 How very strange! I forgot to blog about the Festival of Writing at York. Actually, I didn’t forget. I’ve been so busy implementing things I learnt in the workshops, integrating wise pieces of advice I received and remembering stimulating and thoughtful conversations I enjoyed.
York was about people: authors, publishers, agents, to be sure, but about tweeters, friends, and writers all excited about their, addiction (see above). Many people write in isolation, in snatched moments, in an indifferent or even hostile environment. So when they are amassed in several hundreds, all their enthusiasm, ideas, insights burst out.
The University of York Exhibition Centre was our ‘home’ for the weekend and the campus our inspiration.
Clever organisational touches like name badges in BIG letters meant participants easily spotted those they wanted to talk to (or avoid?) without impolite peering. Sofas, tables, and lounging areas were plentiful. As were quiet corners for a little strategic redrafting.
Although I’d been plodding on after a big family crisis over the winter, I had lost my way with my writing. After York, I couldn’t leave it alone. The techniques and craft methods I had been trying to apply flowed automatically and my fingers flew.
So thank you, York (or #FOW11 in Twitter-speak).
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You start your novel, get the scenes down, complete the first draft. Fine so far. Any writer knows the first draft is not a work of art, or even saleable. So the real work begins; enhanching, slashing and burning, sweating over that love scene, ramping up the fight scenes, checking pacing, inserting tension, moulding and stroking it into something presentable.
Normal people work 9 to 5 (well, 8.30 to 6 these days). Writers? No. Many write after they’ve come home, fed the cat, cooked supper, helped kids, talked to the significant other. And/or they get up an hour or two early, or snatch lunchtime on their netbook, or waiting for the school rugby match to finish, meeting family at the station. I’ve even jotted down plot notes in the supermarket queue.
And as for waking up at 3am with a stupendous idea, or a horrible realisation you’ve made your main character be in two places at once – cold sweat breaks out at the thought.
But even when firmly shut down, when you are resolutely doing something mainstream like staving off hunger in the family, throwing the accumulated heaps of trash out, ot discovering you have no clean clothes left, that siren keyboard sings its song. Just one sentence. You must get that phrase down. You need to type that insight into the end paragraph.
I sit in my friend’s house this morning, early cuppa at the side, hurrying to finish this piece. I’ve got writing to do, you know…
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Nobody can fail to be shocked by the devastation in Japan. Word like apocalyptic and cataclysmic are flying around. Historians recall the Minoan civilisation was one destroyed by a tsunami.
The threads of modern life are multiple and complex, but fragile, vulnerable to stretching and snapping in seconds. Futurologists predict that tiny individual incidents in accumulation or suddenly en masse could trigger the end of everything. And there’s the old saw that we are three meals away from savagery. Japan isn’t half a world away; it’s your neighbour, your work colleague, a large proportion of your personal life goods.
So, we need to take action en masse, to accumulate individual incidents but in a positive way. And every person’s individual effort counts.
Writers are raising funds via Authors for Japan, where donation bids are auctioned for a token prize. It opens today and runs to 20 March. Perhaps it may not raise millions, but it’s one of those hugely important individual efforts. Proceeds go to the British Red Cross.
Close to my heart, as I’m a practical person, are shelterboxes.
To quote their website: “The ShelterBox solution in disaster response is as simple as it is effective. We deliver the essentials a family needs to survive in the immediate aftermath of a disaster.
Each large, green ShelterBox is tailored to a disaster but typically contains a disaster relief tent for an extended family, blankets, water storage and purification equipment, cooking utensils, a stove, a basic tool kit, a children’s activity pack and other vital items.”
So your twenty quid is needed. Now would be good.
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How very strange! I forgot to blog about the Festival of Writing at York. Actually, I didn’t forget. I’ve been so busy implementing things I learnt in the workshops, integrating wise pieces of advice I received and remembering stimulating and thoughtful conversations I enjoyed.
