Life, sport...or a plot in the making?

Greg Rutherford meets with triumph at Hampden Park

Whew! Sport, eh? Bloody hell, as Sir Alex memorably said on that day when he wiped the sweat from his Premier-League-and-Champions-League-winning brow.

Almost everyone who was at the Commonwealth Games in Glasgow will bend your ear about how wonderful the atmosphere was, how cold the burgers were (room for improvement there, Hampden) and how they were almost swept way by that great tidal wave of mutual love, for everyone and everything from the Cook Islands’ lawn bowls team to the fastest man on the planet. Sport brings people together. That’s the message of the Friendly Games.

For the novelist (writer or reader) there’s more to it than that. Real life weaves all our stories together, sprinter and spectator.

My own favourite moment, probably because it was the one I saw at closest quarters, was Olympic champion Greg Rutherford taking on the world in the long jump.

Since his triumph in London, life has been tricky for Greg. He left the Olympics as a surprise winner, with whispers that his victory was a fluke. Subsequent performance lent their support to that theory and then there were the injuries. Safe to say that he wasn’t expected to achieve…which made it all the ore special when he did.

Elsewhere in the sporting world, another young man was battling with loss of form, loss of confidence and public criticism. England cricket captain Alastair Cook was out of the runs and his team hadn’t won a test match in almost a year. Pundits and the public called on him to quit. But Cook came out fighting, just missed a century in the first innings ad finished the second 70 not out as his team thrashed their previously-triumphant opponents.

It was (if I may mix my sports) a Roy-of-the-Rovers storyline, just like Greg Rutherford’s. Sport lends itself to that because it pits its heroes not just against their opponents but against themselves. By challenging them with disaster after disaster — not just defeat after defeat but their own self-doubt — it demands that they reach deep into the well of courage to emerge. And it’s why sports fans care so much when Alastair Cook shakes the hands of the umpires with the broadest of grins as he leaves the field victorious; and why Greg raises his arms to acclaim the crowd just as they acclaim him.

A bit like the story arc for a novel, in fact…

Remind me of Morning Glory

Two things struck me today over my morning coffee. The first is that my life is far duller and more conventional than I ever imagined. The second is that, no matter how extraordinary a character I may create, no matter that a reader puts the book down with a tutted “unbelievable”, there’s always someone out in the real world who has far more claim to be the invention of a fevered mind than anything I can produce.

Today’s Daily Telegraph carried the obituary of one Morning Glory Zell-Ravenheart - not, you’ll be unsurprised to hear, her real name (which was the rather less exotic Diane Moore). And her background appears not to be exotic; her upbringing seems pretty straightforward.

Maybe Morning Glory decided one day that her life, like mine, was just a little too dull; or maybe she was always a wild child. Anyway I won’t go into detail (the obituary does it far better than I do) but who could resist the siren lure of the strap line: “a witch who raised unicorns, taught mathemagics and spell-casting, and preached the gospel of ‘polyamory’”?

Morning Glory was married to the man who went on to run “the world’s only registered wizard academy” (Hogwart’s is clearly not registered, unless the Telegraph has got it wrong). His name was Oberon, in real life Tim — although that, as they say, is quite another story but one of which those who think Tims are slightly wimpish and ineffectual might wish to take note. Reading their life together, with its tightly-woven network of complicated relationships, had me shaking my head. No, really? Unicorns? And I’d no idea you can study eclectic shamanism.

I wish I had invented Morning Glory, though I suspect you wouldn’t have believed her if I did, at least unless I recast her into a fantasy, in which case she might have fitted in quite well. Yet I’ve no reason to believe that anything in the obituary is incorrect. Morning Glory, nee Diane, proves that you can be anything you want to be if you have the courage. Goddess, high priestess, published writer — she was all of those.

By the time I’d finished reading I was completely bemused by the enmeshing of real life and fiction, the believable and the unbelievable. Oh, and the plot twists that life furnishes, clearly illustrated by the fact that her first child turned her back on the witching life, changed her name from Rainbow to Gail and went off to live with her father (for literary neatness, I like to see her settling happily in the suburbs).

Fiction stretches credibility in a way that real life doesn’t. I think that’s a pity. And if you ever hear me say I don’t believe anyone would behave like that - remind me of Morning Glory.

Sweating the Small Stuff: the Importance of Detail

I like a cup of coffee with my breakfast. That’s another way of saying that I can’t function without one. And it has to be a large one. (Take a note because that’s important. Detail matters.)

Out for breakfast for a holiday treat with number two child, I found myself in an upmarket(ish) eatery in central Edinburgh. Oh, the breakfasts! I watched as the waitress carried them past me to other tables. Vibrant smoothies, plates piled high with waffles and crispy bacon, all over-ridden by the heavy fragrance of the full cooked.

We ordered. “Large black coffee, please, milk on the side.”

“Would that be a long black?”

“Yes, if that’s a large black coffee. With milk on the side.”

And so to the breakfast, the thick granary toast with pristine poached eggs bursting, buttercup-yellow, onto the plate. And the coffee.

Ah, the coffee. “Excuse me, I thought I asked for a large black coffee.”

“You ordered a long black coffee madam. This is a long black coffee. It’s the largest we have.”

The coffee was black, at least. But it was half the size of a normal cup of tea (albeit slightly larger than the tiny espresso which graced the next table) and it packed a real punch, a shot of caffeine that could wake you from a coma. It was a brutal, mean-minded sergeant-major of a coffee; and I like to be eased into my mornings.

I got over it. Sort of. The rest of the breakfast was terrific but that small-minded, vicious blast of caffeine undermined the experience. It’s detail you see. Detail is a vital thing, something which can make or break a narrative or a character just as much as it can make or break a relationship or a holiday. (That view of the car park when you wanted one of the sea? It’s a detail you overlooked.)

I confess that I can be sloppy about the details in my writing. I should take more time to see my characters clearly, more time to think about what they do and why they do it - and how. But today was a revelation and one that I don’t think I’ll forget until I find somewhere that can serve me a large black coffee to caress me awake.

News on the Next Book

Who wouldn't be inspired? Majorca rocks...

So…almost a year after my first novel, Thank You For The Music, was accepted by Tirgearr Publishing, and just five months after its publication, I’ve signed a contract for my next novel.

Did I think it would be different? Did I think I might be blasé about it? (“Hmm…oh, yes. Just another contract, nothing to fuss about.”) No, I didn’t. It doesn’t feel quite the same because, let’s be honest, NOTHING beats the buzz of first understanding that you’re going to be published except for that moment when you actually are. But oh, it still feels good.

I’ll tell you a little about this one, just as a teaser. No Time Like Now is, like Thank You For The Music before it, set in the north east of Majorca, this time just outside the town of Puerto Pollensa. Unlike TYFTM it’s romantic suspense rather than plain romance. Our heroine is a housekeeper at a university field centre but when a researcher turns up for a month’s fieldwork, her cosy life is disrupted…because he’s her old flame and the two of them broke up very, very nastily some years before.

It brings together a lot of the things I love. Romantic suspense fiction is the first of them. I still have all my old Mary Stewart books, tattered and read to bits. (Maybe I should think about replacing them.) I like to read and write in all sorts of genres but Mary Stewart caught my attention early (The Moon Spinners is the first I read, and still my favourite) with her exotic locations and desperate situations.

Majorca is the second, happily fulfilling the requirement for an exotic location while giving me the excuse to justify a holiday with the writer’s claim of ‘collecting material’. I have good ideas there, usually when I’m sitting in the sun and staring across the Mediterranean, too idle to do anything but let my imagination run wild in those otherwise barren hours between the afternoon ice cream and the pre-dinner drinks.

The third is rocks. Geography, geology, earth science…whatever. And Majorca has lots of rocks. It has lots of caves, too, and lots of secret places (some of which I’ve invented but I’ll talk about that at a later date). Add that to the mix and see what you get.

So it’s a sort of new venture for me. I just hope, when it comes out, that you like it.

(Not) on the Road Again

No cycling for me today!
Image credit: Paul Downey

I used to be a regular, enthusiastic, cyclist. By ‘regular’ I mean five times a week and by ‘enthusiastic' I mean at least 15 miles a day. I would see the children out of the front door on the way to school, hop on my bike and do all my various errands. I’d cycle to a supermarket (not always the same one and quite often one on the other side of town). I might pick up someone’s new glasses or return some library books or meet a friend for coffee and I’d do it the long way round. Come rain, come shine - though if it was wet AND windy I might think twice.

It was a bit over the top, I suppose, and in the end I couldn’t really justify the time so I started going to the gym instead - much more efficient. There I found my gym buddies and began to meet them, five days a week, come rain or shine. And so the cycling, so to speak, fell by the wayside.

This morning, on a beautiful sunny day, I got my bike out of the garage, pumped up the tyres and, all set to go, gave the brakes a quick check. And that was the end of my bike ride as somehow something had caught my front brake as my bike rested quietly in the garage - and ripped it right off.

As I sat drinking my morning coffee and musing on my frustration, it dawned on me that one of the reasons I used to love cycling so much was that it had a hugely enhancing effect on my creativity. I might be cycling for a couple of hours a day, mainly on quiet paths where not  lot of concentration was required.

I saw things I don’t normally see. I saw a man standing on the bank of the river practising tai chi. I saw squirrels and birds and (occasionally) rats. I may have seen a mink (or an otter). I looked down into people’s back gardens as I whizzed past on the old railway. Once, over a period of several weeks, I saw a woman sitting in the same place on an old railway platform. Every time I passed she was there, just sitting. Middle-aged, smartly dressed, she was always there when I cycled out and gone by the time I came back. Then one day she wasn’t there and I never saw her again. What was that about?

And all these things - and my cycling, of course - tied themselves up into ideas and scenes or even just flash images which appear in my fiction. Some are stories still to be written, characters still to be created.

I don’t want to abandon my gym buddies, but I think I might have to get back on that bike.

Old Fashioned or Badly-Written?

Often, when I’m struggling to motivate myself to write, I take the obvious step. I read.

This week it was PD James and Death Comes to Pemberley. As it’s a long time since I read any PD James and even longer since I read Pride and Prejudice, I wasn’t really sure what to expect.

I should say at the outset that this isn’t a book review, but a rambling reflection on writing. PD James is a terrific crime writer but it did seem to me, as I read on, that she seemed to be breaking every rule in the book.

Never use passive voice. Unless you’re PD James, it appears, in which case Darcy and Elizabeth can settle down once logs have been thrown on the fire. Those who know better than I do repeat the mantra (I do it myself) of show not tell - but DCTP is full of telling not showing. And reported speech instead of direct speech… the book is awash with that.

Actually, I’m not sure that it’s any poorer for any one of those things, once in a while.  I’m not hung up on the rules that people constantly turn out for writers, because not only can you always find places where authors break the rules and it works (or adhere to them so painfully that it quite clearly doesn’t) but because the rules change.

Take adverbs, for example. These days the adverb is a sinner, the devil we should excise from the detail of our work. But I like adverbs, in moderation. Of course they can be unnecessary (she whispered quietly) and of course sometimes we use them because we’re too lazy to think of an alternative. But occasionally it occurs to me that it’s more elegant to use a single word to express oneself. ‘Angrily’, I would argue, is probably at least as good as ‘in an angry voice’ and so on.

Back to PD James and the writer’s rules. Death Comes to Pemberley struck me as an old book, rather dated, perhaps lacking a little in drama with all that reported speech. And of course there’s a problem in writing a sequel to a classic like Pride and Prejudice because the reader will expect the same characters even though (like Charlotte Lucas) they are irrelevant to the story. Nevertheless the author has to include them, and their background, and so they become part of a back story that can’t be left unsaid, even though the book might be improved if it were.

It did strike me that the way we write changes rapidly, almost too rapidly. Readers expect things and we have to deliver. I enjoyed Death Comes to Pemberley, for all its old-fashioned feel (in its style, not in its substance); but I can’t help wondering whether, had it been written by an unknown, it would have found a publisher.  Though I have to say, I’m glad it did.

Cinderella, You Shall Go to the Ball!

This is not a question I ask very often…but what am I going to wear?

It’s less than two weeks until the Romantic Novelists’ Association summer party and Cinderella is going to the ball. Yes, I have my ticket booked down to London and I’m off to meet up with a few old friends, several virtual friends and (I hope) make a whole host of new ones.

Sometimes being a writer is a lonely business. I’m lucky. I have plenty of boots on the ground, so to speak. There’s always someone in an online group who will offer me advice or sympathise with a rejection, and when I’m in that land of the lost dark Alone where only writers go I can always find someone to meet me for a coffee and keep me company in the wilderness.

So far, however, I haven’t been a great networker. Perhaps it’s because I’ve never really thought of myself as a writer and so the trip to RNA or other events in London, or even in Penrith, are just too much of an indulgence in terms of time and money. Of course I wanted to, and of course I looked at the calendar and thought ‘maybe I’ll go to that…next year’. And, of course, I never did.

This year is different. Coming through the RNA’s New Writers’ Scheme means that Thank You For The Music is eligible for the annual Joan Hessayon Award. And so I get a ticket to the summer party in London. I get to rub shoulders with some terrific romantic novelists. I get to meet all this lovely people. I get to have my photograph taken with the other lovely contenders. And that means I get to panic about what to wear.

My purple sparkly dress. I love that. But is it too purple? Is it too sparkly? Is it a little too Christmassy? And the blue check one -  I like that too but maybe it’s a little bit frumpy? That lovely fuchsia one I had for Rebecca’s wedding doesn’t fit any more and actually I don’t wear dresses very often so if there’s anything suitable in the back of the wardrobe the moths will have got it.

So that means a shopping trip. Shame, eh? A dirty job but it has to be done.

I’ll let you know what happens…