Blog | Alison Morton's Thrillers

Friends, Tweeters, countrymen...

Thanks to Twitter, we’ve been able to organise some terrific visitors in the last few weeks.

Jean Fullerton and Alison

Jean Fullerton (@EastLondonGirly) author of No Cure for Love, A Glimpse at Happiness, Perhaps Tomorrow is a friend and colleague from the Romantic Novelists’ Association. She, her husband and three grandchildren came and spent the afternoon with us. Despite being on holiday, in charge of three lively and spirited balls of energy and a working husband, she was maintaining a respectable daily word count towards her next novel.

Apart from her overt helpfulness which is natural to her, Jean epitomised the spirit of the RNA: to help, encourage and foster new writing as well as promote the genre of romantic fiction in all its forms. Let’s say I picked up a few new tips from her and also a generous dollop of encouragement and support. 😉

We celebrated the meeting in typical RNA fashion!

Our second tranche of visitors came for the weekend. Kyla (@CPrincessUK) is a Filofax aficionada, sharing a deep interest in this with my other half Steve1. She and her husband (also Steve!) marvelled at the châteaux of Brézé, Thouars and Saumur, visited vineyards, the Logis de Pompois (a local gastronomic restaurant), had a dip in the pool and generally relaxed.

Kyla and Steve1 discussed the recent (rather mad) sale on the Filofax Germany site, the different offers in the UK and the merits of different sizes and styles and wrote a joint blog post for www.philofaxy.com (the place you have to be if you’re into Filofax). Meanwhile, the other Steve and I discovered we loved books and writing. He described his project to produce a non-fiction book for the general reader answering all those questions that seem simple but aren’t! And, of course, I told him about my alternative history thriller series. He confessed to being a science fiction, fan and we were deep into authors, style, conventions, structure, reader expectations, publishing and films.

Summer’s fading now and it’ll be our turn to be guests of my critique partner @denisebarnesUK in November, so I’d better get writing!

Take a blank sheet of garden…

Talking about muck-raking, sorry, rock-raking, reminded me about the parallels of writing a novel and creating a new garden.

With a novel, you start with a blank sheet of paper, or a blank computer screen, with a garden you start with something like this.

You carry out a survey and draw up a scale plan:

Or for a novel, you carry out research (current knowledge, what’s possible, what’s already there in your brain) and write out an outline (how you hope it might turn out, but like gardens, it’s subject to alterationi the further you get into the work).

Assessing your own abilities and competence, you go on a course: Hadlow College of Agriculture for garden design, Arvon Foundation for writing. You talk to people, get a mentor, attend events, conferences.

And then in comes the first mark on the blank surface…

Rock-raking is the new editing.

Friends who follow me on Twitter (@alison_morton) have been hearing about my rock-raking in recent days. Let me explain. We live on top of a chalk cliff. The view is magnificent, but the soil is crap. That’s a bit harsh. The soil is fertile, fine, and the weeds grow as if on Viagra. But there was a maximum of 20cms (8 inches) in ‘best’ part of the garden. Mostly, it was about 12cm (5 inches).

So enter the rotavator…

We now have 30 cms (12 inches) to play with, but it’s full of chalk rocks (toes included at lower edge of photo for scale):

To get something like this, the rocks have to go.

Rock-raking is hard, monotonous work, but as the sun warms your back and a light breeze plays the leaves, your brain is free to wander off on plot points, characterisation, scenes.

Creating a garden from an open area of plain green is like writing a novel. Rock-raking is like editing and refining once you’ve got a surface to work with.

(To be continued)