© Stock.xchng

As I get into the swing of the new year, I’m finding my week is naturally dividing itself into patterns, with two days devoted to creative writing, two days to the website and two days to sourcing and carrying out the freelance writing work that keeps a roof over my head.

Yes, that does add up to around six working days a week, but while I’m doing what I love, I really don’t care. Besides, some days that simply means logging on to check in on the forums (which are currently suspiciously quiet – where are you all?) and delete spam, while creative writing days can include long strolls and longer chats with like-minded people who inspire me.

This week has been particularly fruitful creatively, as I completed a short story yesterday, sent off an entry for a short story competition, submitted a short story to a literary magazine and sent off some query emails to agencies offering support to selective mutes, as the protagonist of one of my novels suffers from that particular social disorder.

Ooh, and then today I found out that a poem I entered for a creative writing competition run by Sense has been shortlisted, which is fab news!

The stipulation for the poem was that it had to be written from the point of view of someone who is both deaf and blind. It was an interesting challenge, but one that meant a lot for me as Diabetic Retinopathy is something that’s looming alarmingly on my horizon.

So I engaged all my other senses and wrote a poem about a deaf/blind person being taught about colours by their lover. I enjoyed the challenge, was pleased with the result, and am now tempted to go through some of my old short stories and see what happens if I remove one of the protagonists’ senses. It could alter the whole slant of the tale, which might utterly revitalise some of them.

So 2010 is looking (and sounding) good already. Now all I need to do is maintain the momentum…

As a writer I’ve been warned against making too much use of coincidence as a plot device. Early drafts of my stories and novels quite often have characters fortuitously coming across the one piece of information or meeting the one person they needed to move things forward.

I think it’s partly because I see my own life as a series of coincidences. I always have to make sure that in the next draft I make the main character more active, less wafty so that they choose events rather than events choosing them.

But in real life, coincidences often crop up in ways that would never work in a piece of fiction.

Take yesterday, for example. Yesterday afternoon I had the excitement of going to the diabetic clinic to be fitted with a blood testing monitor that will take continuous readings for three days and then, hopefully, present me with a graph to let me know what my body gets up to when I’m not paying attention. Could be interesting!

The weird thing was that while I was waiting for the diabetic specialist nurse to see me I could hear a baby crying and I thought to myself, How funny, all babies sound just like my nephew. I suppose all babies sound the same.

Then when I went into my appointment, the nurse said, “Did you know your sister’s here seeing the other nurse?”

So it was my nephew!

I managed to get linked up to the monitor in time to catch my sis before she left and we went for a coffee afterwards, which was nice as we hadn’t caught up since Christmas. I suppose there are some curious advantages to both of us having diabetes.

The nurse seemed surprised that I hadn’t known she’d be there, but we don’t often discuss such boring things as diabetic appointments, so even if I’d seen her yesterday we probably wouldn’t have known we’d be at the hospital at the same time today.

My plot-lines may have a propensity for swinging from one coincidence to another, but one thing I do know is dialogue, and we have much more interesting things to talk about than that, at least, most of the time.

© Richard Mallinson

Last Tuesday I joined a scriptwriting group held at a local pub. Scriptwriting is a medium I’ve never tried before, but I’m always looking for new writing challenges.  I’m currently writing a short story that seems to be morphing into a script, so I thought it would be a good idea to find out more about the art before I attempt to tackle it for real.

The thing about scriptwriting, as opposed to many kinds of writing, is that many of the people who end up doing it aren’t writers at heart. Often they’re people who want to act or direct. It’s also relatively social form of the sector – you may write alone, but then you might redraft and revise in the company of actors, directors, producers, or even, if you work in TV, be part of a team of writers. So much for writing being solitary!

When I interviewed Mark Ravenhill about it, he commented that he became a writer by default – he wanted to be a director. And he also said that one of the major challenges is that “to work in the theatre, you have to be a person who enjoys collaborating with others, who enjoys working as part of a group. But writing is a solo experience. I don’t like that. I get it over with as quickly as possible.”

I think I have two sides to my personality – I need my own space to write and create, then I need to get out there and talk to be people to drive me forward, keep me inspired.

The scriptwriting group proved to serve the latter part enormously well, as we all gathered together in a room upstairs, and one writer handed out her script for us to read through. Anyone who was willing was allocated parts and I ended up with four small roles, which scared me slightly until I got into it and remembered how much I’d enjoyed acting as a child.

The script was really interesting, and after we’d read out the first episode of the writer’s eight-episode TV series, the critiquing began. I felt like taking notes. Some comments seemed harsh, but all were useful, making this as valuable, if not more so, than any scriptwriting course.

I can’t wait till next week to see what more I can learn – and what role I’ll get to play…

Anna © www.sxc.hu

At the end of last year and the beginning of this one, my novel Anna Speaks attracted the interest of one of the UK’s most prestigious literary agents. They made lots of suggestions that I took on board, making a few changes here and there to strengthen the novel’s good parts and solves problems with some of the weaker areas.

I was so pleased to have this interaction, and the revised novel came through the process more streamlined, more powerful and generally shinier than when I submitted it.

But somewhere along the line, the agency lost interest and decided the book wasn’t for then. An acquaintance of mine kindly submitted the synopsis to her agent early in 2009, and he professed an interest, but then went quiet. I nudged him in March, but he said he hadn’t made a decision yet, and was busy with the London Book Fair. Fair enough, but it’s now July and I still haven’t heard from him.

So, a few weeks ago I decided to take the next step and submit my manuscript to Macmillan New Writing, an imprint whose sole purpose is to publish work by previously undiscovered authors. Such as me.

The scheme does have its controversies. For one thing, you get no advance, and Macmillan owns all kinds of rights to your work that other publishers don’t expect. For example, I think that they own half your foreign rights, so they will get half the proceeds should your novel be published overseas. They also get half the proceeds should your novel be turned into a film.

That actually doesn’t bother me, as it would mean me getting half of something I probably wouldn’t have achieved a quarter of by myself.

My main concern is about the eligibility of Anna Speaks. Although I wrote it for adults, much of the focus is on a rather troubled fourteen-year-old girl. I think of it as an adult novel with some appeal for teen readers. The submission guidelines from Macmillan New Writing specifically mentions that they don’t accept books written for young adults, so unless they can see past the age of my protagonist, I guess I won’t be hearing them.

Which will simply mean I have to find the next agent, next publisher, next potential outlet for my novel. If there’s one thing I’ve learnt from all this, it’s that writers need tenacity as much as if not more than they need talent.