Julia Crouch:

I’m really looking forward to reading Julia Crouch’s latest novel ‘Every Vow You Break’.  I’ve been thrilled to witness Julia’s success and this novel looks every bit as gripping as her first, ‘Cuckoo’.

‘Every Vow You Break’ concerns the Wayland family who leave England to spend a long, hot summer in Trout Island, Upstate New York. Lara, still reeling from an abortion that Marcus insisted on, hopes the summer away from home will give her time to learn to love her husband again.

A chance meeting at a party reacquaints the family with Marcus’s old actor friend, Stephen, with whom Lara once had an affair. Lara feels herself drawn towards Stephen and they pick up their secret relationship where they left off. Lara knows she’s playing a dangerous game; what she doesn’t know is that it’s also a deadly one.

You can read about the work Julia and I did together here and in a more extensive interview with Julia on The Literary Project.

And a third novel is due to be published later this year.  Is there no stopping the amazing Ms Crouch?

Denise Gow:

Denise Gow, a former film-maker and member of ‘The Completion Club’ here at The Writing Coach, published her novel ‘The Icon Painter’s Angel’ both on Kindle and in paperback.  This dual-narrative novel, set in the Renaissance and contemporary Florence explores the life of the iconic Lucrezia Buti, lover of Filippo Lippi:

“In the twenty-first century, a group of icon painters relax on a retreat in the hills above Florence where one of them paints the famous face of Lucrezia Buti. Excavations at the Palazzo disturb a buried black icon imbued with evil powers and the group become disturbed, fixating their sexual longings toward their teacher, Mark. Not until he has a near-death experience and meets the benign influence of Lucrezia Buti is he able to return to his body and restore harmony to his group.”

It is fascinating territory and bound to keep you gripped…

Kirsten Fogg:

Another member of ‘The Completion Club’, Kirsten Fogg had her essay ‘After the Flood on Harte Street’ – published recently.  This essay – about her experience of the Brisbane floods of 2011 – appeared in the magazine ‘Creative Non-Fiction’, one of seven to be chosen from 350 entries.  It’s a deeply moving essay about the transforming power of friendship and the impact of the floods – and well worth getting the magazine to read it. Congratulations Kirsten!

Voula Grand:

Novelist and Psychologist Voula Grand had the paperback edition of her novel ‘Honor’s Shadow’ published by Karnac recently and was also one of six contributing writers for ‘The Psychology Book’ which won the British Psychological Book Award this year.  Voula writes,

“My special interest is in the human dilemmas we face as adults: our struggles and quests to know and do what is right, and how hard that can be; and how we can make ourselves suffer so much in the attempt. This is what I aim to explore in my fictional writing. Stories raise questions, unbidden, to our conscious minds, leading us to places in ourselves that are long forgotten, buried beneath the decades of worldly life, and social conditioning: especially true during the adult years of mid-life, during a natural “taking stock” as we review our past, consider our future, and identify the highs and lows of pride and regret.”

I highly recommend Voula’s work – her psychological insight lends her novels a unique flavour and a real intensity; this is a novel that will remain with you.

Obi Abuchi:

Obi Abuchi published ‘The Magic of Monday’ a fable that teaches lessons on developing a winning attitude in and out of the workplace. The career advice given is this book is based on real advice and insights gleaned from interviews of more than seventy-five business leaders, entrepreneurs, senior executives, and managers.  It’s designed to ensure that you never look at Monday mornings in the same way again!

Obi also published an article in the Telegraph, based on the advice given in the book.

Simon Horton:

Simon Horton had his book ‘Negotiation Mastery’ published by MX Publishing. Simon has taught negotiation to hostage negotiators and some of the largest law firms in the world. He is also a visiting lecturer at Imperial College, London.  In his words:

“Want to learn about Genghis Khan’s negotiating tactics (surprisingly win-win)? Want to read what evil dolphins have to do with bargaining? Want to know how Val Doonican’s mum can help you get a better deal?

‘Negotiation Mastery’ is a comprehensive guide to all the best negotiation techniques, drawing upon best practice in the field as well as cutting edge findings in the worlds of psychology, NLP, game theory, neuroscience, body language and decision theory. And it is highly readable, too, with stories of how Elvis learnt to shake his leg, a love affair with a crocodile, the discovery of Viagra and many others, all used to illustrate negotiation tactics and strategies.”

Congratulations to Simon for the excellent review coverage on this book!

Helen Oakwater:

Helen was also a member of ‘The Completion Club’ and I’ve been delighted to witness the success of her book ‘Bubble Wrapped Children’ about how social networking is transforming the face of 21st century adoption:

“Numerous reasons cause adopted teenagers to reconnect with their birth family via Facebook, creating new challenges for adoption today and tomorrow. Incorporating theory, practice, anecdotes, metaphors, diagrams, models and case studies, this accessible book, written by an experienced adopter and NLP Coach, clearly explains these complex issues.

Bubble Wrapped Children maps connections between trauma, child development, grief, adolescence, contact, truth telling and parenting styles; offering fresh perspectives and strategies for parents and professionals.”

Helen was  featured on Sky News talking about the impact of social networking on adopted children and their families.

Congratulations to all of these authors and I look forward to sharing more success stories from former clients in the future.  If you’re a former client who has recently published a book, do contact me and I’ll be sure to include you in the next update!

Enter the Mslexia Children's Novel Competition and give your children's novel a headstart

If you have completed (or are very close to completing) a novel for children or young adults, the Mslexia Children’s Novel Competition is the perfect opportunity to get your work noticed.  Mslexia are hoping to discover a fantastic new children’s writer who has been overlooked by the usual submission process. In the current climate, where it can be difficult to get your work noticed by an agent or publisher, this could be one way of getting your work to stand out.

Mslexia’s Children’s Novel Competition has a deadline of 10 September 2012 and in order to enter you must have a complete manuscript ready for submission because shortlisted authors will be required to submit a full manuscript for the final stages of the judging process. The competition, which has a first prize of £5,000, is for unpublished novelists only and will be judged by a panel including award-winning children’s writer Malorie Blackman, literary agent Julia Churchill and children’s books editor at the Guardian newspaper, Julia Eccleshare.

You probably know Mslexia, an award-winning magazine for women writers. In addition to their new novel competition, they also run annual poetry and short story competitions. Last year’s adult novel competition winner Rosie Garland has just signed a six-figure two-book deal with HarperCollins – proof that competitions such as these can really make a difference to your writing career.

There are some fantastic writing resources and workshops (to complete at home) on the Mslexia website that aim to help you improve your novel and develop your writing skills.

Who is the competition aimed at?

• Women who’ve always wanted to write a children’s novel, but could never find the time. You only have to write 30,000 words minimum for this competition.
• Women with an unfinished manuscript languishing in a bottom drawer. (Could this be the impetus you need to finish it?)
• Women who took up the write-a-novel-in-a-month challenge with NaNoWriMo and have a rough first draft. (Why not polish it up and send it to Mslexia?)
• Women who’ve submitted their completed novels over and over, and have despaired of finding an agent. (If you reach the shortlist, they’ll all sit up and take notice.)

Full details of the competition are on the Mxlexia website here and a summary of entry requirements follows:

Mslexia Children’s Novel Competition

The competition is open to children’s novels in any genre by previously unpublished women novelists, but it must be for children who are able to read for themselves or for young adults. Crossover fiction (i.e. that aimed at children and adults) is eligible. Nonfiction, and fiction intended for adults is not eligible. To qualify as a novel, your book must total at least 30,000 words.

To enter the competition: send up to 3,000 words – which must be the first 3,000 words of the novel. Any preface is included in your 3,000 words. There is no need to submit a synopsis.

First Prize: £5,000

Juding panel: Malorie Blackman, award-winning children’s author; Julia Churchill, literary agent specialising in children’s books for Greenhouse Literary Agency; Julia Eccleshare, children’s books editor at the Guardian newspaper.

Closing date: 10 September 2012

Entry fee: £25

If you plan to enter the competition, do leave a comment below.  I’d love to know of any Writing Coach readers and former clients/members who enter and will be rooting for you all!

“Nothing in the world is permanent, and we’re foolish when we ask anything to last, but surely we’re still more foolish not to take delight in it while we have it. If change is of the essence of existence one would have thought it only sensible to make it the premise of our philosophy.” – W. Somerset Maugham, The Razor’s Edge, 1943

As you may already know, The Writing Coach is about to enter a new phase of development. Having been running the business for seven years now, I have recently realised that a change was necessary.  I’ll be writing more in future posts about how that change came about for me (and lessons that I can draw from this process) but for the moment, suffice to say that from September 2012 I will be returning to full time education and embarking on a new stage of my career.  I will be studying for a PGCE in English with Drama at London’s Institute of Education with a view to teaching drama, literature and creative writing to teenagers, whilst continuing to pursue my own writing.  I am immensely excited about this new direction.  It does, however, mean that from the end of July this year, I will no longer be personally available as coach; indeed, I have already closed my books to new clients.

Will the Writing Coach website still be running?

Absolutely.  In order to fully focus on my new studies, I will no longer be running a literary consultancy here at the Writing Coach – at least for the time being (if that changes, readers of this blog will be the first to know). However, this is not the end of The Writing Coach website; instead it marks a fresh beginning.  The blog will be very much alive and I will continue to send out the newsletter so do sign up for regular updates and subscribe to the RSS feed or email updates on the blog.

In the coming months, it is my intention to publish both my latest novel and my backlist (previously published by Penguin and Bloomsbury) on Kindle and iPad and I’d like you to join me on this self-publishing journey.  I will continue to update this blog by publishing all archive articles and I will be writing fresh posts that I hope will be useful to new and established writers, whatever stage you are at and however you decide to publish.

In coming weeks I will streamline this website as the focus will increasingly be on the blog.  I have yet to take a final decision on the membership aspect of the site but I am not closed to the idea of a membership aspect/forum.  An announcement will follow in due course though I may wait until October before taking this decision.

What will be the focus of the blog in coming months?

As ever, my aim is to bring you inspiration and motivation relating to all aspects of your writing work and life.  I will continue to post on the subject of traditional publishing and how to approach agents and publishers.  I will also be documenting my own epublishing journey and sharing what I learn in the process as well as offering advice and guidance to those who are also considering this path.  My current interests in theatre and in education will doubtless impact on this blog.  I will share what I learn about how drama and writing interact, for example what I learn about character development and story structure as I study drama.  I will also be reflecting on the process of writing fiction for young adults (YA fiction) as I embark upon a YA novel and work with teenagers.  My hope is that I can bring my own continuing education into my writing here – with the intention of sharing, encouraging conversation and, I hope, continuing to inspire your writing in the months ahead.  I will also write about change: how we recognise the need for it and how we act upon that impulse.

How can I stay up to date with The Writing Coach?

Aside from signing up for the newsletter and RSS or email updates to the blog, you can also ‘like’ The Writing Coach on Facebook here or follow me on Twitter here and here. If you have any questions about the future of the site/the business, do feel free to ask them in the comments below and I will be posting a FAQ soon too.  I’m looking forward to all that lies ahead and to sharing it with you.

As writers, we all need confidence in bucket-loads. Why’s that? Because we are working in a profession where rejection is often a part of the deal. We frequently work without a structure, sometimes without colleagues, relying on our wits and in many cases not getting enough feedback. I’ve worked with enough writers over the years to know that insecurity can go with the territory.  Even published writers experience this, as they go through the publication mill. ‘Will I get enough publicity? Will anyone notice my novel has even appeared? What are the reviews like? How are my sales?’

If you’re a confident writer reading this and thinking ‘speak for yourself, I’m confident as hell’ then by all means, skip to another post on this site. But it seems to me that insecurity is a part of the human condition and in the many years I have spent working as a coach and mentor to writers, I’ve not met a writer who doesn’t experience it in one form or another.

Recently, in my regular drama class at City Lit we were playing a character-based ‘status game’ that got me thinking about confidence in a new way.  I’d like to share my insights, but first, a simple question:

Why is confidence important for writers?  Shouldn’t we be thinking about talent first?

In truth, I think the two go hand in hand. In order to develop talent, we need to work hard at our art. If we wish to develop as a writer, for example, it’s necessary to spend many hours reading: to absorb the skills and the technique of those who have gone before us.  We need to work hard at our writing desks too, developing our ideas and our style – and we need to get feedback from others, to get a sense of how readers perceive our work. We need to read other writers on their processes (the Paris Review interviews are fantastic for this), perhaps attend writing classes or meet with fellow writers to learn more about our craft.  All of this takes time and dedication. But where are we to find this time and dedication if we do not first have confidence that we can DO THIS? And if we produce our masterpiece, how are we going to ensure that we maintain our confidence for long enough to persist through possible rounds of rejections? (JK Rowling had twelve before Bloomsbury accepted the first Harry Potter book; George Orwell endured “It is impossible to sell animal stories in the USA” for Animal Farm and why not take a look at the blog “One hundred famous rejections” for more.)  It seems to me that writers need confidence to inspire their talent and confidence to match their talent as they take their work out into the world.

I have written in the past about “creativity and despair” in my post on the life and work of Sarah Kane “4.48 Psychosis: creativity and despair”.  I also wrote about this theme in my novel Bluethroat Morning.  Creative despair is the flip side of creative brilliance and my work here at the writing coach centres on how we can use our creativity to inspire positive growth and how we can avoid the creative tendency for harsh self-judgement, especially in a success-driven world.  (See my newsletter post on ‘success’ too)

So what’s this ‘playing a ten’ business?

In an improvisation class, our tutor suggested that we play with the idea of status.  If every character had a ‘status’ from 1-10, she suggested (where 1 was extremely timid and 10 was super-confident), how would that affect our playing of that character?  We were asked to pick random numbers from a hat and to walk into the room and say ‘hello’, demonstrating that number via our stance and attitude.  If there wasn’t a strong consensus about what number we were, we had to adjust our playing accordingly and try again until people ‘got’ our status.  What was interesting to me is that sometimes we had really differing views of what a ’4′ or a ’8′ might look like.

This is, of course, interesting from the point of view of characterisation too. Our teacher pointed out the fact that ‘status’ in this respect has nothing to do with job.  ‘My cleaner is a ’10′,’ she said.  ‘If he’s cleaning the communal hallway, he takes over the place and I find myself saying a quiet ‘excuse me’ if I want to get past.’  This exercise reminded me of another drama exercise I’d undertaken in a previous term where a teacher asked us to focus on different parts of our body as we walked.  We discovered through that exercise that ‘confidence is in the chest’.  When you walk with your chest thrust forward, you inevitably feel more confident.  (If it’s useful for character development profiles, we also discovered that age is in the hips and gender is in the knees, in terms of the way one walks…)

In the class on status, we then played various improvisation games where characters interacted with each other in different status positions.  (I was a gallery attendant meeting a gallery-goer who had a higher status than me.)  We discussed how our status can change, depending on different circumstances and relationships (one might be a ’9′ at work and a ’3′ at home for example).  And at the end of the class, we discussed the way in which anyone who is feeling like a ’10′ on a particular day can walk along the pavement in such a style that almost everyone will get out of their way.  We were asked to leave the class walking ‘like a ’10′ to see if this is true.  (It is. Try it!)

But does ‘playing a ten’ actually make you more confident?

When taking part in this exercise, I was reminded of how the physical body affects our mental state.  I once heard the coach Aboodi Shabi talk about how the body affects the self and his ideas remained with me.  When we walk with a focus on our chest, for example (our teacher suggested walking as if there was a small glowing golden ball in your chest), then something in our physical self shifts – and this can result in a mental shift too.  As we begin to walk more confidently, so we feel more confident and happier even.  It struck me that if we can simply ‘decide’ to shift our confidence physically, then a mental shift is also more likely to occur.

Equally importantly, I was reminded of the work of Rosamund Stone Zander and Benjamin Zander, via their book The Art of Possibility: Transforming Professional and Personal Life.  Benjamin Zander is the conductor of the Boston Philharmonic Orchestra and in the book he talks about how he improves the outcomes for his students via the practice of ‘Giving an A’.  He starts the term by telling his students that he will give all of them an ‘A’ if they will simply write him a letter, as if from themselves at the end of term, telling him what they did to deserve their ‘A’.  In Zander’s words, ‘This A is not an expectation to live up to, but a possibility to live into.’

Zander’s students excel because they are not therefore constrained by self-doubt.  One of the reasons that I’m interested in this theme is the fact that I have worked with writers who are effectively ‘getting in their own way’: not writing at their full capacity because a lack of confidence is stifling their creative potential and growth.

I want to be clear about this.  I am not saying that increased confidence will turn you into a genius.  I am saying however that if you learn to allow your creative potential to flow (via a state of confident experimentation) then you have a chance of writing something good and inherently true to you (and maybe even amazing).  I have witnessed many times how increased confidence leads to better work.  Confident writers are more open to creative accident, are more likely to access moments of creative brilliance, are more productive and have greater verve in their work.

How does one play this elusive ‘ten’?

To be honest, an eight or a nine would do! The best advice I can give is to approach your work with a sense of curiosity and openness.  When you are writing, don’t ask yourself what the ‘right’ way of doing this is. Rather, aim to get honest words down, focus on expression rather than on your self. Too many writers approach their desks with self-consciousness. You need to get past this if you are going to write well. Some people find meditation helps. I like to play Bach’s Cello Suites (the Pablo Casals version is my favourite) to get past myself and into a more relaxed state.  You can also try simple breathing and postural work:  close your eyes, breathe slowly and deeply, relax your knees a little, stand upright, as if a thread is pulling up the back of your head, draw your breath in deep and focus on the present moment.  You might like to look at the book ‘Presence’ by Patsy Rodenburg (Director of Voice at the National Theatre) if you want to do the physical work that will lead to greater confidence.  What would happen if you approached your writing desk with a real sense of presence?

For ‘confidence’ you could even substitute ‘truth’.  Tell yourself ‘I’m going to focus on writing something which I believe to be true or something which seems real and true to me’.  Confidence is about openness to process and about the messages you give yourself.  An unconfident writer would approach his or her writing desk thinking ‘how the hell am I going to write anything good? Who am I to think I can write a decent sentence let alone a novel?’  A confident writer, by contrast, would go to the writing desk in a spirit of enquiry.  ‘What am I going to find out today? I wonder what my character is going to reveal to me. I want to try to write about my childhood home in precise sensual detail and I have no idea where that will take me, but let’s play with it…’

We live in a world where too many people play small and stifle their creativity.  Each one of us is unique and we only have one life in which to express our personal truth.

I would love to hear what happens when you experiment with the idea of ‘playing a ten’.  Why not ask yourself the following question:

What makes me feel confident?  What can I do to increase this feeling?  How would my writing improve if I allowed myself to believe that what I write will have real value?

Do share how you get on in the comments below – or if you have any ideas on how to increase the feeling of confidence, I’d love to hear them.

Sometimes 'just opening the file' is all it takes...

‘The Archive Series’ aims to bring all the best ‘Writing Coach’ posts together in one place on the new website.  This post originally appeared on my very first blog ‘Stubborn World’.   It tackles the thorny issue of how to find time to write in a busy life, something that so many of us struggle with.  I do hope that you find some of these ideas inspiring.

1. Set aside a regular time each week for your writing and make it sacred. Even if you can only find a single time slot, for example Sunday evening, put it in the diary and make it A FIXTURE. Tell everybody you know that you’re busy and honour this time. It may seem a small step, but it’s a way to signal to yourself and others that you are committed.

2. Write only what you love. Nothing is going to make you write if you are not passionate about what you are doing. When considering a writing project, ensure it is something you really WANT to write about. If you can find the passion, you are halfway there. Your desk will draw you like a magnet.

3. Perfect your writing space. Make sure that the place where you write is conducive to your work. It’s difficult for anyone to work at a desk that’s strewn with bills or work-related reports. Think carefully about what kind of space you would like to create for your writing. Does it include a pin-board covered in inspirational post-cards? A vase of flowers? A perfectly clear space? Or, if you can’t manage a desk, might it involve an early night curled up in bed with a journal? Make this a space you long to return to. DON’T SKIP THIS STEP!

4. Just ‘open the file’. Every day. I learned this one from time management coach Mark Forster. The biggest excuse for not writing is that we ‘don’t have time’. We believe we must have huge swathes of uninterrupted time if we are to be truly inspired. Thus, we often don’t write at all. But what would happen if you made a true commitment to just ‘opening the file’ every day. You go to your computer or desk, you open the document you are working on and you commit to writing for five minutes. Try it. Five minutes can become ten, fifteen… suddenly an hour has passed. Trick yourself into working. Daily.

5. Simplify your life. This one is essential. And it goes deeper than you may think. What are you so busy with that you don’t have time to write? Is there any way in which you could simplify your life? What could you let go of in order to find time to write? What would happen if you decided to say no more often and set up stronger boundaries about yourself? Could you resign from a committee? Get your shopping delivered? Stop wasting time surfing the Internet? List ten ways now in which you are complicating your life. And commit to taking three actions to create more time to write.

6. Carry notebooks wherever you go. You know this, right? But do you do it? First, it’s about the notebooks being there, when you’re inspired. But it’s also a way of allowing a thought to develop over the course of a day or a week. Get down the initial inspiration and watch the idea twist and change. If you don’t record it, you may lose it. A notebook encourages you to ‘write when you’re not writing’; to be constantly musing on the development of your work.

7. Find a place you can escape to. Maybe it’s a nearby café or the reading room of an art gallery. Again, make this a regular date. When you are outside your normal environment, away from distractions, it is easier to focus on the task in hand. It doesn’t matter where you write, it just matters that you do it. Many of my clients write on the train, or in their lunch hour. One writes for the first hour after her toddler is dropped off at nursery. Don’t assume you must be at your desk. What matters most is momentum.

8. Make a game of it. Set yourself a weekly target in terms of word count and make yourself accountable to somebody else for reaching that target. Set up a reward for yourself, if you hit your weekly target. It’s amazing what you can do when you have an incentive. Remember, if you only write 500 words every day, you’ll have a draft of a book within 6 months.

9. Use the ‘mosaic’ method. It occurs to me that mosaics, like novels, are built from tiny fragments, that, taken alone, are not a work of art – yet when they are assembled, formed into patterns, they become something entirely different. Don’t make the mistake of believing you need to see the entire picture before you begin. Think of it as laying down single tiles (single words). Each day, you lay a few tiles; you’ll see your pattern build. You don’t have to have a template. You simply have faith that a pattern will emerge. But you have to put those tiles down, even if it’s just a few.

10. Don’t let the well get empty. If you find yourself lacking in inspiration, it’s possible you’re pushing yourself too hard. Working all hours? Sitting at your desk in the evening, staring at a blank screen? Too much pandering to screaming children? Not enough time to just stare at the sky? If you don’t make time for creative play, you’ll have nothing to write about. It’s SO important to fill that creative well. What small thing can you do today to ensure your creativity will flow? Visit an art gallery? Dig the garden? Read a fascinating book about the Russian Revolution? It doesn’t matter how you recharge your creativity, but if you don’t have ‘input’ you won’t have ‘output’. It’s that simple!

What tips can you pass on to other writers?  How do you fit writing into your schedule?

If you need regular inspiration and motivation, do consider joining our community which is open for new members until 15th February 2012 only.  The Completion Club is a hugely supportive community and will be running for the next six months, with regular accountability on our members’ forum.  

If you’d like to receive posts like this directly to your in-box, do sign up for the RSS feed (for the blog articles) and the newsletter (for separate exclusive articles) using the buttons to the right of this post.  

For a final opportunity to work directly with Jacqui Lofthouse, do take a look at the Ultimate Literary Coaching Package.

Gull captured on a summer photography course 2011

First of all, a very Happy New Year to you all and wishing all readers of this blog a happy, healthy, and creative 2012!

What is the Annual Review?

Last year, for the first time, I embarked on the ‘Annual Review’ process suggested by Chris Guillebeau here.  This worked really well for me and by the end of the year, I realised that I’d met nine of the goals I set for myself in January 2011, so naturally, I’m doing the same for 2012.  If you read Chris’s post, you’ll see that the review is quite a lengthy process, but for the purposes of this blog post, I’ll simply give a few edited highlights of my review.

The intention is not to brag about any of my own achievements (some of them might seem quite meagre and others will be irrelevant to the reader) but rather to look at what did work, what didn’t (where I failed) and to think about what I can learn from this and what is next.  I also hope that by blogging about the process I can inspire you to think clearly about what you want from 2012 – in relation to your writing work and indeed beyond.  I’ve been quite amazed by how well the goal-setting process has worked this year for me.  This is Part One (what went well – you have to come back for the next post to find out my failures…)

What went well in 2011?

The first question Guillebeau asks in the annual review process is ‘What went well?’.  He invites you to look at individual categories in your life, so here are a few from mine:

Creative:

Enjoying a quiet moment with 'The Paris Review'

This year, I completed the final edit on my fourth novel, a comedy about the literary world and sent it to my agent; it is currently under submission to publishers.  I’ve been working on this novel for a few years, so I was delighted to finally call it ‘complete’.  From a writing perspective, the second half of 2011 was a little more nebulous for me as I wanted to have time to experiment with new ideas and ways of writing.  I wrote 10,000 words of a memoir and began a Young Adult novel.  Recently I also began experimenting with poetry for the first time in years.

Attending drama classes at City Lit was a real highlight for me in 2011.  Acting was my original passion and it has been fantastic to return to classes and to begin to consider writing for theatre too.  In addition, my interest in photography continued. In the summer I attended Unshaken Photography’s ‘Introduction to Digital Photography’ and also started a photography blog here. In addition, I enjoyed learning about iphone photography via Bindu Wiles’ ‘The Photoessay Project’, the result of which is here.

Career:

Me performing Street Theatre on Covent Garden Piazza circa 1983

In 2011, I began to think seriously about career change. I have been running ‘The Writing Coach’ for six years now and whilst I really enjoy working with my clients, in recent months I have become aware of the need for a change, wanting to engage more in the outside world rather than working mainly from home and also seeking a new direction and fresh inspiration.

For some years I have been a School Governor and in mid 2011, I took a decision to consider a career teaching English and Drama in secondary schools (whilst continuing to write when I get a spare minute…)  In November, I applied for a PGCE in English with Drama at the Institute of Education in London and  I  learned yesterday that I have been accepted on the course, beginning in September 2012. (Getting that ‘yes’ was in fact my first goal for 2012!)  I’m really excited at the prospect of moving in this new direction.

Naturally many readers will have questions about how this affects my work at the Writing Coach and the answer is that I will continue to run the website, blog and newsletter but I will no longer be coaching (apart from a very few exceptions agreed in advance) after July 2012.  However, I will continue to offer products (ebooks, ecourses and possibly a membership option) via the site.  As yet I have not taken a decision on whether to employ a manager to run the services but as soon as that decision is taken, I will let you all know.  If anyone has any questions about this, please do get in touch with me via the Contact page.

In so many ways, I see this new direction as an extension of my work at The Writing Coach.  I’ll still be teaching writing and literature, simply in a new form and to a new audience and I’m immensely excited about the future.

Family and Friends:

My family may be publicity-shy but my cat is not...

My family and close friends are always my central priority and when I look back at the year, what I think of, most of all, is my relationships with those close to me and the many good times we’ve shared.  I’m a pretty private person at heart, so I won’t say much here beyond the fact that I’m immensely proud of all those close to me who have achieved some incredible things this year.  You know who you are – and thank-you.  (Of course, it goes without saying that David kept drawing great cartoons!)

Business:

This year saw the launch of the new Writing Coach website.  Goburo were fantastic to work with and I highly recommend Nick and Hayley’s work.  I so enjoyed launching the new-style Completion Club, our online club and a brilliant community for all writers looking to complete a work – and membership remains open until the end of January (allowing for sign-ups for a six month membership).  In addition I launched my ebook with a brand look:  ‘Get Black on White:  30 Days to Productivity and Confidence for Writers’.

Honor's Shadow by Voula Grand

I worked with around sixty-five clients in 2011 (including those working with other consultants and as part of Completion Club) I was also delighted to appear in the acknowledgements of Julia Crouch’s novel Cuckoo and Voula Grand’s novel Honor’s Shadow.  Several other clients and former students got agents and publication deals or self-published.  Huge congratulations to you all.

This year I also began fundraising for the charity African Revival and raised in the region of £700 for the charity (figure to be confirmed).

Goals:

At the beginning of this post I mentioned nine goals that I set at the beginning of 2011 and met.  In case you’re interested, they were:

1. Complete my fourth novel and have it accepted by my agent
2. Write the copy for the new Writing Coach website and launch it
3. Edit and revise ‘Get Black on White’ and launch the ebook.
4. Enrol in and attend a regular drama course
5. Take the children to Paris
6. Take a photography course
7. Raise my consultancy fees :)
8. Get our front garden and driveway professionally landscaped
9. Visit ten art exhibitions

If you’re wondering what goals I didn’t reach and where I failed miserably, please do subscribe to the blog to be sure you don’t miss the next post… And/or you can sign up to the newsletter here.

Question: What can a writer learn from an illustrator?

Answer: The fact that we don’t have to know the entire plot before we begin.  Indeed, we might know nothing at all about our story but if we have a strong ‘hunch’, it’s important that we follow it.

Earlier this month my daughter and I attended a talk at the Richmond literature festival with the author/illustrator Ian Beck.  Beck was there to talk about his new novel The Haunting of Charity Delafield.  I had expected the talk would be more interesting to my daughter than to me, but I was wrong because as Beck described his working process, I recognised it as the same process I use when I write novels myself, the same process that I recommend to clients time and again:  the organic method of development.

Beck was, in the first instance, an illustrator, having trained at Brighton College of Art in the sixties, where one of his tutors was Raymond Briggs.  After working as an illustrator for magazines and in the recording industry for several years (his work included the album cover for Sir Elton John’s ‘Goodbye Yellow Brick Road’), he moved into children’s book illustration in the ’80s.  More recently, he has written novels for children and young adults.

A single image

Beck’s latest novel ‘The Haunting of Charity Delafield’ began life as a single image, similar to the one that now graces the book cover, seen here.  At first, he thought the girl in the red coat might be a character for an illustrated book – perhaps about a girl who had lost a puppy.  But that idea didn’t work and Beck put the image on a Christmas card and left it alone for a while.  Slowly, however, after a long break, Beck told us, the idea for a longer novel began to take shape.  He talked about visiting a garden, Levens Hall and realising that ‘her garden is a bit like that’.  He visits a particular house, full of mysterious objects and understands that Charity (at that time, in fact, he called her ‘Rose’ and her maid was ‘Charity’) lives in a big Victorian house full of peculiar things.  It is the perfect place for a haunting.  Soon Beck was writing a story about a girl raised alone, knowing little of the outside world, “confined to her overly-protective father’s Victorian mansion with its labyrinth of secret corridors and abandoned rooms.”

‘Stories can begin in all kinds of odd places,’ Beck said.  ’The important thing is knowing how to recognise it.’  It was three years from the time of that first illustration to the completion of the novel. It’s clear you can’t rush an organic project. Beck has a shed in his garden where he writes, but he’s equally comfortable scribbling for half an hour in a coffee shop.  He believes it is vital to be ‘open to imagination, allowing things to happen’.  His early influences were illustrations such as Pauline Baynes’ image of Mr Tumnus in Narnia, and books such as The Borrowers and Dr Dolittle.  He admires the work of Arthur Rackham, Edmund Dulac and Harold Jones in Lavender’s Blue: A book of Nursery Rhymes.

But what about the plot?

I didn’t ask the question ‘but how did you work out the plot?’  Why?  Because as an organic writer myself, I understand that when we begin with character, setting, relationships, questions – the plot emerges as part of the process.  Of course, different writers have different methods of developing plot and I do not underestimate the importance of a good structure in a book.  One of the reasons I always advocate organic growth is because I believe that when characters are fully realised, they end up doing things that we don’t expect them to do.  The more we write about them, the more we understand them and all of our best-laid plans can go awry.  I will write about ‘good plot structure’ in a subsequent post. But I highlight Beck’s method of starting with an image or a hunch, even if you don’t know where that will lead you, because I am deeply aware of how many authors are held back by a sense of ‘not knowing’ where a novel is going.  Whereas ‘not knowing’ can be the powerful thing. ‘Not knowing’ is, so often, what the creative process is all about. We have to be brave and we have to face the blank page and we have to recognise that there is mystery in the creative process. If we are to produce our best work, we must remain open to uncertainty.

You can find out more about Ian Beck and his earlier ‘Tom Trueheart’ novels on his website here.

If you’re interested in the organic method of writing, my ebook Get Black on White offers a simple introduction.  Or do sign up for the newsletter on this website for regular fortnightly advice and motivation on the writing process in your in-box.

Could you and should you write a novel in a month?

Today marks the first day of NaNoWriMo, otherwise known as National Novel Writing Month, when thousands of writers worldwide join together with the common aim of writing a novel in a month. But if you’re new to the idea of NaNoWrimo and wondering whether the idea is totally crazy or actually has some purpose, I’d like to explore the pros and cons of freewriting and what you can gain from this approach.

First of all what is NaNoWrimo?

I’ll let the organisers answer that one:

“National Novel Writing Month is a fun, seat-of-your-pants approach to novel writing. Participants begin writing on November 1. The goal is to write a 50,000 word, (approximately 175 page) novel by 11:59:59, November 30.Valuing enthusiasm and perseverance over painstaking craft, NaNoWriMo is a novel-writing program for everyone who has thought fleetingly about writing a novel but has been scared away by the time and effort involved.Because of the limited writing window, the ONLY thing that matters in NaNoWriMo is output. It’s all about quantity, not quality.”

But does this apparently crazy approach to novel-writing actually work? What is the purpose of writing so feverishly as this?

NaNoWriMo is effectively a month-long freewriting programme, where participants are encouraged to freewrite an entire novel.  Most participants spend no longer than around an hour per day writing, so this really is a case of writing the first thing that comes into one’s head.  You don’t go backwards and edit, you don’t worry about whether your character hangs together or whether the plot makes any sense whatsoever.  Some NaNoWriMoers do in fact ‘plan’ in the month before, so they have a rough outline before they start, but most just plunge in with a germ of something that fascinates them.  The idea is that you get something down and you learn to overcome writer’s block once and for all.  At the end of it, if you complete the marathon, you will have 50,000 words of very rough writing which you can then re-read and unravel and edit into something fresh. This year, I will be fascinated to watch the progress made by some of my clients as several members of The Completion Club here at The Writing Coach have opted to join in with NaNoWriMo and I’ll be excited to see what they produce.

Surely no-one who writes a novel this way ever gets published?

Julia Crouch's novel 'Cuckoo' began life as a NaNoWriMo novel

Not so.  Here’s a list of published NaNoWrimo authors:

Julia Crouch, for example, a former client of mine, came to work with me with a rough NaNoWriMo novel under her belt and she talks here about how she went on to polish it into a finished novel and get a three book deal with Headline UK on the back of it.  I’m immensely proud to have been part of the process that led to the publication of Cuckoo.

It’s important to remember that what NaNoWriMo provides is a framework that can enable you to get beyond any blocks and get words on a page.  But it’s what you do with those words afterwards that really matters.  Freewriting enables you to get past your own self-consciousness: your fears of ‘getting it wrong’ and not being sure if you have a story within you.  Once you have that very rough draft, then you can spend as much time as you want shaping it, editing it, taking out the bits that totally don’t work, adding new characters and depth, a better plot and improving the language.

Would you work that way yourself?

In truth, I think that every writer has to find his or her own best way to write a novel (or a book of any kind) and I don’t think that any of us have a right to prescribe that method to others.  NaNoWriMo is one way of working that has been successful for many authors.  Around 200,000 people sign up for NaNoWriMo each year (and around 30,000 complete the marathon).  So if you look at the list of published authors in that light, it doesn’t look so good.  That’s not the point.  The point is – if an author is going to be good enough to finish writing a wonderful, polished novel, they will probably do it with or without NaNoWriMo.

My personal view is that freewriting has an important role in the development of any creative writer – it is a tool in the box and one which we can all use to find out about ourselves as writers.  I remember first reading Writing Down the Bones: Freeing the Writer within by Natalie Goldberg and being struck by her phrase:  ”The aim is to burn through to first thoughts, to the place where energy is unobstructed by social politeness or the internal censor, to the place where you are writing what you mind actually sees and feels, not what it thinks it should see or feel.”  Despite already having a degree in creative writing at that point, I’d never really played much with totally free writing.  It wasn’t the kind of thing that our tutor Malcolm Bradbury particularly advocated and I’m probably still too firmly entrenched in the way I wrote at that time, (the way I’ve written all of my novels) to ever really feel comfortable with the idea of freewriting an entire book.  At the same time, I do understand that it is often only through freeing the subconscious thoughts that we get to the grit of what we want to say.  For me, however, there’s another way of doing that.

What’s the other way?

"Get Black on White: Thirty Days to Productivity and Confidence for Writers"

When I wrote my own ebook Get Black on White: Thirty Days to Productivity and Confidence for Writers I did in fact write 30,000 words (the ‘Get Black on White’ programme itself) in 30 days in the form of a blog, although the material was later extensively edited for the ebook edition. The book does, in fact, serve as an ideal companion for NaNoWrimo writers.  As I wrote the ebook, it  was fascinating for me to see how much I had to share and how easily it flowed. But in the current edition of the programme, I no longer suggest that clients use it to ‘write a thousand words a day’ but rather to help them establish a routine of daily touching base with their writing.

For me, what matters most, is that we have a connection with our writing. I believe that the most effective way of writing lies somewhere between the two extremes of freewriting and writers’ block. I think it is vital that we do have a clear sense of roughly what we are going to write in any particular writing session (at least to have a germ of an idea or a sense of the direction of the scene we are about to write) yet we don’t necessarily have to know the detail of how that will be expressed – in other words, we allow for the insights that our subconscious mind will reveal to us.

If I were to describe my ideal writing state, it would be that of a kind of hypnosis.  Most likely I’ll have Bach’s Cello Suite playing (the Pablo Casals version) as I’m so used to writing to that music that it instantly sends me into a trance and it doesn’t interrupt my flow.  I’ll be immersed in the scene in my imagination, seeing it vividly before my eyes.  I’m not writing so fast that I’m writing gibberish but neither am I getting so worried about the perfection of the words that I fear writing anything down at all. I’m literally ‘there’ in my imagination, pausing when I need to tune in to the scene in more detail yet never for so long that I’m agonising over the words.

I enjoy the feeling of knowing that I am choosing my words carefully and I am, without doubt, a perfectionist.  I could absolutely write a novel in a month but it is not, I feel, my own personal style to do so.

So you don’t recommend NaNoWriMo?

How can I not recommend something which has enabled so many people to break through the barriers that affect their ability to write?  Anything that enables us to approach our writing in a different way, anything that enables writers to discover what it latent within them has to be a good thing. Simply, the helter-skelter approach is not the right one for me, but it might be perfect for you!   And who’s to say that one day I may not eat my words…

I am personally ‘between books’ at the moment.  I’ve been experimenting a lot with other art forms, with an acting class and photography classes (if you are on Instagram or Tumblr or Posterous, do connect with me via the links in these parentheses – I’ve been having great fun with iphone photography lately!)  But I have decided to use the momentum that NaNoWriMo has brought to our experience at The Completion Club to good use to make a commitment to myself to move one particular book idea on.  Instead of committing to 1600 words a day, I am committing to touching base each day on a new Young Adult novel idea.  That’s it – to ‘open the file’ in the words of Mark Forster.

Meanwhile, several of the club members are all buddying up with each other via the Nanowrimo forum as well as via our own forum, forming a kind of mini community within a community and I know they will produce some wonderful work.  Indeed, I am just a little tempted.

A Competition:

To mark the beginning of NaNoWriMo and the launch of my new-style Newsletter on 24th November, I’ve decided to hold a competition. If you’d like to win a free constructive appraisal of 25 pages (double spaced, 12 pt) of your writing in a one-hour telephone call (and via an annotated text) and a copy of my ebook Get Black on White:  A Guide to Productivity and Confidence for Writers, simply tweet the link to the ebook page or this blog post or share a link on Facebook to the same between 1st November and 15th November and let me know via Twitter (@jacquilofthouse) that you’ve done so and I’ll put all of the names in a hat and announce the winner here on 16th November.  Good luck!

Even if you don't have a local canyon, choose somewhere inspirational to work...

Writing a first draft of a novel or any book is, you might say, the easy part.  But it’s at the editing stage that we craft our work into something special.  We aim to transform our material into work that will compel a reader.

If you’ve recently finished a draft of a novel – or indeed, if you are mid-draft but aware that you need to edit before you continue – the methods that I share here break down the process and make it much more manageable.

When I edit my own novels, I always work through several stages so I thought it might be useful to share a checklist of the things I’m looking for when I edit my own work. This article focuses on fiction primarily, but a parallel process can be used for non-fiction.

Take Time Out:

Once you have completed your manuscript, take time away from the work prior to editing. Have a break for a couple of weeks and consider getting feedback on the work from a trusted writing colleague. Think carefully before sharing your work however and choose somebody who you know will be constructive. Opinions can be subjective and if you are not getting professional feedback, it is worth choosing a number of readers, so you can get a balanced opinion on the work. You might like to prepare a list of specific questions for your reader.  Alternatively, if you prefer to keep your work private, just taking time out alone will be enough.  You need to gain distance from what you have written before you can edit it.  Do something fun whilst you’re waiting!

Consider the feedback carefully:

The best part about receiving feedback is that you are free to use it or discard it.  Nobody will give you some ‘ultimate truth’ on your novel. Some feedback will be valuable.  Some you can discard.  Go with your gut feeling.   It might take a few days for the feedback to sink in and for you to sift what is useful. Sometimes we experience a sense of disappointment that the work is not perfect already. It’s a natural response. But learning to accept feedback and use it well is a vital part of our work.  The fun part here is the freedom you have to accept what you’ve been told -if it is insightful – and use it well.  Take your reader’s notes to an inspirational place and journal on the areas of your work that you now sense need work.

Go for the full read-through:

Take a deep breath and don’t put it off any longer. Just take time out, pick up the entire work-to-date and a pen to scribble with, get comfortable in an armchair (or on a cliff-top, wherever you feel at ease…) and read.  Read it as if you had never read it before, as if you were an outsider, a professional editor.  Read the whole document – if necessary over several longish sessions – and annotate your text with any comments that occur to you in relation to changes you want to make, including small line-edits. Just get everything down on that manuscript as this will be your working document.  Whatever comes into your head as you read – get that on the page.

Look at the big picture:

As you read, have a separate notebook where you make notes on what I call ‘the big picture’.  This is where you can scribble more lengthy thoughts on the over-arching shape of the work.  Is the structure effective?  If not, why not?  What would you like to change?  How might you adjust it?  Are there any missing pieces of the puzzle?  Get it all down in your journal as you read.  You’ll use these notes later.

Use a simple check-list:

As you read your manuscript, look out for the following in particular.  Make notes in the margins and your notebook.  Keep scribbling freely and don’t let any thought go:

• Structural issues – where does it not hold together? Are there plot holes? Does it go off at a tangent? Is the plot too clichéd? In non-fiction, does the ordering of the material work?
• Voice issues – is the tone right? Is it consistent? Is it written from the right perspective? Do I need to make changes to the narrative voice?
• Character issues. Are the characters believable? Do they take actions that seem real? Do I believe that they are flesh and blood? Is their dialogue naturalistic? Can the reader empathise? Do the characters develop and change in the course of the book? What do they learn?
• Dialogue – Is it a good, condensed version of natural dialogue? Is it too focused on telling a story via dialogue and not realistic enough? Would the characters SAY this? Is the dialogue there for a purpose – to deepen characterisation or to advance the story?
• Telling not showing – Am I telling the reader too much, when I should be revealing the truth through action? Remember, dialogue doesn’t equal “showing”. Good “showing” is when a scene is dramatised and we are immersed in what is happening, unaware of the narrator’s presence. We don’t say ‘he is sad’, his sadness is revealed to us.
• Pace – is the action always moving forwards? Am I certain that each scene is propelling the character towards their goal, even if they are frustrated in that process? Am I wasting time, waffling? Every scene must be there for a purpose and advance the plot in some way.
• Scene structure – Is there movement in the scene? Do the characters shift? Does perspective change? Is there drama and conflict and change and development?
• Sentence construction. Is this working on a line by line basis? Am I overusing adjectives? Am I using adverbs? (They rarely work!) Do I repeat myself? Are there phrases I overuse? Does it flow? How’s my grammar?

Condense your actions down to a short list:

Once you’ve completed the read-through, take a separate session to look through your annotated notes. Then, choose a notebook – or a document if you prefer to work electronically – that relates specifically to your editing process and begin by making a list of all the major ‘big picture’ changes you want to make. Then ask yourself –  can you condense this list to five key areas? Examples of such areas could be:

• The character of Isabelle is too passive; I need to change her actions and responses to make her more feisty and thus engage the reader.
• The pace in the first third of the book is too slow – cut down on extraneous scene-setting and cut to the chase. Keep the scenes more focused on action.
• Work on my tendency to over-describe and lay-on the adjectives. Remember that less is more
• Get clearer on Simon’s motivation in the novel. That needs to be built at an earlier stage if the book is to have drive.
• Find a different resolution to the love affair. At present it is too clichéd and the end of the book doesn’t have impact as a result.

Don’t forget the line edits:

These are simply examples of the kind of points you might make, but there’s something very powerful in having key focus areas. It means that as we go through the book, we know where our main attention should lie. In addition to these larger points, you will also have a list of smaller points. However, you can work directly from the manuscript in relation to the smaller points rather than noting them separately.

Keep excellent records – be organised:

When you are editing, work on your main document but draw from all of your sources. Have the annotated manuscript(s) at your side and your list of key points. Editing can be an organic process, as when you make changes to a book, other aspects of that book can shift and change. Keep your editing notebook open as an ongoing document. From time to time, print up your newly edited work and read it through. It’s so satisfying to read a new draft and to feel how much smoother and more believable it is becoming. When working with clients, I’m often amazed at how swiftly work can improve with good editing. It is always a pleasure to see how work can be transformed in this way.  Don’t let your filing get disorganised at this time. You need to know where everything is so that you can draw everything together with ease.  Generally I save a copy of the old full manuscript, then take a fresh copy of it and ‘over-write’ the new version on the word processor.  You can start a whole new document if you prefer, but I generally find over-writing works best.

Be a perfectionist:

Once you’ve edited the document – if you are preparing for submission – you need to read the final manuscript through at least twice more. This might seem like the least fun part but if you approach it in the right way, you can gain a lot from this stage.  No literary agent or publisher wants to receive a manuscript full of typos and often-repeated words (we all do it!)  When I was finishing my last book, I did the final read-through on a Kindle.  (You can forward the ms to your freekindle.com address).  There’s something empowering about this, as it enable you to see the manuscript as if it were a finished book.  But also – when you read it like that, all the little errors leap out at you.  The final read-through is the most fun of all because (if you’ve done your job!) you can really enjoy the pleasure of reading your work in a fully polished form and you can take huge pride in this.

Remain true to your own vision:

Finally, remember that if we don’t edit, we don’t learn. Even when we think a book is finished, it will then go to an agent or a publisher who will notice aspects of the work that will improve with further editing. As a result, the book generally gets stronger and stronger. At the same time, remember that it is important to hold tight to your own vision of the book. Stand your ground if you need to. We do learn so much in this process and it strengthens our abilities as a writer.

Essentially, aim above all for the best possible work you can do and for a vision that is uniquely yours.  Then your own pleasure in the work and your skill will shine through to the reader, agent or editor.  Don’t forget – you don’t have to do all of this at once.  Just make that commitment to the read-through, pick up the manuscript and a pencil to scribble with and before you know it, you’re engaged in the process.

Why not try beginning today and let me know how it goes? You can break the process down into simple thirty minute chunks if you’re busy.

What would you add to these recommendations? Do please share in the comments.

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White goose at Winkworth Arboretum

Most readers of this blog will be familiar with the concept of the ‘Artist’s Date’, the phrase coined by the author of The Artist’s Way, Julia Cameron. In Cameron’s words, “The Artist Date is a once-weekly, festive, solo expedition to explore something that interests you. The Artist Date need not be overtly “artistic”- think mischief more than mastery.”

Whilst I can’t claim to keeping that once weekly date solo, I do take my ‘down-time’ seriously and believe that it’s vital for all creative artists to have time away from the writing desk.  This ‘filling the well’ is so important to all artists – it’s a way of refreshing the spirit, engaging with new inspiration and having that all-important ‘thinking-time’ that is necessary if we’re to develop as artists.  This is something that I encourage in my children too.

One of my own favourite ways of filling the well is walking in nature.  These days, I’m getting mildly addicted to photographing plants and wildlife, so I generally carry my camera with me and use this time as an opportunity to really look at what is around me.  I find that taking photographs makes me pay attention to what I’m seeing – I look for detail that I might otherwise miss; when I have my camera with me, I’m focused on the external rather than the internal world.

I’m really enjoying this new creative outlet and I believe that it brings me back to my writing work refreshed and more ready to engage.  Today we visited Winkworth Arboretum for the second time and I share my photographs of the visit on my new photography blog including some more shots of this beautiful white goose who allowed me to get close-up and personal.  I intend to use the new blog to share quotations and insights in future, and I’d love it if you had time to take a look and if you feel so inclined, to comment and subscribe to my feed. (If you want this blog delivered to your in-box, you can subscribe by RSS or email by pushing the buttons to the right).  I’m a total beginner as a photographer, so if you’re a professional taking a look at the new blog, please be gentle with me!  I’m learning all the time and looking forward to getting some professional tuition soon.  But in the meantime, I find that nothing inspires my writing more than this time out.  So even this evening, on my return from Winkworth, my head began to buzz with ideas relating to my new writing project and I immediately took out my new iPad (yes, I succumbed) and began taking notes.  As it happens, the iPad also proved hugely useful tonight as I downloaded the 19th century books British Library app.  It’s incredible!  Almost immediately I stumbled upon several books that will be immediately relevant to my current project – like having my own private Victorian library at home.

Does this goose that I photographed today have any direct bearing on my evening writing inspiration?  Perhaps not.  But by going outside, taking myself away from my work, enjoying time with my family and engaging with the natural world, I was able to return to my writing work with a new excitement.  It’s so easy for us to feel that we need to be tied to the desk if we’re to create our best work.  But it’s simply not true.  We need to return to the desk regularly but we also need to engage with the world.  Else what will there be to write about?

Do share your thoughts on artist’s dates here.  What do you do when you need fresh inspiration?