Newcastle Writing Conference 2015

Just over a week ago, I attended the Newcastle Writing Conference 2015. Organised by New Writing North and hosted by Northumbria University, it was a thoroughly informative and inspiring event - one I have thinking about ever since.

The day kicked off with a storming key notes address from YA author Meg Rosoff, which was a great ice-breaker for the conference, mainly because Meg is such an entertaining speaker. She brought a lot of laughter to the lecture hall as she told us exactly why she hated her former profession of advertising (it involved instant tea granules), her habit of getting fired from almost every job she’s ever had, and how her first novel – a pony book – was rejected for containing too much sex.

The talk concluded with Meg urging us to think of our brains as colanders: almost everything slips through, but once in a while something especially memorable or interesting gets stuck. When writing, she advised us to consider the contents of our own individual colanders: ‘None of it is the same as anyone else’s,’ she said, ‘and that is your strength and your weapon.’

After a panel event about social media, we split off into breakout sessions. I had chosen How to Pitch Your Work with Steve Chambers, mainly because the idea of talking about my novel-to-be terrifies me. In fact, what I really liked about Steve was that he didn’t deny that pitching was an unpleasant business, though as he reminded us, ‘You don’t really have a choice.’

A few pieces of advice from that session that really stood out for me:

• Build your pitch around the main character – people are interested in people.
• Pitch it like you’re talking to a mate at the pub.
•  It isn’t about the novel’s themes or issues - or why you’re writing it - it’s about telling the story.
• Focus on what is unique about your story. 
•  Not everyone will like your ideas, and that’s okay.
•  Don’t lose confidence, and keep pitching – you will improve.

I also found that Steve, who is the Programme Leader of the Creative Writing MA at Northumbria University, had a lot of writing wisdom to share, not all of it related to pitching. In fact, my notes are full of his offhand little gems, one of my favourites being, ‘You can’t help the kind of writer you are, because who you are keeps coming out of your work, in your voice.’

In the afternoon, I opted to attend Meet the Agent with Jo Unwin. Much like my attitude to pitching, I find the prospect of one day attempting to find an agent rather intimidating - they are, after all, the gatekeepers of the publishing world. Fortunately, Jo turned out to be very friendly, eager to explain what her job entailed, and full of advice on how to approach an agent. Of course, a lot of information about submitting work can be found online – and it varies from agent to agent – but I thought I’d record just a few of Jo’s many wonderful tips below:

• The biggest agents in the business might not have space for new authors, but it’s a good idea to approach their assistants, who will be looking to expand their client list.
• Mention a personal connection to the agent if you have one. This might be meeting them in person, but could just as easily be watching them talk at events on YouTube etc.
•  Have a good sense of the book you’ve written. Pitch the nugget of your story in your covering letter – and be specific, so it’s memorable. ‘Don’t tell me it’s about innocence and loss,’ Jo advised. ‘Tell me it’s about a mother whose daughter was lost at sea.’
•  Your covering letter should be serious, demonstrating that you’re a ‘career writer’ – i.e. someone who has been writing for a long time and is committed to a future in the profession. 

The conference concluded with a fantastic panel event called What’s Hot and What’s Not with Jo Unwin, Francesca Main (Picador), Rachael Kerr (Unbound) and Anna James (The Bookseller). It was great to hear about these women’s respective roles in the publishing industry and their current projects, not to mention the many, many book recommendations they had (my bank balance is about to take a serious hit).

As for the question posed by the name of the panel, although the speakers could identify current themes in publishing (nature writing is ‘having a moment’, women’s voices are popular) they cautioned us against chasing trends, because tastes inevitably will have changed by the time a book has been written and published. Instead, we were simply urged to write the best, most important book we could.

I found this point - which had been repeated one way or another throughout the conference - oddly reassuring. Obviously, writing a high-quality novel is no easy task, but given that the rapidly-evolving publishing industry can sometimes seem like a confusing sort of place, it’s a clear objective – something to get on with. 

In fact, Meg Rosoff summed it up nicely right at the beginning of the day, when she related what her agent had once said to her: ‘Forget about being a good girl and doing it the right way, and [write a book] as fiercely as you can.’

Reading Review 2014

For me, 2014 was a pretty respectable reading year. I achieved my Goodreads Challenge of finishing forty books, I discovered some exciting new authors (especially Helen Oyeyemi and Evie Wyld), and I even managed to make it through some non-fiction. On my travels, I had the time to tackle a few tomes (Eleanor Catton’s The Luminaries, Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch), whereas later in the year when I was busier I sped through shorter novels (Lois Lowry’s The Giver, Graham Greene’s Doctor Fischer of Geneva). With only one or two exceptions, I enjoyed everything I picked up – I certainly identified some all-time favourite reads. So below are just a few of the books that especially stood out for me last year.

Best non-fiction: Gossip From the Forest by Sarah Maitland. Maitland's exploration of Britain’s forests is fascinating in itself, but the magic really happens when she connects natural history with the history of fairy tales, and uses what she’s learned to inform her own creative writing.

Best short story collection: The Rental Heart and Other Fairy Tales by Kirsty Logan. There’s been a lot of buzz about Logan’s debut collection - rightly so, as far as I’m concerned, for her short stories are dark, dreamlike and beautifully-crafted. I devoured them all in just a couple of sittings, not because they were easy reads, but because – like faerie –Logan’s world was difficult to leave.

Best children's/young adult book: More Than This by Patrick Ness. I’m reluctant to choose Ness for this because I picked him last year too, but his writing is so bold and unique that I simply can’t resist him. I’m also reluctant to say too much about this story, because the way it unravels is completely unpredictable and best appreciated without so much as a sniff of spoilers.

Best classic: Anne of Green Gables by LM Montgomery. Why haven’t I read this before? It really is a great book, mainly because Anne Shirley is such a fantastic character. As my pal Joely Badger pointed out, Anne is very much a contemporary of Richmal Crompton's (Just) William, in both her earnestness and her knack for getting into trouble. A lovely read.

Most disappointing book: The Ocean at the End of the Lane by Neil Gaiman. I'm a big fan of Gaiman's work, especially Stardust, Neverwhere and his short stories. His ideas are big, his writing is clever, but I thought the plot of this one was rather muddled, even dull.

Best reread: The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole aged 13 and 3/4 by Sue Townsend. After the sad news of his creator’s passing, I revisited Adrian Mole last year, and found his adventures just as bittersweet, just as awkward, and just as likely to cause ugly snorts of laughter as they ever were.

Best book: The Hakawati by Rabih Alameddine. I’m not sure where to start with this one. In fact, at some point in the near future, I’d like to write a proper review of it, because Alameddine has given me such a lot to think about - both as a reader and a writer. So for now I’ll try to keep it short. Hakawati is the Arabic word for “storyteller”, and this is a book about stories. On the surface, it tells the tale of Osama, the grandson of a hakawati who returns from the US to his Lebanese homeland after the civil war. But woven within that story are countless others, ranging from the ‘real-life’ tales of Osama’s family to the fairy tales, folk tales and even religious tales told by the hakawati himself. It’s such a rich and complex structure, so inventive and entertaining, that you can practically sense Alameddine’s glee as he tests how far he can push the boundaries of his novel. I thought it was superb, and there’s no doubt it’s the best book I read last year.

I would, however, also like to mention The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller, We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves by Karen Joy Fowler, All the Birds, Singing by Evie Wyld, and Life After Life by Kate Atkinson, for they too completely captivated me. Now I write this, I wonder whether I enjoyed these books so much because each of their authors – like Alameddine – approached their respective plots in an original, playful way: Miller’s was a retelling of the Iliad, Fowler revealed hers from middle to beginning to end, Wyld related half of hers backwards, while Atkinson told different versions of hers again and again.

So I suppose, if I've learned anything from my reading habits of 2014, it’s that I like a juicy structure; a book that not only tells a good story, but tells it in the best possible way. It’s a discovery that I’ll be keeping at the back of my mind when deciding what to read in the future, and also one I hope will give me more focus when it comes to my writing.

Fae: The Interview

This summer saw the release of World Weaver Press' Fae, which features one of my short stories, 'Antlers'. Around that time, the anthology's editor, Rhonda Parrish, asked us authors a few fae-related questions, and I'm pleased to reveal that my interview has now been published:

Fae Contributor Interview: Amanda Block

So head on over to Rhonda's blog at the above link if you're interested in reading my fairy-centric chat (and first interview!) about the inspiration for the story, reworking old tales, and my favourite magical character. Plus there's an extract from Antlers to be found there too, featuring a birth, a death, and some serious sibling rivalry...

An Update

I seem to have become rather lax about blogging lately so, without further ado, here is an update of my literary activities of the past few months... 

August in Edinburgh is, of course, totally dominated by the festivals, and it’s an amazing time to be in the city – let alone live in it. The highlight for me is always The Edinburgh International Book Festival (EIBF), which never fails to attract world-class authors, and this year was no different. Below are a few of my highlights:

• Patrick Ness is basically the king of YA fiction at the moment - and deservedly so. In person too, Ness is funny, engaging, and has a lovely rapport with his audience. I also appreciated the fact that he spoke a lot about writing as a process, and the following are just a few things he said that stayed with me:

On not having time to write: 'Writers don't write, they write anyway. You find ways to write.' 

On self-belief: ‘You can be a writer - no one ever told me that.’ 

On how his stories take shape: ‘I'm a great believer in if an idea's good enough, wait and things will stick to it’

• Sarah Maitland and Kirsty Logan write original fairy tales, Maitland fusing hers with scientific theory in her book Moss Witch, and Logan creating her own lyrical, sensual fiction in The Rental Heart and Other Fairytales. Given that I frequently use traditional stories in my own work, I really enjoyed hearing about their different approaches to this kind of writing.

• I have never read any of Lydia Davis’ fiction, but her event (chaired by a delightful Ali Smith, whose work I love) made me realise what an oversight that has been, for Davis is truly a master of the short story form (an excellent example of her newer work is Letter to a Frozen Peas Manufacturer). 

• The wise and witty Sarah Waters talked mainly about her new novel, The Paying Guests, and I was particularly interested when she discussed how her historical fiction develops: she reads extensively around the time period she wants to write about, and then lets the story emerge from her research. Also, her event’s chair, Muriel Gray, was fabulous (‘Sarah, this book kept getting me all hot and bothered. I had to think of Jeremy Clarkson to calm myself down.’).

• Haruki Murakami was one of the biggest names at this year’s EIBF. I wasn’t sure what to expect from him, though having read three of his books I should have guessed: Murakami was quirky, witty, with a mischievous streak - he had his audience in the palm of his hand.

Meeting him after the event was even better. For privacy, he was signing books behind a strange arrangement of sheets, rather like a blanket fort. My partner (a highly reluctant reader on whom Murakami has somehow worked his magic) and I queued for a good hour to see the author, and then simultaneously froze when we ducked into all the linen and came face-to-face with him. Unfazed by our silence, Murakami chuckled, ‘I am looking forward to a beer after this,’ and – finding our voices at last – we hastily encouraged him in this endeavour. 

Banter about beer with Haruki Murakami? We felt like the coolest people on the planet.

After all that excitement, September had a distinctly back-to-school vibe, especially following the fun of the festival, and I enforced a strict ‘new term’ routine on myself. Each weekday since then, I’ve been trying to finish my freelance ghostwriting by lunchtime, so in the afternoon I can spend a couple of hours on my novel, short stories, or writing admin (ie tasks like trawling the internet for competitions or sending stories off to anthologies). Unless a pesky deadline comes up, it’s not a bad system, so I’m going to try and stick to it for the foreseeable future.

October was dominated by one of the aforementioned pesky deadlines, and most of the writing month was spent pulling my hair out over perhaps the most difficult short story I’ve ever written. Hopefully I will be able to find it a home one of these days...

And finally, November, which I will remember as the Month of the Novel. First of all, I finished my second full-length ghostwritten book. Obviously, I can’t talk about it too much, but it’s been a very enjoyable project, and working on it every day has given me some much-needed structure since returning from my travels, so I will miss it a fair bit.

In terms of my own writing, this was also a big month for my novel-to-be. A while ago, I realised my old draft simply wasn’t working, and therefore much of ‘new term’ has been spent trying to rethink its structure, plot, characters – most of it, really. I think November was the first time I felt like I was making progress with this often disheartening task, helped in no small part by Edinburgh City Council’s wonderful two-day writing course, 'Start Your First Novel'. Run by Alison Summers, the sessions were great for reviewing (and learning) the process of developing a novel from scratch, and so made it much easier for me to look at my new ideas from a fresh perspective. 

Australia: Melbourne, City of Literature

'What's this about books?'

Continuing with my travels, I left New Zealand at the beginning of March this year, and flew into Queensland, Australia. Over the course of the next week, I then had a series of strange and fairly dangerous adventures, which included sailing out to the Great Barrier Reef during a tornado warning, night diving with sharks, and getting trapped in the middle of ‘Cape Tribulation’ (the name’s a clue, by the way) during a tropical storm, unable to leave a flooded, spider-plagued hostel because all the nearby crocodile-infested rivers had burst their banks. In short, Australia was enormous fun from the get-go.

After those slightly mad seven days, I headed south, to Melbourne, which was an even more exciting prospect than Queensland. First and foremost, it used to be the home of my creative co-conspirator, Joely Badger, who was my trusted guide for the remainder of my Australia trip. And secondly, Melbourne is a UNESCO City of Literature.

Coming from Edinburgh, and having written about its City of Literature status before, I was keen to find out more about this aspect of Melbourne during my stay there. I was only visiting for three weeks, but it turns out you can discover quite a lot about a place in that time, and so below are just a few of my book-related adventures in Australia’s first literary city.

Detail from the Joyce and Court Oldmeadow Memorial Sculpture

1) Visiting the State Library

Melbourne has some beautiful buildings, and the State Library of Victoria is one of them. Handily situated in the centre of the city, its pillared façade and elegant lawn easily make it the grandest building in sight – exactly as a library should be. 

Inside too, it’s an impressive space, especially the domed La Trobe Reading Room. Although perhaps my favourite part of the library was the Joyce and Court Oldmeadow Memorial Sculpture (above), cast in bronze by Tessa Wallis. It features multiple characters from Australian children’s literature, many of which are native critters, including a koala, a wombat and a platypus.

View of Melbourne over the Yarra

2) Seeing John Marsden at the Children's Book Festival

As luck would have it, the Children's Book Festival was taking place while I was in Melbourne and Joely suggested we go and see the author John Marsden, who she explained was something of an Australian national treasure. His most famous work is the Young Adult series that starts with Tomorrow, When the War Began, which seems to have been required reading for Australia’s schoolchildren over the past couple of decades. Tomorrow kicks off the story of seven teenagers who go camping deep in the Australian bush and return to find their town has been invaded, and life as they know it has changed forever... 

Happily for Joely and me, much of Marsden’s talk focused on writing. As a neat little story-building exercise, he had the audience match some random adjectives and nouns, creating strange pairings such as ‘blue spaghetti’ and ‘glass parrot’, and then he demonstrated how to construct a tale around them, by asking three questions: 

- What led to this?

- What are the consequences of this?

- What is the resolution?

Marsden told us that ‘stories interrupt routine’, which I like as a definition, and then pressed upon us the importance of language, urging aspiring writers to learn the rules of English in order to later enjoy breaking them. Plus he dispelled the myth that authors receive some kind of divine story inspiration: the Tomorrow series developed over time, he told us - the result of combining subjects in which he was interested, such as farming and Second World War history, with a wish to write about a group of resourceful teenage protagonists.

Joely at work in The Moat - with cocktail, naturally

3) Writing in Melbourne’s cafés

Melbourne is famous for its ‘café culture’, which I’m pretty sure is just a hipster way of saying it has lots of nice places to drink coffee. But it does, and obviously there is a natural attraction between writers and caffeine (/alcohol) so in Melbourne’s many cafés Joely and I had a great old time chatting stories, plotting stories, writing stories, coming up with a story-related business idea (maybe more on that one day…) and even meeting up with her Melbourne-based writers’ group.

Our favourite haunt, it should be noted, was The Moat, downstairs from Melbourne’s Wheeler Centre for writers. Not only does it have very cool, book-focused décor, they also have literary-themed cocktails. I sampled ‘The Bard (Ode to William Shakespeare)’, and it was glorious.

4) Picnicking at Hanging Rock

All right, this wasn’t exactly in Melbourne, but just outside of the city is the infamous spot featured in Peter Weir’s cult 1975 film, Picnic at Hanging Rock. Although the story of the turn-of-the-century schoolgirls who disappear on a Valentine’s Day picnic at the rock - some of them never to be seen again - was actually originally a novel, written in 1967 by Australian author Joan Lindsay.

I never saw any of these people again

Naturally, staying so close to Hanging Rock, Joely and I decided to visit this notorious place with a couple of friends, and of course we had a picnic there, and obviously we dressed up in frilly white tops and re-enacted parts of the film (shouting ‘Miranda!’ at one another from between the rocks, and so on). And, maybe I’m imagining it, but the Rock does have a weird atmosphere, perhaps not helped by the fact that we visited on a particularly hot, bright day not unlike the one featured in the well-known film. 

It seems to be a popular misconception that Picnic at Hanging Rock is based on true events - even the author herself grew vaguer over time as to the inspiration for her novel. So, for me, perhaps stranger than the Rock itself was its visitor’s centre, which shows a kind of documentary film on a loop about the girls’ disappearance, despite the fact that - as far as anyone knows - it never happened. I thought this piece of marketing quite interesting: although we’re so used to fictionalising facts in books and films and TV shows, it’s rare to experience the factualising of fiction, which appears to be what is happening around the story of Hanging Rock. 

5) Having tea at Miss Marple’s

Finally, one of the things I liked best about Australia was that even when I thought I was getting used to a country that, in many ways, is very similar to my own, it would take me by surprise. I was shocked, for example, by the high quality of hot chocolate there, the high prices of books, and the high probability of being subjected to violence when attempting to feed cockatoos. 

Another such surprise occurred in the middle of the Dandenongs rainforest (again, just out of Melbourne), when we came across the memorabilia-packed Miss Marple’s Tea Room and stopped inside for scones and cake. Why, one might ask, was it there? Did the Dandenongs have some link to the Miss Marple stories? Had Agatha Christie once visited? Or were the owners just very enthusiastic fans? I have absolutely no idea, for I never solved this particular Marple mystery. But then, why shouldn’t one find a café dedicated to a fictional English geriatric sleuth in the middle of an Australian rainforest? Why on earth not? 

Miss Marple's Tea Room, complete with suspicious-looking man on roof

For more bookish bits and bobs from my 2014 travels, see New Zealand: Literary Landscapes.

New Zealand: Literary Landscapes

Mount Ngauruhoe, also known as Mount Doom

Back in February, between leaving Geneva and starting freelance work in Edinburgh, I set off on a three-month trip around Australasia and Southeast Asia. My first stop was the mighty New Zealand, a country of which I had a very favourable impression, despite the fact I had never been there and actually knew very little about it. Well, I knew the obvious, clichéd stuff: New Zealand was the home of the haka, the bungee jump, and far more sheep than people; it had landscapes many claim are ‘like Scotland, but better!’ (seriously, a lot of people say this); and, thanks to Peter Jackson, it was a place inextricably linked in my mind with The Lord of the Rings.

Like so many, I grew up with Tolkien’s world: as a child, I was read The Hobbit at bedtime; as a young teenager, I tackled The Lord of the Rings books on my own; as a sixth former, my friends and I obsessed over the films. Although there are aspects of the saga on which I’m not so keen (the endless songs, the [lack of] female characters, The Hobbit films…), I have always found Tolkien’s world irresistible, its originality and scale marking it out from the rest.

To return to 2001, when we were devouring advanced publicity for The Fellowship of the Ring in the sixth form common room, I remember all the media focus was concerned with the same thing: New Zealand. I didn’t get it at the time - as far as I was concerned, Middle Earth was a fantasy version of olde worlde Britain - but then I watched the film and, of course, I understood. And now I've been there, I understand even more: New Zealand is a magical place.

Hobbiton: view from the party field up to Bag End

The most genuinely 'Middle Earth' experience I had on my trip was undoubtedly my visit to Hobbiton, also known as Alexander Farm on the North Island. Used as a filming location for The Lord of the Rings trilogy and recently rebuilt for The Hobbit films, the site has since been preserved as a tourist attraction. There, you can wander past the iconic round doors of the hobbit houses, all the way up to Bag End at the top of the hill, before finishing up in the Green Dragon pub for a drink and perhaps some second breakfast.

What particularly struck me about Hobbiton was that it didn’t feel like a film set. There are no lighting rigs or tyre tracks or wires spoiling the view. Almost everything is authentic, from the vegetables in the gardens, oversized in comparison to the little trowels and rakes, to the shirts and trousers hanging over the gates, which look as though they've been shrunk in the wash. Walking around that place was not just like walking into a story, it was like walking into that story - the one bound up with my childhood - and so was somehow completely joyful and hauntingly nostalgic at the same time.

Anyone for second breakfast?

But to talk about New Zealand only in terms of The Lord of the Rings would do the country, and my time there, a great injustice. For starters, it has a rich literary history of its own, from the folktales of its indigenous people to its current contributions to the bestseller charts. While in the country, I was fortunate to connect with stories from both ends of this scale. In Rotorua, I visited the Tamaki Maori Village where, aside from watching the famous – and frankly terrifying – haka, I was enthralled by our hosts' storytelling, their tales having been passed down in the oral tradition over countless generations. Then conversely, during much of February, I was absorbed in The Luminaries, a historical novel set in New Zealand that, among its other accolades, won last year’s Man Booker Prize (its Kiwi author, Eleanor Catton, is the youngest writer ever to win the award). Speaking, once more, of walking into stories, it was great fun to spend long bus journeys lost in Catton’s fictional chronicle of New Zealand’s gold rush era, only to look up and find we were driving through the very places mentioned in the book.

Rainforest near Franz Josef glacier

Incidentally, the bus I’m referring to here is the big green Kiwi Experience bus, a ‘hop-on, hop-off’ mode of travel that allows tourists to cover a surprising amount of land. And what land it is. New Zealand’s topography is unbelievably diverse; on the Kiwi Bus we would set off from a surfers’ paradise in the morning and end up in a rainforest next to a glacier just a few hours later. The country has it all: picturesque, snow-topped mountains; lakes so flat they perfectly mirror the scenery around them; tangled, fairy tale forests; gorges that disappear into menacing mist; craggy coastlines packed with chubby seals… and so much more. While the Scottish half of me is reluctant to confirm that it is truly ‘like Scotland, but better!’* there must be few places in the world where you can find such a variety of scenery without crossing a border.

I’ve written before how, as an outdoorsy sort of person, I find the natural world very inspiring, so strangely enough one of the aspects of the trip that I enjoyed the most was the long journeys. During my time on the Kiwi Bus (and when I wasn’t tackling The Luminaries) I would gaze out of the window at whatever spectacular scenery we were driving through that day and allow my mind to wander off where it liked. I reflected on what I had written, I thought about stories I wanted to tell, and I even began to sort out the plot of my novel-to-be. Because of this, New Zealand was probably the most creatively productive time of the whole trip.

As I said at the start, I had had high expectations for my Kiwi experience, all of which were totally surpassed by the country itself and the wonderful people I met there. But what I hadn’t anticipated were the moments that didn’t feature on any bucket lists, or that I couldn’t capture on camera: the feeling of stepping into Hobbiton, for example, or a eureka moment while mulling over something make-believe on a bus. In this way, New Zealand gave me even more than the adventures I had sought out there, and in terms of stories it was - like that of Bilbo Baggins – an unexpected journey.

Mirror Lake reflecting Mount Cook

*The English half of me has no such qualms

‘Well, I’m back.’

Sam and Rosie's house, Hobbiton (New Zealand)

Since mid-February, I've picnicked at Hanging Rock and second-breakfasted in Hobbiton; I've partied with Maoris and hiked with Vietnamese villagers; I've fed kangaroos and wallabies by hand, and been feasted upon by more mosquitoes, sand flies and leeches than I can count; I've climbed to the top of an Angkor temple to experience a sunset, and I've crawled through a Viet Cong tunnel to experience a mild panic attack. Then there was the diving (scuba and sky), the jungle trekking, the missed flight in Sydney, the lost tooth in Melbourne... and a thousand other barmy, totally exhausting and utterly wonderful adventures in Australasia and Asia. In fact, during the last three months, it seems like one of the only activities I haven't managed to cram in (outside of a travel journal) is writing.

Which was exactly the plan. Part of the reason I went travelling after leaving Geneva was I felt overworked and in need of a break (sometimes not an easy thing to take, when half your job is in your head). So while I'm hoping that the time away will be good for my fiction, first and foremost it's been good for me.

Besides, I didn't give up stories entirely - I don't think I could. Whether you want them to or not, new places and new people bombard you with stories, some you might anticipate and some that are completely unexpected. While I won't be writing an account of my travels, exactly, I have some literary bits and bobs from the trip I'm hoping to share with Writer's Block over the next few weeks.

Picnic time? Hanging Rock (Australia)

Plus there's plenty to look forward to, right here, right now. I'm back in Edinburgh and about to start writing and ghostwriting full-time, which is very exciting/terrifying. Fae, the anthology featuring my short story 'Antlers' is to be published by World Weaver Press in July (a post to follow on that one shortly). Then there's the fact that, without setting pen to paper, I've been having a good old think about The Novel and some other writing projects during all the long bus/boat/tuk tuk journeys of late, which may have given me some much-needed perspective. And I suppose, at the end of the day, gaining a little perspective is what travelling's all about.

Au Revoir, Genève

The Schynige Platte: a nice spot
for some writing

For two and a half years, I have spent my days tidying stories in a turret. I have lived in a wood-panelled room – a land-locked ship’s cabin, I like to think – and I have watched the drifting of the clouds and the phases of the moon through the windows above my head. I have walked to a market each Sunday, or else taken a tiny orange train up a hillside to visit my cousin and his family. I have explored: cities, lakes, woods, summer mountains on foot, winter mountains on skis. I have become used to the unfamiliar, not just languages and cultures that aren’t my own, but the sound of church bells in the morning, the smell of cooking cheese or vin chaud in the street, the sight of little old men walking giant chess pieces around giant chessboards in the park… Reflecting on it all like this, I realise how wonderful and strange my time in Switzerland has been, almost like something from a story in itself. And now it is coming to an end - as all stories must.

I have always been driven by the desire to write – and the hope that writing could one day make up the bulk of my income. My Literary Consultant job here has been fantastic, but now I have the opportunity to put aside the editing and administration and concentrate on freelance ghostwriting and my own stories. And I know the place to do that is not in this charmed but expensive and faraway city, but in my beloved Edinburgh – my home, to which it is time to return.

View of Grand Rue, Geneva Old Town, the street on which I've lived and worked

Despite feeling fairly confident about this decision, it's breaking my heart a little, leaving Geneva while I'm having such a good time. I think perhaps it would help to dwell on the negative: the endless bureaucracy here, for example; the lack of sea; the customer service that borders on abuse. But I can’t. Switzerland, despite its reputation as a rather twee and snoozy little country, is an extraordinary place - not least for the fact its people once had the bright idea of dipping bread in booze and melted cheese. 

The mighty Matterhorn

It's also beautiful. I remember learning about  nature inspiring feelings of the sublime when studying Gothic literature at university, and I have felt that sensation again and again in Switzerland. When I hiked around the Schynige Platte above Interlaken last summer, or under the Matterhorn’s domineering shadow in early Autumn, the sights made my heart soar. I think I now understand why Julie Andrews went twirling off towards that mountainous horizon singing all sorts of silliness about musical hills – she just couldn’t keep it in. If you have never been to Switzerland, I urge you to visit at the first possible opportunity.

Of course, it’s people that really complete a place, and I have made some amazing friends out here. Geneva is a transient city, where most only stick around for a few years (or even months), so I’ve been very fortunate in this regard. Whether we’ve been indulging in thimble-sized glasses of wine in expensive bars, or slobbing out in front of TV shows in each other’s apartments; whether we’ve been lounging in the sunshine at the Perle du Lac park, or zooming down ski slopes in the biting cold - my friends and I have experienced this mad and magical place together. 

In many of these friends, and especially in my colleagues, I have also found kindred, creative spirits. We’ve swapped new story ideas, we’ve made colourful spreadsheets of competition deadlines together, we’ve read one another’s fiction – first drafts, fourth drafts, last drafts – and offered our comments. We’ve been there to share in each other’s successes – and commiserated in the face of a few, inevitable setbacks. We even made it official, forming The Pen Poppers writing group for regular practice, feedback and encouragement. As I have said before, writing is such a solitary occupation, I find it best to try and share as much of the process as possible. 

Skiing with my creative colleagues
(and two of my favourite Geneva people), Helen and Elodie

Which leads me onto my writing in Geneva. One of the reasons I want to pursue the next stage of my career in Edinburgh is that I have been a little starved of writing opportunities (as opposed to writing people) in Switzerland. But, in a way, being cut off from the UK literary scene has encouraged me to connect more in cyberspace. In the past few years, I have set up twitter and LinkedIn accounts, dedicated more time to Writer’s Block, completed Nanowrimo twice, joined two Reading Challenges, acquired Goodreads and Amazon author profiles. Now I think about it, I’m not sure I would have made my online presence quite so known, had I not felt far away.

I know I’ll return to Switzerland, both physically and in my writing (I’m already noticing a lot more mountain scenery popping up in my fiction), so I’m sure this is not the last time I’ll talk about my experiences here. But I wanted to get at least some of it down before I went, because I know it’ll seem different in a few weeks, and more different still a year or two down the line. So this is how it is right now, on the brink of leaving Geneva - and this is how I am: happy, grateful, inspired, better organised, more focused, more like a writer, even a little more worldly. And, conversely, because of all that, I'm also ready to go.

Jumping for joy at the top of Mont Salève

Reading Review 2013

In January, I wrote of joining Goodreads and undertaking the 2013 Reading Challenge. Now, just in time, I have finished the final, thirty-fifth book (Graham Joyce's intriguing Some Kind of Fairy Tale), and so I wanted to review a few of this year's most memorable reads.

  

Best nonfiction: Your Voice in My Head by Emma Forrest. I found this memoir of mental illness a little meandering, and I would have liked more focus on the therapist character to whom it's dedicated. Having said that, Forrest is a frank, funny and utterly fearless writer, and the book is full of insight and wisdom concerning a subject that, in my opinion, is not talked or written about often enough. For example: Time heals all wounds. And if it doesn't, you name them something other than wounds and agree to let them stay.

Best reread: The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood. As I wrote in a previous post, I was impressed all over again by Atwood's dystopian classic, and the act of rereading it stirred up a lot of emotions about my teenage years, and the closure of my old school.

Most surprisingly enjoyable classic: Catch-22 by Joseph Heller. I had heard from various people that they hadn't been able to get on with Heller's satirical World War Two novel, but I was giggling away from page one, and had tears of laughter rolling down my cheeks by the 'flies in his eyes' discussion. Of course, like all good satire, the clever humour ensures the unfolding tragedy hits harder, making this both one of the funniest and most affecting books I read in 2013. (Runner-up: Tess of the D'Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy).

Biggest commitment: 1Q84 by Haruki Murakami. When I worked at Waterstone's, many moons ago, my colleagues were always raving about Murakami. I'm afraid it's taken me this long to pick up one of his books - or rather, three of them, for the surreal and unique 1Q84 was published as a trilogy. Although I did feel the story was stretched too thinly towards the end, I'm not sure I've ever experienced such a bonkers plot being told in such clear, matter-of-fact prose. It's an irresistable combination.

Most disappointing read: The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera. I try to finish each book I start because I truly believe I can learn something from every story, even those I don't like. Yet I found this novel so incredibly pompous and misogynistic, I'm not sure whether I should have struggled through to the end. Awful. (Runners-up: Eowyn Ivey’s The Snow Child and Robin McKinley’s Beauty. I expected to love these novelised fairy tales, but found neither really had much to add to the stories they were retelling).

Best children's/young adult book: A Monster Calls by Patrick Ness. Having adored the author's Chaos Walking trilogy last year, I had high hopes for his award-winning A Monster Calls, and still the novel completely surpassed my expectations. I've since come to the conclusion that Ness just gets it: he gets teenagers, he gets stories, and he gets that the things that really scare us are more complicated and difficult to confront than any sharp-toothed, long-clawed thing that goes bump in the night. (Runner-up: Unwind by Neal Shusterman).

Best book: The Tiger's Wife by Téa Obreht. Recommended by the lovely Elodie Olson-Coons, I took to this novel straight away. I'm a big fan of magical realism, especially when it's used as sparingly and effectively as it is in The Tiger's Wife. I also love how Obreht has structured this ambitious book; the way she has blended the folklore and the fantastical storytelling with a gritty, realist narrative set during the Balkans conflict. Obreht is, I have recently found out, just a few months younger than me. Perhaps I should be envious of her, and the success of her first novel, but I'm not - I'm inspired.

Ladies in Red: Rereading The Handmaid's Tale

It is 2002 and I am in my last year at school. I have dragged myself up several flights of stairs to the English classroom, the one right at the top of the building that becomes hot and stuffy in the summer, and I have thrown down my heavy rucksack, which is disfigured by Tipp-Ex eyes and yin yangs. The teacher is telling us that one of our A-level texts is to be The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood. I have never heard of it, or of her, and I’m not particularly bothered: the books we read at school are never as exciting as the ones I read at home, about quests and dragons and magic.

In that classroom, we begin to read aloud great chunks of The Handmaid’s Tale, our teacher picking on whoever is paying the least attention for this happy task. She tells us to listen to what Atwood is doing with language. I haven’t thought much about the way in which novels are written before, only about the stories themselves, and I shiver when I realise that the name of the book’s rebel movement ‘Mayday’ derives (just like the emergency distress call) from the French M’aidez: ‘help me’.

Over the days, the weeks, I become used to the way Atwood jumps through time, or drip-feeds information, or causes me to question the reliability of her narrator. She is playing with me, I realise - and as a result I am being drawn further into the tale of Offred, the scarlet-clad titular character, and her struggle in the totalitarian, repressed state of Gilead. I am not even giggling when we encounter swearing or passages about sex. I’m too engrossed in the world, too eager to discover what happens next. I cannot believe it’s a schoolbook, this bold and brilliant novel. I can’t believe it’s a book at all. I’ve never read anything like it in my seventeen years, and it’s changing how I think about reading, about writing - and about telling stories.

*

Recently, I read The Handmaid’s Tale for the second time. I don’t usually return to books, but I nominated this one for The Geneva International Book Club, so I picked it up again - with some trepidation. Dystopian literature is so very fashionable right now, most notably in Young Adult fiction (think The Hunger Games, Divergent, How I Live Now etc.), but The Handmaid’s Tale was written almost thirty years ago – what if it had gone stale? Or what if it simply wasn’t as good as I remembered?

In Atwood I trust, I told myself, and on a trip to my parents’ house dug out my old book from school. It has a plastic cover that someone – the librarian, most probably – wrapped around the outside; it has St. Margaret’s School, Exeter stamped onto the title page; it has pencil notes in the margins, made by me, long ago. Now I write this, I wonder whether I was supposed to have kept it. I’m glad I did.

Last month, my secondary school closed its doors for good. A small, old-fashioned girls’ school, it sometimes seemed as though it belonged in a time gone by; that was no small part of its charm and - I suspect - its undoing. When I heard of its fate, I was sad, certainly, but I quickly pushed the news aside. I suppose that it all feels very far away from me here in Geneva, both in terms of physical distance and the fact that exactly a decade has now passed since I left. But then I opened up my old copy of The Handmaid’s Tale, and not only was I back in that story, I was back in that school as well.

We were (young) ladies in red too, we St. Margaret’s girls. ‘Cherry red,’ it was called; the colour of our jumpers, the stripes on our ties, the ribbon on our blazers. But the hue of our uniforms is where the similarities between we and the handmaids of Atwood’s novel end. They live in a stilted, subjugated society, whereas our red world was full of words and ideas and learning.

It was around the age I first read The Handmaid’s Tale, in the atmosphere of that school, that I started to consider what steps I should take, in order to make something out of all the stories that kept popping into my head. In fact, I remember telling anyone who’d listen, with all the swagger that comes with having absolutely no clue what the Big Wide World has in store, that I wanted to be a writer. And looking back, after a decade on this path, I don’t remember any of my teachers or friends telling me that it would be hard, that my bank statements would be laughable, that the whole thing was going to be - at times - frustrating and disheartening. What would have been the point? I was going to do it anyway. Funnily enough, for all its dated rules and uniform codes, St. Margaret’s was thoroughly modern in the way it filled us with ambition, and then let us speed off in any direction we chose.

It’s nostalgia I’m feeling, I know this. Rereading Atwood’s novel has taken me back to a happy, formative time and my brain has conveniently edited out all the bleak bits. But I think, given the recent closure of St. Margaret’s, I’m experiencing a little more than just wistful reflection on days’ past. That time is gone for me – that’s how growing up works – but the fact that that school, that environment, that place of possibilities has now gone too – that’s the part that stings.

I should say at this juncture that the book is still fantastic - of course it is. At the book club, it provoked some great discussion, not only on the story itself, but on wider issues that need and demand great discussion: women, religion, reproductive rights, to name but a few. It has also been a boon to my writing, as reading the masters always is, for it has forced me to try and raise my writing game a thousandfold. Most of all, it’s made me think of myself, at seventeen. Fiercely ambitious, hopelessly naïve, what would she say to me now, I wonder, that girl whose notes are pencilled in this old book? Finish your novel, I expect (it’s what I say to myself now).

It is unsurprising perhaps, with all of this rattling around in my head, that in my reread of The Handmaid’s Tale, this passage stood out in particular:

We line up to get processed through the checkpoint, standing in our twos and twos and twos, like a private girls’ school that went for a walk and stayed out too long. Years and years too long, so that everything has become overgrown, legs, bodies, dresses all together. As if enchanted. A fairy tale, I’d like to believe.

Sometimes, when Real Life gets confusing or tough, I wonder whether maybe, like the Pevensie children, I’ll come tumbling out of the wardrobe, and find I’m still a young girl in a cherry red jumper, and that no time has passed at all. Only, that’s the wrong way round: St. Margaret’s is the fairy tale now, the lost place of our childhoods. We’re all grown up and can’t get back – and, sadly, neither can the children who were halfway through their studies this year, nor the teachers and other staff who dedicated so much of themselves to that school.

I hope it’s not forgotten. I think, after my strong reaction to rereading The Handmaid’s Tale, that’s the reason I started to write this: I want to remember. Memories, I believe, are important real stories that we have to recognise, learn from, laugh at, and - above all else - hold onto. In that way, I hope revisiting St. Margaret’s in the future will be as easy as revisiting a favourite novel: I hope I will return to it, unexpectedly, inevitably, over and over; that place and that time that made up so many chapters of the beginning of my story.

Five Female Characters

A few weeks ago, on March 8th, it was International Women's Day, and the internet was flooded with inspiring articles and stories by and about women all over the world. For my own response to IWD, I thought about writing a post on all the real-life women I admire, many of whom are writers, but then I decided it would be fun to pay tribute to the pretend ones instead. It was actually a harder job than I anticipated, narrowing the list down, but in the end I decided that the following five characters are the ones with whom I have most connected – and have most influenced me as a writer.

Hermione Granger

'I hope you're pleased with yourselves. We could have been all killed - or worse, expelled.'

       - JK Rowling, Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone

Like so many, I grew up with Hermione, and what I always loved about her was, although she is famously clever and bookish, she is also brave, vulnerable, emotional, and stands up unapologetically for what she believes in. Before Harry Potter, I hadn’t encountered such a well-rounded character in a children’s book - certainly not a female one. I believe JK Rowling herself sums it up nicely in this (very interesting) discussion on the women in the series, when she says, 'In creating Hermione, I felt I created a girl who was a heroine. She wasn’t sexy, nor was she the girl in glasses who was entirely sexless. Do you know what I mean? She’s a real girl.'

Lyra Belaqua/Silvertongue

… Lyra threw her cigarette down, recognizing the cue for a fight. Everyone's daemon instantly became warlike: each child was accompanied by fangs, or claws, or bristling fur, and Pantalaimon, contemptuous of the limited imaginations of these gyptian daemons, became a dragon the size of a deer hound.

 - Philip Pullman, Northern Lights

Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy contains the book that made me want to be a writer (Northern Lights) and the first book that broke my heart (The Amber Spyglass). Much of the story's power is due to its central character, Lyra, a prickly girl of twelve whose special skill is lying. I too was twelve when I read the first book and I had never encountered a personality like Lyra's before – in fact, I’m not sure I have since. She is perhaps my favourite character of all time; fierce and loving in equal measure, she remains achingly human in the face of remarkable situations and fantastical worlds.

Emma Woodhouse

Emma Woodhouse, handsome, clever, and rich, with a comfortable home and happy disposition, seemed to unite some of the best blessings of existence; and had lived nearly twenty-one years in the world with very little to distress or vex her.

- Jane Austen, Emma

The eponymous heroine of Austen’s Emma is a Marmite figure: you either love her or hate her. Generally, I find people much prefer either Pride and Prejudice’s Elizabeth Bennett or Persuasion’s Anne Elliot. Indeed, even Austen herself didn’t anticipate anyone warming to Emma, saying, 'I am going to take a heroine whom no one but myself will much like.' It is true, Miss Woodhouse is spoilt, selfish, even cruel,  but she is also witty, confident, loving and determined to better herself. To me, Emma, is loveable precisely because of the flaws in her character and the way she comes to recognise them.

‘Offred’

I want to be held and told my name. I want to be valued, in ways that I am not; I want to be more than valuable. I repeat my former name; remind myself of what I once could do, how others saw me. I want to steal something. 

- Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale

Atwood's best novel, set in a dystopian society in which groups of women are essentially used as breeding machines, is narrated by the character of ‘Offred’, the titular handmaid in question. As the book progresses, 'Offred' quietly begins to rebel against the system not with her fists, but with her use of language, which gives her a means of mental - and perhaps even physical - escape. I read The Handmaid’s Tale at exactly the right time: I was seventeen years old, in my last year at school, and just about to go out into the world and discover what it was to be a woman. Atwood's words, through 'Offred', showed me a character with a core of strength not immediately visible, and taught me how language could be wielded as a weapon against injustice.

Sophie Fevvers

'And once the old world has turned on its axle so that the new dawn can dawn, then, ah, then! all the women will have wings, the same as I.'

- Angela Carter, Nights at the Circus

To be honest, I could have picked any number of Carter's heroines for this spot, as so many of them are bawdy and wicked and completely irresistible. But I picked Fevvers, the Cockney circus performer who allegedly hatched from an egg and sprouted wings, because - outside of The Bloody Chamber - she was Carter's first female character I encountered, and I loved her. After all, why should a woman not have wings (or does she)? Why should she necessarily tell the truth (or is she)? Carter initially seized me with her fairy tales, but she keeps me coming back for more and more with fantastical and contradictory characters like Fevvers.

So there you have them: five women who are clever yet vulnerable, fierce yet loving, selfish yet well-meaning, quiet yet rebellious, impossible yet oh so real, and so many other things at the same time. And there are many more of them, of course (I'd love to hear other people's lists/thoughts). Having read an awful lot of classics featuring the angel/monster problem (looking especially at you, Dickens), I think it's so important to take stock of how far fictional females have come. In this way, it's quite apt to celebrate them for International Women's Day: their progress has, after all, reflected that of their real-life counterparts.