creative inspiration

New year, new books

/ Caron Allan

Most of us had to get back to work this week, and that includes writers! I’m at the creative stage, ideas flowing, crazy ones or a bit more sensible, I’m making a huge amount of notes, then just as likely, crossing them out the next day, only to come back a day after that and think, ‘Yes, actually, I like that idea, it could work really well.’

I’m not much of a planner but I’m doing my level best. I’ve been looking ahead, and trying to plan a work schedule.

I’m intending to spend the next five weeks drafting my new Dottie book – hopefully that will be out in December. That will be book 9 of the series, and I’m calling it The Rough Rude Sea. Dottie and William return by steamship from their honeymoon. Obviously it’s not going to be smooth sailing. (sorry about the pun).

Then, mid-February, it will be all change, and I’ll be in editing mode as I tidy up and polish Through Dancing Poppies, the third book in the Miss Gascoigne mysteries series.

Then…

…at some point I’ve got to crowbar in rewrites and polishing etc of Dirty Work, book 1 in the new trilogy Families Can Be Murder. This is a spin-off of my original trilogy Friendship Can be Murder, book 1 Criss Cross was first published in 2012. This time it’s Matt, not Cressida, writing the diary entries and confessing all.

Apparently I’m also going on holiday… I think I might need it!

***

 

‘So, where do you get your ideas?’

/ Caron Allan / 3 Comments

I know I’ve written on this topic a couple of times before, but it’s one of those questions that never goes away.

‘Where do you get your ideas?’

This is one of the first questions people usually ask me – and I’m pretty sure it happens to other writers all the time. It kind of makes me want to groan, because it’s next to impossible to give a sincere and considered answer to this question without boring the pants off everyone by talking for an hour. The short, somewhat trite answer might be, ‘Everywhere!’

But if we really want to answer the question, it takes a minute or two longer. Because really there’s no single answer. Ideas don’t come from one unique, unvarying source. Nor do they come in the same way each time. Anything from the world seen or unseen can come to my attention and lead me to think, ‘Hmm, that’s interesting…’

Inspiration, which is what ideas really are, comes from everywhere and nowhere. A snatch of song, a news story, a little patch of colour on a card in the paint section of the DIY store, the turn of a person’s head making you think just for one split second it’s someone else, someone from another time, someone who should be dead. An unexpected view of yourself in a shop window, that odd moment before you recognise yourself, that brief second when you think, slightly puzzled, ‘I know you.’

An overheard snatch of conversation, ‘Don’t lose my hat, man, my hat’s my identity,’ and ‘Of course she never did find out who’d sent it.’ A film, a book, a taste, a smell, a memory, a story your mother told you – you’ve known her all your life yet this is the first time she’s ever mentioned this particular incident.

I have based two full-length stories on dreams, three short stories and one novel on songs, a poem on a piece of art, a novel based on a documentary I saw on TV about ancient tapestries, (Opus Anglicanum: Latin for English work), and another about the Reformation. I’ve written a short story about an arrowhead, and another about ancestral bones and the relevance they might have to a Neolithic man, about a couple of  trips to Skara Brae in the Orkneys.

I’ve written a whole series of stories about the fact that all too often people think it’s okay to take the law into their own hands. (I’m looking at you Cressida, MC of the Friendship Can Be Murder trilogy!) I’ve written about work situations, about hopes and plans for the future, about family tree research, about children, and pets, and parents. About love. About the absence of love. About Faith. About fear. About books I read as a child. And books I read as an adult. I’ve written about identity and what it means to be who I am, who you are. I’ve written about death – loads.

I saw a gorgeous man on the bus many years ago and wrote a story about him, (The Ice King – still not ‘available’, but if you’re intrigued, here’s a link to a short bit about him.) I’ve read news reports and been inspired to create my own story around some of those. I’ve written in hospital having just given birth, in hospital awaiting treatment for cancer, at work during my lunchbreak when I felt so depressed I just wanted to run away and hide. I’ve written when sitting on the loo, sitting in the garden, on holiday, in bed with flu, and in cafes all over Britain, Europe and Australia. I’ve written on buses and trains and planes. I’ve written when someone I cared about has died. I’ve even got inspiration from sitting down at my desk every day and just making myself write. Sometimes I’ve written page upon page of ‘I don’t know what to write’, like lines that we had to do at school, and still nothing has come to me and I’ve gone away desperate, feeling that the well has not only dried up, but was only a mirage to begin with.

If you are a writer, you squirrel away in the eccentric filing cabinet known as your brain EVERY single thing that you ever experience, and a bit like doing a jigsaw puzzle or creating a patchwork quilt, you keep trying pieces together every which way until something fits and makes a pleasing and meaningful picture. There’s not really a pattern to it, there’s not a system or a set of regulations to follow. You just do it.

That’s where I get my ideas.

***

Quick catch-up!

/ Caron Allan

Writing.

It’s one of those things that everyone you meet says they could do too if they only had the time. Maybe they are right. but I’ve always felt that if something means a lot to you, you find the time, you make the time, you figure out your priorities and squeeze your passion into every crack and crevice you can.

I can remember grabbing time on my commute to work, or during lunch breaks, in the evenings when my better half was watching something on TV that didn’t interest me, or just any spare moment or snatched ten minutes I could find. Ten minutes, several times a week can give you one or two thousand words, times that by 52 weeks in a year, and you’ve got a novel.

These days, I’m officially old, and I no longer work outside the home, so I can spend quite a bit of time every day (not as much as you’d think, there are always distractions…) writing or thinking about what I’ve just written or what I might write next.

My latest book, Midnight, the Stars, and You: Dottie Manderson mysteries book 8, came out in September. And in December, I have two books being released, The Cousins, a sort-of mystery, a stand-alone novel, is one of them, the other is the German language edition of my book A Wreath of Lilies: Miss Gascoigne mysteries book 2. The German title is Ein Kranz aus Lilien.

I’ve already started looking ahead – I’m always doing that – and have plans to publish Miss Gascoigne mysteries book 3 Through Dancing Poppies in maybe April next year.

Then after that… well, so many decisions to make, so many books to write…

We’ve just come back from holiday. In fact, I’ve been lucky enough to have a couple of holidays this year and they had elements in common: a seaside location, and a large number of diverse people in a small area. This is exactly the kind of thing that breeds ideas in my head. I made COPIOUS notes, did a ton of people-watching, took hundreds of photos, and now I’m sitting at my desk thinking, ‘Hmm… what if…?’

It’s too soon to make any announcements, but something is definitely brewing…

 

cover image by Agalaya.

***

Ain’t Misbehavin’ – a 1930s caper story

/ Caron Allan

This one is still in the planning stages – and will not be out for quite some time – I won’t begin writing it until next year! But I’m soooo excited about this story, I’m hoping it will be fun and fairly light-hearted. It’s all about con-artists getting away with it – or will they?

Did I say planning? Yes, that’s exactly what I said. And that is odd – because I am notoriously resistant to planning – I’m a pantser, or… I was a pantser. I’ve carefully planned this book well in advance, which is very unusual for me. I can’t wait to see what happens!

 

The title is from a Fats Waller song that was very popular around that time, and I am grateful to author Jane Tulloch for the suggestion when I was struggling for a title! Thanks Jane!

Meanwhile here’s a couple of cover ideas I’m considering. I always make my cover first before writing a book – it helps me to get an idea of what the book looks like, gives it an identity in my mind and gets my thoughts going in the right direction. I’ve gone for the current trend of cream background with a border, and text ‘on the wonk’. Who knows, that might be out of vogue by the time this book sees the light of day, but we all need a starting point, don’t we?

Let’s hope this is a caper that will work out well for all concerned!

In the Neolithic Village

/ Caron Allan

If you’ve been following this blog for a while, you will have seen this one before… I do quite often repeat myself. Mainly because I know anyone who has already seen it will either have forgotten it by now, or will be happy to gloss over it once more, but there will be many people who (hopefully) won’t have seen it yet.

Recently I’ve been digging out photos and other pictures for posting on Pinterest – it’s one of my favourite platforms, as I’m a very visual person, I am inspired by what I see. And during this digging out process I found some more photos I took years ago when we went to Skara Brae, in Orkney, an island group off the north coast of Scotland.

Seeing those houses had been a goal of mine since I watched that iconic Simon Schama documentary A History of Britain, and I had to see it for myself. It’s not often something inspires me to that extent, but that really did. And because I a) love people and b) love history, I wanted to see a place where those two things met. And where so gloriously stunning as the neolithic village Skara Brae, unearthed during a violent storm in 1850, it was last inhabited four thousand years before that. This glorious place set my imagination on fire, and I concocted this short story…

The corridors linking the houses are dark, black-dark, and yet the children run back and forth giggling and jostling as children have always done. They barely pause in their running as the corridors narrow or curve. They laugh in and out of the houses, running amongst the groups, tribes, families. Outside, beyond the house, the sea and the wind roar, and strange creatures prowl the earth. But not in here.

In the houses themselves, the central hearth is the main light and although bright enough to prepare the food by, the illumination doesn’t reach to the farthest parts of the room where the animals are safely housed against thick stone walls. But their soft noises and comfortable smells lull the elders who sit by the fire and prod the embers or stir the cooking-pot by turns.

Soon the eye becomes accustomed to the dimness and it is possible to see not just vague shapes but the shapes of the bodies of the cattle in their pens, or the shapes of the drawings in the sand of the fireside floor, the simple outlines that accompany the story that is being told. A half-grown child, listening to the stories with wide eyes is given instructions and items of interest, are brought from the dresser to the one who speaks, who holds each thing up for all to see and recounts all that is known, the history of the item, the way it happened to be found or created, all that makes it special is told now to those who are gathered. They’ve heard it before. Even last night but still they all look and a discussion takes place, even the child speaks. He will be a fine man one day soon. They look on him with pride. One day, he will be the teller of stories.

The food is passed round, grain and meat and fish and coarse bread, flat and hot from the stones by the fire. Everyone eats and there is a strange hush over those in the house for a time. There is a ritual about eating. There is a ritual about being in the safety of a warm and solid home with the cattle and the fire. This is what it means to be at home.

It is evening, the day draws to a close and everyone is gathered in the safe warmth of the roundhouse, and nearby, there are other houses, with other people gathered, and the children are the running link between them. More stories are told, more conversation and discussion over the nature of the stars and their brightness, of the tides of the sea, of the path of the moon who guides the hunters and blesses the crops.

And over the way, along the dark tunnel then out into the air, in another similar house, the ancestors listen and smile as the brightness of the moon creeps in.

*

Embracing the mess

/ Caron Allan

A couple of weeks ago, I blogged about routine and how I think it’s essential to productive creativity. But what do you do if your routine goes to pot and everything is unsettled and out of sync?

Just go with it.

I’m thinking of that song by Scott Walker about a million years ago, ‘Make It Easy On Yourself.’ That’s just what you should do.

If you allow the stress of being disorganised to get to you, you will become depressed, anxious, feel guilty, and become increasingly non-productive, then get even more deeply depressed. So it’s important to allow yourself the room to just do what you can manage, and don’t sweat it. Do what you can and don’t beat yourself up if you feel you’re not achieving as much as you should, or planned to achieve.

Do what you can, and gradually normality will reassert itself. Even if you only write a small amount, remind yourself it’s a step forward from yesterday, and any progress, no matter how small, is good. You may even find, as I am beginning to realise, that it’s a normal part of your creative process.

I usually start strong, like most writers. I have a good idea of where the story is going, I know what it’s about. But for me, again like many writers, the problems arise about halfway or so into the story when suddenly I realise a) I’m useless at writing, b) my story sucks, and c) it’s never going to be ready in time.

The first couple of times this happened, I gave up on the story. That was a long time ago when I was a young writer. Then I realised I could work through the doubt and fear and finish a book. And for a long time, that’s what I did. But the last couple of years have been exceptionally stressful in my life, and pressures have taken their toll. And now, my old anxieties have resurfaced and this time it’s so much harder to push them away and carry on. But that’s what I’m going to do. Because what choice do I have? Do I want to give up writing? NO!

So now, I’m embracing the mess, and working with it, secure in the knowledge that, regardless of my feelings and the muddle that is my so-called WIP, I can do this. It might take a while, and it might be baby steps, but I will get there, and finish this book.

‘Mesdames et messieurs, allow me to reveal at last, the identity of the criminal’, said Birdcule Poirot

***

Routine – the nemesis of creativity?

/ Caron Allan

I recently read somewhere that routine hinders the creative process. To really be creative, we need to let go of organisation, routine and any kind of rigid preconceptions or framework, to allow ourselves freedom to explore in any direction and form that appeals to us.

I couldn’t disagree more strongly. If you think that routine is a hindrance and obstacle to being truly creative, I’d like to invite you to reconsider.

I suggest that it is routine that brings freedom and that freedom is often to be found within boundaries, not outside of them. Because parameters do one great thing for us, yes, even us creative types. They give security. And if you feel secure, worries and fears are left behind, and you have the freedom to be creative.

All art is created within boundaries. Or a framework of conventions, if you prefer to call it that. Mozart created wonderful music. Yes, undeniably, he was incredibly creative and had a flair for genius. But… Musical composition is, in many ways, one of the most rigidly ‘controlled’ art forms in that very deeply-held conventions dictate the agreed (not necessarily explicitly agreed) common elements that must be adhered to, in order to create any form of music. Sonatas have a specific set of rules, if you like. All sonatas have common elements that make them what they are. Similarly, concertos, arias, opuses and symphonies all have elements which dictate how they are created and underpin the very stylistic identity of a given piece of music.

Now I am tempted to take a long detour at this point and show that this is exactly the same as the genre conventions in writing, but I won’t, as I’ve already waffled quite a bit, and I want to keep this blog fairly to-the-point (wow, who’d have thought it?).

Yes, true, occasionally, I just go with the flow, letting words pour onto the page. There’s nothing actually wrong with that, but it doesn’t make for good reading, it rarely fits neatly into a novel, and I am a novelist, so that is what I need to write. Unfocussed, meandering writing is great fun, very cathartic and can help you to improve your writing overall. It’s great for journals too. But for ‘everyday’ working writing, you need focus, not indulgence.

Within a framework, we have the freedom to be creative. Routine can be just such a framework. I’m actually not a very organised person with regard to my writing. But I have discovered that an established routine is my friend when it comes to cracking on with my WIP and meeting deadlines.

Why?

If you are organised, you can relax and focus on the job in hand. You make the most of your time, and have something concrete to show for it, so productivity is improved and you feel good about what you’ve achieved. Which makes it more likely you’ll do it again tomorrow. In addition, good output leads to increased confidence and positivity, and as many writers know, these are commodities that can be hard to come by.

Planned routine is anticipated, your subconscious inner writer is actually hard at work long before you sit down at your desk. You know what is expected, and what your intentions are. This means you ‘hit the ground running’ and are ready to go straight away with no need for warming up or getting yourself in the mood.

As I’ve said already, routine planned writing leads to increased output and measurable results, you see the word count piling up and you see that you are moving towards your deadline or goal. This gives you the impetus you need to write through the tough sections of your book, those tricky little scenes and the mid-book blues.

For me, one of the main advantages to this type of organised approach to work is that I remain ‘current’ with my WIP. I literally don’t lose the plot. By that I mean I don’t lose track of characters and plot strands the way I do when I’m here and there and all over the place writing whatever takes my fancy. The resulting draft is more seamless, the scenes transition more smoothly, and small details are less likely to be overlooked.

They say it takes six weeks to develop a new routine: three weeks to break old habits, and another three to establish new ones. Give yourself six weeks, starting today. Who knows, by the time we reach the end of April, you may be firmly in the Routine is my Friend camp.

***

VERY short fiction

/ Caron Allan

I’m not much good at writing poetry, but a short story – or a really short story – I do like to have a stab at.

Very short fiction, usually a maximum of 500 words, is called Flash Fiction or Micro Fiction. And there are groups online who write 6-word fiction, 25-word fiction. To me those aren’t really stories so much as quips and captions. But I recently discovered 100-word stories and that gave me something to really think about. A 100-word story is called a Drabble – but most of my stories are a little under 100 words., so I’m not sure they qualify!

It’s tempting to link them together – but would that be several stories of 100 words, or would it be one story in installments? It feels like that might be cheating.

But here are a few I tried out.

 

But that one seemed to naturally lead on to this:

Um, Neil you’re such a baddie!

So maybe I’ll try something different, though it’s tempting to see how the above (2) story(ies) could pan out.

My stories do seem to tend in a certain direction – I always seem to turn to crime in one form or another.

And lastly…

Actually I cheated there, as I didn’t invent this, I just observed it when I was in a cafe and gave it my own little embellishments.

Hope they made you smile.

***

 

 

 

Five Good Things

/ Caron Allan / 2 Comments

I can’t remember what this is called, but it looks cute and smells heavenly – a winter blossomer!

On some of the social media platforms I use and visit, there is a hashtag or thread for ‘3 Good Things’. (esp Mastodon social…) These posts enable people to share about positive experiences, often quite small, that cheered them up, gave them some happiness or boosted their mental health.

Things have been tough lately, haven’t they? Politics – don’t get me started – the economy, just – everything.  For many of us, winter is a grey, cold place, we don’t always get to see people or do the things that we love and make us feel a sense of fulfillment.

So I thought I’d share five good things that have given me a lift over the last couple of weeks.

  1. New whiteboard! It is truly colossal. I grossly overestimated the size I needed. (Maths is not my strong subject…there’s a reason I’m a writer!) So although I need a stepladder to reach the top, it’s a thing of beauty and wonder to behold, already covered in my illegible scrawl.
  2. I’ve got snowdrops – and grape hyacinths! Yay, spring is coming! Soon my garden – and yours too, if you have one – will be full of lovely blooms to fill us with happiness. If you don’t have a garden, maybe just a pot with a small but glorious riot of colour? Or take a walk to the nearest park and get a lungful of fresh air and check to see if anything is putting forth buds yet. it will give you a huge boost.
  3. I’m getting on with my (many) WIPs. That feels good to me – I feel productive, ideas are flowing, that makes me feel positive and like I’m achieving something with my life.
  4. Although we no longer have cats, (cue sad face) I love to see the cats of my neighbours pottering back and forth, sniffing the bare stalks of our catnip plants hopefully, or staring at the birds on our bird feeders. it’s like Cat TV for them! Fortunately casualties are very low.
  5. I’m enjoying reading. I’ve only read two new books this year so far, but I am enjoying having my Kindle. I always used to favour ‘actual’ paperback books, but these days I find them too heavy to hold, so I’m getting used to eBooks. Like the world of nature, books help me to leave myself behind for a short while and ‘escape’ into another world.

So that’s it – my five good things. Modest but uplifting small things in my life. I hope yours is going well too!

Even my rosemary cuttings are thriving – and flowering all through the winter like brave little soldiers! The colour gives me such a lift!

***

Looking back at old work

/ Caron Allan

I saw this quote by Dean Koontz recently and it made me reflect on all the other stories that haven’t made it as far as publication. I’m talking about my stories here, not other peoples’.

I have written many, many more books than I have published. and I think that is often the case for other authors.

As authors, we have to serve an apprenticeship of writing. We have to learn our craft, just like a teacher learns to teach, a surgeon learns how to operate, or a dinner lady learns where the kids have to line up to come into the dining hall at school.

No one ‘just knows’. Okay, you might have a facility with words, you might be brimming over with fantastic ideas, but that doesn’t guarantee that what you write will be readable or marketable. and you need to be able to repeat the performance again and again.

Another (very) early work, written on the back of Weetabix packets… circa 1970

So it doesn’t surprise me that even an eminent author like Dean Koontz may have dry times when nothing seems to work sales-wise. Or that he seems to feel it took him a while to get started.

When I look back on some of my early stories, I cringe at the crass ideas, the overused plots, the terrible, stilted dialogue. Or the lack of knowledge. In one story I had a crocodile chasing a woman for miles up a steep hill. (Hint, that wouldn’t happen in real life. Like me, crocodiles are not fans of long steep walks uphill.)

In a way it can be discouraging to look back and think, I had zero talent, this is awful. (And, quite often people still think this about my writing, even though I’ve come on in leaps and bounds over the last thirty years!) On the other hand, every so often you can come across a paragraph, or even just a phrase, where the sun seems to shine through and you think, now that, is most definitely, a good bit.

So in no particular order, here are some of the stories that didn’t (yet, though who knows) make it:

I still mainly write my first drafts by hand – that gives me the excuse of buying more notebooks…

Jobshare: the idea was, a famous author hires a stand-in to take his place so he can disappear for a while to concentrate on writing not just a new book but a whole new genre he has not tried before. The lookalike was murdered, but who was the intended victim – the author or the lookalike. I think we’ll probably never know. This one had more holes than a fishing net.

The Soft Impeachment: even worse than it sounds, this was a cringe-fest of a romance. Luckily for you, I haven’t published it. But it was the first full length novel I ever completed, back in the early 1980s, and it was this that showed me I could do it, no matter what anyone said.

Dolly: I changed the working title of this to Babygirl once I started work on the Dottie Manderson mysteries, but it’s still never made it out of the filing cabinet. The idea is that a famous actress has just buried her adoptive mother and goes in search of her birth mother, only for her birth mother to be murdered. Who was the villain, the actress’s boyfriend, her unknown father, the dodgy care home owner, or someone else. Hint: I have no idea.

These were the only really early ones I actually finished, though there are a number of others that stalled around the third to halfway mark.

Even a bad book needs a bit of planning!

These are the almost-rans, written within the last twenty years and still in line for revision and maybe even, one day, publication:

Humanity: this was my vampire novel, written in 2002-3 after we returned from Australia after five years away, and I wanted to do something new. Sadly, I lost faith in the project when the TV series Being Human came out. It’s the same idea really – can a vampire hold on to their human qualities and carve out a life for themselves in the real world? Here’s a teeny extract:

  He moved along the road.  Cautious.  Keeping to the darkest shadows.  Nothing coming from either direction.  Middle of the night.  Not a single light on in any of the houses.

  He wiggled the fingers clutched to his side.  Sticky.  Very Sticky.  (Q: What’s brown and sticky, Uncle Neal?  A: A stick!  Nephews and nieces laughing.  God, kids tell such corny jokes.  Seems like some things never change.)

  As he crossed a pool of lamplight, he didn’t need to look down at himself to know that he was still bleeding.  The blood had soaked one side of his shirt and now it alternately flapped heavily or stuck to him, cold, and filled his whole body with a nauseating chill that had become frighteningly familiar.  It felt like every heartbeat pumped more blood out of the tear in his body.  The wound felt massive, like a huge rip in the side of an ocean liner, yet he knew it wasn’t as bad as that.  But he needed to rest.  Had to get himself inside somewhere. 

I have a soft spot for this book, so maybe one day, it will see the light of day…

The Refuge: another book that I can’t quite let go of, and have been thinking of reworking and releasing for several years now. It’s about ‘found family’ I suppose, though I didn’t know that term then. It’s about people surviving the destruction of their town and fleeing to a refuge in the mountains, and their attempts to survive, and like Humanity, it’s about whether we can hold on to ourselves in a time of crisis, and rebuild a life. If you like, you can read more about it here:

The Silent Woman: is a ghost story with a bunch of people who are ghost hunters, but it’s more to do with solving mysteries than just investigating the paranormal. There are a couple of chapters and a bit more information about this book here: 

Like many authors, I often feel I am made up of things I have written. A bit like, I don’t know, baggage maybe, or more like photographs of loved ones, we writers carry these stories with us everywhere we go, no matter what we do, and I believe that every new story we write is built upon the shoulders of these story-memories. It’s part of who I am, and I love it.

***