Kickstart your Imagination: how Writing Prompts Work

Let’s start with why I’m talking about writing prompts at all. A strangely organic process has been taking place over the past few months. It began when we headed into lockdown: I started thinking about how I could help writers by running a free online writing retreat session. (By the way, I’m about to run my fourth one tomorrow – you can sign up here).

Loads of 40 people signed up for it, which blew me away. Then I had to come up with the structure for the session. I could, of course, have welcomed attendees, set a timer and let them get on with their current work in progress.

But I felt more was needed, so I set about designing two separate writing sprint sessions, each with eight prompts, one of which was a picture. That became the template for each retreat, book-ended with discussion and chat.

Five weeks ago, I started thinking again. I know, it’s a bad habit I’ve fallen into …

I was thinking of the people who couldn’t attend the online retreats – or didn’t want to because they didn’t like the tech aspect of joining an online meeting. What about them? I decided I’d design a little PDF of prompts for them.

I came up with prompts. And more prompts. I spent my late evenings on Canva, designing the pages. I added workbook pages and advice on creating a retreat when you’re at home. 53 pages on, I realised I had more than a quick PDF resource: I had a self-study mini-course. It went live on Tuesday and until midnight on Sunday 21st you can get it for $17, which is less than half price. (Find out more here.)

But, back to the whole notion of prompts. I have fun creating them because I imagine the kinds of stories they’ll inspire. We writers are eternally afraid of the blank mind, the blank page. The urge to write that has no focus on what to write.

So when the Muse isn’t making home deliveries, we need those triggers, those little goads to the imagination. And what’s fascinating is how writers can make such different stories out of the same prompts – that’s certainly been evident in the online retreats so far.

Prompts work in different ways, so let’s explore some of them and why they work.

• There’s the ‘opening sentence’ kind of prompt. It acts like a springboard into what follows. It’s like you stop telling a joke just before the punchline and you let someone else come up with that punchline and deliver it. A trigger like this works because we like to fill in the blanks, the gaps between given facts. Conversely, you could set an end-line and ask the writer to imagine the story that led up to that point.

• Then there’s dialogue – sometimes just a single speech, that works because it is so immediate, so intimate. You’re pulled into an exchange, a dynamic between characters. The speech makes you think of voice and tone and attitude – of the character who’s likely to speak in that way.

• Some prompts work because they’re evocative. A descriptive phrase, a metaphor, can create a mood, a scene. The writer drops in, looks around, imagines the kind of story that could be set there, the kind of situation that would give rise to that particular image.

• Then there’s the picture prompt. I always include them because some people’s imaginations are more easily triggered by seeing an image – it could be a face or an object or a place. A Mediterranean harbour. An old house or a distant planet. A flower held in a hand. A war memorial. (Are any of these triggering a story in you?)

• You can have theme prompts, where you present the trigger as a simple subject statement: ‘the pity of war’, for instance. Interestingly, these may not be the best route to imaginative story-creation. They can be the doorway to polemic instead, where message dominates what is written. It’s important to maintain empathy, to go into and inhabit story, rather than just preach.

• Finally, there are the single word prompts. Deceptively simple, even slightly flat at first sight, these are the prompts that yield richness because they are more oblique, more of a hint, more open to interpretation.

Prompts are a resource to turn to when you’re feeling restive and when, as I said earlier, you want to write but you don’t know what you want to write. You hand over responsibility to a single word or image or teasing phrase. Your imagination, like a dog that’s flopped in the corner on a hot day, stirs, rises, starts to look eager at the prospect of a walk.

Keep a box or book of writing prompts by you, if you can. Treat the box like a lucky dip. Flip the pages of the book. Pick a prompt without too much thought. Toy with it, turn it this way and that in the light. Let it start to fire the neurons in your creative brain. I promise you it will.

Interested in using prompts to restart or kickstart your creativity? My new self-study mini-course, Create your Home Writing Retreat is here. Plus I’m now creating two bonuses.

• First, for as long as I run my free retreats the prompts we’ve used in each session will be added to the course.

• Secondly, I’m designing a new PDF, Create your Writer’s Prompt Box, so you can build your own inspiring resource, one which will stand you in good stead on those dry days.

Join my free online writing retreat session Saturday 20th June - go here.

Create your Home Writing Retreat - go here.

The pressure to do, the need to be: finding daily meaning in a time of crisis

I’m writing this at the height of the Coronavirus epidemic, at a time when we don’t even know yet how many people have succumbed to this terrible virus because the numbers we’re being told only include hospital deaths. This is a time when politicians flail and flounder, desperately trying to cover their backs. This is a time of looking back, of questioning why we were so ill-prepared when we had two months of knowing this disease was heading our way. This is a time of looking back to a past where by comparison all was safe and taken for granted. This is a time where we in the UK think of our Brexit stress and laugh grimly, because really, it didn’t compare. We thought that was bad? Well, now we fear not just for our economy but for our very lives and the lives of those we love.

How have you been feeling during this time? I would guess that with every passing hour you feel something different. Anger, pain, anxiety, sorrow, terror and a weird kind of rebellious positivity can all pass through you in moments. What is particularly hard is the lack of control. We are forbidden to leave our homes unless under certain rules. We cannot do our jobs or run our businesses. We cannot earn and we wait for government bail-outs while fearing there will be a greater price to pay down the line, in that economic wilderness to come.

Horrendous, isn’t it? Yep. As I type this, I feel my heart race and my stomach clench with panic. The words are spilling out. Fear lies behind the chipper wartime-spirit we’re trying to show the world.

There’s another more subtle pressure at work here and I don’t know if you’ve felt it. The pressure to make good use of this, the strangest, most isolated of times. Because we are not all that isolated, in a way. We are still in touch via the ubiquitous Zoom rooms, social media, online news. It is coming at us from all angles, relentlessly, ceaselessly. And we hear messages about self-education, learning new skills, sorting out that pigsty of a house at last, cataloguing your library, getting bags of clothes ready for when the charity shops reopen, learning how to grow your own vegetables ….

People who are completely unused to designing the shape of their day without their work schedule programmed into it, flail around for a new structure. So many of us grew up with a work ethic that gave us identity and meaning because of what we do and how hard we work. I know that kind of conditioning affects me. I work, therefore I am.

And I do believe, strongly, in self-education and in stretching our own boundaries. One of the greatest benefits of the internet is the way it offers knowledge to all. I am part of that, as a student and a teacher (I will be shortly be redesigning some of my in-person workshops and putting them online).

But there comes a point, a still and quiet point like this, when you examine our notions of action and education. You realise we often define education in terms of its usefulness and that usefulness in terms of money and career. Progression. Progression to what?

Instead, look at it another way. If you want to take a programme or learn a skill, think about how much pleasure you will get from it. Think about how it opens up your mind and soul. How it enriches you, in other ways than the monetary ones.

Also, take time to stop. You’ve never had a better excuse. Just. Stop.

Open yourself to awareness of the gorgeousness of a spring that’s unfolding around us in what seems to me greater beauty than ever. Really look at it and listen to it and breathe it in. Clumps of cherry blossom and clouds of hawthorn. The bright green corrugated leaves of the hornbeam. Grape hyacinths and celandines. The rattle of magpies building their nests. The song of blackbird and robin. Skies clear of con-trails. The early bumblebees blundering past.

Read the books you’ve been meaning to, certainly, but don’t choose them because you ought to. Everyone is supposed to tackle Proust or War and Peace or something toweringly, titanically literary. You’re thinking now is the time to tackle heavy tomes, for your own good. No. Don’t do it. Pick the book you can sink into like a feather bed. Pick the book that throws a shawl around your shoulders. Pick the book that makes your heart dance with excitement. Pick the book that takes you back to the glee of childhood. Pick the book that takes you out of yourself, out of your worries, for a time …

Get back in touch with the privilege it is to have life, breath, and blood flowing in your veins. Take the next five or ten minutes after you read this and do … nothing. No lists, no pressure, no curiosity. Just be still.

Just be. 

• On my Facebook page over the past three weeks I’ve posted a daily poetry reading. I’ve selected the poems for their power to inspire or console. Head over here to listen to the latest!

• I’d love to hear which books are distracting, entertaining or consoling you right now! Comment below this post with your recommendations

• I have now run two free online writing retreats and these have gone so well I intend to run more. Sign up to my mailing list via the form below and you’ll be the first to hear when I arrange my next one!

  
  UPDATE: I’ve created a self-study mini-course, Create your Home Writing Retreat: find out more here.

Photo (c) Lorna Fergusson

Find solace in creating your home writing retreat - 7 tips and an invitation

In ‘normal’ life – which with every passing day right now takes on the shape of a mirage – how often have you dreamt of going on a writing retreat? Now, we’re in a time of crisis and there’s no choice: we can’t get away to write. We may have extra time at home, but that is time we didn’t choose to allocate to writing. It’s time where we may be distracted by family concerns and commitments, such as home-schooling our children. It’s also time in which to fret about the future – and fretting isn’t good for the creative muse.

All the same, people are pursuing new interests and spheres of knowledge. We’re rediscovering the pleasures of crafting. We’re learning languages or doing online fitness workouts. It’s quite amazing.

And you? You want to write. So today’s post is all about seeing your home (which at times may be feeling like a prison or a cramped overcrowded madhouse) as a haven. A retreat, in fact.

Here’s 7 tips for setting up your writing retreat at home.

1.  Choose a time. Your commitments are not going away. The dog needs a walk. The elder child needs to be coaxed into doing some schoolwork. The toddler needs to be watched in case they blunder into a sharp corner or decide that shoving a clothes-peg up their nose is the greatest idea in the world. You need to review the shape of your day – a shape that may have changed radically since lockdown. You used to write when the kids were at school. Now you may have to opt to rise before they do, or stay up late after they’ve gone to bed. You may need to bargain: you will give the family time and attention on condition that they give you your ‘me’ time to write. The other thing that’s important in all this is to try to negotiate a time that suits them and suits you, which is about knowing your own ‘best’ times of day in terms of alertness and creative flow.

2.  Choose a place. When we dream of retreats we dream of cottages by the sea or high-ceilinged rooms with a view or serene libraries, hushed as a monastery. Well, not now. You are going to have to claim some territory in that over-crowded land you call home. It may not be ideal, but it is worth selecting a location within the house where you put a flag up saying ‘This is my writing territory’. You may have a loft, a shed, or a spare room. You may not: then you’re going to have to choose your bedroom, or a corner of the living-room or the end of the kitchen table. Once again, it’s clear you’ll need to negotiate because all these places have other claimants too. But I think it is time to be tough, especially if you allow other people in the household to mark out their special places as well. In your chosen location, put down some possessions associated with your writing: your notebook and pens, the book you’re taking notes from, the laptop. These are visual cues to you and to the family that you mean business.

3. Make the special place just that – special. It’s important to see your writing retreat as a pleasure. So make everything about it as joyous or as peaceful as possible. Work in natural or good lighting. Sit on a comfortable supportive seat. Play music in the background, if that helps you. Use scented oils in a diffuser. I use a Tisserand pulse-spot roll-on which has rosemary, mint and bergamot in it. Write in a beautiful notebook where even to touch the paper is a pleasure. Use your favourite pen. Wear a silk kimono if you want to, or your fleecy onesie.

4. Ring-fence your creativity. You need to put up an imaginary barrier to distractions or worries or guilt. This can take the form of an actual sign you put up: Keep Out, or Silence Please (I have a Bodleian Library Silence sign I hang on the doorknob). You can also have a notice or card propped up in front of you with a favourite quote or a few words saying ‘You can do it’ or ‘Stay with it’ or ‘You deserve time to write’ or ‘Your words matter’ or any other encouraging message you want to give yourself. Switch off the distractions of emails and social media notifications. Don’t listen to the news (I am rationing tuning into news bulletins these days). Ask your family members to write down any questions or requests and place them gently just outside your place of creativity: you’ll attend to them later. Wear headphones, not just to shut out extraneous noise but as a visual signal to the others that you are, literally, in your own head-space right now. Have a pad of post-its by you and if any distraction, reminder for your to-do list or anxious thought arises, jot it down there and push it aside, for later. Don’t break the now of your retreat.

5.  Have modest goals. If you’re feeling stressed, don’t add to that stress by being too ambitious. Set a reasonable time-limit and break the big creative task down into smaller, achievable goals. Write a poem. Write a scene or a flash fiction. Feel good about that. Don’t equate sheer volume with value. If you have found the perfect image for how you or your character feels, that writing session has been totally worth it.

6.  Give yourself breaks to rise and walk about the room, or do some stretches. (As I write this, I am actually chuckling at myself, because I am notorious for locking myself into a fixed, hunched position for hours on end. I need to take my own advice!)

7.  Find support and community if aloneness isn’t working for you. Move beyond the family who are on your side but who may not necessarily understand how you’re feeling. Join fellow creatives in co-working sessions. Just knowing that other people are quietly working with you can be a real encouragement and solace. It can also create a sense of accountability, if you have buddies to discuss the session with, before and after, sharing intentions and what was achieved. It’s a paradox that you need to create a kind of ‘bubble’ round yourself for flow to happen, but that bubble isn’t burst in the presence of other creatives.

UPDATE: I’ve now developed a self-study mini-course, Create your Home Writing Retreat. Find out more here.

Invitation: I’ve just run my second free online writing retreat (Sat 4th April), after the first went so well a couple of weeks ago. Attendees have reached out to me afterwards saying how valuable they’ve found these sessions so it’s likely I will host more! If you want to know when I arrange the next one, please sign up for the Fictionfire newsletter via the form below - you can unsubscribe at any time.

Can being ill ever benefit your writing?

You may have noticed this blog has been quiet for a little while. It’s because I’ve been fighting with my body. Or, to be more precise, I’ve been learning not to fight my body.

At the end of last year, I ran into a wall. I had been pushing myself, the way I do. When it complained, I told my body to shut up and keep on going. This is what we are all so guilty of. We live in a society that says do it, have it, keep burning the candle at both ends. Face it, conquer it. Your body is your vehicle. Your body is your servant. Your body is not as important to you as your mind and soul. It is merely the container for those abstract, superior elements. Exhaustion is your default state – but that’s a good thing, isn’t it? It shows you’re putting in effort; in modern culture, striving and effort are gold badges of worth.

Then there comes the day when the body says ‘Enough’. It tells you, ‘I’ve had it with this attitude. I’ve had it with you not taking care of yourself. Of me.’

That rebellion can take the form of an exhaustion so draining there is no functionality left. Illness creates a fog in the mind. That questing, rational brain of yours can no longer dart about. It is lassoed from below and chained to a body that now asserts itself as having primacy.

Or a grumbling, niggling level of illness suddenly grows into something unmistakable. Something that fills the foreground of your awareness and stops you thinking of anything else. The body’s main weapon in this is pain. Pain makes you sit up and pay attention, like nothing else does or can.

This is what happened to me. Two health issues reached crisis point in December. I was told both required operations. One of those operations I have now had (the other isn’t so urgent). Three weeks on from the operation, I look back and take stock of it all. For weeks beforehand, virtually unable to eat and living with the fear of severe pain if I ate the wrong thing, my energy levels and my mental acuity both went through the floor. In the recovery phase, I have had to learn patience. Passivity. A willingness to wait. I am not good at those things!

Regular readers know I’m writing a book on mindset for writers. Oh, the irony! I had to live my own advice. I had to understand that I couldn’t push on with the book and publish as speedily as I had planned. Nor did I want to, once I had accepted the situation. Why? Because, quite simply, the book would not have been good enough. The book wouldn’t have been as rich and considered as I wanted it to be. There is pushing on, there is driving on – and there is the old proverb about more haste, less speed. I would add: more haste, poorer quality.

So how have I used the time of this health crisis? I have learned to sit and think, quietly. I have learned to doze and not feel guilty about that. I have learned to give my body time to rest and heal. It deserves that care and respect.

I am lucky enough to work mainly at home, but my new morning regime has involved staying in bed, reading and writing, in what I call ‘the bed office’. This has been amazingly productive in the last three weeks, as my brain revives and with it the enthusiasm and joy I feel about the book. It was not dead; it was merely sleeping.

I have written parts I would not have written had I not had this crisis. This is the creative paradox of it all.

If you are a writer and your health challenges you, either temporarily or continually, here are some recommendations I hope will help you:

·        Maintain awareness that you are not separate from your body.

·        Imagination is a wonderful thing but it can be two-edged in that we imagine the worst results from our symptoms (even without late-night Google searches!) However, remember that it’s your imagination that gives you the empathy to be a richer writer.

·        Try to turn resistance and resentment into acceptance. We use the ‘fighter’ image so often when it comes to illness, but it isn’t always the appropriate way to look at it.

·        If you can’t write, use the time to read and ponder – you are refilling the creative well.

·        Illness isn’t romantic. You’re not one of the Brontë sisters (and what they endured was pretty hellish). Illness isn’t pretty. But it is human and it brings out human kindness. Accept help from others even if you’re the stubbornly independent type.

·        Do what you can, not what you think you must. Do the minor things and don’t obsess about the central task you really can’t cope with right now.

·        If the work has worth, it won’t go away. It will wait for you. Have faith.

Interested in reading The Unputdownable Writer’s Mindset? Sign up here for advance news and sneak peeks in the run-up to publication.

I am really excited to be talking about mindset during the Women in Publishing online summit March 2-8 2020! Grab your free pass here. This gives you 24 hour access to an incredible range of talks and presentations on all aspects of writing and publishing. Or you can upgrade to the Full Access pass at an early bird rate before March 1.

Collected Fictionfire blogposts 2019

My favourite reads of 2019

Well, hey, it’s that time again: time to look back over the past year. Time to take stock. I’m starting by selecting some of the books I’ve enjoyed most in the past twelve months. My year has as usual involved lots of ‘professional’ reading: searching out examples of writing technique for workshops, books that compare with clients’ work so I can give guidance as to genre and market etc. To be honest, I’ve been feeling that I’ve lost some of the joy of reading fiction. Too often, my editorial brain kicks in and I start analysing, spotting flaws, inconsistencies and repetitions and coming up with ways to improve the structure or the prose. This means that I find myself enjoying non-fiction more and more, as you’ll see from the list.

It also means that some books disappointed me. Some of these were ‘big-hitters’ with huge marketing clout behind them. It wasn’t that they were bad, as such, just that they weren’t quite as mind-blowing as I had hoped they’d be. And two of them, one a heavily-promoted debut, the other a prize-winning historical novel, really could have done with serious editorial advice! The debut started brilliantly, then followed the law of diminishing returns, culminating in an unbelievable ending, sketchily executed. The historical had gorgeous language and detail but neither gripped nor convinced me.

Right, now I’ve got the Scroogey curmudgeonly stuff out of the way (and no, I’m not going to name the books in question!), time for the goodies. These are books that stood out for me as jolly good reads.

Fiction:

I like crime novels and the stand-outs for me were Lisa Jewell’s Watching You and JJ Marsh’s Behind Closed Doors (the first in her Beatrice Stubbs series – strangely, although I’ve read several, I hadn’t yetread the series starter!) and Bad Apples. I love how these books combine crime and mordant wit along with a wonderfully unconventional heroine and her eccentric circle of friends. A bonus is the range of European backdrops for Beatrice’s adventures. Her latest, Black Widow, is on my list for 2020.

Emily St John Mandel: Station Eleven. Now, it took three goes for me to get into this book but once I was in I was really in, increasingly awestruck by the architectural complexity of a post-apocalyptic story full of intelligence, pathos and the celebration of human creativity in a destroyed world. It was gripping, memorable, haunting, clever. One I will definitely re-read.

David Nicholls: One Day. I was late to the party on this one but loved how he captured the different eras of his characters’ lives. Great dialogue, great social observation.

Non-fiction:

Michael Palin’s Erebus is about a famous ship, lost for more than a hundred and fifty years under the icy waters of the Canadian Arctic. It was one of the famous Franklin expedition ships and that’s a subject I’ve been fascinated by for decades so I couldn’t wait to read the book. What was a revelation, though, was the story of that ship before it became part of that doomed expedition: the gallant Erebus had led a life of adventure for many years, including voyaging the stormy seas of the Antarctic. Palin is genuine in his enthusiasm and the deceptively light touch of his narration is a delight.

Nora Ephron’s I Feel Bad about my Neck has all her trademark sharp wit. Wry laughter and recognition throughout. I wish she were still around.

Bernadette Murphy’s Van Gogh’s Ear is an extraordinarily detailed examination of the mystery of the famous event in Arles. She applies the skill of a detective and the familiarity of someone who lives in that region to unpick the legend and get to the bottom of what really went on. I bought this at the ‘Van Gogh in London’ exhibition at Tate Britain, one of the highlights of my year.

Robert Macfarlane’s Underland is an exploration of the hidden places of the world, deep under our feet, deep in the bowels of cities, caves and mines. It is gorgeously written and it is profoundly thoughtful, so much so that it’s one of those books you can only read in instalments because it feels like too much for you to take in. Plus some of his accounts are quite horrifying, if you are at all prone to claustrophobia. I remember when I was 19, crawling on hands and knees through a low passage in the Sterkfontein Caves in South Africa, utterly freaked out by the lack of light and the sense of the weight of rock poised above my skull – this book brought that sensation back to me. But if you want an erudite guide who will show you places you never imagined and take you on a journey of historical and ecological resonance, he’s your man. (Lofoten, Norway, oh wow – echoes of Michelle Paver’s Dark Matter.)

Clare Josa’s Ditching Imposter Syndrome helps you to do just that. It’s inspiring, direct and encouraging, waking you up to how imposter syndrome manifests itself in your life and career. Like her earlier Dare to Dream Bigger, it is one of those books you devour fast, knowing you’ll go back for a slower, thoughtful read after.

I read Robert Poyton’s Do/Pause during my research for my book The Unputdownable Writer’s Mindset (coming out next year - sign up for the wait list here!) It’s a small book but a really wise one, highlighting that in our fast-paced hyper-productive lifestyles we become our to-do lists and lose sight of what truly matters or how to manage our lives. He is ‘not so interested in how you cram more in to your life but in how you get more out.’ At this time of the year, at the solstice, at the season of festivals, this would be a good book to read and remind yourself that sometimes it is important to step off the treadmill.

Good reads yet to come:

Of course, like you, I have a vast to-be-read pile. Here are some I own but didn’t get to this year: Marion Turner’s Chaucer – A European Life; Peter Moore’s Endeavour (another ship book!); Maria Popova’s Figuring – I have followed her amazing Brain Pickings blog for several years and highly recommend it. Pat Barker’s The Silence of the Girls and C.J. Sansom’s Tombland (I was given it last Christmas and cannot believe I haven’t read it yet!) Plus many novels by my writer friends, a whole range of clever, enchanting and gripping fiction queuing up on my Kindle or my bookshelves!

Which were your favourite books of 2019 – I’d love to know! Do please comment below and share your recommendations! I have no single book of the year this year but you can read about my choice last year - the amazing and powerful Smash all the Windows by Jane Davis here.

Lessons Learned on a Solo Writing Retreat

I’ve just returned from a week by the sea. I planned the trip for ages and in the run up to it I often lay awake, heart racing with gleeful anticipation. I had run retreats for other writers before, in St Ives and Oxford, where my focus had been on enabling attendees to access their creative energy and get productive.

This one, though, was all about me. Which made me feel a little guilty. I’m a woman, a mother, a mentor to other writers. I’ve run my literary consultancy for a decade now and before that I was a teacher. I’m a little out of the habit of putting my writing first!

I arrived late on the Saturday evening. I couldn’t get into the rental property at first, which is a whole other story! On Sunday morning, I laid out my papers, notes and laptop. I thought about the six precious days ahead and how this book, already more than half-written, was going to make giant strides forward.

Then, quite simply, I panicked.

So here, at the other end of that precious week, are some lessons I’d like to share with you to help you if you’re considering going away to write: they’ll also remind me when I go on my next solo retreat – and yes, there will definitely be a next one!

1                     If life has got in the way and you haven’t been working on your book for a few weeks or months you can’t expect it to jump and greet you like an old friend the minute you decide to pay it some attention. It’s going to be like my sister’s cat: whenever she’d been on holiday, on her return, instead of rushing to be petted, it would turn its back on her. It would have to be coaxed round. So it is with your abandoned masterpiece. You’re going to have to sweet-talk it. You’re going to have to give it time to thaw out towards you.

2                     Which leads to the next problem. You don’t have all that much time. You don’t feel you can wait for it to warm up naturally, so you try to force the issue. You open up Scrivener. You reread some older bits, dismayed because they feel as if someone else entirely wrote them. You can’t remember what your fine intentions were. You’re all at sea. The panic grows and with it, the paralysis. You go out for a walk, hoping that will help. It doesn’t. Force is not flow. Thus endeth Day 1. Only 5 to go.

3                     You stay indoors the next day. You think that relentless application of the seat of the pants to the chair will help. It doesn’t. You read inspirational work connected to your topic. At first, all that does is spark envy and a sense of inferiority. What were you thinking – that you could contribute an individual vision to this overcrowded subject?

4                     You picked one of the loveliest places in the world for your retreat. You start to think that may have been a Very Bad Idea. You leave the laptop and sit in a chair by the window, watching the light change ceaselessly. The weather is mostly bad. But you see a rainbow plunge its arc into the bay in front of you. You are seduced by beauty. It is a distraction. You might as well have paid for this week as a holiday and let yourself enjoy it as such.

5                     On Day 3 you see another rainbow (you see 10 by the end of the week – is that a sign?). You take more notes from that inspirational book. You start grabbing at post-it notes and jotting down ideas and phrases. Some of those ideas seem to reach out to others, like those films you see of neurons sending little tendrils out at the synapses within the brain. That evening, for the first time, the spirit moves you to write. You write nearly 2000 words in one fell swoop. An immense relief floods you. An immense weight drops away.

6                     On each of the days that are left you write 4000 words. You know other writers would write more. You don’t care. Those words, damned in your brain, have suddenly started flowing and you are in an altered state of consciousness. You don’t edit, you don’t reread, you don’t think too hard – you just let them rise.

7                     You realise that next time you won’t book a week. You will book 10 days or more. You will factor in that you need to depressurise before you can begin to let things flow. Writing is not a switch you flick at will. When you care about it the way you do this book, you must let it rise like the water in a well, slow, silent, inexorable, until it reaches the brink and spills.

8                     You learn that the beauty of the place was not a distraction. It was part of a meditation. It was part of a mental state. You needed it and you will again.

9                     You learn that a balance of intense burst of writing with going for a walk (even if your ears are falling off with the cold) or simply sitting, watching the waves and hearing their rhythm, has worked for you. What’s more it has restored something in you.

10                 On the train home, still writing, you look up and see that 10th rainbow. A gift.

Now I am back home, the next task is not to let the magic evaporate. I still have part of the book to write and life will inevitably get in the way. But I will make steady forward progress, heading for publication in early spring. If you want to hear how I get on and later read special advance excerpts, for this is a book I am writing to help other writers, you can sign up at www.unputdownablewriter.com. And if you want to keep helping me make this book as relevant as possible, please do take my quick anonymous survey: https://forms.gle/rSxHNhMuduvERJdPA

Are you in Europe and interested in learning how to self-edit? I will be teaching a half-day workshop and offering one-to-one consultations at Zurich’s WriteCon on 30 November! Visit www.writecon.ch to see the full programme and speakers and make your booking.

Moonstruck: meeting Buzz Aldrin

Three years ago, I met one of the men who walked on the moon. Today marks the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 landing. Go out this evening and look up. The moon is a symbol of change: a few nights ago it glowed red as our planet cast its shadow on it during a lunar eclipse. It can glow pale silver, it can be dark grey. It can be a sphere, a semi-circle, a sliver – and it can disappear entirely. We cast it in the role of goddess of love and inspiration, haunter of our nightmares, presider over inspired madness. The moon visits us – but half a century ago, we visited it. Humankind, the lover of this mistress of our imaginations, came calling.

So, in honour of that, here’s the post I wrote about the time I met Buzz Aldrin (from my previous blog, Literascribe, in June 2016).

‘I’m sitting in the gallery of the Sheldonian Theatre, one of the most beautiful if not one of the most comfortable venues in Oxford. Looking down across the packed floor, I see a tanned face and a white beard through the glass of a side door. Moments later, in he comes, wearing a beige blouson jacket with embroidered badges on it. He waves like a king and air-punches like a prize-fighter as he makes his way through the applauding crowd.

He’s Buzz Aldrin.

His sassy, witty ‘Mission Director’ Christina Korb conducts the interview, trying to keep him on the straight and narrow, but she has trouble managing the blurted reminiscences and anecdotes. The man is bursting with things to tell us. He’s opinionated, forceful, waving be-ringed hands, talking about the Omega watch he wore on the outside of his spacesuit because it’s kinda hard to see the time otherwise.

I read Andrew Smith’s fascinating book Moondust: In Search of the Men Who Fell to Earth several years ago, struck by the poignant reason for its composition. At that time, only nine men were still alive who had walked on the surface of the moon, so he set about interviewing them while he could.

Well, there’s fewer than nine now. That is why several hundred people have queued in the chill rain outside and will later queue for the best part of an hour to get their books signed. I’m one of them. For a moment, we’re in contact with history, with what now seems a lost idealistic era. I grew up with the sense that space held all potential. I’d read Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Martian and Venusian series. I’d read Isaac Asimov and Arthur C. Clarke and Ray Bradbury. The stars, the planets and the dear old moon itself held out dreams of adventure and fulfilment.

So tonight we lap up the bombast and the showboating, enjoy the clearly oft-repeated wisecracks, the whole display of it all, because although this man is 86 now he is more alive than most we’ll ever meet and this man walked on the moon! He wears a t-shirt saying ‘Get your ass to Mars’ and is passionate about sending humans there, saying that a human can do in a week what took Spirit and Rover five years. He describes his spacewalk, saying he ‘wanted to putt putt putt around like George Clooney in Gravity.’ He says yes, the Russians put Sputnik up there but ‘if you put up a dumb satellite you don’t give it a parade and everybody loves a parade!’ What’s more, they put a dog in orbit and left it there – ‘at least we brought our monkey back.’ He expresses regret at the loss of Neil Armstrong. He talks of his family and his sense of destiny: his mother was Marion Moon and his father knew the Wright brothers. Yup, it was all meant.

When I eventually reach the head of the queue and he signs my copy of No Dream is Too High, I burble something about looking up at the moon from a Scottish garden when I was a little girl, amazed to think he was up there. ‘My mother came from Edinboro…’ he smiles and I pass on, past the selfie-taking crowd. Outside the Sheldonian I wish the clouds would part and I could see the old man’s stamping ground.

I remember another night, years ago, when I looked at the moon and it gave me an idea for a story of ‘something strange, spectacular and out of this world.’ This idea grew into a children’s book, Hinterland, which made it to the shortlist of a significant prize for unpublished novels. I remember the magic of writing that story, of describing grey dust and a terraced crater like an amphitheatre and ‘hanging like a jewel against the dense black void, with fat blue oceans and swirling white clouds’, our planet. And I think to myself, I need to rediscover what that story meant to me and maybe, just maybe, roll it out onto the launchpad once more and send it into the ether myself.

So thank you, Buzz.’

Three years on, after a week of TV programmes celebrating the moon landing mission, what are my thoughts on re-reading this post? The moon missions and the space programmes still speak to us of heroism, imagination, persistence, resilience, and all the power of human aspiration. We are in awe of the courage of the astronauts. We are in awe at the sight of the mighty and beautiful Saturn V thundering into the sky, fuel roaring and crackling as it burns its way into the heavens. This is wonderful. Fifty years on, it is still heart-stoppingly wonderful.

Yet we live on a riven planet, despairing as prejudice and the meaner aspects of human nature hold sway. Our planet is in more danger than ever before – and that is down to us. No stray asteroid or conquering alien race threatens us: we threaten ourselves.

Buzz and his like remind us that even in imperfection, in in-fighting and rivalry, in near-misses and tragic accidents, in times when it doesn’t seem worthwhile to believe in any ideal at all, that vision and a sense of human destiny still matter.

Keep going out there and looking up. Keep dreaming. Keep asking for the moon. And the stars. And everything we as humans are capable of. Keep trusting we can be the best we can be. (And by the way, that doesn’t mean going back to the moon simply to wrest the mineral riches out of it. I would rather we never went back than that we went back as raiders and exploiters. We have done enough of that on our own sublunary globe.)

As for Hinterland? Still waiting on the launchpad – but that doesn’t mean it won’t blast off sometime! In the meantime, the next book on my personal launchpad is The Unputdownable Writer’s Mindset. Because writers dream and take their own kind of risks; they need to believe those risks are worth taking. Even if they’re not flying to the moon.

Visit www.theunputdownablewriter.com to sign up for advance news and sneak peeks ahead of publication.

Paying tribute to Barbara Large

Many years ago, I arrived in the beautiful and ancient city of Winchester, carrying a novel I had nearly completed. I was wrestling with guilt because for the first time, I had left my two young children with their father, so that I could have a couple of days to myself. I had set off on a bold adventure: I was attending what was then known as the Winchester Writers’ Conference, an annual event attended by hundreds of writers from all over the world. 

Shortly after my arrival, a slender dark-haired woman with a Canadian accent came to chat with me. Back in the days when there was scarcely any internet and certainly no Facebook groups for writers, we were used to working in isolation. I had come seeking information but more than that, I was looking for connection. I didn’t really understand at the time just how significant those connections were going to be and that meeting Barbara Large MBE, the conference’s founder and Director, was going to change my life.  

Barbara, who died in March of this year, was an extraordinary person. Her will and energy were phenomenal. I was always in awe of her dedication and her genuine concern that no writer should feel alone or adrift in the literary world. She welcomed and encouraged every single delegate and she celebrated the success of conference attendees with as much pleasure as if that success was her own. Even when she retired in 2013 after 34 years of presiding over the conference, she kept on reaching out to writers and running her own Creative Words Matter courses, with the help of Adrienne Dines and Sarah Mussi. At last year’s conference she was physically frail but her will undaunted, her joy undimmed. Her indomitable spirit was still an example to us all. 

Barbara’s favourite expression, when she made her annual welcoming address and when she drew each conference to its close, was to call us her ‘family of writers’. She listened, sympathised, and encouraged. She drew us together, establishing connections both personal and professional. 

When I was at last a published author, I started a whole new relationship with Barbara. She first invited me to give a talk at the conference and then to run workshops and give one-to-ones. Winchester became an annual feature in my working calendar. I ran some weekend workshops for her in Shawford at other times of the year. Barbara opened up a whole new career for me as a creative writing teacher and editor, culminating in my setting up Fictionfire Literary Consultancy ten years ago. 

Over the more than two decades I have been attending what is now the Winchester Writers’ Festival I have made friends with so many fellow writers – a couple of whom I met that very first year. It all comes down to that first tentative visit, where Barbara made me welcome and made me feel seen and understood. 

This year’s Winchester Writers’ Festival starts on the 14th June and you have until the 10th to book your place. I won’t be teaching there this year but I will be raising a glass to Barbara and all she stood for: an unselfish commitment to sharing knowledge and experience, a dedication to being an encouraging voice, cheerleader and guide. I’ll be sending my good wishes to everyone there this year.

We writers are far less alone than we used to be, thanks to the internet. We know more about the world of publishing than we used to do. We are able to self-publish in a way we couldn’t before. We can research agents, attend events online and offline. We are connected. 

But still in the wee small hours we may be full of doubt about the value of our work. We may feel alone with those doubts and wonder if we will ever be able to complete that book or find a publisher. 

Barbara would say to you: ‘Yes, you can! You’re not alone! You are part of the wonderful family of writers – welcome!’ And she’d go on to regale you with the famous anecdotes of the delegate lost in the nearby cemetery and the pink nightdress on the bed of one male delegate’s room … 

I hope that in your writing life you find true guides and cheerleaders. Seize every opportunity to attend events where you may meet them – you never know where it may lead!

You can read some of my blogposts about the conference on Literascribe, my previous blog. Just follow the tags in the sidebar - Winchester Writers’ Conference and Winchester Writers’ Festival.

I will be teaching on Oxford University’s OUSSA summer school programme and the Creative Writing Summer School at Exeter College as usual this year.

I’m also working on my new book, The Unputdownable Writer’s Mindset - visit www.theunputdownablewriter.com to sign up for advance news and sneak peeks ahead of publication in the autumn.