Truth And Fiction Like Two Hands Clasping…

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 Early Days

When the majority of my books – around 15 - came to life my only contribution was to take an intense  year to research and write each novel and deliver my completed manuscript to my publisher on  November 30 ( the date agreed in the commissions). I dealt with two major publishers - Hodder & Stoughton and then Headline – now Hachette.

I posted my  precious manuscript – which some writers may tell you becomes like a baby in your life – to my talented editors, Anne Williams and later Harriet Evans  (now a successful novelist herself). I would get it back from them by Christmas. complete with some changes inspired by their  insightful comments.

Interestingly enough Anne always insisted that they were suggestions, not instructions. Through time I had great advice from both Anne and Harriet which has entered my permanent writing process.

After that I returned the amended manuscript  to my editor  who entered it into  post- editing production involving formatting and cover design processes. I don't think I was aware then that it takes more than a  village to raise a novel. Since I have started going it alone I am very aware of that.

The production safely  in process, I would then begin to  prowl around my shelves, my growing pile of heavily scored notebooks - and  in the busy universe of my mind - to ponder an  arena of  people, life and history that would be the basis for my next novel. This was - and is still - my professional habit and routine through a many years.

By the time the novel appeared in the Spring I would be writing again, always voyaging into very different territory. In the meantime my  publisher's marketing department took care of the (rather limited - I wasn't famous after all...) promotion process. 

The novels were well reviewed - mostly in provincial presses across England and in  some magazines, although they never reached the magisterial heights of the literary broadsheets. I was from the North, after all and I had come from a working, rather than the literary background. I notice that this issue of being ‘from the working class’ is quite a trend nowadays. When I was first writing  I was distinctly pre-trend: there were no literary festivals therefore no platforms for my kind of writing. There was no Internet and no metropolitan networking - this  was strictly for already established writers. I had no contacts – my novels were published, as it were, out of the blue by Headline in its earliest days. I have my then editor Anne Williams and later Harriet Evans to thank for that.

As each book came out I would write some articles about the ideas underlying it,  I would do a few presentations.  But really I was free to get on with writing the next - very different - novel. This was, of course,  as well as working at my full-time job, as well as being a companion for my hard-working husband and nurturing my two children. Of course they are very big people now. Bonjour  @lickedspoon 

When i became a professional writer, the writing of popular novels was a virtual cottage industry before it became corporatised and monetised, with - it seems to me - increasing distance from the intense personal creative activity which had been all about dreaming up  stories and writing them down. In had became clearer that my thriving career  could not survive, based as it was on  instinct and a powerful storytelling imperative, rather than the somewhat rigid and perhaps stereotyped perceptions of The Market.  

 Going It Alone?

I had always made a living alongside my profession but never expected to make a fortune through my writing. (I think people tend to hope this nowadays…). The professional and artistic satisfaction for me was always the possibility of seeing the novels out there being read, and hearing readers response to my stories.

And this is why and how – my children grown and flown - I began to explore ways in which I could still write my novels and shepherd them into the market myself. So I started to write novels for myself, creating a very tiny imprint called Damselfly Books in order to locate them. 

So I proceeded to  publish Paulie’s Web – a novel emerging from my seminal experience as writer in residence in a women’s prison. I wrote The Pathfinder – a novel exploring my inner fascination with my Celtic roots which keep re-emerging in my philosophies and ideas - and in my novels. This always seem to me to be begging for some fictional expression. I went on to write the novel called The Bad Child, focusing on my work as an educator and the fact that middle children – (I myself was one and I was observing my niece, also a middle child, as another) – could be independent, rebellious and self-activating – rather different from their siblings. This is how my very special  Demelza came to life in this novel.

Becoming Alice emerged from my increasing professional interest in the complex connections between what appears to be pure fiction and what seems to be true memoir. This novel was to be the first of three novels set in the arc of public and private life between 1941 and the Millennium. It is no accident that this time-span just happens to be the arc of my own life fully realised in the life experience of a girl called Alice. At the moment the second and third novels in this trilogy are just at the brainstorming/note-writing/plot-planning stage now.

I was now realising just how much the focus throughout my writing life had been  - rooted in my own life experience - transformed through fiction  - eventually appeared on the page. But I realised that my life experience was not unidirectional or set in a neat narrative; rather it was fragmentary – incoherent shards and fragments which took different shapes depending on how I cast my story-net. This, I thought, was rather like the toy kaliedescope that has sat on my mantelpiece for more than twenty years. Now I had my title! This was when I began to write and publish some short stories which reflected this concept more directly.

The Workshops

So it was that  last Spring -  one year ago - I presented a series of workshops on the connection between memoir and fiction. The participants were both enthusiastic and inspiring. That was when, in serious earnest, I began to pull together my stories and to write new ones which would illustrate an  original fusion of objective truth and pure fiction. This was why and how I wrote the stories one by one over this last year. And then laid them out and then I surveyed them to see just what I had created.

And now I turned to Damselfly to publish this new collection to be called Kaleidoscope - Stories from the Frontier.  This subtitle – like the nature of these short stories – was inspired by a good deal of reading, especially the work of Diana Athill and Jean Rhys. I was particularly engaged by Diana Athill’s insightful comment on the late work of Jean Rhys, with whom she worked in the last 15 years of Rhys’s long life. Athill remarked on Rhys’s writing ‘from the ‘frontiers of old age’ as being of her very best. So I had my sub-title.  

In my publishing process I’ve used the services of Word-2.Kindle   to ensure the technical standard of the text. This company were both patient and helpful, which is just what I needed as I was going it alone.  Inspired by the Kaliedoscope on my mantelpiece. For the cover design I joined forces with my artistic, literary friend Avril Joy and we designed the cover together.

The blurb on the cover of Kaliedoscope took some thinking about. It has so many functions for any new reader. Referring to oneself in the third person is truly odd. Anyway this is what I ended up with:

In this collection of short stories Wendy Robertson acquaints us with the life of career writer Ruthie Evans - rooted in the North, travelling from Ireland to Singapore and Soviet Russia, featuring characters who reflect their Twentieth Century times. In the stories Ruthie emerges triumphant – complex, highly intelligent, conflicted and full of joy: a unique and special memoir, exploring the relationship between memoir and the short story.‘…truth and fiction like two hands clasping… A rare glimpse of what it’s like to be inside the process of writing… ‘Kathleen Jones: biographer‘More than just a memoir… a masterclass in the writing process.’ Sharon Griffiths: Columnist & Author‘A powerful writer.’ Mail on Sunday.

I truly hope you enjoy reading Kaliedosope. If you like the idea of this adventurous combination of memoir and fiction you might be inspired to write a story yourself - a story which could leap out the truth of your own experience. And then another. And another.

It seems to me now that this present lock-down situation could be perfect for anyone, writer or not, to embark on such a self-enhancing and satisfying project.

Buy?     Click Here

Also read two earlier posts  where I discuss  the complex relationship betweem Memoir and Fiction.

Here
https://lifetwicetasted.blogspot.com/search?q=memoir+and+fiction

 and here 

https://lifetwicetasted.blogspot.com/search?q=Kaleidoscope.+A+creative+view+of+the+literary+connection+between+memoir+and+fiction.

If all this has made you curious about the stories. Here for you is the contents list:

Kaleidoscope: The  Stories

Keong Sak.................................................................... 1
‘I do enjoy Singapore, very much.’ Tim Rice
Watching and Feeling............................................... 18
‘Blake said the body was the soul’s prison
unless the five senses are fully developed andopen.’ Jim Morrison.
Masculinity............................................................... 27
‘Prithee, peace/ I dare do all that maybecome a man; / Who dares do more is none.’Shakespeare.

This Working Life...................................................... 44
‘Nothing will work unless you do.’ Maya
Angelou

Patchouli...................................................................  53
‘There is nothing automatic about political
change, about liberation.’ Gloria Steinem.
Bandages................................................................... 63
‘No one ever told me that grief felt so like
fear.’ C S Lewis
Ruthie’s Rant............................................................. 74
‘Even though I was shy, I found I would get
onstage of I had a new identity.’ David Bowie.
Rudder and Bridle..................................................... 79
‘The faculty of the imagination is both the
rudder and the bridle of the senses.’ Simone
de Beauvoir.

Brown Velvet............................................................. 83
‘I think writers are, at best, outsiders to the
society they inhabit.’ John Irving.]
The Woman Who Loved Jesus.................................. 95
‘Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth.

Educating Tegger..................................................... 104
‘The only person who is educated is the one who has learned how to learn …and change.’Carl Rogers

Governess............................................................... 118
‘.… it is the duty of the poet to obtain
citizenship for an increasing horde of nameless emotions.’ Ágnes Nemes Nagy
Going By Train......................................................... 152
‘I have learned how faces fall to bone/how under the eyelids terror lurks…’ Anna
Akhmatova, 1957

The Fox House......................................................... 165
‘Only connect the prose and the passion, and
both will be exalted, and human love will beseen at its height. Live in fragments no longer.’EM Forster

Story Teller’s Apprentice......................................... 179
‘My daughter is one of my greatest
inspirations. Every day she surprises me andteaches me something.’ Patti Smith.

White Frost on Grass - Parts One, Two & Three.....185
‘The first lie in fiction is that the author givessome order to the chaos of life.’ Isabel Allende.

Big Issue.................................................................. 212
‘Now I know what a ghost is. Unfinishedbusiness, that’s what.’ Salman Rushdie.

Tiananmen.............................................................. 231
‘Life is like riding a bicycle. To keep your
balance you must keep moving.’ Albert
Einstein. 

x

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.

Perpetual Brainstorms and Creating a Novel from the Inside Out.

Creating something - whether it’s a story or novel,  a poem  or even a painting - involves creativity not just at the beginning but at every stage.

For this writer the perpetual brainstorm that is daily life  blossoms with dozens of emerging ideas, any of which could grow into a new novel, new short story or – more rarely for me, but sometimes - a poem.

My method is to distil the wild chaos of these ideas into the roughest of lists generated by the brainstorm invading my subconscious.

Once this list exists I start to come across - apparently by accident - sources, resources, poems, myths,  anecdotes, functional tasks, smells, plants, costumes others' experinces, which attach themselves like iron filings to  a magnet to one or other of the ideas 

On the list in my book about writing The Romancer: On Being a Writer, I described   this chaos as a kaleidoscope which, when you

make when you shake it, creates endless patterns and shapes that form up into coherent shapes  even stories. (This coherent mass is important the late, great Julia Darling  used to call it the soup.)

Then, from that fertile and febrile subconscious process, characters start to emerge - it could be ‘a man I once knew’, ‘a woman who in some part is like my mother’, ‘a girl I met in prison’, 'a woman who was too fond of walking', 'a woman who was too fond of men', 'the child who had too much anger', 'child who had too much pain.'

 I leave these people bubbling away in their particular kaleidoscopic fashion as I  settle down now to writel

Then I give some attention to what we all – writers and non-writers - know best -  context. Everyone lives through time through time whether there lifespan is 10 years, 70 years, or 110 years.

This understanding time creates a natural which could be built around e.g.  the life of the nation, the succeeding generations of a family, the life of an individual, a plant,animal or an organism. It is marked by such rites of passage – seasons, catastrophes, wars-world, wars-local, birth, death, murder, miracles, marriage, redundancy, illness, bankruptcy, gaining freedom - all  these phenomena function act as rites of passage for the individual: cusps of change in any and every individual life in any society. Further there are unique individual rites of passage through experiences such as abuse, prison, physical injury, or brilliant discovery

Then somehow, like traces of DNA laid on top of each other, there comes to be a match between the kaleidoscope of a unique life and the people participating in it. Effectively this is fiction. In the making this fiction you create a unique – albeit fictional - lifespan with its own story arc which will resonate and be recognised across a whole population of readers,

This is the way a thousand stories have emerged into modern life -  great mythic poems like Ovid’s Metamorphosis, and the creation  myths and fairy tales from every community across the world which all go to illuminate  our  common human ground.  

Then we have the gifted people who consciously address this human miracle and create story magic that crosses across national boundaries - people such as  Lewis Carroll and Hans Andersen, and poets like Ted Hughs and Seamus Heaney. And the more numerous singers who create lyrics, poets  who create poems, writers who create short stories and novelists  who create their novels. 

In the case of this story-teller  - this point is where my own unique novel starts to evolve: I home in on a certain person in my people-scape, a place in my landscape, a stage in a certain lifespan: all these things crystallise my starting point and I feel able to begin to write.

This convoluted process could take an hour, a day, or a year or indeed a lifetime - even while you are doing something quite else -  such as working on the earlier novel or story.

But you do know the point when you need to start writing this particular story. 

After that -  as my writing friend Avril Joy http://www.avriljoy.com/  and I always say  - you must trust the writing. Don’t abandon the creativity when you actually start writing; don’t hamper the writing with fail-safe planning, or vain attempts at  audience- or market-pleasing.

As you write, be sensitive to the surprises and insights arise on the page in your writing: characters who take their turn at  centre stage until one of them demands a permanent place at the centre; you give them names and perhaps change the names if they’re not happy with them.

The form of your story will begin to emerge. I firmly believe that form always follows inspiration.  Your story starts here and takes shape as you write. From time to time you start to look at where you’ve been in your narrative and you begin to get the sense of where you might be going.

It might take a year or so to become conscious of where you’re going and right on to 
finally arrive at a body of work that just could be your novel.

This is the point where you need a   splurge of another kind creativity. First you need to edit the body of your prose into its best literary heart possible. Choice of absolutely the right word in the right place. (Every word a bullet !) The most illuminating metaphorical inferences. The music of the language. The virtue of this creative editing to the best possible prose  we need to take got this is a central and important point.   We need to take this stage for granted:  the writing itself has got to be good.

 The need to import a sense of shape to help  mould the form of your novel is a creative task in itself. You need to ask yourself some questions.

 Perhaps five questions will be enough:

1.    1 What seems to have emerged as the main strand of meanings in your novel?
2.     What is the journey, the arc of change, in the characters you have created within this novel?
3.     Are here underlying themes that have emerged in the writing – that have kind of snuck up on you?
4.     Are there visceral connections between the different stages in the narrative? (It’s worth considering here the nature of continuity, cause and effect, and reiteration and restatement for emphasis.)
5.     Will your readers trust your storytelling to read to the end?

Shaping A World for Alice

In my new novel Lifespan: a World for Alice my focus is on the years between 1941 and 1951   in the lives (it turns out) of seven very vivid people. Clearly the point of visceral and metaphoric connection throughout the novel is very important so that it moves smoothly forward. It needs to be more transparent than its   multi-layered structure i might imply. It   needs to be smooth and well formed to hook itself into the reader’s  mind to become part of his or her own imagination.

I am quite happy to say that I’m just about at this stage with A World For Alice. 

This manuscript has now been drafted;  edited in transcription from my pen and ink written draft and edited. Now it's needs to be shaped into a recognisable, functional novel which will make sense to the reader. I  completes a whole swathe of editing on the screen but then my mind began to scream for a more graphic tool to facilitate this shaping process.

So, I print  the whole novel. It's now in about its eighth draft. I print off all the pages.  Now what I have is a fairly practical task. I have to deal with the matrix of all my characters living their diverse lives through these years and make it a coherent whole. 

I   consider a method described once by the very original Beryl Bainbridge’s. It seems at this point she would print off the whole manuscript and put each chapter separately on a step of her stairs. Then she  could arrange and rearrange the order  of the chapters perhaps inserting new material until  the sequence and the story worked on every level.

 I  am quite attracted to what sounds like a very practical approach but doubt whether the order would survive in this very inhabited house with people running up and down the stairs several times a day.

So I decide  to use Post It notes and stick   them on  a board in order. Each chapter has its own Post-it Note,  colour-coded in relation to which  character’s narrative predominates that particular chapter.  I put these in vertical lines in a kind of order that I can change around as I re-consider sequencing and shaping.  I can write new material to help with this shaping. I am very pleased with first stage this but then overnight the Post-it notes collapse  into a sticky pile on my work table and make no sense at all.

In desperation I find some stickier coloured labels which I can still move around at will, facilitate my effort to make the whole novel smooth and coherent. This method seems to work. 

Now I have all these changes in order and all the incidental editing inserted as I’ve worked through the rearranged chapters yet again.  The next stage is for  the this order and these changes to go back into the printed document  be printed off again. The benefit of good old computer is crucial at this point. Different from the olden days …

 70,000 words. A  good first lifespan in my trilogy. Just needs a bit more polishing. And a bit more. It seems to be working so far. 

Fingers crossed.

I hope my readers will like A World for Alice. No.  I hope they love it.

A girl like a a girl I met in prison elbowed her way into Paulie's Web

New W.I.P.. After the bombing and in a safer place

Work In Process for the first book in my trilogy 

Lifespan

Book One: Embarking 

 Collecting the Pictures

1945 June 4^th  'Labour will need a sort of Gestapo to rule,' says Churchill.

(Maggie gave birth to Alice in during the bombing of South Shields. They are now in a safer place...)

‘
Now Alice, we’re gunna see your pretty picture,’ says Maggie, unbuckling Alice from her harness, leaving the big pram outside the photographer’s shop.  The bell tinkles and Eli Mason looks up from the far counter where he is wrapping a big picture in brown paper and string. He looks up and smiles. ‘Ah!Mrs… er  Miss … You’ve come for your photographs!’

She smiles. ‘Just call me Maggie,’ she says. ‘Yes. We’re looking forward to seeing them aren’t we, Alice? 

Alice makes her mouse squeak in response and Mr Mason laughs He puts an envelope on the near counter. ‘There you are. Good job,  though I say it myself,’

Maggie leans over to get a closer look.  ‘Amazing. Just perfect Mr Mason.’  She has tears in her eyes. ‘She looks so much … herself.’’

Mr Mason smiles ‘That’s what we want from our photographs. People looking like their best selves. Especially these days.’ He pushes a mahogany frame towards her. ‘Choose the best picture and put it in this frame.’ For free,

Maggie puts her hand on it and hesitates,.

‘It’s a present,’ he says. ‘For Alice.’

Maggie smiles, relieved. She only has the money for the photos in her purse.

He wraps the photos and the frame and - after protesting – takes  the money for the photos from Maggie. ‘Well, if I must.’

She tucks the package into the pram basket and makes to go. Mr Mason puts up a hand. ‘I don’t know if you’re working, er … Maggie?’

‘Well, I work four nights in the bar at The Welsh House. I'm staying there.’ She smiles. ‘Singing for my supper.’

He stares at her, ‘As a matter of fact I need a hand here in the shop. The women are signing on at the factory and the men are in the army or at the pit,. Much better money of course. I told you I’ve lost  Bernie  didn’t I?’ He hesitates  ‘Would you be interested to work here? Maggie, times to suit you?’

Maggie smiles faintly. ‘Its wonderful to watch you work Mr Mason.. But I know nothing about cameras, or taking photographs.’

He smiles ‘I can teach you. Took young Bernie straight out of elementary school. In six months he  was nearly as good as  me.’ His smile fades. ‘Not that that’s doing him much good now  at the bottom of the Atlantic.’

Maggie finds herself nodding. ‘Now Alice is at school perhaps I can make the time.’ He is delighted, bustling to find his calendar to arrange when she can start. She is outside the shop and walking down the street with Alice in her pushchair before she realises that she had said yes to Mr Mason because he was so sad about his lost boy.

From my blue notebook; The Sublime Susan Sontag on Structure.

I was having a pre-Christmas writing room sort -out when a book by Susan Sontag fell from my writing bookshelf open at her essay on Dostoyevsky’s writing.

Perhaps you know,  as you read  LifeTwiceTasted, that when I’m not writing my novels, I’m pondering the mysteries of the writing process as it occurs book by book.

My Blue Notebook

I  am in the middle of writing an exciting new novel  which – at present- is told from a single eccentric point of view. But in the back of my mind is the thought that I might eventually wish to incorporate other perspectives to deepen and thicken the narrative.  This is both a creative and a technical challenge for any writer. And then, as if responding to my thoughts, Susan Sontag’s book falls from the shelf open at her essay on Dostoyevsky’s writing. I read the page . I read the page eagerly and copy it into my blue notebook where I note words and ideas that inspire me.

Here are the sublime Susan Sontag’s words about the structural energy in rendering points of view.

…. ‘Summer in Baden - Baden’ is unified by the ingenuity and velocity of its language, which moves boldly, seductively between the first and the third person – the doings, musings, memories of the narrator (‘I’) and the Dostoyevsky scenes (‘he’, ‘they’ ‘she’) between past and present. But this is not a unitary present any more than it is a unitary past. (Submitting) to the undertones of remembered themes, passions from earlier moments in his life, the narrator, In the present, summons up memories of his past…

Sontag’s lucid de-construction of this complex element of narration certainly inspires me to plunge back into the process of my novel with ‘ingenuity and velocity.’ 

It could – as I hope it will – make this my best novel yet.

Happy holidays to all my reading, writing and creative friends out there in the world. With this wish comes a profound hope for a peaceful world in 2016 where the self-styled warriors of every culture turn their swords into ploughshares, their bullets into bees, their bombs into poems and their drones into butterflies.

D's Christmas House 

Postcard 5 from Marseillan. Abby sat up in bed...

 Inevitably, sitting here on my balcony in sunny Marseillan, I am fizzing up a new story – the next novel or novella or whatever it may be. On element of this is the waiting, waiting for characters to walk off the streets and into the novel. This has happened before. In many places, at many times.

Yesterday I was in the city of Agde yesterday, feeling so affectionate about the narrow streets, the ancient atmosphere. I spent some sitting beside the magically green river Hérault. The quayside is busy now with cafes and travellers but still in my mind’s eye  I see bustling traders and fishermen, fishing boats and tall ships trading exotic spices for Langedocean wine and oil in this port that goes back to 600 BC.

This is the place that inspired two of my novels: An Englishwoman in France, which goes back to the Roman occupation of this region, and most recently Writing at the Maison Bleue which goes back to the German occupation in World War 2...

I’ve been meaning to write some posts about the role of characters in the writing process and how one builds on the seeds of a character after he or she has walked into your mental and imaginary space. I thought first I would reflect on characters in Writing at the Maison Bleue with reference to a helpful article I stumbled on. I’ve already mentioned my conviction that the best writing follows intuition and naturally derived insight. But here in the relaxed sunshine I thought an exercise in back-checking might be useful. This article mentions four elements: a driving need, desire, ambition or goal; a secret; a contradiction; and vulnerability

Of course my characters in Writing at the Maison Bleue are already made - Francine on her bicycle, Joe with his rucksack - living, breathing and striding out between two covers. But in this series of occasional posts I will look at all eight characters in the light of this article and see if I have hit the mark. 

What do you think?

 

‘Desire’

In this excerpt we meet Abby:

Abby Constantine sat up straight and yawned. The rough fabric of the hostel sheet folded rather than slid down her smooth form. Felix lay against the pillow admiring the way fine dark hair gathered like an arrow in the small of her back. He laid his finger on the nape of her neck and allowed it to sketch a line to just that point.

She shivered slightly. ‘Don’t do that, Felix.’ Her light voice was well modulated, low key. Felix had a good ear and had always known that he could never make love to a girl with a voice like a corn-crake, no matter how beautiful she was. He’d fallen for Abby first because of the silver tones of her voice. She was very pretty, if too plump to be beautiful, and she could be violent and crude in many ways. But she had the voice of an angel and that was enough for Felix.  

More characters and excerpts soon…

Until today Joe hadn’t talked very much with Lolla about his writing

Joe, at 19 is the youngest writer at the Mason Bleue retreat. He makes good friends with the oldest writer there: eighty-odd year old Francine. And he makes friends with the celebrity guest writer Kit Hallam.  

Excerpt from Writing at the Maison Bleue 

[...] It was on Giro day when the Award  letter came through Joe’s door. He celebrated his award with his girlfriend Lolla at the Black Bull - their usual meeting place on a corner at a decent distance from their respective hostels.

‘A thousand quid? Y..yum! ’ Lolla smacked her pouting lips – not really a pretty sight. ‘We can celebrate on that, Joe.’ For Lolla celebrating meant something serious up her nose or down her throat. At least, thought Joe,  she did this in a quiet fashion. She had told him more than once that she hated anything vulgar. There were people around them who were vulgar. And that, she said, was the worst thing in the world.

Joe shook his head. ‘No cash, Loll. Really, like! Says here the Award covers the plane and this place on the river. Sunshine and writing. And talking.’ He frowned. ‘Dunno whether I’ll like that. Talking.’ He frowned. ‘Good job I got a passport.’ He said thoughtfully.

His social worker had got him a passport when Jonny Green, a singer who had been in the same care home before his rise to fame, had treated the present generation of kids there to a beach holiday in Spain. In the end Joe had not gone because he’d been in a fight and was seen to have blotted his copybook.

Now Lolla pouted, her eyes gleaming through the long blackened lashes that flapped against her fringe. ‘Not fair, that, Joey. You should see some cash shouldn’t yer? Won the competition didn’t yer?’

Until today he hadn’t talked very much about his writing with Lolla . The writing was mostly his private thing.

In his heart of hearts Joe agreed with Lolla. He wondered if all the winners of the Room to Write Awards got their prize in vouchers and tickets. Or was it just those who lived in hostels for  outsiders?  Maybe it was like clothes vouchers for the needy  He knew he was not as needy as some of his other acquaintances because luckily drugs had turned out to be not his bag. It was a fact that drugs had been pushed onto him in prison when things became hard. And it was true that when he got out he was still using. But he had been rescued from sliding down that road by a guy called Cragan whom he met in the Black Bull. Cragan helped him to get off the gear for good. These days even the thought of the gear made him gag. [...] 

When Joe is writing he starts by making lists

Here's one of the  lists that he leaves on the salon table:

Joe Conroy

Trace at the Seaside -

- Fat Bob and skinny Joan, on duty

- Bob drives the minibus.

-The sea boiling up like soup

- The darker sky simmering like grey custard

- The mini-bus stinking

-  of dinner, salt, vinegar crisps and hair-gel

- Bob and Joan light off to Kind William pub

- As they walk away Bob touches Joan’s arse

- Glass box with weird talking clown – one lass runs off screaming

- Five pound-coins in Trace’s paw

- Bag of chips, ice lolly and three goes on the Waltzer

- Whirling round and round and round

- Sea, lighthouse funfair.

- Sea, lighthouse, funfair

- Woozy, seasick, Trace falls into the arms of a lad with red socks

-They race the tide and the tide wins

- Sheltering from the rain, tucked under the cliff

-  Fucking in the rain that fingers his bare arse

- The boy in red socks can’t manage

- Rain stops. Trace laughs. The lad

- punches her in the stomach and runs

- Trace is sick into a rock-pool 

-  size of giant’s foot

- hermit crabs scuttling for dinner