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.

Reading Challenge 2013

Look at any article aimed at new writers and, almost without exception, the advice 'read more' will feature heavily. As a new writer myself, I see it again and again, but of course it's perfectly true. Barbara Kingsolver, author of the magnificent The Poisonwood Bible, puts it beautifully on her website: I learned to write by reading the kinds of books I wished I'd written. 

Last year, I didn't read nearly enough. In my defence, I work with words all day long, so picking up a book in the evening always feels like a struggle. Nevertheless, there was plenty to be learned from the few novels I did manage to make it through. Emma Donoghue's Room, for example, introduced me to the power of a good narrator, while Patrick Ness' wonderful Chaos Walking trilogy impressed me with its meaty themes, so relevant to the young readership at which it's aimed. And after devouring Kate Morton's The Forgotten Garden (unfairly labelled a 'summer read'), a fully-fledged fairy tale popped into my head, which I promptly wrote almost all of in one sitting.

Thinking back on this leads me to wonder what would happen if I put a little more effort in and made a lot more time for books that I am neither working on nor trying to write. As such, 2013 will be, for me, the year of reading. A few days ago I joined Goodreads (my profile can be found here) and signed up for their 2013 Reading Challenge, pledging to read at least thirty-five books by the end of the year.

That number may not sound particularly earth-shattering, but I'm hoping to go for a bit of variety with my reading this year, mixing up female authors with male, modern fiction with classics, fantasy stories with reality and maybe even try out a little non-fiction and (gasp!) poetry. Of course, it's not exactly an unpleasant or even academic exercise - I love reading, so mostly it'll just be fun. But perhaps, along the way, I might stumble across something unexpected, as well as many, many books that, inevitably, I will end up wishing I'd written.

2012: The Writing Year in Numbers

Completing NaNoWriMo and pushing through the last few weeks of work before Christmas seem to have robbed me of all energy, therefore I present my review of the writing year mostly in numerical form:

2 novels undertaken, one for work, one for... fun(?)

3 competition successes: Cargo Publishing/Scottish Book Trust's twitter competition, Indigo Ink's Grimmoire Fairy Tales anthology, 5 Minute Fiction's Christmas competition

9 short stories completed: Something New of You, It'll All be Gone Tomorrow, The Gorgon and the Goddess, Ring-a-Roses, The Weeping Glen, Unnamed, Unsettled, The Visitor, The Queen and the Stag

12 blog posts (far better than last year's effort of 1)

63 short stories ghostwritten

179 tweets, mostly about writing

25, 432 words written for NaNoWriMo

77, 159 current length of the complete (in first draft) novel

And now for some New Year writing goals/projects in bullet point form:

• Rewrite novel

• Complete more stories for fairy tale anthology

• Enter more competitions

• Keep up the Pen Poppers (writers' group)

• Write more posts for Writers' Block (meta)

Think that's my lot for now. 2012, you've been awesome. 2013, I'll deal with you later.

Happy New Year!

An Advent of Stories

Whoever invented the modern advent calendar (I suspect those clever, Christmas-loving Germans) was onto a good thing. Whoever invented the chocolate advent calendar was onto an even better one. And now, the folk at 5 Minute Fiction have come up with an idea that's just as sweet: an advent of Christmas stories.

I've actually been thinking a lot about Christmas fiction recently. I think it's a lovely tradition, obviously made popular by Charles Dickens among others, and it's rather a shame there isn't more about at this time of year anymore. I had a couple of ideas for longer festive pieces, which I hope to write one day, but when I saw this competition - to pen a Christmas-themed flash fiction, the best of which would be displayed on the 5 Minute Fiction website during the countdown to Christmas - I decided to have a go with a completely new idea.

I can't really say too much about it, as it's pretty short and I'm a spoilerphobe. But I was really pleased that 5 Minute Fiction named me runner up in this competition and my story, The Visitor, is now available on their website here.

Merry Christmas!

NaNoWriMo 2012: The End

At this stage in the novelling game, I don't anticipate my last scene to be followed by the words 'The End'. It would certainly be nice and neat but, for a story about second chances, it wouldn't work to close with so much finality. Nevertheless, a few days ago, I was sorely tempted to write those two little words at the bottom of the page for, after a month of NaNoWriMo, I had reached The End.

Progress throughout the month: a little hit and miss

As can been seen above on the Bar Chart of Joy, this year's Nano has not been particularly smooth sailing. In fact, I became severely stranded on three occasions both for pleasant reasons - a trip to Amsterdam, the visit of a friend - and a thoroughly unpleasant one - being struck down by an evil time and energy-guzzling illness. Sabotaged by my own body! It was a bit of a struggle, more so than I anticipated, but I did manage to claw back my word count over the last few days and finally finish - hurrah!

Now, after a few days of hardly thinking about writing at all, I think a kind of debrief is probably due on the experience, for which I've come up with the following:

1) The first draft is complete
Firstly, and perhaps most importantly, I have finished it, just like Joss Whedon told me to. It might be in a complete state, but it's all there, and therefore far easier to work with than a load of blank pages.

2) I have a better grip on the story
I have written this story over several years with months and months going by between bursts of activity. Returning to the plot in such a concentrated way has allowed me to see what works (the settings, for one) and what doesn't (the lack of emotional payoff at the end is currently my biggest concern), and therefore what I need to work on...

3) I have a plan
... Which leads me to the future of the book. I love to organise, and writing is one of those glorious activities that almost always benefits from a healthy dose of planning. It was always inevitable then, that as I was typing furiously to the deadline, my mind would be on the next stage of the process. I already know that the first thing I'm going to amend in the New Year is the opening of the story, which will take place in a completely different location (a wood) and then I'm going to tackle the rewrite chronologically, ie separating out my interlinking 2005/2010 timelines in the hope that I can smooth over all my plot holes and straighten out all my story arcs.

So finishing Nano is not an end - far, far from it. But the point is it's not a beginning either. To quote the mighty Joss once more:

Finishing [...]is first of all truly difficult, and secondly really liberating. Even if it’s not perfect, even if you know you’re gonna have to go back into it, type to the end. You have to have a little closure.

Which is why, to myself, and only in relation to the first draft, I think I can say it just this once:

The End.

This is the first and last time a post will feature
more than one graph. Promise.

Modern Grimmoire

A couple of months ago, I saw that Indigo Ink Press were running a competition to find stories for their forthcoming fairy tale anthology. This weekend, I received the very exciting news that my entry had been successful, and I am to be published next year in Modern Grimmoire: Contemporary Fairy Tales, Fables and Folklore.

Soon to feature... The Mirror Child

My entry, The Mirror Child, was originally written as a response to Snow White. It features a Queen so desperate for a child that she is tricked by a mischievous fairy, who gifts her reflection - and only her reflection - with a baby.

Originally penned in 2008, The Mirror Child formed one third of a trilogy of fairy tales written for my Creative Writing MSc. The first story in the collection, When Winter was Caught, was published a few years ago in English Digest, a Taiwanese English language publication, as part of my stint as their Overseas Writer. The second story, The Sea-Maid Speaks, was shortlisted for the Chapter One Promotions Short Story Competition and published this year in their anthology, The Beginning. 

So it's very nice to find a home for the third and final story in the collection, not to mention the warm, happy feelings that being chosen for publication brings. Plus, the finalists are invited to a launch party called the 'Poison Apple Ball'. I'm not even sure what this entails, but if by some miracle I can afford a trip to America (or to whichever faraway location it happens to be held), I'll be there with wings on.

NaNoWriMo 2012: Preparation

As of tomorrow, I'll be taking part in Nanowrimo. To prepare, I have done the following:

1) Read through the existing manuscript
As previously mentioned, my Nano challenge this year is to finish my incomplete novel, at least in first draft. In an attempt to try and remember what on earth was going on in the story, I recently skimmed through everything I had written so far. Surprisingly, I didn't hate it. I didn't exactly love it either, but that's okay.

2) Made a plan
I love planning. If I could get a job plotting books and not writing them, that would be marvellous. Recently, my Geneva writers' group indulged this perversion of mine by promising we could have a 'structure clinic' at some point in the near future, whereby we all help one another put our stories into some sort of order. For me, this is painfully exciting - sort of like a literary Christmas - although I have realised I should probably make a plan for my own Nano project, if I'm going to be bossy about everyone else's.

3) Signed up
Nano has an excellent website, featuring lots of tips and banter, where you can design yourself a fancy profile, with pictures and a novel synopsis and everything. Mine is now up and running here. My favourite thing by far on the Nano website is the Bar Chart of Joy. Nothing gives me greater pleasure than watching the bar chart of my word count go up and up during the month of November - just as nothing fills me with as much dread as getting behind and watching the projected word count get further and further out of reach.

My Novel profile as of 01/11/12 - featuring the Bar Chart of Joy

4) Spread the word
During previous Nanos, I've found it best to tell my nearest and dearest that I'm attempting a novel in thirty days, just so they know why I look so hollow-eyed/unwashed/confused by reality. Better yet is to get them to do it as well. Long ago (May) I made a pact with Miss Joely Badger that we would both do Nano this year. And then there's my Geneva writers' group, some of whom may be attempting it too. As I said in my previous post on collaborative writing: share the writing burden!

5) Tidied my flat
I am notoriously messy and will neglect housework for weeks and weeks on end if I can get away with it (considering my 'studio apartment' in Geneva is probably only slightly larger than a shoe box, this is rather shaming). But when one is in the throes of novel-writing, scrubbing the bathroom often begins to look like an appealing alternative to writing, so that particular procrastination path has been nipped in the bud.

6) Bought a lot of food

The 'Inspiration Station'
- complete with novelty lighting

I work long hours and the aforementioned minuscule apartment has a kitchen which is literally inside a cupboard. This makes me a very lazy cook. I don't even really try: pasta and pesto has become my go-to supper (and believe me, I go to it a lot). However, novelists need nourishment - and Nano novelists cannot afford to be wasting time wandering the supermarket aisles every day. Therefore I have bought myself all sorts of healthy food: smoothies! Bananas! Broccoli! I can't remember the last time I ate broccoli, and I'm not convinced I can recall what to do with it.

7) Bought a lot of booze
As above, but more so.

8) Got in the mood

I've been working on my poor nameless novel for a long time now. Almost five years, in fact. As such, I have a pretty good idea of who will star in the inevitable film adaptation (Ralph Fiennes, Rachel Hurd-Wood, Julianne Moore), what the soundtrack will feature (Israel 'Iz' Kamakawiwo'Ole's Somewhere Over the Rainbow, Portishead's Numb, among others) and have even built up an 'Inspiration Station' of random pictures vaguely connected to the story, so I can't accidentally forget I'm supposed to be writing it. In addition to reading through the manuscript, I have revisited these bookish bonus features - and am now officially In The Mood To Write.

Soundtrack music: Israel 'Iz' Kamakawiwo'Ole's 

version of 'Somewhere Over the Rainbow'