Books and friends #1 – Flight by Vanessa Harbour

It occurs to me, looking at the uncorrected proofs and early copies piling up on my desk, that the people I know write great books, and I should talk about it more.

So here is a short series, prompted by the pile in question, of books to think about this summer.

#1 Flight, by Vanessa Harbour

One of the lovely things about being a writer is getting to know other writers and hang out with them, online and off. I can’t remember how long I’ve known Ness for, but she has been a big support and encouragement to me and my writing, and every writer needs that, so thank you, Ness.

Vanessa teaches Creative Writing at Winchester University and works as an editor for the Golden Egg Academy. Flight is her first novel for children and I’m thrilled to see it out there at last. By ‘out there’ I mean in uncorrected proof form. It will be published by Firefly in August.

As a young reader I was obsessed by books about horses and also the suffering of the Second World War. I loved The Silver Sword and I Am David, both of which I’ve recently reread with my youngest, and I also devoured the Jill’s Gymkhana books, National Velvet and anything about horses I could get my hands on. (My youngest is more interested in sharks than horses, but each to his own.) In Flight, Ness Harbour has combined my two obsessions in a thrilling tale that captures the bravery, the danger, the sacrifice of living amongst the Nazis and trying to preserve what is good.

It’s 1945. Two children, a gypsy boy called Jakob and a Roma girl called Kizzy, set out to rescue the Lippizzaner stallions at the Spanish Riding School in Austria from a brutal Nazi officer as the Americans approach. I didn’t know the story of the Lippizzaner horses but I feel that I have lived it now. This is for anyone who likes dancing horses, great storytelling and danger. Which is most readers I know.

And if Ness would now like to do a similar tale about dancing sharks, I have a reader ready-made who would love that too.

Writing competitions! Lots!

Are you writing a poem, a short story, a play, a novel, a screenplay …?

Are you under 16, over 16, or even 16 exactly?

Would you like some amazing industry professionals to see your work, and possibly even publish or perform it? Lots of people are looking for new writers right now. Some great competitions end soon, so get your skates on …

I became a published author by winning a competition. It was the Times/Chicken House Children’s Fiction Competition, and you can find out more about it here, including Barry Cunningham’s writing tips. He discovered JK Rowling, so he knows a thing or two … The competition is closed for this year, but if you’re still polishing your children’s manuscript, keep an eye on when it reopens later in the year for 2017.

If you can’t wait, ITV’s Lorraine has just launched a nation-wide hunt for the next bestselling author for 5-7s. You’ll need to send in the first 1000 words of your masterpiece by Monday, 29th February – so not long now – and may appear on TV.

There are loads of other writing competitions around meanwhile, and here are just some of them. Thanks to Joan Lennon on Girls Heart Books for the details on these two …

“The Betjamen Poetry Prize – it’s for poets aged 10 – 13 and the deadline for submissions is 31 July 2016, so you’ve got plenty of time.  But there’s lots on the website to get your poetic juices going, courtesy of Indigo Williams, so have a look.

500 Words – a story writing competition for ages 5 – 9 and 10 – 13.  The deadline for this one is much closer – 25 February 2016 – so you’ll need to get your skates on.  There are some good prompts and interesting articles on this site too – well worth a visit.”

The BBC Writers Room is of course full of opportunities for plays, film scripts and comedy.

The Sky Blue Theatre Company even have a video about their British Theatre Challenge!

And finally, Creative Writing Ink has a wonderful list of competitions for everything from poetry to playwriting to fiction to sitcoms.

Whatever it is you’re working on, there is probably a competition you could enter it for, where you might be lucky and get shortlisted and get some invaluable feedback. Don’t be disheartened if you don’t get far this time. Having the courage to polish your work and enter is what matters. You might at the very least make friends with fellow entrants (I did). And you’re bound to learn a lot from the process – even just imagining what the judges might be thinking, and making your work as great as it can be to impress them.

Good luck, and let me know what happens.

Sophia xxx

Elizabeth Gilbert’s top 10 tips for writers to stay inspired

Today, I’m sharing a post I read on Goodreads this week, and simply loved.

Elizabeth Gilbert is the author of Eat, Pray Love, which I loved in book and film form – but particularly the book – and also of one of my favourite talks, at an Oprah event, about living with failure, and juggling our difficult lives. It’s the story of being a woman in a society where women haven’t been powerful and autonomous before, and are still working it out. It’s a story of a missed flight, and a panic, and something we all recognise, and she tells it beautifully.

http://www.oprah.com/video_embed.html?article_id=23558

Since the phenomenal success of Eat, Pray, Love, Elizabeth has been fascinated by what happens next when someone has, it seems, reached the peak of their creativity. What do you do after that? How to you go on? Her new book addresses the spark of creativity, and she’s been answering readers’ questions on Goodreads about the creative process.

Here are the top 10 tips and observations that Goodreads have put together, based on her answers. I think they’re great. If you’re writing, or not writing and want to, check them out …

Where I write … and my top 10 writers’ retreats

This post appeared originally on the Girls Heart Books blog, where I post once a month. You can check out posts by loads of great writers for girls here. 

23 October 2015

I’ve just launched my new website, and I hope it’s a colourful, comfortable place for readers to visit. A website feels like a home in some ways – somewhere that reflects your taste and interests, and where you invite people in to find out more about you.

It got me thinking about where I write. I have a wonderful shed in the garden, and the picture featured here is of my Danielle Scutt Barbie (my good luck charm when I wrote Threads) standing on my desk in front of my mood board. You can see more of the shed, inside and out, here.

I know that all a writer really needs is a tabletop, something to write on and with, and her own imagination. But a shed helps too! I’m not the only lucky writer to have one, or some sort of special retreat. Here are my top 10, and where to find out more about them …

10. JK Rowling’s first writing cafe in Edinburgh – The Elephant House

9. Dylan Thomas’s shed in Laugharne

8. Phillip Pullman’s garden shed in Oxford

7. Roald Dahl’s super-famous Writing Hut in Great Missenden

There’s a lovely piece in The Guardian featuring these last 3, and more. Check out the pictures and stories here:

Five best writers’ sheds in pictures

And there’s more on Dahl and Thomas in another great piece, which also features some lovely quotes about George Bernard Shaw, Virginia Woolf and Mark Twain: Famous writers’ small writing sheds and off the grid huts

6. George Bernard Shaw’s shed at Shaw’s Corner, called ‘London’

This is my favourite description of it, via the BBC

The tiny structure of only 64 square feet (5.9 m²), was built on a central steel-pole frame with a circular track so that it could be rotated on its axis to follow the arc of the sun’s light during the day.^[2] Shaw dubbed the hut “London“, so that unwanted visitors could be told he was away “visiting the capital“.^[3]

5. Virginia Woolf

“She was always being distracted – by Leonard sorting the apples over her head in the loft, or the church bells at the bottom of the garden, or the noise of the children in the school next door, or the dog sitting next to her and scratching itself and leaving paw marks on her manuscript pages. In winter it was often so bitterly cold and damp that she couldn’t hold her pen and had to retreat indoors.” – from The Guardian

4. Mark Twain

“It is the loveliest study you ever saw…octagonal with a peaked roof, each face filled with a spacious window…perched in complete isolation on the top of an elevation that commands leagues of valley and city and retreating ranges of distant blue hills. It is a cozy nest and just room in it for a sofa, table, and three or four chairs, and when the storms sweep down the remote valley and the lighting flashes behind the hills beyond and the rain beats upon the roof over my head—imagine the luxury of it.” – Mark Twain, in a letter to William Dean Howells, 1874.

Finally, my favourite article on the subject, 7 Inspiring Writers’ Retreats, includes…

3. Lawrence of Arabia’s Cloud’s Hill cottage (best retreat name)

2. The bandstand TS Eliot borrowed in Margate to write bits of the Wasteland …

… and last but very not least …

1. Vita Sackville-West’s tower at Sissinghurst

Who needs a shed when you have one of these …?

Which is your favourite? And where do you write?

Leipzig, Manga and more

Today, I’m in London packing my bags and making sure I’ve got travel insurance. (Thank you for reminding me, Post Office man.)

Tomorrow, I will be … well mostly on airplanes and trains, but on Friday I’ll be here …

At the Leipzig Book Fair. Which, as you can see, isn’t just any book fair. As well as celebrating traditional books, this is the biggest Manga Comic Con in Europe. And as practically every teen I know who reads LOVES Manga, it’s definitely the place to be.

There will be drawing. There will be girls in blue wigs, and face paint, and wings, and space outfits, and boys in the same. There will be lots and lots of books. There will be my lovely publishers, Chicken House Germany, who kindly invited me, and me, reading from You Don’t Know Me, and thinking how much my characters would have loved to be there.

There will be fun. Wish me luck. Now I really must work out what to wear …

How do I get my book published?

Today I received a very polite email from a visitor to my website called Jack, asking how he might get his book published. I could write an essay on the subject (and in fact I’ll be talking about exactly this at the Cheltenham Festival on Saturday, but in more detail and with special regard to children’s books, along with my publisher Barry Cunningham and a panel of publishing folk). I’d love to have replied to Jack in greater detail, but only had time to write briefly. However, I thought this might be worth sharing for the many people out there writing their own books.

I didn’t mention self-publishing, I realise. That’s another essay. And one of increasing relevance in today’s publishing market.

Nor did I mention getting editorial input from somewhere like the Golden Egg Academy, who work with authors whose books aren’t ready yet, to turn them into something an agent and publisher can get excited about. That’s another essay.

Here, though, are the basics. This is what I said.

Hi Jack

Thanks for your message. I have various suggestions for you, and I think most authors would agree.

First – congratulations! You finished your first draft. That’s such an achievement in itself. Second, if you haven’t done this already, put the book in a metaphorical drawer and don’t look at it for a few weeks. Then get it out again and revise it as much as you need to in order to polish it to the highest possible standard. It may take a few drafts, or many, to get it right. (It took me over 30 drafts until I was happy with my first published book.)

While you’re doing that, I strongly recommend you buy or borrow the latest edition of the Writers and Artists Yearbook, which is the bible for new writers. It lists all the publishers and agents, and what they’re looking for. Each agency has different requirements and is very specific. Please follow their guidelines, down to the line spacing. Once you’ve found a few that are looking for the kind of book you’ve written, you can send off to them. If they only want a few chapters, send them what they’ve asked for, not more. Do let them know that you’re applying to more than one at a time. They will understand, but they like to be informed. Craft your covering letter as carefully as your book, and make sure that without being overconfident, you sell yourself as a writer as much as you sell your story.

And then wait! If you get any feedback, think of it as a very positive thing and use it as much as you can. And start writing your next book. Because it might be your second, or third, or fourth that’s the one that makes it.

Good luck!

sophia

Edinburgh Book Fest, part 1

Last week was one of those ‘best job in the world’ weeks. I was invited up to the Edinburgh Book Festival, to talk about writing for teens. Every year, Charlotte Square is transformed into a tented village devoted to books, readers, coffee and cake. So basically heaven. Even if it is a little bit rainy, sometimes.

I took my elder son with me, as I occasionally do, because he’s an avid reader and loves getting the chance to meet and talk to some of his favourite authors. (He is, however, not a fan of selfies.)

I didn’t have to worry about what to say, because my talk was chaired by Eve Harvey, a super-friendly writer and ex-bookseller and the only person I know who exclusively wears Doc Martens with ribbons for laces. She totally won the prize for The Coolest Footwear at the Festival. Her job was to chat with me and  the very lovely Holly Smale, who wrote … oh, you know what she wrote.

Geek Girl  was the best selling YA book of last year, and probably the funniest. In my humble opinion book 2, Model Misfit (set largely in Japan and featuring an irrascible cat called Kylie Minogue), is even better. If you haven’t read it, READ IT NOW. Book 3, Picture Perfect, is set in New York and I’m half way through it. That’s fab too. How does Holly do it? That woman is a WRITING MACHINE. She was also a great person to do an event with. We did a reading each and answered questions solidly for about 40 minutes.

Our biggest revelation? Probably that what you see on the page is not what we wrote the first time. Oh no. That is draft a hundred and fifty squillionth. Our first draft was rubbish. Always is. We worked on it to get it better. If you’re a writer, so can you. Don’t worry if you don’t love what you’re doing right now. Keep at it and, with practice and patience, you might write the YA smash-hit bestseller of the year. You never know.

We spent our time getting ready and chatting afterwards in the authors’ yurt. Just how gorgeous is this? (It is an actual, real yurt, not a tent, and is filled with coffee, cake, wine, helpful volunteers and famous authors. If I could live there, I probably would.)

This picture is a bit wonky because I took it surreptitiously. The yurt is a place for looking like you hang out with Julia Donaldson and Meg Rosoff ALL THE TIME, and not wildly fangirling with your phone out. (However …)

The Festival also has its own bookshop. This is where I’m quite pleased that I married a man whose surname is alphabetically close to Malorie Blackman’s. Shelf-wise, Malorie and I hang out quite a bit, and that’s fine by me.

Sadly, I didn’t see the real Malorie in the yurt, because she came a day later, but the Edinburgh Book Fest is the kind of place where you might find that the person pouring your coffee is the Children’s Laureate. See what I mean? Best job in the world.

But that’s not all we did in Edinburgh this year. Oh no. Coming up shortly … Edinburgh Part 2, featuring chocolate (lots of it), fairy lights, comedy, a rainbow unicorn and a semi-naked man up a ladder, juggling knives. I am only making one of those things up.

Come back soon and I’ll tell you all about it.

 

How to Be a Writer

As you probably know, I write a regular blog post for Girls Heart Books, which is a great site run by writers of fiction for girls (or mostly girls), about us, and our books, and being a writer. If you haven’t already, check it out!

My last post was advice I’d given to a 16 year-old girl called Nicole, who wrote to me asking if I could give her any help finding work experience in the field of writing.

She ended her email like this: ‘Therefore, essentially what I’m asking is, do you have any/know of any work experience opportunities for a hard working, creative and versatile 16 year old?’

It was a good question, from an articulate girl who was clearly passionate about what she wanted to do.

I remember feeling exactly how she felt when I was 16, so for Nicole, and for the 16 year-old me, and for all other teens who might be wondering what they should do to make their writing dreams real … here’s what I said last week on Girls Heart Books.

“Hi Nicole

Thanks so much for your message. I can understand your frustration and I sympathise!

While I know many writers who would just love someone to help them at home, it would end up being with all the things they have to do that aren’t writing, such as finding travel receipts, and filing, and other very boring jobs. Shadowing is also a tricky one, as all the interesting stuff is going on in an author’s head. Watching her make lots of cups of tea, procrastinate, spend too much time on the web, pick up her children from school and then madly tap away on her laptop while they’re having tea would probably not teach you much about the craft you love, sadly.

I think if you got the chance to work in a publishing company one day, that would teach you a lot about the commercial decisions that have to be made for a book to be successful. So take a job like that if you can. But as you say, they probably only take people over 18. My best suggestion would be to see if you can get a weekend job – paid or otherwise – in a bookshop. Especially an independent one. Then you’ll get your hands on lots of books and see what people are reading, what they love, what they ask for, and what booksellers like to recommend. All the booksellers I know are fonts of knowledge.

But meanwhile, the best, most obvious and most important thing you can do is ….

Just write. Every day. Read a lot and practise different styles. Finish your stories. Hone your craft. Imagining ‘what it’s like to be a writer’ (which I cheerfully admit I did all the time in my teens and twenties) is actually just an act of procrastination. When it comes to it, you just work that bit out as you go along. The important part is the writing itself, and you only learn that by doing it and doing it and doing it.

If you need to get out of the house, and you can’t do the bookshop thing, then get whatever summer jobs/helping people out jobs you can. They’ll all feed your writing. Help out at an old people’s home. Visit old ladies. Work in a kids’ camp. Meet people and see how they interact with other people. Notice what makes them tick. That’s what will make your writing rich and varied later on. Much more so than doing any writer’s filing ever could.

Good luck!

So that’s what I told Nicole. I would also add ‘Write for anyone who lets you. At this stage, don’t ask to be paid. Just do it for the experience. Create your own magazine if you have to. And keep a copy of everything you do.’

If you’re wondering what you can do on the road to becoming a writer, I hope it helps just a little bit. And if you’re a writer yourself, what advice would YOU give to someone like Nicole?”

BBAs, Eggs, Boats and Quizzes

It’s been a busy few days. I’m surprised how much writing, in the middle of it all, has been done. Not a vast amount, admittedly. But some.

Perhaps it helps that this has been my view since yesterday morning:

I’m staying with friends in Cornwall, because I was a guest at the Kids’ Lit Quiz World Final, which took place in Falmouth this afternoon. It was FABULOUS, as it always is, with quizmaster Wayne Mills, from New Zealand, setting and asking all the questions, and teams from Singapore, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, Canada, the USA and the UK all competing for the KLQ cup. And I’m pleased to say that, after a thrilling contest, the UK team – from City of London School for Girls – won! There was much celebration, as you can imagine, by the home crowd.

It’s a brilliant event and any school can enter a team of Year 7s and 8s into regional heats, to compete for the national finals. If you’re at a school with keen readers, I recommend you do. Wayne asks challenging and imaginative questions about a vast range of books, from the classics to Veronica Roth. Next year’s world final will be in the USA. Just saying …

On the way, I popped in to a boat party being held in Bath by my old editor, Imogen Cooper (as in, she used to be my editor – she’s not remotely old), to mark the first birthday of her new and amazing Golden Egg Academy. Here’s Barry Cunningham from Chicken House, entertaining writers on the Penny Lane:

The Golden Egg Academy was just a plan on Imogen’s kitchen table this time last year, and now it has 200 members – all aspiring children’s writers, who get access to top-level editorial input, workshops, writing tools and more, to help them find the heart of their story and get their precious manuscripts ready to submit to agents and publishers.

What was extra lovely was that the party was organised by some of the members themselves. As Ben Illis, a visiting agent, put it in his entertaining Q&A (yes, the boat party had an ask-the-agent Q&A – it was great), one of the most valuable things members would get from the GEA was support from each other, which would last throughout their writing lives. Go find them on Twitter. They’re always at it – asking questions and talking about books. When they’re not eating cake on a boat, that is …

The week before, it was all about the Best Book Awards, run by the Booktrust.

I’ve written about those on my website, so you’ll find more details there. To cut a long story short, it was another party (I know, but believe me, I spend most of my life not going to parties) and it was also great fun, because it was full of children and grown-ups who are passionate about books. And I lost out to John Green in the 12-14 Best Story Book category. JOHN GREEN! So that was really, really OK.

Here, in case you need to see them, are the shoes:

And here is Helen Skelton, who was one of the judges …

And Michael Morpurgo …

And Mel Giederoyc, who was hilarious as the main presenter …

And this was my seat. Frankly, the event was worth it for my reserved seat sign alone.

That’s not the end of the parties. There’s another one on Saturday, for lots of writers and bloggers attending the Young Adult Literature Conference in London. If you’re on the list, I’ll see you there.

Meanwhile, I should probably get on with writing a book.

And proof pages – what are those?

As I’ve mentioned before, my most popular post on this blog is something I wrote way back in 2010, called And what is line editing exactly? It’s all about palimpsests, and it describes my experiences of getting close to the end of editing my first two books.

I was discovering then, and have since become more certain, that everyone’s experience of the editing process is different. It depends on the book, the publishing house, the way your editor (or editors) like to work, and you … Much like the writing itself, it helps to know how other people do it and see it, but eventually you just have to go your own way and work it out for yourself.

I’ve just finished book 6, The Castle, which comes out in August. So far it has been through edit 1, with editor Imogen, then edits 2 and 3 (both fairly major) with editor Bella. Edit 3 was so detailed that it effectively became the line edit. Hugely painful at the time, revisiting every sentence, testing each one for the pace of the plot and the depth and development of the main character’s emotional journey – but brilliant when it came to the next stage, the copy edit (which I normally dread), because there was very little to do.

The copy editor gets the manuscript once you’ve nailed down the story and characters and, as far as you and your editor are concerned, every paragraph is nigh-on as perfect as it’s going to get. She’s there to check the manuscript objectively for internal inconsistencies, factual inaccuracies, grammatical oddities, and deviation from house style in grammar or spelling. It can be a nightmare (‘She was outside. Now she’s inside. How did she get through the door?’ ‘How can she know [insert character’s name] when she’s never met him?) But this time was different.  In fact, if you took out the copy editor’s preference for italics over apostrophes, which I was fine with, there were only about a dozen changes. Unheard of for me! I took the opportunity to make lots of fine-tuning textual changes of my own. And then the text was ‘finished’. Which meant it was ready for the typesetters. And then, a few weeks later, came the proofs.

Proof pages tend to come as a print-out – the first time, these days, that you get a paper package in the post, rather than an email – of the pages as they will look in the book. It set out in landscape, with two book pages to each side of A4 and it’s thrilling. You finally get to see the text as the reader will see it: so many words to a page, the chapter headings in that font, in that position … and the idea is to change as little as possible: only any mistakes that may have crept in.

My memories of other proof edits are dim, because by then I’m always onto the next book and this is something that has to be done quite quickly (the typesetters are waiting!), and hopefully without too much fuss. This one was fascinating.

I had expected to want to race through it as quickly as possible, then get back to the new book I’m writing, but in fact I enjoyed it. There had been a decent break between edits, whereas most of the others had been back to back, so I’d had a breathing space and could come to the text fresh. Several sentences that hadn’t flowed properly and had bothered me throughout the long writing process suddenly resolved themselves. Because the lines are much shorter in a printed book than they are in a Word document, I could spot repetitions I hadn’t noticed before. There were a few places where mistakes had crept in in the last edit – missing words, plural verbs with single subjects – but they were rare. Sharpened pencil at the ready, I hope I caught them all.

It wasn’t all criticism. There were a couple of places where I felt the writing actually flowed as I had always wanted it to, and where I was quite proud of it. But on the whole, wherever I looked, there was something I could tweak to make it better. Often a word, occasionally only a paragraph break, or a comma. (I tried to limit myself with comma changes. When you get to that level of detail, you know it’s time to step away.)

The last page was only two and a half lines long. That had to change. What reader wants to turn to the final page and discover she’s only got half a sentence to go? We agreed to format the chapter slightly differently so it would work. And at the very last minute, I took out the penultimate chapter completely. It was only two pages long, so not complicated to do from a typesetting point of view. And I realised, coming to it fresh, that much to my surprise it was totally redundant. Everything important it had to say was captured, better, in the chapter that followed. So out it’s gone.

The book is done now. I won’t see it again until it’s printed. And strange to think, having read the text hundreds and hundreds of times, I will probably never read it straight through again. I’ll read bits, to find appropriate extracts for readings in school visits, but never from cover to cover. For now, it’s on to book 7 …