The Fine Line’s inaugural short story competition is now closed.
Whatever your taste, style or inspiration, submit your tale and you could win £200 ($320/€230) and publication in The Fine Line Short Story Collection. A percentage of all entry fees goes to charity so you’ll be doing good while getting your work out there.

Email your story with contact details and the name of the charity, from those below, to which you would like the donation to be made to editorial.consultancy@gmail.com.

Click here to add your competition entry to your cart, and proceed to checkout.

The Rules

The competition is open to anyone. Only employees of The Fine Line or The Fine Line Editorial Consultancy may not enter.

Maximum word count for each entry is 5000 words. There is no minimum word count.

Entries must be entirely the work of the entrant and must never have been published, self-published, published on any website or public online forum, broadcast nor winning or placed in any other competition.

The entry fee is £5 ($8/€6) per story. Payment is made online via credit/debit card or PayPal. Entries will not be read until payment has been received.

£1 of every entry fee will be donated to charity. Entrants should specify the charity to which they wish the donation to be made in the email accompanying their entry: Irving House, Cricket for Change, or Home-Start Worldwide.

Entries should be sent as email attachments to editorial.consultancy@gmail.com.

Entrants may submit as many stories as they wish.

Worldwide copyright of each entry remains with the author, but The Fine Line will have the unrestricted right to publish the winning and runner-up stories, in the short story anthology and any relevant promotional material.

First prize is £200 plus publication in The Fine Line short story anthology. Twelve runners-up will also be published in the anthology.

The judges’ decision is final and no individual correspondence can be entered into.

The deadline for entries is the 15th of June, 2011.

Winners will be notified by the 30^th of June, 2011.

The Charities

Irving House is where special animals are cared for by special people. Not a shelter or adoption facility, Irving House is designed for allowing animals who otherwise would face life in a cage or worse, to live out the remainder of their lives in safety, comfort, and love while providing whatever medical attention they may require. Our rescues come to us from the streets or from death row or from simple surrenders. They might be blind or sick or old, but dog or cat or even rabbit, the one thing they all have in common is the neglect and abuse they endured before arriving at our door. We get them well, we gain their trust, we give them love, comfort and care and a safe haven to call home. At Irving House, we welcome the ones that others turn away and create second chances where there was once no chance at all. To find out more, go to Irving House

Set up 30 years ago, Cricket for Change uses cricket as a vehicle to help children and young people living in underprivileged and difficult circumstances. Hit The Top is the world’s largest cricket project for young people with disabilities; the Street Chance and Street Team Projects work with communities to provide cricket facilities; the C4C Apprenticeship trains young people to be cricket coaches; and the Refugee Cricket Project helps child refugees, affected by war and natural disaster, to learn English and cricket, and provides them with any necessary advocacy. The charity works overseas with partners such as UNICEF and the ICC, providing help and cricket facilities for children in over 15 countries. To read on, go to Cricket for Change

Home-Start Worldwide is based on a very simple and practical idea: we train local volunteers, usually parents themselves, to support local parents who need help. Most services already know what they will offer: medical care, a loan of money, information or training, for example. Volunteers have to be ready for anything. Their first job when home visiting a family is to listen. The second priority is to help the family make links with the local community so that they will gradually feel more confident in their environment. One week a volunteer might be helping with the shopping, making sure the children are involved, and another week cutting out pictures with the children while their mother gets some much needed sleep. The volunteer’s job is largely dictated by the family themselves, although volunteers will suggest activities if they think they will help. Formed in 1999, there are now Home-Start schemes in 22 countries. For more information, go to Home-Start Worldwide

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Note: this piece was not originally so ladylike, but in order to remove both an adult-only rating and facebook blacklisting of the site, it has had all rude words replaced with nice euphemisms.  The necessity of rewriting the piece rather proved its point: the word shocks like no other.

So, while reading an interview with the now 73-year-old Jilly Cooper about how getting old ain’t all bad, I realised that, to my shame, I’ve never read any of her books.  Nor have I read any Jackie Collins, Danielle Steel, or Barbara Taylor Bradford.  This isn’t a boast – it’s a confession.  And one I’m embarrassed to admit.

It’s not that I’m a snob.  It’s just that, somewhere along the way, I got it into my head that, literary giantesses though they are, these women’s books didn’t matter.  That it was love and not romance that mattered.  That there was something desperate about the women who read them, as though they had nothing in their lives – or their heads – but badly written bonks, charmers, and chicks.  Quite what I thought I had in my life, or my head, that was so much worthier of taking up space, I don’t know.   Come to think of it, had I let any one of these writers’ heroines live all manner of things for me,  I could have saved myself many many hours to devote to all those higher things, whatever they might be.

I could try blaming school – my English teacher let me write about Hermann Hesse’s Siddhartha for my Review of Personal Reading.  Maybe it was university and all the Italian metaphysical poetry I’m sure even the poets didn’t understand (and which, incidentally, my pet rats would shred years later, unafraid to be outspoken about their literary taste).  Raised in the Scottish countryside without a tv, deprived of Blake and Bobby James, I could even give blaming my upbringing a shot.  But, really, I’ve only myself to blame.

It is entirely through my own doing that I’ve allowed myself to be ruined by literary fiction.   Jilly, Jackie, Danielle, and Barbara – these women are Queens of Literature.  They are amongst the bestselling authors the world has ever known.  By definition, their books are classics.  They tap into something in the female psyche – in their multimillions.

And if they’re trash, well I can’t help thinking of the scene in The Fisher King where Robin Williams hands Amanda Plummer a loveseat he’s made from a champagne cap and says “There’s nothing trashy about romance.  Besides, you find some pretty wonderful things in the trash”.

So, I set aside Jill Dawson’s moving, expertly crafted depiction of Rupert Brooke (a man whose musings take self obsession to new lows, though it is very well written if you want to read about the minutiae of the man), and took my hollow tin chest off to the Saint Columbus Hospice charity shop where they had a half price sale on books.  I resisted Mills and Boon, though the British Heart Foundation shop has them on sale at two for £1 and a friend and I were thinking of co-writing one because, apparently, there’s a lot of money in it.  It might help if I read some first.  Taking the first step towards an alternative career and doing good – what more could one ask for?

Jilly’s Riders was a jolly good fun romp through steaminess I never knew existed in the Cotswolds countryside.

I stuck with Jackie and Lethal Seduction till I got bored of the repetition.  The man’s a rogue who likes having sex where people can see him; the girl’s a brat with a wholesome, caring husband who she thinks is boring; her father’s a gangster caricature who likes women with enormous breasts and little brain; the intelligent journalist is undervalued and feels lost.  You’ve made the point – get on with the story.  She doesn’t, though, and the whole thing drags on for over 500 pages when 200 would have done.

I read all of Danielle’s Secrets because it was short and, from the opening lines, had the promise of a happy ending and who doesn’t like those.  It all came together very neatly which was pleasing.  The beautiful yet aloof and formidable star finally opens her heart (by way of enormous diamonds and enough mink coats to render the mink extinct) to the television producer who, in her arms, finally recovers from the loss of his wife and children in a plane crash; the sweet, sensitive actor’s junkie wife has the decency to get herself murdered so he can marry the woman he’s been horrible to throughout the entire tv shoot but who he secretly loves and who secretly loves him; and the motherly, gorgeous actress who everyone loves, leaves her abusive husband and makes the gay matinee idol realise that all that gayness he’d been indulging in was just the result of an emotionally-deprived childhood, but with her love, he’s all better now.  Sorry if I’ve just ruined the story.

I got bored of Barbara’s Being Elizabeth pretty quickly, when I could see how it was going.  I like a feisty heroine, but when the whole thing’s been mapped out and you’ve read the bit at the back where she talks about it being based on English monarch, Elizabeth Tudor, so you know it’s not going to end well, the story loses some of its momentum.

Then there were the sex scenes.  Jilly romped, Danielle ascended to new heights they’d never known, and Barbara smouldered and suppressed.

Jackie’s scenes got me thinking, though.  Not about sex so much as about words.  Jackie’s intention, it seems, is to shock.  Thing is, there’s nothing shocking in the language she uses.  If  the unmentionable four-letters-beginning-with-f-word no longer needs to be replaced with “fug”, what words can a writer use to shock?  There are shocking acts, of course – scenes a writer could put down that would horrify readers across race, class, age, gender, and culture.

The only single word I could think of that is pretty much guaranteed to offend is the not-to-be-mentioned-four-letters-beginning-with-c-word.  There are other words directed at certain social groups that are intended to offend, but sometimes members of those groups use them when addressing each other.  So, though their original intention is to cause offense, they’ve been appropriated into cultures to the point that they may be used as terms of endearment or with pride.  Since it changed from a slightly racily descriptive word in Middle English to an insult, the afore(not)mentioned has not been appropriated by any cultural group.  Unless you have a particularly witty or personal putdown, if you want to offend, to express just how much you loathe an individual, it is the most powerful word we have in our vocabulary.  The same is true, whether you’re in conversation (of sorts) or a writer attempting to shock your readers.

Jackie used it once, slotting it into a coke-addled machismo rant from a photographer who refers to a temperamental model as a “super-not-to-be-mentioned-four-letters-beginning-with-c-word”.  Makes it sound like a super power – something to be proud of.  And maybe it is.  We could appropriate the word into our culture – use the “super” prefix to give it a new meaning.   Should you decide to test it in its all-new incarnation, do let me know how you get on.  Meantime, I have some chicklit to attend to.

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In 1693, the first British women’s magazine, The Ladies’ Mercury, was published.  It ran for only four issues before folding.  Quite why its run was so brief is unclear, particularly given the fact that its male counterpart, The Athenian Mercury, ran for over seven years.  Presumably the concerns of the fairer sex weren’t considered sufficient draw to the magazine-reading public.  However, in those few weeks, it birthed the lampooned, beloved, feared, and all-knowing bastion of moral virtues: the agony aunt.

The Ladies’ Mercury promised to answer any questions relating to ‘Love etc’ with “the Zeal and Softness becoming to the Sex”.  ‘All questions relating to love’ were to be sent to the Latine Coffee House in Ave-Mary-Lanes for ‘the Ladies Society’ to consider and reply to, using zeal or softness as they best thought fit.

It wasn’t until 1770, with the launch of the Lady’s Magazine that the agony aunt would again be seen in a ladies’ periodical.  By way of qualifications for the role as dispenser of advice, ‘The Matron’ (also known as ‘Mrs Grey’) declared herself to be ‘duly qualified to make my monthly appearance in the Lady’s Magazine while I am able to hold pen, being in my grand climacteric and having been deeply engaged in numberless scenes variegated and opposite, serious and comic, cheerful and afflicting’.  Quite what those ‘numberless scenes’ consisted of was never made clear, but apparently they provided her with ample qualifications for the job.

In 1798 another Society of Ladies created the Lady’s Monthly Museum or Polite Repository of Amusement and Instruction, ‘an assemblage of whatever can please the fancy, interest the mind and exalt the character of the British Fair’, with reading that even ‘the chastest matron may peruse’.  Readers were invited to confide in the ‘Old Woman’ whose advice tended to be of a more bracing than comforting tone – preferring, it seems, the zeal to the softness of her sex.  By way of introduction, she wrote ‘If a miss scarcely entered her teens asks my advice respecting a lover or inveighs against her mother, if a wife, forgetting the duty to her husband, attempts to engage me in her favour when she is disposed to bid defiance to his lawful commands, I surely cannot show myself more their friend than by conveying to oblivion the folly of the one, and the worthlessness of the other.’  When they weren’t conveyed to oblivion, troubled readers’ enquiries were consistently answered with the Old Woman’s cureall – ‘confine yourselves to your domestic duties, where alone you are calculated truly to shine’.  Simply another sort of oblivion, really.  Her readers were occasionally allowed to leave the home, but only in the name of national duty.  As she once rallied her ‘Fair Countrywomen, Englishwomen, Daughters of Britain! Descendants of a free-born and virtuous race and hopes of your land!’ to act ‘against the prevailing spirit of innovation’.

Decades later, other agony aunts were no less disparaging of a lady’s life outside of the home and of conduct that wasn’t entirely befitting of a lady.

Seeking to find some sort of work-life balance, a wife and poetess sought the advice of The Weekly Magazine’s agony aunt in 1859 and was told that ‘Your duty now is to your husband.  No wife should have a soul above buttons nor should she ignore the fact that man’s heart lies very near his stomach, and that cold mutton dampens the flame of wedded love’.  Unappetising as it sounds, I think it would dampen the flame of any love – the greatest loves in history would have parted ways over such an inedible dinner.

In 1894 Home Sweet Home’s agony aunt took great exception to the attempts of ‘Tudor Lass’ to find a husband.  ‘No, I have no respect for a girl who tries to get a husband through a matrimonial agency.  ‘Tudor Lass’, it would be better to die an old maid than to descend to such means of getting a husband’.  Quite what she would have made of online dating, I’ve no idea.  Possibly she would have spontaneously combusted.

In the midst of such censorious advice, on the pages of ‘Cupid’s Post Bag’ in the Englishwoman’s Domestic Magazine, both the enquiries and advice developed a saucier tone.  The magazine launched in 1852 and the problems in Cupid’s post bag began ordinarily enough – gentlemen callers failing to return calls, prospective fiancés taking an age to propose, overbearing older sisters, weight loss, how to rid oneself of freckles.  By the 1870s, after Cupid’s page was renamed ‘Conversazione’, the contents of his post bag took on an altogether less ladylike tone.  The readers, it seemed, had decided to ditch the recalcitrant fiancés for spurs, tight-laced corsets, and the whipping of maidservants.  The magazine was edited and, largely, written by a man – Samuel Beeton, with his wife, Isabella, contributing on the subjects of pets and cookery – so it’s quite possible that he was Cupid and, failing to empathise with the feminine fate, decided to add a little colour to his post bag with tales of what he hoped his readers might spend their time doing.

The more outlandish the problem and advice, the more it is assumed that the agony aunt is a spoof, creating scenarios and solutions for her page solely for comic effect.  I had always assumed Mrs Mills of The Sunday Times to be a spoof until I sent her a problem (fairly unremarkable relationship stuff – no spurs) and she gave a most helpful reply.  So, Cupid may have had to do nothing whatsoever to the content of his post bag.  Possibly, readers’ concerns did morph from domesticated drudgery to flagellation – a change which would have delighted the maidservants no end, I’m sure.

A century or so later, the role of the agony aunt tends to be of a fairly serious nature.  With the exception of the likes of Mrs Mills, she is more likely to offer comfort than reproof.  Agony aunts such as Marge Proops, Clare Rayner, and Anna Raeburn used their position to campaign for women’s issues.  Sally Brampton counsels almost exclusively on issues of mental health, eating disorders, and abusive relationships.  Peaches Geldof gives out her own adolescent advice while Jordan focuses mainly on how to bed your man and keep him there.  A quirky and interesting take on the role, Carole Jahme is an ‘evolutionary agony aunt’, using evolutionary psychology to explain quite how we evolved to such a befuddled state and what to do about it.  Over 300 years on from the Ladies Society of the Latine Coffee House in Ave-Mary-Lanes, the problems for which we’re seeking the zeal and softness becoming to the sex have little changed.  Love is an unending conundrum.

This fairly lengthy preamble leads me on to the fact that, as the reader of the work of a great many aspiring writers, I noticed there was one area of life on which no agony aunt was commenting.  That is, the life of a writer.  To remedy this, I set one up – Dear Editor.  It started out as an advice column and forum for writerly concerns and has segued into other areas of life – partners who don’t seem to realise that one doesn’t achieve one’s creative best by standing at the sink doing the dishes, for example.  Really, it’s for anything on your mind – I won’t convey you to oblivion and spurs are unlikely to shock.

I await with interest.

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In France it is forbidden to call a pig Napoleon; in England it is legal to murder a Scotsman within the ancient city walls of York, but only if he is carrying a bow and arrow; in San Salvador, drunk drivers can be executed by firing squad; in Indonesia, the penalty for masturbation is decapitation; in Vermont, women must obtain written permission from their husbands to wear false teeth; and in Florida, it is illegal to have sex with a porcupine.  Peculiar laws offer both entertainment and a fascinating insight into historical customs.  As an exercise in research (and as a way to put off writing that feels productive), see if you can find ten.

Two

“For sale: baby shoes, never worn.”  This six-word story by Ernest Hemingway is a flash fiction classic.  In only eight syllables, there is a myriad of tales and images.  Start with 100 words.  Write a story of that length, then keep cutting until you get to 20 (or six, if you can manage it).  Is your story still intact?  Does it still contain the key elements – character, plot, and setting – with which you started?  As you cut words, you will have to imply more than you write.  In addition to being a way in which to put off whatever it is you’re supposed to be doing, it is also a good exercise in discipline because it makes you hone down your writing, conveying a tale to the reader without crowding your work with unnecessary detail.

Three

You’re driving along a deserted road, miles from anywhere, when you see a wedding dress hanging from a tree.  How did it get there?

Four

The fairytale, Hansel and Gretel, is usually told in the third person with the assumption that the children and their father are good while their mother and the old woman who seeks to fatten and eat Hansel are bad.  Change the perspective and rewrite it in the first person from the perspective of the children’s mother.  What motives might she have had to send the children out into the forest?  Did she know about the old woman?  If so, how did they meet?  Is she actually a baddie in the tale or just misunderstood?  Rewrite the tale in any way you like – change the setting and denouement, for example – but make sure you write it entirely from the point of view of the mother.

Five

Who took this picture?

Six

You get up one morning to find a Dear John letter on your kitchen table from someone you thought died 10 years ago.  What does it say?

Seven

This began as a Valentine’s competition, but it’s a useful writing exercise for any occasion.  The discipline of conveying detail in a few words is a good tool to use in all aspects of your writing and, if you’re struggling with a blank page, it can serve as both a distraction and a way to get some words down on paper, hopefully lifting the dreaded block.

Write on anything you like, but if love inspires you, in the 17 syllables of a haiku, tell us why your Valentine is so very special.  Or why you’re so right in being anti-Valentine.

In case you’re in need of a prompt, a haiku is a Japanese poem with three short lines of five, seven, and five syllables.

Matsuo Basho is said to have been a master of them.  Some of his (not always altogether intelligible) works are below.

the first cold shower

even the monkey seems to want

a little coat of straw

the wind of Mt. Fuji

I’ve brought on my fan!

a gift from Edo

old pond

a frog jumps

the sound of water

No epics of courtly love, no novels in verse, and no sonnets, please.  Vent or exalt, but do it in no more than 17 syllables then submit it in the box below.  We’ll publish our favourites in the next newsletter.

This is a sample from The Pocketbook Of Prompts: 52 Ideas For A Story, available through The Fine Line Shop.

If you would like professional feedback on any of your work, whether it was sparked by a writing prompt or something entirely different, please go to Our Services to find out more about what we do.

Copyright © Katie Gould 2010

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It unfolds in a country ruled by a military junta. Literature and freedom of speech have been banned and the holdings of all libraries burnt.

The narrative voice belongs to an aging authoress who lives on a vast estate and whose confidante is her old professor who lives in the nearby city.

Despite Draconian laws, they continue to write. They meet periodically to discuss their own works and literature in general.

The novel is divided into five parts, one of which is titled The Fabrication. Here the narrator describes how she creates her fictions, and compares her methods to those of her professor.

Her methods are based on my own, but I have exaggerated them, somewhat, in the novel.

Here are a few extracts:

In my experience, stories already exist, like bunches of grapes hanging from vines in the personal and collective unconscious. They are lush with potential, robustly coloured, waiting to be plucked and pressed into the equivalent of wine, waiting to be manipulated by an author and rendered into text. If an author fails to harvest his allotted share, the fruit will lose vitality, or perhaps be picked by another. Or the characters-in-waiting will grow restless and move on for, like unborn souls, they are urgent for life.

Sometimes my compositions would unfold gently, like the intrusion of morning or evening, or like the stretching petals of an opening flower. Sometimes a tale arrived as haunting visions, forcing me to stay up all hours while great insects chirruped cacophony into humid air. Sometimes I just heard the narrative utterance of the first lines and first paragraph and I would hark and go with them.

While composing my fictions, I followed an indulgent, daily routine. I rose at dawn, relishing the sun’s light, wasting no time, squeezing from the hours every drop of life. I wrote by hand, preferring the hold of a pen and the sensuality of paper over computer.

Sometimes I got up from my pages and strolled through the garden. Or I walked to the ridge and looked back towards the house, with my thoughts on what I was creating, processing it from a distance, allowing it to breathe. I continually modelled the clay of my creation, cutting away at its exterior to release the composition from a foetal place.

I seldom wrote at night, instead reading or listening to music, though I continued living the creative process, occasionally acting it out. Sometimes I glanced through what I had written that day, but made no corrections.

In beginning a new piece, I wrote down the title, which I never changed. This served as a contract, an anchor and commitment to the process … I set down a template, a blueprint, as an artist will sketch a cartoon before beginning on the painting itself, or a sculptor first fashions a wax maquette. This would not be anything rigid, just a rough draft of what I intended the novel to be about. It was not a plot outline. I never worked with plots.

I generally wrote the first and last chapters, marking the boundaries of the tale – the point of embarkation and the final destination. This light embrace positioned me and I felt secure within it. I located the centre of the narrative and composed from there, following the pulsing, life-craving of the story within me, embellishing the narrative with flamboyant and florid devices, peppering it with artefacts and symbolism, sometimes knotting sequins to catch light.

I never dictated to the work, but instead irrigated it, permitting it to grow and reach its fullness organically. I thought of myself, not so much as the creator of the tale but as its unfolder – the instrument that gave it life. The question might arise as to whether I considered myself a mere channel and not actually a composer.

When I had identified the sound of the narrative voice, when it resonated confidently within me, I would decide which wardrobe to dress from for the duration of the novel and select a set of clothes. I would wear these outfits only to write.

Properly attired, sitting at my desk or pacing the stoep, I visualised a door. The world into which this door led would be that of the new fiction and it was through that door that my characters entered. I left it slightly ajar throughout the creative process.

With each novel’s portal there was a precise time of opening, a time when I turned the handle, or drew back a bolt, or flicked a small catch, or turned a key, swinging the door open. From this point there was no going back. Either I walked in, or strode in, or took each step cautiously. There was no telling what lay beyond, in that new world over which I alone had mastery. I would then call up characters from out of the shadows, leaving the door held open on a hook and waiting, like a stage director who had pasted advertisements outside a theatre.

I paid little attention to how my characters turned up as long as they did not let me down once I had accepted them, leaving me stranded. Sometimes I heard the ring of wagon wheels against cobbles, or the clip of a horse’s hooves, or the idling purr of a restored Cadillac as its passengers stepped out.

The  professor was not comfortable with this avant-garde uncertainty, the vagueness, that he judged me to employ in peopling my novels. In a classic way, he composed all his characters, first sketching them, then defining and clothing them, then clarifying their role, all within the preparatory drafting of a foundation plot. He wanted to control his characters and found the untimely arrival of my unknown, ex-directory persons disconcerting. Because the individuals who graced his novels were completely his creation, they were safe and accomplished, posing no challenge to his control of the whole.  He was especially concerned about my emotional involvement and by the way I empowered figures.

Even though I made use of itinerant players, I also drew from everyday life. I took from the world what I needed and altered its shape and purpose to make of it something it was not. I walked the various quarters of the city, but particularly the docklands, frequenting cafés and cabarets, show-bars, strip-salons and gaming-rooms, sitting alone in corners, observing, continually trawling social encounters, hunting and gathering material to enrich my novels. I irrigated reality and harvested substance, borrowing from people their form and manner while taking care never to expose myself as a working author.

I filled a data-base with faces, modes of dress, manners, inebriation, courtesy, vulgarity, desire, the gentlest of gestures, a movement of the mouth, the turning of a head toward light, the glance of one stranger toward another. I took note of how women used cosmetics, how they painted their faces and with what colours and whether they replaced waxed eyebrows with thin inexpressive pencil lines or left their own to give proper feature to their eyes. I was fascinated by the application of foundation, rouge and hair dye. I looked out for unusual jewellery.

When my characters were more or less assembled, inside the place where I was to begin the novel, I would half-close the door for intimacy, still allowing for any latecomers. Then, together, we prepared for the creative process, as though to dance, without disturbance from the outside world, and where all of us felt safe. We knew that there would come a time when I, as author, had to conclude the story and bid them farewell, so we savoured every moment. I would be right there among them, yet apart, enacting with them, yet a few steps back.

On completion, when the tale was done, just before finally closing it off, I indulged in the pleasure of what I had created. Late at night, in the deep silence, I would walk back through the fictitious world. There I would make tiny adjustments, repositioning this or that, adding a colour here or a hat there, brushing a texture, cutting away something that might now seem superfluous. And even at that very late stage, if it was necessary, I might allow a dialogue to extend, or slightly alter the course of an event. I might even permit a character some last, final deed.

Going back into the fiction was like entering a magic land and I would be there like a producer just before curtain-up, just before the entire composition was given over to an audience. The feeling of accomplishment was exhilarating – like placing a keystone or tasting a fine dessert.

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Despite being an arguably nonessential form of punctuation, the semicolon is prone to overuse, appearing scattered over paragraphs like confetti.  In correct usage, it can serve two purposes.

The first is between sentences as a pause that is longer than a comma and shorter than a full stop.

For example:  The rumour was that the queen had died; her subjects believed it.

Last Friday’s music exam was awful; Tuesday’s geography one was slightly easier.

The coroner said there will be an inquest, of course; but that is just the start of the investigation.

The second is to separate longer items in a list, particularly if the items themselves use further punctuation with commas.

For example: George arrived at the picnic with an enormous hamper; Alice brought wine, though she’d only thought to bring chardonnay which   no one liked; Felicity arrived with her six dogs, one of which immediately tore open the leather straps on George’s hamper and slobbered all over the pork pies; and, finally, James turned up with his dreadful girlfriend who refused to eat anything, feeding it, instead, to her fluffy puppy.

Such a sentence could be punctuated solely with commas, but it would be difficult to follow.

Send problems to Dear Editor

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I’m finding it difficult to establish any sort of writing routine.  I don’t have a specific room in my house just to sit and write.  I want to be able to just sit somewhere quiet, interrupted only by bird song, for example – not my three teenaged kids and husband who don’t seem to take my writing seriously and still expect me to do all the housework etc.  I feel like I need somewhere all of my own before I can really get inspired and creative.

From your letter, you’ve got a couple of issues here.  One is the attitude of your kids and husband to your writing and the other is your own attitude towards it.

I don’t know enough about your familial relationships to know the full situation, but from your description and my experience with other creatives – whether they are painters, writers, musicians – yours is a common problem.  If you want them to take your writing seriously and to give you time to do it, you’re going to need to be strict with them.  Have you told them that you take your writing seriously and want them to do the same?  You need to make that clear if this is something you plan on investing a great deal of time and effort in, either for your own pleasure or with the intention of obtaining publication.  It wouldn’t hurt to suggest they help with the domestics, while you’re at it.

The other issue is your attitude towards writing and your “need for somewhere all of my own before I can really get inspired and creative”.  There are, broadly, two approaches to the need for a setting in which to write.  One is of the Virginia Woolf room of one’s own ilk: an approach that requires a place of quiet and solitude in which to pen one’s thoughts.  The other is most eloquently expressed by Charles Bukowski in his poem, Air and light and time and space.  It’s a magnificent piece of writing, but also a candid exposition of any creative process.  Bukowski’s attitude is that, if you’re going to create, you’ll do it no matter what the circumstances – it won’t be dependent upon a having precisely the right conditions.

It’s a question of deciding which approach suits you best and leads to the greatest productivity.  If you need solitude in order to write, then you need to make the necessary changes in your home life to ensure that you have it.  I’m slightly concerned by your belief that you need to have this seclusion before you can “get inspired”.  Have you tried seeking inspiration on the other side of the closed door?  It is perfectly understandable that putting the words down on paper might require seclusion in order to concentrate, but don’t limit yourself to the isolation of four walls when looking for inspiration.  You don’t need a room in order to generate ideas.  Your writing is likely to gather more colour and the writing process be more enjoyable if you look to sources outside of your own head and the four walls you seem to think are essential to creation.

On that subject, there are a couple of pieces in the Blank Page, What To Write About and Seeking Inspiration, that you might find useful.

Best of luck with your writing.

Send problems to Dear Editor

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I’ve always wondered how one overcomes writer’s block. Personally speaking, I have no difficulty starting out ~ the blank page does not intimidate me ~ but somewhere between the one-third and halfway mark writer’s block sets in and I have the darndest time writing through it. I tend to just ramble and ramble for pages until a flicker of a thought comes to light and then I have to go back and rewrite over the ramble. There must be an easier way.  Thank you.

Rambling until a flicker of thought comes to light isn’t necessarily a bad way to go about writing.  It’s frustrating, irritating, and time-consuming – time that may feel like it’s being wasted – but you’re still producing words.  Your story is still being told.  Regard your rambling as time spent finding the right words.  Yes, you then go back and cut out perhaps 99% of what you spent the last week getting down, but the words you keep have been through both a dogged immersion in your story and the cull that followed.  That immersion is invaluable because it is time spent with your characters, plot, setting, description – every component of your writing, basically – exploring them, developing them, getting to know them, fixating on the who, what, why, when, where, and how of them.  You might decide, after hours spent with them, to ditch the whole lot and take the story in an entirely different direction, but at least you’ll have spent that bit more time exploring them.

I’d recommend you go easy on yourself, too.  Don’t think about what others might have to say about your writing.  Focus on your own opinion of your work.  Write without feeling self-conscious about what anyone else’s opinion.  I’m sure you’re very well aware of it, but just in case you need reminding, no writer ever got it right first time round – revision is a necessary part of the writing process.  Or, as Ernest Hemingway more eloquently put it, ‘the first draft of everything is shit’.

The practical remedies for writer’s block are divided in two.  One is to keep writing.  Even if you have to type ‘the cat sat on the mat’ or ‘the quick fox jumped over the lazy dog’ ceaselessly until some words of your own emerge, you must keep returning to the page.  You could do what is known as ‘free writing’: a stream of consciousness approach in which you write whatever words come into your head.  Don’t concern yourself with grammar, punctuation, spelling or the quality of your writing.  Just keep putting words on paper.  Any words are better than no words at all.

Don’t feel you need to stick with the novel on which you’re working at all times.  Digressing into writing exercises, for example, keeps you at your desk and is a potentially productive procrastination.

As an alternative to a free writing approach, you could plan the progression of your novel.  Gaining a sense of where your story is going could help you work out the steps needed to get there.

With this technique, you could either sit at your desk ad infinitum or decide on a routine – a set time during which you will write, regardless of what words come out.  Routines can work well to provide you with discipline, if you lack it, and to make writing a part of your life rather than something that consumes it.

The other is to do the opposite: to step away from your desk and find something else to do in the hope that, while you’re not looking, your story will continue to germinate so that, on your return, the words will pour forth.  Baking is a popular pastime amongst writers, though I’m not sure why.  As are long walks and sitting on park benches.  Take your notebook with you – even while switched off, your mind might just throw you a word or two.  While getting away from writing, you could rearrange the place in which you usually write.  This is procrastination like any other, but it has a sense of being productive, of assisting your writing.

Should you get desperate there is outside intervention, either from a professional or personal source.  Assisting creatives when they are blocked is a specialism of some counsellors, though I’ve neither sources nor recommendations to back that up so I’m afraid I don’t know how effective they would be.  Probably more useful are friends and fellow writers with whom you can discuss writing concerns, either in person or through forums.  Share tips and vent.  Find a sympathetic first reader – someone who won’t just say everything’s perfect, but who also won’t cover every page with red scrawl.

And if you happen upon a magical elixir that cures all writer’s block, do please let me know.

Best of luck.

Send problems to Dear Editor

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It usually begins with Post-It Notes. They surround my monitor as I type this.

If not those sticky, colored squares, then it’s a ragtag collection of paper bits that start my stories. I get ideas in droves and jot them down for later use. It’s also how I organize what I need to do. If I can see it, I’ll remember.

The stories that shoot into my head have to be noted or they’re lost to the soup of my boiling imagination. Seriously, it’s soup in there. I write bizarro fiction. It’s the genre of the weird.

My publishers like to call bizarro the literary equivalent to the cult section of a video store. We write entertaining, amazing fiction. Bizarro encompasses many other expressions: noir, horror, westerns, fantasy, science fiction, and many other genres. It’s a lot of fun to write and to read. It makes for interesting soup.

So at the moment, beside the burning novella that’s mostly finished (I only have the writing it down part left to do), I have purple and yellow Post-Its to tell me what to write.

Once the littlest kid is fed, clean, and off to preschool, I sit down and concentrate on a note. Or I might first do a load of laundry, play with the dog, make a salad, grab a mocha, clean a toilet, paint, or play on facebook for an hour, then concentrate on a note. It might also turn out that while the kid is involved in video games before school I’ll have a few moments to work on something. Say, a bit about how I write?

Music comes next. I devote time every week to building up my playlists or culling Pandora stations into something I can let go and use to tap-tap-tap my stories out. Currently, Die Antwoord, Love and Rockets, and Modest Mouse make up the majority of my office ambiance.

I have a bit of A.D.D. creativity. Writing is often interrupted by other artistic pursuits. I usually have several projects going on at once. Some begun years ago have yet to be finished. But I’m not usually nailed to my chair when I write.

However, I’ve been initiated into a certain style of writing that I’m coming to both appreciate and enjoy. I’ve not yet done it strictly by the rules, because I didn’t have the time involved. Carlton Mellick III, the Grand Master of Bizarro Fiction, has come up with a three-day writing marathon idea. What he does is spend three days doing nothing but writing a novella. He barely sleeps, eats, or gets up from his chair until his book is done. He comes up with simply brilliant stories that people love.

I tried this in a two-day format and wrote nearly an entire twenty-five thousand word novella. The first two days produced the bulk of it, while I sat in my very hot office with very little clothing on and wrote. Later in the week I had a couple of days to go at the rest of it leisurely, and finished it up then. Certainly, after such a marathon one must go back and edit, but surprisingly, not that much.

I’ll soon be doing a full-fledged three-day marathon. We’ll see what I can come up with.

Normally, I’m up and down. Like today. While writing this, I’ve played with my son, fed him, clothed him, and I’m about to clean him up. I’ve answered messages and played around on facebook. I’ve picked through my favorites on YouTube and stared at my half-done painting. I’ll come back to polish this up after I take the kid to school in twenty minutes.

Then I’ll paint.

That’s after I take down one of these Post-It Notes surrounding my screen. It’s over there on the right. It says, “How I Write for Fine Line”.

That’s how I do it.

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Maybe it’s because I have written so much radio drama, I have to be able to see it or I can’t write it. If I’m writing something that takes place in the past – I am drawn to the early part of the twentieth century – then I travel to that place, listen to music, look at old maps, look for tiny telling details and research as much history as I can bear. I don’t want to become swamped with fact but I want to be able to imagine what it was like. I need to be there.

The actual writing, for me, is where the story begins to unfold itself on my screen. There are dozens of analogies of how it feels to write but to me it feels a little like trying to walk through a dark room with my arms outstretched. You stumble across things you weren’t expecting, and as you grope around in the dark take two steps forward in any direction and then one step back again. It can be either frustrating or exhilarating, but this is where I feel I’m most creative, and I usually come up with scenes or situations that I had never imagined before. I have to say here, that I write primarily for myself and when I can impress myself with a good line or an image, then I’m satisfied.

When I’m writing the first third of a novel, I usually have mixed feelings about it. Some days I love what I’ve written and sometimes I get cold feet and tell myself that it’s not too late to dump it and start again. The middle section is always difficult – too far from the beginning to give up and too far from the end to be able to feel secure – it’s like being stuck in the doldrums. Towards the end, I start to speed up, almost finished, but this part is also the hardest. All those choices I made so casually earlier on in the story have consequences. I am now the grown-up left to tidy up the mess of a very messy adolescent and I tear my hair out and spend many hours pacing around as I try to bend everything I’ve written into something complete.

I tend to rewrite compulsively – I usually start each day by rewriting what I’ve written the day before. And when I’ve finished the first draft, I go over it many times until I feel that it couldn’t be any better, at least on that day. I try and follow the dictate that you put your novel away for a few months and then come back to it with fresh eyes, but it’s not always possible. But I do know that the more distance you can put between you and the book, the better. Eventually it stops becoming part of you and starts becoming its own entity that you have a duty to brush up and polish before you send it out into the world.

All of this makes me sound like I know what I’m doing. Although I have written five novels (one lies unpublished in a drawer) I still wonder how the hell I did it. As I make my tenth cup of tea, and it’s only eleven am, check my email again and then download another track from itunes, I feel like a total fraud. If I were employed by anyone, I’d have been sacked long ago.  And so I use the 500 words a day rule. More is ok, but less is not. And when and if, I finally start writing, sometimes I forget the time, the children’s school pick-up time and the dreaded word count. Caution, spelling, self-monitoring all go. Nothing matters but the story. But on other days I stare at the screen for hours and every word is a struggle. And so I go for a walk, read the newspaper and try to imagine what it must be like to be someone else, not a fictional character, but someone with a real job.

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Biblically, it is a symbol of shame, of the white rose so embarrassed by Adam and Eve’s carryings-on that it blushed crimson.  For a celebration of romance, however, Aphrodite opening a vein for her Adonis is probably a more apposite backstory to the flower’s symbolism.

A red rose is for courage.  It is an expression of a love that must be kept secret (though the universality of that particular symbol rather detracts from the secrecy).  It is brewed to lure, bewitch or poison – depending on the stage of the relationship.  Should you be in the happy situation of having a bevy of suitors from which to choose, write their names on the leaves of a red rose and cast them into the sky.  The name on the leaf last to reach the ground is the man you should marry.  If what you’d actually like most for Valentine’s Day is some peace and quiet, a rose is also a symbol of silence.  It might be more straightforward just to buy earplugs or ask your beloved to be quiet than hope that they’ll work out the intended symbolism – a process that could take quite some time and a great deal of guessing.  Also, its powers to silence are said to be effective only when presented to the likes of banshees, vampires, and unquiet spirits.  If you happen to have a penchant for the undead – enough to have got yourself into a relationship with one – you may well be quite happy to hear about their day forevermore.

The quantity also carries symbolic meaning.  If all you want to say is ‘I love you’ then give one; if you miss someone, give six; if it’s just a passing infatuation, send seven; if you both love them and delight in their company, give a dozen; eighteen roses is a floral begging for forgiveness; congratulate with twenty-five; and to show a love that is everlasting and unconditional no matter what (including, presumably, spending the month’s rent in interflora), heft home a bouquet of fifty.

However many you intend to give, be sure to keep them fresh: a withered red rose symbolises a fading passion and dying love.  Valentine’s (or Valentinus’s) Day is hardly the time and place to tell someone it’s over.

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But, really, you could.  Flowers, cards, jewellery, chocolate, dinner, champagne, and perfume are perfectly nice.  They’re pretty and pleasant – a delightful way to say ‘I love you’ – but in romance of yore, they would have won you neither maiden nor squire.

Devotion required a little more than a bunch of flowers, a card, and some chocolates.  It had to be proved via feats of remarkable invention and questionable sense.  You could, for example, raise a rooster til it was 11 months old then chop off its head, cut out its heart and eat it.  If you could get hold of a wild duck or dove, your intended would be equally impressed, though only if you pointed at the ground and held their shoulder while you swallowed it.  It would take a little more if all you could get your hands on was an owl – to impress with an owl’s heart, you’d have to cut it out, dry it, and carry it round in your pocket.  Attempting to woo a gentleman, a lady could win him by secreting a teaspoonful of ground fingernail into his beer.  He would have to come by the web of a wild gander’s foot to dry, crush into a powder, and sprinkle in the coffee of the woman whose affections he sought to ensure she would both marry him and stay faithful.  To make himself irresistible, a gentleman could pull out some of a lady’s hair, hide the dried tongue of a dove in his bedroom, or chew a piece of gristle while standing on his head.  Continuing the livestock theme, if you and your friends wish to know who will marry first, put a cat on a quilt and fling it up in the air.  Whoever it lands nearest will marry first.  Or have her eyes scratched out.  If you meet THE ONE at a party, whisper his or her name twenty times (it has to be done in front of him or her so try to find a way to work it into the conversation) then before you go to sleep (presumably alone) wish twenty times that you’ll be together forevermore and you shall.  Assuming the muttering hasn’t put them off.  Should you have any concerns about your husband’s fidelity, simply cut a lemon in half, rub the pieces on the four corners of your bed then put them under your pillow.  If you dream of him, he is faithful; if you don’t then all this Valentine palaver is for naught.  Should you want to prove your undying devotion to your husband, run three times round the block with your mouth full of water.  If you succeed, he will know that your affections are true.  Presumably, choking, asphyxiating or spitting it all over him for making you take part in such a ridiculous activity when you’ve already made your feelings perfectly clear proves he’s better off without you.

Going to such bizarre and strenuous lengths to prove one’s feelings does sound more impressive than stopping by the shop on the way home to pick up some flowers, but I’m not sure that all the muttering, gargling, heart-swallowing, hair-pulling, and cat-flinging is indicative of devotion so much as serious disturbance.  Ground fingernails and gander’s foot don’t sound half as appetising as champagne and chocolates; and if we all sought out an owl, duck, dove, goose, or rooster to fillet every Valentine’s, they’d soon become endangered species.  Personally, I’d rather not come across the dried tongue of a dove in a man’s bedroom and would be perfectly happy with a card.  I suppose it depends on just what sort of feelings you wish to convince your beloved.

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Write on anything you like, but if love inspires you, in the 17 syllables of a haiku, tell us why your Valentine is so very special.  Or why you’re so right in being anti-Valentine.

In case you’re in need of a prompt, a haiku is a Japanese poem with three short lines of five, seven, and five syllables.

Matsuo Basho is said to have been a master of them.  Some of his (not always altogether intelligible) works are below.

the first cold shower

even the monkey seems to want

a little coat of straw

the wind of Mt. Fuji

I’ve brought on my fan!

a gift from Edo

old pond

a frog jumps

the sound of water

No epics of courtly love, no novels in verse, and no sonnets, please.  Vent or exalt, but do it in no more than 17 syllables then submit it in the box below.  We’ll publish our favourites in the next newsletter.

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Daughter of Aeolus and wife of Ceyx, when her husband perished in a shipwreck, Halcyone threw herself into the sea and drowned.  Out of pity, the gods changed them both into halcyon birds (later to be known as kingfishers), then forbade the winds from blowing for seven days before and after the winter solstice so Halcyone could lay her eggs in peace without the threat of storms.  In a further act of perilous spousal support, the female halcyon bird is said to support her mate when he tires flying over the sea by carrying him on her wings.

Though her tale is tragic, the birds named for her are beautiful and the days of rest the gods gave her, too, are halcyon.

Now, halcyon days are golden.  They tend to be associated with times of peace, prosperity, and tranquillity; family picnics at the seaside from which familial bickering is absent; and days in which joy is abundant and strife forgotten.  Depending on your disposition, this is either a nauseating prospect best dispatched to the same spot in hell as Hallmark’s wonderful mothers, true friends, devoted fathers, and forever-mine lovers; or remembrance of such days fills you with the glow of repose, idle nostalgia, and hope.  It really depends who you ask.

In the search for golden moments, fiction is as good a place to start as any.  Writers tend to have something to say about it.  To name a few: Lucy Maud Montgomery, sent Anne of Green Gables off to spend many a halcyon day in “the golden prime of August” in the lodges and harbours of Prince Edward Island.  Fyodor Dostoyevsky declared them to be “frightfully dull” leading to such desperate boredom that it “sets one sticking golden pins into people”.  Jack London only found them with a drink in hand.  Arthur Conan Doyle brought a certain flamboyance to his idea of bliss with the “strange tales of fortunes made and fortunes lost” and “stirring adventures” of the pioneers.  W. Somerset Maugham sided with Dostoyevsky after being charmed by a woman into married misery.  And Charlotte Bronte’s Professor mistook female subjugation and repugnance for a “halcyon mien”.

So, tragic little Halcyone, leaping from the rocks, knew nothing about the dastardly, plundering writers who would either venerate or take her name in vain.  All she wanted was to see her man.  Preferably in human form, but feathered and with the promise of immortality was the only deal the gods were offering that day.

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I am a lazy artist. I get some silly/brilliant/stupid idea for a script and get really excited. Epiphany! Light bulb! Yes­ — this comic about a dead moth I saw must be drawn! The world simply must have it. Moaning and whining and procrastinating, however, quickly follow this bolt of inspiration. I want to sit down and work, and I will, for 5 minutes. Then, it occurs to me that those dishes really need doing and, honestly, the toilet is gross and needs to be scrubbed. What I am saying here is that, sometimes, I would literally rather clean my toilet than sit down and draw a comic.

Eventually, I will drag myself to my “studio,” (the half of my kitchen that is not taken up by my Ikea table that I found on Craigslist for $60), and gather my drawing board, a half-empty tablet of Bristol Board (a hot press, heavy paper that many comic book artists use), a pencil, a ruler and some pens. Then, I will half-heartedly limp over to my couch, put my legs up on my coffee table, put on some music or turn on the television, and begin measuring out tiers and panels.

Generally, unless an idea is complex, I don’t write an entire script before I begin the drawing. The idea (whatever ridiculous thing it is), usually forms itself on the page as I draw, although I always have a pretty good script in mind. Once and awhile there’s a thumbnail or two in my sketchbook, but more often it’s a few lines of chicken scratch outlining the general text.

After measuring out the number of panels I think I will need on each page, I sketch the narration (if there is any) onto each blank panel. I then begin to rough out the figures, and speech balloons.  Once I’ve got rough sketches done of the main action and dialogue, I return to the first page and draw the details in pencil.

Then I go get something to eat and spend at least ten minutes looking for my pencil, which is, inevitably, stuck in my ponytail.

Once the pencils are complete, meaning that the entire comic is sketched and the narration and dialogue are satisfactorily placed on the page, I give the whole infernal thing the once over to decide if any changes need to be made, as, once inking begins, it is a huge pain in the ass to make changes.

Writing and drawing comics is a lot like directing a short film. One wants to make sure that each panel (or shot) is conveying the mood and perspective that is best for the story. In my work, particularly, it is important that the characters’ expressions are perfect. I rely on facial expression and gesture to convey what shouldn’t need to be written. In comics, especially, the idea of “show, don’t tell,” is paramount. Comics should never be wordy when they don’t need to be. If one can say what needs to be said using a raised eyebrow, or a look between two characters, or an atmospheric mood, that’s all that should be used. As my work is greatly emotionally driven, much of the dialogue and narration can be dropped in favor of the subtleties of the drawing itself.

Inking sucks. Usually, I do a preliminary inking where I draw over the major pencil lines with a Micron pen, a quill or a brush, and then lay in the lettering. Hand lettering is difficult, but, in my opinion, and for my work, I think it lends a more personal touch than any computer font could do. So, after a great deal of talking to myself about how much I hate it, I sit myself down and lay in the text. After the initial inking is complete, I furiously erase the underlying pencil, scattering grey bits of eraser all over my clothes and couch cushions, surely inhaling at least one chunk of the rubber.

The next step is the easy one. Using a large black artist’s marker, I lay in all the large black areas. Comics with a lot of large black areas mean that I don’t have to do a lot of detail work and that makes me happy. After all the large areas of black are laid in, that’s when I really get antsy.

Unless I have a deadline, there could be up to a week before I begin the detail work on any comic. Sure, I will walk guiltily around the neglected drafting board with the half-finished comic on it, and think, “Today I will finish inking!” But, the reality is, I am easily distracted. Yes, I would rather go to the movies. Yes, I would rather go out for cocktails with my friends. Yes, I would rather do the laundry, stare at the wall, walk barefoot over broken glass.

Eventually, however, the guilt of being a professional artist who hasn’t finished such a simple thing as a three-page comic about the weird next-door neighbor, or the moth, or the last boyfriend, will get the best of me. I will sit down, and start the painstaking work of adjusting all the inked work until it is perfect, re-lettering the lettering I screwed up before, rushing around the house searching for White-Out, and finally, look all the pages over for the tiniest flaw.

Despite my laziness, I am a perfectionist. I will obsess over every detail, until even the smallest area of cross-hatching or the slightest turn of a lip is exactly as it should be. Some flaws I leave, because I believe that it is the flaws in hand made work that makes it beautiful.

Now, with ink-covered, overly-caffeinated fingers, shuffling the large, stiff pages in my hands, I am in love.  Even after torturing myself for weeks (or perhaps because of it), having made this lovely piece is the most satisfying feeling I can have. Nothing compares to the feeling of having crafted even the simplest story from a glimmer in my mind into a fully formed work of art.

Now, I better get back to my inking… except, that bathtub is looking pretty grubby…

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The ideal writing day for me begins when I wake up naturally at eight o’clock. While I sip on a large cup of coffee I stare into space.

This hour sets the tone for the day.

About nine I eat some protein, cheese toast maybe. From nine to ten I go to the computer or, more often I lie down on a couch with a legal pad and pen. I let my mind wander. About ten an idea or character has come to me. I follow that and start to write.

I scribble from ten until about two.  I write down whatever comes into my mind. I spell phonetically and insert notes for later research.   I don’t interrupt the process to look up anything. I just try to capture the dreamlike state I am in.

Around two o’clock I start to wind down. I take a twenty minute nap and then have a shower and get dressed.

After that I go into another part of the day: the one that is for business and chores and relationships with real people.

This perfect writer day hardly ever happens. Even the idea of an interruption throws the unconscious mind off. The telephone is the worst enemy so I don’t have one in my studio.

Other people don’t understand that even speaking ruins the meditative mood. No one really understands how fragile the state is except another writer

By nature I am impatient, nervous and impulsive.

Quotes help me keep steady while writing fiction. Non-fiction writing comes from a different place.

Two of the quotes that help me are:

“The Unconscious is like children and dogs. It loves order and hates surprises.”

The other is from Flaubert.

“Be regular and orderly in your life, like a bourgeois, so that you may be violent and original in you work.”

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I am a huge procrastinator unless I have a sudden inspiration that comes out of nowhere, I am in the middle of a project, or I have a routine such as a weekly column. Otherwise, I may not write a word for weeks at a time, and when I am determined to start again, it is pure torture and I would do just about anything to not have to sit in front of the computer and put words on paper.  Every fiber of my being pulls against the idea until I HAVE to write something – until something fills up inside me and I have to put it down. It’s like I have no choice in the matter, and it has always been that way – I write because I have to write. It is something inside me and I have to let it out,

I have journals dating back until 3^rd grade with poems and sayings and little stories. Poor Mom. She had to read them all. And later, I never wrote in journals about things like, “I hate that boy and my parents are jerks.” Everything was a story. But by that time, middle and high school, I guarded them like the queen’s jewels and never let a soul read any of them. I still keep journals with stories and sometimes snippets of them are used in columns I have published or in books. I love when that happens because it feels like I haven’t wasted so much time and paper.  But actually, I think the journals were to prepare me for the writing that I needed to really do – to work on and craft and (horrors) re-write many, many times.

I write fast, which is hard to believe, since it took me 9 years to complete My Husband Ran Off With the Nanny and God Do I Miss Her. But writing a book is so hard for me not only because of the re-writes my Nazi agent forced on me, but because it is like a gigantic puzzle and all the pieces have to fit just right – the characters, plot, what happens to everyone has to work and it is like not being able to see the forest through the trees.  I used to lay chapters on the floor and make sure they transitioned the right way and then I would read it and go,” Damn! What happened to Jackie the Jack Russell?” or, “I really burnt the kitchen down in February?  Was I kissing Alex and sleeping with John on the same day? What a slut!” And I would have to change it all around. You also can’t have a character just disappear into space. Everyone has to have some kind of resolution. I may never write another novel again. It was traumatizing!

I believe habits and rituals really help get one back into the writing mode. I wrote for four years at the White House for President Bush Sr. and that was crazy. You wrote like a fanatic from 7 am until God only knows when, depending on his schedule and how many disasters were happening at once. But it was the most exciting time of my life and I wouldn’t trade it for the world. It was very exciting and sometimes you had long deadlines such as a day or two, and sometimes a triple red dot would arrive meaning you had to write the entire speech and have it on the President’s desk in two hours. The boss did that to me the very first day and I went into the bathroom and got sick. I didn’t stay in there long because the clock was ticking. Then the nurse called and said my daughter had a tummy ache and wanted to come home. “Tell her forget it!” I shrieked at the nurse. She hated me ever since. But that was exactly when I decided I missed the nanny much more than my lazy, cheap, cheating, arrogant husband.

So after doing serious writing for the White House, I started writing my book, which is much more in the humor vein. What really helped is I was offered a humor column in a Long Island Newspaper and that got me in the habit of writing at least two articles a week, many of which became part of the book. But when I have no structure and when I am not in the habit of getting up and finishing an idea or a chapter that I had been thinking about all night, you can’t drag me to the computer to write. It’s weird that it comes and goes.

There are times when an entire day goes by and I have felt like I had been writing for five minutes and when I stop I kind of float around as if I had just polished off a few glasses of Champagne. There are other days I can’t get anything right and I keep getting up to do anything besides sit back down to write.

I write mostly late at night, about 11pm until 2 or 3. The day is too distracting. But when I am in the middle of a project such as a book or screenplay or article, I hit it early in the morning, and then at night.

I also listen to George Winston first. It gets that part of the brain flowing. And I try to exercise. But right now as I try to promote my book, which is an entirely different endeavor that I find basically so overwhelming and confusing that if I hear the word social media one more time I could sock the poor person who mentioned it, I don’t write at all. In fact, Kate asked me to do this months ago. So, it’s all, for me, a matter of habit and getting whatever part of my brain that still exists to get out of its own way and let the characters speak for themselves and take me places they want to go. You can’t boss them around too much, and you certainly cannot have your parents in mind when you are writing.

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Hemingway said ‘There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.’

Well, perhaps it was easier when it was a typewriter. Now, first thing, I sit down and check my emails. Even if the obvious spam is sifted out, there are various spammish messages to distract me. Maybe even an interesting or relevant one. Then the dog needs walking. By the time I get back from that I’m feeling peckish. The kitchen is a mess, so I move some dirty dishes around, unload the laundry. Then perhaps I sit down and think about what I ought to be writing. But if the sun is shining, I’d much rather be outdoors… and if it’s raining it’s too depressing to work.

A writer ought to have a website. A schoolboy friend of my son’s has been running mine, and I feel it is time I paid it more attention. So I spend a few weeks trying to learn html and uploading material, and wondering where it went – it didn’t upload to where I meant it to go, ah there it is on a completely different page… Days pass in happy distraction. Each day I check the stats. Are people visiting, are they clicking on the ads, are they buying my books? I’m impressed that Google ads can match its offerings to my books. I’ve written one book on paedophile priests (Google offers adverts for legal services and domestic abuse counselling), one on kitchen gardening (buy your own hen), and one on finding an anonymous love letter on a beach (hot water bottles, genies in bottles). After a month, Google ads announces that I have made my first website revenue – 0.007p. I am ecstatic.

A couple of times a week I can distract myself with a fan letter. The Letter in the Bottle came out in French last year, and made a big media splash there. People now write to me about their own experiences – often tragic – and I feel if they have spent time and trauma writing to me, they deserve an answer. And searching for French accents on an English keyboard takes extra time.

So if I’m lucky I actually start real work – writing – around 3 o’clock. Not much time until the kids get back from school… I think about trying to write the novel, but that is going badly, so it would be easier to do something else. Shall I try and write another piece for Private Eye? I write about parks in danger, but it is so depressing – another park being concreted over for housing, or parking, or whatever other rubbish reason. A complex tale has to be squeezed down to about 100 words. And even then, there is so much material on rotten councils that often my piece gets held over, month after month, which is discouraging for me and the campaigners.

Shall I abandon the novel and start work on some of the other ideas that are floating around? Or shall I go and dig up some bindweed at the allotment?

I remember going to a do at my daughter’s school and one of the mothers saying to me. ‘I’ve got a fantastic idea for a book. It’s all ready. It’s all done. All I have to do is write it down.’ And she smiled smugly. But of course it’s the writing down that takes the time, that takes the discipline, the self-belief that it’s worth doing, that someone might want to read it. The research is easy, reading other people’s books, surfing the sites, taking notes, talking to people. It is forcing oneself to actually sit and write something – ideally something original, well-crafted, beautiful, interesting – that is hard.

Looking at the other offerings from writers on this website, I see that I am not alone, and suddenly I feel a bit better. Other writers out there are avoiding writing by noting the bird species visiting their bird feeders! Perhaps writers are only those of us who run out of distractions and suddenly have nothing else to do than turn to their keyboards. Perhaps it is lack of application or concentration, perhaps it is nervousness at what others might think of one’s work, but perhaps it is simply a very natural reluctance to bleed over the keyboard, to lay bare a part of oneself out for inspection.

But the days when it clicks into place are great. The days when you are on a burn, when you forget to be distracted, when email is an intrusion, when the coffee sits there undrunk, those are the days when it is worth it. I just need a few more of those.

© Karen Liebreich

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