The Book Cycle with Michelle Harrison

I am always excited to have Michelle Harrison on the blog, as she is one of my favourite authors. Michelle's latest Middle Grade novel, The Other Alice was published last week. Here is my review. The Other Alice is also my Book of the Month for August. 

Each book I've written has been a different experience, mainly due to whatever else is going on in my life but also because, six books in, I know more about my strengths and weaknesses as a writer. My first book, Thirteen Treasures, was written at a leisurely pace and then redrafted over several years as I searched for an agent. Everything I've written since has been much faster due to having deadlines - usually about 18 months from start to publication.

The starting point is usually a question, or a recurring thought. I don't remember the exact moment I began thinking about all the unfinished stories in the world, but it's something I've thought about often: all these characters and worlds unfinished, waiting for an ending that never comes. Many of these stories are probably average or terrible (I can speak for myself, here) but undoubtedly, there are gems with real promise. What if the characters' desire for an ending were enough to bring them to life? That's how The Other Alice began.

My stories are driven by plot first, characters second. The plot I have to puzzle over, whereas the characters tend to arrive in my head, often unexpectedly. The first thing I do is write an outline. I call this an 'extended blurb', because it's a longer version of what you'd see on the back of the book. I don't give away many answers at this stage, because I don't know them myself. This gives me a framework so my editor and I know roughly where I'm headed, and usually it has enough detail for the cover to be briefed. 

Once complete I'll have questions that'll determine the plot and the characters. For The Other Alice, these were: What would trigger the characters stepping off the page into the real world? What control would the author have then? How does the author cope? Who is going to figure out the ending? Who is the villain? And what would each of these characters do once they find out they're just a figment of someone else's imagination?

I'm pretty old-fashioned - I use Word and write each chapter as a separate file, piecing it together at the end. I use notebooks (always pretty ones) for character profiles, plot points and brainstorms. Sometimes I jot these on post its so they can be moved around. I'll also list potential character names and place names, mix and matching until I get the right one. One of the characters, Gypsy, lives on a narrowboat that I couldn't quite pin down, so I held a competition for my fans to name the boat. Sure enough, the perfect name - Elsewhere - came up. In addition I keep track of my chapter titles (I love thinking these up) and their word counts so I can watch them grow.

My notebooks also contain information that never materialises within the book. One of my favourite features of The Other Alice is the set of fortune cards (similar to tarot cards) that Midge finds in his mother's room. Each set is individual to the owner, and these were based on fairy tales. I spent a few happy hours thinking about the entire deck of cards and what their meanings could be, but only a few are actually mentioned in the story.

I struggle hugely with first drafts, and I'm slow. That's where the bulk of my time goes. That said, this was a tough book to write as it was the first since becoming a mother, and with only ten hours a week paid childcare, the rest I have to get done in naptimes, after bedtime, and with the help of family. My first drafts are overwritten with pointless tangents where I've changed direction. I resist editing on the go; I just don't have time and it's more productive to keep going until the end, then fix it after. Distancing yourself from a chapter or scene makes it easier to see faults when you come back to it. It's hard to get that if you're constantly rereading. 

I much prefer the redrafting stage. Besides Thirteen Treasures, The Other Alice was my most chaotic first draft. I'd gone too 'meta' with the 'story within a story' concept, and my editor told me I'd blow my young readers' minds - not in a good way. This all needed cutting back and simplifying. Other problems were characterisation and voice. My protagonist, Midge, needed aging down and in that first draft he and Alice had another sister, Cleo. I ended up cutting Cleo out as there was little to differentiate her from Midge. She didn't do much, except act allow Midge to voice his thoughts. I got round this by internalising some of these thoughts, and playing up the role of Tabitha, the talking cat. It was a lot of work but the right decision. 

Making the manuscript shine with the smaller details during the edits is my favourite part. I love nipping out anything that's extraneous, adding in more clues, and getting rid of ideas that never fully developed. The finished product thrills me more than the journey - perhaps it's the whole theme of unfinished stories and unfulfilled characters coming into play in my subconscious . . .

Published on 28th July 2016 by Simon and Schuster 

Summary

What happens when a tale with real magic, that was supposed to be finished, never was? This is a story about one of those stories . . . 

Midge loves riddles, his cat, Twitch, and ‒ most of all ‒ stories. Especially because he’s grown up being read to by his sister Alice, a brilliant writer.

When Alice goes missing and a talking cat turns up in her bedroom, Midge searches Alice’s stories for a clue. Soon he discovers that her secret book, The Museum of Unfinished Stories, is much more than just a story. In fact, he finds two of its characters wandering around town.

But every tale has its villains ‒ and with them leaping off the page, Midge, Gypsy and Piper must use all their wits and cunning to work out how the story ends and find Alice. If they fail, a more sinister finale threatens them all...

The Book Cycle with Alexander Yates

As part of The Winter Place blog tour, I am pleased to welcome author, Alexander Yates, onto the blog to tell us about his book cycle.

The idea that became my second book, The Winter Place, started out ages before I actually began the writing process. The novel is set in Finland, a country I first visited in the summer of 2001. Back then I had just finished up my first year at university, and I flew to Helsinki to spend the summer with my Finnish girlfriend (now my wife). Images from that wonderful trip stuck with me long after I returned home. And the next semester at University, I even sketched out a short story set in Finland. It was about an abandoned castle in the Finnish countryside, filled a flock of talking, bellicose magpies (we Americans, as you probably know, are smitten with castles). But nothing ever came of the story, and I moved on to other projects. It wasn’t until over a decade later, after years of returning to Finland and feeling more and more at home there, that the castle and those talking birds re-emerged as a chapter in The Winter Place.

Like all of my longer projects, this novel started out as an outline. For me this always begins with a kind of larval stage—a disorganized mess of post-it notes and white-board scrawling. This is where the characters, plot points, and ideas of a project first begin to take shape. Then, after a time arranging these ideas and getting a sense of the broader movements, I pull everything together into a detailed written outline. The outline for The Winter Place ran about 40 pages, dense with text.

(note: my original post-its from The Winter Place have long since been scrapped! This is the equivalent for the next book I’m working on)

My outlines always include a beat-by-beat, bullet-pointed summary of each chapter. Once the outline is complete I actually break it up, and make each “chapter” into its own document. I give these little skeleton chapters a provisional title, and arrange them all into a file on my computer, which gives me the wonderfully soothing feeling of having accomplished something (even though I have actually accomplished very little at that stage, and am still 1-3 years away from a finished book). In addition to the morale boost, these skeleton chapters also mean that I have a place where the real writing can start, and a roadmap for where to might go. 

I realize that this all sounds rather robotic and uninspired (it does to me, at least). So I need to be clear—despite spending a lot of time making my outlines as thorough and detailed as possible, I never let them boss me around. In fact, when it comes to the real act of writing, sentence-level discoveries always trump the outline. For example, if I come to a point in a chapter where EVENT A is supposed to happen, but EVENT A no longer feels 100% honest or right, then my response is always to discard the outline and fly by the seat of my pants. I never allow the work to be a slave to the plan. So rather than think of my outline as a detailed blueprint that must be followed, I see it as a really dense, ornate, lovingly constructed safety blanket.

Of course, giving myself (and my characters) permission to go off script like this results in a lot of extra revision. Often a change in course at Chapter 10 will force full re-writes of Chapters 2, 5 and 7. To keep everything straight in my head, and to make sure that I don’t permanently delete any language that I might find useful elsewhere, I save older versions of all of these chapters.

(a composite image of my versions folder from The Winter Place)

As you might guess from the image above, color is another way I keep things orderly in my head. I’m a very visual person, and I find that assigning a different color to each main character allows me to zoom out to get a sense of my manuscript as a whole. My first book, Moondogs, was composed of four different inter-woven threads that could each be read individually as their own self-contained novella. My second book alternates between the points of view of Tess and Axel, two siblings who have very different voices and different reactions to their own grief. Tess’s chapters are all colored in yellow, and Axel’s are in green. The little bits of red and purple that you can see in the image above are chapters from the point of view of their grandparents, and parents—threads that I discarded early on in the drafting process.

But more than just being an organizational strategy, this visual element can also affect the content of the novel itself. For my first book this meant working with a designer and artist to create key images to go with each of the four storylines. For The Winter Place, I shared an early version with a wonderfully talented friend, who made three beautiful illustrations to go with the three parts of the book. While these three illustrations did not make it into the final published version, they became central to my own visual imagination. I started off every writing day by looking at the images. In a very real way I’m not sure I fully saw my characters until I’d seen them through this artist’s eyes.

 

 (Illustrations of Axel, Tess, the Bear and the Keeper from The Winter Place, by artist Mary Clare Cole)

This brings me to the last and perhaps most important phase of the cycle—sharing your work. I consider myself tremendously lucky to have a few close friends who are talented writers, excellent readers, and not shy about telling me when I’m being an idiot. I don’t share a project until I think it’s very close to being done, but once I do the perspectives of this small group are always invaluable. It’s only after a book gets through this circle of readers that it goes on to my agent and my editor, who will also have edits and ideas of their own. Nine times out of ten, their suggestions will be spot on. Often, they will also result in a good deal more work for me. But that’s a small price to pay for making the novel as strong as it can possibly be.

Thanks to Alexander Yates for such a brilliant post. 

Published by Simon and Schuster in October 2015

Summary

When a mysterious stranger and his brown bear show up on the same day that Axel and Tess's father dies in an accident, Axel fears he might be going crazy, especially as only he can see them. However, the strange duo are quickly forgotten when Axel and Tess are shipped off to Finland to stay with grandparents that they've never met. But when they arrive in Finland, Axel is stunned when the stranger and his bear reappear. More incredibly, the stranger tells him that his parents are lost and need help. 

Desperate to see his father again, and actually meet his mother, Axel follows the man and his bear, disappearing deep into the frozen wilds of northern Finland. When Tess realises that her brother has vanished she's distraught. And so begins the frantic search across snow and ice into the dark forest. But as the hours creep by and with no sign of Axel, Tess begins to wonder if her brother has ventured onto a path that she cannot follow.

To find out more about Alexander Yates:

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The Book Cycle with Rhian Ivory

Today I am so pleased to welcome author, Rhian Ivory onto the blog, on the day of her book launch for her eagerly awaited novel, The Boy Who Drew The Future. Rhian is here to tell us all about her Book Cycle.

I’ve always had very vivid dreams, often disturbing and sometimes recurring. I don’t sleep walk anymore but frequently did as a child and would wake up perched on the edge of the bath or holding my wardrobe door handle (thanks C.S. Lewis) so it comes as no surprise that as an adult I dream plot lines, characters, scenarios and what ifs and that’s how The Boy who drew the Future started. I dreamt the end scene of the novel which involved a boy who had drawn someone’s very dark future. I remember telling myself in my dream to remember the idea. I didn’t remember it but someone broke my dream later that day and I raced upstairs and wrote out the end scene in detail. However I didn’t know how to move from the end to the start of the story but this came over time. Over quite a long time in fact, about seven years if we’re counting and during this time I carried on dreaming about this boy and his gift. 

And then I started seeing a hand.

Over and over I’d dreamt about a hand in a river held up like a stop sign, a warning of sorts.

Then I saw something in the hand. 

But I didn’t know whose hand it was or why I kept seeing it but I knew I wanted to find out the answers to all my questions and so I bought several notebooks.

I filled these notebooks with dreams, ideas, snippets of conversation I overheard on trains, I watched documentaries about rivers, I read books about art and how to draw hands and I even tried drawing a few hands (sadly these drawings somehow found their way to the recycling bin). I read everything I could about the future and how people might read it/draw it/see it/hear it and uncover it.

One of the notebooks I filled had a print of The Kiss by Gustav Klimt on the front. I was drawn to the picture and knew that it would be in the book, that it would be important to Noah. I knew a little about Klimt but not enough, so I got some books out of the library in addition to researching him on line and found some fascinating pictures of his muse, Emile wearing the now iconic Klimt dresses. http://www.messynessychic.com/2015/07/15/dressing-the-woman-in-gold-the-unknown-bohemian-designer-behind-the-paintings/

As the story grew I did a lot of walking setting the scene mentally in my head before I could write it. I played out conversations between Beth and Noah as I walked under tree tunnels, sat on benches reading out their dialogue next to a carpet of Bluebells and imagined I could see them walking off in the distance, holding hands.

 Rutland Water

The beautiful River Wye

I remember watching an episode of The West Wing during this furious writing process and listening to Toby telling someone (probably CJ) how he’s always writing, even in his head and I realised that I was doing that too. I wasn’t quite in Toby’s league obviously but we had a lot in common.

And then one day (quite a few years and babies later) I finally I had a first draft, hurrah! But the wrong narrator, doom! I’d written the whole novel from Beth’s perspective when it should have been Noah telling the story. Luckily for me I didn’t know this would be the first of many drafts because if I did I’m guessing I’d have had a Toby from The West Wing reaction. 

So once I’d got Noah’s voice in place as the central narrator and rewritten the whole thing (fun times!) I went back to the river to watch the fish with the novel on my kindle. I listened to it using the text-to-speech function.

 But as I walked I realised there was someone missing from the story. I kept hearing another voice. I went home and wrote a scene from the perspective of a ghost walking along the river with his dog. 

I then moved backwards in time asking myself who this ghost was, what kind of a boy was he, who he might be frightened of. 

And so Blaze was born. This of course meant rewriting the whole novel, but I wasn’t brave enough to do that yet. And I really didn’t want to write another draft. I just wanted someone to buy it and let me sleep in peace so I told myself it might be better if I just forgot about Blaze and the lovely scenes I’d written. I took Stephen King’s advice and killed my darlings. But then my very wise agent suggested I went on a writing retreat and I’m so glad she did. Over the course of the weekend Imogen Cooper (Golden Egg Academy - http://www.goldeneggacademy.co.uk/) asked me a lot of questions and prodded me into letting Blaze out of the box. I sat at her kitchen table and wrote my first proper Blaze chapter and it just flowed, as if he’d always been there, sitting in his hut quietly drawing people’s futures, waiting to be let out. 

And the rest as they say is history, except it isn’t because it took a lot more work with the help of my agent before it was ready to be seen by anyone. Kirsty McLachlan has read so many different versions of this book and has remained steadfastly faithful and encouraging and that’s what every writer needs in addition to an editor who actually wants to buy the thing. Step forwards Janet Thomas and Penny Thomas of Firefly Press (http://www.fireflypress.co.uk/node/161) and their genius idea of introducing me to the artist Guy Manning (http://www.guymanning.co.uk/) who came up with the stunning cover and many more drawings making the book come alive visually, which for a novel about two boys who draw the future is pretty essential.

All original artwork in this post is the work of Guy Manning.
***
Thanks Rhian for an inspiring post. I love the drawings by Guy too. 

The Boy Who Drew The Future by Rhian Ivory is published by Firefly Press in September 2015

Summary 

Noah and Blaze live in the same village over 100 years apart. But the two teenage boys are linked by a river and a strange gift: they both compulsively draw images they don’t understand, that later come true. They can draw the future.

1860s - Blaze is alone after his mother’s death, dependent on the kindness of the villagers, who all distrust his gift as witchcraft but still want him to predict the future for them. When they don’t like what he draws, life gets very dangerous for him.

Now - Noah comes to the village for a new start. His parents are desperate for him to be ‘normal’ after all the trouble they've had in the past. He makes a friend, Beth, but as with Blaze the strangeness of his drawings start to turn people against him and things get very threatening. Will he be driven away from this new home - and from Beth?

Will both boys be destroyed by their strange gift, or can a new future be drawn?

To find out more about Rhian Ivory:

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The Book Cycle with Jane McLoughlin

Discussing her book cycle today, I am pleased to welcome author, Jane McLoughlin, onto the blog.

Jane's next book, The Crowham Martyrs is published this month by Catnip. I will be attending the book launch later this month, so I will tell you all about it then. 

Oh…

I will really have to stretch my mind back to where The Crowham Martyrs began…

I know it started as a screenplay, not a novel, middle grade or otherwise, and its main character, Maddy, was a few years older than she is in the book. 

Oh, wait, she wasn’t the main character at all, in those early days…Mr. Casey, one of the teachers, was…

However, the setting—a creepy school called The Crowham Martyrs—has never changed. It was loosely inspired by a teaching placement in a Sussex town (all right, it’s Lewes, if you must know) that many find quaint and “ye olde”… 

                        …but I find totally creepy

That’s really all I remember of the origins of Crowham.  The draft of the screenplay disappeared somewhere, and to the best of my knowledge it was never finished. 

But there was something about this school, and the funny-but-vulnerable girl who gets sent there, and feels trapped there, that stayed in my head and never left! 

I began to write The Crowham Martyrs as a middle grade novel after my first book, At Yellow Lake, was published, and its follow-up, which never found a publisher, was set aside. This seems like half a lifetime ago, and I can’t actually remember how long it took for me to write the embarrassingly rough first draft I sent to my agent. 

However, I know that in the process of being written (and endlessly re-written) some things never changed: Maddy could always see ghosts, the school itself was always threatening, and there was a horrible secret about Maddy’s life that would gradually be revealed. 

So, during the writing process I did two things that were very important. (I wish I could say I meticulously planned the plots’ twists and turns, but that would be lying…next time, readers, next time!) 

To begin with I visited scary places, starting with the Clapham Woods, also in Sussex, which is allegedly haunted.  Sadly, the strange phenomena I’d read about online (and that friends who live in the area claim to have experienced) didn’t materialise for my friends and I when we walked through the woods. 

It was pretty, and a little bit isolated, but not in the least bit frightening…at least not by day!  

The same thing couldn’t be said for my return trip to Lewes, however. 

Athough my friend Dot found it “charming” and “fascinating”, to me it was, as ever, gloomy, claustrophobic and downright menacing. In other words—perfect! 

The second thing I did while writing was read around the ghost story genre.  I read books by Susan Hill, James Dawson, Chris Priestley, Cliff McNish, Helen Grant, MR James, Lindsay Barraclough and other writers, both for children and for adults.  I read Michele Paver’s Dark Matter, possibly the most frightening book I’ve read since “The Shining”…you have been warned! 

I did a bit of background research, too, although The Crowham Martrys is not meant to be historically accurate. I was both inspired by and haunted by gruesome images and writings from the early 17^th century that deal with the supernatural.  The ghosts from the past that creep into Maddy Deeprose’s dreams may not be “true” but they are powerful and terrifying, and they represent appalling events which actually occurred. 

So, although I can’t really remember where the journey to The Crowham Martyrs actually began, it’s been a wonderful trip, and I miss the characters that I’ve come to know as friends. I don’t miss the woods, though….or the school itself…

I especially don’t miss the basement. 

(basement picture.

Once again—you have been warned! 

The Crowham Martyrs by Jane McLoughin - published by Catnip Publishing on the 15th June 2015

Summary

Could there really be witches and demons here at Crowham? Are the badness and fings real? And do all these things have anything to do with Hannah going missing? Do they have anything to do with me? Between growing up and boy trouble Maddy Deeprose may seem like your average 13-year-old girl, but there's something different about Maddy she can see ghosts. The new school term starts at Crowham Martyrs, but Maddy can sense that something is wrong. She begins to have disturbing visions and nightmares of suffering and pain and when her best friend goes missing and nobody will listen to her, Maddy knows it up to her to uncover the truth behind the Crowham Martyrs and stop history repeating itself. A spine-tingling mystery that will haunt you forever.

To find out more about Jane McLoughlin:

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