"Launching my book into the world..."

I know I shouldn't, but I see my book a bit like my "baby." I spent years, first gestating it (note the extended metaphor), then crafting and writing it, then editing it. And because of all that, I feel very protective towards it. Yet now has come the time to let it go (once I publish it, which will be soon, promise!) and let it live its own life...

Writing outdoors

 

 

I explained in a previous post why I liked to write in a café. But a café is not the only place that inspires me to write: I also like to write outdoors. And when I say “write outdoors” I mean write sitting on the grass, in a garden or in a meadow, surrounded by wildflowers, with the sun shining on a summer afternoon… An idyllic setting.

When I’m writing outdoors, my surroundings tend to work their way into my descriptions: I love describing the countryside, the seasons, the way they change, and what better way to describe them than having them before my eyes as I write? It’s a bit like the difference between painting a landscape in situ and in a studio; and to make a description is to paint with words.

I’ll see a bird, a gnarled tree shaped by the wind, darkening clouds, I’ll hear animals scuttling in the undergrowth, I’ll smell crushed leaves of wild mint and feel the fresh coarse grass, and all those elements will start a trail of thought, or give me new ideas. Ripples on the surface of a pond. A deer barking. Shadows lengthening at dusk. Raindrops on a cobweb. Golden sunlight after a storm.
 

If I’m stuck in front of a blank page, I only have to raise my eyes and gaze at the landscape, and soon I am writing again. I’m not very productive in terms of word count when I write outdoors: there is always something catching my attention, and distracting me, and I daydream, and I contemplate the landscape instead of writing. But those surroundings usually help me make my prose richer and more interesting.

I sometimes look at my surroundings and ask myself: how would [one of my characters] describe this? What would it evoke to them? What would their feelings be? And I can come up with interesting answers which even help me to define the personality of those characters better. Or I “discover” something about them I had not thought of before.

I like trying to see a landscape through the eyes of my characters, for the differences in their perception of it reveals a lot about them. Where one sees bleak, barren, inhospitable moorland, for instance, another sees the play of light and shadow, contrasting colours, beauty. And another, having spent all their life there, will not see anything at all, that landscape being so familiar, so much part of them, in a way, that they stop taking any notice of it. I find those contrasting perceptions interesting to work with in terms of character development. It is also a good stylistic exercise.
 

Is the moor barren or beautiful?

So I try to write outside as much as I can: usually in the summer, when I am in the country. I take my manuscript and my pen and sit down in the grass to write – until it starts to rain that is and I have to run back inside! Or until the wind scatters my precious draft and I have to run after the pages. The hazards of writing outdoors…

 

"When were you written?"

Accent or no accent?

Most of the characters in my (still unpublished) novel As Winter Came and Went speak with an accent. There are French accents, Irish accents, Devonian accents, “aristocratic” accents… This would all be very well if it was a BBC or ITV series, but As Winter Came… is a novel, and as I was editing it, I wondered: how can I make the readers “hear” all those accents? And as I tried to find an answer, I realised that what I should really ask myself was: should I make the readers hear all those accents? 

 

Many novelists make some of their characters speak with a regional accent. Examples that come to my mind right now are Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, or, closer to us, Winston Graham’s Poldark series. The spelling and the use of dialect give some of the characters in those books a very distinctive “accent.” The narrative thus gains both originality and what can be described as local colour. Would this work in my novel? Should I try to emulate these authors?

 

Pros of making a character speak with an accent

 

• A character’s accent is a clue to their identity. It gives indications as to their origins or their social class.
• As such they are a good example of the “show don’t tell” dogma every would-be novelist keeps hearing or reading.
• Accents can give colour and originality to the narrative. They are stylistically interesting.
• Accents can help define a character’s individual voice. It can become their signature and can help this voice stand out and become instantly recognisable.

But…

 

Cons of making a character speak with an accent

 

• It’s not that easy to transcribe an accent into writing. You have to know that accent very well: that means you either have to speak with that accent or have a first-hand experience of it. Otherwise there is a risk you will not transcribe it well (and vex those who speak with this accent). For instance, nothing annoys me more than fake French accents, whether in literature or in films and series. The worse is when English actors who do not speak a word of French speak English with what they think is a French accent. I mean, it’s ok if it was supposed to be comical. But if not… It’s a big fail.
• Accents require consistency. If you decide to make a character speak with an accent, he/she has to keep that accent for the whole of the novel.
• If there a several different accents in a novel, I think you have to either transcribe all or none.
• If an accent is not transcribed well, it can easily become a parody. And actually some authors tend to use characters with heavy regional accents because it brings comic relief.
• Accents can slow down the reading and make a narrative loose fluidity. By transcribing accents into writing, you change the spelling, sometimes the grammar. And though I don’t mind that, some people can find it annoying.

 

My decision for As Winter Came and Went

 

In the end I decided I would not try to transcribe the accents of my characters into my narrative. Even if it meant I had to “tell” instead of “show.” The accents of some of the characters are important in the narrative so I made it clear that they spoke with an accent: for instance another character remarks on it. Yes, it’s a bit of a shortcut and it’s not very original but I think it’s better than having them speak in a fake accent. Sometimes you do have to “tell.”

 

This also led me to realise that there are other ways of making a character’s voice individual, interesting and original: their choice of vocabulary, their use of grammar, etc. I tried to use these to create the different voices of my characters. And I hope it worked.

 

 

"The special and wonderful relationship between a novelist and her main character" Part 2

Can other writers relate? As I mentioned in my post Introducing my novel, Dennys was meant to be only a secondary character... Yet little by little he took over the story, and the result... You'll see if you read my book (yes, I'm shamelessly trying to make you want to buy it once it is published)!

Getting the first draft done

I write like I paint, in layers. First I apply a base layer, to experiment with shapes and colours, then another one on top of it, and another one, and another, until it is only a question of tweaking and refining details. There is no sign of the base layer in the finished painting, yet without it the painting would not have existed.

I see the first draft as a base layer of a painting. An unrewarding, difficult, discouraging stage. But probably the most important one in my writing process, which is made of a succession of drafts. The first draft is usually handwritten. The second draft happens when I type the first one on the computer: that also allows me to edit it as I cut/add/alter many passages, correct mistakes and make the plot more coherent. Once the manuscript is on my computer I edit, edit, edit, edit, edit… I do more historical research, check period details, work on the style and on the fluidity of my prose, hunt down as many spelling/grammar mistakes as I can, eliminate crutch words… I’d say there must have been about five drafts of As Winter Came and Went: I’m soon going to start working on what I hope will be the last one before publication, having received feedback from my first readers.

The first draft is the stage I like most and least at the same time. It is wonderful to be able to put my ideas to paper, to craft the world of my novel, to create my characters. But sometimes ideas run out and I face a blank page. Sometimes I realise that something in the plot doesn’t work and will have to be revised later on. Sometimes the writing is downright horrible and I don’t know how to make it better. 

I find first drafts hard to complete. I have a couple of novels in progress that probably won’t go past this stage. For without a finished first draft I have nothing to work with: it is the raw material of my writing process. When I was writing the first draft for As Winter… I made myself complete it. I forced myself to go on writing, even if it was mediocre, telling myself that I could change it later anyway. A first draft is just that. A first draft. A base layer that will be hidden beneath the finished work. What was important was getting it done. The trick is to understand that and to accept its imperfections.

Completing the first draft for As Winter… felt like a great achievement and as I wrote “THE END” (yes, I just had to write “the end,” because it is so satisfying) I was both proud and relieved and I knew that I would publish this novel one day, even if my work on it had only started: almost a year elapsed before I deemed the manuscript had been polished enough to be seen by other eyes than mine.

If someone was to read that first draft (assuming they could decipher my handwriting), it would make no sense to them. Or the first part would make some sort of sense, then suddenly they’d have the impression they’re reading a completely different novel. It took me years to write it and both the plot and the characters changed dramatically during that time. The novel I envisioned when I first started to write this draft has nothing to do with the one I have completed. Yet in this first draft are all the seeds from which As Winter… grew. Even if parts of it are so silly or so badly written that I am ashamed when I reread them, they were as necessary as the scenes which I barely reworked when I edited the novel.

I am now busy writing the first draft of the sequel of As Winter… (I’m about half-way through the first chapter) and I find it easier and more enjoyable, probably because I know my characters much better and because I have a good idea of where the story is going (that is to say, I know how it ends and roughly what happens in-between). I hope it might be finished in a year or so, though I wouldn’t bet on it since I still have to re-edit and publish As Winter… as well as completing my Master degree in history. Writing is only a hobby for me: that’s the trouble when you’re a would-be novelist!

"The special and wonderful relationship between a novelist and her main character"

Now, I really like Dennys, the main character of As Winter Came and Went, even if he is, in more ways than one, something of an antihero. But I'm sure that if he could spring out of my laptop like a genie out of a lamp, this would be the sort of conversation we would have... Can fellow-writers relate?

Inspiring landscapes: The French Alps

The Mont Blanc in the evening

 

Up to the late 18th century, dramatic landscapes such as mountains and the seaside were perceived negatively: mountains were a hostile land, sparsely peopled by villagers stuck in valleys which, due to the difficult terrain and the sometimes extreme climatic conditions, could spend months completely isolated from the world and from each other. Mountains were bleak and dangerous and nobody in their right mind would have willingly travelled there.

 And then came the Romantics. Then came painters, writers and poets who saw beauty in the bleakness, thrived on isolation and sought inspiration there. 

 

In the 20th century, the development and democratisation of winter sports perfected the transformation of mountain ranges such as the Alps into attractive holiday destinations. As February arrives and the French winter school holidays in France begin, families from all over the country migrate to Savoie, braving the snow, icy roads, interminable car journeys, screaming children and traffic jams to spend a few exhausting days (or couple of weeks) skiing and snowshoeing and eating raclette (melted cheese) and fondue (more melted cheese) and drinking mulled wine in the shadow of the Mont Blanc. When the holidays end they head back, to face more traffic jams, with the children still screaming in the car, and everyone in the family sporting sunburnt noses and weighing 5 kg more than when they started off...

I know what I’m talking about... I’m writing this post in the car, after a week spent in Haute-Savoie braving temperatures of approximately -10 °C, dense fog and snowfalls that reminded me that even if the mountain is more accessible today it remains a difficult, if not hostile environment, tolerating the presence of man more than welcoming it. At least that is the impression it gave me.

 

The lovely village of Cordon in Haute-Savoie

Is it what makes mountains so fascinating? That mixture of danger and attraction. Their sheer immensity. Abrupt rocks and ice and snow towering above forests of pine trees and fields of wildflowers where the cattle graze. Picturesque villages and quaint wooden chalets. The music of the bells cows wear as they head back to their farms on a summer evening. A brook gurgling through woodlands hushed by snow, as ice creeps down its banks.
 

 

When you gaze in the evening at the white slopes of the Mont Blanc, as the setting sun paints them pink, you understand why such a landscape inspires artists and spurs creativity. A land of contrasts and raw emotions. Ambiguous. When I ski down a slope through the forest and look up to see the mountains, a shadow against the sky, I never know whether the sight is uplifting or frightening. Part of me is impressed. Another feels crushed. Do mountains evoke an impression of eternity, that of ice and rocks, or of the mortality of men, so small and fragile before them?

To go up a mountain enables you to see further, to rise above the rest of the world. Yet mountains also enclose you and weigh down. They block out the horizon. Do they fuel dreams or hinder them?

 

 

"Editing the first draft..."

Editing a first draft can feel like trying go through a jungle... And because at times words are not enough, even for a would-be novelist, I thought I'd draw cartoons of the daily problems I face with my manuscript, with my (capricious and ungrateful) characters, with the publication process... Actually, this idea came to me one night and the following day, I drew a few of those cartoons, during a long car journey. So here's the first one, more to come later!