a gallimaufry

on how i spend my time now

I haven’t written about a book I’ve read this week because I have hardly been reading. Instead, I am completely addicted to the television series Line of Duty.

I had decided to watch the latest series, Series 6, as it’s shown on BBC1 because my friends are watching it. I thought the first episode was so compelling that I then rushed to the library to borrow the DVDs of the previous series. And for the last week, every moment when I haven’t been preparing lessons, teaching, cleaning, being nice to my family or waiting on the whims of the cats and the hens, I have been glued to series 1 and 2.

The series is what I would term at the macho end of the artistic scale: guns, police raids, brutality, corruption, crazy plot twists, no time to sniff the roses. Characters trot out jargon and standard phrases but the quality of the acting means that their expressions, their eyes, are often telling us more than their words. The phrase ‘line of duty’ takes on a metaphorical quality pretty early on. What and where is that line? Who crosses it (practically everyone) and why? Is it fixed? Loyalty to your colleagues is the highest virtue; how far can you let that take you before you cross the line? Line of Duty doesn’t provide any easy answers to this, everyone gets dirty one way or the other.

The two series I’ve watched so far feature the same central characters, who work for AC-12, an anti-corruption unit that investigates bent coppers. In the first series we watch the trajectory of a successful and popular detective inspector who, in order to cover up his ‘weak spot’, is drawn further and further into a web of criminality and corruption. The actor who plays him, and the writing, are so good that even as we are revolted by his actions we feel his anguish, his conviction that this is not who he is. His struggles form the core of the story. He is a classical tragic hero.

In the second series, the central character under investigation is more ambiguous. Hitherto an exemplary detective who has impoverished herself paying for her mother’s care in a home, she is (eventually) the sole survivor of an ambush on a protected witness and three police officers. Did she knowingly lead them into the ambush or has she been set up as the fall guy? Has she just been trying to do the right thing? As the series develops, we see the officers investigating her also make bad choices, commit adultery, hide their financial problems and lie about connections to the investigation in order to protect themselves or their friends. The series asks: are some actions acceptable in some circumstances and not in others? Why?

I am now impatiently waiting for the library to re-open tomorrow so that I can borrow the third series. I am also amazed that anyone remains in the police force since so many officers end up dead or compromised!

(Quentin Blake, illustration for ‘The Pig’ in Dirty Beasts by Roald Dahl, ink and watercolour, from here)

Meanwhile... I am trying to write a second children’s book. So far I have written one full draft. Then I started typing this up and got halfway through when I realised that my Cunning Plan for switching viewpoints in alternate chapters was actually a Terrible Idea. Now I have started again although with bits of the First Draft, telling the story just from one viewpoint – which has necessitated quite a bit of moving things around and changing things. I’ve also cut a sub-plot.

At the moment I have two major problems. One is trying to keep organised as I rewrite, but maybe I shouldn’t worry too much about that and hope that Future Helen sorts it out at the next stage. The other is that I now have a narrator who is a servant in an alternate nineteenth-century northern England. Obviously, her words will be read, not spoken, but I sort-of don’t want her to sound terribly middle-class while at the same time I don’t want her to end up either like Joseph in Wuthering Heights (unreadable!) or like a patronising stereotype (‘Oo arrh madam I do be heartily sorry’). My present solution is to get her to use a lot of idioms but I am not sure how well that’s working.

Anyway – I recommend Line of Duty. All of those years when people were saying it was good – they were right! Surprise! Is anyone else out there a fan?

a late start

Hello and a happy new year!

(Virginia Lee, clay sculpture and drawing; from her blog here)

I suppose I’ve been hibernating, in a way, these past few months. It turns out that December was quite a difficult month for me and by the time we reached the holidays all I wanted to do was hide and read. And then the transition period for Brexit ended, and there we were, me here in Belgium and my fellow countrymen in Britain, and even though I was completely prepared for it and knew what to expect, I suddenly felt excluded and rejected by my own country. Which was irrational, but there we are.

Anyway, after that massive whinge I can assure you I am feeling a lot better now. ‘What’s happening in Belgium?’ I hear you cry. Well, like everyone else we are mainly avoiding other people and most things – museums, galleries, theatres, cafés – are closed. Schools are not, although secondary schools and adult education centres are providing a mixture of online and in-school lessons. Hairdressers have just re-opened! People all across the land fluffed their grey roots and danced for joy. (Not me, as I’m a home-haircut person.) We’ve just had a verrrry cold week, which displeased the hens. We were warned by experts that icicles Can Be Dangerous. I played in the snow and never knowingly wore fewer than three pairs of socks.

(Boris Zvorykin, illustration for Snegurochka, 1925; gouache and ink; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York)

I’ve read a lot of good books and I will write about some of them here. I might change some things about this blog, I might not. I’ve been practising driving the car (I had about eleventy billion lessons in the summer and autumn, and now I have a special learner’s licence which means I can drive alone without my husband!!!!). The driving part is not so bad and I can now do this without turning into a trembling wreck, but I’m not terribly accurate at parking. Yet.

And I’ve gritted my teeth and got back to work on novel #2. It had been languishing since April last year. I had written a first draft, and then made a proper plan, and got halfway through a second draft when I abandoned it. Blowing the dust off it, I’ve realised that narrating it from two alternating viewpoints wasn’t working so I have been changing and planning some more and pulling out a subplot that was a bit rubbish. (A lot rubbish.) And then the wonderful Golden Egg Academy ran a series of free seminars for aspiring children’s writers over one weekend. The seminars were great: inspiring but also very practical and full of tips you could take away and put to immediate use. Judging by them, Golden Egg’s creative writing courses are extremely good and worth every penny but even so sadly beyond the gallimaufry purse at present (and anyway my writing is still very much a self-indulgence and not really a serious pursuit). So this was truly an opportunity and a boon.

I found a tiny snowdrop in our front garden this morning. That seems as good a sign as any to wriggle out of my nest of dead leaves and moss and emerge blinking into 2021.

hello 2020!

Happy New Year (belatedly). I hope that you all had lovely holidays. I did!

I don’t usually make New Year’s Resolutions because in the past I tended to make a massive list which was a complete overhaul of all my foul habits and terrible personality traits, and then after two days I’d have failed massively and would spend the rest of January, generally my least favourite time of year, feeling depressed and frustrated at what a total LOSER I was. (In addition to all my other terrible personality traits.)

However, 2020 seems rather a special moment, perhaps it’s the pleasing rhythm of the digits. It may be counter-intuitive to be cheerful when the year has begun with climate apocalypse, Australia on fire, Iraq and the US squaring off and authoritarianism on the rise around the world, and yet I am. And in this cheerful mood I have made some Resolutions! My cunning plan: to keep them small and on the vague side.

1. give more attention to a gallimaufry

I am going to find more time for this blog. Writing book reviews is very time consuming and I find mine tend to plod rather, and in any case I like the conversational aspect of blogs. So I might change what I write about a bit. (All right, this is VERY vague but I think it’s something that will evolve rather than be imposed.)

I also intend to run Sylvia Townsend Warner Reading Week again – watch this space!

2. read more widely

To break out of my fiction addiction I am going to read one non-fiction book, one long poem or one play a month. (At least one – I can read more.) This month I finally opened Alan Clark’s Diaries, which has been sitting shrink-wrapped on my shelves since 1994. (Alan Clark was a Tory MP who served in Mrs Thatcher’s and John Major’s governments, during which time he kept diaries which he subsequently published, I wouldn’t say they were scandalous but they did ruffle a few feathers as I recall.) I intend to post about this.

Loosely associated with this plan is a resolution to go as long as possible without buying any new books! This is actually Chris’s idea, which I have filched. (I had already bought a book when I read his post, so I am starting now BUT I am not sure I shall publicly announce when I do buy my next book because it might just be too shaming. I am a very weak person.)

3. finish my novel

I’m going to finish writing my second book (I started it in the summer holidays but have had so much work to do I’ve been unable to touch it since). Perhaps it will be better than the first one!

4. have more fun

It occurred to me that I am turning into a boring humourless middle-aged git. Oh no! Therefore, I am going to spend less time obsessively reading and ranting about politics and more time having fun. To this end I have already got drunk on fancy beer (the cats were very lucky that I couldn’t find the Marmite when I got home as I intended to smear them with it, one of my friends told me it was a flea-deterrent, though since then I’ve discovered that the cats are supposed to eat it not wear it) and bought some sheet music so I can start playing the piano again. This has got off to a good start.

What about you? Do you ever make New Year’s Resolutions – or are you already perfect? Heheh. If you’ve made any this year, what are they (or the ones you’ll publicly confess to, anyway)?

writing progress

(Alas, this painting is untitled and uncredited but bears an uncanny resemblance to me in writing mode)

In February I wrote that I had revised the children’s book I wrote and, filled with hatred and loathing for it, submitted it for The Times/Chicken House Children’s Book Competition. The long list was released on the last day of May and my book was not on it. Frankly I was not surprised and had been telling myself it would not be listed since the moment I had submitted it. But still I was illogically a bit disappointed, I suppose I had hoped that it did actually have some merit I just hadn’t noticed.

I had also submitted it to a couple of agents but failed to garner the slightest interest. Two agents (or was it three?) aren’t that many but since I had lost faith in the book it seemed wrong to expect other people to slog through it.

Anyway, onwards and upwards and I’ve started on a new children’s book and am enjoying working on it. After the first chapter (not the first chapter any more) it progressed slowly as I was reading and thinking and planning some of it, but I had time in July to write down quite a lot of it, it really felt as if I was just slapping the words down on the page and much of it came more easily than the first book had done. This felt good. At the moment I am writing to find out what happens. I have some characters and a rough plot but I don’t know how it ends yet. I think about each chapter and then write it down and then think about where the next one will go. I don’t mind if it’s rough, but when something feels flat or boring, I don’t persevere with it I scrap it and try something different. This is a difference to the last book, in which I was quite wedded to the plot and I think it got dull in places but I didn’t want to change it. I am also trying to keep description to a minimum...

It’s strange and exposing writing about this here because I am shy of showing either of the books to anyone. I want them to be read but also never read. When it comes to writing books, if they are never published then it’s easy to consider yourself a failure and it’s very likely that these posts about my fiction writing are just going to turn into a very public account of my failure. But I think that’s important. Trying and failing are what most of creative work consists of, yet we prefer to speak publicly only of the successes.

I’d also like these posts to be a reminder to myself that I am writing for my own pleasure as much as anything else. And the more I think about how the story might go and what shape it might take, the more I notice and appreciate this in novels I read. Having studied English Literature at university, I am always to some extent aware of how a novel is working as I read it, but now I am stopping and analysing bits more consciously again, and going back and finding books I’ve read and looking at how they create certain effects, or move between scenes, or build up tension. And this is a good thing in itself to do. To look at the craft of the novel. It seems more physical than words in my head, on the page.

writing progress

As I mentioned in a previous post, I decided to enter my novel in The Times/Chicken House Children’s Book Competition. Before I could do this, I had to revise it. After I first owned up to having written it, both my mother and a kind but also very knowledgeable blogger offered to read and comment on it. Their feedback indicated revisions and I got started on this. Alas, my teaching hours from September to the middle of January gave me no time to continue and it’s only in the last few weeks I’ve been able to get back to it. The deadline for submission is the end of February, not a great deal of time.

And I found, going back to it, that I had completely lost faith in it. It’s hard to judge your own work, I think; at times I thought it was all right, at least in places, but now I think that it just isn’t any good not all the way through, like a stick of rock with ‘this isn’t very good’ written all the way through it. I’ve revised it but not enough really, even if the original idea were strong enough the rest of it isn’t. The other day I just got really fed up and submitted it anyway (then instantly realised I’d forgotten to resolve something, only a very tiny detail but still, sloppy, oops). I suspect it isn’t terribly professional to submit something just because you hate it so much you don’t want to see it any more, but then the advantage the amateur has is that she is not professional. Then I stuffed the final draft and my notebooks into a box and closed it. Joy!

Now I am feeling very cheerful and free. I am having lots of ideas for the next book, maybe they’re better and stronger. One thing I have learnt from writing the first book is that no matter how much you want to fling yourself into your chair and start writing, it is much better to do some research (in this case, because it’s going to be a sort-of historical novel) and planning – the world you’re going to write about, the characters, where roughly the plot is going. Though not too much planning because that would kill it for me, and as long as I’m an amateur, writing as a hobby, the main point is for me to enjoy doing it as who knows if anyone else will ever read it anyway. So, onwards!

(Sadly this is not me writing but Christine de Pizan, an illustration in The Book of the Queen (c. 1410) in the British Library, BL MS Harley 4431, fol. 4r; from here)

i wrote a book but it's just the beginning

(H.M. Brock, detail of illustration to Mansfield Park, published by Dent in 1898, found here; this is what I look like when writing at my elegant escritoire)

A while ago I wrote that I had written a children’s novel – well, the first draft of one. Since then I have completely rewritten it once, typed it up with some revisions, revised it a further two or three times, to be honest I’ve forgotten how many, and grown to hate it. I have even started working on a sequel.

My original plan had been an experiment: could I write a novel rather than just giving up? As I worked on it, had flashes of excitement, enjoyed it, hated it and avoided having anything to do with it, I grew a bit more ambitious. What if it were worth publishing? The trouble is, I genuinely have no idea. I have never been any good at judging my own work – at school I would leave every exam glum and convinced I had failed, whether my result turned out to be a C or an A; I could not tell the difference in my performance. Was my book an A-grade book or a F-grade?

Feedback was of course required. I read it to my daughter yes yes she is biased and hates hurting people’s feelings, but she is an actual child. She told me she liked it but it would be better if the main character were called Astrid and she added that her favourite bits were the bits with the cats.

Then, I don’t quite know what possessed me, but I wrote an outline and submitted the book to two agents. I didn’t honestly think that they would dance about with excitement and offer to represent me, but I wanted to see if the first three chapters and the outline were interesting enough for them to ask to see the full book, and then I might perhaps get some ideas from them on how to improve my work. (Now I type that on the screen I realise how entitled that looks: agents! Please devote your time and energy to teaching me how to write a novel!)

Unsurprisingly, one agent has never replied (their site warnw that after eight weeks you should assume that they’re not interested); another replied very promptly to say it wasn’t for them. No feedback, although the second agent did send some useful links for companies specialising in editorial services and a forum where writers can give feedback on each other’s work. (The second agent also noted that they receive thousands of submissions every year and only request the full manuscript on a handful of occasions; this was both heartening and depressing.)

Friends, I felt downcast. Like many people who were moderately good at writing stories as a child, I dreamt of being a writer but put the idea out of my head as I grew older. I studied English Literature at university and if you’re spending all your time reading Chaucer, Milton and Shakespeare it’s hard to believe that you have anything to say that’s worth the tree deaths. (But this is silly: every age needs their writers and their stories.) I had told myself that writing was for other, special people to do, not people like me. Now I felt as if my dream were dying a second time.

And then I remembered that pretty much all the writing advice I’ve ever seen has stipulated: persevere. Keep learning and keep on trying. I spent a chunk of Friday reading about writers who persevered for years and years and received hundreds of rejections before they finally succeeded in getting published. Some wrote three – three! – long novels which still languish somewhere in a bottom drawer before they produced anything publishable. And I also read some of the comments on the writers’ forum in which people said that they would always carry on writing whether they were published or not, because they enjoyed it.

I realised that I had indeed been extraordinarily arrogant in assuming the first book-length piece of writing I churned out – in fact, the only piece of fiction I had written since I was a teenager – would be good enough to publish or be read by any but my nearest and dearest. All of these writers had devoted many hours, years even, of their lives to honing their craft, analysing their own and others’ work, pushing themselves. Some had attended MA courses in creative writing, some hadn’t, but all of them had something valuable in common which I had not: they had taken their writing seriously, not as some sort of hobby. They were not amateurs in their mindset, as I had been.

On Friday, thus, I stood at a crossroads. I could either commit to my writing and say that this was worth doing, or I could give up and spend the time reading instead. I have to admit, the second option was pretty tempting: clearly I am not one of those people who would die if they weren’t writing, because for many years I have got on just fine without it. Or almost just fine: although writing fiction has been a struggle that hasn’t always been pleasant, it has given me something that nothing else in my life quite has.

Anyway, I decided to commit. Or to commit for a while anyway (no, I’m not very good at commitment!). The best next step would be to send my work to an editorial service – not that the book itself is necessarily salvageable, but I need to know its weaknesses and work on them, and I don’t seem very good at identifying them myself. However, commitment or no commitment I cannot afford to do this. I considered joining the writer’s forum but at the moment I feel a bit scared of them all. I think I’ll lurk for a bit and when I’m feeling braver I’ll sign up and offer some of them some feedback and then maybe post a bit of mine... Then, luckily, I remembered my mother! I know that it’s not a terribly good idea to ask your nearest and dearest for their opinions on your work, but my mother used to be an editor, and of children’s books, as it happens. This was a long time ago and tastes have changed, but still, she is smart and honest and I feel quite certain she will have some useful comments for me.

I may not be able to afford an editorial services or an MA in creative writing, but I can read some books about writing and educate myself. I have a couple already and have ordered a couple more. Maybe I’ll write about some of them here?

Meanwhile, another important piece of advice for new writers which I’ve read a lot is: put the book away and get on with something new. I am a bit stuck on the sequel and anyway, there doesn’t seem a great deal of point in killing myself over the sequel to a book no one may ever read (apart from my mum!) but I have lots of ideas for something completely different which I am excited about.

Why am I writing all of this here? Well, on Friday, reading what other writers had written about their failures as well as successes made an enormous difference to me; they probably are the one reason I haven’t given up (yet). And I have also learnt a lot from reading the posts and articles of writers both at the beginning of their careers and further on. I decided, therefore, that I would occasionally write a bit about my adventures in writing here on this blog. Whether I ultimately become a professional writer or give up, what happens to me might interest another writer and cheer them up on a dank Friday when they’re thinking about giving up. And it might perk this blog up a bit...