The house is quiet. Blissfully so; a warmth and silence to the air. Daily walks have resumed, looking for our favourite cats and trees and birds along the way, discussing the day and what’s to come, or what’s already happened. Work continues, writing for myself and for others – pitches to be made, submissions to be followed up, ideas to be crystallised, stories weaving their threads in my mind. As well as the Ambeth Chronicles, I’m now working on a collection of short stories plus another novel, the one where the main character dies in the first paragraph. And of course the housework never stops, cleaning, washing, ironing, managing the minutiae of the family, diary dates and after school activities, the only reward the satisfaction of a task completed. Oh, and I miss her. Her little voice, the interruptions, her singing and laughing and playing around the place, going out and doing things together. I always do, when she goes back to school. But I know she’s happy, she loves learning and friends and fun and so I take comfort in that.

I know I’m lucky, that my office is in my home. And I work hard, damn hard, to get things done. Not just the day-to-day stuff, but also the writing, the stories I believe in. You have to, if you want to get anywhere. I’m also lucky that I can be there for her, for walks to and from school, for ideas and playdates and growing pains. It’s a choice we made as a family, to do things this way and it works for us and, I think, for her.

The thing with life is that it’s different for us all. We all have our own path to travel. And as this world turns and trembles with fire and war and death, we have to take comfort in the small joys that the day brings to us, gratitude for what we have, for the choices we’ve made.

Huh. So that’s interesting. A piece started with the idea of back-to-school turning into a reflection on the greater picture. But that’s how writing works, or at least it is for me. You take a thread and follow it, and sometimes you’re surprised where it leads. Perhaps it’s true for life as well.

Autumn is nearly here, my favourite season. The days still warm with a promise of sun, the nights cool enough to sleep comfortably. Fields full and hedgerows heavy, a feeling of ripeness and depth in the land. The trees start turning to gold, bittersweet before the barrenness of winter. It’s a season when, for some reason, I revisit old memories, the cool air and smoky scent of fallen leaves and bonfires waking something inside, as though I’m looking through treasured pages before putting them away, safe for winter.

OK, it’s not really an update that autumn is almost here – it’s probably pretty obvious to any of my northern hemisphere readers (and in the south, spring is on its way!). But I do have a couple of writing updates to share.

The first is that the team at Writers & Artists, the Bloomsbury community website, have asked me to write a guest blog about my experiences trying to get published. Yay! It’s now live on their site and you can visit it here:

http://www.writersandartists.co.uk/2014/08/the-waiting-game

And I’ve had another request for a full manuscript. As regular readers of this blog may know, this is the second request for me; the first one, sadly, didn’t work out. But on reflection I really do think it was for the best, that the agent in question wasn’t right for me, and I wasn’t right for them.

This time it’s a publisher who has asked for the full MS, which is very exciting. So I’ve sent it off with fingers crossed and will of course update as to what happens.

Note: There is a school of thought that states you shouldn’t discuss full manuscript requests, that agents may wonder why it is that someone else didn’t go with your book, if it’s so good. My answer to that is that this is a subjective process and that my book just didn’t resonate with that particular person. We’ve all read books that we’ve had to put down, unable to finish for whatever reason, yet they were still published. Even the best of the best sellers have been rejected at some point or another. And as this blog is about about my experiences as a writer on this journey to get my books published, I wouldn’t be being honest if I didn’t document the highs and the lows of the process.

So agents, if any of you are reading this, don’t take my previous rejections as being some sort of indicator of the quality of my work. All it means is that I haven’t found the right person yet. Who knows, it might be you. xx

I’m not the first writer to use this phrase, nor will I be the last. In fact, it comes from the lectures of Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch, a professor, journalist and literary expert who used the term to describe removing fancy words and overblown description from your writing. But here I’m using it to talk about my own darlings, the characters I’ve created in the world of Ambeth.

I wrote a blog post some time ago about how it feels to dream a character to life, how they take on characteristics you may not expect, leading the story forward. But what happens when their story ends, when you (as the omnipotent writer) have to kill off one of your favourites for the sake of the narrative?

In the Ambeth series, I find I’m killing off at least one character per book. One I did not mind at all – a most unpleasant fellow, it was a pleasure to concoct a poetic justice for him, a deserved death. But there was another, a young man, who I mourned for weeks after he ‘died’ – I couldn’t read the section where he meets his end for quite some time as I found the whole thing too upsetting. Still do, to be honest. But there was no other ending for him, his death a pivotal moment that shaped much of what was to come in subsequent books. And there are others – some whose deaths I’ve written, others that I know are to come and it is a very strange feeling, that idea of their story ending. It’s as though whatever feeds their story through to me tapers off and I know there is no other way forward.

In life I avoid the types of films and TV that depict violence, murder and mayhem, guns and gore. Unless it’s fantasy, for some reason. Orcs and elves and vampires and superheroes, that sort of violence is OK, I guess. Strange, isn’t it? And yet here I find myself killing people off, writing their deaths. But I guess the key is that I also write their lives, their loves, their thoughts, give them as much of a chance to live as I can.

In a new book I’m working on, my main character dies in the first sentence. She is dead for pretty much the whole book. So that’s another way to look at it, I guess. I killed my darling before the story started, so it didn’t hurt so much.

After posting this blog yesterday I had a discussion with a fellow writer who, in the nicest possible way, reminded me that the distinction between ‘show’ and ‘tell’ is not simply confined to narrative vs dialogue, but also in how we, as writers, choose to inform the reader. So you could say either ‘Joe looked nervous,’ or you could say, ‘Joe was chewing his fingernails, eyes darting from side to side.’ Not poetry I know, just a couple of different ways to get the message across. And that’s where I’m going to leave it. I’m certainly no expert on all this – as should be apparent from this blog, I’m learning all the time, and ‘show, don’t tell,’ is one of the toughest concepts to get my head around. That’s why I compared it to a net of knots, because it’s so easy to get caught up in it.  There are times while I’m writing when the words are just tumbling out of me and I  have to get them down, then I can go back later and sort out the bits that don’t quite read right. At the time when I’m doing it I don’t have the space to consider show vs tell, I just have to write the story as it comes to me. I think if I stopped to consider style I might lose the thread.

There are some excellent books out there by people who do know what they’re talking about when it comes to writing fiction: On Writing by Stephen King is one I found particularly helpful, while another friend recommends Writing Fiction by Janet Burroway (I’ve not read it yet but I plan to). If there are any you’ve read that have helped you, please do add them in the comments.

So there you go – another step on this journey of learning. And this, I think, is also part of being a writer – the willingness to learn from what you’re doing, to put mistakes and crappy stories and bad reviews and rejection behind you and keep moving forward, keep that belief in the story.

God. These three words. Honestly, they are one of the biggest net of knots in which a writer can become tangled. Should I show? Should I tell? Am I telling too much? How can I show this bit? It is an art and something that only comes with practice and feedback, unless you are some sort of preternaturally talented individual who can sit down and write bestsellers without even thinking about it.

I have been writing for many years, but the majority of my work (and certainly all that has been published to date) has been articles for magazines and various clients. And that, my friends, is quite a different sort of writing than that which makes up a novel. It’s all telling. I mean, when I interviewed people I included quotes and descriptions of my surroundings, but I was still telling my audience about what they needed to know. Health and Beauty, Home and Garden, the beauty of the changing seasons, how to plan a wedding – it’s all passing on information. Even this blog is just me telling you stuff.

But story telling is different. You have to weave the picture for your reader, through dialogue and action and words and backstory and description. You notice I use the word ‘weave’ – in fact, I have used it as an analogy for writing several times in this blog. It’s because to me, that’s what storytelling feels like. As though I hold a handful of threads, whether different characters or worlds or ideas and it’s up to me to work out how they go together to create the fabric of a story. So there are times where I have to let dialogue inform the reader, and others where there is nothing else I can do but describe the surroundings and events. So I move between show and tell, learning as I go to work the threads in ever more complex patterns and, as I do, I see them start to move ahead of me, showing me (or telling me?) the way forward, a glimpse of the finished pattern.

I still remember the first time someone said it to me. Show, don’t tell. It was one of my first beta readers and, let me tell you, it was a huge eye opener. Such a wonderful, helpful thing to say to someone like me, who had an idea but not much idea at that point of how to convey it. I am eternally grateful to him.

Writing. Sometimes I wonder why I put myself through it. But it is because I have stories I need to write down, characters running around in my head demanding their stories be told. So I press on, weaving show with tell. And this is what I believe, based on experience and feedback to date. You can’t show all the time, or you risk leaving the reader anchorless, having to infer their surroundings from what the characters are saying and frankly, how often is someone going to say, ‘I shall sit over here, on this sofa upholstered in a tasteful paisley next to a nice end table.’ You just wouldn’t. No one would. So if someone, whether friend or agent or whoever, says to you ‘Show, don’t tell,’ consider their point in the context of your story. Because sometimes you have to just tell. And it’s OK, really it is.

There are a lot of articles on the internet these days about “Life Hacks’. Ways to do things quickly, to get things over with so you can move on to the next thing and not waste any precious moments. Some of them are actually pretty cool and useful, but I am concerned that, as the pace of life becomes ever faster, we are losing our capacity to wait for things, to work for things, to enjoy the reward that comes after time spent moving towards something. You see it in queues, in shops and restaurants, people getting frustrated when they can’t have what they want straight away, instant gratification, constant moving between this screen and that screen, updating emails, Instagram, Facebook. Hack, hack, hack.

I’ve studied martial arts for many years and one of the basic tenets is that ‘The journey is the reward.’ That the years you spend training, improving your technique, working with other students, mastering breathing and focus and control and becoming the best person you can be, is the real reward. At the end of it, sure, you get a belt. A signifier of the journey taken, a signpost in the road. But black belt is only the beginning. There are levels above it requiring even more study and dedication. You can’t hack this stuff. And I believe that to be true of creative endeavours as well. Sure of course there are always going to be prodigies, people in whom talent shines so bright it is oozing from their pores at an early age, their lives dedicated to that one thing that fills them. But for most of us creativity grows and changes as we do – the things we can write or create or dream now are a product of our experiences, of the journey we’ve been on.

And I don’t think you can hack storytelling. I’ve been working on a series of books for a while and I suppose I thought of them as being young adult novels. But now I’m not so sure. I had a comment a while back about the pace of narrative, about holding the reader’s interest. Now I am very open to comments and consider everything seriously – I do believe constructive criticism to be an essential part of growth. But in this instance I had to disagree. There seems to be a trend in writing, certainly in young adult, where everything is sped up, action jumping off every page, the language fast and frenetic, barely giving the reader time to breathe before the next big event. And it’s exciting, of course it is. But it also makes the assumption that young adults need to be constantly entertained, that the culture of constant screen time and instant gratification means you have to rush along, writing as though updating a series of Facebook posts, hook after hook after hook. And this, to me, seems a hack. I believe a good story needs to take a reader on a journey, draw them into a world where the characters and the things they do are interesting as part of the narrative. Of course you have to keep things moving, keep them interested, but I don’t believe that all young adult readers (or any readers at all) need to be pulled along at breakneck speed. When you are creating a whole new world (as I am), you have to build it from the ground up. Not with pages and pages of description because snore… But the first few chapters have to lay the foundations, to draw you in and make you intrigued to discover more. Then, once the framework is in place your characters are free to move about within it. When I refer to The Long Walk I don’t need to describe it again – my readers already know what it means and where it is.

A long slow build up drawing you in can be just as rewarding as a crash bang wallop all the way through. Beta readers are a big help; they’ll tell you where the boring bits are. Mine are all hooked. ‘When is the next book coming along?’ Love it. I am working on the fourth instalment of Ambeth, five and six coming along behind it and have several people just waiting to see what happens next. Hope this translates to the larger world once it’s published.

It’s that time of year again. Blackberries are starting to ripen, dark and glossy against bramble and green leaves, treasure hidden in the hedgerows. The gorgeous child and I will go and pick them soon, braving wasps and spiders and thorns to fill our plastic containers with juicy berries, ready to be washed and frozen and made into jam, enlivening pies and strudels over the winter months. I still remember dropping into the local greengrocer last summer and seeing a small punnet of berries for sale at 1.99, the lovely child looking at me with wide eyes knowing we had four large containers filled to bursting in our shopping bag, all picked for free. Does anyone else pick blackberries any more? They were rotting on the branches last year; we could not pick them fast enough.

It was also around this time last year that I finished my first draft of Oak and Mist. It was called The Oak Gate back then – I’m still considering which of the titles might be better, to be honest – comments are welcome. It was a monster of a story, over 160,000 words. Since then I’ve managed through successive edits to whittle it down to below 140,000, plus have split it into two halves, each one working as a stand-alone book. But the story hasn’t changed, nor have the characters – it was the language, as mentioned in a previous post, that needed work. And also the beginning. I have rewritten and changed the first three chapters so many times I’ve lost count, condensing the original draft from three unwieldy chapters into a few short pages. But the beginning incident, the idea that started this whole journey, has not changed – I just hadn’t been able to fix upon the best way to present it to you, dear readers. Though I think in the past month I might finally have written an opening to my own satisfaction, and for that I am grateful.

The beginning is important because it’s the part of your manuscript you send to agents and publishers in the hope they might like your work and want to read more. Most request anything from the first five pages to the first three chapters, so you want to get it right, or as near to right as possible.I have a friend who is thinking of writing a book and she recently emailed me, saying she didn’t know where to start. This is the hardest part about writing, I think. Starting. Sitting down and typing that first sentence, the pathway that leads you into the story.

There are so many wonderful examples – Daphne Du Maurier’s Rebecca ‘Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again‘ and Jane Austen’ It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man, in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife‘ are two that come to mind straight away. And there are so many awful ones as well – there are even competitions to see who can come up with the absolute worst opening to a novel. The Edward Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest is one to look at if you’re interested, named for the man who came up with the immortal ‘It was a dark and stormy night.’  http://www.bulwer-lytton.com

But the crucial thing is to start. As you can see, it’s taken me almost a year to get the start of my book the way I wanted it to read. But it didn’t stop me from writing, from continuing on with the story until it was told. For you can always go back. Until the work is published, there is always room to make changes. So don’t let a fear of starting hold you back from beginning your book. The story is there, waiting to be told. Let it out.

And before you think we’re going to descend into some sort of hippy dippy schmaltzy crap, don’t worry. Life isn’t all rainbows and butterflies, I get that. We all have sh*tty days, days when nothing seems to go right. We all have our battles, our crosses to bear. Some are bigger, more ferocious, heavier than others and I can’t speak for those of you struggling with some of life’s great challenges. But I can say for myself, that when I wake feeling despondent, wondering why the hell I’m putting myself through this, that I need to be grateful. Why? Because I can write. Because the stories are still flowing through me, the ideas, the worlds, the characters are milling around in my head, a rich and tangled tapestry that I have the privilege of untangling and reweaving onto the page. As a writer that is my reward. The creation of an idea, the light bulb moment when you realise ‘That’s why? That’s why this character did that? So that’s how it all ties together!’ It’s a feeling like no other.

So today I received some not so good news. The agent who asked for my full manuscript wrote back to me. They enjoyed my writing very much, thought my ideas fresh and original, but weren’t sure about some of the things my character goes through. They offered an analysis of my work and pointed out some issues I was not aware of. But in the end it came down to the fact that they weren’t sure who my target audience would be and so they could not offer me representation. Wow. It was a blow to the guts, that’s for sure. It hurt a lot. There may have been tears. But I got up, dusted myself off and realised that I still had a lot to be grateful for. I could turn away and say ‘Forget it, I’m not doing this any more.’ Or I could do what I did. Sit down and write. Write a response, first of all, thanking the agent for their time, letting them know that I appreciated their advice. Then write this blog, to remind myself why I am writing in the first place and to affirm the fact that I still believe in Ambeth, in the story I have to tell. There are a lot of other agents out there but even if they all say no, if I have written a book that’s too difficult to categorize or package, I still have the capacity to publish it myself. And I have a whole group of readers all around the world who enjoyed the story, who want to hear more. And that, as a storyteller, is something for which to be grateful indeed.

(Oh, and I’m not made of iron. It still hurts, believe me. But being able to share my experience helps, so thanks for reading. xx)