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Archives for March 2017

Hidden Stories: the story behind the story

March 13, 2017 by Jacqui Lofthouse Filed Under: Authors, Books, Character, Guest post, Inspiration, Writers Leave a Comment

We are delighted to announce the publication of The Belfast Girl by former Writing Coach Client Caroline Doherty de Novoa. Caroline writes this guest post about hidden stories to celebrate her publication.

Hidden stories, The Belfast Girl, Caroline Doherty de Novoa, Story

The Belfast Girl by Caroline Doherty de Novoa

A lesson in journalism

Nora Ephron’s high school journalism teacher once set the class an assignment to write an article for the student newspaper, about an all day conference all faculty members were attending the following Thursday. Nora went away, interviewed the teachers, found out all the relevant facts about the conference: the times, the topics, the speakers. She wrote it up, taking care over every sentence, making sure it was well structured and clear. And she handed it in feeling quietly confident.

The following Monday, the teacher gave back the papers. Or threw them back to be more precise. Nora, the over-achieving straight-A student was horrified when the teacher, a look of disgust on his face, dumped her paper on the desk in front of her with a big red C minus scrawled across it.

The teacher walked to the front of the room and started writing something up on the board. Here is the real story:

‘Time to celebrate: there’s no class on Thursday.’

I know it was a lesson in journalism. But I think about it a lot when I’m sitting down to write a short story, a novel or, in my latest adventure, a play.

Caroliine Doherty de Novoa

Caroline Doherty de Novoa

The unseen story

Where is the unseen story that’s crouched around the edges of the obvious , perhaps only just visible in your peripheral vision, perhaps only discoverable if you lift up the obvious, take a look underneath it, or turn it around and look at it from a different angle?

I recently read Chimerica, the play by Lucy Kirkwood about ‘Tank Man’. You may not immediately recognise him by his nickname but you’ve probably seen a photo of him. Black trousers, a simple white shirt, hands at his sides holding large shopping bags, a large tank advancing towards him.

Tank Man is the nickname of the man who stood in front of a Chinese army tank on the morning of 5th June 1989—the day after the Tiananmen Square Massacre. As the tank manoeuvred to bypass him, Tank Man repeatedly put himself in front of the tank’s path, obstructing its march forward.

Chimerica by Lucy Kirkwood

Tank Man appears on the cover of Chimerica. And you’d be forgiven for thinking the play is about him. His story must be interesting, right?

The play opens at the exact moment Tank Man is staring down the tank. But the first scene isn’t set in the square. It’s in a hotel room. There’s a US photographer leaning out the window taking that famous picture. And you soon realise there is another story there beyond the one that’s immediately apparent—the story of the man behind the camera.

Later in the play, as we follow the photographer in his search for Tank Man, the man who made him famous, we realise there is, actually, a third man whose story is just as fascinating, just as important. He isn’t Tank Man. He isn’t the photographer. But the risks he took were just as great. And he’s been there, right in front of us, all along. If only we’d known how to really look—how to see the story lingering in the shadows.

Hidden stories

I’ve been thinking a lot about those hidden stories recently, ever since I published my second novel last month and started talking to people about it.

People ask, ‘what’s it about?’

‘Motherhood,’ I’ll explain, ‘the book opens in a Belfast hotel room in 1993—a couple in their late-thirties are buying a baby from a younger couple.’ And then I’ll get that look. Sometimes, I even get that question. It comes in a variety of forms:

‘Are you getting broody?’

‘Will we hear the pitter patter of tiny feet soon?’

Or, my favourite: ‘Are you guys thinking of having a family?’ (As if my husband, my parents, my sister and her kids, my many wonderful aunts, uncles and cousins I’m blessed with don’t really count.)

You see I’m a woman in my late-thirties, happily married and childless. People see me, they hear the premise for the book, and they automatically think they know what I want, they think they get my story.

They don’t stop to think about what’s going on at the periphery of that opening scene in the hotel—in the room and outside of it—about all the strands flowing from the same event, all the alternative ways of looking. Who can blame them? We so rarely do look beyond the obvious. I often don’t. Which is why, to remind me, I have a post-it note stuck next to my writing desk with the words ‘Time to celebrate: there’s no class on Thursday.’

When people ask about the note, I say, ‘Let me tell you a story. In fact, let me tell you three.’

Caroline Doherty de Novoa’s second novel, The Belfast Girl is out now. Her other work includes Dancing with Statues, a novel set in Ireland and Colombia, and the anthology of creative non-fiction Was Gabo an Irishman? Tales from Gabriel García Márquez’s Colombia, which she co-authored and edited.

To learn more about Caroline’s writing please visit www.carolinedohertydenovoa.com or find her on twitter @carolinedenovoa

You can read about Caroline’s work with The Writing Coach here.

 

The Importance of Reading: ‘Reading as Alchemy’

March 1, 2017 by Jacqui Lofthouse Filed Under: Authors, Books, Guest post, Inspiration, Reading, The writing life, Writers Leave a Comment

We are thrilled to announce that Miranda Gold, a former Writing Coach client, has had her first novel Starlings published by Karnac Books. To celebrate her success, we are delighted to be the first to publish Miranda’s wonderful lyrical essay ‘Reading as Alchemy’ about the importance of reading – and her take on  keeping the reader ‘on the page’. Miranda will also be appearing at Jewish Book Week on 5th March 2017.

Miranda Gold Starlings, importance of reading

‘Starlings’ – the debut novel by Miranda Gold

The October I spent at UEA was cold and damp, but I invested in a failsafe cocktail of vodka and poetry to keep me warm. Student essentials: one to trick me into a blundering dance, the other pulling back the curtains, tugging me out into the day. The vodka offered an immediate (if predictable) metamorphosis, all too easily reversed; the poetry was, and continues to be, subtly transformative, its potency less easily measured.

Nine o’clock on a Monday morning may not be the obvious highlight of a fresher’s week and, trudging through the drizzle across campus, I hardly imagined it would be an hour I would come to treasure. Four of us would turn up at Marina Mackay’s office, her Scot’s voice lifting our eyes on to the sonnet she’d place in our hands and those fourteen lines would sit silently on the page until, word by word, they began to speak. One voice became several, spiralling out far beyond the page, reverberating with all the poetry it was in conversation with, reverberating with us. Clarity can be seductive, but when you are drawn into a world shaped out of words, one that takes its time to let you in, the effect is enduring. It is another way of listening that flashes up another way of seeing.

Staying on the page

It was poetry that first taught me what it meant to stay on the page, which is another way of saying it taught me how to read and, later, how to write. The concentration of meaning invites a curious, lingering attention. It’s something of a cliché to talk about the affinity poetry has with music, but the only danger with clichés is that we stop hearing the truth they hold, not that there isn’t any truth within them. Cliché or not, the crux is that poetry suspends the reader, holds them there – and not just because of the shapes it takes in front of our eyes – though there can be comfort in certain forms, that appearance of containment – but the shock is often visceral when the poet breaks an established rhythm; we are anchored by an intrinsic logic, then shown its fragility. That’s what does it – the physicality – because rhythm is physical: it bypasses that cerebral clutch for the explicable and goes straight to the heart of knowing. The day to day has little patience for ambiguity, it’s frightening because it holds us up – but on the page there is space to absorb it, and the questions unfold rather than confront. For me, it is the qualities of language beyond dictionary definitions that allow this – the aural and metrical qualities, those that embody rather than denote meaning.

Miranda Gold, importance of reading

Miranda Gold, author of ‘Starlings’

If the novel were to try and impersonate poetry it would stall pretty quickly, but novels that tap into some of poetry’s magic are often the ones that give flesh to the bones of narrative and we feel the breath flicker, the heart pulse. Turning the page comes more naturally than staying on it of course – and this is compounded by the velocity with which our world moves – but if there is one thing we share with every era before us, it is surely the fear that we cannot keep up; every age has its Frankenstein. We read first for plot, but we don’t simply read for plot , and it’s when we slow down that there is the potential for empathy and empathy must be one of fiction’s greatest treasures – when else can we sustain the impression of living and feeling inside another skin? That’s why picking up a book can feel like such an investment, it asks something of us, even if we’re not conscious of it. That’s the paradox – it draws us in precisely because it makes a demand on us – we want to care, we want to find significance and be part of creating it and, perhaps most importantly, we want at once to find ourselves in another world yet still find something of a mirror there too – it’s about touching the distant and realising it’s not so far away.

“It sounds almost like alchemy and maybe it is” – the importance of reading closely

Doubtless, there is an impulse for momentum – that forward drive, whose counterpart in fiction is narrative, is essential, it creates that sense of urgency which can’t be separated from the instinct for survival. But just as we might want to live for more than simply getting through the day, pulsing from one event to the next, we might want to stretch out both sense and sensation that is layered on the page. What and who is drawing that narrative on? What is it that pulls a reader right inside the core of a single moment when the only medium is words? Words absorbed by the imagination and transformed. It sounds almost like alchemy – and maybe it is. Reading and writing, two supposedly solitary activities, are, in fact the most intimate of unions. When the words on the page spark recognition or tap into a latent but never fully articulated sense we might have always had, it can feel as though those words might have been written for us, that we understand and are understood. It is not about time or place, it is not about facts or details – it is about making a connection; particularities are just the writer’s way of opening the door to the world of the story and the reader’s map in. That feeling of exclusivity may just be another clever illusion – one that is multiplied by as many readers as the book has – but that doesn’t make the experience or affect insubstantial. The shifts fiction create may be subtle, delayed; explicit protest and high drama are not the only routes to change: we might locate something that sends us into the world a little differently, building a slower but possibly more enduring momentum.

importance of reading, London Review of Books Bookshop, Miranda Gold, Starlings

Miranda Gold reads from ‘Starlings’ at her launch at the London Review Bookshop

If you’d like to hear Miranda Gold speak, she will be appearing on Sunday 5th March at 4.30pm at King’s Place, St Pancras as part of Jewish Book Week, talking about her extraordinary first novel, Starlings, together with Katy Guest, editor of Unbound Books.

“Starlings captures a family unravelling as the unspeakable finds a voice, and is by turns sad, hopeful, and deeply compelling. It explores inherited trauma, how the impact of untold stories ricochets down the years.”

 

 

 

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Jacqui Lofthouse

The Writing Coach was founded in 2005 by the novelist Jacqui Lofthouse. An international mentoring and development organisation for writers, it is also an online home for writers, somewhere you can find advice, information, motivation and most of all encouragement for your writing work ... read more

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Anna Bright never wanted to write a novel. At least, that’s what she tells herself. But a chance encounter with a famous novelist and a surprise gift of an art book cut a chink in Anna’s resolve. The short, tragic life of Modigliani’s mistress, Jeanne Hébuterne, becomes an obsession and before she knows it, she has enrolled on a creative writing course, is writing about a fictional Jeanne and mixing with the literati.

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