Guest post - The Writing Coach

The Silence of the Archives – A guest post by Pete Langman

February 24, 2020 by Jacqui Lofthouse Filed Under: Authors, Books, Character, Guest post, Inspiration, Literary Consultancy, Reading, The writing coach, The writing life, Writers 1 Comment

Our former client Pete Langman, author of Killing Beauties, met his publisher John Mitchinson of Unbound at our Writing Coach ‘Google Academy’ event

Here he writes about how we transform archival material when writing historical fiction.

If it takes an historian to rediscover an exciting but little-known character’s life, the historical novelist can imagine them a new one. But how does this work, and what are the pitfalls? These questions were brought into sharp relief during the writing of Killing Beauties, a novel that follows the adventures of two female spies, Susan Hyde and Diana Jennings, in 1655/6, when England was a republic under the rule of Oliver Cromwell. These women dealt in information, and the novel begins the delivery of a message that will change their lives.

I was introduced to Susan and Diana by my partner, Dr Nadine Akkerman, as she was researching her (bloody splendid) book Invisible Agents: women and espionage in seventeenth-century Britain. She wasn’t that far into the task before it seemed as if Nadine was operating more as spycatcher than researcher, and it was only in the face of her relentless work that the she-intelligencers slowly gave up their secrets. As Nadine put ever more flesh on their archival bones, we began to realise that they were the perfect protagonists to star in a work of historical fiction. What was so promising about this pair was partially the fact that they were operating in the same circles at the same time, and yet don’t appear to have met, and partially the fact that their lack of excitement about the idea of being caught led to their tracks being pretty well covered over.

These women were slippery characters, and the archives would only give up so much information, making it difficult to work out an absolutely solid and continuous trajectory to their stories. This, of course, is not unusual, however, it’s just how history works. Archives rarely answer every question you put to them.

There are two approaches available to the historical novelist: to fictionalise history or historicise fiction. A fictionalised history is one in which a story is woven around actual events, while historicised fiction is one in which historical detail is inserted into a story. I would say I chose the former, but it would be more accurate to say that the former chose me.

Archives do not tell us everything. There are always gaps. Sometimes you can fill them in by using other sources (though this needs to be approached with care), but sometimes they simply insist on remaining as gaps. The primary site of divergence between the historian and the novelist is in the way they approach these gaps: for the former they are traps; the latter, portals. I could make the gaps work with me rather than against me.

The stories of Susan and Diana were very detailed in certain areas, and utterly obscure in others. Diana practically vanishes until the 1660s following her arrest in 1655, while Susan’s final few days on earth are recorded in a letter that also says her body was spirited away from prison by friends. Edward Hyde, her brother and the author of the History of the Rebellion fails to mention her death at the hands of Parliament. This omission, the reasons for which we can only speculate upon, gave me a great opportunity. I had a solid story of a woman risking all for king and country, and losing. The fact that she then vanishes from the records meant that I could do anything I wanted, within reason.

The opportunity that the archives presents to novelists

Where there is a lack of evidence, the historian must tread carefully, warily avoiding suppositions and remembering not to fall foul of the sin of repeating a ‘perhaps Shakespeare had seen X’ in the form of ‘having seen X, Shakespeare …’. The historian may speculate, but carefully, very, very carefully. Both historian and novelist chart the same territory, but the latter may draw the map that results however they wish.

People in the past appear more reliable, honest, predictable and knowable than we are for one reason – their stories are fixed in the history books. It is in that fixedness that we find the safety of truth. But truth, like the history presented in books, is in large part an illusion.

The stories of Susan and Diana were rich enough in information to show me the way, and yet it was the silence of the archives that allowed me the freedom to play.

Creativity and Leadership – A Guest Post by Trevor Waldock

July 15, 2019 by Jacqui Lofthouse Filed Under: Authors, Books, Guest post, Inspiration, Interviews, Literary Consultancy, Self-publishing, The writing coach, The writing life, Uncategorized, Writers 1 Comment

We are delighted to share this guest post by Trevor Waldock. Trevor is one of the best-known, and best-respected, executive coaches in Europe and has worked at the most senior level in organisations across all sectors. The author of Doing the Right Thing – Getting Fit for Moral Leadership, he is also the founder of Emerging Leaders, a charity, which aims to bring the best of leadership development to the poorest of communities in sub-Saharan Africa.

I have struggled for years with being a writer. Am I a writer? How do I know? How do I judge the answer to that question? I write. Yes. But do I write well and how do I make an honest assessment of myself? I recently published my sixth book on Amazon Kindle Doing The Right Thing, so you could say that makes me a writer. But do the four books published on Amazon Kindle carry the same weight as my books that were published by ‘real’ publishers on real paper? Is Amazon Kindle cheating? I’m sure that every writer has to wrestle with their own demons and these are just a few of mine. One of the great tensions that I have battled to resolve over the past years is the need, the desire, the urge to write, on one side and the fact that I run an international charity on the other side. In my book Jericho & Other Short Stories, I wrote a story called Poets & Engineers. It captured something of this tension. My job often demands me to be an engineer – issues of structure, details, processes, boundaries and delivery – yet by heart, I am a poet.

How to resolve such a tension? One way was to write about my work in developing leaders in both the first and third worlds, in The 18 Challenges of Leadership and To Plant A Walnut Tree. While I was writing about aspects of leadership – like my latest book Doing The Right Thing – then I could tell myself that my writing was part of my job. That way I could justify carrying on leading and carrying on writing. But that doesn’t explain my book about travelling around Rwanda with my son 11 years after the Genocide, or my short stories books, or the short book Am I Really Tired? which could be seen as work or maybe not.

The tension came to a head for me in a dream that I had a few years ago. I was trying to get back home and came to the High Street but a police line cordoned it off. As I tried to find out why I could not go down the normal route home, I discovered that someone had died there. A murder or death of some kind. So I had to find a different way home. The scene then cuts to me talking with my dad who was asking me about my writing and I was telling him how much I wanted to write. He was so overwhelmingly supportive and said he would do anything he could to support me financially and that I should just get on and write. (In real life my dad showed zero interest in my writing. I’m not sure I even told him of my aspirations). The dream was one of those shocking dreams that you know you have to listen to. The meaning of the dream, for me, is summed up by a scrap of paper that I wrote soon afterwards, which still sits on my desk. It simply says,

“Write or die”

So I made some tough changes in my daily routines. Firstly I decided that whatever the risks to my leadership role I had to write and so I set aside each morning to write and read things that would fertilise my writing. The next thing I did was talk through my ‘real’ job with a coach. What he helped me see was that I had segregated the idea of leader from that of creativity. It had become an either-or, in my mind. He came up with this idea that my strength was as a creative leader. Creativity can show itself in coming up with ideas, shaping strategy, forming new ideas and… writing about them. Reforming my identity in this way led me back to the definition of leadership that I love most and use across the world.

“Leadership is the ability to create a story that affects the thoughts, feelings and actions of others ” (‘Leading mind’ – Howard Gardner, 2011)

Leaders are authors. They create stories and they can do that with thoughts, with actions, with inventions, with innovations, with imagination and vision and with words.

So, armed with these liberating insights I am trying to be kinder to myself. To embrace the totality of who I am as a writer, rather than segment myself in someway. Writing has become like a thermometer or warning light. When I’m not writing and caught up in the operational realities of leading an organisation (the engineer) then I know that I am out of balance and very soon I will feel the ‘soul death’, as I call it, creeping upon me. So when I see that happening I stop and I write (the poet). This is no theory for me. I write this on the first afternoon of three days vacation that I’ve taken. Taking the vacation was a last minute decision, made only the night before, because I knew I was out of balance. So I stopped and I’m writing and I feel some new blood flowing through my veins today. I write because it’s who I am.

Teaching Writing: Editing vs. Coaching

February 8, 2019 by Jacqui Lofthouse Filed Under: Editing, Guest post, Inspiration, Literary Consultancy, The writing coach, The writing life, Writers Leave a Comment

A Guest Post by writing coach consultant Delia Lloyd.

Delia Lloyd

There’s a scene in one of my all-time favourite films, All that Jazz, that addresses the perennial question about innate talent vs. learned ability. In the scene, the protagonist – a choreographer modelled on the legendary Bob Fosse – confronts a ballerina in his company who’s crying because she knows she’s not as good as the other dancers.

“I can’t make you a great dancer,” Fosse consoles her. “But I can make you a better dancer.”

That’s how I feel when I work with writers.

I don’t know if there’s such a thing as being a “natural talent” in writing. You can definitely see when a writer has a gift – David Foster Wallace, Amos Oz, and my new idol – Anna Burns – all come to mind. But, as we all know, years of half-written sentences and crumpled up drafts – not to mention gallons of self-doubt – lie behind any prose that looks effortless.

For most of us mere mortals, however, writing is mostly about putting your bum in the chair and being willing to write shitty first drafts. So then the question becomes: how do you help people become “better dancers?”

For a long time, I worked with writers primarily as an editor. Someone would give me a draft of a paper and I would fill it with red ink, altering word choice, verb tenses and sentence length. Invariably, I would also recommend that they completely rewrite their introductions so as to hint at the entire shape of things to come. I’m a firm believer that if you get the introduction right, the whole paper writes itself.

These days, I spend more time as a writing coach. My advice still boils down to some combination of exhorting them to work on both style and structure. But the process is quite different. For starters, I don’t “fix” anything. I mark up clients’ drafts to show them where they might improve their writing. Mostly, however, what we do is talk.

We talk through their arguments to clarify what they are trying to say. I try to show them that even if they feel confused, they actually know what they wish to say. They just need to move what’s in their heads onto the page.

Sometimes, we do exercises together to practice various aspects of good writing. We look at how to experiment with “strong starts,” how to identify one’s audience and meet its needs, and how to use mind maps to organise key points and supporting evidence.

Other times, we simply talk about why they feel under-confident in their writing. They tell me about a boss who told them that they weren’t any good at writing, so they should just avoid it. Or about a thesis adviser who abandoned them, interested only in seeing the final product, not guiding them through the process.

For me, editing and coaching both constitute helping professions. The primary difference is that with coaching, you get more insight into the whole person who sits behind the written word. And you don’t so much “do something” to their writing as empower them to do it themselves.

I’m not sure if I am producing any prima ballerinas. But I certainly enjoy helping the writers I work with become better dancers.

An interview with novelist Stuart Warner

September 21, 2017 by Jacqui Lofthouse Filed Under: Authors, Books, Guest post, Inspiration, Interviews, Motivation, Self-publishing, The writing coach, The writing life, Writers 2 Comments

In this post, our Founder Jacqui Lofthouse interviews her former client, the novelist Stuart Warner, author of The Sound of Everything. They discuss his transition from poet to novelist.

Novelist and Poet Stuart Warner

When we first met, in your writing life you were primarily a poet. What made you want to transition to novel-writing?

I recall telling friends how much I admired people who’d shown sufficient determination to write a novel. I’d written hundreds of articles, as well as the poetry, so I knew I could write fluid prose. I set out on the first draft as an adventure to see whether I could produce a story of 80,000 words or so – whether I had the persistence to do so. That was my initial goal: simply to produce a first draft.

Did you have an initial impulse that prompted you to write the story that you chose? Did you begin with a story premise or just an image or an idea for a character…?

My decision to write a novel came first. I then had to decide what to write about. Having read Stephen King’s On Writing, I’d decided not to make a detailed plan. I took a few days off work and, on day one, I sat down at my desk, fountain pen in hand, and wrote a single page of notes. It was about 300 words. Rereading it now, I’d call it a rough synopsis. It contained several ideas, which carried through to what became The Sound Of Everything. Mostly, it was about the protagonist: the pickle he’s in and what he wants instead. After writing those 300 words, I turned to a fresh page and started chapter one. Interestingly, the first sentence I wrote had nothing to do with my initial notes, yet it drew on an image I’d been carrying round in my head for a while, a location which plays a major part in the novel.

It’s interesting to me that an image was central to your beginning – as I too, often work from images and strong hunches. I’ve noticed the importance of landscape too in your novel… what role do you think a sense of place plays in your writing?

Place is very important in the novel and it has been in my poetry, too. The Sound Of Everything is set mainly in a small town on the Welsh border, though there are also a couple of hill-top scenes. Certain locations – or types of location – seem to resonate with what’s going on inside us. For example, someone might feel the freedom of the wide-open spaces on a beach or a mountain, or a sense of being trapped by their daily routine in an urban environment. For someone else, I guess the opposite could be true. For me, there’s some sort of interplay between what one might think of as the magic and the mundane: what we see with our eyes, what we feel inside and, perhaps, what we experience beyond the five senses. Writing about different landscapes helps me access that interplay.

Beyond the five senses – you’ve sometimes described this, I know, as ‘spiritual fiction’?

I’d say it’s a small-town mystery with a spiritual aspect – spiritual in the sense of questions we might sometimes ask ourselves, such as ‘Who am I?’, ‘What am I doing here?’ or ‘What’s the meaning of life?’ Going back to your previous question on place, while my initial 300-word outline related to the external plot, the image that came through in the first line I wrote – sentence one, paragraph one – was concerned with the protagonist’s internal exploration. It was only when I came to working with you on the second draft that I delved down deeply into that exploration – the feelings the protagonist experiences when he starts to open to that side of himself. It was difficult to decide what Amazon genre the finished novel fitted into, but I plumped for visionary and metaphysical. Spiritual seemed to me to be too much associated with Christian fiction, whereas the novel resonates more with Eastern ways of thinking – yoga, for example.

That’s fascinating, that the mentoring process allowed you to delve deeper into the protagonist’s inner exploration. Is that what you expected?

When I found your website, I wrote an email to you to enquire about your one year mentorship programme. Here’s what I said: ‘I’ve just finished the first draft of my debut novel and so I’m a beginner as far as novels are concerned… Completing the first draft, regardless of its merit, has given me a huge confidence boost. I now feel ready to commit to learning the skills that I will need to become a published novelist. ’ I had no idea what to expect from working with you, but I figured it made sense to learn from someone who’d already achieved what I was setting out to do, particularly as I’d never studied creative writing.

One of the key points you made in our first meeting, having read chapter one, was that I needed to show why my protagonist acted as he did, by describing what he was experiencing from his point of view. I’d done that in a few places but, generally, the point of view I’d used was too distant. I know now that you were teaching me a technique to improve my writing, but you also opened a door for me, one which helped to strengthen the bridge between my writing of the novel and the way I’d approached my poetry.

I’m so glad that the new closeness in point of view has revealed a link between your fiction and your poetry. For those who might be considering working with a mentor, what in your view, have been the main benefits of the work we’ve done together?

Just to explain how it worked, I’d send you an extract – 6,000 words or so – about a week before our meeting date. You’d then read and mark up the extract before we met. In meetings, which were on the phone as we live 250 miles apart, you’d give me feedback. We’d discuss what you said and we always ended the meeting with an action plan for the next month. Three or four weeks later, I’d send you a new extract ready for our next meeting. Meanwhile, you’d post the marked-up extract back to me. This went on for a year.

The regular schedule was superb because it enabled me to put in a renewed burst of activity every four or five weeks, trying to put into practice what we’d discussed. I’d have to work hard to produce the next 6,000-word extract – sometimes, the same extract as the previous time but substantially rewritten. Then, I’d send it to you and receive almost instant feedback on how well I’d achieved my goals. Rather than slaving over a whole manuscript for a year and then sending it to a beta reader or agent, I’d get ‘mini-reviews’ of my work every month. I believe that accelerated my learning process.

While you were always very positive in your feedback, you always encouraged me to go further. I would usually feel that I’d made huge strides forward each time and you always liked what I’d done. But, after every meeting, I felt I could delve even deeper, because that’s what you asked me to do. That was the bridge with the poetry. When I wrote my poems, I was expressing my truth, as best I could, in a few short words. With the novel, your mentoring helped me to dig down to that same depth in a much longer written work. Of course, I also learnt much in the way of technique. Probably the most important point was the need for the protagonist and other main characters to act in a way consistent with what would be going on in their head: psychological realism you called it, I believe. Why would they act that way after what happened in the previous scene? What was their motivation?

What has changed for you in your writing life in the last year?

The biggest change is that I’m now working on my second novel rather than my first. This time last year – June 2016 – you were mentoring me on revisions to what would become The Sound Of Everything. A few months later, in August, I sent the manuscript to a couple of professional beta readers, followed by further edits and more beta readers in October. Then came the publishing process and a few months brainstorming ideas for the next book. Eventually, I started to write again at the end of April and now I’m 30,000 words in.

Back in summer 2015, when I’d just completed the first draft of The Sound Of Everything, I wondered whether I’d be better to ditch that project and start a different story from scratch. Then I read somewhere that you learn a lot more, about writing a novel, by editing rather than starting afresh. I think that was great advice. My whole experience with that first novel has given me a lot more confidence this time round – that my rough first draft will evolve in a way I’m happy with.

You decided to self-publish ‘The Sound of Everything’ – what was behind that decision?

When I started to read about the importance of genre, I figured I might find it difficult to find an agent. Also, I’d already been down the self-publishing route with my poetry. When I raised the idea with you, you suggested several websites I could look at. One of these was Joanna Penn’s. I found her advice very useful, and I started to realise that many writers now self-publish from choice, particularly if they plan to write several books. It’s a long-term strategy, with less emphasis on the initial book launch and more on building a following.

Can you describe ‘The Sound of Everything’? Tell us about the book…

The book involves two quests: one internal, the other external. I wanted to write a story, which was a bit of a page-turner but also had depth to it – the spiritual aspect we discussed earlier. It’s told from a single viewpoint and includes quite a bit of internal dialogue. It starts with Jack, the protagonist, dashing into an Indian gift shop. What happens to him there, changes the course of his life. Below, I’ve copied extracts from two kind reviews I received on Amazon. I’m sure the book isn’t for everyone, but the extracts are in line with the feedback I’ve received from most readers I’ve heard from.

‘You are drawn into the story from the first page. You gradually learn more about Jack, the main character – why he has moved back to Drimpton, the town where he lived as a young child, and how he adjusts to working there and dealing with the many different characters he soon meets. There are surprises and twists, warmth and touches of humour and wisdom – it is thought-provoking, you don’t want to reach the end, and when you do, you find your mind returning to explore the unfolding themes.’

‘It is beautifully woven from a number of threads relating to the current and past of a town and some of its people as they are discovered by the main protagonist over a few days where he is trying to work out the answers to a number of different (and interesting) issues. It also covers the growth of that lead character as he tries to work out how to move forward from a position in life that he has arrived in because that is where he thought that he would like to be, and then isn’t 100% happy with now he’s got there.’

To find out more about Stuart Warner’s work, visit his website here.

Writing in the Dark – by Miranda Gold

September 19, 2017 by Jacqui Lofthouse Filed Under: Authors, Books, Events, Guest post, Inspiration, Markets for your work, The writing coach, The writing life, Writers Leave a Comment

We are delighted to introduce a guest blog by Miranda Gold, novelist and author of ‘Starlings‘ – ‘Writing in the Dark’ explores her experience of working with a writing coach: our Founder Jacqui Lofthouse.

Miranda Gold – Author of ‘Starlings’

I arrived at the British Library for my session with Jacqui on three hours’ sleep, carrying an embryonic first draft and unsure how this could bring any coherence to my life or my writing.

Jacqui was unperturbed. ‘I have a hunch,’ she said, ‘we might need to focus on the coaching side of things.’ It wasn’t what I wanted to hear of course and Jacqui was intuitive enough not to press the point. Instead she brought out the manuscript I’d sent her and, between offering her responses, began helping me to find way ways I could make writing part of the fabric of my life – I didn’t realise it then, but by shifting between the two she was translating her suggestion with the same precision she would bring to her reading of my work: the writing and the life can be interwoven into a seamless whole.

This has very little to do with writing from life and very much to do with writing in and with life. The impact of this may have been delayed (almost everything is with me) but it has been enduring. Since then writing has been my anchor and it seems it’s impossible to underestimate just how many influences, however apparently fleeting, have laid the foundation for my writing.

The process has been different with each new piece and the blank page becomes more terrifying, not less, but the fabric becomes stronger and more intricate; the sense of urgency to build worlds out of words supersedes the fear. It’s something of a cliché to speak of how a writer will be carried by the momentum of the story once they have breathed life into it, but it holds true. Yes there may be countless returns and revisions but at least it is alive on the page, here is a world that a reader can meet.

Jacqui also recognised that how I pieced together the novel that would become ‘Starlings’ would be inextricable from the story itself, she could read the modernist influences and see that much was being communicated by the rhythm itself, aware that this would be next to impossible to sell or fit neatly into a box but encouraging me regardless.

Starlings by Miranda Gold

The point is she didn’t try to push me in any direction other than for what clarity would look and sound like for this particular novel. It would have been all too easy for her to urge me to cut away ambiguity, insist on linearity, create something that could be swallowed whole. Instead she listened to it and read it on its own terms and took me – in my blurry-eyed state – on my own terms too. Sometimes what a writer needs most is to be given license to find a the shape for a story even if it isn’t immediately comparable to whatever else might be flying (or not) off the shelves. So I stood by the risks I’d taken because the story of ‘Starlings’ might have been told any number of ways but the way it has now been told is the most honest communication of an experience of living a legacy of half-told stories that couldn’t be easily tidied up into a single meaning.

I would be several drafts into my second novel before I found a publisher for ‘Starlings’ but it now has a home and has found readers who have brought out meanings I wasn’t aware of, reminding me again that a book doesn’t end on the page. Writing is necessarily solitary but making connections is at the heart of it – not only within the book itself but with the books it may be in conversation with and the readers who engage with it.

I’m now working with the pioneering Unbound to publish my second novel, ‘A Small Dark Quiet.’ Though it may be easier to classify, I knew it was likely it might fall through the cracks. That was why Unbound appealed to me – they’re passionate about opening the door to ideas that might not fit easily on a traditional publisher’s list. They’re the first traditional publisher to work through crowd funding and I really feel they are helping to make significant changes in the literary landscape – maybe the reader can help shape the market after all. It’s going to be a challenge but there is a lot of support. I don’t know that any route to publication is easy but I’ll keep taking up the challenge as long as I have a story to tell.

Miranda Gold’s new novel ‘A Small Dark Quiet’ will be published by Unbound – you can support the novel here.

Miranda Gold will be reading from her new book ‘A Small Dark Quiet’ at Hornsey Library on Saturday 23rd September from 3pm-5pm. She will be joined by fellow Unbound author Caitlin Davis and the event will include a short Unbound screening. More details of the event are here.

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.

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 5^th 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, 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.”