OLD STRATEGIES FOR THE NEW YEAR by Penny Dolan.

Happy New Year to one and all, and good to have you here on An Awfully Big Blog Adventure! 

 

Yes, it’s January the First. New Resolution Day! Now you may well be one of those people who don’t make resolutions, don’t need to make them, or prefer to make your resolutions on the magical cusp of the midsummer moon. 

However, if you - like me – use these early January days to shift your life into a more orderly state, here are three small, possibly contradictory and even familiar suggestions.

ONE JAR.

The story goes like this:  

A Nobel prize-winner came to talk to a business conference about planning. She went up to the desk, took out a glass jar and some big stones. She put the stones into the jar, filling it right to the top.

Then, from a dish, she took a handful of tiny stones. She tipped those in too, and another handful, filling the jar to the top.  “Full, again,” she murmured.

Then, from a third dish, she took a handful of sand. As she tipped that into the jar, the sand slid down to fill in the gaps. Finally, she smiled, took a nearby tumbler of water and poured that in too. “Full again, again?” she asked.

Then she spoke to her audience. “Believe me, the only way you can get so much stuff into this one jar is by putting the big things in first. So, when you start planning your time, get those big things put into your day first. The rest of the stuff will fit around them.”

Maybe in 2014, the most important work needs to come first, and all the small stuff should be made to slip into the gaps between?

Or, as somebody else said, “The main thing is to make the main thing the main thing.”

Now for: 

THE TWO TIMERS

A while back, I heard about the “timer technique” as a way of edging yourself back into writing, especially when you are daunted  by the work. I know lots of writers regularly turn to this as a way of getting unstuck.

Method: Take a kitchen timer (the portable tick-along kind, not the whole oven, obvously!) to wherever you intend to write, along with your notebook/laptop/pc/ whatever. 

Focus your mind on the project for a moment, set the timer for a short time, such as twenty or thirty minutes, and just write what you can. Then re-set and start again. Then again. If you need to take a short break, do - but then sit back down with that timer again.

Somehow, coping with a shorter commitment is easier than coping with the voice in the head that screams “I’ve got to do three hours on this really difficult project and I’m scared to begin, even though I sort of know something about it but do I? Aaaagh!” You might even find you write right through the timer, going on longer than you thought you could manage.

I’d suggest that, even if you have a timer for the kitchen, you buy yourself your own personal timer. Choose one with a tick that doesn’t irritate  - and it doesn’t need to be kept next to your ear while you’re working, anyway. Just keep the Timer Two near your desk and grab it whenever the void starts to echo, echo, echo . . .

There is a whole trademarked-tomato-shaped-Pomodoro-management-and-life-style website as well as various apps that do the same thing, but for me the real-world physical act of setting the timer to just the right number of minutes is part of the process.

So on to:

THE THREE ANYTIME PAGES.

Julia Cameron “Artist’s Way” approach is well known. Her writing style – or is it her so-American life style? - can seem slightly annoying here in the damp UK, but, as a good friend told me, you have to read through the layers to find the ideas that will work for you. 

Julia's core practice insists on the writing of three pages, on waking, without shaping or editing the words in any way. The drowsy mind lets all the worries and anxieties and bad stuff rise to the surface, as well as the moments of good stuff and gratitude. It’s worth finding out more about this whole approach if you haven't already dipped into her many books 

However, Julia’s “mornings” rarely seemed to be my “mornings”, often full of rush and responsibility, even now. So often, for many reasons, those three contemplative morning pages have seemed impossible, have been an empty failure at the start of the day.

Well, during the busy days of December, and having some writing trouble (too boring to expand upon!) I decided to opt for a half-way practice:   The three “anytime” pages.  Yes, anytime, anywhere. I gave away the guilt.

If I can do my pages first thing, I do. If not, I don’t grieve. I plan for some other patch of the day to sit and think and write, and so far this has worked, with only one day – the visitor changeover of Boxing Day-skipped entirely. I feel positive, not negative.

My anytime pages are written by hand, so there's no chance of the words being "work" - or even legible. I use a beloved green fountain pen, filled with green ink, and scribble away on yellow pages, which brings a touch of playfulness to the process. 

The quiet, slow, steady dropping down into the three anytime pages may not be Perfect Julia, but as December passed, I began looking forward to showing up at the page, started finding a little faith in my words and work again.

 Now, with the clear and empty days of the New Year ahead, who knows what might happen? Maybe it's not so big a step to get back into writing now the festivities are over, after all? And maybe old suggestions can still be good suggestions?

 Wishing you good writing and reading in 2014.

Penny Dolan

Creative Thinking : N M Browne

I am fascinated by the creative process, particularly when I'm not engaged in it. The more I think about it and try to pin it down the weirder it seems.
Do you picture a scene before you write it and then describe what you see or do you bring the scene into being by the act of writing, the words themselves populating your brain with images? Do you hear the voices and try to cpature them or do characters only speak as the words tumble onto the page?
I think for me the words precede thought, or at least that's what it feels like. I never know what is going to happen until it emerges somehow or other from my incompetent careless fingers. But words definitely make pictures in my head so that in editing I can take a closer look, re examine a shadowy figure and discover that he has black hair, that his shirt is crimson, that he holds a damascene blade in his left hand and that his nails are painted the colour of ripe plums.
I always thought that this process of writing was the same for all writers, but of course it isn't. I am intrigued to discover that many people know what they are going to write before they start, that some people don't picture what they write at all and others are haunted by the disemboided voices of characters they have never met, though they may just be the mad ones.
It isn't much discussed, this actual business of envisaging or creating perhaps because it is so hard to describe; the moments of making things up are fleeting, the ideas, intangible. At times writing comes close to lucid dreaming at others it is more like constructing a flat pack wardrobe from IKEA - one of the ones with the key piece missing - and doing it blindfold.
And another thing... is this imagining universal or is it only writers or painters who work this way? When people ask where we get our ideas from is it because they don't have any and are baffled by the process? Doesn't everyone sit and extrude images, places and people, pulling them like rabbits from a hat of our imagining or gathering them like candy floss on a stick. Are we writers particularly strange or is it just that we, spending long hours staring into space, are more inclined to notice? Any ideas?

I had a dream - Michelle Lovric

In the cold light of dawn, there’s nothing my husband dreads more than the words, ‘Darling, I had a dream …’

My subconscious has always enacted dreadful deeds in the dead of night. And my almost blameless spouse has been the villain of a great many of them. He used to protest his innocence, but now he knows better. Every morning after, he apologises abjectly for whatever he (didn’t) do in my dream, makes tea and comforts me.

But secretly, I know, he shares William Dean Howells’ opinion of the matter:
The habit husbands and wives have of making each other listen to their dreams is especially cruel. They have each other quite helpless, and for this reason they should all the more carefully guard themselves from abusing their advantage. Parents should not afflict their offspring with the rehearsal of their mental maunderings in sleep, and children should learn that one of the first duties a child owes its parents is to spare them the anguish of hearing what it has dreamed about overnight …

Howells also documents the way the dreamer often turns on the dreamt-about, blaming them for dreamt-up sins. Unhelpfully, he adds, The only thing that I can think to do about it is to urge people to keep out of other people’s dreams by every means in their power.

‘But I didn’t ask to be in your dreams,’ protests my husband.

My latest novel for children, The Mourning Emporium, was published on October 28th. This means that my husband gets a break, because in the weeks around publication, my dreams change. All paranoia focuses on the act of publication and its sister-acts of publicity, performance and parties.

Here’s a selection of what my subconscious been up to in the small hours the last few weeks:

I am in a locked car, improbably parked on a jetty near our home in Venice. I’m tied up. The car teeters on the edge of the jetty and then drops into the dark green depths. A person I don’t know stands on the jetty, watching impassively.

I’m on a strobe-lit stage, wearing only a slightly grubby spotted sheet. The dancing mistress hisses from the wings, ‘DO YOUR BUTTERFLY DANCE!’ I stumble around like a blowfly who’s just been sprayed with DDT. I fall off the stage, crushing to powder a lady who has the shape and texture of a vast meringue. It turns out she was the one VIP I was supposed to impress.

I am at a party. I’m comprehensively snubbed by someone I am particularly happy to see – someone to whom I would have given custody of my professional happiness or with whom I would have shared my last Bendicks Bittermint. People turn away from my naked grief. I go to the kitchen and start washing dishes.

I am flattered into judging a literary competition. It will be good for my career, I’m assured. The UPS boat arrives, and a huge box is unloaded for me. It is as big as I am. These are the competition entries. I have two hours to read them all. Then the UPS man stagger onto the jetty with another box. And another. The whole boat is full of entries. I stare at the hopes and dreams of other writers and know that I am about to betray all of them.

The bitter aftertaste of bad dreams like these can linger till sunset. They leave the dreamer drained and feeling guilty. A really bad dream can perpetuate the sense of inadequacy it evokes by rendering the dreamer inadequate for the tasks of the day.

In Japanese mythology there’s a creature called a Baku, who looks something like a tapir crossed with a lion and elephant. It feeds on the bad dreams of humanity. I imagine it rather corpulent. But it can dine on dreams only if they are offered up voluntarily. The dreamer must cry, ‘Devour, O Baku’ three times before he or she may be freed from his hallucinatory tortures.

Does anyone else have any titbits for the Japanese tapir god?

Does anyone else have special nightmares on publication street?



LINKS
Michelle Lovric’s website
William Dean Howells’ full essay on dreams can be found in Impressions and Experiences, 1896.

Block print of Baku by Katsushika Hokusai

Obstructions and Freedoms - Elen Caldecott

I have two very different takes on the creative process to share today: obstruction and freedom. They may seem like opposites, but I think they can both benefit creative people.

Obstructions are the limits that other people set on what we can do. I first came across this idea a good few years ago when I watched Lars von Trier's The Five Obstructions in which von Trier challenged his friend and mentor, Jorgen Leth to remake the same short film five times, each time with an arbitrarily imposed obstruction. Lars chose the obstructions, naturally, and they ranged from technical (one short could only be made up of sections that were 12 frames long) to the emotional (another short had to be filmed in the worst place in the world). It should have been a disaster, but Leth rose to the challenge and, for the most part, the short films he produces are sublime. In each case, it is the obstructions that inspire Leth to try harder, to think bigger, to be bold.

Freedoms, on the other hand, are what you have when no-one is looking over your shoulder. When an idea comes, characters take shape, words spring and there are no deadlines and contracts and editors. Freedom is what you have when writing is done simply for pleasure. It is often the thing that self-publishers will guard jealously.

This week I attended a meeting for a writing project that comes laden with obstructions - it is for the educational market. There will be no violence, no dangerous activities, no pigs, no swearing. There will be a phonics list. I might have felt the weight of a depressing constraint. But I didn't. Instead, I felt challenged - how do you make a story exciting if it also has to be safe? How can I keep readers asking for 'just one more chapter' if it all has to be written in phoneme-decodable language?

Actually, I found myself bristling with ideas. By setting up obstructions, the publishers are forcing me to think harder, to be ingenious.

Next week, I'm attending a writer's retreat. That will be all freedom (even the freedom to lie around in bed eating biscuits all day, if I want). I won't be doing any contracted writing. I hope that it will be invigorating and luxurious. It is just this kind of freedom that keeps writing fresh for me.

And just to illustrate how good things can be with a bit of obstruction, here's Jorgen Leth's 'cartoon perfect human':

www.elencaldecott.com
Elen's Facebook Page

Keeping the romance alive - Zannah Kearns

What was the first story you fell in love with? The one that you insisted grown-ups read for you again and again and again? Or the book that you stayed up with late into the night, snuggled under your bedcovers with a torch?

What book gave you a lightbulb moment of understanding about yourself or the world around you - helped you understand something new about humanity?

And when was the moment you realised you wanted to ‘be’ a writer? When did you start filling a notebook with scribbled thoughts, crazy and wild?

When was the first time you finished writing something, and felt that excited heart-pound because it might actually be quite good?

Do you still have that?

When did it become about daily word counts? When could you more easily retell your latest submission letter than the story itself? All those brown-envelopes...

Where did the romance go?

Let's remember to love the process! You don’t have to write (other than in that compulsive sense of yes I do, I absolutely HAVE to do write!) What I mean is, you do it because you choose to. Because you love it. Remember?

Don’t take your love for writing for granted. Don’t let it slip into drudgery and mechanics.

I met someone completely embittered that he’d never found a publisher. I’d never met anyone so angry about it before. It left me wondering whether that in itself might mean he never does, because where was the love? It wasn’t about the story anymore, it was about those evil publishers who couldn’t recognise his brilliance. The story had shrivelled into a darkened corner, too shy to emerge.

What do you do to keep the romance alive?

For me there are two things. Both, I understand are recommended by Julia Cameron in The Artist’s Way, although I'm pretty confident they're not patented! I haven’t actually followed her book myself, but I’ve heard good things about it!

The first is free writing - preferably in the morning, first thing when the day is only just stirring and you still have one foot in the world of dreams. Writing about whatever comes to mind with no pressure for the words to be good or to build to anything. Sometimes material surfaces that can be used, but it doesn't have to. It's just for fun, maybe to clear out the dross, but you don't have to over-think the reasons.

The second way to stoke the love is a writer’s date. A concentrated time to remind you that creativity is a joy.

Why not book a date with yourself sometime this week? It only need be for half an hour... Go and buy yourself a new notebook. It doesn’t have be expensive. Yes, we all love Moleskins, but you could buy something bog standard. Heck, go crazy and buy a pen, too.

Then stop somewhere.

A bench in a park. Find a river. Sit under a tree. Or wait for the good seat in the coffee shop.

If you have children, you’ll probably have to wait until they’re in bed! Pour a glass of wine and sit somewhere different in your house. Or dig out a sleeping bag and sit in the garden.

Just stop. Stop.

Smell the air.

Relax a moment.

And then open up your brand new notebook and write about why you love to write. What have you been you trying to do all this time?

Never forget why you love it. Let yourself fall for writing all over again.

Where Did I Get the Idea? Angels and Fables by Emma Barnes

When I am visiting a school to talk about writing I nearly always get the question “But where do you get your ideas?” I reply that although getting an idea feels almost magical at the time, I can often trace the roots of it back to something I have read in the past. Often a long time ago.

My latest book is no different. How (Not) To Make Bad Children Good is about a Guardian Agent (a bit like Guardian Angel – get it?) who comes down to Earth in order to sort out one particular naughty child, Martha, and attempt to make her good. Of course nothing goes as smoothly as he plans.

I had been wanting to write something on a Guardian Angel theme for a very long time. And when I thought about why, I suspected it had something to do with a particular book I had loved as a child, and which had featured Guardian Angels. Having published my own book, I was curious enough to dig around in the boxes of childhood books that had been stored in my parents’ attic. And finally I found it – a rather battered green hardback.

It was called Dreams and Fables and was written by C.S Woodward – a Canon and later (I discover from Wikipedia) a Bishop. It was old fashioned even when I was first reading it (published in 1929 and I promise you I am MANY decades younger). It was a collection of stories which had been broadcast as part of children’s Sunday services. All of them have (to an adult eye) an extremely obvious moral message at the core. But few of them (as I found, when I reread them) had lost the particular charm that had entranced me when a child.

There are several Guardian Angel stories in the collection. The pattern of them is this: a child goes to sleep, anticipating an exciting event the next day (starting school, going on holiday). Then their Angel appears, and despite the child’s protests, whisks them off to the shops to buy a few last minute items. But these are no ordinary purchases. They are things like Unselfishness Mixture, Cheerfulness Ointment and Obedience Tablets.

“Take one of those,” said the Angel to Arthur, “and put it in your pocket. You will find them very useful when you are told to do something you don’t much want to do. When Nurse tells you to go and wash your hands for dinner or Mother says that it’s time to go to bed, you will find that you will run along ever so much more quickly if you slip one of those little tablets into your mouth; or when Father tells you not to make quite so much noise in the house you will find an Obedience Tablet a very great help.”

Even as a child, I think I found something a little suspect about this: the prescribed remedies, and the ever-grateful child. Being good is not quite so straightforward as all that. And what if the child didn’t feel like being obedient, and cunningly left his tablets at home? On the other hand, I loved the idea of another being whom nobody else could see, and who swooped into one’s bedroom and took one off on a journey into the night. And I loved the strange items with their peculiar properties.

So, not surprisingly, my own story has kept some of these elements. My Guardian Agent, Fred, swoops in by night and perches on the bed post. But only after he has first crash-landed on the rug. And he has a bag full of gizmos, all designed to help with his job of turning Martha into a better person. Only quite often the Interstellar Radar, or Anti-Jealousy Medicine fail to work.

And when Fred finally does succeed in making Martha think more about other people, it all misfires horribly – as when Martha generously donates her family’s prize possessions to charity.

“It was only stuff you didn’t need. You already have earrings. Why do you need more the same?”
“They are not the same!” screeched Mum.
“Still, Martha meant well,” said Dad. “It was a kind thought.”
“I knew you’d understand,” said Martha. “That was why I gave them your new computer game.”
“What!” roared Dad. "You gave them Alien Bodysnatchers 2?"

The story is poking fun not just at naughty Martha, but at the adults who tell her one thing one moment, and then come down like a ton of bricks when she puts their words into action.
And I suppose this is where I part from Dreams and Fables. I can’t write, as C.S.Woodward does, of an infallible adult authority, and I don’t want to preach at children. But that doesn’t mean I’m mocking that world either.


One of the stories in particular moved me. It concerns a child called Nancy, who is taken by her Angel to the Cenotaph. There she hears the Unknown Warrior, urging mankind to make an end to war, and is told “it depends upon you and upon all the other boys and girls like you”.
Looking at the publication date, 1929, I realise that CS Woodward had seen one World War and was likely dreading another. Who can blame him if, for children, he wanted to maintain a safer, more certain moral universe?

Emma's web-site

How (Not) To Make Bad Children Good on Amazon

Creative Differences - John Dougherty

A few years ago, I was lucky enough to be thoroughly alarmed by the late Diana Wynne Jones.

I went to see her at the Cheltenham Literature Festival. In response to the inevitable question about her next book, she said that it would be published in February and was about a child who goes to visit relatives in Ireland only to find that strange things connected with Celtic mythology begin to happen.

"Eeek!" I thought; and at the end of the session I approached her with a question of my own.

"How do I tell my publisher," I asked her, "that my next book, about a child who goes to visit a relative in Ireland only to find that strange events connected with Celtic mythology begin to happen, is going to bomb because Diana Wynne Jones's book about the same thing comes out a month earlier?"

Well, she was absolutely lovely. She told me that this sort of thing was always happening, and that she was sure my book would be completely different from hers. Which, as it turned out, was completely accurate: I read and thoroughly enjoyed The Game, and my Bansi O'Hara and the Bloodline Prophecy was - thankfully! - nothing like it.

I'm thinking about this now because I've just read a terrific book about a boy who accidentally summons an ancient deity. The deity accepts as a prayer something which wasn't intended to be a prayer at all, manifests before the boy, and asks for worship and sacrifices. In the story that follows, the gods are shown to be capricious, self-centred and arrogant, with little regard for the rights and feelings of mere mortals.

If you're familiar with my work, you might think I'm describing my first Zeus book, Zeus on the Loose. But many of you may guess that I'm talking about Wishful Thinking by Ali Sparkes - and if you haven't read it, I can thoroughly recommend it. It's very different from Zeus - much more of an adventure and less of a comedy, though it does have some genuinely funny moments - and is clearly aimed at an older readership. It's also beautifully structured, and includes, among other delights, one of the most nail-biting car chases I've read in a long time.

I have to say, I really enjoyed reading something that started with such a similar idea to one of my own stories and took that idea in such a different direction. I've no idea which of us first came up with the idea, and I don't really care; because the important point, I think, is that neither of us could have written the other's book.

Anyone can have an idea - and any two people can unwittingly share an idea - but it's what you do with that idea that counts. So today I feel like celebrating our creative differences - and in particular the fact that thirty writers could independently have the same idea, and end up with thirty entirely different stories.

And I'm sure - as Diana Wynne Jones told me - that this sort of thing really does happen all the time. Can anyone think of any other examples?

John’s website is at www.visitingauthor.com.
His most recent books are:
-> a retelling of Finn MacCool and the Giant’s Causeway for the Oxford Reading Tree 
-> Bansi O’Hara and the Edges of Hallowe’en   
-> Zeus Sorts It Out

Visitors From the World Called Imagination - Ellen Renner

‘Where do ideas come from?’ It’s the one question you’re bound to get during a school or library visit. I’m always truthful and say I don’t know. Oh, the disappointment in the eyes of that future author in the third row who sits, pencil poised, hoping to be gifted with the secret of story. I offer comfort in the form of tips on how to generate ideas and catch them before they fly away, like Roald Dahl’s BFG scooping up dreams in his net and bottling them, and the child is satisfied.

And, for me, there is a sense of disaster averted. I truly hope that no clever, obsessively inquisitive neuroscientist ever cracks the mechanics of creativity. I don’t want to know where my ideas come from, I just want to spy them fluttering past my eyes at unexpected moments, like translucent, technicoloured butterflies. Actually, I have a superstitious fear that if the magic process is examined too closely, it will wither away under the white hot glare of intellect. Some things grow best in the dark.

The origin of characters is even more mysterious to me. There’s a wonderful, darkly funny story by Diana Wynne Jones called Carol Onier’s Hundredth Dream. It should be required reading for all writers, especially those whose characters have a habit of hi-jacking the story.

I remember typing the last words of the final scene of my second book, City of Thieves, and feeling an overwhelming sense of bereavement. I had spent a white-hot six weeks glued to my computer, writing sixteen hours a day to get the story out. Not because of editorial deadlines but because Tobias, the main character, refused to get out of my head until I told his story. And it is a good story. Compelling and heart breaking. And although I know I created that story and remember long sessions working out the plots and reveals, it still feels as though Tobias told it to me.

When I’d done the deed, and written the last word, I lifted my aching fingers from the keyboard, looked round my extremely untidy study and suffered real grief that these characters I had lived with so intensively for a month and a half did not actually exist somewhere … in some alternative world. I believe I actually cried.
I always tell that story with a slight worry the men in white coats will be sent to talk with me by kind well-wishers, but I’ve come to believe that, for me, it perfectly illustrates why I write. It’s all about the characters.

Oh, you do need plot. And pacing. And themes … and all the other lovely mixture of ingredients that are so much fun and make up the craft of writing well. But characters are the heart, the soul, and the ‘why’ – at least for me. But where do they come from?

Some writers (I know, because there are whole chapters in ‘how-to’ books and entire units in creative writing courses dedicated to the subject) draw their characters directly from life - observing people they know and those they don’t; taking notes, adding, subtracting, rubbing out and re-drawing, until they have the characters they need to populate their plot.

I don’t do it that way. I start with a concept, an idea, a theme. After that, the characters form a casting queue outside my mental door. Of course, they must also be drawn from life – from a lifetime of observing people, of reading books obsessively, of watching television and film. But I don’t have to build them mechanically. They seem to create themselves as I put the first chapters down, and tell me their stories as I write. It truly does seem a form of magic.

I’m in that delicious, tantalising stage of a new book. A book I’ve been waiting nearly six months to start. As the time approached when I knew I’d be clear of other writing commitments and able to begin this new project – a shiny new strong idea that I don’t want to mess up – I was torn between anticipation and fear. I was wracked with the classic anxiety: had I forgotten how to write my own stories? Would I be good enough to tackle this big idea? Would the words come; the plot? And – especially – the characters?

A few weeks in and anxiety is easing. I’ve become caught up in my own storytelling web. Or, to put it more accurately, I’ve fallen in love with my characters. They have arrived, wholly-formed and real, from some hidden part of my mind, and are living their lives on the pages as I write. I’m enjoying their company tremendously. They’re teaching me about their world, about pain and strength and courage. This time, I do have a deadline to meet; I know how long I have to be in their company, and am already dreading the day that I will type that last scene and raise my head to look around a strangely lonely study.

Soundtracks Again

‘What is your soundtrack?’ Miriam Halahmy wrote on Monday. My soundtrack is often the noise of bombs whining down, of artillery bombardment, of planes strafing civilians, things I’ve never heard, but that my mother – she told me once – relived when I was in utero, which maybe explains why all through my childhood I was terrified when I heard a siren. I mean the air-raid type sirens which were in use in the ‘50s. There was one that used to go off from Kendal quarry every day and I never got used to it. Maybe it was an air-raid siren working out its time. But the bells that ring out over the ruined city of Berlin in Saving Rafael – German churchbells, not the severe mathematical patterns we hear in this country, but a cluster of notes rung together in harmony – come from the Christmas record that was always played in my childhood home. I can hear them in my mind now.

Music affects me in two ways when I’m writing. Firstly, there’s the music that actually occurs in the novel – a lot of Django Reinhart and Louis Armstrong in Last Train from Kummersdorf and there’s a particular track on my Charlie Parker box set from the ‘40s – ‘Dizzy Boogie’ – which has really lit up the jazz I write about in the novel I’m working on at present. But I will say no more about work in progress.. When I was writing Saving Rafael, I had a cd called ‘Berlin by Night’ which contained popular music from Germany in the Nazi period. Not, I hasten to add, Nazi songs, but songs ranging from ‘Lili Marleen’ to disguised jazz, given a German title and lyric to make it more acceptable to the authorities. It has ‘Es geht Alles Vorüber’, the smash hit of the end of the war, the one that people kept listening to. Its message: ‘Everything passes, everything goes by, and every December is followed by May’ annoyed Propaganda Minister Goebbels – not martial enough – but that made no difference. My mother associated it, bitterly, with the letter she got telling her her first love had been killed in action – but she did have her Maytime after all, when she met my British father.

I listened to that cd over and over again, and composed the ‘theme lyric’ for the novel, in slight imitation of a terribly shlocky number that had me frankly laughing my head off. Jenny, in the novel, knew it was trash, but because it was playing the first time she realised Raf was interested in her, it got terribly important to her.

And yet – the scene where my young hero reaches across the table and starts playing with Jenny’s fingers comes, not from any of those contemporaneous songs, but from Tchaikowsky’s Violin Concerto (in D Major, I believe). I’d been wondering how to write that scene just before I was taken abruptly into hospital to have a tumour taken out of my spine. The second night after my surgery, I had a dreadful moment when I woke up and thought: ‘Somebody’s in pain,’ and then realised it was me – just as authors describe in many novels, and I always thought they’d made it up! But the thing that made me cry was that I thought I’d lost my novel.

I got some more opiates from the nurses, pulled myself together – they were dealing with an emergency in the room and the last thing they needed was an author agonising – and then the next morning I was listening to the Tchaikowsky on my personal stereo and suddenly I was in the Café Kranzler again. I’d found the novel! Such a relief, because honestly, it was an awful moment, and I realised how important a companion the novel I’m working on is to me.

Tchaikowsky wrote the concerto as a love-letter to a young violinist – who didn’t reciprocate his affection – but it is the most passionate, flirtatious, wonderful bit, and the part of the slow movement I was listening to was just like someone playing with their loved one’s fingers. I had something to write on, so I reached out – I had to lie flat in bed – and scrawled it down.

There’s a jazz cd by Abdullah Ibrahim called ‘Water from an Ancient Well’ that my brother gave me, that I often had playing on my computer while I was writing Kummersdorf. Music so often releases something in me, and it’s vitally important to me for that reason. I can’t imagine writing without music. If I didn’t have any of the machines that are our personal musicians nowadays, I’d have to sing for myself. Perhaps that would be better, who knows?

But I’m a twenty-first century writer, born in the twentieth century. My childish imagination was fired by ‘Music and Movement’ and by the stacks of wonderful glossy records, ‘78s, that lived in our Kendal house with us – my parents didn’t have a lot of money, so I guess they'd found these in the cellar when we moved in.

Anyway, I have wonderful memories of my brother and me, on wet Lake District days, putting on 'The Night on Bald Mountain,' and dancing excitedly to it. And that music surfaced years later when I wrote my novel about a witch persecution in the 17th century, Malefice.

What is the soundtrack to your landscape?

My landscape is Hayling Island off the south coast of England, next to Portsmouth. Hayling is 25 miles square and completely flat. When the tide goes out it drains right round the Island revealing wonderful mud banks which are a haven for many different birds.Around two thirds of all birds in the British List are here, including Common Tern, Little Tern, Little Egret and the Brent Geese which winter on Hayling from the Arctic Circle.
So my soundtrack begins with the cry of the seagulls and the call of all the different birds which populate my landscape.

Behind the cry of the birds is the sound of the wind. Did you know that windsurfing was invented on Hayling Island? In 1958 a schoolboy called Peter Chilvers attached a tent flap and a curtain pole to a piece of wood and launched from the beach into the wind. The wind blows hard across the Island coming in from the Solent. Trees bend over in agony and the tall pines groan and creak. Thousands of yachts are moored around the Island and the wind plays a merry tune as it jingles their shrouds.
My soundtrack is underpinned by the wind.

My first book, HIDDEN, is set in February in a freezing cold winter and part of the story is set during a deep sea mist. Fog horns sound out on the Solent making my character, Alix, feel cold and lonely, like the illegal immigrant, Mohammed, she has rescued from the sea. Fog horns sound more than once through my landscape and are a metaphor for the huge and difficult task my two teenagers have set themselves, in rescuing and hiding Mohammed to save him from being deported.

My soundtrack contains many more sounds across the three novels; the crash of the waves on the beach in a storm, the dragging of the tide across the pebbles, the splash of my characters falling or jumping into the water, alongside the roar of motorbikes and the revving of motorboat engines. Bicycles whirr down the back lanes of the Island and car brakes squeal in a spin.

There is the clump of boots across the limestone edges of Derbyshire as my characters  in the third book take off for a rock climbing weekend.
Ropes creak and quickdraws snap and click. Someone yelps as the rope runs through his hand burning the skin on his palm and there is a sickening crunch as a helmet crunches into the rock during a terrifying fall.


I have developed my soundtrack over four years, writing the three novels, visiting the Island several times a year to take notes and photos and to write with the wind in my ears. I have also revisited my old climbing haunts and reminded myself of the sights and sounds of the climbing community. I've hung around friends with motorbikes and I've been out on a motorboat in Chichester Harbour, tracking the desperate journey of my characters in the second book. Just as it takes time to develop the landscape of our writing, so it takes time to enrich the soundtrack. I just wish I could record it and put it on a CD.

What is the soundtrack to your landscape?

HIDDEN, the first book in my Hayling cycle, March 2011, Meadowside Books.
www.miriamhalahmy.com
www.miriamhalahmy.blogspot.com
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Infinite (Im)Possibilities for Writers: by Rosalie Warren

In an infinite universe, anything that can happen does happen - an infinite number of times.

Of course, the idea of an infinite universe is a tricky (possibly an infinitely tricky) one to grasp, and there's no proof as yet that our universe is infinite. Some theories propose that we may be part of a multiverse - a (possibly) infinite number of universes embodying all possible physical laws and values of important constants like the strength of gravity. Many of these universes would contain little of interest (a low gravitational constant, for example, makes it impossible for galaxies and stars to form, so life is most unlikely). Other variants would look more like ours. There might even be one in which I don't like chocolate, though I'm not sure that counts as 'possible'.

And then there's the interpretation of quantum theory which says that when you open the box to reveal Schrödinger's cat, the universe splits into the 'cat-alive' and the 'cat-dead' version. By the time a few splits like this have occurred, you get a fair degree of diversity and some interesting narratives evolving.

Which brings me to the connection (there is one, I promise) with writers and writing.

If the universe really is infinite, then all our books, even our wildest fictional fantasies, are true. There is a universe somewhere, or perhaps a pocket of our own universe, where the characters you and I have invented actually exist - and do exactly the things they do in our books. And, in a 'neighbouring' universe, they make slightly different choices and perhaps write themselves into a better book.

This may all sound incredibly far-fetched. I am not an expert, though I did some physics at university long ago. These days, I'm a keen reader of those books that thrill you with the exciting bits of cosmology, quantum physics and neuroscience. They set my imagination alight... and nothing does that more than the idea that every work of fiction ever written has actually happened, somewhere way out there. I'm not sure why this thrills me, but it does.

As I sit and write, often feeling that I am listening in to my characters' conversations and observing their actions rather than making them up, the idea that I am tuning in to something real is a very powerful and poignant one.

I realise that the question of what 'actually exists' plunges one into some deep waters of philosophy. I'm going to stay in the shallows for the purpose of this post, but if anyone wants to wade out deeper, I'd love to know what you think.

Thanks to Brian Greene and his intriguing book 'The Hidden Reality' (Allen Lane, 2011), which gave me some insight into all this stuff and made me marvel all over again at the wonderful place in which we live. It seems safe to assume that the universe is even more amazing than our current theories tell us, and that, for me, feels exactly right.

[Photo of Earth from space by Terra satellite, image copyright NASA]

A No-Brainer

Now and again something strikes me as so true, so right, so profound, that I can’t sleep. I pace the corridors of my country retreat until the early hours, mumbling away to myself.

At the same time I am, of course, wary of such feelings. I know the way my brain chemicals can leap about and do somersaults, bounce off the inside of my skull, creating all sorts of messianic thoughts.

When I think something is important, I begin to question why I think it is important, and then begin examining my values. Nothing can withstand such scrutiny. Great ideas the size of planets shrivel up into wasabi peas. By the time the maid serves breakfast, I might as well sit at the table dressed as Napoleon.

The book that caused the most recent episode was “The Master and His Emissary” by Iain McGilchrist. I experienced so many stirrings of recognition I began to believe that my brain liked what it was reading so much that it was stamping out any embers of criticism.

It’s a huge book, but its thesis is straightforward – and please realise I am simplifying this hugely - that left brained thinking has elbowed its better half into the long grass. Left brained thinking is rational, mathematical, deductive. Right brain is empathy, intuition, emotion.

I usually despise such simplifications. And I despise this one more than most, because McGilchrist uses closely argued prose (ie a very rational left brained argument) to make his case against that very methodology.

However. I’m going to use a brilliant manoeuvre and beg your indulgence. Let’s think of this right brain/left brain stuff as a useful metaphor. Now that you’ve agreed to this, I’ll plough on.

Consider what school subjects our political leaders still believe to be most important: literacy, numeracy, science and IT. The curriculum, then, is heavily weighed towards left brain thinking.

Why are maths, science and IT are still valued more than art, music or drama? Why does reading receive more emphasis than oracy?

Subjects that cannot be easily gauged, or measured, are valued less. You can measure reading age, spelling age, maths age. You can test a child’s knowledge of science. You can buy computer programmes that will test the lot.

But no computer can test a child’s capacity to draw, or to express an emotion in speech. And by definition, there can’t be the tools for measuring creativity: if you are highly creative, you will have brilliant ideas long before some bureaucrat comes up with a way of testing what they are.

And yet when we look at what makes an organisation great, it isn’t its targets, or its data, it’s the people in it: people who show initiative and creativity; people who are good with other people, who watch out for the smallest signs of distress and respond to it; people who recognise and nurture talent.

What elevates something to excellence is something beyond measure.

McGilchrist’s book is a six hundred page scream. The data munchers, the Daleks, are taking over. They are taking over because the test obsessed school curriculum exaggerates the abilities of systematizers over those of their more intuitive, emotional, people-friendly peers. The examination system rewards closed, rational thought, students who can play the game.

More than ever, then, artists and writers need to make strong, well-argued cases for the elevation of their disciplines in schools and in the world outside. We must not pander to the data-fiddlers and boast that whatever it is we do can improve a child’s scores. Ironically, and sadly, we, like McGilchrist, have to use the techniques of the left brainers (rational argument) to champion the intuitive, poetic mind. (I had thought of tying a fish to my head and standing on one leg in Parliament Square, but didn’t think that would put these ideas across so well).

We need only look at children’s faces when we tell a story, or perform a play, to know that what we provide is right. We do not need any other test. Quality cannot be quantified.

Which is why literature is so vital. Literature is all the right-brained thinking child has left. If her art and music lessons are squashed into the scrag end of an afternoon, often taught by teachers who are not particularly fully absorbed by these subjects, the result is a desert for the empathetic, intuitive child. The left brainers tramp merrily away with all the booty.

Letters From a Dentist - Liz Kessler

Last weekend, I went to Vienna with my father. It was the first time I’d been to the city where he spent the first eight years of his life. The city he had to leave in 1938, because the Nazis didn’t want him there.

I have told his story before – so forgive me if you’ve read or heard it – but it was only when my latest book came out this year that I realised how deeply it resonates within me, on so many levels. And so I’m going to tell it again.

A Danube Steamer today

See this boat? It was a moment aboard one of these that changed my father’s life forever.

Picture the scene. Vienna 1934, and my father, aged four, was recovering from whooping cough. My grandfather was Czechoslovakian, my grandmother Austrian, and they lived in Vienna. As a treat following my father’s illness, his father took him on a Danube Steamer, where he knelt in his smart clothes looking out at the world passing by, not realising his feet were inching closer to an English lady beside him.

‘Careful with your shoes, Heinzele, you’ll dirty the lady’s dress,’ my grandfather said.

The lady smiled, and replied, ‘No, no, it’s all right,’ in halting German. ‘What a lovely boy,’ she added, pointing to my father, in his ‘pretty’ clothes and golden curls.

 My father as a young boy, with my grandfather

My grandfather and the lady got into conversation – as far as they were able, given the language barriers. She and her husband were in Vienna for a dental conference. The adults soon became so engrossed in conversation that the English couple, Mr and Mrs Jones, missed their stop.

As they reached the end of the line and discovered their fellow conference members had disembarked at an earlier port, my grandfather offered to show them a little of his city and bring them home to meet his wife and share some traditional cakes and coffee. And so, the Joneses came briefly into my father’s and grandparents’ lives.

The only contact after this was a note, written in stumbling German, which my father still treasures.“My dear Mr. Kessler. We have nothing forgotten. I cannot the German well write but I think often out of you and that so lovely son.” It’s signed Gladys H. Jones and was written on the paper printed with her husband’s dental practice address.

The original letter from Gladys Jones

Shortly after this encounter, the world went crazy.

My father had spent the first few years of his life living a happy, innocent existence in a small, Jewish family. In the late 1930s, families like his were no longer welcome in their own country.

Because my grandfather was Czech, they were able to move to Czechoslovakia, which they did in 1938. They were among the lucky ones. Soon, however, my family were once again unwanted Jews living in a Nazi world. Only this time, there was nowhere they could go. That is, nowhere unless they had a mass of signed certificates, permits and papers which would allow them to leave the country.

My grandfather began a long, difficult bureaucratic paper chase until, eventually, he had everything. Everything, that is, except for the final and most crucial item. An affidavit from someone in the country they wanted to go to, taking full financial responsibility for them. Without this legal document, there was no way for a Jewish family to leave the country.

So the trail reached a dead end. My family knew no one overseas. They had nowhere to go, and no one to help get them there. But then one day, my grandfather rediscovered the letter from Gladys Jones. The English couple they had met four years ago! Maybe they would write the letter that would give them their lives back. It was a very, very long shot. This couple had no reason to do such a thing. A day trip around Vienna was hardly a fair exchange for what he was asking. But my grandfather wrote to them anyway. It was the only option he had left.

Within weeks, the affidavit came. Yes! They would do it! Come to England – we will do whatever you need. My family had been saved. They came to England and lived with the Joneses for six months – and were finally free to live the rest of their lives.

But what if they had never met the Joneses? What if my father hadn’t been ill; if his father hadn’t decided he needed cheering up with a boat trip; if he hadn’t knelt on his seat! If the Jones’s hadn’t missed their stop...

At the end of all those ifs is an unthinkable alternative. No one needs reminding what kind of future awaited a Jewish family living under the Nazis.

This tiny chance moment that gave my family a chance of a new life makes my mind tingle. The thought of all those seemingly random decisions we make every day that could change the course of our lives forever absolutely fascinates me. In fact, this idea is at the heart of my latest book.

In A Year Without Autumn, Jenni finds herself transported a year forward in time, and discovers a terrible tragedy has torn her best friend’s world apart. Jenni needs to work out how she got there, and – more importantly – if she can get back and make everyone act differently so that both families face a different fate.

Even though this is my eighth children’s book, there’s something special about it for me. I think it’s because its inspiration lives within me at the deepest level possible. The tiny moment that saved my father’s life, and the fact that without this moment, things could have been so very, very different.

It may not say so in the pages of my book, but in my heart, A Year Without Autumn is dedicated to the many Mr and Mrs Joneses of this world, and the things they do every day without realising that they have just changed another person’s life forever.

A Year Without Autumn is now out in paperback.
Find out more about Liz on her facebook page or her website

Keep Silent by Lynda Waterhouse

I keep his picture by my desk. His dark eyes stare at me. His hair is long and he needs a shave. His lips are set in a determined downward curve. He is trying a bit too hard to look like he doesn’t care about me and yet he is carrying a placard which he is defying me to read and consider. Upon it are written the words,
Keep silent, unless your speech is better than silenceThe man in the picture is Salvator Rosa (1615 -1673), artist, actor, philosopher, and possible bandit. I first encountered him at The Wallace Collection which owns his painting of Apollo and the Cumaean Sybil. The self portrait is usually in the National Gallery but can now be seen in a wonderful exhibition of his paintings at Dulwich Picture Gallery.
Keep silent, unless your speech is better than silence
His advice seems to run counter to all the pressure on me to twitter, buzz, hum and fritter my words and myself in order to get myself ‘out there’. Should I deck myself out in the literary equivalent of a meat dress and get noticed?
Keep silent, unless your speech is better than silence
John Le Carre recently said in a recent interview that he likes to be the quiet guest at the dinner table. If we are expected to ‘make a noise’ all the time are we sacrificing a bit of our creative self? After his death Salvator Rosa became the darling of the Romantics because he refused to paint to order. He painted scathing pictures showing Fortuna scattered her riches on those that least deserve them. I would love Fortuna to scatter some random riches and recognition in my direction.
Keep silent, unless your speech is better than silenceHis words challenge me as I write. Silent images flicker on the screen of my imagination over and over again and I dance with them until they are reformed into words. Then I can only hope that these words can successfully transmit those images and emotions into another’s imagination so that a story or a poem comes into existence. A story that is better than silence.

The words in the air - Abi Burlingham

Have you heard them lately, the words in the air, floating around unseen? They can be quiet, discreet things and go unnoticed if we don't listen. Then, when they know they have your undivided attention, they will SHOUT OUT! Before you think I'm completely mad, let me explain. In fact, here's a question: have you ever been struck by a sudden thought or idea, an image maybe, or a word or two, not at a time when you were trying to think of something to write about, but seemingly out of the blue, when you weren't even thinking about your latest WIP (work in progress)? I would imagine the answer to this is a resounding YES! So you'll know what I mean by the words in the air.

The thing is, lately I haven't been listening very much. I've been far too busy getting on with proper writer type things, like editing, writing new things, plotting, re-writing old things, blogging, promoting, keeping my accounts in order so that I don't go upsetting Mr VAT, that type of thing. And, because I have immersed myself in all of this, because I have been a woman on a mission, pre-occupied with word counts and what I have and haven't finished, I have made no time for the words in the air. In fact, they seemed to have stopped appearing altogether, and what is worse, I didn't even notice!

Then, I reached a sticky point - the woman on a mission hit a brick wall (metaphorically speaking) a few thousand words into my current WIP, my first YA (young adult) novel. I had managed to get past a similar sticking point earlier on in the novel by using index cards to help my plotting, but now, as the dramatic action was supposed to increase, I found myself drawing a blank. After a lot of angsting and huffing and puffing, none of which was the slightest bit constructive, I decided to put it to one side. So, plot plan, chopped up cards, sketches, notes, were all dumped on top of a cupboard and left. I have to tell you, I was grumpy about it. After all, I was a woman on a mission. I wanted to get on with it. But it just wasn't happening for me, so I abandoned it, for three weeks.

A few days ago, two things happened on the same day - rather a coincidence. A fellow writer and friend visited a disused mine and tweeted a picture of it. My reaction was a sharp intake of breath as the image reminded me of my deep-rooted fear of enclosed spaces. The same evening, while reading a Famous Five book to my little girl, one of the characters discovered a staircase leading to an underground tunnel running under the sea. Suddenly, there it was. The answer! The missing piece in my puzzle. Why had I not thought of it before? But there's the rub. If I hadn't stopped to look at the photograph and taken an interest in somebody else's experiences, if I hadn't taken time out to read to my daughter, would I have found the answer? Probably not. I may have found another one, but it's unlikely that it would have been this one. To add to this, the idea of a tunnel, earth, sand, water, triggered another idea connected to the elements. Some of these already featured in my story, but suddenly, I realised that I could do something extra with this, something I hadn't planned at all.

It seems to me that being a writer is not always about the amount of words written, or getting the job done, although of course, these things are important. It is about being open to all sorts of things, about using what comes to us. We are opportunists and need to take time out from the physical action of writing to be inspired and to experience what is around us, to soak up what exists, sometimes to just be. Because the words in the air will come, and when they do, we need to be ready to reach out and pull them in.

Do you take time to listen to the words in the air?

Abi Burlingham

www.abiburlingham.talktalk.net

www.abiburlingham.talktalk.net/Blog.html

the border between fiction and reality, by Leslie Wilson

This is my last blog for ABBA for a while, and I feel sad, but with the imminent arrival of new twin grandsons (all being well) and a novel to finish off, and my gardening blog (Leslie Erika Wilson, Literary Gardener, do visit it if you haven't already), and The History Girls, I have to pull my horns in somewhere. But I have loved blogging here and will continue to read and enjoy other people's blogs!

So - the parting note.

There's a path that goes - well, somewhere, where the Chilterns slope down to the Thames near Reading, and it leads to a place on which I have based the house in my novel-in-progress. I walked it first in the winter, when I was finding the spot, and a winter path is very different from a summer path. It's in summer that a scene actually takes place there, so the Sunday before last, I asked David and the dog if they'd walk it with me again. Matilda always says yes to a walk - well, she's a dog - but David agreed too, and off we went..




It was a good thing I went, because the last time the ground was wintry and muddy, but in summer it's lined with loose flints. I think it was a road before it was a path, because you can see that it was made and hogginned or whatever the word is, with the flints. It's only the ones at the surface that are loose. This is where Jack, riding a bike along there with his mind in turmoil, has to come off his wheels and into a thorny bit of hedge.

When I wrote the scene, I had blackthorn in mind, because that was what I saw there in the winter, but now there are brambles scrambling everywhere, covered in delicious berries, which we and the dog snacked on.
There were also spindleberries and woody nightshade berries, lovely, but more or less poisonous; elderberries, which I don't care for, and enormous fat haws, which I do like to nibble. The other candidate for thorniness was the dog-rose at the start of the path.
But I found the spot I'd envisaged, and there were brambles there.

So Jack slithers on the loose flints now, and his bike tips him into the brambles. Poor Jack, it's early June, so he doesn't get to eat blackberries for comfort. Then my heroine turns up on her elderly horse, with a posse of dogs, and all the animals nose at him.
We walked on up the path till we came to the estate gates - and there I stopped. I couldn't for the life of me have gone through there now, because the house I've imagined is totally, completely different from the house that's there, and I wanted to leave my mind unmessed with.



So we turned back, because I knew what was REALLY beyond those gates; the world of my book, with all the characters.

Odd, in a way, that none of them came along the path to greet me. Or maybe just as well. They might complain at me for everything I've put them through.

INFORMATION AND INSPIRATION: everything a writer needs- The SOAiS Conference. - Linda Strachan

On Saturday  17th September 2011 at The Surgeon's Hall in Edinburgh the
Society of Authors in Scotland (SOAiS)  held their annual conference with a theme of understanding and making the most of the digital revolution in books and looking for new opportunities.  

The conference was also followed on twitter and you can follow the tweets on  #soaconf

Sara Sheridan and Marion Sinclair
networking- 'Let me give you my card'

There were over 100 delegates attending the conference which was open to all, not just members of the Society.

It was a fascinating day with lots of great speakers who were generous with their advice and happy to answer questions.  We started off with author Sara Sheridan who as always was energetic and enthusiastic in her approach. 

She spoke about harnessing traditional media to promote yourself and your books. She suggested making a plan and if possible taking one day a week for publicity and that every event you do should lead to at least 2 or 3 other kinds of publicity (blog, Twitter, radio, newspaper).

'Look at your book from the outside.

What do people say about it when you leave the room?'

This bears thinking about.  Sara suggested looking to see if there are themes within your book that you can use to attract a slightly different audience than the obvious one.

Although I am sure most of us will struggle to be quite as proactive as Sara, there were lots of ideas which I will be mulling over in the next few weeks.

Allan Guthrie

Next Allan Guthrie  who is an author and an agent, spoke about embracing ebooks, and the opportunities in the digital revolution for authors. Following the route one of one author who decided to self publish his book as an ebook with tremendous success, Allan also regaled us with the progress of one of his own books in this direction, as an example of how crucial it is to work at promoting an ebook, and how important forums, discussion boards and online reading groups are, and also connecting with your readers online. He encouraged us to think about eBooks as an additional revenue stream for authors, a platform, a way of exploiting backlists; of getting paid regularly!

 'The writer now has control over what they do with their books, But also have responsibility too- including their own sales.'

Nicola Morgan

After a coffee break we returned to listen to Nicola Morgan who told us
'I am the one and only Crabbit Old Bat', referring of course to her online persona and her listing on google (she wasn't the least bit crabbit)!
As ABBA readers will know Nicola is a frequent contributor to this blog and mentioned ABBA in her talk about Building an Online Platform, something that she knows a lot about.
'Do not be panicked by what other people are doing online. But do try and see if it works for you.'
Great advice.

She continued to explain how to build an online presence - to blog, tweet - with reference to her latest eBook Tweetright - and how important it is to be human and not just someone who is endlessly promoting themselves.
You can find out much more about what she had to say on Nicola's blog about building an online platform 

A panel discussion came next about overcoming an author's reticence when it comes to self promotion.  One the panel were Vanessa Robertson -The Edinburgh Bookshop, Colin Fraser - Anon Poetry and Claire Stewart - Scottish Book Trust, chaired by Catrin Armstrong (Scottish Book Trust)

Panel with advice on Self Promotion for Authors

Vanessa Robertson told us how to make a bookshop love you, how their books are handpicked because they know what sells in their shop and what works for their customers. That authors need to work with booksellers. Also how important it is for an independent bookshop to stock books that will not only be what their customers know they want, but sometimes quirky and interesting books that will lead to an impulse buy, that the bookseller can hand-sell. She told us to 'befriend your local bookshop.'

There was mention of unusual combinations such as a 'poetry and perfume' event recently held in the Edinburgh Poetry Library, about tweeting a fragment of poetry, or your book, to encourage people to follow you, or to go to a link to your website or blog.  

Using podcasts, and having an interesting twitter or blog persona, something that might be a hobby that you tweet or blog about.  Once again the idea of attracting people to being interested in you as a person, who might then be interested in what you have to say in your writing or on your blog/website. This can then lead to interest in your books.   This is a theme that came up several times during the day.

With a break for lunch and an opportunity to chat about the morning, it was very soon time to re-convene for the afternoon session which started with a choice of breakout sessions; covering aspects such as Author appearances (author,Alison Baverstock), eDistribution and selling your eBook (author and publisher, Keith Charters), Diversification- a key to the future?(author Caroline Dunford) and Claiming eBooks for ourselves (author Lin Anderson).

Lin Anderson

I chose to go to Lin Anderson's session and it was a very practical and useful discussion of how to go about putting a book up as an eBook. Too much to go into on a blog but it is not as complicated or as difficult as it might seem.  Something any author with out of print books would do well to consider.

'Don't give away your work. 

Don't let your publisher bully you into handing over your ebook rights.'

She also said  'There was never a better time to be a writer.'

Andrew Dixon

 Andrew Dixon who heads up the newly formed Creative Scotland (previously The Scottish Arts Council) told the conference about the new structure of Creative Scotland, their commitment to funding writers and encouraging professional development, artists residencies, and of their plans to promote all things creative in Scotland over the coming years.  He spoke about how their budgets were less pigeon-holed now, allowing for more opportunity to allocate funding more 'creatively'  than in the past, especially with 2012 being designated 'The year of Creative Scotland'

 The final panel discussion was with agent Jenny Brown (ASLA),  Publisher, Bob McDevitt (Hachette Scotland) and Marion Sinclair of Publishing Scotland who were all talking about The Road Ahead. It was chaired by Keith Charters (Strident Publishing).

Jenny Brown, Marion Sinclair, Bob McDevitt and Keith Charters

Jenny Brown told us of reasons to be cheerful and optimistic despite the changes in the publishing industry there were lots of opportunities for writers and interest in books and writing.

Marion Sinclair spoke about how the number of Scottish publishers, members of her organisation, had increased and her message to publishers was to continue to 'care about books'. Also that niche publishing might be on the increase and one way forward for smaller publishers.

Bob McDevitt said there was still an important role for publishers and that it was easy to confuse books and publishing with what has happened in the games or music industries but that books were a different industry and would react differently because people saw and used books differently.  He also mentioned that some authors, who have made a name for themselves by self publishing eBooks very successfully, have still returned to traditional publishers and negotiated contracts for print books - as it is seen as a kind of validation.

The day was rounded off by an evening reception in the Playfair Hall providing an opportunity to chat about the day and meet the other writers, publishers and guests.

There is no doubt the publishing world is changing and at the moment no one seems quite sure where it is all going.  There are opportunities for authors to take more control of their books and their livelihood, but alongside that comes the commitment to spending more time and energy on self-promotion and publicity.
 This will inevitably impinge on writing time so it is a decision each writer has to make for themselves.  The possibilities with social media are varied and exciting, but it is not for everyone and can be distracting and time consuming. 

The conference was excellent.  Well done to the SOAiS Committee for organising it and to Anna Ganley and Rachel O'Malley from the London Staff who worked so hard to make it a success, and tweeted from the conference on #SoAconf 

The Society of Authors is also running the SoA short story Tweetathon find out all about it  Here  and read the first one, started by Ian Rankin. Why not take part in the next one on wednesday or follow it on #SoAtale.

Linda Strachan  has written over 60 books for children from picture books to teenage novels, and a writing handbook for aspiring and newly published authors Writing for Children.

Website www.lindastrachan.com
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