The Shoes were a Triumph

Novels Now sends warmest wishes to our RoNAS heroine, Scarlet Wilson. Two nominations in one year continues to be a remarkable achievement. Sadly, she was pipped at the post by Sarah Mallory for the category prize.

Next year, Scarlet, next year…

Scarlet’s shoes, however, made it into the photographic record of the RoNAS and what a well deserved appearance it was. Deep grey and sparkly all over Novels Now is sure they added a further touch of class to a very classy event.

Well done to all.

The RONAS are TONIGHT

Novels Now is excited. Tonight the wonderful books up for the RNA’s prestigious awards and their even more wonderful authors, learn their fate.

Richard and Judy will host the evening in London. Fingers still crossed for our own Scarlet Wilson.

Where Do You Get Your Ideas? No 2 PICTURES

My Last Duchess by Robert Browning, was a poem my English teacher, Mr Clapp, used to show us how not everything could be understood by the first or simple reading of words alone. It remains one of the most powerful introductions any student might have to the business of writing.

Browning is focussing on a portrait, but using spare phrases that chill with their mundaneity, he lets us see another portrait in our minds – the monster who was the girl’s husband. Other viewers might look at that picture and see:

Essex Girl – a dutiful wife – an obliging sitter – a young girl – a father’s daughter – a mother’s joy – a brother’s friend – a sister’s confidant. We all see someone and we all make different stories for her.

The early pictures we’re exposed to are likely to have animals in them. They might be in picture books with wonderful illustrations of cartoonish bears. Small children are quite happy to believe that animals talk and open honey pots and paddle boats down the river. Teenage girls probably go on believing horses are human beyond the moment parents might consider healthy.

How many have seen the photographs of Edinburgh’s male panda recently? He’s ready to mate, we’re told, because he’s doing handstands and spraying his territory. Doesn’t that prompt a reaction? if you’re writing romance, doesn’t that take you easily along to the adage, about a young man’s fancy in Springtime?

And having arrived at your young man of preference, don’t you wonder about his wheels? As I’m writing historical romance, it sends me off to photos of horse drawn traps, carriages and curricles. How did a girl hang onto that? Occasionally, you can see the real thing in a private collection.

What would historical writers do without the National Trust and National Trust for Scotland properties to visit? Quite often at big houses or museums I pick up a pile of postcards. They sit around my writing place and are a ready reference as well as an inspiration. They are often of the house’s paintings and contain valuable information about fashions of the time. I have a lovely domestic scene from the Geoffrye Museum in London, artist unknown, that shows a middle-class family in their evening wear. One of the effects of the postcard is to make me wonder what it was like to spend every evening with these same people. How boring or entertaining was it? Doesn’t it make you understand how welcome visitors must have been to break the tedium? Doesn’t it send your writer’s mind off at all sorts of tangents dreaming up the gossip?

And what about the people who underpinned the comfortable classes? How about this taken at a big house outside Manchester? This is one of a series of photos I took and have subsequently used them as prompts for flash fiction. Sibling Rivalry is up on the Shortbread website and The Laundry Wife’s Daughter on Writelink’s where it won a prize.

The Laundry

http://www.shortbreadstories.co.uk/story/view/sibling_rivalry/#axzz2LjiMBhni

http://write-link-creative-writing-contests.com/flashsplash/the-laundry-wifes-daughter-2/

Where Do You Get Your Ideas? No 1 Real Life Moments

Where Do you Get Your Ideas? Is it the most frequently asked question a writer faces when out and about? Well, if you live in Edinburgh, the most frequently asked question is, “So are you the next JK Rowling then?” so maybe Where Do You Get Your Ideas, might be the second most frequently asked question.

The answer isn’t always that easy. Certainly a writer can make glib references to ideas being all around, but if the person you’re talking to has just come through a difficult divorce, a bereavement, or been left a million acres of waterless Australian desert, then it may not be clear how this event transforms into top class fiction. It isn’t always clear to me either, but I know that real life is the raw material I most often start with.

I once wrote a story about a little girl who was just beginning at high school. She had a younger brother who was profoundly handicapped and his disabilities formed the constraints within which she led her life. I entered it into a competition run by my writers’ club for a children’s story, calling it, A Friend For Kim.

The judge said his wife was a social worker and he’d read the story to her. it made her cry. He had been profoundly moved by it himself, but couldn’t place it on the prize list because it wasn’t a story for children, it was a story about children. The club made me an ex gratia prize award. It remains the work I’m most proud of and I have never been able to place it.

Where did I get the idea? I was waiting to collect one of my sons from the cubs. The boys rushed out. Among the first was a child whose sister was profoundly handicapped. He was full of the joy of his evening, but as he came further out of the hall and into the real world, his face took on the bleak expression of reality. His parents were good and conscientious parents making sure the remaining children of the family had love, attention and opportunities, but there was an inescapable difference between their family dynamic and that of the other children.

It was his despair that was my idea. I nurtured it for years before using it. I crafted it into different circumstances. I’ve never been able to sell it. Editors don’t like non-sentimental work dealing with disability.

Who’s to say they’re wrong?

It’s an ill wind – Nina Lambert

It’s an ill wind by Nina Lambert ran over five episodes in Woman’s Weekly. I saved them up and read the whole as I would have done a novel.

The story is cozy crime with romance. The crime is all off-stage, if you don’t count a cack-handed effort by one of the romantic couples to pretend they’re villains and the romance is fairly well-concealed too. Our heroine Emma, kicks over her job in the opening paras and that turns out to be because she’s secretly in love with her boss, Liam. Liam reappears at the end of episode three.

As almost everyone is a chef and the action takes place on a luxury yacht, there are a lot of recipes containing chilli and coconut and prawns. The chief villain beats his wife (3rd) and drinks too much.

Okay, it didn’t float my dinghy. Magazine serials used to be the meaty fiction offering wrapping up the week’s reading. Now, the editors seem to believe all the research about readers having the attention span of one of those unfortunate prawns in Emma’s lunches. The writer has had to reduce everything to synopsis. We are TOLD the whole story. Where are the emotions this reader wants to engage with?

Woman’s Weekly have a new serial starting on 6th February from Jan Jones.