A “Must Read” YA

Year of Reading: Week 2 Book 2

One book in particular has been crying out to be read from my TBR pile for twelve months. I’ve held off, but with the dread that someone or a casual word somewhere would give away the ending of a story and book that has come so highly recommended.

At last I’ve finally had the chance to read Six, Karen Tayleur’s brilliantly tense and riveting YA coming-of-age story.

 

One car

Five seatbelts

Six people

This out-take from the prologue, alongside the four line story rhyme introduction (each chapter features) There were six in the bed, and the little one said, ‘Roll over, roll over’ So they all rolled over and one fell out…suggested to me that only one character survives the car crash so hauntingly shown in aftermath within the prologue.

The tension builds as you come to know each of the six main characters, shown through both first and third-person viewpoints, and fret over who may or may not survive. I’m not giving anything away, except to say I was shocked and that the ending is inspired, brilliant, inescapable.

Six – a fantastic read, and read again book. Highly recommended.

Six - Karen Tayleur Published by Black Dog Books 2010       ISBN: 978 – 174203155 – 2

Year of Reading challenge

~~~~

“The more that you read, the more things you will know.

The more that you learn, the more places you’ll go.” 

                                                                                             - Dr Seuss

As a writer, I know the great importance and gains of reading widely and often, both critically toward improving my craft and for enjoyment. It’s the last part I’ve struggled with over recent years.

A writer of historical fiction must read copiously in the era of their research, the writings of the day, and everything they can lay their hands on about the time, place of their setting and the people. I’ve found over the past three years that this has left me little time to read for pleasure or to sample many of the wonderful, recently published books out there, particularly YA and kid’s lit that I also love and write in. I feel I’ve missed a large chunk, and not least because many of my friends and peers have been published in these genres and I’m eager to read their latest books.

My shelves are crammed more these days with books I want to read and the percentage of “read” to “waiting to be read” has tilted dramatically in favour of the latter.

In this National Year of Reading, I’ve set myself the challenge to read 52 books in 52 weeks. These fifty-two will be chosen beyond the many novels, information and history books I’ll be reading in the course of my research and background gathering for my current WIP.

I need and want to rediscover the pleasure of story for entertainment and escape; the great read you can’t put down while the carrots steam dry and the washing sits idle in the machine. Of course, I’ve read some fantastic books, memoirs and historical novels in pursuit of improving my knowledge of the era of my last novel, but it’s the other genres that I love passionately too that I’m missing of late.

I’m not sure I’ll get to blog on each of the fifty-two books of my challenge, but I will read them. I intend to put aside time every day to do so. Not the last ten minutes in bed of a night when my eyelids give up before my brain and the book is closed on the promise of a tomorrow that my ultra-busy 2011 couldn’t fulfill.

This will be my Year of Reading. How about you?

 

Week 1 Book 1

My first book of the year was Buying a Piece of Paris written by Ellie Nielsen. This is a non-fiction account of Nielsen’s efforts to fulfil her dream of buying a Paris apartment in just two short weeks – negotiating with limited language and knowledge of “French real estate etiquette”.

I totally enjoyed this easy read and jaunt around Paris, that, if the truth be known, fulfils a little of my own fantasy. I love how the prose frequently drops into French – my enjoyment obviously madly influenced by my own current attempts to learn the language and in appreciation of Nielsen’s struggles.

The view of life painted in Paris of Nielsen’s fellow expat’s enticed me more, yet also warned of the difficulties that perhaps only those with considerable means can fully circumvent.

A great read for lovers of Paris, France and French, or those nurturing a secret yearning to live in a foreign country.

Buying a piece of Paris - Ellie Nielsen Published by Scribe Publications 2007 ISBN: 9781-921215-51-3

Return to the Coal-face

One-hundred years ago, my great-grandfather trekked down the pit road six and a half days a week, sometimes a mile into the gloom, to reach the current coal face of the Hamilton Palace Colliery in Lanarkshire, Scotland. (Those who lived in the colliery’s tiny pit village of Bothwellhaugh affectionately knew it as the “Paillis”.) It might have taken John an hour before shift start for him to ride the cage down hundreds of metres to the road below before beginning his walk, and he didn’t earn a shilling until the first coal shards hewn hit the bottom of his skip.

In the quiet of the mine, every noise magnifies, the laughter and cursing of men, the snickers and snorts of pit ponies, the clang of picks on rock and shot fired into the bords bringing down stone and coal and earth. Some shifts, depending on your bord (work face), you’d spend soaked to the skin from start to end, if not soaked with sweat from the heat generated deep underground, you’d be wet through from the sodden roads or lying crouched in cramped quarters to get at the coal.

We can read a hundred books, and scan a thousand photographs and still be hard pressed to realise the eerie, cloying nature of dust-filled air and the closed-in walls of the underground caves of a coal mine. Tiny lamp lights carried not far in front, especially in the days of naked flame lamps pre-gas and battery lit lanterns. Danger lurked in a myriad of life-threatening ways. Precipitous rock was not always given to staying put leading to frequent “falls of stone”, or men and lads might face a panicking pit pony sending a tonne of skip and coal  careering down the tracks to crush any body unable to jump into a cutaway in the wall, or see the pony fall victim itself, another of the many unfortunate creatures  lost to the task.

Men might  drown with an inrush of water. Others fell down shafts or found themselves crushed between hutch (skip) and props. The tales and manner of demise of workers, especially in the shameful era before men’s lives were considered more important than the tonnage hewn, are endless, even without the oft written about explosions from fire damp and roof falls. I cannot imagine many miners, wheelers, shiftmen or engine drivers began their shifts at ease, nor saw their loved ones wave them off without a prayer. In the course of writing my novel, I’ve imagined their discomfort, the dirt, the wet, and the fettered fear that must have travelled the pit road with all who worked the tunnels. Last week, for a second time, I ventured down a coal mine too.

My first trip underground was mid-2010 when I went down a Lanarkshire coal mine, into the gloom, yet fully trusting of our guide and in the knowing we were down for a limited time and with all the safety precautions of modern-day OH&S. Still I found it unnerving and the prickles jagging up my spine only eased on stepping back into daylight. I was determined though to tour underground at the Wonthaggi State Coal Mine, it being my great-grandfather, John McConaghy’s workplace the last eighteen-years of his working life before ill health saw him retire in 1930.

Regardless of whether you’ve a family history connected to mining, the tour at Wonthaggi offers excellent insight into the workplace/life of a miner, wheeler or shiftman. From the steep trek down a (tourist smooth) path between the skip tracks to the ride out up the very steep incline in a cage train, I found the tour took me not only down into the mine but transported me to another time. Part of me wanted the human voices to hush and let me hear the whispers and sounds of the long-ago workings take up instead. Only the coward in me remained happy to keep it real and modern and focused. A few seconds pause, at one stage, saw our humorous guide, Rod, snapping off the lights to give us an inkling into just how black, dark can be. From then on, though the periodic lamp lighting somewhat injured the pretence going on in my imagination I was most grateful for the light they cast just the same.

Rod told us tales of how the miners used to kick the thunder box before opening the lid for a sit, lest they got a bite on the bum from a rat for their oversight. Yet the rats were the miners’ mates. The miners used to feed them. And if the rats hung around, you knew you were pretty right. But if the rats were running past, you knew to high-tail it out of there fast too.

We writers and descendants are lucky to have such opportunities to hear the whispers of our forebears and vicariously experience a tiny taste of their lives, without the danger, the suffering, the physical and health damage working in any mine (be it coal, gold, tin, or other) can inflict on a body leading to premature illness or death. I’ve often lost sight of some of the harsh realities while writing my novel, which is set in both Wonthaggi and Bothwellhaugh. At times I saw only the romantic side of a different era and place and lifestyle, despite working hard to establish authenticity, but then even war can take on a romantic side in literature. We can paint the suffocating air, the crash and grind and squeal of a hutch careening out of control and slamming into flesh, but I am grateful not have to see and live the aftermath and grieve as men, and wives and mothers did often in days when many had no choice but to follow the pit road. I am grateful as are some I’ve interviewed and read about that those days are gone. Though there are others that equally mourned the passing of such days and a life that was all they knew.

I’ll be proud to see the novel that has resulted from my research published. I’m delighted that the feedback coming already has acclaimed its veracity and believability. Research is my bliss in being a writer, almost equal to the writing, be it interviewing a rodeo clown, climbing down a coal mine, or scuba diving in the ocean. I wonder what on earth, above or below, is coming next…

I’d love to know what type of things you’ve done or adventures you’ve had in pursuit of authenticity in your writing research. If you like, you can leave me a message in the comments.

Au Revoir 2011 ~ Bon jour 2012

Waving 2011 goodbye, I’m grateful it was here, yet pleased to see it go. It’s been fun and frantic and sped by like no other. But, hey, don’t we always say that?

CYA logo by Bec Timmis

The first half-year for me was head down and fully focused on finishing the final draft of my novel, reworking a YA mss and planning a writing workshop. I thought they kept me busy enough combined with uni classes. I kept up with my writing goals and surpassed the one to enter a major writing competition by winning the published author category of the CYA Writing Competition for my YA novel mss Jumping Through Hoops in early September. A huge highlight in a frantic year, including my going up to Brisbane for the presentation.

 

On the homefront, it was a strange year of goodbyes and hellos in our family. In February, our nest shrank from three to two with our daughter flying across the world to the UK for nine months leaving hubby and me empty nesters, albeit briefly. What initially seemed a strange and unnerving occurrence soon revealed bonuses. It’s amazing how much simpler life becomes for a writer with fewer people to take into account, plan meals around, and be interrupted by. Still we were thrilled when our youngest son returned to the nest in April, bringing with him his cheeky humour and remarkable ability to “tidy” a room in record speed. Shame his equally remarkable ability to completely trash it at even faster pace remains unchanged. (Enter the “closed door” policy. What you cannot see, cannot hurt you. )

Second semester got even busier with one uni subject requiring me to write an 8000-word exegesis, alongside completing the final stage of my Master’s Major Project subject. Both needed lots of writing and rewriting and for a few weeks there, I thought I’d drown under academic research papers, novel chapters and the pressure of looming deadlines. Short term stress though, for which I’m grateful, but glad to see the back of too.

So what will 2012 bring?

I’m still sorting my list of writing goals? I certainly have a wish list of a few small things I aim to achieve like:

•             Find a publisher for TST
•             Find an agent
•             Make more reading time
•             Indulge in more relaxation/family time
•             Write many, many words of my new novel.

The journey continues because, of course, I’ve got to go all the way – from Hook to published Book.

So Happy New Year, one and all. May the muse, good health and good fortune bless us all in 2012. (And may it be somewhat less frantic than its predecessor.)

Postscript: I’m also grateful that when my car gallantly caught a Camry driving off the upper level of a tiered car park in early December that neither my daughter or I were inside but safely sipping tea in a cafe until a policewoman came in search of us. Thought you might like to see the pics. I am grateful too that the elderly lady who mistook her accelerator for her brake was not hurt either. Just another reminder to me to smell the roses more next year and never ever forget that cars and stuff are replaceable/repairable, but those we love are not.

Viva La France

Parlez-vous français?

Mais oui!

Gotta love a research trip. Mine is set to go. With flights to France booked for next year and a preliminary itinerary planned, it’s been made real.

This week my French language course books arrived. Tres excitement! Flipping through the pages I’m already recalling my high school French.

I studied the language for three years in secondary school. Funnily enough I recall almost everything I learnt from the first six months and virtually nothing from the next two-and-a-half years. I remember the basics: the numbers, the verb être “to be”, foods and vocabulary, thanks to the Poirot family who liked to eat poisson (fish).

When I began form one (year seven), my family were living for a two-year stretch in a country town in northern Victoria and I went to the Catholic high school where one of the nuns taught French – sans accent. Dare I blame my deplorable French pronunciation on the formidable Sister Austin whose rote learning of verbs and vocabulary impressed the words indelibly into my brain? Perhaps. Sadly, she cannot be blamed for my ongoing struggle to successfully roll my Rs!

We moved back to Melbourne mid-year and I immediately found myself drowning in a class run by a ferocious French woman who refused to allow a word to be uttered not French. To this day, I cannot fathom how she expected me to explain my lack of understanding and language in French, especially when 99 per cent of the time I had no clue what she was saying back to me.

The situation was not helped by her sighting my Term I and II reports where I was shown as an A+ student in French at my previous school. I’m sure she thought I was fudging or lazy.

Mais non!

What I’d understood perfectly well spoken in slow, Australian accented, basic French did not translate coming at me in rapid-fire real French.

Next year, we’ve planned to spend the final two weeks of the trip settled in an authentic French house in a small village in Provence so that I can write up the balance of my notes and write some actual scenes while immersed in the atmosphere and culture of France. This was my one regret from my last novel’s rushed research trip. This time I want to ‘live’ the life (if mostly in my imagination being such a different era) and I see speaking to the locals in the village where we’re staying in their language as an important part. Or at least attempting to.

Armed with a basic French course book, cds and dictionary, I’m hoping to learn to converse enough to pass the time of day and request “un vin blanc, s’il vous plaît” at the very least.

So over the next few months hubby and I are both going to dive into language and all things French in preparation for the trip. Not to mention me researching and sorting heaps of questions, locations and history preparatory to my research around the battlefields in the north.

Here’s hoping any new language and vocabulary I learn will stick too, unlike Mandarin. A recent cleanout turned up my one semester workbook and I was disappointed to realise it was all just Chinese to me.

一白葡萄酒，請

Uni Kid (at heart)

Some folks get their thrills buying a new car, or taking a trip. Some find their bliss in simple things like the scent of a rose or laughter of a child. I miss my secret thrill.

Every day thousands of people teem through the turnstiles at Melbourne Central Station, up the escalators and out into the blue sky or leaden deluge, dependant on which ten minutes in the hour Melbourne’s weather alternately puts on, and onto Swanston Street.

Being a writer, I often study people’s faces, surreptitiously, of course, and wonder what they are thinking. Where do they come from? And where do they go to? Who waits for them at home? And how did he get that scar on the bridge of his nose? Car accident? Angry wife? Superman flight off the garage roof as a child?

A couple of times a week for the past 18-months, I’ve been one of the throng emerging from the subway into the world aboveground. And on every single one of those days, walking along Swanston Street, I look up to the skyline and the buildings, the signage of RMIT, and cannot contain my smile. A fizzing bubble of excitement races up my spine and the same words wing through my mind. “I love being a uni kid.” (Yes, I’m a little old to say such a thing – it’s a throwback to my daughter’s uni days when she spoke of the media kids, the tv and radio kids in her course. What can I say – it stuck.)

I can’t help it. Eighteen-months on, I still feel thrilled and privileged and honoured to walk the hallowed halls of  RMIT and to be completing a Masters degree. I never went to uni straight from school, but I’ve always been a big believer in life-long learning and undertaken many courses over the years from dressmaking to Chinese cooking to life writing to Mandarin 101. My first taste of tertiary ed came in the late nineties when I decided that if I was going to free the writer I knew fluttering against the cage of insecurity inside of me, then I’d better get some keys to help unlock the cage door. So I commenced my Diploma of Arts – Professional Writing & Editing at Box Hill Institute. Three fantastic years later, set on my path  and armed with confidence, fantastic writing buddies and with  two published books and three in-print, I graduated. But a part of me still yearned for a degree – and, I have to add, the cap and gown I was robbed of at my graduation. Every other year the BHI TAFE grads wore gowns, but someone dropped the ball on the planning for the grads of 98.

A couple of people in my Masters have said they won’t be attending their graduation ceremony. And I can understand why with most having already graduated once before and worn the gown and mortar board I so covet. Next year, though when my turn comes, I’ll be there with bells on, Bells on hand that is to help me celebrate.

I can’t wait to wear that mortar board, but I’m pretty happy too that I’ve got one more semester of being a uni kid. So if you see a woman on Swanston Street smiling into the sky a bit goofishly, next year, it could well be me. Or some other middle-aged silly loving what she’s doing and thinking herself very, very lucky to be a uni kid too.

Or it could be a writer hugging news of a new book contract. Now there’s another thrill I’ve never gotten over.

A Novel Beginning

“So much of our time is preparation, so much is routine, and so much retrospect, that the pith of each man’s genius contracts itself to a very few hours. The history of literature — take the net result of Tiraboschi, Warton, or Schlegel — is a sum of very few ideas and of very few original tales; all the rest being variation on these.”  Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Experience”

Where do you start a new novel? According to the famous words in A Sound of Music’s Do-Re-Mi, the “very” beginning is a very good place to start. But for my new novel, I don’t think the very beginning is the right place to start.

I mean how can a writer know so early in the writing? Often nothing much is happening in the “beginning”. Hence the value of backstory and flashback. Sometimes important incidents shaping the character or journey might be found in the past, but are these the best starting points? Or, are you best to start in media res (in the action)? Or in a poignant moment.

You know what, it doesn’t matter, because…

Yay! I’ve started the writing. And my initial chapter one starts not at a birth or even when characters first meet, but at a significant event where all their lives are about to change. The moment in time is inevitable and unpreventable.

Whether this start remains as the beginning one, two, three years from now when I finish this novel, I am yet to know. What I do know is that it’s fantastic to have started and to have met one of my main characters. I cannot wait to get to know them all.

I have lots of scene ideas and a storyline. It’s complex and going to take time. I do know this novel is not going to be written like the last with a chronological narrative. That’s exciting in itself. And opens up a whole new way of writing for me. I’m usually pretty linear. But because I have lots of ideas and multiple viewpoints, I think this story and characters will lend themselves to growing and weaving into each other. Of course, it might all tangle into one hell of a mess too, but the beauty is the freedom to write in disconnected scenes. Of course I envisage the connections in my mind, but it’s going to be a little like a jigsaw putting it together.

I’m excited to have bought the new Scrivener for Windows program and am hanging out to try it. I’ve just got to put aside a couple of hours to go through and learn the basics via the tutorial. I love that I’ll be able to write in scenes and then shuffle them and draw them all back together via the program. I can see lots of possibilities. I’m also eager to try the digital index cards and cork board, though I’m equally impressed with the value of laying out hardcopy index cards to map a manuscript too. (If you’re into index cards, and haven’t already done so, you might like to check out my previous post on manuscript mapping.)

I’m glad I’ve had a few months to begin to separate from my last novel. It was very funny and quite strange to see in the new writing where the main character is supposed to be a young Aussie male that the voice and speech mannerisms came out fuddled with the unique voice of Maire, the main character from my recently finished novel. Funny because she’s female, young and Scottish. Hmmm. Perhaps the distance from the first is not great enough yet.

I have lots of research to focus on before progressing too far with the writing. Though I am writing in a similar era to my previous novel so have the benefit of a great starting knowledge on the history, lifestyle and culture. Really I’m just thrilled to have made a start.

The writing process is different for all of us. American author John Irving begins with his novel’s last sentence and works his way backward through the plot to where the story should begin. I don’t have such a process to  start. Though with my background in writing for children and YA, I try to go with action, or start the point of story where things begin to happen, hot up. I’d love to know if you begin your new story by a set process or how you begin. I wonder if it affects different genres, age groups, styles. Please share if you’d like to in the comments.

(The photograph above is the birth of my new baby zucchinis, or they will be soon. Writing novels takes preparation just like vegetable plants. Only I’m not sure that my new novel will look as beautiful for awhile. I’m sure I’ll be eating these zucchinis long before my novel is ready.)

No. 510

Or what should be titled “The best conversation starter ever”.

What began as a trip in 2008 to explore my ancestral roots, grew into a niggle that refused to be stilled. Perhaps weeks of researching my family tree and their migration from Ireland to Scotland and on to Australia placed me in just the right mood to be open to the teeming vibration of possibilities I found from the moment I began to walk through the reconstructed setting of the Wonthaggi State Coal Mine.

Writers will recognise that feeling – that stir – there’s a story here. I didn’t know what it was at the time. All I knew was – “it’s here”. And what a setting? What a history? What a backstory?

I couldn’t use my family story because, well, there wasn’t one. Okay, of course, there is a family background, a migration, of good, solid, hard-working people who flew under the radar and left little trace of themselves or their lives. Not in the newspapers, nor in diaries, or letters – nowhere it seemed of note. A lot of people ask if my novel is my family story. No, it is not. But it is their background, their journey and representative of lives lived in the early nineteen-hundreds, a time of mass migration to this country and the age of the coal industry.

I found little oral history to be told either, much as I quizzed my mother, imploring her to search perhaps missed grey areas of her memory that may turn up some trinkets of possibility. But no. My great-grandparents were battlers who got on with life, despite the loss of more than half their children at birth and in infancy, uprooting themselves twice in search of a better life for their family. They made no fuss or show of their lives and seemingly had no desire to record it. But their background, their journey to Australia, the places they lived, those details I’ve lifted and molded to my story. Some extras too, remembered from anecdotes told by my grandmother, embellished and expanded by Mum, have been woven into a work that is otherwise entirely fiction. But it is the small gems of truth that bring authenticity and texture to my story and were a great thrill for me to include beyond the more impersonal, yet invaluable greater research.

One treasure I did unearth during the research is the medallion I am wearing in the photograph at top left of this blog and reproduced below – No. 510. This is a replica of my great-grandfather John McConaghy’s miner’s token. Every time a pit worker went down the mine, he took his token off the board so that the mine management would know who was below and who to search for in the event of an accident. John’s number was 510 for all the eighteen-years he worked there. My grand-father, Ted Nash, who later married my grandmother (and John’s daughter), along with his four brothers all worked at the mine too, though most of them, including my grandfather, only briefly.

I wear the token on a strip of leather, often, and it never fails to amuse and delight me how often a stranger will ask me the meaning of the number 510, or what the medallion represents. I’ve had strangers ask on trains, in Melbourne Central, restaurants, the supermarket, even in London, who cannot keep their eyes from it, and I watch as their curiosity grows. They’re always intrigued with its background too. I’m often surprised how many people are connected in some way to the State Coal Mine in Wonthaggi or who’ve had ancestors working in coal mines somewhere in the world.

Just thought I’d share this gem and tangible link to my past and my story, which, to me, makes it all the more precious.

What I am Reading

Words to transport me across generations, centuries, continents and viewpoints – such is the mastery of writer Arnold Zable in his acclaimed memoir Jewels and Ashes.

What began as a “case study” for my Master’s exegesis – too dry a term by far for this riveting narrative and beautifully told story – became a lesson in the art of traversing narrative time. I chose Zable’s work because I’ve long admired him and his writing and have attended various of his talks and his inspirational Painting with Words workshop. (You know how every now and again you get that feeling your writing has upped a level, well, I believe this workshop prompted one of those shifts. But, I digress.)

With my next novel unstarted, at the time, but swirling in my mind, I wanted to write my exegesis to inform on an aspect of its writing. I can already see the structure of my new novel forming as a complex narrative where I plan to show three characters’ viewpoints and visit them in different time spans, on different continents and be able to crisscross between them all. Hence my exegesis topic: Traversing Narrative Time, Space and Viewpoint. Part of the reflective practice in my uni subject’s title is to look to the masters to see how they’ve achieved such techniques. Zable was my first choice, though I also studied Gabriel Garcia Marquez who is the master Zable says he studied to learn his artistry of transitions.

Jewels and Ashes traces the author’s pilgrimage to the birthplace of his Jewish parents, (in Bialystok, Poland), crisscrossing the decades of the twentieth century to uncover the truth and fate of his extended family. When I first read the book several years ago, I marvelled at how Zable showed history while weaving his family background around his 1986 journey to Poland, but I didn’t really understand what he was doing craftwise, how he was doing it or why. I just knew whatever he was doing transported me on one amazing journey. Mind you the way Zable paints his words in such rich detail and description transports you with seamless ease too.

Of course, I’ve read many novels featuring multiple viewpoints, time and places, but I’d always been keenly aware of the transitions from one to the next. Some jolt you out of the story with a clunk, or shifts only occur at the end of chapters or storybreaks, whereas Zable weaves into the next event, place, time with seamless transitions, be they in mid-sentence or mid-paragraph.

How does he do it?

Through my study of Jewels and Ashes, and Arnold’s own explanation of his technique, I understand him to effect many of his transitions by connecting story fragments or threads using subtle and well placed links. Closer study of the text reveals these to be both tangible and intangible associations, such as events, trees, photographs and letters, and/or sensory connections, such as memories, smells and sounds. For the purpose of my exegesis I extracted the examples below to demonstrate:

• Decades later,… (p. 8 ) a simple flashforward (prolepsis)
• We leap through the centuries (p. 46) transition bringing narrative forward two-hundred years
• As a child I would often gaze at his portrait in the Bialystok photo album… (p. 46) transition back through flashback (analepsis)
• Father has now warmed to the subject. He draws me with him to Nieronies Lane. (p. 76) transition of place
• Years later, when Mother fell on a Melbourne street, the memory of another fall, in a time and place far removed, came flooding back. (p. 88) incident as link to another time
• At 4 a.m. on summer mornings, throughout the twenties… (p. 93) connects one paragraph later through the link of season to On a summer morning in 1986…
• Above all, Father recalls the seasons (p.139) a memory and seasonal transition of time and place.

Arnold Zable is not only a wonderful storyteller, but a generous humanitarian, and I was lucky enough on two chance occasions during the writing of my exegesis to have opportunity to speak to him and ask him about his practice when writing his memoir. Arnold told me he did not plot the narrative of Jewels and Ashes, but followed his physical journey and allowed the threads of the greater story to emerge instinctively. However organically these evolved, the chronological discontinuity and disruption of story serve to build a sense of mounting dread even in a fact-based narrative where the reader knows the holocaust history:

‘At Linowe station the trains were drawn up by the platform, waiting. The time-tabling was precise, the organisation efficient. The doors of the cattle wagons slid to a close on entire families, crammed together, robbed of light, air and hope. Soon after they were on the move: a journey of several hundred kilometres southwest, across the breadth of Poland, to a town called Auschwitz’ (p.137).

The switch to a new focus in the next paragraph serves to discontinue the narrative and heighten tension even with foreknowledge of the horror coming.

This post offers only a glimpse of one of the multiple narrative devices available to traverse time, space and viewpoint to best dramatic and emotional effect. Regardless of whether you’re interested in the writing craft, I urge you to read Jewels and Ashes. You’re in for a treat, a harsh history beautifully told and one that must never pass out of memory. Honour goes to Zable and all those it recalls.

It is so true what they say about  the value of reading as a writer and what you can learn. Though I’ve never studied a topic quite so intently (or academically) before, and found the initial drafting of my exegesis extremely challenging, I can honestly say what I’ve learned is invaluable. If I can begin the writing of my new novel and in some small way emulate the beauty of the transitions of Arnold Zable in his writing, I’ll  be thrilled. What once seemed impossible, now seems achievable.

I hope this post excites the idea of some ‘narrative’ time travel in your writing. If so, I’d love you to let me know or leave any thoughts you’d like to add in the comments.

The Three Rs

aka: Reading, Research and Relaxation.

Hello, poor neglected blog. October snuck by me with just two posts, and I can’t believe November is here so fast. Yet, haven’t I been wishing it here for weeks? Terrible, I know, to wish your life away, but I’ve a blissful and much needed month planned and I’m geared up.

Or should I say wound down? Despite me thinking this time last year what fun and how productive would be participating in NaNoWriMo (the write 50,000-words in a month) and that I might give it a go this year, I find myself feeling and needing the opposite. It’s been a hugely busy year for me. Between uni and finishing my novel I’ve been writing almost seven days a week since the start of the year. Now it’s time for some rest and relaxation. AND SOME FUN!

My new novel grows daily in my head and in lots of notes. Just like the little cress seeds I planted last week, ideas are popping their heads up and stretching out towards the writing. The story is another historical work and so needs lots of research, and, excitingly, a research trip, though I’m not planning on going anywhere until next year. My aim for November is to spend lots of time reading, but not only for research or time period or specific purpose. Reading for enjoyment and to catch up on the huge number of temptations filling my bookshelves that have been beckoning to me like the delicious wafts emanating from a chocolaterie to someone on a restricted diet. Now I’m free to give in to temptation. (And this doesn’t include the pile on my bedside table or in the box under my bed!)

There’ll be lots of reading for research too, and internet travel. You know, the fun kind. Getting lost for hours in another space and time, and travelling to places at a finger click – all thanks to Google. The type of research where you can blissfully lose hours criss-crossing shores and time periods, meeting heroes and heroines and learning histories – all guiltless because it’s actually work. With no real writing planned, other than that insisting on being written, (and those new characters are becoming a little persistent) my time, for now, is my own. What bliss. No doubt a few blog entries will be made up for too.