Finding Inspiration

Torn between three loves

/ Caron Allan

As you might be aware, I’m putting the final touches to my book Through Dancing Poppies. It’s the third book in the Miss Gascoigne mystery series, set in the 1960s in the UK, and the release date for this book is 24th April. Not long now!!!

As one book nears its end–production-wise, anyway–other books call their siren song. It’s so tempting. Because when you’ve worked on the same book for one year, two years, more, you can start to feel a bit like someone waiting for the last guest to leave at a party. Just, go, already! I mean, you love them to bits, and will definitely invite them again, but right at this moment, you just need them to leave. That’s what it’s like as you near the end of a book you’ve worked on, in this case, for a little over eighteen months.

So the idea of another book to work on is very tempting.

But which one? Something totally new, like my roughly planned out Ain’t Misbehavin’ a kind of caper set in 1931, featuring a couple of clever con-artists, a mother and daughter who scam people out of a ton of money and are always a step ahead of the law.

Or the next Dottie book – book 9 of the series which is due out in December and still needs final revisions and proofreading? This book is called The Rough Rude Sea, and its appeal is very strong–a ship-based setting travelling between the Canary Islands and the Channel Islands in the summer of 1935. Here’s a teeny extract from the beginning. To set the scene, Dottie and William are about to return home from their honeymoon (spoiler! Now you’ve got to read the first 8 books! 😀 ) but they turn up at the docks to board the ship and…

‘This is not what I was expecting.’ Dottie Hardy gazed mournfully up at the small steamship moored a little ahead of them. The nameplate attached to the bow claimed this ship to be the SS Icarus. Dottie felt this did not bode well.
William paid the taxi driver and turned. He frowned as he looked at the ship. ‘Must be some kind of mistake.’
There was an official of some sort standing at the dockside, by the roped gangplank that led onto the ship. He held a clipboard and had a red pencil in his hand. William went over. The young man looked up, gave William an uninterested look and said, boredom oozing from every pore, ‘Name?’
‘Hardy,’ said William without even thinking. Then he said, ‘Hang on, what happened to the SS Tigris?’
The man yawned, and scratched his chin. William was aware of an urge to shake him. William shoved his hands in his pocket just in case.
‘The company’s gone bust. Three days ago, in fact. This vessel has been courteously provided to bring the first class passengers back to British shores, with no expense to yourself, I might add, all costs have been generously covered by SeaSteamers. Was that William Hardy? And er…’ He paused and looked Dottie up and down in a wolfish manner that had William shoving his free hand even deeper into his pockets, ‘I suppose that is the delightful Mrs Hardy?’
‘You suppose correctly,’ William growled, and thrust his tickets and the passports at the man.
The man perused them with minimum attention and handed them back. ‘Seems fine. Cabin 27, middle deck. Dinner’s at eight, in the main saloon bar and dining-room, top deck. No need to dress.’ He yawned again and turned away, all interest in the passengers lost.
William turned to find Dottie was coming up behind him, the taxi driver bringing their luggage from the back of his car.
‘What’s going on? Has our ship been delayed? Or is it moored up somewhere else?’
William, hardly believing it himself, explained.
She looked at the little ship in disbelief. ‘This is it?’
‘Yup.’
‘Really? It looks so small. You’ll never get five hundred people and crew on that.’
‘Nope. He says it’s just for the first-class passengers. I’m guessing there aren’t many of those.’
She stared at the vessel for a full minute. ‘And are we happy to go on board this little thing?’

OR… I could have a stab at the more contemporary book Dirty Work, which is book 1 of the new Families Can Be Murder trilogy, a spin-off from Friendship Can Be Murder, my books Criss Cross, Cross Check and Check Mate, which feature posh Cressida and her determination to get rid of annoying or nasty people. She confides all to her diary, so it’s not exactly a murder ‘mystery’. In the new trilogy, it’s her husband Matt who is keeping the diary and confessing everything on paper:

In the front of my wife’s old diaries, there’s always some romantic, sweet dedication, full of love and promises of devotion. I did one for her, years ago, but her first husband Thomas, did loads of them, and they were all flowery and romantic, the kind of thing posh blokes always do, and in really expensive diaries, too, you know the sort of thing, designer stationery. She still keeps them in a drawer of her bedside table and she gets them out now and again and sits there all emotional and lost in the past, and… It makes me wonder if she loved Thomas (she never ever called him Tom) more than me. I get a bit jealous when I think of him. Which isn’t fair, I know, but I can’t help it, I just do…
Oh yes. So now I’ve got my own diary, and all it says in the front is ‘99p from Last Chance Book Bargains: your last chance to buy ’em cheap!’ Really cheap too, there’s a calendar in the front, and there’s two 27th Februaries. Is that for some kind of late Groundhog Day, or in case I need a do-over?
But instead of sitting in comfort in the sunroom at home like she does, here I am, stuck in the cab of my van, writing a quick sneaky note as I wait to find out what my dad is getting up to.
‘Matt,’ he said to me one day last week, ‘Could you give us a lift to the New Mills Business Park? I’ve arranged to see someone about something next Friday afternoon, ’bout twoish.’
Well, I don’t mind doing things for my dad—we get on really well, he’s not as young as he was, and he’s always been there for me, even when I was in prison—but he was acting dead cagey, so naturally I was onto him.
‘What’s it about?’ I asked him.
He just tapped the side of his nose. ‘No need for you to get involved, mate. I just need a lift, and don’t for the life of you go mentioning it to your mother.’
Nothing sets off alarm bells like my dad telling me he’s up to something I can’t tell my mum. What’s the old bugger getting up to now? At first I thought it might be some kind of birthday surprise he’s got planned for her. But to be honest, I doubt he even remembers when her birthday is, after only forty-nine years of wedded bliss. It’s like the pin-code on her phone. He needed to use her phone, and it was locked. So he asked her for the code, and she (very cleverly as it turns out) said, ‘Just tap in the code. It’s our wedding date.’
So obviously he was completely stumped. Not big on remembering anniversaries or birthdays, or… just anything really.

So tempting, all these writing/rewriting options. And then there’s a new series idea I’ve been thinking about for several years, The Runaway Policeman. I’ll just leave that with you.

***

 

‘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.

***

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.

***

Writing a believable character

/ Caron Allan / 5 Comments

I think we all know that a work of fiction could not exist without its characters. They act out the plot, control the information given to the reader, and they are the people we would like to be if we ourselves were the centre of the work. They are our representatives in the story world in many respects. I think that is especially true in the kind of books I write – fairly traditional, solve-along-at-home mysteries.

One of the things I love about characters is their ability to be brave, cowardly, wicked or audacious, righteous, and definitely unlike me, astute and quick-thinking! They are able to be either in the right or the wrong place at the right or the wrong time. Always in the thick of the action, the excitement, leading the way to discovery. I love that my characters can do all the things I can’t – lead exciting lives in glamorous, or not so glamorous places, rub shoulders with criminals and celebrities, solve mysteries, dancing until the early hours of the morning, and of course, go to nice places! They rarely have to worry about shoving things in the washing machine, getting the groceries sorted, puzzling over a newly appeared patch of damp on a ceiling, or a lost roof tile. They don’t have to clear up after pets or puzzle over the right home insurance.

Hopefully this will be out in 2025. I’ve written it, I promise.

In many ways, a minor character can be fairly cardboard – not every character needs to be – or indeed can possibly be – unique. They are like the stock characters of a theatrical production. There are only so many human traits, qualities and physical looks that can be applied to characters. In a lot of cases, I just suggest an appearance or a type of person and let the imagination of my readers furnish the rest of the details. If you’re anything like me, too much description to read slows down the action and is the bit you have a tendency to skip.

But the main characters – oh they have to be fully realised and to become completely real, fully-rounded and believable for the reader, or else there is no empathy, no immersion in the story. If you can’t lose yourself completely in a murder mystery, then there is nothing to be gained with the final revelation, the answer to the riddle of the story. It just won’t matter. I love it when I close a book at the end, and look around me, almost surprised to see the world is still turning. I had forgotten the real world, and part of my imagination, part of my self is still lost in story land. That is a job well done by the novelist. It’s what I try to aim for, though I often worry I don’t succeed.

For me, a main character has to be imaginable. I need to be able to picture that person, as if they were real, moving and inhabiting some invented space in my head. I like to think I might recognise them if I met them in real life. I want to know how they think, how they feel, what they like, what they hate. I want to know who their friends are, how they fill their spare time, what they do to pay the bills, all the real life stuff that applies to ‘us’, the readers.

Honest this one is going to be finished one day too…

If they don’t engage with the world around them in the book they are set in, they won’t feel real to me. They need to act like real people. They must be impacted by social issues, by world events, by the art and popular culture of their time. I want to see them dancing, singing, talking, crying, laughing, eating, drinking, catching a bus or train, driving somewhere, getting caught in the rain, falling in love, or visiting their mother. They have to have a life that extends beyond merely the demands of the mystery. They can’t just be clue finders.

That said, I try to add what I think of as timeless values to my characters. I don’t want them to exhibit the tendencies and faults of their time. I don’t want my main characters to be racist, sexist, homophobic, or bigoted. I want them to transcend what might have been widely-held attitudes of their day, because those are things which are important to me. I don’t want them to appear too sanctimonious or holier-than-thou either, so it’s a fine line between Dottie, Dee and so forth being a decent person and being way too prim and proper.

But hopefully it’s keeping them on the right side of believable, and relatable, and making the story the stronger for it. I try to make my books character-driven rather than event or plot-driven, as for me, a story is all about its players.

So what’s happening with me now?

Just a quick catch up for you. I had hoped to have at least two if not three more bosk out this year, but it just hasn’t happened. It’s been a tough year. diagnosis of breast cancer, followed by chemo, two surgeries, radiotherapy and now, I’m about to start yet more chemo mean that I’ve been utterly exhausted and not able to write very much at all. I’ve done perhaps half of Dottie Manderson mystery book 8 Midnight, the Stars and You. and I’ve written about half of a new Friendship Can Be Murder mystery, to be called Dirty Work, and… *sigh* I’ve just started book 3 of the Miss Gascoigne mysteries, Through Dancing Poppies. I wrote a stand-alone novel The Cousins last year but haven’t had the oomph to do anything with that yet, so it’s all in the pipeline. Hopefully 2025 will be a n easier year.  On the upside, a new German translation of the first Miss Gascoigne mysteries Eine Begegnung mit Mord will be out on the 11th October, so that’s something, I suppose.

Onward and upward. 

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Looking ahead to Autumn and new things…

/ Caron Allan / 2 Comments

Our maple is already wearing its Autumn hues

It’s still the height of summer (not that you’d know it from the 19⁰C and wet weather we’ve had this week, in contrast to last week’s high 20s and even low 30s) yet already I’m turning my face towards Autumn.

I know I say this every year, but for me, it is not Spring, but Autumn and Winter that form my season of creativity. I have no idea why this is. I don’t know why, but for me, autumn is not the season for rest and consolidation, but of flights of imagination taking wings. I get quite excited about the approach of autumn and winter. Maybe it’s the cuddly jumpers, I don’t know.

It seems as though the rest of the world is full of new life in the Spring. Is it because I’m an October baby, my lifecycle naturally starts from Autumn onwards? Or because when we lived in Brisbane what seems like a lifetime ago, October was in the Spring? But how can five years there undo the habits of the other fifty-nine years I’ve lived in the Northern Hemisphere? Or maybe it’s because for parents everywhere in the UK, Autumn is when the children go back to school and you at last get two minutes to sit in silence and just enjoy hearing – nothing. Ah, bliss!

Started a new notebook today too – a cause for celebration in itself!

As I’ve mentioned a few times, in our house things have been tough since last October but now, today, I feel something stirring again. It’s a feeling, a bit like being pregnant, a sense of something wonderful happening in the hidden depths, a private joy that no one else is able to share or even aware of. It’s the buzzing of new ideas, of fresh creative energy, a sense of gentle excitement that says, ‘Hmm, I think something is coming…’ I love it, it’s such a special feeling, and it can only mean one thing.

I think I feel a new story coming on…

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Rewriting a novel – a nuts and bolts approach

/ Caron Allan / 4 Comments

(This post first appeared in 2017 when I was invited to do a guest spot on Pink Glitter Publishing for my dear friend and author Emma Baird.) And sorry, it’s another really long post this week…

I love rewriting. There, I’ve said it. I think I could be the only person in the history of the world who actually enjoys rewriting. In fact, I like it a lot more than writing the first draft. I hate that bit. Okay, maybe not hate. I love the thrill of writing the first 50 pages or so, when it’s all fresh and exciting, and it begins to unfold on the page. Love that. But…sooner or later I always hit the first-draft wall. I know it’s because I don’t plot. I’m a pantser. So sue me, I hate to plot. If I plan out my book, on some level I feel I’ve already told the story already and it loses it’s allure.

But that makes the initial experience of writing a draft rather an emotional, rivers-deep-mountains-high kind of affair. But… rewriting, oh that is a whole new thing. I LOVE rewriting. You are free from the ‘burden’ of creating and, taking a distancing step back from your work, you can begin to rethink, polish and tidy. I love to tidy. Sometimes I can only do this by laying all the pages out on the floor and wracking my brains over which order this mess is supposed to go in.

Hemingway famously said, ‘Write drunk, edit sober.’ I haven’t tried it, but it might work for you. I have to say, editing sometimes makes me feel like I need a little help…

Don’t revise as you go. I know there are always a few people for whom that system works, but trust me, it’s not for most people. You get so bogged down in the detail that you never progress. I know people who have spent literally years rewriting the same first three chapters and have never finished the book. It makes me so sad. Write the whole book, from beginning to end, always looking forwards, pressing on till you reach ‘The End’. If you can’t remember the names and places mentioned earlier in the story, just do what I do and put a massive X, or XX, or Mr Thingy, or What Was Her Name, The One With The Long Blonde Hair, in its place. Or refer to a list of names and places you create as you go along.

It’s so much easier to revise a whole book. Like creating a sculpture, you’ve got that solid block to chip away at. You’ve got the overall shape and idea to work on. Your book is your outline. (You can thank Mary Wibberley for that bit of advice in her book from decades ago, To Writers With Love.)

After finishing your first draft, don’t immediately start revisions. Unless you are on the clock and the deadline is almost on you (we’ve all done it), put the book away for as long as you can. This is the perfect time to write another book. Yes, really. Leave your first draft for at least a few weeks, ideally a few months, or even a year. You will need to approach it next time around with a good degree of detachment to get out of writer mode and into rewriter mode. Then, when you’ve finished the next book, while that is ‘maturing’, you can go back to the previous one. Or, if you’ve a) got all the time in the world, or b) you’ve decided to write a series and publish fairly close together, now could be the perfect time to write book three!

Gary Cooper pondering that tricky scene just before the end of chapter six.

So you’re ready to start. Read it. Don’t write, don’t type, don’t tweak, fiddle, twiddle or jiggle. Just read the whole story through from beginning to end. You are trying to get an overview, to reacquaint yourself with your story. Afterwards, make notes on how you felt about the book. Does the story hang together? Does the plot progress logically (unless an illogical plot is essential to your story)? Do you have that sensation of tripping up as you read—a bit like when you miss a stair and think you’re falling—that’s when there’s a problem, usually a plot problem. Try to pinpoint what it was that made you feel like that. Put a sticky note on the page, or if a computer file, highlight the section, or bookmark it, or make a note in the Track Changes feature if using Word.

If you’re frustrated by not being able to make changes as you spot them, or worried you might forget, again, as already suggested, make notes in the Track Changes feature of Word, or pencil notes in the margin, or use sticky notes if working with a paper copy, just don’t change the body of the book yet. Hopefully after rereading the whole book, you will be able to see the strengths and weaknesses of your draft. You will see what needs to go. If not, give it to a trusted friend or writing pal to read. Ask them to be honest and not just pat you on the back. Rewriting can feel very much like ‘fixing problems’ or putting right things that are wrong, and with this mind-set, this can be quite demoralising. Don’t get into this trap. Remember, you’re polishing, refining. Putting flesh on a flexible framework. It’s all good.

Save your original draft, and make a copy with a new version name, just in case in the end, you’re not happy with what you’ve done and need to revert and give it another go. Again, we’ve all done that, I think. Give yourself a fall back position.

Start tinkering. Start with the easy stuff like consistency of character description and behaviour, check the names, spellings, and personal details of all characters, check place-names are correct and consistent throughout. Then move on to point of view. With POV, consistency is everything. If you’re writing anything other than an omniscient third person viewpoint, then there will be things your main characters cannot know until it is revealed to them. Make sure you’ve nailed that.

Next, check for all those words you overuse. For me, that’s words like So, And and Also. A friend of mine uses Thus in almost every paragraph… it’s really annoying. If you use unusual words to describe something, don’t repeat them more than once (if that) as unusual words stick in the reader’s mind and break the wonderful spell you’ve created of suspending disbelief: the worst possible offence you can commit as a writer of fiction. Don’t rip your reader from the story and plunge them back into the real world. Make less use of unusual words such as coterie or Schadenfreude, these are words that stand out from the page, and stick in your reader’s mind. If you use clichés—please don’t—but if you absolutely must, do it just once, don’t repeat them. You also don’t need to show off all the big words you know. Nine times out of ten, the simple, direct phrase will work better than anything flowery, waffly or too complicated. Keep it simple.

And if like me you write books set in the 1930s or 1960s – check for anachronistic things – things that weren’t invented then, hadn’t been discovered, developed or couldn’t be done, differences of etiquette, speech patterns, all the stuff that has furious readers turning to Goodreads or Amazon and saying, ‘1*, couldn’t possibly get past the comment about using a zip! In 1920? Hardly!’ Because believe me, those little things make a big difference to a reader and can ruin the whole reading experience. If in doubt, ask someone, or ask Mr Google.

Brain boggle is a normal part of revising your book. Don’t worry about it. Have a nice soothing cuppa and relax for a bit.

Check hyphenation, apostrophe use, adverbs and speech tags. I don’t agree with the ‘don’t use adverbs, they’re evil’ approach, but use them sparingly. (See what I did there?) Keep metaphors and especially similes to a minimum, unless you’re writing poetry; they are also irritating. Don’t use fussy speech tags: he responded, she retorted, he espoused, she countered, etc. Once in a while is fine, but you don’t need to tag every speech, just enough so the reader knows who said what. The word ‘said’, 90% of the time, is the best speech tag there is, it’s invisible, the reader will pass on, aware of who is speaking but not bothered about how – that should be clear from the context and what they say. Again, keep it simple.

Tidy your grammar, get rid of typos and unnecessary repetition. Check your tense scenes or action scenes for long, meandering sentences that slow the reader down and take forever to read so that the reader can’t remember what you were talking about, and they have to go back to the beginning to reread, trying to figure out the meaning (like that, for example – four lines for one sentence??? Too much, unless you’re writing War and Peace). Check slow, reflective, emotional or romantic scenes for accidentally humorous clangers, (my often quoted, ‘and then he opened the door in his pyjamas’), or break-neck short sentences that rush the reader too quickly through the text.

Read it again. And again. Tweak as you go, now, but remember some changes will have a knock-on effect and need to be addressed multiple times throughout the book. Now pass the draft to your close friends/beta-readers/book group, for your first round of major feedback. You can’t, sadly, trust yourself entirely to write, polish, edit, proofread, proofread, edit and polish then proofread. you’ll need help. If affordable, get professional help, go with a recommended person or business, not someone you pluck from nowhere unless they have incredible feedback. Otherwise keep to a small trusted group of serious writers and readers who have excellent language skills and a kind, tactful way of letting you know when something’s not quite right. If you use more than one beta-reader, you might find they contradict one another – then all you can do is go with the majority and trust your gut.

Then—I hate to say it—you need to do it all again. I read somewhere that if you don’t hate your book by the time it is published, you haven’t done enough work on it, and believe me I’ve come so close to hating a couple of my books. Your book is not ready for your editor or proofreader until you are absolutely convinced that it’s perfect. Trust me, it won’t be. But it’ll be pretty close. Make sure you are not the only one to do the ‘extra final final proofread’ – you’ll definitely miss something.

As an editor, I’d say there’s nothing worse than getting a script that should be as close to release-ready as an author can make it, but turns out to be little more than a first draft. It’s like seeing a neglected child. And when you make your first sale or get a really wonderful review, it will feel like it was worth every minute.

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