writers’ block

From Idea to Publication

/ Caron Allan / 2 Comments

There are a number of components to creating a book, and I’ll admit I hadn’t realised just how much was involved when I set to write my first one. Which has still not been published, by the way, it was truly terrible. You’re welcome.

A writer begins with the germ of an idea, a creative spark, just a little something that falls into the imagination from the ether and says, ‘Hey, you know what would be a good story? This…’ It’s hard to say where inspiration comes from. It’s the first question people always ask me: ‘Where do you get your ideas?’

And it’s almost impossible to answer that, because ideas or inspiration can come from so many, many varied sources, and are often a kind of amalgamation of a number of different threads that come together seemingly from nowhere. I wrote a blog post about this a while ago. If you’d like to read it, you can follow this link:

After the germ or spark, comes the ‘mulling things over’ phase. You begin to add more and more to your idea, like the layers of an onion. You test it to see if your initial thought will work in practice. You begin to think of snatches of dialogue, or scenes or names or any number of little details that add the colour and richness to your bare bones. At this point I usually have to start making notes, a bit worried I’ll forget something – I know what I’m like!

Then comes the beginning of the writing. For me, this usually happens quite quickly – I feel very excited, I write as fast as I can in an actual paper notebook, I’m not one of those people who creates a first draft on a computer or who uses a special app. This is the honeymoon phase that I never want to end. It is joyful and fun.

BUT.

Then comes the dark night of the soul, the ‘I can’t write for toffee’ phase, imposter syndrome raises its ugly head, and I am consumed with doubts about myself, my ability and my work. At this point all I can do is to dig deep and become really stubborn and tell myself I WILL do this. I push on, writing even though I’m pretty much convinced that it’s a waste of time. I didn’t realise until just a few years ago that almost everyone feels like this about their work, whatever it is. It’s taken me many years to realise that persistence is my most valuable tool. Another thing I’ve blogged about before!

Finally my first draft is complete. I let myself and my story rest for a few weeks or several months. I take a break to enjoy doing other things, like cooking or gardening, I read loads, sometimes do a bit of editing or proofreading. I blog, of course, and dip in and out of social media. Or dare I say it – I might go out – (we are able to do that now in the UK, not sure if that will all change again, it still seems a bit naughty to go out of the house for anything other than the bare essentials).

There’s till loads to do on the book. A first draft does not a book make, and I will need to revise, edit, polish, revise, edit and polish several times over before it’s ready to be ‘properly’ edited, have a final proofread, then released on an unsuspecting world. At this stage, I need to let go of my favourites – not necessarily in a ‘kill your darlings’ kind of way, but just letting go of scenes or phrases and being honest with myself if they just don’t work.

Then my technical – or lack of – skills come into play. These were the things that provided the biggest learning curve for me as a new self-published writer some years ago. I didn’t have the money to pay someone to do all this for me, and I wasn’t with a traditional publishing house who do so much for their authors. So I had to learn how to create a reasonable book cover, (Canva, I love you so much), how to format my eBooks and paperback books, and how to make marketing materials. I had to learn what metadata was, and how to use advertising. I had to learn to negotiate the online world to publish and market my books. People were very kind and there are loads of helpful sites and books if you get stuck or don’t know how to do something, but you have to be determined to work your socks off and learn a ton of new skills, even if you are not a techy kind of person.

But finally, the big day dawns and your book – or my book, in this case – is out there is the big wide world. It’s a bit scary, doesn’t seem real, and is hard to believe you actually made it from that first little spark of an idea months or sometimes years earlier. The book writer’s journey has often been compared to pregnancy and the birth of a child. I think that’s a pretty good analogy, especially when it comes to the ‘don’t you ever come near me again’ part of the process, and the shouting, swearing and throwing things. Certainly I’m not raring to get writing another book as soon as the first one has come out. I need my recovery time of a month or two before I’m ready to start all over again.

Aww, doesn’t my new baby look cute?

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Ten (awful) things about me

/ Caron Allan / 4 Comments

Of course, I don’t wear the anorak all the time. It’s for special occasions.

I thought I’d tell you ten things you might not know about me. Why? Well, we’re all besties now, right, so that means I can off-load some of my mess special characteristics and just—you know—really be myself with you.

  1. I got a 10-yards swimming certificate when I was ten years old. So if I’m ever on board a boat that sinks really, really close to the shore, I’ll be fine.
  2. When I was out for a walk with my family in a park when I was eleven years old, I needed to go to the bathroom, and there were no bathrooms, so I went behind a tree, and a man and his dog came over and asked if I was okay. (I didn’t realise there was a path behind the tree as well as in front of it.) I was too embarrassed to say I was peeing, so I made up a totally unlikely story about losing my pocket money behind the tree and said I was looking for it. Crouched there as I was, I half-heartedly raked through the  leaves by my feet. The only problem was, this kind man decided to help me look for it…. It was about five long minutes before he must have realised what was going on, and with a panicked expression got up, said goodbye, and that he hoped I’d find my ‘pocket money’, then he and his dog ran! Aww. My parents laughed, but I was mortified.
  3. I failed my English Literature ‘O’ level. Though I later went on to complete a Bachelor’s degree in English and History so I certainly showed them!
  4. I also failed my Sociology ‘O’ level. Ironically, it was the only subject I really studied hard for. I must have guessed how bad I was at that subject. To make matters worse, my teacher told my parents I wasn’t going to pass and so they had to pay for me to be allowed to sit the exam. All for nothing. Is it too late for a resit?
  5. I love cats and dogs but I’m allergic to fur and dander.
  6. I love learning new languages, but I am hopeless at it. I always get the different languages muddled in my head, and I may start a sentence in French, but I’ll just as likely end it in Spanish or German…
  7. I once peed myself laughing with my cousin, then had to throw myself in a handy nearby river to disguise my ‘accident’ so as not to get into trouble with the dreaded parents. I was about twelve at the time. I was a horrid child! I also fell into a river on Boxing Day, then sat in a tree in my underwear hoping my clothes would dry in the breeze and went home an hour later frozen half to death in sopping wet clothes. Me and bodies of water do not get on.
  8. My work experience week coincided with my sixteenth birthday, and I was sent to spend a week with the local newspaper. I spent my sixteenth birthday covering court cases as a junior reporter. It was fascinating and I got well and truly bitten by the true crime bug!
  9. I once rode my bike into a fence and smashed it. And I took myself to the front door of the fence owner to confess all. He was so astonished at my honesty that he let me off. (Another pre-teen escapade!)
  10. I got thrown out of our school’s church service for asking too many questions about God. I wasn’t even a disbeliever, I just was asking tricky theological questions, which apparently was not okay. (Still eleven!) Oh well. I also got a prize in school prize giving for Religious Education, so maybe they forgave me after all.

So yeah. That’s me. I can kind of see how I ended up being a writer.

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10 tips for getting on with your writing

/ Caron Allan / 2 Comments

I think most of us have days when we stare into space and can’t think of a single thing to write. Here are my top tips for getting on with it. There’s not anything really earth-shatteringly new here, just practical ideas to keep you—and me—writing. Some are obvious, some are simple, some are just coping mechanisms that have worked for me.

  • Keep social media out of your work area. It’s so easy to ‘lose’ an hour or two just checking your emails or catching up with social media—and this is a really good one for disguising as work. But if you are a media junkie and know you spend too much time oohing and ahhing over other people’s cat pictures or searching for memes, do everything you can to keep internet availability to areas away from where you work. Keep your breaks short—just enough time to eat, drink, pee and then get back to work. (btw Eat, Drink, Pee is the little-known follow-up to Eat, Pray, Love. Less successful because it lacks the strong spiritual appeal of the original.)
  • Plan. Yes, even if like me, you are more of a pantser, when you struggle to move forward with your work, then leave yourself a couple of lines of notes that will give you a kick-start to begin your next writing session. I heard it suggested that a writer even breaks off in the middle of a crucial scene to create an easy pick-up point. However, if like me, you’re a bit forgetful, you might not find this idea too effective. Instead I prefer to scratch down a few lines in pencil, just to give myself a little push in the morning. (Not a morning person!) while it’s still fresh in my mind. I often have an idea in my head of where the story is going to go, but can forget some of this by the next day. This idea is a good one to avoid losing the plot—literally.
  • Take a notebook everywhere. Yes, I know this is an obvious one for writers, but trust me, I can’t count the number of times I’ve had to either abandon a brilliant idea or rush to buy a notebook when out and about. And trust me, notes written on a napkin in ketchup or eyebrow pencil aren’t so easy to read when you get home. You don’t have to take along a huge, heavy notebook, just a teeny one that fits into a pocket will be fine, so long as you always have something with you in case inspiration strikes. For me, any time I’m left alone to stare into space can be a good time to write—on the bus, train, waiting for the bus or train, waiting for loved ones to finish work or try on a dress… or you could get a note-making app on your tablet or phone, I like Evernote. I do a lot of my best writing in a caff with a cappuccino at my elbow. So before you leave the house, make sure you have a notebook and about six pens. Wallet? Check. Keys? Check. Notebook…?
  • Count your words. This is really a coping mechanism for if you are going through a sticky patch. It’s really aimed at people who, like me, write longhand before they transfer work onto a device. Each morning, before you start work staring at the crack on the ceiling, count the previous day’s word total manually. Doing this will mean a) you get a quick overview of what you wrote yesterday and that will help you to get into writing mode, and b) you will feel encouraged to build on what you already have. This works for me when nothing else does, even if I end up discarding half or more of the previous day’s work.
  • Break up the blank. This continues from the one above. If you sit and stare at the white page or screen in dismay and your brain refuses to create, try this:
    • Do Step 4 as above.
    • Then start each new page with the date and running word total in the top left corner.
    • Number the pages bottom right.
    • If you are using chapter headings or titles, write that too, or simply write chapter and the number.

You could also do Step 2 for this point, again to give yourself a little push.

  • Change your routine. This is another one that works well for me. Try sitting somewhere different to your usual spot, give yourself a new viewpoint. Listen to different music—even music you hate can be useful. I used to sometimes sit in one of my children’s bedrooms when they were at school and listen to some of their music. Just changing your daily routine or habits can trick your brain into creating fresh words. Try getting up in the middle of the night, if you’re a morning person, or go out and write in the pub or the library or the park. Anything different is good and will help to lift you out of your slough of despond and help get rid of that wading-through-mud feeling.
  • Revise. If you’re really stick, go back and look at your original premise for your WIP and see if there’s any aspect of your story you’ve missed, ignored or just plain not considered. Did you go down a blind alley? If you don’t have old notes to go back to, write down a couple of paragraphs of what you remember about getting the original idea for your story. How did it work out in your mind? How does that compare to what you have actually written so far? Try to see your story as a whole unit, like a ladder with rungs moving the story forward. What needs to happen to your characters to get the story to the next rung?
  • Read. This is the easy one. I’m not advocating spending weeks and months reading hundreds of books, but just take some time out to read for half an hour or an hour. Refresh your mind, read some poetry, or a familiar favourite book. Again too, you could try something new and different that will get your creative juices flowing. If I’m writing fiction, I read a non-fiction, usually history.
  • Write something else. So often I find the minute I start work on one story, I get ideas coming through for another. Usually it’s another story where I’ve already completed the first draft and am just subconsciously mulling it over. Try your hand at a short story or a haiku.
  • Doodle. Make yourself some brain-storming cluster diagram. Put your key word—or your character name, or anything to do with your WIP, and then bring lots of lines out from the central idea and at the end of each line, write a word or phrase or idea that somehow relates to the key word. You can do this for every character, or every location or plot point etc. You can put down anything that is linked with your main character, or maybe just ideas that are only tentatively linked. You could sit and create a list of words from your title, or your character’s name. You could try Googling your character’s name and see what comes up—but don’t get side-tracked, it isn’t supposed to replace writing but to stimulate it. Try brain-storming something completely different, a colour or a sound that is relevant to your story, eg blue—then write all the things you can think of to do with ‘blue’: the colour of royalty; meaning sad or depressed; lapis lazuli used to be used to make the pigment blue for artists, and was more expensive than gold, so hence very little of it used in paintings, only for the special few key characters, which brings us back to royalty again; the Greeks had no colour for blue, and used the word for brass; the Bible says sometimes when you pray the ‘Heavens are as brass’; does that mean they are blue, or they are hard and impenetrable? Blue is a cold colour, blue is the colour for baby boys—but used to be the traditional colour for baby girls up until the early 1900s, then mysteriously it swapped, so did this result in confusion? Hopefully you see how this technique can generate ideas.

So those are my top tips. Hopefully if you do get stuck with your writing, or you feel like you’re not getting anywhere, one of these might help you to get back on track and find fresh and exciting ideas. Above all if you’re struggling with a particular idea or a specific part of your WIP, don’t panic. Do something else for a little while or try one of these ideas. You’ll soon get your mojo back.

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