Blog | Alison Morton Author

Saving libraries day

Today, the book world moves. It’s out there saving libraries for you and the next several generations.

If you do nothing else this dull and cloudy weekend, go and take a book out. Or audio book. Or CD. Or DVD. Go and browse the Internet for free. Ask those incredibly clever librarians for information, guidance or just chat about books. Find out when the next pre-school storytime or bookclub takes place. Search local history. Find a quiet desk where you can write your own book…

The day would be over before I could list everything you could do in a library.

I discovered magic worlds there when I was 5 years old. Just go there today and look for yourself.

Surviving the emotional foot-stomp on creativity

The renowned Nicola Morgan, famously proud to be the first Google result for “Crabbit Old Bat” and an award-winning author of around ninety books, never fails to offer diamonds to aspiring writers. Frankness and occasional brutality are her hallmarks. But she’s usually right.

So, in my morning scan of blogs, I found her post today especially pertinent. She describes her personal experience of how emotional upset or personal crisis can throw a creative writer completely off kilter. She also offers possible solutions… Do go and read her post, then come back. 😉

I exchanged emails with Nicola a last month about a family crisis and the emotional shredding that went with it. But also about my strategy vis-à-vis my writing. I abandoned new writing, but carried on with brief, grabbed sessions of editing. I maintained contact, however tenuous, with my obsession.

Physically exhausted and mentally drained, my other half and I dawdled back down the M6 and M40. We listened to music, talked in snatches about nothing in particular. As we reached the ferry port in Portsmouth, we almost wept in reaction. We slept nearly the whole eight hours of the crossing. We’d never worked so hard, but we’d achieved a satisfactory resolution to the crisis through sheer drive and nervous energy.

Disembarking from the boat in Le Havre, we revelled in the glorious sunrise, refreshed in a strange way. Five gold stars to nature. We took it easy for the next few days, throwing vitamins, fruit, coffee, wine and rest at our systems. I picked up again with my Twitter and email friends. I fiddled about doing some more edits (see previous post). Then my diary peeped at me. The York Festival of Writing. I had to write something in preparation of the one-to-one sessions with an agent and a book doctor. The deadline was 1 March, but I had fixed 7 Feb as my personal one.

I sat down and wrote. And it came. I reviewed and fiddled, but my brain threw words at my fingers at an accelerated rate of knots and they typed.

Not a new novel, not even a chapter of a new novel, but a start. As is this blog post…

The big print

Post-machete, post-rewrite of scenes, post-restructuring, I may possibly have kneaded the flabby dough of my master-work into some kind of presentable product. The plot has changed, the tension ramped up, the prose decimated and a sting in the tail (tale?) injected into the ending.

I’ve printed the whole thing out, double-spaced, ready for the tooth-comb. All 346 pages of it. Now, after the craft comes the graft. By this time next week, my eyes will have fallen out of my head, completely wasted from poring over 85,000 words line-by-line to check each sentence for any and every fault. My voice will be gone from reading it aloud and even boring to death those spiders daring to emerge early from the crooks and nannies. Sorry, nooks and crannies.

I need to abandon the blue-sky of story arcs, narrative thrust and character development and get down to the dirty little word front. Whoever wrote, said, or even thought you can easily dash off a work of genius that publishers will trample each other to death for, hasn’t done it.

I fervently hope to be published but if I’ve learned anything since starting this blog in March, it’s that it truly is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration.

A brain flash…

Perhaps I’ve been a bit slow, but I had a light bulb moment when munching my croissant this morning.

I’ve been playing around with some ideas for a one-sentence ‘hook’ for my novel INCEPTIO and have been researching, scribbling, thinking about it over the past few days. Scanning the Radio Times at breakfast, I read the once sentence descriptions under each programme title. Particularly the dramas and films.

Law &Order
Van Buren sets a trap to find a businessman suspected of shooting a water inspector because of expensive bills.

The Perfect Storm
When skipper Billy Tyne sets out in the Andrea Gail to fish the Grand Banks of the North Atlantic, he has little idea that he and his crew are going to encounter a storm of unprecedented ferocity

Dad’s Army (film)
In 1940, with a German invasion threatened, the defence of Walmington-on-Sea is in the hands of Captain Mainwaring, the bank manager, and a motley collection of townspeople who make up the Local Defence Volunteers.

All there, isn’t it?

Sad, cross and guilty – the story of an unfinished read

My reading tastes are pretty wide-ranging. I like a challenge. I like a good story. I’m nosy as well as persistent, so however poor a start, I’ll plough on with most books because I want to know what happens.

I’ll read almost anything: from Pascal Mercier’s Night Train to Lisbon and Kafka’s The Trial to These Old Shades by Georgette Heyer and Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code. One genre I particularly enjoy is crime and thrillers, especially historical ones like the Lindsey Davis’s Falco series and anything by CJ Sansom. I’m quite fond of John Grisham, Tom Clancy and David Baldacci and, of course, J D Robb’s Eve Dallas stories in a futuristic America.

So when I found a new (to me) thriller author with great ratings, I experienced that little tingle of joy at the discovery of a new source of reading delight. A stylish spy thriller. Yum, yum!

I had to put it down at page 152; bored, irritated, puzzled and sad. And deeply disappointed. Its stylishness was so self-referencing, it precluded enjoyment. The pacing was poor, the descriptions so convoluted and sometimes only decipherable by those living in a prescribed part of one US city.

I kept falling asleep over it. I pinched myself awake only to struggle with the inconsistent characterisation.
Putting it down, I felt a sense of relief. And release. I’d made my decision. I didn’t have to pick the wretched thing up again.