writing inspiration

What I Learned at the Writers Conference

Finally, after three years of absence (one due to holidays, two to You-Know-What), this past weekend Steve and I got to go to a real-life, in-person Writers Conference again. People! Writers! Books! Workshops and conversations about plot and character and publishing and writing software and essays and food writing and the difficulties of switching genre and getting things done and how weird it is to be, well, as weird as we are… It was glorious.

What did I learn, you wonder? Well, aside from all the stuff I really can’t summarize in a little blog post—you had to have been there, that’s what we take those workshops for—there are two thoughts I came away with. Neither one of which should have been news, but they kind of were.

Thought #1: Writers don’t look like their publicity photos. Well, okay, some do; they’re just naturally handsome and photogenic and we all hate them for it. But several times that weekend, when a writer was introduced and walked up on stage, I had a little “Oh!” moment. As in, “Oh, they actually look like a normal person! They’re older/larger/less perfectly groomed/more grey-haired/whatever than I thought!” With some of them the “Oh!” moment happened when they started reading from their work: in their writing, they’re so eloquent, so polished, so poised—but on stage, there might have been a slight stammer or a lisp, or they read their work with less expression than it deserved, or their hands were shaking just a bit.

Writers, I realized, are just normal people. Even those “big names” with multiple published works and bestsellers to their credit, whom I look up to with a tinge of envy. Reading the eloquence of their writing, and looking at their attractive and polished photos, I got intimidated; then I saw them in the flesh, and they turned out to be—well, real. Actual human beings. I haven’t lost one iota of my admiration for them, I’m just not intimidated by them personally anymore (well, not as much). I can be inspired instead.

Thought #2: There is more than one way of doing things. “Thou shalt outline!”—“I can’t outline my novels, I have to write several discovery drafts and throw out the first three until I figure out what happens.”—“Write a synopsis first and work from that!”—“I don’t know what the book is about until I’ve written it.” All of those statements came from successful authors with several published books to their credit. Directly contradicting what the last successful author with several published books to their credit had said.

That there is more than one way of doing things is a revelation that I had about more than one creative field in the last couple of years. I wrote about it with regards to knitting (and life) two years ago, and just a few months back, I realized it about pottery: I was taught one particular way to throw on the wheel, and I was getting frustrated because I wasn’t doing very well with it. I concluded that it’s because I didn’t know the right way to do it. I started watching online videos, and several of the instructors were quite dogmatic about how it’s supposed to be done: Never, never use a sponge to pull up—no, always use a sponge to pull up! Wedge every piece you throw and make sure you put it on the wheel the right way around—no, just smack it into a ball, it doesn’t matter which way it lands on the wheel! This is the only right way to do it—no, this is the only right way to do it! The more online videos I watched and books I read, the more different ways of doing it I saw. And all of these people produce beautiful work.

It seems that that also holds true for writing (which, in case you missed the point, is my revelation du jour). Plotting, pantsing, structured, unstructured, according to a map, discovering as you go—what it comes down to is that you need to do what works. What matters is that you get the thing written. It’s irrelevant if you’ve outlined or inlined (I just made that up), as long as you get a piece of writing out of it. There is not just one way of doing things, and the really exciting thing about that is that because there are so many ways of doing things, you always have another option—if this doesn’t work for you, try that instead.

That’s what’s so wonderful about events like Writers Festivals: so many opportunities to learn different ways of doing things! And as exciting as it was to get back to an in-person conference, the Pandemic [ugh!] has actually had a good effect here. If you can’t make it to a real-life festival (either because you can’t afford it, or you live too far away, or, which is a perfectly legitimate reason, you’re not comfortable being physically close to so many germ-breathing strangers yet), the number of online options have proliferated in the last couple of years. You can attend festivals and learn from those amazing pros from the comfort of your own personal computer chair, finding out all about novel structure or how to plot a mystery, or, for that matter, how to sculpt a ceramic camel using newspaper as armature.

And I can tell you that the learning experience in an online conference can be just as intense; you need just as much time to recover from it as from a real-life convention (i.e., you spend the day afterwards collapsed on the couch, trying to let your poor brain recover from all the input). Speaking of which, I think Steve still hasn’t got over this one; he’s gone missing. I know he came home with me—here he is in the kitchen perched on the stack of books we brought home—but I haven’t been able to find him anywhere since. Well, I’m sure he’ll resurface once he’s had a long nap and revitalized his woolly brain.

Life, the Universe, and a Writers Conference. Writers are normal people, and there is more than one way of doing things.

A Thousand Rooms: A Guest Post by Helen Jones

Some months ago, my writer friend Helen Jones of Journey to Ambeth was asking if anyone wanted to beta read her latest book, A Thousand Rooms. Yes, please, I said. So she sent it over to me, and I have to say, it’s one of the best indie books I’ve read. And as of yesterday, it’s published! So, in honour of that event, Helen has come over and written a guest post for us here. One of the things she and I have in common is that we’re both Europeans who’ve done a fair bit of travelling, so I asked her to talk about how the things she has seen in her wanderings inspire her writings. Over to Helen:

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‘The world is a book, and those who do not travel read only one page.’ St Augustine

Recently, a writer in a group I’m part of commented that she was feeling short of ideas, the stories that used to come to her so easily tapering off. The group response was unanimous. ‘Go outside.’ ‘See the world.’ ‘Come back to real life.’

As writers we create, our stories born of inspiration. But where do our ideas come from? I realise that writers need an interior landscape to plunder – after all, the Bronte sisters lived quite sheltered, shy lives, yet were able to write stories of deep passion and emotion. As I’ve said before, you don’t have to live with dragons to write about them. Yet they were no strangers to love and loss and emotion, and that is the landscape they chose to wander with their words, creating tempests from what, in their own lives, may have been more like gentle breezes. We each of us have our own unique life history, our own moments seen and experienced, and each of those moments can be the spark for a story. However, as we told the writer in our group, sometimes you need to step away from the desk and look for ideas elsewhere, or take yourself somewhere where ideas might come and find you. As writers, by nature we are observers, and we pull detail from the world around us wherever we are. I’ve written a short story sparked by an unusual outside light I saw on a walk in my neighbourhood, and another one inspired by a spate of leaks in our newly purchased home.

On my Instagram profile, I describe myself as a traveller. I’ve been fortunate to see a lot of this planet, though there are many places I’d still like to visit. But travel is not always about moving through space – in recent years I’ve wandered worlds within imagination, stories taking me to places beyond anywhere I’ve seen.

And yet, they still hold echoes of real world locales, a gleaming palace on the California coast transplanted into the magical gardens of Ambeth, a castle in Wales, favourite childhood haunt, now holding a secret that could change the world. And a dead girl roaming the streets of Sydney, her erstwhile home my old apartment, her old office the same one where I used to work.

My latest novel, A Thousand Rooms, was inspired by a real event. When I lived in Sydney I used to walk to work and, one sunny morning, came around a curve in the road to see a woman lying on the pavement under a blanket, two police officers crouched next to her. The accident hadn’t happened long before – there were no other emergency services there yet, and the bus that had hit her was pulled up to the kerb a little further along, the driver sitting on the verge with his head in his hands. The area wasn’t cordoned off, either – I walked right through the group, past a young woman on her phone in tears saying ‘she’s dead, she’s dead’, past the police officers and the dead woman. As I passed her I looked down. One of her arms was sticking out from under the blanket, the skin smooth and unmarked, adorned with a silver charm bracelet. I remember thinking that she’d got up that morning and chosen that bracelet along with everything else she was wearing, not imagining she’d be dead before lunchtime.

Then I kept walking. I had a busy day ahead, there was nothing I could do to help and I needed to get to work. I made it through the day but that evening, when my now-husband and I were driving somewhere, I made him stop the car, opened the door and threw up. Reaction hit me hard – even now, fifteen years later, I still feel sorrow for that unknown woman and her sudden death.

In A Thousand Rooms my protagonist, Katie, like the woman on the road that morning, dies suddenly. And then nothing happens. No angels or relatives appear, and she doesn’t feel any different – she just remains Katie, wandering around Sydney, unsure what to do next. As I wrote the story it unfolded from that initial event, research taking me through different afterlife mythologies, imagination adding characters and twists. But without that first spark of inspiration, who knows whether I would have written the book at all.

Of course, you don’t need to travel far or be part of dramatic events to find inspiration. When we told the writer in our group that she needed to see the world, we meant only that she needed to find a different outlook, whether that was in her garden, or farther afield. You don’t have to go far to find stories, but you do have to go outside, once in a while, and help them to find you.

Helen Jones was born in the UK, then lived in both Canada and Australia before returning to England several years ago. She has worked as a freelance writer for the past ten years, runs her own blog and has contributed guest posts to others, including the Bloomsbury Writers & Artists site.

When she’s not writing, she likes to walk, paint and study karate. She loves the idea of finding magic in ordinary places; as a child she and her grandmother used to visit the woods on Midsummer’s eve to look for fairies – whether they found any or not, is a story for another time.

She now lives in Hertfordshire with her husband and daughter, and spends her days writing, cleaning, thinking, and counting cats on the way to school.

A Thousand Rooms can be found here: myBook.to/AThousandRooms

And you can follow Helen on her blog, Amazon page or Facebook page:

https://journeytoambeth.com/

https://www.amazon.com/author/helenjones

https://www.facebook.com/authorhelenjones/

Lavender’s Blue, the Song

“Lavender’s Blue”, the Septimus Series Short Story that I posted the other day (if you haven’t read it yet, go here, or here and download yourself a copy to keep), started with a song – well, actually, with a movie. That’s right, the Cinderella movie that I love so much.

The lullabye “Lavender’s Blue” features quite prominently in the film, and so afterwards, I had the song stuck in my head. And as I kept singing it, and thinking about Cat and Guy and the world they live in, a story started taking shape in my head. Voilà, “Lavender’s Blue”.

And here is the song (well, one version of it – it’s a folk song, so there are lots of different versions. The one Cat sings has a slightly different last line).

https://youtu.be/Ow25lvYoKXo

Life, the Universe, and a Lullabye. Enjoy!