How do you start writing fiction when you’ve been writing short non-fiction your whole career? Dawn O’Porter had to wrestle with this when she sat down to write her first novel, PAPER AEROPLANES. For all you writers out there (and especially those who are working on their Young Writers Prize submissions right now), here’s her advice for breaking through the writing barriers and getting your ideas out:
Do you have a writing routine? Share yours below!
Posted in Authors, Our books, Tips for Writers
Today’s writing advice comes from RED INK author Julie Mayhew. Below, she talks about the importance of setting deadlines.
Fortunately, if you’re hoping to enter the Hot Key Books Young Writers Prize competition, we’ve set the deadline for you! Your first 4000 words plus 1-page synopsis is due to us on July 22nd. Get writing!
Do you set your own deadlines? How do you keep track of your work? Leave your advice in the comments below!
Posted in Authors, Hot Key Prize, Tips for Writers
What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever received? We posed this question to a few of our authors, and we’ll be posting their video responses this week to help all the Young Writers Prize entrants get their writing in top shape!
Today’s advice is from Nigel McDowell, author of TALL TALES FROM PITCH END. Click on the book cover below to learn more about Nigel and his amazing work!
Posted in Authors, Hot Key Prize, Tips for Writers
Last month, we had another huge milestone – our first book tour! The months of planning and organising (and packing) for Dawn O’Porter’s PAPER AEROPLANES tour all came together in a crazy week at the end of May. Check out what we got up below!
For more about the book and Dawn’s future event dates, check out her web site here.
Today’s post is by Elon Dann, the author of CLOCKWISE TO TITAN. It’s part 2 of his blog series about his adventures…with rubbish. Read on…
Sunday. Litter picking. The Lane, a shady, tree-fringed road, a vestigial remnant of the pre-1980s countryside as it was before tracked arthropods rumbled and the housing estate I live on was thrown up. A small piece of the city’s noncoding DNA, and a very nice piece it is too. Birds. Squirrels.
A man, standing next to a red estate car.
(The leafy Lane is where I found my hat. A woollen ‘Nike’ cap filled with sick that I uncovered one winter. What’s your problem? I scrubbed it out with handfuls of snow and it came up a treat in the washing machine. That’s a £15 hat for nowt. If a litter picker can’t benefit from urban recycling, who can?)
‘There’s two types of people,’ says the man. I nod, mentally thumbing my storehouse of ‘there’s X types of people’ gags: two types, the type that splits people into two types and the type that doesn’t; 10 types, those who understand binary and those who don’t, etc., etc. Jokes and hats, all game for reuse and recycling.
‘Yes,’ I reply. Together we contemplate the extinct fridge, the smashed up kitchen units, the lumpy sacks of rubble fly-tipped on the grassy verge. I devote what I calculate to be a millionth of one percent of an average UK male life expectancy to sucking in air and tutting. The trash is ugly, broken, dirty, as unutterably useless as one Nectar point, the quantum of worthlessness.
‘Those that care,’ huffs the man. ‘And those that don’t.’
‘True,’ I agree. Heady stuff, this dialectic. But then, I find litter picking and litter itself conducive to thinking. I’m not alone. Lise Meitner developed her theories of radioactive decay by studying how discarded doner kebabs fell apart when she speared them with the tip of her umbrella in 1920s Berlin, and they say Keats’ poem was originally titled Ode on a Bottle of Yazoo Milkshake Some Git Threw Into My Carriage before his editor unwisely changed the receptacle under discussion to a boring old Grecian Urn. (It’s always Yazoo milkshake. I swear, when they land people on Pluto, there will be a bottle of that lactic muck awaiting them, festering in a crater under a crust of frozen ammonia.)
The man puts his hands on his hips and sighs. His car is large, I’m hoping he’s about to offer to transport the dumped junk to the tip for me. ‘People, eh? Tells you something about people.’
You can over-philosophize. Litter doesn’t teach you much about people, apart from how perverse they can be. Why take the trouble to bag up your dog’s waste, then sling the bag into an inaccessibly high tree branch?
My favourite example of this twisted thinking is when I pick up, say, a curry sauce stained polystyrene takeaway carton from the front lawn of a house. Not a scruffy house like mine, a nice house with block paving and UPVC soffits and hanging baskets. Billions of Nectar points’ worth of love and care.
‘Ooh, thank you,’ the owner will say, breaking off from giving the Mitsubishi a shiatsu massage with a Dyson. ‘I’ve been wondering for weeks when someone might do that.’
‘Did you ever think of picking it up yourself?’ I might ask. (I used to ask. Not nowadays. Never ask, never criticize, never comment.)
The answer: ‘Oh, no. Well, I didn’t put it there, did I?’
I’ve even seen people mow around the litter on their lawns, looking away, not seeing it. I should form an enterprise to exploit this prevalent attitude. Blue asbestos? Secret documents? Rival crime gang body parts? No problem. Just stuff a little of each into Pringles tubes and have someone drop one tube under every pyracantha and privet hedge they see. Guaranteed not to be touched for thirty years. Just don’t employ the people nominally paid to deliver pizza flyers and free newspapers. Not unless you want it to all end up being burned underneath the swings in the kiddie park.
Zoom back. The present.
‘I mean,’ says the man, ‘It must be more effort to drive here and dump stuff than to go to the tip. And the tip is free, as long as you’re not commercial.’
‘Guess so.’
The conversation has run its course. The man gets into his car, starts rummaging in the glove compartment, ‘I’ll find my mobile, ring the council,’ he says, before signing off with, ‘You’re doing a grand job there, pal.’
I continue with my picking, working my way along an adjoining cycle path. People defy classification, but there are definitely two types of litter.
Some rubbish writes its own stories, most not worth telling. Today’s fly-tipped mess: a kitchen-sink drama, DIY on the cheap. More finds: a school report, the place for a parent’s signature left blank; a blister pack of antidepressants, a cheap bracelet inscribed ‘Charlene’ and a screwed-up photo of a young soldier in dress uniform, all these together. Heartache, perhaps, but no more mystery lies behind their arrival on the pavement than behind that can of Tennents Super, now serving as a lethal drop-in hostel for slugs, a Bates Motel for molluscs.
Other litter challenges you to discover the story behind it. Half a table-football table. Half? A pile of French pornographic magazines mixed with a judo instruction manual in Bengali – multiculturalism in action; a whole stilton, big as a bus wheel; trays of furry minced meat and sausages; a carrier bag containing a dozen 400g jars of Dolmio pasta sauce. I hear theories that the food is shoplifted by drug addicts, that sausages are a favourite. I buy this (or steal it) only to some degree. What drug, I ask myself, induces a craving that can only be satisfied by eating almost eleven pounds in weight of bolognese sauce, gives you sufficient gall and alertness to smuggle a heavy bag laden with clonking glass jars out past security guards, yet causes you at the final moment to decide you can’t be bothered to lug them home and dump them on top of a bus shelter? Whatever it is, I don’t want any.
I return to the Lane. A red estate car rips past at speed, the driver ducking low behind the dashboard. He exits the junction without waiting or indicting, anxious to spare himself the embarrassment of flashing me a shrug and a sheepish grin.
A fridge, smashed up kitchen units, lumpy bags of rubble, now joined by a jigsaw of splintered worktop fragments.
Two kinds of people…
(Just in case: Of course I made up the bit about Lisa Meitner. What were you thinking?)
There are lots of things that keep people from writing — self-doubt, perceived lack of time, the size of the task… the list goes on and on. In fact, it’s amazing that books get written as frequently as they do.
Fortunately for young aspiring writers everywhere, RED INK author Julie Mayhew has designed a two-part Skype in the Classroom lesson to help break through those barriers and get the stories flowing. Sometimes, it takes a little structure to help get the ideas out of our brains and onto the page. Today, we’re challenging you to write, using part one of Julie’s lesson. Here’s the challenge, direct from Julie:
The spiral exercise (which led to the changing room scene in RED INK when I was set it as a task in a workshop), involves writing the first word that comes into your head in the centre of the page. Now, that is the first word of your sentence. And just write, whatever comes out, no editing, but in a spiral not in a straight line. Your mind will be too preoccupied with the shape of your writing to pass comment on what you’re actually saying. A great way to free up your subconscious – and all the great ideas locked inside.
Tweet us your spirals or post them to our Facebook page! We can’t wait to see what you come up with. Oh and don’t forget to check out RED INK! The paperback is out this week at your local bookstore.
Posted in Authors, Our books, Tips for Writers
Last week, Nigel McDowell‘s brilliant debut novel, TALL TALES FROM PITCH END hit bookshelves and reading devices all over the world. This book was a long labor of love — you can read all about Nigel’s process here, and here is a little intro to the book from Nigel:
There are few things more delightful than listening to an author read their own work. This happens to be particularly true with Nigel’s book, because there is a particular way people from Pitch End speak. So, for a Monday treat, here is Nigel reading a few pages from the book:
For more about TALL TALES FROM PITCH END, click here! And if you’ve read it already, let us know what you thought in the comments below.
Happy Publication Day! Today’s blog is by one of our newly published authors, Monica Hesse. Monica’s novel STRAY is out today in bookshops everywhere. STRAY tells the tale of a girl who is forced to live her life through the virtual reality memories of someone else, that is, until she realises she may have another choice…
Whenever I’m reading science fiction – any fiction, really, but especially science fiction or fantasy – I pay a lot of attention to the character names. I pay attention to other things about characters, obviously: what they look like, or how they react to the plot bubbling around them. But those traits mostly tell you about the character as an individual. A name can tell you about the whole world of the book.
I see “Katniss and Peeta,” and I know that the world of THE HUNGER GAMES must exist in the conceivably distant future – far enough ahead for the main characters’ names to have mutated into something foreign, but not so far that they sound completely unlike anything we’ve ever heard. (Are Katniss and Peeta so different than Kathryn and Peter?)
I see a deliciously twisty name like Minerva McGonagall facing off against a stodgy, boring name like Vernon Dursley, and I know that wizard families and Muggle families in the world of Harry Potter must keep separate – to live in the same country at the same time, yet value such different things in a name.
When I started writing my novel, STRAY, the character names were where I began. I knew the rest of my fictional world wouldn’t fall into place until I figured out what people were called, and why.
STRAY is about a government experiment for children: participants in The Path don’t live their own lives; they live the virtual life of Julian, a boy from a long time ago who was officials decided had the perfect childhood. But then a group of Pathers escape, and have to learn how to navigate the real world. It’s sort of like The Matrix meets Never Let Me Go.
From the beginning, I knew that the real world would be a scary, confusing place for Pathers. I wanted them to feel out of place – like nothing about them fit in. Not their mannerisms, not their language, and not even their names. I figured that the officials who ran The Julian Path would be very concerned with efficiency, with keeping track of things. They wouldn’t have been worried about making Pather names sound good, just about making them functional.
That’s how I came up with Lona. And Fenn.
They’re not names, really. They’re actually carefully constructed codes. “Lona” is a grouping of letters, each of which stands for something. The “L,” the 12th letter of the alphabet, refers to December, the month she was born in. The “O” refers to her birth date, the 15th. The “N” signifies that she lives in the 14th sector of The Path, and the “A” means that she’s in the first quadrant. There’s a lot of information contained in her name, just like there is in her best friend Fenn’s – born June 5th, Sector 14, Quadrant 14.
On Path, these names seem normal. But Off Path, they’re weird (Endl, Ilyf) or just plan horrendous, like Grni. I made sure that all of the “regular” characters in the book – the non-Pathers – had beautiful names: not just ordinary ones, but really melodious ones like Talia or Genevieve, to make the Pather names sound even more clunky and unfortunate.
All of this guided my thinking and helped me shape characters. Once the book was done, I became completely obsessed with Path naming traditions. I wanted to know what my Path name would be. I wanted to know what my friends’ would be. My mother’s name is Dawn, and she’s born on April 1. It was really exciting to realize that her Path name would also start D-A, and I devised a formula to help me figure out the second two letters. (O-V, incidentally. Her name would be Daov).
Because I’m the kind of reader who loves to get involved in other authors’ fictional worlds (I’ve taken the Harry Potter Sorting Hat quiz – I’m a Ravenclaw), I’m posting that formula below. Enjoy, and pass it on.
The Path is in you. You are the Path.
What’s My Path Name?
Letter One: Birth month. January corresponds with the letter A, February with B, and so on.
Letter Two: Birth day. 1 = A, 2 = B, etc. If you were born on the 27-31 of a month, then the formula is Z + [however many digits you go beyond 26].
For example, there is a character in “Stray” who was born on May 28. His name is Ezbrn. 26+2 = Z + B. If he had been born May 29, his name would have been Ezcrn, and May 30 it would have been Ezdrn.
Letter Three: On Path, the third letter of your name is the one that relates to general geographic region, which is determined by your postal code.
For U.K. readers: The first letter of your post code is the third letter of your name.
For U.S. readers: The sum of the digits in your zip code corresponds with the third letter. For example, the zip code in my hometown is 61761, which added together is 21, which would correspond with the letter V. If the sum came to a number greater than 26, you would add those numbers together. For examples: 90998 = 35 = 3+5 = 8 = H.
Letter Four: The fourth letter relates to a more specific location, which I’m representing by the first letter of your street name.
Main Street = M, Elm Street = E. If you live on a numbered street , like 3rd Street, then your letter will be “T” for “Third” and not “C” to correspond with “3.”
Ready for a few examples?
Prime Minister David Cameron, was born October 9 and lives in London on Downing Street. His Path name is Jisd, which I would probably pronounce JISS-dee.
U.S. President Barack Obama was born August 4 and lives in Washington on Pennsylvania Avenue. His Path name is Hdgp – one of those really unfortunate names that would probably be pronounced, “Head gap.”
Your Path name is probably a lot better than the President’s. I’d love to hear it. Tweet it to me @MonicaHesse using the hashtag #Stray.
Happy June Pub week day 2! Today we’re celebrating the release of TALL TALES FROM PITCH END with a blog from the author, Nigel McDowell. TALL TALES is a fast-paced, exciting story of teenage courage and rebellion. This novel is nine years in the making. Below, Nigel explains how Bruno Atlas and THE TALL TALES came to life…
It’s weird the way images just drop into your head and refuse to leave: in my case it was nine years ago, and I saw a boy sitting alone on a rock. A rock on a grey beach under a wild sky. Odd. I looked closer and saw others – grey-faced, trudging along this beach in clothes the colour of ash and mist and taking no notice of the boy. But were they ignoring him, or could they simply not see him? Or did they not want to see him or did he not wish to be seen? Then I noticed that the boy was crying. Why?
And so it began. Novels are often investigations — that demand of ‘why?’ is unavoidable, and you find yourself dragged along, hoping to find the answer! So as soon as this boy – who would quickly be christened ‘Bruno Atlas’ – appeared in my imagination, I knew there was a story behind his loneliness, his weeping, and I had to discover it. I put pen to page, and (with nothing else to go on) wrote – ‘The Boy Who Was Invisible’…
Bruno Atlas came first and then the seaside town of Pitch End formed around him. He was an observer, noticed things others didn’t, and my first drafts were full of Bruno’s wanderings as he explored the paths and ‘darkways’, rooftops and hiding-places of Pitch End, desperate to discover its secrets. And I was always hurrying along at his heel, trying to keep up…
My partner was born and raised in a seaside town in Northern Ireland, and when I first visited him there, it was an instantly vivid place: town hall, clock tower, beach, two main streets on a steep slope…these details settled in my imagination, then did a weird squirm and changed: I needed a lighthouse where Bruno’s father had worked, so one was added. And the clock tower was too small. I knew it would be crucial to the plot, needed to be nearer to the town hall, so it grew and shuffled uphill and became the lopsided Clocktower of Pitch End (and became not unlike the Albert clock tower in Belfast) –
Cobbles replaced tarmac, pavements were opened by pernicious weeds and rooftops split, sprouting trees; a town so battered by storms (inspiration – typical Northern Irish weather!) that its buildings stood at a tilt, huddling against one another for support. And a long strip of gloomy beach, where I’d first seen Bruno:
Then came the one-footed talking ravens; the Withermen who have clocks where their hearts should be; Cinder-Folk – gypsies with a power for controlling fire; clockwork Cat-Sentries that prowl the town and spy on the Pitch Enders, then a whole army of dormant clockwork animals waiting to be wound! And ten unique pocket-watches bequeathed from fathers to sons…all this, and the Elders, the bad guys – a group of elderly men seeking to evade age and hold onto their power by any means possible. Soon I had to sit down and scrawl a map of Pitch End, the first of many –
It expanded, go out of hand, as things do, and now I’ve more information about Pitch End than I can keep track of!
It’s very easy in fantasy writing to become fixated on the building of the world the story is set in. But through it all – through nine years of writing – I tried never to lose sight of that first glimpse of a boy on the beach, seated on the rock and looking out to sea, bereft and alone. Bruno Atlas. And as I wrote the novel, I began to will him on – to untangle the truth from all the lies of the Elders, to make his own choices and to think for himself, to discover his own voice. Perhaps even defeat the Elders once and for all? My dearest wish is that, if you pick up Tall Tales from Pitch End, you’ll become as immersed in Bruno’s world as I have been. That you’ll follow just as closely in his shadow at every twist and turn and enjoy every battle and every loss, every discovery, every surprise…That as you read you’ll be willing him towards a final triumph. Writing, like reading, is an adventure – I hope you enjoy Bruno’s, because I wouldn’t have missed it for the world.
Today’s blog is from Eleanor Hawken, the author of THE BLUE LADY. This fun, chilling tale of haunting at a boarding school hits shelves everywhere this Thursday! Below, she writes about her inspiration for the novel, and her love of everything spooky.
Classics like Mallory Towers and St Tinian’s had led me to romanticise the idea of boarding school from a very young age. I imagined a sisterhood fuelled by torch lit ghost stories and midnight feasts. So when I was packed off to boarding school with a tuck box and a lacrosse stick at the age of thirteen I could not have been happier.
And to my utter delight, my new school friends not only enjoyed ghost stories, but the school had a resident ghost of its own. Her name was The Blue Lady. I can’t remember if we knew who The Blue Lady had been, how she had died or why she haunted the school, but every girl knew her name. Legend had it that she always appeared on the last night of term. We faithfully upheld the end of term tradition of sleeping the wrong way round in our beds so when The Blue Lady came to chop our heads off in the night she’d only find our feet. 
This tradition, however flawed in logic, was something we continued into sixth form. I remember one school story of how a bunch of girls had stolen a blue choir robe from the chapel – one girl then donned the robe and shrouded her face in a blue chiffon scarf. She’d waited until midnight, when all the first years were fast asleep – their heads lined up in a row at the foot of their beds. The girl walked down the central aisle of the dormitory, sweeping her cloak over the girls’ heads as she walked, waking them up one-by-one and ensuing mass hysteria.
Some of the episodes that feature in my book, The Blue Lady, are an undisguised nod to my time at boarding school – the Ouija board in the abandoned dormitory being one of them. My friends and I went through a period where we were obsessed with Ouija boards and séances, trying to summon the spirit of The Blue Lady and other long-dead school girls we could muster up from the Other Side. Sadly – or fortunately, depending on your love of the dramatic – we never managed to contact a spirit. Still, we persisted in trying.
I remember one Halloween we all filed in to one of the disused dormitories with our matron in tow to tell our favourite ghost stories. By that age I was an expert in urban legends, conspiracy theories and all things spooky. A steady literary diet of Point Horror and any classic with a mere sniff of a ghost had seen to that. Wuthering Heights, A Christmas Carol, Rebecca, The Turn of the Screw – all books I devoured as a school girl and put me in good stead for a little spooky storytelling of my own. As I listened to the other girls tell their stories, old favourites such as Humans Can Lick Too, The Killer in the Backseat and Babysitter with the Murderer Upstairs, I prepared to tell mine. Let me just indulge you with a little information about my teenage self – I was incredibly dramatic. In fact I wanted to be an actress; I loved any opportunity to put myself centre stage, so a ghost storytelling session was right up my street.
The story was this…
A weary traveller returns to the deep dark countryside to visit his family. His car breaks down and he is forced to hitchhike. A woman picks him up and agrees to take him to his family home, but first she offers to take him to her house where she’ll make sure he gets a warm drink and something to eat – the man looks frozen. Too polite to decline the woman’s offer, the man reluctantly agrees.
She drives him to a splendid manor house. The windows glow with warm and inviting light and the sound of music and laughter dance to the man’s ears. As the woman leads him into the house he is amazed by the scene – glamorous party guests draped in luxurious fabrics, fashions which he hasn’t seen in his lifetime, he assumes the party is period fancy dress. The woman leads him up a grand staircase and into a sitting room on the first floor, pours him a brandy and they stand and exchange pleasantries by a roaring fire whilst the other party guests come and go.
Never too fond of brandy, the man leaves most of his drink, placing the glass on the mantelpiece as he makes his excuses to depart. The woman then graciously drives him to his family home. The next morning, over breakfast, the man recalls the strange tale to his family. “But no one has lived in that house for years,” his father says with confidence. Determined to prove his father wrong, the man insists that they pay a visit to the house. Sure enough, the windows are boarded up and the walls crumble with age and decay. Lost for words, the man leads his father into the house, up the grand staircase and into the sitting room he’d been in only hours before. The fireplace is cold and bare, cobwebs cover every surface and wall. But sure enough, on the mantelpiece, is his half-drank glass of brandy.
The story went down a treat, much to my great satisfaction. It was around this time that I began to harbour the secret desire to write. I’d fill notebooks with bad poetry and stories and scribble down ideas for novels and characters that I’d one day write. So it seems fittingly full circle that I have now given The Blue Lady her own book, complete with a story as to why she died and why her spirit just won’t rest. I wish I knew the real Blue Lady’s story, but regardless of what it might be, my imagination has thankfully filled in the gaps. I hope you like her story when you read it, I hope it chills you and makes you wonder what’s lurking just on the Other Side. Enjoy.
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