Guest and Debut Author Sarah Painter talks to Strictly Writing about her book 'The Language of Spells'

As part of her whistle-stop blog tour promoting her debut novel, 'The Language of Spells' which was released yesterday, author Sarah Painter settles in the Strictly Station with a nice cup of tea and a cream cake and tells us a bit more about herself and her book.

Welcome, Sarah.  Can you tell us what 'The Language of Spells' is about and how the story came to you?

It’s about going home, family secrets, and second chances. With added magic. And kissing. Here’s the blurb:

When you are ready, seek, and you shall find. It is your gift.

Gwen Harper left Pendleford thirteen years ago and hasn’t looked back. Until an inheritance throws her into the mystical world she thought she’d escaped. Confronted with her great-aunt’s legacy Gwen must finally face up to her past.

The magic she has long tried to suppress is back with a vengeance but gift or burden, for Gwen, it always spells trouble. She has to stay – she has nowhere else to go – but how can she find her place in the town that drove her out after branding her a witch…?

The story started (as mine always seem to) with a character's voice (Gwen’s mysterious great aunt Iris) in my head that stopped me in my tracks and made me want to write it down.

How was your journey to publication?

I've been very lucky to get lots of encouragement along the way, but it's been a long road… I got an agent with my second book and had the 'close but no cigar' experience with publishers. Rather than seeing this as an achievement (positive thinking!),  I responded with a massive crisis of confidence. I did a masters in creative writing and, after parting company with my agent and completing my dissertation, I decided to write a 'fun' book. Something to cheer myself up after a year of trying to write gloomy literary fiction for my degree. Then I spent what felt like a lifetime (a few months) subbing to agents. I had lots of interest - requests for the full manuscripts and rewrites and exciting phone calls - but they all ended with 'close but not quite'. By the time Sallyanne rang me, I actually didn't realise she was offering to take me on and had to check! After working with me on revisions, Sallyanne subbed it to publishers and secured the deal with Carina UK. Phew!

How important do you consider the support of family/friends?

Vitally so! As you can tell if you waded through my last response, I had a lot of rejection and a lot of near misses. There were plenty of dark moments when I thought that I should stop torturing myself with the submission process and take up something I could actually succeed at. I would’ve given up many times over if it wasn't for the support and encouragement of my writer friends (most of whom I met on Write Words, many moons ago) and my lovely family.

We always ask this because we ALWAYS want to know! What advice would you give to any unpublished writers today?

To write from your heart, work on your craft, and to keep going. Also, get yourself a support network of writer friends. You can swap critiques and cheerlead each other through the tough times. Try online forums, blogs, Twitter, or, if you’re less of a scaredy-cat than me, a local ‘real life’ group.

What's your next book going to be about/ have you already begun  writing it?

I'm working on the sequel to The Language of Spells. My publishers asked if I would write another book set in the same world and of course I said ‘yes’. After pinching myself very hard to make sure I wasn’t dreaming, that is!  

You can find Sarah's book here: 'The Language of Spells'

The next stop on Sarah's book tour is at Novelicious and she'll be there on Saturday 1st June. That's tomorrow!

Thanks for joining us at Strictly Writing, Sarah.  Good luck with the book, the tour and the next book.  We're sure we'll be seeing a lot more of you in the future!

Guest Post: Justin Carroll talks about the novella

 Novellas - Too Long, Too Short, or Just Right?

When I was pimping my novella, Everything’s Cool, I received similar responses from a number of agents, who stated that, “there’s no market for novellas.” Novellas aren’t vogue; their odd length means that, like the three bears’, these offerings of literary porridge just aren’t hot enough, or cool enough.

 

There’s no doubt that the novella has an interesting relationship with the literary world. Agents shy away from those works of 20,000-40,000ish words, decrying them as unpublishable. Publishers, meanwhile, have a strange love/hate affair with them – a decent profit per unit, but a marketing quandary: How to market something without using the stigmatized word, “novella”. 

Then there are those writers who scoff at the novella, considering it a rambling short story or a novel that ran out of steam, both being the product of a sub-par creative force.  

But, some writers don’t take the above view. Ian McEwan, author of the Booker shortlisted novella, On Chesil Beach, recently wrote that the novella is “the perfect form of prose fiction”. Before him, other writers had embraced the novella – in recent years, Kurt Vonnegut and Ray Bradbury to name but two. Or, further back, we see Henry James, Kafka, Steinbeck, or the school perennial, Joseph Conrad and The Heart of Darkness. 

For these writers, among numerous others, the novella isn’t a failed novel or the product of an inability to edit. In a novella, words cannot run riot; much like a short story, every word is precious, every scene needs to be carefully considered with an economy of language and description. There’s an urgency, a tension to novellas that I personally rarely find in a novel, unless it is barely longer than a novella itself – a shining example being Iain Banks’s The Wasp Factory.

And for readers? I’ve met very few who would cry out in joy at the prospect of a novella any more than they would clap excitedly at the prospect of a two-thousand page saga.

 

Justin Carroll

But, what really matters is not the length or identifier, it’s the story.  Story drives and guides the novella like no other medium. There’s no time for rambling or self-indulgence. It’s not a literary morsel, a few thousand words to whet the appetite but leave the reader wanting. It’s a tight story, driven by carefully created characters and plots, that allows just enough space for them to breathe and develop in a way that a short story often cannot. There’s something about the novella, about the tightness and self-contained nature of it that, like a good short story, ends precisely when it means to. By necessity the reader has to dive in and lose him- or herself. And, to have one’s readers lose themselves in one’s world is what every writer aspires to, surely?  

I’m not saying that the novella is ‘the perfect form’, and I’m certainly not saying that I will only write novellas. However, I do strongly believe that the novella is as valid a choice for storytelling as any other. Arguably, it is a better way to tell a story than a rambling epic or an unsatisfying short story.  And, if your story reaches its natural conclusion at a mere 30,000 words or so (42,000 in my case), don’t try and fill it out unnecessarily. Revel in the fact that you have crafted a story that is the length it needs to be. Be proud that you have joined the novella alumni, those writers who have wrestled with a taxing medium and crafted a story that is enjoyable and rewarding to read.

Then, let the readers decide: Unpublishable, unmarketable, bastard offspring of the novel and the short story? Or a work of fiction that, like that third bowl of porridge, is just right. 

 

You can buy Everything's Cool here. Follow Justin via his website or on Twitter (@writerjustinc)

Joanna Thomas: the pleasures and pains of blogging

I started blogging just after my 30^th birthday, as part of a bucket-list style challenge to try out 30 brand new experiences before turning 31. Number one on the list was to start a blog, and the blog was to be about my journey through the challenges. You see what I did there? Wiped one challenge off the list with little more than half an hour’s worth of fiddling about with Blogger. Easy-peasy.

Except, blogging about my experiences has turned-out to be as important, challenging and rewarding as each of the other Thirty@30 experiences themselves. Writing the perfect piece takes me hours. I agonise over every word just as I agonise over the words in my novel. I pour my heart and soul into each blog, and worry as I send it, defenceless, into the world. I Facebook and Tweet my posts with the same anxious pride that others reserve for pictures of their babies. I hope that people are going to read, like and share them, and am hurt when some of my dearest, closest friends seem to ignore them. Conversely, I am elated when people share their own stories, and give me inspiration for new challenges. I am overwhelmed by the support of people I don’t even know, and, of course, many that I do. Putting your writing out into the world makes you vulnerable, but I’ve found that even swinging on a trapeze doesn’t match the exhilaration of hearing that people are moved, touched, or interested by my words. A particular highlight was being re-tweeted by the wondrous and bonkers Amanda Palmer. That piece received 600 page views in 24 hours, a huge deal for me.

My writing process for the blogs is completely different to my efforts at fiction. I have discovered a liberating sense of urgency around penning my posts, because I can’t wait to get them online. I’ll stay up until 3am tapping away at my keyboard, knowing that there’s going to be some fairly instant gratification once I’m done. The same can definitely not be said for my novel, which I have been working on for five years and which I fear has become stale. I keep worrying at it, prodding old wounds, burying my head in my hands at the exhausting hopelessness of it. For all that I agonise over my blogs, I rarely start writing one without finishing it, which I think and hope keeps them fresh. If only I could do that with my novel! Sometimes, of course, the blogs are too raw, and I have to go back and make tiny tweaks when I think no one’s looking. It’s worth it for the breathless excitement of typing straight into Blogger and hitting the ‘Publish’ button.

Blogger and writer Joanna Thomas

 

For all the differences in the process, blogging has taught me that good non-fiction, just like good fiction, is all about storytelling. If you give readers a story arc and a healthy dose of dramatic tension, humour and emotion, they’ll go with you, and forgive the raw moments or rough patches. Fortunately that’s something I find relatively easy to do when writing about my challenges, since each one implies a mini-journey for our hapless but bloody-minded heroine, aka me.

As I write these words I’m seven months into a twelve month challenge, and still have lots more Thirty@30 experiences waiting to be discovered, enjoyed (or not!) and written about. And whatever happens once the challenge ends, I know that blogging will forevermore be a part of how I express myself through words. Now, back to that pesky plot hole in chapter four…

Visit my blog: Thirty@30

Follow me on Twitter: @JoannaJosefina

Joanna Thomas is a London-based writer with a day-job as managing editor of a legal publishing company. She blogs, writes poetry, and is editing (and re-editing) her first novel. She is also a freelance fiction editor.

Guest post: Ian Mayor on writing computer games

Hi. My name’s Ian Mayor I’m a writer and I love stories.  

 

Games writer Ian Mayor

 

Although I dabble in comic book writing, screenwriting, copy and prose; for about ten years now I’ve spent my weekdays as a computer games designer and writer (a role that’s often called “Narrative Designer”).

Narrative design is an odd gig but an increasingly common one, no two games writers I know of got there the same way. Here’s my story.  

In a prior life I wanted to be a screenwriter. After a degree in Film and Television Production at Manchester Metropolitan University I buzzed around the North West’s amatuer filmmaking scene (which involved a lot of bars) before spending a couple of years writing and directing educational films. If you’ve ever seen the memorable “Manual handling and lifting techniques” by Bolton College Consultancy Services I wrote the opening line “Most accidents in the workplace are due to improper manual handling and lifting techniques”. Around that time I realised that I wasn’t truly pursuing my dream and that a change of day job might be in order. I cold-called a games studio in Warwickshire, who, unbeknownst to me, had recently advertised for a freelance writer.  

Back then, (December 2000, yeesh) computer games seemed like an odd step for someone with serious writing ambition. This was the Playstation era, games were everywhere and I was amongst the first generation who had grown up playing them. Although the medium was being explored as a venue for storytelling, few outside the industry could see the potential or value in interactive narrative. This was never a problem for me. 

Unlike my outgoing, sporty siblings I’d grown up bookish, creative and a bit oversensitive about about it all. I drew, I acted, I obsessed over Batman comics and when at age 8 my brother and I got a 16K ZX Spectrum for Christmas, I played games.  

Gaming requires a greater investment of imagination than you probably expect. Brace for tangent.  

In his book “Understand Comics”; cartoonist Scott McCloud wrote about “closure”, a functions of the human brain which helps us make sense of the world. Although he does it in a very different way, I’ll Illustrate the concept thusly. 

You enter a room with a smashed window, a ball is on the floor surrounded by broken glass.

Think, for a second, about what occurred in that room at some point in the past. Now, you’ve just done a complex thing, effortlessly. You’ve made a story, filled in the gaps with your own knowledge of how the world works and solved the simple “whodunnit” of how the room got in that state.

I’ll bet you did more than that, tell me... what did the room look like? was it day or night? I’m cheating a little, you filled in those gaps as you just read them. Of course, as readers we do this all the time but we rarely think about the mechanics of it, closure is powerful stuff.

Although you use this same function playing current games, back in ‘82 when your avatar could be a small group of pixels allegedly depicting a spaceman your brain worked overtime to make sense of the game. 

Due largely to technical limitations games of the 80’s were usually light on context, “story” was often printed on the cassette case inlay that the game came in (which you wouldn’t have because you’d pirated the game off a school friend). But to me, and many like me, it made no difference, there were stories in games before anyone put them there.  

We all love stories and will invent them where they don’t exist. In what’s left unsaid in prose, between the panels of comic books, the edits in film and in the abstractions of gaming.  

To me, this says something universal about storytelling which everyone who crafts stories should be conscious of. A writer’s greatest tool is not her mastery of words or his understanding of structure, it is the readers/viewers/players mind. Your chosen medium is just a method of delivery. 

And so, nearly twelve years after that first writing job, six weeks in a barn-house office near Hatton Wood, I’m still in games. The writing led to a full time design position with the same company and (a brief break aside) the rest of my professional life.  

Games is still a young medium and an exciting one, games developers have produced some amazing stories, and though I concede we’re yet to deliver a narrative masterpiece, I believe it’s coming.

 Ian Mayor is a Designer and Narrative Designer for Reflections of Ubisoft Studio, he lives in Newcastle Upon Tyne with his wife and cats and you can follow him on Twitter @IanMayor where he’s more likely talking about comic books and risotto.

Marketing the Intangible - Chris Chalmers

Marketing the Intangible. Or How I Unleashed My E-novel on a Largely Indifferent World.

If anyone ought to have an inkling of how to sell something that isn’t actually there, it’s me. I’ve spent a fair few of my 20-odd years as an advertising copywriter selling mortgages, pet insurance, mobile phone tariffs and a dozen other things that don’t, in any physical sense, exist. And isn’t that also the case with an e-book? Don’t be fooled by that sexy little thumbnail on Amazon – beyond the boundaries of your digitally generated Kindle screen, there’s nothing there at all...

Chris Chalmers, author of Five to One

I was thrilled to be published, of course – it had been a long old slog, as it is for most of us. But when I heard that Five To One had won a debut novel comp run by a digital publisher and was going to see e-print at last, there was no stopping that irksome voice at the back of my head from popping a few champagne bubbles with the words:  Oh, well you’ll not be signing any copies of that then...

It’s true, e-publication comes with one or two drawbacks that the print-endowed are spared... Elderly relatives ask you endlessly when your book’s out in paperback... There’s no wobbly stack of copies to manoeuvre an hour early into readings, so you can bag the best spot on the table... And as you sound out your local bookshop for a little light publicity, they look at you like you’ve just suggested squatting in their window and gnawing on the ankle of a tethered E. L. James. (On second thoughts, they’d probably go for that on grounds of brand-appropriateness – hers, not mine...)

So how do you publicise an e-book? Answer: You take stock of what you’ve got and you run with it.

Non-fiction’s easier, obviously. Write a book about Ju Jitsu and, a few clicks on from Google, you’ve got the email address of every club in the UK and beyond.  With fiction, it’s harder to find your audience. But, as a clever publishing friend of mine pointed out, my novel had one thing going for it: location, location, location... Five To One is set in London SW4, and it traces the path of four lives that converge when a helicopter crashes on Clapham Common at 12.55 on a sunny afternoon.

Aha, Clapham Common! Kindle-Central if ever there was one...

Back on Google and four days later I’m taking delivery of 5,000 full colour, double sided postcards, just perfect for pushing through letterboxes and signing for adoring fans. Admittedly the latter hasn’t happened much, and even the former was stymied by the approximately 30% of doors in Clapham South that sport that very un-sporting NO JUNK MAIL sticker (...Junk? My book? How very dare they...) It’s taken three, day-long expeditions – two sunny, one sodden – but nearly all have now been distributed round those chi-chi streets fringing the famous  Common. How my pavement pounding has translated in terms of sales I don’t know for sure, but I did notice a definite blip in the Amazon rankings within a day or two of each door-drop.

On top of that, I’ve inveigled myself into readings and onto author panels at venues as diverse as the Royal Festival Hall, The Hootenanny pub in Brixton and The Ivy Club in WC2. I’ve had an article in Writing Magazine (where I came across the fateful competition in the first place; hey, it may look like Woman’s Realm but it’s all good stuff...) I’m now on my fourth local radio interview, and continuing to blog, tweet and FB myself into the consciousness of as many people as possible. That said, the social media thing is one area I don’t feel I’ve mastered yet. I’m like a wasp trapped in a jam jar, making lots of noise that I’m not convinced is projecting very far.

And naturally I’ve taken gratuitous advantage of my advertising roots, by touting a 30 minute presentation round agencies called Published at Last – a Tale of 9 Years, 4 Books and the Small Matter of an E-revolution. Ad agencies like a bit of show-and-tell with their lunch on vaguely arty topics from the outside world (it makes them feel less guilty) and, like everything else, it’s a useful for getting the word out... It’s also furnished me with another nifty publicity idea courtesy of a member of the audience – namely, slipping my Five To One postcard into bookshop copies of John Lanchester’s Clapham-set Capital.

I haven’t had the bottle to do it yet, but it’s a good wheeze. And any other suggestions welcome...

Five to One, by Chris Chalmers

About the writer:

Chris Chalmers arrived unexpectedly following a Beatles' concert at Southport Floral Hall when his mum was induced by the stomping. He's travelled to 40 countries, swum with iguanas and proposed marriage in front of 60 elephants. He was also once the understudy on Mastermind (sadly, no one tripped on the green room stairs). His first novel, Five To One is now available on Amazon and he’s currently looking for a home for the next one. More information at www.chrischalmers.net.

Author Q&A - YA Author Philip Webb

I'm delighted that Philip Webb, author of the hugely entertaining YA novel Six Days, agreed to do a Q&A for Strictly Writing. Over to you, Philip...

Philip Webb's debut novel, Six Days

Did you consciously set out to write for the YA market, or was that just the way the story developed?
It was a conscious decision to write for a YA readership. Some of my favourite books are for teenagers, like The Owl Service by Alan Garner, but also I think it's fun and challenging to write for this audience. I wanted to write a fast-paced adventure - something in the tradition of ripping yarns like Treasure Island.

Your characters speak in a very distinctive style: was that tough to come up with, and to keep up?
The voice of Cass came first, before the setting, before the plot. Her voice is something that I developed from the way different generations of women in my family speak, so it was familiar and for that reason it was relatively easy to create. Once I started writing in Cass's voice it started to get a life of its own and that really helped me to explore the plot. I would throw Cass in a certain situation and know how she would react and how she would describe it. For me, the most important thing to get right is the voice - without it, the story feels forced and hard to visualise.

One of the things I loved about Six Days is it was set in avery recognisable London, when so much dystopian fiction is either American or set in an unidentified future country. How important was the setting to you while writing?
It was really important to set it somewhere I knew well. The story is fantastical in places with alien spacecraft and Terminator-type warriors and so-on, so setting the story in a London that readers can recognise helped to ground it a bit. Also, I think it helps make it more believable when the setting is real. Creating a fantasy world from scratch is very demanding and hard to pull off, and it requires patience from the reader to learn about places and customs etc, so using an existing city is a kind of short-cut. It was great fun to set some of the key action in places I know and love like the British Museum - to visualise how these places have changed in the future...

Your novel has a very strong, engaging female protagonist.Why do you think there is a plethora of strong female characters in YA fiction when, it could be argued, there is a dearth of them in other genres?
Yes, there's a trend of strong female roles in YA, but also in sci-fi as a genre - Katniss in The Hunger Games is perhaps the latest in a long line of ass-kicking girls like Hit-Girl in Kick-Ass, Ripley in Alien and Molly, the assassin for hire in Necromancer. I agree that there aren't so many in other genres and I don't know why - I think these characters often work because their struggles in male-dominated situations are what makes them interesting.

Do you tend to plot things out in advance, or do you prefer to see where the story goes?
I tend not to plot in advance. I think it would make my life easier in the long run but I find it impossible to do! I start with a character and a setting and a problem and develop from there. I have a really vague idea of things I want to happen along the way, and maybe an ending, but the ending ends up changing anyway! Plotting in advance would kill it off for me, although I'm sure it would save a lot of dead-ends and wrong turns. I think it's more fun as a writer if you explore the world as you go along (as the reader will). Also, I think the actual writing is what generates ideas going forward, and if you have a rigorous map of the plot you'll be less open to that. But I guess there are no set methods - it's just whatever works for the writer.

Who are your favourite YA writers?
Loads! Alan Garner, Philip Reeve, Philip Pullman, David Almond, Suzanne Collins. Recently, I really enjoyed My Sister Lives On The Mantlepiece by Annabel Pitcher. Also, I'm reading White Darkness by Geraldine McCaughrean which is fantastic.

What’s your advice for writers wanting to target the YA market?
Pacing is pretty key - YA readers aren't forgiving of slow passages where not much happens! Young readers are hungry for worlds and stories that take them out of their lives a bit. In Six Days, the children have the run of an empty ruined London - that freedom is something you yearn for as a teenager. When I think back to what I read as a teenager, I can remember the sheer excitement of discovering reading and the doors it unlocked - it's a magical time that's hard to recreate as an adult, no matter how much I enjoy reading now, but that's what I'm aiming for.

What’s next for Philip Webb?
I'm writing another YA novel - not a sequel to Six Days, something new. It should be out next year. I can't say any more than that!