Jurassic Park!

Hi everyone.

Yet another post from Mallorca! Apparently the Mediterranean gives me the blogger's buzz. I'm turning away from writing today but for a very good cause!

I'd like to tell you all about a fantastic place in Donegal, Ireland called Oakfield Park. I'm sure not many of you have heard of it. It's a fantastic but quite low profile place. And that is precisely why we are trying very hard to raise its profile.

Oakfield Park is an 18th century Georgian Deanery which has been restored by Sir Gerry Robinson. It's a beautiful house with 100 acres of land attached to it with trains, castles, lakes and all sorts. You can find out more about it here and you can see a picture of it below.

But the best thing about Oakfield Park is that all of the proceeds go to charity. Mainly the Marie Keating Foundation, but to many others as well. Which is why it's so important for more people to know about and visit Oakfield Park.

Oakfield Park have recently created a promotional video in the form of a Jurassic Park parody. I won't give too much away but it's funny and very well done. This page is all about it and I really urge you to watch it. Not only is it a funny video but the more views and shares this video gets, the more likely it is to be seen by more people and the more money Oakfield Park will make for charity.

I am sorry for diverting away from creative writing today, but this is very important to me and when better to share it than on Chris Pratt's birthday
!

I will really really appreciate any support any of you can give to this project. Thank you so much for reading.

Genre

I'm currently writing this on a sunbed in Majorca. I know I don't usually post on a Thursday and, frankly, I wasn't expecting to post at all this holiday. But lying here by the pool, people watching, gave me an idea.

How important is genre when we're writing? When you write, do you have a genre in mind? Does it inform your writing? Or do you ignore it entirely? Please comment below because I really want to know.

I like to think that I don't mould my writing to any particular genre, that I just write and see what happens and hope it's original. But today at breakfast I had an idea for a novel. A very vague idea that I won't bore you with. But, as often happens when I'm on holiday, the idea was quite girly. And I thought to myself I can't write this. It's too chick-lit-y.

But why should I deny myself a good story idea because I think it falls into a genre that is stereotypically defined as girly? Should genre matter when we're writing? And why do I feel like chick lit is an inferior genre that I shouldn't bother with? 

I have no definitive answer to any of these questions. I just find it sad that the very concept of genre has the potential to shape, or even, destroy our writing ideas. Please comment below. I'm interested in your thoughts.

Thanks for reading.

I thought I was writing a story about a commuter. Turns out I was writing about an alien

Hi everybody. I’d like to apologise for the huge gap between this blog post and the last. I’ve spent the last four weeks interning at Simon and Schuster and commuting to London every day tends to take up a lot of your time. Unfortunately, I’ve got some holidays coming up so my blog posts may continue to be quite erratic over the next couple of months, but I’ll try to write as much as I can.

Today’s blog post was inspired by a friend of mine. I met up with him in London while I was interning and, like the typical writers we are, we went to The Dickens Inn at St Katharine’s Docks and played a writing game. Did you ever play that game when you were a kid where you’d write a sentence of a story and your friend would carry it on and you’d keep swapping every other sentence? I did. My sister and I had a two way black board that we’d write stories on and keep walking around the blackboard, adding to each other’s stories until the whole black board was full.

Well, my friend and I played this game while sitting by the docks and we realised that, aside from being fun, it is a great way to generate ideas.

Depending on who you’re playing with, this game really makes you think on your toes. I started our story with the line ‘It was hot so, naturally, the city smelled like coffee and sun cream’. I was imagining a character like myself, catching the tube through London to get to her job on a hot summer day surrounded by tourists and professionals. The next line of our story revealed that, actually, our protagonist was an alien: ‘I was still getting used to it even though I’d been on earth for the last 27 planetary rotations’.

This game constantly forces you to come up with new ideas. Every idea that starts forming in your head while you’re writing will be completely re-written in the next line. You could come up with 10 different story ideas whilst writing the first 10 lines of the story.

I appreciate that this isn’t exactly ground-breaking advice. This is a game that all of you have probably played at least once in your life. But if you stop looking at it as a silly game and start looking at it as an idea generation exercise, it can actually turn out to be very useful. So don’t dismiss it and, next time you meet up with a fellow writer, give it a try!

Thanks for reading

Tension

This week’s post is fairly similar to the one I posted a few weeks back on ‘Gas stations’. However, this week I’m going to talk more specifically about tension.

In my ‘gas stations’ post, I talked about keeping your reader interested and I quoted George Sanders’ essay Rise, baby, Rise : ‘When I was a kid, I had one of those Hot Wheels devices designed to look like a little gas station. Inside the gas station were two spinning rubber wheels. One’s little car would weakly approach the gas station, then be sent forth by the spinning rubber wheels… A story can be thought of as a series of these little gas stations.’

In the ‘gas stations’ blog post I mainly focused on intrigue and beautiful writing as ‘gas stations’. However, during my work experience, I think the most useful thing I learnt was the importance of tension in fiction. I read so many manuscripts in which there was no tension in the plot and, therefore, I didn’t care what happened to the characters and I got bored. The best manuscripts I read were packed full of tension.

Tension isn’t quite the same as intrigue but it can work in a similar way. It keeps the reader reading because they want to know whether the tension will be resolved or whether it will escalate. I read one absolutely fantastic manuscript during my work experience. I won’t say its name because, even though it has been published in the US, I signed a confidentiality agreement and I don’t want to get into trouble. But I think I’m allowed to tell you vague details about the plot.

It was a novel told in two parts. The first part was set during the First World War, the second was set in the lead up to the Second World War in Germany. Throughout the novel there is almost constant sexual tension between various characters. There is also tension in the construction of an anti-Semitic man involved with the SA and his communist sister planning to marry a Jew. There is also the tension that comes from the fact that the protagonist lived a secret life in Russia during the First World War and is now trying to keep it a secret from his family.

The whole novel was absolutely packed with tension and, even though I was sat at a desk reading off a computer screen all day, I could not stop reading. Tension is so ultimately important in writing. Without tension, a book can easily get boring.

Like many of my blog posts, I feel like some of you may think I’m stating the obvious here. But there are so many things to think about when writing fiction that it’s easy to forget about some of the simpler things. And the importance of tension in a work of fiction is something we shouldn’t forget.

I hope this is helpful. Thanks for reading.  

Style

Last week my creative writing tutor told me about something somebody said about style. Unfortunately I can’t remember who said it or the exact wording of it. I’ve googled it and I can’t find it anywhere (so if anyone recognises it and knows who said it please say in the comments) but I know it was something along the lines of this:

Style is our way around everything we cannot do.

And, although I cannot remember the exact wording or who said it, it stuck in my head. Because, when I really thought about it, I realised I agree with this as yet anonymous writer.

I know this is a really controversial thing to say and I’m sure it’s not true of everybody, but for me this statement makes perfect sense. As writers developing style, we try out lots of different styles, we encounter difficulties, we eliminate the kinds of things we as writers find particularly difficult and what is left becomes our style.

Not only did this statement stay with me, I also found it very comforting. I’ve always worried that the fact that I usually write in first person because I find third person difficult, or the fact that I seem to stick to realist stories, meant that I was a bad writer. But that’s not the case. Every writer is different and the fact that we find some ways of writing easier than others does not make us bad writers. It only means that we have found our own distinct style that we feel comfortable writing in and that we’re good at.

Of course, we may still try out new styles as a challenge, for a change, to try and say something different. And I suppose, if we really work at this new style and eventually master it, that will become our style too. Style is a fluid thing. It can change over the years. You can have more than one style.  But if you don’t, if you only have one style and all your stories or poems sound quite similar, I don’t think that’s a bad thing. It just means you’ve found what you’re good at.

Like I said, I know this is a controversial thing to say and if you disagree and see style in a very different way, please comment below. I’m really interested to hear what you all think about this. Also, please do comment if you recognise this quote because it’s driving me crazy.

Thanks for reading.

What I Learnt at Penguin

Sorry I’ve been absent for a while. I spent the last couple of weeks doing work experience at Penguin Books. And, although it kept me from writing my blog, it was a fantastic experience and I learnt a lot. So what better title for my return blog post than ‘What I Learnt at Penguin’.

During my work experience, my most frequent job was to read manuscripts and write reports on them. Some of these manuscripts had been sent in by agents hoping to get them published. Others were books that had already been published in the US and the agent was looking for a British publisher. And what I learnt from reading these manuscripts is that it seems as though you don’t need to be a good writer to get an agent, and you don’t need to be a good writer to get published in the US.

I read many finished manuscripts that had already been published elsewhere that were badly written, boring and broke every rule every creative writing teacher preaches. So this led me to the conclusion that a publisher will publish your book if they think they can market it, but not necessarily if it’s any good. I read one manuscript that has been published in the US set during the Afghanistan war. The book was awful. There was no suspense, the characters were unrealistic and inconsistent, the encounters and events of the book were painfully manufactured and unnatural. But, a publisher could market it. It’s based on a very topical subject. War books are popular. With the right book cover, the right quotes, the right comparisons, that book could sell.

This conclusion was supported by the conversations I heard around the office. At one point, two editors and an assistant were gathered around a desk talking about a new manuscript that had been sent to them. All three of them loved the book, couldn’t stop going on about how well it was written and how they couldn’t put it down. But they were considering turning it down because they didn’t know how they would market it.  

I’m not writing about this because I want you to bear it in mind when you write. The worst thing you could do as a writer, in my opinion, is conform to what a publisher wants. I just find it very interesting that the commercial publishing industry is so bloody commercial. I'm also not saying anything bad about Penguin here. I have no idea if those manuscripts I read will be published or turned down. All I know is they had been accepted by an agent, and some of them had been published in the US.

There is so much more I could say about what I learnt at Penguin – and so much I probably will say in subsequent blog posts – but I wouldn’t be able to fit it all in here. So for this week I will leave you with a fact that you may find comforting and you may find infuriating: crap books get published all the time whilst good books are in danger of being turned down.

Thanks for reading. 

Why write fiction?

I apologise that this blog post is slightly late this week. Life tends to get in the way sometimes, doesn't it?

This week I have a question to ask. Why write fiction? It’s a fair question. There are so many great real-life stories that we can learn from documentaries, history books and newspapers, yet people continue to write fiction.

Of course, one simple answer to this question is that fiction provides us with fantasy and sci-fi stories that real life, unfortunately, cannot. But that doesn’t explain why writers continue to write, not only realist fiction, but real stories as fiction. Plenty of novels – In Cold Blood by Truman Capote, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas by Hunter S. Thompson, The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway (all books that I would recommend by the way) – are real life stories that have been written as fiction. Even Schindler’s Ark by Thomas Keneally was published and sold as a fictional book.

You could argue that publishing as fiction is a way of getting more people to buy a book. But it goes further than this. These books are written with the structure and style of fictional stories. So why do we do this? Why do we continue to fictionalise the life events of real people we learnt about in our school history lessons?

The answer… because fiction makes the story real. It brings a story to life. That may sound like a paradox. I’m basically saying that lies and fabrications are more real than anything we can learn about in documentaries.

But it’s true. Fiction brings us into the minds of characters we would never have the chance to meet in real life. It takes us to new worlds, historical worlds, worlds that may never have existed. Through fiction we can experience things far better than we can through documentaries. We can discover how it felt to live through the blitz or to get trapped on a mountain. Picasso once said ‘I can’t paint a tree. But I can paint the feeling you have when you look at a tree’. And that’s what fiction does for us. It gives us more than just the facts and figures.

When Thomas Keneally writes about Oscar Schindler, we don’t just find out that he once watched a girl in a red coat during a Nazi raid. We find out how Schindler felt and how that event impacted his life. How much of that is Keneally’s fabrication and assumption almost doesn’t matter. Because the fact that Schindler is written as a character rather than a historical figure means that we can imagine ourselves in his shoes and understand how he must have felt.

Of course, this is where the line between fact and fiction starts to become blurred. But that is another blog post for another day.

What I’m really trying to draw attention to here is the power of fiction. Fiction can do things that documentary can’t. It can penetrate our minds and hearts, get people to completely change their perspective on things they’ve always had set views on, inspire sympathy and empathy in the most unlikely people. And that is why we continue to write fiction.

Thanks for reading.