(geni.us/TheWestsAwakeAL)
Hello everyone,
I hope this week’s note finds you well? The rollout of the vaccine is really ramping up around the world now, and it’s wonderful to see the beginnings of life returning. Not in Ireland as of yet, we’re still in Level 5 lockdown, we’ll all need socialisation lessons to reintegrate us into society after this!
Today however, I met someone who said one of the things that drives authors nuts! I thought I’d share it with you for the laugh. The conversation usually goes something like this:
Stranger: ‘So what do you work at?’
Me: I’m an author.
Stranger: oh, would I have heard of you?
Me: Definitely not.
Stranger: ‘Oh you don’t have anything published then? (sympathetic face)
Me: I do.
St: What? a few short stories, or a poem or something?
Me: Twenty three novels.
Stranger: Oh…and have you sold many?
Me: Yeah, a few.
Stranger: I’d write a book, if I had time. (the implication being that all it takes is time)
Me: Really? What about?
Stranger: I can’t tell you that, you might steal my idea, but let me tell you this, it would be a best seller!’
Me: I don’t doubt it.
Some version of this conversation happens around once a month. 🙂
It never fails to make me smile. I think every profession has their own version of this. When I told people I was a teacher in the past, I was often told about the worst teacher that person ever had, as if I should in some way apologise for the entire profession.
So, as well as those people, I often am asked by nice people such as yourselves about the process of writing. How a story comes about, do I plot it or does it kind of just unravel itself, and questions of that nature. So I thought I’d tell you a bit about my process today. (To call it anything as orchestrated as a process is probably to talk it up a bit too much to be honest)
I may have told you my thoughts on this before, if so bear with me.
I believe that every story exists already in the world. The Greeks, the Romans, the Bible, the ancient myths and legends of different cultures, Shakespeare, the holy books of various different faiths. They all contain the same themes. Love, loss, jealousy, gratitude, revenge, betrayal, friendship, compassion, the whole gamut of human emotion. And in each culture, there are the storytellers. In our world it is authors, filmmakers, song writers, Netflix producers and so on, in ancient Ireland for example, it was the bards who went from castle to castle telling the news but also stories to entertain, to warn, to illustrate, to flatter. Regardless, of when or where we live, storytellers all do the same job. Fiction is the conversation of mankind.
If you lose someone you love, and your heart is broken, then your heart is broken and it feels the same, whether you are in Dublin or Durban, San Francisco or Sydney. If you are fifteen or fifty or ninety, it doesn’t matter, a man or a woman, if you live in 2021 or 1621. Makes no difference whatsoever. So by telling stories with universal themes it helps us feel less alone. It answers the deepest of human needs, the need for connection.
So I am in the very fortunate position of being a storyteller for my time. And I love it.
So how do I tell a story?
What usually happens is something triggers a thought. The monument to the Kindertransport children in Liverpool Street Station in London started the Star and the Shamrock. A visit to a lovely old house up the country a few years ago, where I saw a photo of three sisters in 1940’s dress sparked Robinswood. A walk along the quayside in Cobh, formerly Queenstown got me thinking about Harp and Rose and all of that gang. A woman ringing a radio talk show I had on in the car one day brought Carmel into my life.
I don’t plot my books at all. I just start writing, with the sure and certain faith that the stories exist already, and all I am just the way they get into my time and place, I frequently write late at night, when the house is quiet, and often in bed. Tapping away as my husband calls it, as he snores beside me.
Oftentimes I am stunned with where the characters take me. And I never know how it will end until I write it. I’d love to take the credit, but honestly, it comes from somewhere else. (I can feels some of you rolling your eyes right about now!!) But it’s true. I can’t explain it. If I get myself into a particularly tight corner, a frequent occurrence, and the plot hits a stone wall, I walk on the beach. I think it out, often while talking to myself so I look a bit deranged, and I come home and it’s unravelled and I know what to do.
I talk it out with my husband too. He doesn’t think he’s of much use in this regard but I assure him he is. Things occur to me as I’m telling him a story. Any teachers out there will know this is true, to learn something is one thing, to teach it takes a deeper level of understanding so the process of teaching is in fact learning on the part of the teacher as much as the students.
So then I have my first draft. I re-read it, tweak it a bit, add and subtract, and send it to my editor, and a woman I love on a personal level as well as being dependent on her professionally, and together we hammer at it again. She is a genius, and can see the whole story so clearly, so she helps me unstick bits that need unsticking.
Then I take it home, I rewrite it better and maybe do that three or four times. Until I’m happy with the story. Enter then my wonderful copy editor, who makes sure my Americans sound like Americans, that my subject-noun agreement works and that my peculiar Hiberno-English makes some version of sense while still sounding like me. Because we are a former colony of Britain, we Irish speak a very unique version of English, with our syntax sounding unusual because it is translated directly from Irish, a language that bears no resemblance whatsoever to English.
So there you have it,
I started a new book today in fact. Book three in the Queenstown Story, and while its hard to get going, once I have a paragraph or two down I’m off and there’s no stopping me. Harp and Rose have really hit a chord with readers, so it is easy to write sequels knowing those characters have a place int he hearts of readers already.
If you’d like to read book 1, The Last Port of Call you can get it here,
BUY LAST PORT OF CALL HERE (geni.us/LastPortofCallAL)
or if you’ve read it and are waiting for the next book, The West’s Awake, you can preorder it here.
PREORDER THE WEST’S AWAKE HERE (geni.us/TheWestsAwakeAL)
Le grá agus míle buiochas,