Guest Blog by Josa Young - A Passion for Writing

Working is writing for me. Nothing else seems quite like work, and I love working and achieving something as many days in the month as possible. When I was trapped in a corporate nightmare a few years ago, I would feel grubby and unfulfilled at the end of most days. The only thing I was allowed to write were reports that circulated internally like bored goldfish in an algae-infested tank. Other people in my 'team' did nothing at all as far as I could tell except a bizarre activity called management, that involved telling other people what to do - but only when you had no idea how to do it yourself. I could have taken the piss and written a novel and no one would have noticed, but that would have made me feel even grubbier.

When I was young, physically my writing life was words on paper spooling out of the top of the typewriter with a ting at the end of every line. Then I saw films from the US that featured word processors and I longed and longed for one of those. In the mid-1980s I got an Amstrad, and then the words would appear on a screen, where they could be edited. I did long to write fiction, and tried some short stories - had one published in a magazine when I was at Cambridge (sub Switch Bitch) and another very nearly made it onto Radio 4.

I earned my living as a consumer journalist, having been a Vogue Talent Contest winner while in my last year reading English at Cambridge. When my children started arriving I began to specialise in maternity leave cover at senior levels in magazines and newspapers. Deputy editor of Elle Decoration;. Commissioning editor on the Times Weekend section for instance. Very little time to write, but I still was doing something that resembled what I loved.

My mother died when I had two small children. I needed to get away, so I went on an Arvon course taught by the glorious Beryl Bainbridge, and Nicholas Shakespeare (who had been at Cambridge at the same time as me, and told me I had verbal diarrhoea when I wrote very fast). I wrote and wrote. It was raw and rather personal and not very good. But it made me feel better. Beryl was very encouraging and said I must get on with a novel. Something snapped inside me and I felt freed to do fiction at last. I bought a portable word processor (precursor of the laptop). While features writing at Slimming magazine, a plot came to me. And as soon as the contract ended, I started bashing away, five days a week during office hours for five weeks until I was once again engulfed in magazine land. The time flew, the words flew out of my fingers. My characters did all kinds of things, including flying. It was the first version of One Apple Tasted.

When I had finished, I chucked it all on the floor and shuffled it into some kind of order. I then bumped into a family friend, who offered to be my agent. I was so excited. Which is why I am not so excited now. As you can tell by the publication date, One Apple Tasted was a long time in a bottom drawer. I have written other bits of things since, but the rejection letters gave me a bad case of block. Along with the pram in the hall and all the chaos of a life lived. I need to get on with the next novel, Sail Upon the Land. It is in my head and on bits of paper, and needs to come together through the racing fingers once again.

My message to all aspiring writers is, it is passion communicated that works for readers. Doesn't matter what kind of passion as long as the feeling is there. Your readers will connect with your passion. Go for it. I hope you get there quicker than I did.

Do visit Josa's website for more information about her and One Apple Tasted.

Author Portrait courtesy of Christian Cunningham

Virtually Friends?

Hello, everyone! And how are you today? Had a good breakfast? Got the kids to school? Humoured your boss or already been down the gym to stretch and tone? Come on then, let’s get on with the writing day. Let’s celebrate each other’s literary successes, let’s mentally hold each other’s tired typing hand. Because that’s what we do, here on the net – regardless of our identity away from the screen, regardless of whether we stutter or dress weird or laugh like a donkey on dope. We stand firm, side by side. We’re in this game together, arms open wide.

Heh, heh! It’s a fickle community, I find on the web. Best buddies come and go – some stay in touch, even meet up with us, in the flesh. But others fall by the wayside because we’ve moved on and they haven’t or because they’ve found success first.

During my years mingling in on-line writing communities, I’ve found there are various types of virtual friends:

1) Those you email every day – every few hours! – to pour out your woes which are usually submission/writers’ block related, but occasionally to do with the real world. Messages are signed off with kisses and there are usually LOLs. They keep us going through the ups and downs. Until one day, the affair fizzles out - normally because one of us has got a deal and the other, er, hasn’t. That’s when we both find a new buddy who’ll really understand. It’s ta ta for now. Thanks for everything. If we remember, we'll buy each other's books when they come out.

2) Those that are useful to know – for their knowledge, for their clinical kiss-free advice and contacts. We are both networkers and keep each other posted with our submission progress, whilst knowing this is partly to pick up any tips or agent news. Emails are less frequent and strictly to do with writing. There are no smiley faces, but we pass on the occasional link to a new agent’s website - once we’ve submitted our own work, of course.

3) Similar to number 2, but those we see as mentors. We are in awe and feel genuine warmth for their help. We don’t like to pester but know we can rely on them for carefully worded advice and timely pick-me-ups. We wonder what they get in return and hope, one day, we’ll be in a position to know, if someone comes to us for help.

4) Banter buddies – they are some of the best! If we must, we’ll talk seriously about the craft, but most of our time is spent in forums, giggling over our latest purple sex scene or recommending a new chocolate bar. Lots of smiley faces and kisses, lots of laughs. And lots of virtual cakes and wine if any agent dares turn us down!

5) Genuine friends, whom, if we’re lucky, we get to meet in real life, who ‘get’ our real personality, who like us regardless of whether we are a writer or not. I’ve met up with authors before and wish circumstances – and location – allowed me to more often. Not that I’m advocating meeting up with any old bod. Never do it alone - or at night time. Treat it like a blind date!

So there you have it – do you recognize yourself? What kind of friends have you made from writers’ forums? I hope some of them are on this blog:)

Lyrics and poetry

I love an alliterative band and indeed a group which pays so much attention to what they're saying. Don't give me any of this mind-numbing Cascada or Basshunter nonsense, give me a band which has something of value to say in its lyrics. Give me Fleet Foxes.

The band is performing tonight (Monday, September 7) at the fabulous Vicar Street venue in Dublin and I was of the few (700 or so) who managed to scramble onto the Ticketmaster website a few months ago in a desperate race to get tickets once the clock struck 9am. The Seattle-ites are a breath of fresh air in today's music, even if they are influenced by the likes of the Beach Boys, Fairport Convention and My Morning Jacket. They have a unique talent for writing lyrics which are powerful and beautiful, yet simple, and all credit goes to the band members – Robin Pecknold, Skye Skjelset, J Tillman, Casey Wescott and Christian Wargo.

Song lyrics, and poetry and prose, are in my estimation, inseparable twins. Some say the music makes the lyrics more beautiful. Any band will tell you that their song lyrics are not expected to stand on their own. When stripped of their musical accompaniment, some might say the words when read aloud, seem a little 'flat'. A similar problem occurs too, in that so-called 'modern 'and 'post-modern' poetry would sound odd set to music.

I once read an article which claimed the recording artist Morrissey is a poet as great as Philip Larkin, the only difference being that Morrissey wrote his song lyrics to fit the melody, and Larkin wrote his poetry to fit metre.

Fleet Foxes' song White Winter Hymnal, while refreshing and hauntingly beautiful with a video to match, has one simple line. To paraphrase, the protagonist is following a pack who are described as being 'swallowed in their coats' and they have red scarves tied around their throats to stop their heads from falling in the snow. Then the protagonist turns round and sees Michael falling and turning the snow red like strawberries in summertime.

It was only last year the checked shirt-clad band released its self-titled album with the music, hushed, wistful, melodic, harking back to the days of yore. It is a gem which should be a listening priority for any self-respecting music fan. The choral harmonies of Crosby, Stills and Nash complement the lyrics, and instead of enjoying their poetry bare, in the stripped sense, you get double for your money here.

Their songs 'Ragged Wood', 'Mykonos', and 'Blue Ridge Mountains' can all stand alone as poems, but when you add the music to these pearls they become simply outstanding. In 'He Doesn't Know Why' the lyrics deal with mortality — 'Tiger Mountain Peasant Song' finds the singer "staggering through premonitions of my death," and in Oliver James, the narrator finds a drowned child on the banks of a river.

Can any blog readers suggest poems they'd like to see accompanied by music? TS Eliot's The Wasteland perhaps? I imagine it would sound like a Jesus and Mary Chain Song. Or what about a Philip Larkin verse? Or is there a song, which, when stripped of music is just as good as a poem? Over to you...

Band promotional photo courtesy of David Belisle

Chasing Payment

Recently I’ve read a lot about writers wondering if the time has finally come to give up on a project. You’ve sent it out a dozen times but the manuscript keeps on bouncing back. When you complain to fellow writers about your bad luck, the commiserations come thick and fast.

They’ll regale you with the names of those authors who finally made it just as they were about to pull the plug on their writing careers and at first it’s comforting to compare yourself to JK Rowling et al.

But there are only so many exhortations to keep your chin up that a writer can take and if one more person tells you that it only takes one agent to like what you’ve written, you’ll scream. Much more of this boomeranging back and forth, you think, and maybe it’s time for your final trick – the one where you drop led weights in the envelope.

Of course, by the time you’ve reached that stage you know you are completely beyond hope. Not only will you have lost the plot, but somewhere along the way you’ll have mislaid that nugget of certainty you’d carried around all the time you were writing your story – the one that swore blind that the idea you’d come up with had legs. Sturdy legs strong enough to bear any amount of disappointment and rejection. Damn it, what you’d written was good, wasn’t it? Wasn’t it?

We all reach our that’s it, I quit point with a novel or story, sooner or later. I send out quite a few stories in a year and maybe up to half a dozen serial ideas, so I do know whereof I speak.

Serials take a lot of time so it’s generally a good idea to find out sooner rather than later if it’s a turkey. (Speaking of turkeys, I actually did write one about a rather nasty character who was knocked out by a frozen one, flung from a bridge. I won’t go into why.) The editor didn’t really warm to my initial idea and maybe I should have stopped right there.

But I was full of enthusiasm for it, and submitted a first episode - to another lukewarm reception. I definitely should have stopped there, shouldn’t I? But I didn’t. I finished the damn thing. Got it rejected.

Did I learn from the experience? No, I rewrote it as a long short story and submitted it again. Got it rejected again,from two different magazines, each time for different reasons.

But once in a while this strategy for refusing to give up pays off. As far back as 2003 I wrote a short story for a competition about a young girl in her first term at university who imagines herself in love with a fellow student, in the year above. So besotted is she that she moulds her personality to his and quite loses sight of her own identity. It’s a theme that I can get quite obsessed about and I was certain that I was onto a winner. It got nowhere.

Undaunted, I tried my luck with it to a couple of magazines, one abroad. In order to do that I had to shave off a few words to meet the target word length and play around with a few of the references which were a bit clever-clever. But still it came back. Twice.

I shrugged it off, but I was hurt. I loved this story. And I wanted someone else to love it too. Which is why, at the end of last year, when another year or so had elapsed since last I’d laid eyes on it, I decided to read it through and see if I’d been deluding myself all along.

I still loved it. Time had moved on, however and I had to change a few references. I sent it off to Woman’s Weekly in November. They returned it in January. It was Just Not Them.

Okay, definitely time to give up, I decided. It was a new year after all. Time to look forward not back. Yet my new year was a bleak one. Writing wise I just couldn’t get going. So one afternoon I read that story again. And I still liked it.

But I could see there was a problem. It came somewhere towards the end. Too neat, too contrived, I decided. Though it would only need a tweak here, a tweak there. And I needed to cut out a few of the fancy words and references. I was tripping over Darlings on the carpet towards the end of my edit.

I don’t know what made me send it off to Norah McGrath at Fiction Feast/Take-a-Break. I suspect it was desperation as much as my very last-ditch attempt to get this story before an audience bigger than myself.

Reader, she bought it. I suspect it will appear in next month’s Fiction Feast, the October edition, out next Thursday, 10 September.

And the moral of this blogpost is? Writers can be critics and critics can be writers. But possibly not of your own work. Sometimes you just have to keep flogging away at it, even when the horse is dead. Or when you’ve written a turkey.

Guest Blog by Vanessa Curtis - Which writer would you secretly like to be?

I’ve decided that I would like to be Sarah Waters. Damn the woman, she just gets it right every time! I’ve finished reading ‘The Little Stranger’ recently and although it doesn’t have the shocking plot twists so familiar to anybody who has read her ‘Fingersmith’ novel, it does have the usual heady combination of evocative scene-setting, warped and memorable characters and a subtle but hypnotic growing tension towards the climactic scene of the novel (yes, you can tell I’m a book reviewer, can’t you?). Best of all it’s just so damned readable – on the sofa, in bed at night, in the garden by day – it doesn’t matter where you pick it up, you’re bound to be sucked in and forget about your surroundings. This is the sort of writing that I out-and-out envy. There’s no point hiding it – I’m jealous as hell. And so few contemporary authors really have this knack of churning out brilliant novel after brilliant novel and never running the risk of doing the same thing or becoming boring. Waters has stayed quite near to the era she used in ‘The Night Watch’ in this new novel but that’s where the similarities end. It is also, as somebody pointed out, her first novel not to include lesbianism. I can’t say as I noticed. I was entirely caught up with her slightly obsessive and maybe even a little unreliable narrator and the crumbling aristocracy of ‘Hundreds Hall’ where most of the action takes place. So few authors can be entirely fresh and captivating with each new book. Tracy Chevalier got off to a good start with her ‘Girl with a Pearl Earring’ and the very different Victorian follow-up, ‘Falling Angels’ but subsequent novels have been low on believability, crammed with too much research and not enough genuine plot development and featuring a succession of rather one-dimensional characters. Similarly Jeanette Winterson who has never, in my opinion, matched the beautiful, bitter-sweet ‘Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit’ and whose novels have got increasingly weirder, laid out in odd ways upon the page and given to chapters of one or two lines. Only the wonderful Helen Dunmore seems able to match Waters for sheer versatility and quality of prose – in fact, she goes one step higher with her prolific output in not just one, but at least three genres. Each adult novel is a jewel in itself, some historical, some contemporary but each perfect book intriguing and self-contained. Her trio of ‘Ingo’ novels for children, set in a land of Mer people living underwater in a place inspired by Dunmore’s beloved St Ives, are a lesson to any writer. She weaves her hypnotic swirls of fantasy action in and out of very gritty, contemporary family drama – a difficult feat to pull off. And Dunmore is also a wonderful poet and broadcaster as well as a very nice, grounded person. Grrrr. So, I’m already a children’s author, but if I wasn’t, I’d quite like to be Jacqueline Wilson mixed up with a hint of Louise Rennison, whose wickedly funny Georgia Nicolson novels I really admire for making teens laugh out loud. So, the novels and novelists I envy the most are not perhaps hyped as great ‘literary novelists’ but they have that far greater quality of appealing to the Common Reader and of creating strong, flawed, unusual and highly memorable characters and setting them against contrasting backdrops. And surely that’s what excellent writing is all about? Now – who do you want to be?

Vanessa Curtis is the talented author of children's books 'Zelah Green: Queen of Clean' and 'Zelah Green: Dating Queen' (due out early 2010). She is also a journalist and biographer of Virginia Woolf

Don't expect me to write for money

This post is partly a response to Sam Tonge’s: Don’t tell me to write for fun.

Lots of people paint for pleasure. They have no expectation of ever selling a painting. Some of them are bashful to even show you their work. It’s nothing, really, just something I do to kill the time now that the kids are at school. They keep the canvases in the outhouse, next to their husband’s abandoned guitar, in the part of their property they never got around to redecorating. After many years completing level sixteen of the art classes at the local night school they might secretly take one of their canvases along to Prontoframe and then tack it up on the wall, but only if their supportive husband insists, and they only hang it in the abandoned, almost outside lavatory, the one that nobody ever visits. They don’t stick a price tag beneath.

Others learn to play the piano. They pay for lessons, but they don’t expect to be paid when they play. They might consent to perform for the family after a second glass of sherry-flavoured courage, when the tree is twinkling and carols are demanded. They have absolutely no anticipation of striding into the Royal Festival Hall to bow before the adoring throng of black polo necks.

If you’re going to make a point, you might as well overstate it and repeat yourself three times, so here we go. Thousands more play football every Sunday and though they dream of walking out onto the hallowed turf, they know it’s a dream. They don’t seriously expect to be offered eleven million quid to join Newcastle Untied (which just happens to be the team supported by Sam Tonge and her family). They’re shit and they know they are (the Sunday footballers, that is). It’s only a hobby, after all.

Writer’s are different, but you know that already: we’re all number fours on the enneagram, something I intend to blog more about another day. Have you ever met someone who described writing as a hobby? Poets possibly; they acknowledge the restricted career ladder. But fiction, no way. We see ourselves as professionals in waiting, apprentices ready to take over from the masters. We compete with McEwan or Keyes or whoever, not the boys at the village rugby club. We all secretly know we are the next JK Rowling. We’re just yet to be discovered. We know the market is tough and the odds are against us; we’ve faced down a thousand rejections, but our dream lives on. And all this at a time when the prospects are shrinking in front of our faces, as highlighted in the recent Guardian article about The age of the gifted amateur. However much success we’ve unearthed we want more, notwithstanding the paralysing self-doubt that freezes us rigid from time to time. Whatever we are, we are not amateurs.

My problem with this isn’t that everyone who writes harbours ambitions of winning the Booker or a CWA dagger, or securing a spot in the gondolas at the end of the aisles in Waitrose. It’s not that we predicate our enjoyment of our vocation on external validation. I take that for granted. I’m like everyone else.

What I do fear is that all this writing to please agents and publishers, all this following of the rules of writing that we all purport not to follow, is ruining our art. I'm talking about the perceived rules of what agents want and don’t want. It’s throttling our creativity. It means we will carry on churning out the stuff that has gone before, we won’t break the mould, we won’t escape the predominant genre. A friend of mine recently received a rejection from an agent that wasn't in any way critical of her writing, the main reason for rejection was that the story didn't fit easily into any established genre. That is grim.

I do sometimes think that, if we did it a bit more for ourselves, and enjoyed it a little more, then perhaps we'd ultimately be better at it. I suspect most people reading this will disagree. The prevailing opinion I've heard is a sort of Thatcherite literary economics - let the market decide.

And, if any agents ever read this, I didn’t really mean a word of it, honest.

pic: I don't expect to get paid for my windsurfing either, although that's not a bad gybe

A Font of Knowledge - Guest post by Deborah Durbin

Deborah Durbin has been a freelance journalist for 12 years, contributing features to numerous publications including My Weekly, Fate & Fortune, It's Fate, Natural Health and The Daily Express. She is also the author of 12 non-fiction books. You can visit her website at www.deborahdurbin.com, and her blog at http://deborah-durbin.blogspot.com/

So far this week I have learned that if you mix strawberries, mint, lemon juice and a little milk powder together you can create the most marvellous, natural face-pack. I’ve also learned that if you apply honey to a burn, it will heal much quicker and it will also prevent scarring. I now also know that a study carried out in the Netherlands found that by drinking three to four cups of the nation's favourite drink you can reduce the risk of heart attack and stroke by up to 70 percent.

As a freelance journalist this is the best part of my job; learning about things that I might never have had the opportunity to know about and it amazes me how much trivia I now know – I think I would make a good contestant on Who Wants to be a Millionaire?.

I mainly write for the women’s lifestyle market, so it covers quite an extensive range of topics: in my 12 years as a journalist I have covered a diverse amount of subjects; from Native American Astrology to 50 facts you never knew about chocolate and almost everything in between.

A feature I was recently commissioned to write was about cellular memory – something I had never heard of before. For those that don’t know, Cellular memory is when a transplant donor recipient adopts the personality, habits and traits of the organ donor. I found it fascinating as I read through pages of case-study notes from transplant patients describing how they suddenly had a penchant for food they hated prior to their transplant. One recipient, who was given the heart of a murdered 10-year-old girl, reported being plagued by nightmares of the murder and told detectives working on the case not only where the girl had been murdered, but the weapon used, along with the address of where to find the killer. The murderer was convicted on the basis of this evidence.

Had I not been asked to write this piece, I would know nothing about the effects of cellular memory. One of the great things about writing features is the amount of information you gain as you research the topic of interest. I may never use this information again, accept perhaps for breaking-the-ice conversations at dinner parties, but if I’m ever anyone’s ‘phone-a-friend’ and Chris Tarrant should ask me what beverage would prevent someone having a heart attack, I will be able to answer with confidence.