My Big Sister Boudicca

 

      I have been locked down and shielding nearly six months now. I have the evidence of this extraordinary isolation in my rather untidy notebook.

 These conditions, for good or ill, lead to excess introspection – a detailed examination of the present, future and - particularly if you are my age – the past.

 So was that one day my late sister took residence in my imagination. I loved her deeply and for a long time she was my heroine.  So one day, notebook on knee,  shielding myself beneath my trees, I started talk to her about the hard times of our growing up, which we faced in very different ways.

 

           Big Sister

Your hair is the colour of a bright penny

much admired by  everyone.

 Mam - also red-haired -says,

“Like Boudicca and the first Elizabeth.

great women, both.”

 

At first you wear your hair in long plaits,

hooked up with green ribbons. One day

I sit on the stairs listening to them row

when – school looming - she insists

on cutting off those long plaits;

 

My own hair – curly and tangled, mostly unkempt -

means that eventually I’m christened Medusa

by cruel boys at school, where clever does not count

and  I’m never picked for teams and am ignored

by you in corridors. Unhappy times.

 

And each day with my tangled hair

and slipshod ways I walk ten paces

behind you  on our way to school.

You do not turn. And I feel   

 I am not here.

 

But with your clever mind and bright penny hair  

you find your place among the racy girls

who admire your dancing style and love

those green shoes with four-inch heels –  

that Mam has bought  for you on credit .

 

At school your friends - too cool to study –

hold you back,  drag you down,

and stop you showing your clever brain.

(Even so, you still go on into the world

and rise to the top. )

 

With Mam working at the factory

your cool friends visit  our tiny house,

roll back the rug, put Bill Haley

on our Dansette player – also bought on credit –

and start to dance

 

But I am here, lying on the sofa, half asleep -

these days playing truant seems to be my only option.

“Hey lass!” says the coolest girl. “Are you off school again?”

But you just stand there before the mirror, back-combing

your bright penny hair into a bouffant style.

 

Plundering Memory. A Writer's Odyssey

I am thoroughly relishing the work on my new short story collection called Kaleidoscope – Stories from the Frontier. I am now writing the sixteenth of what will be twenty short stories. Perhaps you read one of them on my last blog post - Patchouli?
One of the most exciting things in this new project has been to focus my mind on the whole notion of memory and how it works for a writer.

In the process I have asked myself questions. What is my memory? Is it objective? Is it all I remember? Is it, perhaps, what I have forgotten? Is it all that I’ve been told of what has happened to me? Is it what I have dreamt? Is it these buried subconscious memories that are meat-and-drink in popular articles on crime and its solutions?

Do I as a writer of fiction, plunder my own memory and the memories of others? In surveying my longish list of various kinds of publication I feel certain that I do this – not just in character, content, and narrative - but in those embedded memories of the language and syntax of storytelling – crucial inner memories of the senses, the feelings, the fugitive memories of pain of delight. 

From these I have created and recreated original characters in my fiction. And I have even borrowed others’ memories as though they are our own, and projected memories harvested from my reading. I reinvent lives as essentially original inventions and end up believing that that is what really happened.

The joy and privilege of being part of an oral as well as a written culture is that somehow we inherit memory as part of our acknowledgement of  our membership first of the human clan, and then the human race. This has been reinforced and strengthened throughout the millennia by the sharing of stories in family and social groups, allowing us to develop a shared heritage of collective memory, sensitivity and consciousness as human beings.  Modern discussions of genetic memory perhaps reflect this.  

A writer’s instinct is ultimately to express universalities which will link with our readers' own experience and world-view. Thereby hangs worldly success, after all. Perhaps this particularly might be said to be more purposely focused in novels attached to genres such as espionage, crime, romance or war.  But even in these fields the narratives and the characters should be unique and idiosyncratic to save the work from suffering from an uninspired sameness.

As novelists and storytellers  from the house of our own memory we invent characters with their own histories and conflicts and we use them as psychic dwellings for our own dense complex experiences.

 Each one of us, with our unique baggage of complex memory picks up our pen and then asks the writer’s question What if…?  This is what I have been doing as I am writing Kaleidoscope. Stories from the Frontier.  My theory is that our writing is fuelled and developed from our embedded and continuing memory, whether intended or not. So in the end – as I have found in working on Kaleidoscope -it’s quite exciting to do this with a greater degree of consciousness than ever before.

Mindometry: Family Origins - A Child Makes Meaning

Writing for the States of Mind Collection, Mindometry)

Siblingometry

-Making Prisms of Meaning.

 

This family is a square:

at each corner is a child;

the hexagon at its centre

surrounds the lynchpin -

the charismatic mother.

The sides of the hexagon

consist of the beloved dead.

and the generations to come,

who send their own stories

swinging onwards and backwards 

in time..

  

              Child One:  Boy One

She wanted to make you brave like her

but she should have loved you more.

You are the tender one, your bruised personality

springing out of injury and unintended hurt -

loving music, following fashion

playing out the role of victim

with justified conviction

your hesitancy hiding

a romantic heart

that crashed and broke too early.

Child Two: Girl One

You were the feisty one -

the most like her, with your hot temper

and your challenging demeanour.

She was bound to steal your cigarettes

and smoke them to teach you a lesson

You were bound to be the one to test her to the limits,

to call her grown-up bluff. In the end,

you built  your wall of worldly success and family life.

So, defeated, she was driven to surrender

her power and ultimately keep her distance.

Child Three : Girl Two

You idolised and feared your mother

and tried to please her with cups of tea.

And – your stories between hard covers.

Needy and watchful, with your eagle eyes,

your bat-like ears, you tried to make sense of the language

and action around you - at first without understanding.

But you forgot nothing. Your primal perceptions became

Memories which you wove into stories  that both hid

and revealed a difficult  truth. To know you

the world  would need to decode your stories

and fact or fiction - fabricate its own prisms of meaning

Child Four: Boy Two

You were the last, the final product

of a soul-mating-bond cut off  too early.

You were her baby, her ewe lamb:

clever and self-determined.

Normally frugal, she’d make any sacrifice for you –

sweets and bikes galore, demonstrating  pride

and admiration. I remember the day when,

bold as ever, after diving with too much ardour

into a stony shallow river, you came home

with a bloody chest.

I watched her pick out the small stones

and bandage you gently,

with a nurse’s care.

(C) Wendy Robertson 2017

Love Song for France

(Inspired by Leonard’s Cohen’s eponymous prose piece)

Why I Love France

The heat in the morning, the click of rigging and the rustle of  

of sailing boats setting out for Africa: a long old journey

The wash of the tide against the staithes

Spreading out the seaweed yet again. And again

Francine and Joe waiting in the shadows to walk into my story

Pere Goriot walking arm in arm with Jean Valjean

Alongside Jean Sablon and Simone de Beauvoir.

The padding of my sandalled feet matched by the click of jackboots

And the hollow calls of Jean Moulin

Church celebrating the sea breathes smoke and scent

Seagulls, cormorants; a man counting untypical ducks,

their ducklings ticking along behind.

Boys - a whole day to play with -  swoop into the sea on a tripwire.

Pink sunset catching the tall buildings in relief

Rose red moon rises yet again over…

Moliere, Robespierre, Desmoulins, Beaudelaire, Maupassant

Inspiring revolutionaries and English poets.

Then there is Paris, dusty elegance in straight lines

Bateaux mouches cruise the slumberous Seine  

Markets like still-lives illustrating a world of plenty

Men in overalls drink cognac with their morning coffee,

Music and chatter leak out of riverside cafes and

songs gargled with laughter spill across the cobbles

towards paintings lined up against the stone walls of a church

A woman in a black dress pocked with fragrant lavender seeds

tips her ear to the voices of Americans who

have danced in this favoured city.

France is world of veils and shadows, pregnant with story.

Afternote: Francine and Joe walked into my novel Writing at the Maison Bleue. W

See sidebar 

Also see sidebar for An Englishwoman in France

A Writer’s Commentary* on 'The Invention of Angel Carter' by Edmund Gordon,

 I've just finished reading my Christmas present from @lickedspoon : the new biography of Angela Carter by Edmund Gordon. It was a thoughtful present. She knows  I am very interested in the esoteric elements of the writing process as well as the unique cultural and political processes of the twentieth century,

So, I passed several days avoiding the inevitable post-Christmas torpor in reading this biography of a writer who perhaps saw herself - and was seen - as the Che Guevara of English Post WW2 letters.

 I don't envy this biographer his huge task of apprising the millions of words, in terms of work, journalism, commentary, and letters in her archive, including a thousand pages in letters to a single friend - all now deposited in the British Library, if you want to dip into it -   that flowed from her pen in the complex task of self-creation - of  defining and redefining herself, inventing herself, endowing reason to her impulses, adapting her interpretation of her thoughts and experiences  to 'prove' the truth of the centrality of myth in her world-view.

Even as a feminist from the beginning I have never thought of Angela Carter's work as more than marginal and of esoteric interest (although she did anticipate with prescience the present-day tranche of simplistic erotic vampire teenage sub-literature.)

But the more I read Gordon’s book the more interested I became in the way the unique psycho-drama of her own life and the weird psychopathology exploded into her writing. Having just finished a novel myself, focused on the inner life of an imaginative girl child I was a particularly captivated. 

I began to see how 'the clever-undergraduate' characterises Angela's writing. Because (although she had a truly big brain tuned into fantasy and turned that to good effect) she didn't get to Oxford at eighteen. Her intense reading was a rag-bag - widely eclectic and impulse-driven, and - although she later did a degree as a mature student - without the essential filter of intellectual discipline or  academic discourse to sort it all out so she could internalise it and allow it to bed down in her consciousness. Only in this way do we begin to integrate our acquired knowledge into our unique conssiousness  – to make it our own. She was confident enough then to rubbish certain lecturers and experts and adore others. So she missed out on the true academic discourse that prevents youne junior school argument

Jane ‘tis so!

John ‘tis not!

Jane ‘tis so!

John ‘tis not!

Jane ‘tis so! 

Jane bashes John over the head,

As the details emerged in this biography it seemed to me that Angela was like a magpie picking up bright things (and people) with which to line her writer's nest. The result of this unique evolution has been - despite the hagiographic splurge of comment that emerged after her very sadly early death at 51, the range of her literary output can still be seen is somewhat chaotic, derivative and distinctively un-synthesised.

These are the characteristics of an autodidact, of course. Being a bit of an autodidact myself I am aware that we grasp on every new bit of knowledge or insight like a sweetie and parade it around like a banner. Angela Carter did this with her mixture of Freud, Jung, Bruno Bettelheim, de Balzac, Baudelaire, Burgess, de Sade, Grimm, Perrault and many others (A formidable task for this biographer to explore ...)  Sweeties from all these sources were selected to fit her particular imagined world-viewn regarding what it was to be human or animal, what it was to be a man and what it was to be a woman. And she communicated her special view  that the differences between all these -  (animal, human, man, woman) were essentially a social construct rather that a given identity -  through her literary and journalistic output.

I began to think that there is something of the infant in Angela’s phenomenal self-absorption.  I was also very impressed by her literary self-confidence. She always felt she was a great writer and fated to be famous, and convinced the people around her of this, through her forceful self belief, her overt un-synthesised scholarship, alongside her mannered whimsical charismatic charm. These qualities in total made her  free spirit attractive to a wide range of people who were much less sure of themselves in those changing times. These included Carmen Calill and Liz Calder, themselves gifted literary change makers; they included her baffled depressed first husband and her silent, enamoured young second husband. They included her two Japanese houseboy/lovers – one who thrived in later life, on who didn’t. They included some of the students she mentored at the Universities of Sheffield and East Anglia. (The advice she gave, documented here, seems strange to me.)

I began to think that her greatest creative product was herself; self-made, self-storying, self-constructed. Her complex  construction included the paradoxes confident/awkward, boastful/overtly modesty.

I ended up wondering whether Angela had ever recovered from being the intensely spoilt, greedy child of indulgent parents especially including an obsessively possessive mother. The latent cruelty which blossomed in Carter's emotional make- up and in her encyclopaedic writing was brought to flower in part through her lifelong demonising of her mother, in her struggle to declare her own separate soul. The stifling, intense feminisation of her childhood experience, it seems to me, set in motion her further dogmatic (ie intellectually unsynthesised) assertions that the differences between men and women are a social construct. And that there need be no rules, no boundaries to her writing.

Still, when she feels strongly about something one can trace an inverted snobbery in her commentary. She flags up her distant working class background when it suits her, to despise the pretentious middle class around her, of which she is a member. And then her reflections on the working class people around her focus more on the ridiculous and comedic than the human,

It seems she is such a dedicated individualist she lacks empathy with both the middle class and the working class contexts in which she finds herself. This might have afforded her much greater insight as a writer into the true nature of myth and fairy tale in society. This might have happened had she not hi-jacked them to fit her own psycho-social worldview and make her personal art form.

The inchoate tumble of these ideas - much vaunted as 'groundbreaking' and 'original', by her reader and writer-fans - lacks the discipline which would have allowed her to work out a credible coherent argument and contribute widely to thinking and storying in this field. Her self-described role as the 'moral pornographer' is disingenuous. It has a   lot of esoteric charm but it lacking in rigorous thought.

Reading Gordon’s engrossing account of the talented Angela Carter’s invention of her own life did not at all put me off recognising her as a good writer in her time.  But  I kept thinking of the bright universal wisdom of Ursula le Guin which for me places her way above Angela Carter in terms of the skill, the fantastic insight which endows true literary value of her work in the similar field.

The Invention of Angela CarterA Biography

By Edmund GordonChatto & Windus 2016 

NB* This is my own commentary* - a writer’s reaction this book.

For a more straightforward review read
Rosemary Hill’s review in the Guardian 

Postcard 4 Poems, Morning and Sounds on the Lagoon,

Morning

Bright silver
morning sun crashing
onto the lagoon
breaking into
shards of
diamond light that shoal together
before breaking onto
the shore

Sounds on the Lagoon

The buzz of the coffee machine
The tap of a joiner’s hammer
The murmur of
considered conversations
Ducks quacking after their ducklings
The murderous shriek of seagulls,
loudest before it
stops
The clanging of a ship’s bell
The click of masts chiming
The whine of wind driving
through a hundred spinnakers
The boom of a boat’s engine
ploughing through the water
the shush of its wake as
it streams through the water
leaving a creamy line
on its pulsing surface
The chirp and chatter
of children in ten  tiny boats,
being towed in a line,
like ducklings in a row.

  

Au Revoir

Wendy

Working and Playing in the Languedoc with no WiFi.

You may have noticed my two week absence on these pages. So sorry about that.
 

I went back to the Langudoc with A and D, my two favourite writers, for a work-play September break. The weather was stunningly hot. The woman in the stationary shop mentioned the ‘unseasonally hot weather’; the woman on the oyster stall said the same, adding ‘You should go to the beach!’ 

Cafe Writing

The hot weather ‘broke’ in the last few days and it was ‘only’ very warm in the morning and hot in the afternoon. On our last day, dragging our cases across the bridge over the River Hérault which, instead of its usual gleaming silver-green was now a churning brown, spitting trees and logs as it hurled itself towards the sea.

The River Hérault, still  in a silver state.

The big performance-pontoon had sheered away from the quayside and was bobbing about mid-river. The  Hérault  had burst its banks further upstream - a serious affair:  lives had been lost.

We all had plans for our stay.  A and D had their own reading, writing and planning  projects, My tasks were to mop up some last pieces of research for the final edit of my novel, Writing at the Maison Bleu; to read some more short fiction - Truman Capote, Edith Wharton, Henry James – in preparation for our October 25th Room To WriteWorkshop on The Novella; to write exploratory pieces towards my own new short fiction.

I also had a  plan to send  to you some ‘Postcards from Agde’ - to follow on from the ‘Postcards from Marseillan’ (scroll back) that I wrote for you in June.

This was not to be. We had quite elaborate plans to have WiFi Internet Access in our slice of a medieval house. For various reasons this didn’t materialise. We had to make do with WiFi facilities at the Melrose Café on the Quayside which was only intermittently available. In other years here we depended for the Internet on the WiFi facilities in  the library (The delightfully named Maison de Savoir). But to our chagrin this year it was closed for refurbishment.But to our chagrin this year the library was closed for refurbishment.

                                                                              

So –  our work/play break consisted if two weeks in the sun in dusty, atmospheric old Agde -  virtually without the Internet.

All I can say is that it was great. It was remarkably peaceful and fruitful – living and working in a kind of seclusion: no checking out, no Tweeting, for Facebooking, no emailing. There was a lot of writing, planning, talking and

thinking. And a lot of sitting in cafés, over café crème or Pastis, watching the comings and going in this busy little self-absorbed town.

A little bit of writer’s paradise, 

to  be truthful. 

On the plus side I did find two new fantastic book sources for my new novel -

Writing at the Maison Bleu.

Reading and Writing

On the minus side I really did miss writing my Postcards from Agde  just  for you. I would have written about :.

Autimn Fruits

Cooking and Writing 

A Reading Corner 

Windows in Strange Places

Wish you'd been there. Wx

A Sense of Place.. The Maison Bleue, Work in Progress.

Extract from The Maison Bleue 

(This novel will be published in September, If you would like to order a signed copy email me at wenrob73@hotmail.com )

Crime writer Ruthie Dancing finds the house where she will set up her writer's retreat:

'...The Maison Bleue is half massive old stone and half rendered, peeling plaster; its garden sprawls down to the great plane trees that line the Canal du Midi. The window shutters are pale blue, framed in dusty white. There are nine windows – two on each side of the door on the ground floor, two on the first and second floors and one at the top under the white-painted arch of the roof. All of them, even the small one at the top, have narrow balconies painted a glossy dark blue. On the rendered walls the pale blue paint is dusty and peeling and quilted with dozens of cracks, gauzy as spider’s webs...'

And in an outbuilding in the garden Ruthie finds the place where her writers will find inspiration and write.

... ‘Don’t go in there, Ruthie!’ Aurélie’s voice comes from behind her. ‘It is a very nasty in there. Full of filthy stuff.’

The heavy door with its big iron latch should be hard to move but it isn’t. It slides easily when Ruthie pushes it. And now where she is standing the bright southern light trickles through gaps in the roof and through the five arched, unglazed windows on the opposite greenish black wall.

The floor is knee deep with the detritus of centuries – rank soil, rotting leaves, tree branches, paper labels, wrinkled condoms, tin cans, broken glasses and bottles: all whirled here on the wings of the mistral, that high southern wind that will leave nothing in its proper place.

Aurélie stands, arms folded, and watches with some amusement as Ruthie scrapes her way through the rubbish down to the surface of the floor then pulls off her scarf to scrub at it. ‘It’s marble, Aurélie! Marble!’ She laughs with delight. She scans the space. ‘This must have been a very important room.’ On a place high on the far wall and are streaks and lines of dust like shadow of a high tide. ‘And there’ve been bookshelves here. Bookshelves!’

She stands there, her face burning in the high sun of mid day streaming through the windows. She can see long tables here, high desks. And she can see men with their heads down over their writing, filled with the focused energy so familiar in her own working life. 

‘Ruthie? Are you all right?’ Aurélie is beside her, her hand on Ruthie’s shoulders....'

ƧƧƧƧƧƧƧƧ

If you have read so far you might be interested in my posts elsewhere  about the importance of place for this writer -  here where I spoke of it in relation to my novel Lines of Desire. and here where I spoke of Castletownshend in Ireland and travel as inspiration.

The Champagne and Strawberry Book Launch

 

 My close writing friend Avril Joy and I had a great Sunday in Durham celebrating the coincidence of the launch of our very different books about our writing process.

Our books are both out on Kindle this week and out in Paperback next week.

We meet regularly to talk and to write together and encourage each other. Avril actually writes beautifully about this process in her book.

But today was to be a pure celebration. And where better to celebrate that in the beautiful Durham City? This is an old haunt – and an old inspiration - of mine .and features in several of my novels. A great place to celebrate.

 The day was a bit damp but that only added a certain sheen to the lovely old streets and to our celebration.

 

We started in the Saddler Café with strawberry tarts and coffee. 

We looked at our books on Kindle and reflected on the amazing creative processes  that allow us to share our work with loyal and lovely readers far and wide. A magical process for all writers.

Not reallu us going to the champagne bar!
The monks bringing the relics of St Cuthbert
to Durham City 

Then we moved on to the champagne bar ...

and toasted our books and ourselves and buzzed with new ideas, new projects and renewed our optimism about – well, just everything.

So just what was it that we are celebrating?

 

Click here to See Avril's Book From Writing with Love 

Click here to See my book The Romancer: A Practical Guide to Writing Fiction  
 

Compelled to Write - My Writing Process

Today is "My Writing Process" blog tour day, when writers post about their writing process. Last week, the inspired Kathleen Jones, posted hers.  Thank you Kathleen for inviting me on your Writing Process blog tour. I read your post and was inspired.  Click here for Kathleen's post 

My Writing Process

Q. What am I working on?  I have just sent to my agent the completed revision of my novel ‘Herding Peacocks’ about a group of writers on retreat in a house in France and...   ‘You can’t have rules for writers. That would be like herding peacocks,’ says crime-writer Ruthie Dancing, who suspects her plan for a Writer’s Retreat in might be a folly. Still, she gathers together a diverse group of writers - from young Joe, who lives in a homeless hostel, to the venerable romance writer Francine, whose life, going back to World War 2, is at the core of this novel. Then there are the cerebral poet Mariela and sociopathic Abby with her dangerously passive boyfriend Felix. Ruthie’s honoured guest at the retreat  is Booker Prize-winner Kit Hallam. And then there is American actor-playwright Tom Roache who comes join the fun and perhaps nail a part in the film of Kit’s prizewinning novel.’…

I hope my lovely agent and the editors like my new baby. The writing profession is unique in that with each major project we writers are reduced to an anxious infant, hoping that our parents approve of our precious product.

As Kathleen pointed out in her last post this situation is in a changing state with with the independent eBook publishing revolution. I have joined in this, recently using Amazon Createspace to publish my novels Paulie’s Web and Cruelty Games on Kindle and in Paperback. This was a truly pleasing and empowering process that I would recommend to anyone disappointed in the present state of mainstream publishing. My next personal publishing project with them will be to republish my two short story collections Knives and Forms of Flight.

In this intensely weird 'waiting game' I am also waiting for publishers reactions' to my novel Lines of Desire.

This one is  set on the island of Britain in 383 AD when a great love story blossoms between Magnus Maximus, (in the Welsh myth Macsen Wledig), the Roman military leader in Britain, afterwards for five years Roman Emperor. At th ecentre of the novel is Elen the legendary daughter of a powerful British king in the place we now call Wales. Magnus is fascinated by Elen, a gifted Seer and healer who is a ‘pathfinder’ and whose artistic, talented ancestors made straight roads in Britain long before the Romans. Now, as the Roman Empire begins to crumble, these two lovers symbolise the merging of the spiritual, sophisticated Celtic culture (with its esoteric rites and rituals) and the pragmatic military culture of Rome which is beginning to embrace Christianity as a useful political tool. 

At present,ever compelled,  I'm involved in reading and researching  for a novel about an as-yet un-named (do you have any names to suggest?)  ex-military prisoner, painter and poet. It's set in Bohemian London society just after World War Two. 
      I reckon you need to read and explore a hundred sources -  letters, histories, diaries and  artifacts before embarking on a fiction that will spring authentically  out of those times and events. 
      My working title for this one is Wraparound - after a short story written last year out which will be the basis for this novel. More about this on Life Twice Tasted anon...

Q. How does my work differ from others of its genre?    A perpetual drawback for me -  in publishers eyes - is that my work is seen as not sufficiently ‘genre-specific’. This is demonstrated by above, I suppose, by my diverse (some say crazy...) work-in-progress list above.  
      Interestingly this diversity has never been any kind of drawback for my precious readers, who themselves are a pretty diverse, imaginative, intelligent, well-read lot,

Q. Why do I write what I do?  The past-in-the-present dominates my mind, my imagination and my writing. I always 'see' individuals, unique characters in their times. And I tell their stories.
      I have lived through interesting times and have been a compulsive writer since I was eight. Anais Nin once said that writers taste life twice, once when they experience it and secondly when they write it. This so very much expressed my own writing experience that I named this blog Life Twice Tasted.

     My novels are mostly set in some crosspiece of time, place and the unique lives of my characters. Look at my Lavender House,  set in London in the 2010s and goes back to life in the 1960; and The Woman Who Drew Buildings , set in present day Durham City,  which  goes back to Poland in the 1991.  And An Englishwoman in France set in contemporary France  2006 and goes back  through the Middle Ages to even earlier times. . My new novel, Lines of Desire, is entirely set in Britain in 383 AD but in its way looks back thousands of years and forward to imperial attitudes today.

Q How does your writing process work?  My writing process has evolved from the early days when autobiographical scraps stumbled on into stories that were published, then into longer stories that evolved into young adult novels which were also published,  then into much longer adult novels that required reaching and research to absorb the feelings of a time and a place to I could write my novels freely and imaginatively. These were also published.

 (Add to this the practical and personal insights obtained from my five years as writer in residence in a women’s prison, from which emerged my novel Paulie’s Web emerged.)

I suppose my ingrained habit of  writing every day, every year, has meant I have taught myself a good deal about the writing process and how it works for me. I read, think and dream for some months - often years – before a  whole idea emerges, in the end welding all this together into shapes in my head, like iron filings tapped by magnets.

This is the most  exciting part of the process and often happens when I am editing and working on the earlier novel, I sometimes have to fight quite hard  to keep it at bay until I’ve completed and sent off the earlier novel. Like Kathleen Jones I start writing by hand in notebooks and drafting books. (See my last post…)

Then I transcribe and tentatively edit this draft onto my computer,  and play about with it for a time. Then by some kind of organic magic I begin to recognise that I have a novel there.

Then I print off the whole novel and look at it before giving it two buddies - my colleagues at RoomTo Write for their opinion. Then I enter all my own amendments and viable suggestions from my buddies. Then I go through it editorially yet again, And again.

I relish  this editorial stage. It is finicky and detailed – the opposite of the seductively exciting flamboyant early stages where the words flow onto the page and the pages pile up,
       I think all writers nowadays have to develop editorial skills to a high level because publishers are not prepared to invest so much in the editorial process and like near perfect copy and joined up storytelling.

Equally important is the fact that in these days of personal and independent publishing - enabled by companies like Amazon Createspace - the writer her or himself has to ensure the perfection of their own copy before they upload their baby and send it out into the world.  
       For me the kingdom of self-publishing  out there is divided into two categories. One category features good novels so well edited that the reader’s mind never thinks about the edit, The other category features potentially equally good  novels whose under-edited  state sticks out like a sore thumb and does the writer no justice.  Nothing is ever perfect but it is our job as writers now os  to make our babies as perfect as they can.

I am well aware that  everyone has a unique approach to the writing process but I think the great key is to begin by writing freely and very consistently - eventually to create a critical mass of relatively coherent prose text with an original story at its core. In time will inevitably form up into articles, poems, short stories and novels.

        In this critical mass of writing the writer will find her voice, her style, her themes, her  form and the default errors built into her intuitive writing.  Recognising all this through several writing processes must show in better and better writing in each successive novel.

Now I am passing the Writing Process Baton on this Blog Tour to a writer whose work I admire,

So the baton goes on to novelist Avril Joy.

Avril Joy writes novels, short stories and poetry. Her first novel The Sweet Track was published in 2007 by Flambard Press. In 2012 she won the inaugural Costa Short Story Award. .

Click here to  Read Avril