easier said than done!) is just write. Frogmarch yourself to the desk and just flipping well get on with it!

 

Give Birth Like a Feminist is available now.

Check out the The Positive Birth Movement.

SISTER SCRIBES: JANE CABLE ON CONTRADICTIONS AND RABBIT HOLES

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For the first time in my writing life I am going back a couple of centuries. Not just with a glance over my shoulder, but really, properly back. With a good half of the novel taking place in 1815. It’s frightening – and exciting – and it’s requiring a great deal of research.

My research is centred on one family, their homes and their business interests. From that point of view, it should have been easy. Their country estate is in the hands of the National Trust, their town house still exists (albeit as offices) and their mine was one of the richest in Cornwall. What could possibly go wrong?

I knew before I started that nothing existed on the ground to show where the mine buildings once stood. I’ve walked past the field in roughly the right place numerous times, and apart from a few lumps and bumps, which may or may not be indicators, there is nothing there. What I didn’t expect was that the mine itself has almost completely disappeared from the records.

There is a portrait of the owner though, and a copy of it is in St Agnes Museum. It’s labelled as showing Ralph and his mine captain, with the mine in the background. Perfect. Except the original of the same painting in the Royal Cornwall Museum says it’s Ralph’s father, and that the mine is unknown. When I eventually found some corroborating evidence, and given when the artist died, the RCM version is almost certainly right.

This sort of thing has dogged my research. Sources you believe would be credible contradict each other. The National Trust had little to offer, telling me there was some confusion in the records as to which works on the house were completed by Ralph, and which by his son. Other sources claim more precision, but are they right?

My husband thinks this is a good thing, his theory being that if nobody really knows what happened, then no-one will know if I get it wrong. But as far as possible, I want to get it right. And thanks to the wonderful Courtney Collection at the RCM I am making progress. Not only are there some records of the mine (very little of it contemporary, however), but also an article from the 1960s about Truro’s Georgian townhouses. I popped in for an hour or two and stayed all day.

Herein lies the rub. The biggest danger of research isn’t necessarily the inaccuracies, it’s the rabbit holes. Does my story require me to know there were eleven shafts in the mine and their precise locations? I found myself becoming a total bore, pointing out to longsuffering walking friends exactly where they all were and the order they were dug. And how much a share in the mine was worth and how that was calculated. And the ages of the pumping engines. No, no, no. Completely irrelevant.

But all the same, it helped me to paint a picture, and some very useful facts did emerge. Like the mine was closed in 1814. It reopened later, but my novel deals in a very thin slice of time. And actually, the fact it was temporarily abandoned suits my story very well. Now I need to sift and sort through the rest of the information covering many pages in my notebooks, to work out what might be right – and what I actually need.

Oh, and I need to avoid any more rabbit holes and actually get writing.

My Writing Process – Ada Bright

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First, thank you very much to Frost Magazine for inviting me to be here, specifically during this week which is quite a big deal for me!

My name is Ada Bright and I am a writer born, raised, and still living in Southern California.  I make a point of it because I’ve learned that alot about me can be traced to this little factoid. I am laid back about life and stressed about that three pounds I gained in 2017, I don’t own a coat that can withstand temperatures below 68 degrees Fahrenheit, foodie menus float my boat, and I am very leary of how you store your dishes considering the fact that I’m ready for the earth to roll and shake beneath my feet at any moment. Also, I’m married to a very cute, blue-eyed guy who gave me no blue-eyed children (0/3), I have a photography following, and my mother lives with me and still does my laundry (but none of this stuff can be blamed on California living).

Today, September 12, Canelo Digital Publishing is releasing a book I wrote with British-born-and-raised Cass Grafton called The Particular Charm of Miss Jane Austen. It is the first book we’ve written together, but it’s sequel will follow shortly behind – being released in November of this year. The tagline for our first book is “a comedic tale of time-travel and friendship” and honestly, that about sums it up. Cass and I have been friends for nearly two decades and the many varied and often hilarious differences we’ve discovered in how our two cultures have shaped us is as much at the heart of this book as our love for Jane Austen’s novels.

Even as we work on the marketing for these novels (and start outlining a third in the series), I am also working on a romantic mystery set right in the US. This is quite a shift to try to work alone. I realize that what Cass does effortlessly (keep in mind the structure and order of the story throughout) I struggle with. My natural rhythm of writing is to compose a scene in my mind almost entirely, then write it all on the page in one quick lump of words (after that initial rush, I’ll slowly revise everytime I read through it). Therefore, I jump around from scene to scene as the inspiration strikes. Since I don’t have Cass to give me order, I’ve been meticulously writing scenes on sticky notes and moving them around on the floor to figure out the order they need to go in. It’s been fun and overwhelming and a bit of a housekeeping mess, but I think, in my own meandering way, I’ve found a way to thread it all together. 

Writing is like that for me. I write because the words give structure to my mind. I wrote as a child to understand my feelings and my choices. I wrote as a teenager to entertain my peers with “friend fiction” (Yes, that boy at the mall who took your lunch order did fall in love with you immediately! Or, even if he didn’t, I’ll write a story that will make you feel like he did). I write today because I hope that what makes me feel excitement, joy, and love will entertain others as well. 

Thank you again for having me, Frost Magazine! 

 

SISTER SCRIBES GUEST: ALEXA ADAMS ON THE GIFT OF TRUST

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Meet Alexa, a fellow writer and Jane Austen fan who’s become a trusted friend and needs no better introduction than that.

 

For most of my life, I did not have many female friends. As the only child of a woman who prized sincerity above all else, many of the unwritten rules of girlhood were lost on me, and I often said things that offended others, never really understanding why what I perceived as honesty provoked such backlash. I was occasionally bullied, and the lesson I took away from those experiences was not to trust women professing friendship. Apart from a few, lifelong attachments, my friends were always mostly men. As I grew older and got married, this became more isolating. Inevitably, I would find myself at parties grouped together with a bunch of other women, nervously tottering through conversations, struggling to get through the evening without trespassing on those invisible boundaries established so many years ago on the playground.

I was often depressed in my 20s, but I had no idea the lack of a female support group contributed to the problem. I thought my career in sales and marketing was the driving issue. I wanted more purpose and independence, and in a leap of faith I am still amazed my husband supported, I quit my job to write. This was a whim; I had absolutely no idea what I was doing. It was other women writers who showed me my path through their guidance, support, and acceptance.

I truly was shocked by the kindness of the woman writers I met. I didn’t expect it, and it took me a long to time to trust it. I hid for years behind my pen name, using it as an excuse to keep all my authorly interactions online, dreading having to explain to someone I had now known for years that no, Alexa is not my real name, though my middle name is Alexandra, while I simply appropriated Adams from a few notable figures in US history. Perhaps by not acknowledging my real identity earlier in my relationships with these women, I had once again trod on one of those unspoken laws of female friendship?

Cass Grafton, the Sister Scribe who invited me to contribute these thoughts, was one of the first fellow writers whom I revealed my true identity to, and she took it in such stride that it taught me how paranoid I had been behaving. In the few years since, so many of my online relationships have been solidified into real-world friendships. My network of women who I can depend on, confide in, and trust has exploded, and I have a hard time recalling how I ever got by without them. These friendships are the most unexpected gift that writing has bestowed on me, and for them I am immeasurably grateful.

 

Biographical Info:

A devoted reader of Jane Austen since her childhood, Alexa Adams is the author of several Austenesque novels and short stories including Being Mrs. Bennet, Darcy in Wonderland, The Madness of Mr. Darcy, and Tales of Less Pride and Prejudice. Alexa is an American residing in Switzerland with her husband, daughter, and son. She blogs about Austen and Austenesque literature at alexaadams.blogspot.com, is a contributing member of AustenAuthors.net, and a founding member of the Jane Austen Society of Switzerland.

 

My Writing Process – Georgia Hill

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Huge thanks to Jane Cable for inviting me! I write romance – romcoms and historical. I live on the Dorset coast with my two beloved dogs (a sprocker and a delinquent cockapoo puppy) my husband (also beloved but not at all delinquent) and a ghost called Zoe. I love Jane Austen, elephants and Strictly Come Dancing. I’m also a complete museum geek and find inspiration for my writing from the folklore and history of the many places in which I’ve lived.

I’ve worked in the theatre, for a charity and as a teacher and educational consultant before finally acknowledging that making up things was what I really wanted to do. I’ve been very happily living in a fictional world ever since.

My writing

I began writing professionally in 2009, have had 6 novels published, a volume of short stories and have also written short stories for magazines. 

My writing process

I used to walk the dogs, then write throughout the day. Nowadays I find being glued to a screen for too long makes my eyes gritty and my shoulders stiff. I’m far more likely to write for an hour, put some washing in, write some more, make a cup of tea – you get the picture. I’m always thinking about the work in progress, so even when I’m not at the keyboard, I’m wondering about my characters. They become very real. There’s a certain amount of promo on social media to fit in too. Luckily I enjoy that.

Planner or ‘pantser’?

I’m a convert to planning – reluctantly! Using Post-its, I brainstorm the story, working backwards from the end listing the main plot points. Those are written up into bullet points as a crib sheet. This guides me through the story and avoids the ‘what was going to happen next?’ issue. However, characters often take on a life of their own and the crib sheet has to be rewritten as it’s scribbled over so much. If I’m writing one of my dual narratives, I have to plan out more carefully and often end up writing a chapter by chapter synopsis to help me keep track. Helps with the edits too.

Word count?

I keep a tally on the crib sheet when writing the very ‘dirty’ first draft. I tend to write that quickly and usually add about 20,000 words during the second draft so I usually know where I’m going.

Structure?

I have the three act structure in mind and occasionally have even been known to apply it! Instinct guides me more.

What’s hard about writing?

I love writing the first draft. It’s very rough and, as I’m not a skilled typist, has lots of strange typos and very little punctuation. I’m strong on dialogue so the first draft is often little more than that – with ADD DETAIL written in lots of places for the second! I love telling myself the story, which is why I’m a reluctant planner – I like to see where the characters are going to take me. Once their story is told, I lose interest and have to force myself to do the next round of edits – that’s when, for me, the hard work begins.

My advice to other writers

Keep abreast of social media, especially Twitter; you can pick up current trends, tips and useful features. Develop a writing community but choose your writing pals wisely and build up trust; they can be your most valued supporters. Read widely and often. Take a notebook absolutely everywhere. Do your research. And develop a very thick skin!

Links

www.georgiahill.co.uk

Facebook georgiahillauthor

Twitter @georgiawrites

Instagram @georgiahill5681