Editing, head space and PhDs

Happy Days!

It was two years ago today that I took my PhD viva. Time has flown, the world has changed and so have I. The little lad in the picture is now a toddler and loving life. My daughter is still smiling and I am very aware of how important family is. I am also aware of how fragile life is.

Things have been happening over the last few months that have made me think, made me reassess and consider what actually makes me happy. One thing I do know is that I still love my writing, escaping into a world of words. I love my research and need to develop it further. However, my research profile is not as strong as it should be that is in part due to work commitments that consume every waking moment leaving no head space to let ideas develop. That is one thing that has to change.
I have lots of ideas bubbling away both creative and critical. I just need to focus and create that head space and I am going to. Watch this space.

During the past week I was talking to NS via skype and we were discussing that innate inability to self edit your own work at times. We both acknowledge that when critiquing other people's work you can see the mistakes both structural and copy but when it comes to your own there is a sense that the shutters come down. This can mean there are some cringe worthy moments when an editor/critique partner points out an issue  in your work that you know you have picked other people up on. Yet you still can't see it in your own work. We were also discussing the importance of working with people and organisations that you trust. I am lucky I can offer that sort of support to my students at the University of Winchester but also to others through  the Golden Egg Academy. It is a very satisfying process watching something grow and evolve. I just get irritated when I can't see my own mistakes.

In fact I am fascinated as to why we can't see the mistakes so I asked gorgeous daughter, who knows a bit about brains, and she came back with the obvious - your brain sees what it thinks it has written and not necessarily what is actually on the page. This is all well and good but how do you make it see it afresh and anew. I am aware there are all the ideas about leaving it in your bottom drawer for three months and then going back to it but it can still be an issue. I know about reading it backwards so you just see the words and not the sentences. Then of course the ever important reading out loud. All of which are valid but I still find the occasional mistakes gets through - so frustrating. I want to explore how the brain works more with this.

How do you approach your editing?

I also wanted to let you in on my plan. It is my intention to use this blog more to develop my ideas as I focus on my research. It is something I have seen a friend do and it works well so thought I would give it a go too. It is time to take control and move on. Watch this space.

However, this is the second post I have written today but the first one will never see the light of day. It ended up just too personal for me and my family but still needed to be something that was written down. This is for all my family, you will know why I have chosen this particular version. Love you.

Born to be a writer?

Books - a shining light for a writer

This week JW pointed me in the direction of some interesting pieces of work: Maria Takolander's 'On not being born to write' and Dallas Baker and his critical work. Both of which got me thinking and I  intend to explore more. Here are some of my initial musings which I will develop over time but am currently thinking out loud or 'out blog'!

How many times have you heard that saying 'I was born to write' - numerous I imagine. Of course we are born to write because we are all born and with that birth comes the ability to learn to use language. It is up to us how we do that and what we do with that ability afterwards.  What happens to us and our writing often develops out of socio cultural identities not out of genes. Inevitably I find writers are often vociferous readers. One seems to feed the other. The love of reading could be a catalyst which both informs and encourages the aspiring writer to be brave and put pen to paper. I thought Takolander's statement 'good writing comes out of good writing' to be very pertinent.

I have sisters who say to me, 'I don't know how you do it, how do you come up with ideas. I couldn't do it.' But I actually think they probably could given the time, the space and the encouragement to do so. When I say space what I mean is 'head space' not necessarily 'a room of one's own' Woolf style (though I can't deny that does help). Space away from life and all its pressures allowing your brain  time to stop, think and create.

Talking of that space to write, Takolander goes on to discuss creative writing degrees where she highlights how courses often state they cannot teach the art but they can teach the craft. Art as she pointed out is such a loaded term. There is an element of elitism attached to it while the term craft seems more accessible.This begs the question though who decides what is art and what is craft? When does craft become art? I have no answers yet but am working on it.

I have said this before, creative writing degrees are an opportunity to find your voice. Try on others until you get to the one that fits you the best - as per Al Alvarez quote which I know I have used numerous times before. If you are a writer on your own you rarely take risks or dip your toe in different styles of writing. You make a decision about what sort of writer you think you are, often based on your favourite books to read, and only focus on that. Sometimes that can be a big mistake. The number of times my students have come to me and said that they had done 'X' module which they thought they would hate but instead they have fallen in love. Particularly in their first year where they have a chance to explore four genres: fiction, scriptwriting, poetry and creative non fiction. They might have preset ideas about what they will and won't like. It is interesting to watch those ideas being tipped upside down. I did it myself. I had a very set idea what sort of writer I was until I did my degree. It had never occurred to me to write for young adults. Now I can't imagine writing for anyone else. That all happened because I had the opportunity to try the YAF voice on.

Another thought came out of one of the many tangential conversations I have with IC. We were discussing the fact that if you are a musician, a dancer, sportsperson, artist etc you are likely to have spent many years training (often costing thousands in money and time) so that you can become the best you possibly can. Why should this be any different with writers? A creative writing course is certainly a way of undertaking some of that training. There are a myriad to pick from.

Briefly I will touch on Baker who made some fascinating points where he relates creativity and critical reflexivity with the Foucauldian idea of the aesthetics of existence and self-bricolage. A bit like my idea above of your writerly person being created out of your socio cultural moment. It would make this blog too long to explore that here but I will do at some point because I have been doing some work on web of identities and gyres that I would like to relate it to - watch this space.

It has been a long old week and I know it is only Thursday but that should tell you everything. We are heading towards the summer when I can focus more on my own work and make some pretty heavy decisions but hopefully I will have that head space that will allow me to be creatively critical and critically creative.

How about a bit of Cohen?

Getting your work out there...

This is just a brief post but I wanted to share this little film.
I am lucky as many of you know I am a lecturer in creative writing at the University of Winchester and I love my job (most of the time - just don't ask in the middle of marking hell). As part of the course we take a truly holistic approach we, obviously, focus on writing but also explore the different ways you can use writing. Part of which is getting your work out there. This can be a very daunting process. For the last few years at Winchester we have provided a stepping stone, that first opportunity to disseminate your work to the public through our own creative writing magazine for all students (not just Winchester) called Vortex. Here is our Programme Leader, and editor of said journal, Dr Neil McCaw, talking about it and the process:



Yesterday I was part of a validation event having written a new course for doctoral students. It is a huge relief that it is over and was passed but now it gives me time to think. Time to focus on my own research and writing. The sun is shining and everything seems possible. So where shall I go next?

https://soundcloud.com/lauramarlingofficial/laura-marling-where-can-i-go

Writing what you know...or not

We are often told as writers to write what we know but sometimes it is just as important to write what we don't know. J K Rowling had a great success doing precisely that as did Philip Pullman with The Dark Materials. JK can't have known Hogwarts or Diagon Alley as actual places but I bet they are based on things she had seen or read about elsewhere. What J K does do so successfully is to create a world we all believe in. As did Pullman, though obviously using Oxford he highlights the difference in the setting by spelling the country as Brytain. It is the same yet different. If I was going to go all academic on you I could relate it to Freud's uncanny or Bakhtin's carnivalesque. But today I am not.

Our writing cannot help but be based on some part of our autobiographical background. It might be something that we have read, seen or had life experience of. When you write you have a web of identities. For me, mine are as a writer, a mother, a woman and an academic. Each intricate layer informs my narrative and my understanding behind the decisions I make. They make me the writer I am. I write fiction for young adults yet it is a long time since I have been one. My children are no longer teenagers, they have moved on but my writing is still embedded within teenage-dom. For me the important thing is not to restrict myself to one cultural moment. Unless of course the aim is relevant to the story - thinking of Dave Massey's Torn for example. My writing needs to be contingent and fluid reflecting the ever moving world around me while I create a fictional world that is familiar and recognisable, particularly as I write realist novels.

The important thing is not to be afraid. Believe in the world you create and your readers will too. It doesn't matter whether you are creating a realist world, a dystopian one or fantasy world, you need to understand exactly how it works. This means undertaking world building exercises alongside your character building ones. You need to understand not just what your world looks like but how the culture works within it for example.

If we only wrote about what we knew a lot of books would not be written. If you have a story that you love that is a based in a world that you believe in then get down and write it. Just make sure you do all the pre-writing work. If your idea is in an area you have no experience of, research it. Also do not be concerned about using autobiographical instances as the starting point for a story. It is what writers do. (Just a word of caution make sure you are not going to offend anyone if it is going to be obvious it is a story based on a certain person).

Here's a bit of Joni for a Saturday afternoon when all the work and words are not falling right.

The importance of recycling

How many times have you been told to 'kill your darlings' when writing? I was talking about this last week and what I suggested was that you don't kill them but perhaps you move them and I don't mean within the same story. There are times when they just don't belong however beautiful and well crafted they are.

What I suggest you do is create a darlings document. You then can move all these precious words into it as you never know when you might be able to use them again. We all know how hard they were to write in the first place. Why waste them?

As I have already told you I am rewriting again and I have suddenly find a use for elements of a novel I wrote a few years ago. Moments of Disjointed, a novel I am unlikely to ever try and get published, have jumped ship and moved into Trafficking. I did't anticipate this and hadn't thought about Disjointed for ages but then suddenly a scene from that story bounced into my head. A perfect episode that summed up an issue I was having in the rewrite. It gave me the sense of tension I wanted.

But it doesn't just happen in fiction, I have spent the morning beginning to write a chapter I am doing in collaboration with a good friend.  So far again the words I am using have been inspired by text I have used elsewhere. They are not strictly the same ones and are very definitely in a different order but there is an element of inspiration drawn from established 'darlings' that were tucked away in a more recently ignored folder entitled 'PhD bits.' All things that had never quite made it into the final thesis.

See it is all about the recycling and don't be afraid of it.

There is a caveat of course. Don't use those darlings just because you are in love with them however beautiful or clever they are. Even when you move them to a new story, make sure they fit and you are not trying to shoehorn them in. Remember you have plenty of writing life ahead of you when you can utilise them.

White Buffalo 'Wish it were true' .

Perfect words

A head full of words

I was reading some manuscripts in preparation for last Saturday's Golden Egg Academy Editorial Surgeries and I had one of those moments when a phrase just jumped out of the page. It was so perfect. The rest of the sentence needed a bit of work but that single phrase said so much, but then, oh joys, it happened again in a different manuscript. The phrases were just beautiful. They said everything they needed to in just a couple of words. And no, I am not going to tell you what the phrases were. I will leave that for the writers when they get their books published.

As an editor/lecturer, it is a wonderful feeling when you have those moments when reading someone else's work, but when it happens to you as a writer you feel just wonderful. For a brief moment you feel as if you are at one with the world. What you are hoping for is words that will stick in your reader's mind. They will see exactly what you are seeing. Some people assume it only happens in poetry but it doesn't. These beautifully crafted words can appear in any written text, in the same way it doesn't have to be fiction, be it adult or children's. I have read some stunning phraseology used in creative non fiction which has lifted the writing off the page, so the images danced in front of me.

Even as a lecturer in creative writing I can't turn to you and say 'write me a beautiful phrase, NOW!' Neither can I give you precise instructions on how to make it happen. That's not how it works. It comes with learning your craft, listening to your imagination and following your gut. You need to write, read, write, read some more and then do a bit more writing. Letting those images pirouette and having faith in them. But also, there's a caveat here, be prepared to kill them off, however beautiful they are, if they do not move the story/plot forward.

Speaking as a writer, I often find you may not even be aware you have created one of these phrases. It is only when someone read's your work and spots them that you become aware. You are just conscious of writing your story to the best of your ability. I am rewriting the first third of my novel. I have written nearly 18,000 words but at the moment I have no idea if they are in the right order. Will there be one of those wonderful dancing phrases in all those words? Who knows? We will have to wait and see. I have a fair few more words in my head waiting to get down on the page but at the moment life as an academic is definitely getting in the way sucking the life out of me.

I was going to list my favourite phrases here but then decided that I couldn't decide which ones to include so, instead, I have decided to ask you - what are your favourites?

Here is Gabrielle Aplin's Home. 'It is not just where you lay your head...' For me home is just as much about people as places and they don't all have to be in the same location either. It is just good to know they are there when your 'home' is rocked.

Beverley Birch and the physicality of verbs

Beverley Birch

I was lucky enough to attend the first morning of the weekend workshop that Beverley Birch was running at the Golden Egg Academy last weekend. Other work meant I had to come home early and not spend the whole weekend there, which I was desperately sad about. Beverley, an editor at Hodder until her recent retirement, was running a workshop on 'Through the Narrator's Eye.'

I only had a brief taster of Beverley's session but it was fascinating. It was all about the detail and how it can be used to convey the story. Beverley, as many of you know, is also a writer - check out one of her books Rift. She spoke to us about her writing processes. Her first draft is all about the idea and getting it down. The second draft is about pace. The third draft is all about characterization. The fourth about detail and so it goes on going back through pace/characterization/detail until she feels it is ready. Often she will go through 50-60+ drafts before she reaches this stage. As she pointed out, with the publishing industry as it is at the moment, you need to go that extra mile.

This means self editing, so you write the story but then you have to step back and see it from an editor's point of view. You have to be quite cold and calculating about what works and what doesn't. What messages you are trying to get across etc. Are you being consistent and is the voice apt? Beverley suggested that many editors now are looking for something that is pretty much there now. Gone are the times where an editor will spend hours getting it right with you. This is not because they don't want to but purely because they don't have time. Like the rest of the world they are under a huge amount of pressure.

It is all about reader reaction - do you want to read more or is your immediate thought, 'Nah, not interested.' You are looking to create an umbilical cord between your characters and your reader making them part of the story. You want to be looking for texture, for an ebb and flow in your story. Remember as an author, what you focus on is what the reader is going to see. You need to paint that picture and as such you need to think filmically when you write. As Beverley pointed out look at your language and think, is it said 'sufficiently and efficiently?'

For example, Beverley went on to talk about the physicality of verbs and how much they can convey about a situation and/or how a character is feeling. It also means you can cut down on those pesky adverbs. This is an example I use for my own students. 'The old man shuffled slowly towards the kitchen.' You can cut slowly out immediately as you can't do anything but shuffle slowly. Active verbs can build tension/drama/action when used appropriately. A basic example is suggesting the headteacher 'strode' towards the badly behaving teenagers. It is a much stronger image than just walking. It implies anger or at the very least, purpose.


It was wonderful to catch up with two students from Winchester as well. One former MA student, Sarah Bentley, and one about to be former student, Harrison Bulman. We worked in a group along with the wonderful Zoe Taylor who was the Golden Egg intern until recently. We had a wonderful time dissecting four excerpts that Beverley had given us. It was fascinating listening to everyone's opinion. Luckily we agreed on a lot of stuff.

This is just a mere taster of what Beverley covered last week. I wish I could share more but hopefully it has given you some things to think about when you are editing. I am now off to do some rewriting of my own. Happy weekend.

And because I am working on my dream I thought I would post Bruce Springstein's version: