My Mother Left me for a Tree

The Word For Freedom

A collection of 24 short stories celebrating a hundred years of women’ suffrage, from writers inspired by the suffragettes and whose stories, whether set in 1918, the current day or the future, focus on the same freedoms that those women fought for so courageously.

Through this anthology Retreat West Books is proud to support Hestia and the UK Says No More campaign against domestic abuse and sexual violence.

 
Reviews:

Portobello Book Blog

The Literary Shed

The Literary Sofa

Hair Past a Freckle

Write Right

My Reading Corner

Books, Life and Everything

 


My Mother Left Me for a Tree is a short story exploring how feelings around abandonment may not concern themselves with how loss occurs - whether someone dies, leaves or isn't emotionally present. And how/if these feelings manifest may not be as expected.

The Word for Freedom is available  to buy in kindle and paperback. Proceeds go to Hestia who  support over 9,000 adults & children in crisis across London every year with their experiences of domestic abuse, modern slavery & mental health needs.

Review: The Garden Party

The Garden Party by Katherine Mansfield
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

The Garden Party delights in setting and breaking the boundaries of class, convention and experience. A hat, like the one worn, can be a marker of all three especially when handed down from mother to daughter. Death, the great leveler raises questions on these areas which is balanced out by all the limitless possibilities of life, once you are not restrained or restricted by such boundaries as class, convention or experience.

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Review: The Brothers Karamazov

The Brothers Karamazov: A Play in Five Acts by Jacques Copeau

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Dostoevsky's story of The Brother's Karamazov is distilled eloquently into this 5 act play. Morality, politics, family alliances and faith are some of the themes explored in the witty dialogue of the play. We, alongside the characters, question the drives and motivations that promote, develop or destroy all that is seen as good or evil in the human condition.

The brother's between them are the 'Everyman'. Each one an aspect of our being such as intellectualism, spiritualism or sensualism and together as brothers, they are greater than the sum of the parts.

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Review: Our Endless Numbered Days by Claire Fuller

Our Endless Numbered Days by Claire Fuller
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

The novel started out well and with hints from the blurb, moved us quickly into an exciting story. However the plot was too thin for anything more than a novella and the dark fairytale-like qualities we were promised at the start never quite paid off.

Devices like the survivalist lists and the playing of music without instruments all pointed to the need to make sense of trauma, order from disorder. The side by side narrative of past and present revealed the truth to our protagonist as well as ourselves and helped us all to make sense bit by bit. And however unconvincing the voice was in its description of the understanding that came with time, we hoped for pay-off in the end.

Unfortunately the predictable plot made the read disappointing in the end, unless you didn't guess.

Although it reminded me of Donoghue's Room, it may have suffered in that comparison.

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Review: Silence by Shusaku Endo

Silence by Shūsaku Endō
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Biblical metaphors abound and Christian comparisons drown a story which is essentially about self-doubt, what is right and wrong and how we perceive such concepts differently in various contexts.

I found the Biblical references tiresome, and altogether too familiar but then liked the quietly subversive subtext which had me swaying with self-doubt as I followed the protagonist's progress. Quite a modern take on 17th Century missionaries in Japan considering it was written in the 60s.

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Forecast: Probability of Miracles

Who expects miracles? Do you? Do they require faith, luck or magic? Are they answers to pleading with deities or are they rare events which we have no real understanding of?

In Sedgewicks (2013) book 'She Is Not Invisible' we are taken through a journey of exploration including numbers, patterns, probability, coincidence and miracles. We are shown the links between what seem to be random events and also dissuaded from making correlations between random events which are not connected.

One example is how we might be 'amazed' at the coincidence of meeting someone at a party with the same birthday, when we only need 23 people to be at the party to have a 50-50 chance that there will be 2 people who have the same birthday. Furthermore, we are told if there are 30 its a 70% chance and if 57 a 99% chance (Sedgwick, 2013).

And we are told of Littlewoods Law which explains 'miracles' as 'something that might have a million-to-one chance of happening' which when we consider the vast number of experiences we have every day, means they happen more frequently than we might think (Sedgwick, 2013). 

Statistically, we can 'expect to see something miraculous happen every 35 days' (Ibid). So no need for belief or magic, while you go about your normal life something 'miraculous' will happen, approximately every month. 

What is going to be your million-to-one experience this month?

Careful – you might miss it, if you're not looking out for it, if you don't believe in miracles or think they are not going to happen to you. Million-to-one happenings are not so rare and miracles happen whether you believe in them or not.

The forecast for the future is a high chance of miracles. 

Sedgwick, M. (2013) She Is Not Invisible, Hachette UK

On Play: Learning from Fairytales

A Tiny Feast by Chris Adrian (2009) is a modern fairytale. My Goodreads review gives it five stars and explains:

'The juxtaposition of the fairy world with a cancer ward gives us a new viewpoint with which to see the world of science. Real life needs hopes and dreams without which we would not strive to overcome our trials. Sometimes it's better to be 'away with the fairies' than to engage with the sadness and hardship of human life and death. All this and so much more, presented with humour, warmth and a hospital environment we can believe in, wrapped in the guise of a short story.'

The story has many important messages which include the idea that children should play, and that sometimes fairytales and the like are ways people can use to process what is happening around them and make a kind of understanding of the impossibility of devastating situations. In the story we are told:

'A boy should play—that is his whole purpose.'  

In this instance it is illness which prevents the child from playing but in society we have created many other ways to prevent our children from playing and ways of curbing their playfullness. Whether we are dressing them beyond their years, schooling them with examinations or creating a society which has unrealistic expectations of them by giving a range of responsibilities while not always balancing the book with tending to their rights. We don't have to see the child-soldier or the child in forced labour or the child marriages or mutilation to see the child's right to play being eroded.

The United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (1989) agrees:

'That every child has the right to rest and leisure, to engage in play and recreational activities appropriate to the age of the child and to participate freely in cultural life and the arts.

That member governments shall respect and promote the right of the child to participate fully in cultural and artistic life and shall encourage the provision of appropriate and equal opportunities for cultural, artistic, recreational and leisure activity.'

Article 31

Today the National Union of Teachers (NUT), called for a ballot on boycotting primary school testing  (Coughlan,2016). There have been many boycotts since the SATs were introduced (reference) including  my family's. It was a simple method, whereby the head of the school informed us when the SATs were scheduled and we would keep our child away from school at those times. The head went as far as to tell us the specific times, so that our daughter was only absent for a few hours rather than missing a whole day. Our daughter left primary school 16 years ago but it seems, we are are having the same arguments. 

Arguments which Holt was having in 1976, when he makes a case for for doing, instead of education. The kind of education which Holt (1976) describes as 'learning cut off from active life and done under pressure of bribe or threat, greed and fear' (p.3). Whereas:

‘Play is freely chosen, personally directed, intrinsically motivated behaviour that actively engages the child. Play can be fun or serious. Through play children explore social, material and imaginary worlds and their relationship with them, elaborating all the while a flexible range of responses to the challenges they encounter. By playing, children learn and develop as individuals, and as members of the community.’ 

 Davy, A. (2006)

This is why I am a youthworker. To play, to encourage play, to remove barriers to choice of and in play and to build relationships and communities from the central tools of play, which include:

• freedom
• voluntary participation
• choice
• personal interest
• individual direction
• motivation
• engagement
• exploration
• social skills
• creativity
• flexibility
• challenge
• experiment
• learning
• development
• individuality
• cohesion

(List based on Davy, 2006, quote above)

So let's play.

Adrian, C. (2009) A Tiny Feast, The New Yorker, Issue April 20, 2009

Couglan, S. (2016) Teachers Union Calls for Ballot on Primary Test Boycott, BBC News  

Davy, A. (2006)  New Playwork: Play and Care for Children 4-16, Cengage Learning EMEA

Holt, J. (1976) Instead of Education: Ways to Help People Do Things Better, Penguin Books Ltd, Middlesex

United Nations (1989) Convention on the Rights of the Child, UN Human Rights Office of the High Commissioner

The Middle Ground, The Common Ground

We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves by Kay Joy Fowler (2013) teaches us much about kinship. Sometimes it means beginning in the middle, not just the middle of the story as Rose's story did but in the middle between what we know and what we don't know.

We make assumptions constantly and at the same time know those assumptions are not the whole story. So why not make assumptions that are positive. Ones that celebrate what we have in common so we can better understand each other rather than open up what sets us apart.

Fowler, speaking about We Are All Completely Beside Outselves, said she 'wanted the book to start with the assumption of kinship' , that she 'wanted the reader to assume the similarities, before looking for the differences' (Online Q&A).

A good place to start. A foundation to build from. A positive connection. The middle ground. The common ground.

52x52: Overt Reading: Be a Role Model Reader

52 random acts of kindness that each take under 52 seconds. One action each week, over a year takes less than an hour of your life.

Today is World Book Day and books will be read, bought and talked about, children will dress as their favourite book characters to go to school and books will be celebrated worldwide. What about the rest of the year?

Often we take for granted what we have and then can't appreciate what we don't have. I grew up in a house where books were just there. I saw people reading and expected that that was what one did. People read. I had no idea that this was not always the case. That years later I would work with children who did not have books at home. That years later I would meet adults who did not read because they chose not to or could not. That years later I would meet children in Nairobi and Mumbai, who had so little that when posing for a picture, each one would hold a book in front of them with pride, a sign of achievement, hope and as their most prized possession. 

Today I can, not only read a book in print (a book-book) but on a tablet or phone or even listen to an audiobook. It is wonderful there are so many formats but if no one knows I am reading, how will others know that this is what I do. How can I be a role model to the children and young people I work with and share my love of books if they don't see me read. And yes I could tell them but showing rather than telling has more power.

So now, at times I leave my phone and tablet aside and take a book-book with me and as overtly as I can, read my book (especially on local buses where I rarely see people read). I read in plain sight.

So today's task takes less than 52 seconds, just pick up a book from your shelf that you want to read and pop it in your bag or on the side, ready for you to take with you to work or study or the park or cafe or anywhere, so you can show that you love reading and maybe be a role model for future generations of readers. 

Be a role model reader.

More Lessons from Harper Lee

Author Harper Lee passed away on the 19th of this month and having read and been inspired by To Kill a Mockingbird, I turned to her other novel Go Set a Watchman to find some solace. I was aware there had been controversy around this novel, however I was interested in knowing where young Scout's story had originated. The book, a precursor of To Kill a Mockingbird has an older Scout trying to find her way in life and reminiscing about her childhood in an effort to make sense of her world.

My Goodreads review: 

Go Set A Watchman will be forever compared to Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird and at the moment, in the main, seems to be seen as coming up short. However if we talk about the message of the novel, rather than the plot or structure, we might see it as being the better of the two in the future. The message?

• Heroes are only as we perceive them.
• Consciences, like morals are malleable.
• Power corrupts, whether in terms of sexism, racism, class or any other oppressive force.
• We cannot understand what is right if we rely on other people to tell us.
• Concepts like 'right' , 'truth' and 'good' all change according to and need context to be understood
• Prejudice comes as much from faith and culture as it does from good intentions and ignorance.
• There are no 'good' or 'bad' people, only the good and bad they do.
• Children need to evolve past parents guidance and learn from themselves.
• We are all flawed.
• We are all bigots in some way.
• We are afraid of what we have being taken away from us.
• Our response to what scares us is fight or flight.
• We, as a species, are not as evolved as we think.
• And history does repeat itself – until we learn.

If, by  reading this book, any one of the above is understood, maybe we will not take for granted the benefits we have and try harder to be better people.

* * *

Go Set a Watchman was published in 2015 but much of its material pre-dates To Kill a Mockingbird (Telegraph, 2015). Although it was never published in the fifties (perhaps because of its inflammatory politics) it is as pertinent today because of those same politics and social commentary.

Comments on Need and Greed:

 'If you did not want much, there was plenty.' 


'The only thing I’m afraid of about this country is that its government will someday become so monstrous that the smallest person in it will be trampled underfoot, and then it wouldn’t be worth living in.'

Comments on Prejudice, Conscience and Faith:

' Prejudice, a dirty word, and faith, a clean one, have something in common: they both begin where reason ends.'

'[E]very man’s watchman, is his conscience.'

'[T]he twenty-first chapter of Isaiah, verse six: For thus hath the Lord said unto me, Go, set a watchman, let him declare what he seeth.'

'As you grew up, when you were grown, totally unknown to yourself, you confused your father with God. You never saw him as a man with a man’s heart, and a man’s failings—I’ll grant you it may have been hard to see, he makes so few mistakes, but he makes ’em like all of us.'

Comments on Friendship and Love

'[T]he time your friends need you is when they’re wrong.... They don’t need you when they’re right.'

'[A]lmost in love... No, that’s impossible...either you are or you aren’t. Love’s the only thing in this world that is unequivocal. There are different kinds of love, certainly, but it’s a you-do or you-don’t proposition with them all.'

Lee, H. (2015) Go Set A Watchman, Heinemann 

Learning From The Dead

Whether history or the social conditioning passed on from the dead is our learning, we have decisions to make about how we are to live out our lives. Before we face west into the sunset of our years, do we just trudge coldly through the snow, dragging our feet until we lay down with it in our graves or do we raise ourselves to the snow's dizzying heights, throwing ourselves into life with the ups and downs that it brings or fly on the wind, snow swept flurries to rise and fall and then eventually lay down softly with all the rest, to rest. 

Joyce tells us:

'Better pass boldly into that other world, 

in the full glory of some passion,

 than fade and wither dismally with age.'

Joyce presents the dead of the unchanging social traditions of Ireland and that of the unchanging mentality of the individual. Gabriel, a master of self control, eschews change while eventually recognizing its need, in not just wider society but in his own persona. He is frozen in his development like all of Ireland, in the snow that covers the whole country and the grave of a man who has died with more life lived in his young years than he himself. In this story we see Gabriel begin to thaw.

With Gabriel's thaw and relinquishing of control, the falling of the snow awakens a realization that he has as little control over death, and is of as little consequence in the greater universe as a snow flake that falls. He finds life affirmation in the acceptance of death, that he is at one with the living universe where all of us are falling. Individuals linked by the universality of death.

The end of the hero's story is the end of everyone's story, a joining up in the end by the blanket of snow under which we all come to the same end.

The snow falls throughout the universe, just as death comes to us all, even the hero in his own story. As Joyce's last words of The Dead put it:

'His soul swooned softly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.'

However, the power of the language, especially Joyce's, is that such words outlive the narrator, narrative and the writer. The 'full glory' of Joyce's 'passion' will not as he feared 'fade and wither dismally with age' it will 'boldly go into that other world' of immortality.

Joyce, J. (1914, 2011) The Dead, Melville House Publishing

Room

'Room' by Emma Donoghhue has had a great movie interpretation of the book, capturing the atmosphere, characters and situation of living for the first five years of a life locked up in a room. I cried through most of it and was riveted by the limited (but vast) world view of a five year old. It replicates the skewed perspectives which come from an unusual upbringing in a restricted environment.

This story is certainly a 'different kind of true' and the idea that 'everyone's got a different story' has special resonance.

My childhood story was certainly set on a stage larger than a room. It included rooms, houses, schools and playgrounds, fields and roads and cities and counties. But for all its horizons it was usually limited to the people in the vicinity and usually not much farther than a room. 

However big the house or however far I traveled, it was one room at a time and even when phoning home it was just from one room to another.  

In many places I've traveled I've seen a family live in a room, converting it at night to sleeping quarters by laying out bedding and clearing it away in the day to live. It has made me question my 'need' for so many rooms in my home, despite the modest size of our maisonette. 

My rooms:

1 room just to sleep in

1 room just to wash in

1 room just to toilet in

1 room just to cook in

1 room to lead me to the other rooms downstairs

1 room to lead me to the other rooms upstairs

1 room just to sit in

It seems ridiculous that many of our rooms are only used for a portion of the day and unused the rest. The nearest I've come to living in less wasteful accomodation is when I have lived in bedsits which convert from day to night and camping which is an all-in-one with communal toilets. 

And that is just our houses. What about our workplaces. Billions of rooms which are only used for a portion of the day, week and year while there are people sleeping in the streets calling a doorway their 'room'.

According to Crisis, last year 7581 people slept rough on the streets of London. And for every rough sleeper in London 100 people are in hostels and 1100 households are in overcrowded accomodation.

With all those empty rooms.

Function and Tuning

Books do not need to be literary masterpieces to be insightful. Neither do they need to be an overall success. They can, like The Secret Keeper by Kate Morton have a relatively uninspiring but steady plotline and setting and flashes of perfection which set it apart from mediocrity. The following is one such flash of genius:

'She was the sort of person who needed to be kept happy, he realized. Not as a matter of selfish expectation, but as a simple fact of design; like a piano or a harp, she'd been made to function best at a certain tuning.'

Whether it spoke to me because I could associate with it or it spoke to me as the simple truth of the human condition, it spoke to me.

I am made to 'function best at a certain tuning' - aren't we all?

Loyalty & Love

'Our Man in Havana' is a comic look at international espionage and the role and unreliability of informants in state affairs and although it shows its age by some of its inappropriate racial references it is also ahead of its time in its predictions.

I left London for Havana, having read Our Man in Havana (1958) by Graham Greene, set in both London and Havana and planning to watch the Alex Guinness black and white version while there. We watched it noticing we had passed Sloppy Joes, one of the locations on the film and while we sat eating sloppy joes at the home of the original sloppy joe, on the TV appeared Our Man in Havana.

Today the messages still hold true, whether they are black and white on the page on on the screen:

'Would the world be in the mess it is if we were loyal to love and not to countries?'

Martian Worships Duct Tape

'The Martian' by Andy Weir is a wonderful tale of survival against the odds. Although the odds were better for a botanist's be able to 'science the hell out of this' and survive being the only man left on Mars, it was still his spirit which kept him going through adversity. How would any of us survive on an alien planet when we are left for dead...depends on your science, I suppose, and possible how much duct tape you have available. As Mark Watney, 'the Martian', puts it 'Duct tape should be worshipped'. I understand this sentiment – and although I may not have a roll on me, I always have a few lengths wound round and old credit card in my first aid pack in my bag and Ive often been glad of it.

Advantages of duct tape:

• Tears without a scissors
• Tears in strips
• Strong
• Waterproof
• Easy to carry
• Adhesive

10 uses for duct tape

1. Patching up a tent or taping broken poles
2. Sticking bubble wrap and wrapping postage parcels to keep shape & secure
3. Use as grip for opening jars
4. Protect floor from furniture streaks by applying strip to under legs of furniture
5. Prevent wires and cords from becoming a trip hazard by fixing to ground
6. Temporary stopping of leak in plumbing
7. Patch for hole in shoe, waterproof coat or inflatables
8. Remove fluff from clothes or pet hairs from couch
9. Patch a bicycle inner tube
10. Use for emergency splints or bandages or keeping a blister plaster on when sweating

Ps. Forgot No 11. For kidnapping purposes in thriller movies to prevent screaming

According to Today I Found Out, duct tape was invented as a waterproof tape for ammunition cases and was military green and was called 'duck tape' , possible for its green and waterproof properties later called duct tape for its use on ducts and coloured silver to match. However today we are advised that the one area we should not use duct tape is ironically, on ducts!

52x52: Leave a Book

52 random acts of kindness that each take under 52 seconds. One action each week, over a year takes less than an hour of your life.

Whether it's at a book exchange box or on a train or bus, leave a book you have enjoyed for someone else to enjoy. Add an inscription maybe in the front to explain what the book is for (so people don't try to return it to you somehow).

Or even create a Little Free Library yourself, as littlefreelibrary.org says:

East Village, London

To promote literacy and the love of reading by building free book exchanges worldwide and to build a sense of community as we share skills, creativity and wisdom across generations.

Or you could join Book Crossing where you can register your book, release it into the wild and as other people resister as they find it and release it again, you can follow the progress of your book who-knows-where...

Leaving Home: For Hundreds of Years

Reading 'Star of the Sea' by Joseph O'Connor, reccommended to me by my Father, I was struck by the many and varied ways we see the lives of those fleeing from famine and destitution to America in the 1840s. On the 26 day voyage, we read letters, headlines and announcements, hear stories of the past in Ireland and see the lives conflict on board the Star of the Sea. 

It is not hard to see where the migrant culture of Ireland has come from. It is not hard to see why the population of Ireland is only 4.8 million today compared to that of the city of London's which is 8.6 million.  It is not hard to see why, by the time Ireland achieved independence in 1921, that Ireland's population had dropped to only half what it was in the 1840s and why it's still less than it was before the famine over a hundred and fifty years ago.

It is said that there are more Irish abroad than in Ireland. Global Irish has some sources saying that the diaspora total number is 70 million. 

According to The Washington Post, the census of 2013, had 34.5 million Americans who listed their heritage as Irish. The headline read:

The Irish-American Population is Seven times larger than in Ireland 

Yet in the Irish Times, John Grenham says 'Nobody ever left Ireland to go to America.' And I understand what he meant. I never left Ireland to go to Italy. I left for a job, opportunity, experience and a new life. But mostly I left because of the people, the Irish and Italian links, like when I left for London,  just like Grenham mentions in his article. People left Ireland to go to jobs or opportunities with family and friends and they were all in America.

Reading to Transport

When I wrote 15 Reasons to Read,  I failed to mention one of the most important:

to be transported

Roald Dahl mentions that books 'transported' Matilda 'into new worlds' from the comfort of her home in an English village, however there is also the very physical transport of reading while travelling.

By this I don't just mean in the metaphorical sense but in a very real sense. The very movement from one place to another and the time it takes to do this, as well as the more figurative transportation into other worlds. I have just come back from a visit to my Mother on holiday in Spain which involved the physical journey starting at 3am with a taxi, then coach, then a walk around an airport, to a plane to Spain, and another walk around an airport, then a minibus and finally the short walk to my mum's apartment, arriving around 9 hours later.

This would have been a tedious journey without, every step of the way, having an audiobook playing in my ears. While I waited in line for the bus, or made my way through the airport, or was held up in security, or on all the journeys when I could close my eyes and be transported while being transported.

Nine hours of travel gave me, not just the opportunity to get somewhere else but to get immersed in another world and take a journey unbroken by the usual day-to-day issues which have us resorting to bookmarks in or turning over the corner of the page, until we return to the book or not and oft times  means we meet the books we are reading at a surface level like a stone skimming the water.

My Journey & Transportation

To Spain (Book 1) Audiobook 1: I read Second Life because it was the second novel of S J Watson, who wrote the psychological thriller Before I Go to Sleep. Most of my family read and loved the first, however the second turned out to be predictable and in its attempt to create the same kinds of twists and turns as his first book, it doesn't quite make it. The plotting has the shape of a snake swallowing its own tail and regurgitating it again.

In Spain (Book 2) Paperback: I read The House at Riverton by Kate Morton because my Mum, recommended it to me one day and the next we found it in a second hand stall for a euro (in English in a Spanish market!). If that's not a sign I don't know what is. So I began the daunting 599 paged saga and found it an easy read. The main character Grace Bradley, aged 98, tells her story of being a housemaid in the 1920s at Riverton, and I enjoyed following her into her Upstairs Downstairs world of the past and present.

In Spain (Book 3) Kindle Edition: I read We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves by Karen Joy Fowler for a book group session I was going to miss while on holiday, but felt guilty enough to read anyway. I was glad I did - I loved it. It was a book which had a foundation in the writers life experience growing up with a psychologist as a father, which was backed up and drawn out and elucidated with research giving it a great sense of place, time and occasion. It was a story only the author could tell and all the better for it.

To London (Book 4) Audiobook 2: I read The Sins of the Fathers by Lawrence Block because my partner recommended it and it was shorter than the previous 300+, 400+ and 599 paged previous books. It made the journey home enjoyable. I was quite tired and between naps and the voice of Alan Sklar, I had a thoroughly therapeutic travelling experience. When I couldn't find my passport or the alarm went off at the airport or the child behind me kicked my seat on the plane while her grandparents moaned about the service of the budget airline, I fell in and out of sleep and let the story of ex-cop Matthew Scudder transport me to another world. Yes it may have been a world of murder and mayhem but in the mind of Matthew Scudder, we see a world where mysteries are solved, justice is sought and achieved and knowing right from wrong is a comfort in an otherwise disturbing world.

So from London to Spain and back again I was transported, physically and figuratively and through time between London, Paris and Berlin, a 1920s English Country House, the world of science and psychology and New York's Greenwich Village.

Sometimes I wish I lived farther away from my work just so I could read while I travel there. Maybe I'll just pretend I do and take a bus or train or walk just to have a read and be transported.

On Writing: Planning & Possibilities

Possibility & Catching Ideas

I am warned, in The Craft of Novel-Writing, that if I 'linger at the planning stage' that I 'may never start the book at all' (Doubtfire, 1982, p.12). Any planning needs to leave room for the kind of organic development that can't be planned. A book should be 'fluid' and 'a voyage of discovery' that is 'full of surprises' and that it is more likely that the reader will be surprised if I (the author) am 'continually surprised' (Ibid).

This, Stephen King describes as 'an immense feeling of possibility' with which he wrote his very first story as a child (2000, p.28). According to King, 'good story ideas seem to come quite literally from nowhere' and the writers job 'isn't to find them but to recognise them when they show up' (2000, p.38).

Doubtfire (1982) advises keeping note books handy in the planning stages, to catch the ideas as they come (p. 9-12). In 1982 when the book was written, mobile phones weren't as prolific so wouldn't be available, as they are now, at that moment you want to jot something down.

Words, Numbers & Discipline & Freedom

When planning to write a novel its good to keep in mind the average length being anywhere between 60,000 and 100,000 words (Doubtfire, 1982, p.10) and according to Writers & Artists a 'typical paperback' will be 80,000 to 100,000. 

Doubtfire (1982) looks at a book of about 70-80000 words and suggests breaking it into 30 chapters of around 2500 words (p.11). The 1-30 method, as advised by Winston Clewes, involves writing 1-30 down a margin of a page and by the 1 put a 'possible opening' and by the 30 an 'idea for an ending' and by the other various numbers 'brief notes on some highspots of the story' (Ibid). It doesn't all need to be planned, but as you write, more notes by the chapter numbers and changes and more notes again will help to sort any 'muddle' out, and help to 'plan a strong back bone for your book and build towards a powerful climax', which can also change as appropriate (p. 12).

Irving Wallace (1969) in The Writing of One Novel considers that 'Every author prepares for a book in the way that best suits his psyche' (p.56). Wallace liked to plan using an outline, which he considered to have the 'virtue of being creatively thought out, worked out, disciplined, in the authors mind and on paper...' (1969, p.60). However he recognises that a novelist 'who plans too carefully in advance' could create such a 'rigid mold that he leaves no room for hisimagination to soar freely or for new ideas to root and grow...' (Ibid).   

Marathons, Toolboxes, Training & Work 

When Guy de Maupassant (1888) showed Flaubert some of his early writing, Flaubert saw 'a certain iintelligence' but wasn't sure if he would go on to develop any talent. Flaubert (Ibid) advised him: 

'Talent...is nothing other than a long patience. Work.'

Francesca Bell in Being a Writer, uses Haruki Murikami's analogy for writing a novel as running a marathon and considers the 'writer has to be fit for purpose and stamina is part of that fitness' (2015, p.268).

How do you train to be a writer? William Boyd in Notes on Becoming a Novelist considers that he found the 'right thing' to do to be a writer was 'writing as hard as [he] could, fulfilling [his] apprenticeship, making mistakes and learning from them' (2015, p. 291).

This apprenticeship carries with it a toolbox. Stephen King (2000) talks about the writer's toolbox of skills in vocabulary, grammar, style and form and says if you want to write to the best of your ability that 'it behoves you to construct your own toolbox and then build up enough muscle so that you can carry it with you', then he says when you are faced with something hard 'instead of getting discouraged, you will perhaps seize the correct tool and get immediately to work' (p. 111). 

Do Two Things

Stephen King's  (2000, p.145) advice is:

'[I]f you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot' 

King reads 70-80 books a year. I looked at my list since starting this blog in September and wondered if I was in the right ball park. By the 19th of February in Reflections on Reading I had read 19 books and since then I have read Timbuktu, The Drowned World, The Guest Cat and The Rosie Project. That's 23 books in 6 months, so in a year, at the same rate, I will have read 46 books. It looks like I have some catching up to do.

When it comes to writing, in the last six months I have attended a writing class, been editing my novel, have written a short story, some poetry, essays for an MA and written over 80 blog posts like this. King (2000) likes to get in 10 pages or 2000 words a day (p.154). However, if that is his only job I would imagine it being easier than when he wrote Carrie in between wash cycles at work. I feel like that's what I am doing and its hard work. I want to be writing all the time but when your eyes are closing and your head is dropping over the keyboard its hard. But there you go - no one ever said it was going to be easy. And all the cliches I drag out to young people I work with about hard work and achievement come to mind and I am chastened.

And I plan to read a lot and write a lot...more.

 
References: 

Boyd, W. (2015) Notes on Becoming a Novelist, Writers' and Artists' Yearbook 2015, Bloomsbury, London
Brill, F. (2015) Being a Writer, Writers' and Artists' Yearbook 2015, Bloomsbury, London
Doubtfire, D. (1978, 1982) The Craft of Novel-Writing, Shocken Books Inc, New York

King, S. (2000) On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft, Scribner, New York
Maupassant, G, (1888) 'Le Roman', Preface to Pierre et Jean, cited in Allott, M. (1959) Novelists on the Novel, Routelege, London
Wallace, I. (1969) Writing One Novel,  The New English, Library, London

10 First Lines of Novels with First Person Narration

1. The Great Gatsby (F Scott Fitzgerald, 1925)

'In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I've been turning over in my mind ever since.'

2. Room (Emma Donoghue, 2010) 

'Today I'm five. I was four last night going to sleep in the Wardrobe but when I wake up in Bed in the dark I'm changed to five, abracadabra.'

 

3. Moby Dick (Herman Melville, 1851)

 'Call me Ishmael.' 

4. Wuthering Heights (Emile Bronte, 1847)

'I have just returned from a visit to my landlord –

the solitary neighbour that I shall be troubled with.'

5. I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings (Maya Angelou, 1984)

'When I was three and Bailey four, we had arrived in the musty little town, wearing tags on our wrists which instructed – ‘To Whom It May Concern’ – that we were Marguerite and Bailey Johnson Jr., from Long Beach, California, en route to Stamps, Arkansas, c/o Mrs. Annie Henderson.'

6. The Catcher in the Rye (JD Salinger, 1951)

 'If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you'll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don't feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth.'

7. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (Mark Twain, 1884)
  

'You don’t know about me without you have read a book by 

the name of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, but that ain’t no matter. That book was made by Mr. Mark Twain, and he told the truth, mainly.'

8. David Copperfield (Charles Dickens, 1850) 

'Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, 

or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show.'

9. Robinson Crusoe (Daniel Defoe, 1719)

'I was born in the Year 1632, in the City of York, of a good Family, tho' not of that Country, my Father being a Foreigner of Bremen, who settled first at Hull; He got a good Estate by Merchandise, and leaving off his Trade, lived afterward at York, from whence he had married my Mother, whose Relations were named Robinson, a very good Family in that Country, and from whom I was called Robinson Kreutznaer; but by the usual Corruption of Words in England, we are now called, nay we call our selves, and write our Name Crusoe, and so my Companions always call'd me.'

10. The Woman Who Walked into Doors (Roddy Doyle, 1996)

'I was told by a Guard who came to the door. 

He wasn't one I'd seen before, one of the usual ones.

He was only a young fella, skinny and with raw spots all over his neck.'

Related Posts:

• On Writing: Point of View
• 10 First Lines of Novels with Third Person Narration