 How very strange! I forgot to blog about the Festival of Writing at York. Actually, I didn’t forget. I’ve been so busy implementing things I learnt in the workshops, integrating wise pieces of advice I received and remembering stimulating and thoughtful conversations I enjoyed.
York was about people: authors, publishers, agents, to be sure, but about tweeters, friends, and writers all excited about their, addiction (see above). Many people write in isolation, in snatched moments, in an indifferent or even hostile environment. So when they are amassed in several hundreds, all their enthusiasm, ideas, insights burst out.
The University of York Exhibition Centre was our ‘home’ for the weekend and the campus our inspiration.
Clever organisational touches like name badges in BIG letters meant participants easily spotted those they wanted to talk to (or avoid?) without impolite peering. Sofas, tables, and lounging areas were plentiful. As were quiet corners for a little strategic redrafting.
Although I’d been plodding on after a big family crisis over the winter, I had lost my way with my writing. After York, I couldn’t leave it alone. The techniques and craft methods I had been trying to apply flowed automatically and my fingers flew.
So thank you, York (or #FOW11 in Twitter-speak).
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You start your novel, get the scenes down, complete the first draft. Fine so far. Any writer knows the first draft is not a work of art, or even saleable. So the real work begins; enhanching, slashing and burning, sweating over that love scene, ramping up the fight scenes, checking pacing, inserting tension, moulding and stroking it into something presentable.
Normal people work 9 to 5 (well, 8.30 to 6 these days). Writers? No. Many write after they’ve come home, fed the cat, cooked supper, helped kids, talked to the significant other. And/or they get up an hour or two early, or snatch lunchtime on their netbook, or waiting for the school rugby match to finish, meeting family at the station. I’ve even jotted down plot notes in the supermarket queue.
And as for waking up at 3am with a stupendous idea, or a horrible realisation you’ve made your main character be in two places at once – cold sweat breaks out at the thought.
But even when firmly shut down, when you are resolutely doing something mainstream like staving off hunger in the family, throwing the accumulated heaps of trash out, ot discovering you have no clean clothes left, that siren keyboard sings its song. Just one sentence. You must get that phrase down. You need to type that insight into the end paragraph.
I sit in my friend’s house this morning, early cuppa at the side, hurrying to finish this piece. I’ve got writing to do, you know…
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Nobody can fail to be shocked by the devastation in Japan. Word like apocalyptic and cataclysmic are flying around. Historians recall the Minoan civilisation was one destroyed by a tsunami.
The threads of modern life are multiple and complex, but fragile, vulnerable to stretching and snapping in seconds. Futurologists predict that tiny individual incidents in accumulation or suddenly en masse could trigger the end of everything. And there’s the old saw that we are three meals away from savagery. Japan isn’t half a world away; it’s your neighbour, your work colleague, a large proportion of your personal life goods.
So, we need to take action en masse, to accumulate individual incidents but in a positive way. And every person’s individual effort counts.
Writers are raising funds via Authors for Japan, where donation bids are auctioned for a token prize. It opens today and runs to 20 March. Perhaps it may not raise millions, but it’s one of those hugely important individual efforts. Proceeds go to the British Red Cross.
Close to my heart, as I’m a practical person, are shelterboxes.
To quote their website: “The ShelterBox solution in disaster response is as simple as it is effective. We deliver the essentials a family needs to survive in the immediate aftermath of a disaster.
Each large, green ShelterBox is tailored to a disaster but typically contains a disaster relief tent for an extended family, blankets, water storage and purification equipment, cooking utensils, a stove, a basic tool kit, a children’s activity pack and other vital items.”
So your twenty quid is needed. Now would be good.
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Simon Scarrow always succeeds in letting me into his tough, male Roman world without alienating me from an environment so different from my own. His heroes, Macro, the blunt-speaking grizzled veteran, and Cato, the educated and younger soldier, bash their way through numerous adventures (including Eagle in the Sand) in the time of Emperor Claudius.
The adept/tyro dynamic twists between the pair, each learning from the other, while becoming friends, no, comrades, in the face of a series of dangers thrown at them. Yet, I identify with their values, their reasons for their decisions in an uncompromising often brutal world. But if I based my behaviour on theirs, I would end up doing twenty years in Holloway.
So, what’s going on here?
Simon Scarrow builds his world accurately and succinctly. No question. You are in the middle of a forced march, a seige in the scorching desert or emmeshed in the corrupt palace politics. You feel the bitterness of a lover killed, the conspirator escaping, the relief that you are alive after rebels and Parthians have killed many of your comrades.
And that’s the point. Scarrow builds a plausible world in meticulous detail, drawing on original sources and painstaking research. But he entices us into the parallel world of emotions experienced by Macro and Cato as human beings. Despite the alien values framework by 21st century norms, many of their dilemmas are the same and the decisions just as difficult to make.
But what if the alien world isn’t based on history? This is both the task and a trap before science fiction, alternate history and fantasy writers. Many such worlds dip heavily into our own history, folk myths and basic fears: Tolkein used Anglo-Saxon culture for Theoden, C S Lewis used the wicked female witch versus golden, enigmatic and noble male, H G Wells despaired about our future as a race. And I’m not going to try and work out who or what the Klingons are…
The most intruiguing, for me, is the alternative history model where history changes at a point in the past and canters off in a different direction. Michael Chabon’s The Yiddish Policemen’s Union is a stylish noir murder mystery packed with pathos, wit and bizarreness set against the premise that in 1947 the Jews were given part of Alaska as their homeland instead of Palestine. But only for 50 years. And the lease is up…
The world weary detective’s character has the usual elements: failed relationships, faithful sidekick fighting to stay in the “normal” world, a tough boss (his ex-wife), a dead relative to avenge and gritty determination. But although the world-building is achieved with dense, interlocking detail, it’s the essential shared dilemmas and emotions that bind us into this fantastical world.
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 What is that strange feeling when you schedule work in that day, but at 6 pm and the nth cup of tea, you wonder what happened. Many people suffer from this. Especially writers, it seems.
Diversion is a word that comes up a lot. Doesn’t sound too bad: something that distracts the mind and relaxes or entertains. Indeed, divertissement was the word for pleasant entertainment or a short interlude.
The Romans, pragmatic as ever, used divertus to signify turned aside, probably meaning a river, rather than the flow of thought. Today, many people get diverted by Twitter, so perhaps diversion is really a a time-suck.
 Procrastination, to forward to tomorrow (pro + crastinus, of tomorrow (from cras, tomorrow). Hm. Romans again, but persistently current, especially when faced with hundreds of pages of edits… Still that deadline is a long way away, isn’t it?
As long as you haven’t succumbed to an artistic form of accidie – spiritual sloth, apathy, indifference. Sorry, can’t be bothered to finish this paragraph…
Irrespective of how you describe it, FTI is the outcome. Failure to implement was originally used in IT and possibly in economics. Now it’s one of the most often heard business buzz-words. Broken down, you get failure – not meeting a desirable or intended objective and implement – execution of a plan.
So why do we dilly-dally, drag our feet, or heels, lollygag, stall or shilly-shally? Why are we diverted by tidying, cake-baking, gardening, fiddling under the car bonnet, spending our precious writing time on Facebook and Twitter? We should be time-managing and compartmentalising, scheduling and meeting deadlines. No?
Could it be because writing is not seen as worthy, as a proper way to spend time?
Alison Morton is the author of Roma Nova thrillers, INCEPTIO, and PERFIDITAS. Third in series, SUCCESSIO, is now out.
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How very strange! I forgot to blog about the Festival of Writing at York. Actually, I didn’t forget. I’ve been so busy implementing things I learnt in the workshops, integrating wise pieces of advice I received and remembering stimulating and thoughtful conversations I enjoyed.
