SCBWI British Isles is Ten!

This is actually a momentous occasion, folks: the very first post by my new blogging partner Teri Terry! That's her pictured right. Now that my fortunes have changed, I've started a new blog (please follow me, so I don't look so unloved). The blog is targeted at readers. Notes from the Slushpile has always been focused on writers and so shall it remain. I think in this new age where there are so many voices on the internet, it would be a waste to give up this blog which has run for six years, with a peak audience of 2,500 readers a day. The audience has drooped as my blogging dwindled because of writing commitments - but have no fear, we have a plan. To start with I have recruited Teri Terry to blog with me ... but eventually I hope to turn Notes from the Slushpile into an online magazine, open to contributions and wisdom from all you other travellers out there who have experience of the slushpile. Onward and upward! Candy Gourlay

I am fired up, raring to go, and excited about writing, and it isn’t just because Candy has let me loose on her blog! I just spent the weekend at the 10^th anniversary celebration and mass book launch that was the SCBWI British Isles Onwards and Upwards conference.

It was brilliant time catching up with friends old and new, and I even learned a few things along the way. Some are not what you’d expect, at all….

TERI'S TOP TEN TALES OF THE UNEXPECTED

1. A two hour journey on motorways on a rainy Friday afternoon takes over four hours.

2. Do not – under any circumstances – take the wrong path. In a graveyard. Alone. In the dark, in the rain, when you are late and don’t have time to retrace your steps. This is a very, very bad idea.

It is also good not to read anything written by Nick Cross before this walk...

3. Watch out for the Undead (see no. 2), and strange eyes that follow you late at night, from under the stairs.

OK, I feel your skepticism. Believe me: this looked much scarier

in the dark at 2 a.m. after walking through a graveyard

4. There are four P’s, and they are important to story: Plot, Pace, Place, and People. Marcus Sedgewick says so, and as well as inspiring and clever, he is rather divine. This was universally agreed in the back row at his keynote.

The Divine Mr M

5. The guys wear the best shoes.

6. An editorial director at a major publisher – no names dropped, here – can be rather lovely, and encouraging, and positively wonderful. In fact, a few ideas were born, and the whole process is looking more of a hill than a mountain.

Rebecca Hill for Usborne, Kayt Bochenski for Harper Collins, Tom Truong for Stripes, Sarah Lilly for Orchard, Brenda Gardner for Picadilly, and Bella Pearson for David Fickling Books

7. Purple is The Colour of 2010.

Julienne Durber & Philippa Francis:

on trend in the colour purple

8. It is ok to be an Internet Slut, Fetishist, or Experimentalist. It is also ok to update your Facebook status while attending a talk on Social Networking. In fact, it is practically required.

Keren David can't control herself (neither can I)

9. There is a bell in case of emergencies. I’m not sure what happens if you ring it, but it is good to know it is there.

It was outside my door at my B&B : it was SO hard not to ring it!

10. Helium filled balloons may be pretty, but they don’t make good travelling companions in the back of a car.

They just refused to duck down! Imagine!

Of course, there were also the Expected.

The conference was run like a well organized machine by dedicated SCBWI volunteers; the speakers were inspiring; everyone was there ready to work and play hard. The editor and industry panels told all their secrets. My talented and understanding critique group got on just fine without me as I dealt with motorways, and the Undead.

So hard at work! Lucy van Smit, Kathryn Evans, Mariam Vossough, Linda Lawlor and friends

Party time! John Shelley, Candy Gourlay & Benjamin Scott

Special thanks to Bex Hill, Benjamin Scott and all the other lovely SCBWI volunteers involved in making the conference such a success; to Paula Harrison for getting me there and back, with only a few wrong turns, red light and balloon-related incidents; and to Candy Gourlay for putting together such an amazing video of Scooby-ites working hard at their craft (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R0WEnLYSrd0). I don’t think anyone could watch it without feeling proud to be a part of SCBWI, and a little choked up.

Our amazing conference chair, Bex Hill, and party guru, Benjamin Scott

Now for the big question: how are we ever going to top this next year?

Slowmo Wrimo? Just keep going

Well it's the second week of Nanowrimo. How's it going?

Are you feeling like this:

Or like this:


(With thanks to Meg Rosoff for this brilliant animation.)

Nicola Morgan had some fine advice for Wrimo people; though there were some driven to grumpiness by theWrimo hysteria that seemed to overwhelm the web in the run-up to November.

Me, I think it's a good idea - IF it's the kick in the backside that you need. It's almost the end of the second week now. Tina Matanguihan of the Refine Me blog invited me to write a pep talk for Filipino Wrimos. I was very happy to oblige.

I did a talk for the second week - the week when Wrimos usually hit The Wall.

Thinking about what advice to give, all I could think was that whatever happens the end result of this exercise should be USEFUL. That the quantity of words should be in a shape that can be remodelled into the quality that was eschewed by this project in the name of getting the book down.

So here's my pep talk, for what it's worth. And thank you, Tina for making me stop and think about it. Nick Cross, look away now:

Greetings Wrimo Writers!

It’s Week Two, how are you coping? Are you still gliding swiftly on beautiful turns of phrase, skilfully churning out the chapters, on target to hit the half-way mark by the end of the week – which, by the way (she adds helpfully), is 25,000 words?

Or have the words gone gluey in your brain, those perfectly formed sentences dangling just beyond your reach as you sit frozen over a screen, taunted by that stupid screensaver of holiday snaps from happier days, never to return?

Before I turned to fiction, I worked for  a news features agency in London. Every day I dropped the baby off at the child minder at 8.30am, got to the office by 9am, left work at 5pm sharp to collect the baby, having written two 600 word articles. EVERYDAY. I did phone interviews before 12pm, had a quick sandwich and was writing by 1pm.

This was when I discovered the truth about Writer’s Block:

There is no such thing.

There is no such thing as losing your ability to write. There is no such thing as losing your talent. But there is such a thing as having nothing to write about.

What most writers declare to be Writer’s Block is nothing more than a lack of ideas.

A lack of ideas is nothing more than a lack of information.

And why would there be a lack of information? Because there is work to be done.

On that agency job, all the times that I couldn’t get words out it was because I didn’t have enough info to make my story. So I picked up the phone and asked some more questions. I picked up the newspaper to do some more research. And inevitably, the story would take shape. At 5pm I could press the send button on that telex machine (yes, those were the days) and go home to give my baby some dinner.

If NaNoWriMo were about quality and not quantity, I would be prescribing all sorts of inspirational activities – read a poem, watch a good movie, gaze out a window. But this is about churning out a novel, folks, not crafting: CHURNING. To get those words out, you can’t stop moving.

Here are a some tips to help you get over that first Wall, however fat and solid and tall it may be.

• Make sure you’ve got something to write. Words don’t just come when summoned. They need a story with living breathing characters, problems, settings and plot to hang on. If you seem to have hit a brick wall – can it be that you need to do some work on your story?

• Stay in your seat, keep those fingers on the keyboard. Do you need a rest? DON’T. That’s right. Don’t take a break. Don’t get yourself another coffee. Don’t check your email. Write the next sentence, however hard that is. And when you’ve finished writing it, write another one. And another. No novel was ever written without keeping one’s buttocks on the seat.

Just keep swimming!

• Break it down. Wrimo writers should write with their eye on the prize: 50,000 words. WRONG. 50,000 words divided by 30 days in November is about 1,700 words a day. Plan a day here and there where your target is 2,000. Plan a day here and there where your target is 500. Smaller targets are achievable, making days with bigger targets less threatening.

• Sketching. When the pretty words aren’t coming, try sketching. Use phrases, no details, no dialogue unless it comes to you easily. Use big brush srokes. See your scenes in their bare bones. It is so much easier to write pretty words when you have a structure to hang them on.

• Turn reported description into active scenes. You’re doing okay, getting the story out, but your word count is dismal. How can you boost word count without resorting to useless padding? Here’s what you do: read through and find a “reported” scene. A reported scene is something like “Carlos despises Maria”. In Show and Tell, it’s the Tell. It’s not on the stage. Put it on the stage. Turn that into a scene. How Carlos asks Maria on a date but forgets to turn up. And when Maria rings him, he makes her feel small and stupid, as if she deserved to be left in the lurch. Literally, turn it into a Show – not only is it better writing, it will fatten up your word count!

• Use back story to build even more scenes. Exposition is the bane of novel writers, right? Those long explanatory paragraphs that get in the way of the action – so boring but so necessary. Necessary, sure but you can avoid the boring part by sneakily slipping it somewhere else in the text – maybe not even in the same chapter. This is called a Set up, a fine way to build word count!

Check your chapters for long bits of exposition. Cut them out! Now find a sneaky place in an earlier chapter where you can plant a scene that serves that purpose. A scene – meaning a mini-event (see the previous point about turning description into scenes). Now when you get to the part of the story where the back story used to be the reader already knows about it. Your story skips apace, and so does your word count.

So there you are. The wall is scaled. The two weeks are almost done. Two more weeks to go.

Keep those fingers flying, and keep your bottom on that seat. After all is said and done, just getting on with it is what you have to do. And then believe you me, 50,000 words are coming soon to a manuscript near you.

Congratulations.

Write who you are: Teri Terry has an identity crisis

It might seem rather incestuous - today's guest blogger Teri Terry is basing her blog on a talk I gave in Birmingham last week. As I always do, I bashed on about how it's not about writing what you know but writing who you are (not an original thought, unfortunately - I read it in Plot and Structure by James Scott Bell).I also read in Story by Robert McKee that Stanislavski used to ask his actors: Are you in love with the art in yourself or yourself in your art? Hmm. Inneresting question for anyone trying to write novels.
Candy Gourlay

Who Am I, and what does it mean for my writing?

A reasonable question to ask. I’m posing it after having a bit of a light-bulb moment on Saturday.

I was on the train coming back from Birmingham, iPod on, not thinking about anything in particular while the countryside rushed past my window. But random things were having a chat in my subconscious, as they do. I’ve always founds trains are great places for thinking.

I’d just been to the SCBWI event with Candy Gourlay and lots of lovely SCBWI friends as well. I won’t be a spoiler and tell you all about it, as this event may appear in a location near you, soon (and GO if it does – it was a fascinating and inspiring talk). But a few thoughts collided in my brain on the journey home.

They were three:

• a rejection received the day before: along of the lines of, concept check; writing check; supporting cast, check; main character – er… – lacking something?
• Culture and cultural clashes – being from one place, living in another – what this means (and from a personal perspective, it is one of those things you don’t really get when you are making the decision: at 20-something or even 30-something, you don’t feel the long-term implications in your guts)
• Write what you know vs. write what you are.

I’ve had this sort of debate with myself, before. If you looked up ‘rootless’ in the dictionary, I’m sure you’d see my photo: Dad Dutch, Mum’s parents Finnish, me born in France, moving every five minutes with Dad’s air force postings throughout childhood. And I continued this pattern on my own, living all over Canada and Australia, collecting degrees and changing careers along the way, until I somehow landed in England. I’ve lived in the same house here now for six years with my partner, and I’ve never even come close to that long before. It is a bit terrifying.

When Frances Lincoln had a ‘Diverse Voices’ writing competition a few years ago, I remember looking at it, and wondering: would writing about belonging nowhere be an acceptable interpretation of the rules?

I decided not, but out of the thinking JJ was born, my 13 year old character in Meet Me at the Lost and Found whose artist dad and poet mum had her many times around the globe before she could talk.

Writing what you know: the feeling of belonging nowhere and trying to find a place for yourself, and the survival techniques you learn, like how to quickly integrate enough but not too much in new surroundings. The ‘one friend’ rule: you just need one, and you’re all right.

When it was gently rejected last week, it was pointed out that the ‘warm fuzzies’ this sort of 10-plus book needed to have were missing. The expectation that JJ was making her own family for herself when her parents dumped her with an Aunt in London were not fulfilled. The relationship with her Aunt and Grandad didn’t develop sufficiently, and JJ wasn’t likeable enough. And the criticism was fair.

On my train journey, I was thinking about the three things I mentioned above, and about rejections of the past. And I started to spot a pattern.

My secondary characters are not generally a problem: it is always the ‘I’, the main character, their development, their relationships, readers’ sympathies with them. There seemed to be a recurring theme.

A-ha! An epiphany! Something to work on, and think about.

But the why is less comfortable. When I write, I am my main character. Male, female, whatever age. JJ feeling disconnected from anywhere is writing what I know. But resolving the story to give warm fuzzies at the end isn’t what I know. I don’t get it. Because I still always feel like I don’t belong anywhere, like I need space. Like I don’t want to get too close to people in case they disappear. Beyond my ‘one friend’ – long-suffering, darling husband – I get to a certain point in relationships with people, then back away.

Ways forward for my writing?

I get it, and I’ll work on it. And I also see why I prefer writing for 12 or 14-plus. Adolescents are plagued with feeling alienated and needing to find their way. Warm fuzzies aren’t my specialty. Dystopias are just the thing…

Teri is currently writing Slated, a chilling YA Dystopian trilogy.

Last word from Candy: well this is a pet topic of mine so I can't help putting in a last word. Not mine but another quote from Robert McKee that really resonates with me - Make no mistake, no one can achieve excellence as a writer without being something of a philosopher and holding strong convictions. The trick is not to be a slave of your ideas, but to immerse yourself in life.

Heads up, anyone working on high concept who hasn't wept over a character yet.