Bouncebackability – when you (yet again) don’t make a longlist

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Cathy Rentzenbrink, Charles Dickens, Stephen King, Thomas Hardy, WriteMentor

‘Bouncebackability’ first entered the Oxford English Dictionary in 2005, after football manager Iain Dowie coined it to describe Crystal Palace’s ascent from the edge of relegation to promotion through play-offs. What happened to his team in the 2003–4 season is, apparently, not uncommon. In 2018, Richard Foster wrote that, ‘the best preparation a team can have for a play-off final is the experience of losing one the year before’ (The Guardian, 25^th May, 2018). He backed this up with an amazing statistic: ‘Of the 10 beaten finalists who have returned to the same fixture the next season, nine have succeeded second time around – and the only exception made amends a year later.’

Surely a near miss for writers could have the same effect? The problem is we never know how close our work gets to being longlisted; if it’s not there, it’s not there. The WriteMentor folk addressed this problem recently (as much as it can be addressed) when they published additional lists of ‘Very Close’ and ‘Readers’ Favourites’, alongside their official competition longlist. Those who found themselves on these lists tweeted how hugely encouraging it was. Inevitably, though, there were more omissions than inclusions and I was one of the omissions.

I haven’t had much success lately – and I’ve ended up in a bit of a slough. I’ve been researching a new novel for a year but can’t quite bring myself to write it.

There’s a ton of advice out there to help writers like me who feel discouraged: you should ringfence a slot every morning to write whatever comes into your head; join a writing group; take a course; go on a retreat/workshop; get a mentor, etc.

But what works for one person might be unhelpful to another (assuming it’s even affordable). Stephen King – whose book On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft is a favourite of mine – says he is ‘doubtful about writing classes’, though ‘not entirely against them’, which I found pretty interesting. In case you’re tempted to stop reading right here, perhaps the following (re his view on workshops/retreats in which would-be writers do daily critiques on each other’s work) will resonate more:

‘The pressure to explain is always on, and a lot of your creative energy … is therefore going in the wrong direction. You find yourself constantly questioning your prose and your purpose when what you should probably be doing is writing as fast as the Ginger-bread Man runs, getting that first draft down on paper while the shape of the fossil is still bright and clear in your mind.’

Getting your first draft down before you lose that vital spark appeals to me. (Elsewhere, he says, ‘If I don’t write every day, the characters begin to stale off in my mind – they begin to seem like characters instead of real people.’) He also advocates reading widely. That, of course, has to be right. At the end of last year, I came across an insightful tweet from literary agent Jennifer Laughran (@literaticat):

‘The best advice if you want to write for kids is, GO TO THE LIBRARY AND READ 100 BOOKS PUBLISHED IN YOUR CATEGORY IN THE PAST FIVE YEARS. Put your favourites in a special pile and buy your own copies of those so you can write in them. Tear them apart. Why and HOW do they work? If you do this: CONGRATULATIONS, you just did much of the work for a master’s degree without having to pay for it. While you’re at it – make a spreadsheet of those 100 books, noting WHO PUBLISHED THEM, and agent/editor if they are listed in the acknowledgments. Note patterns! If you do THIS step: CONGRATULATIONS, you just got a crash course in publishing and are armed with the knowledge of “who publishes what” that you will need as you begin your querying/publishing journey.’

I’m thinking this advice is transferable to anyone writing for adults, too, though reading 100 recent books might be a stretch.

I’ve also discovered that outings connected with my subject are really helpful (though this probably isn’t startling news to anyone else!). Towards the end of last year, I had an overnight stay in Dorchester and walked to various places connected with Thomas Hardy. Google Maps took me across fields to the church where Hardy’s father first saw his mother, then to the nearby house (what remains of it) where she was in service, and finally, along the road, to the cottage where Hardy was born. I came back feeling more hopeful and inspired than I had for months!

Ditto after a trip to Charles Dickens’ house in Doughty Street, London, last week.

I’ve also found writers baring their souls about failure and insecurity immensely encouraging. In Cathy Rentzenbrink’s new book Write It All Down, she says:

‘It is pointless to worry whether the work is any good or whether you are any good. It’s all about learning to tolerate the gap between our aspiration for the finished thing and the current dog’s breakfast that we see before us. With each of my five books I wasted aeons of time fretting about whether it was rubbish and I was useless and would everyone laugh at me and had I bitten off more than I could chew …

‘A sea change came when I had a talk about it with my agent, Jo. We were sitting on a wall outside the London Book Fair, and I was crying because I felt so adrift and miserable and unable to finish the next draft of what would become The Last Act of Love. I told her that I just didn’t think I was good enough. “Look,” she said kindly, “self-doubt is intertwined with creativity. I don’t understand why, but all the creative people I know spend a lot of time believing they are useless. You just need to not listen to it.”

‘That was a life-changing moment for me …’

Bouncebackability is about the state of your morale, the ability to shut out negative voices. The reason I remember when the OED first included it is because a boy in my son’s English class decided to celebrate by inserting it into an essay on Romeo & Juliet as often as possible! For example, Romeo, he said, showed bouncebackability when he moved on from his unhappy adoration of Rosaline (‘I have a soul of lead’) to joyous devotion to Juliet (‘Did my heart love till now?’) I don’t know how else he applied it but it must have made his teacher smile (a bit) and I’ll never think about bouncebackability without doing the same. It helps me lighten up.

Thoughts on ‘Why You Should Read Children’s Books, Even Though You Are So Old and Wise’

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‘Children’s fiction has a long and noble history of being dismissed,’ writes Katherine Rundell in this short but inspirational hardback. She cites Martin Amis who once said, ‘If I had a serious brain injury I might well write a children’s book.’ 😲 Instead of going on the attack, though, Rundell, a prize-winning author and Fellow of All Souls, Oxford, has chosen to write a wonderful rebuttal.

She shows how the best children’s books help us ‘refind things we may not even know we have lost,’ taking us back to that time when ‘new discoveries came daily and when the world was colossal, before your imagination was trimmed and neatened …’

As the Financial Times says, ‘It’s a very short book but it packs a real punch.’ It also covers a lot of ground – zipping through the history of children’s books (which, in English, began as ‘instruction manuals for good behaviour’), the importance of fairy tales (with their ‘wild hungers and heroic optimism’), the need for greater diversity of authorship (‘there is so dazzlingly much to gain’) and how library budgets should be increased (not ‘slashed’), along with lighter issues, such as the ‘bookworm’s curse’ of knowing a word’s meaning but not how to pronounce it.

There are many thought-provoking ideas here but one, in particular, made me pause: ‘… there are some times in life when [a children’s book] might be the only thing that will do.’

A few months ago a friend of mine, struck down by a neurological illness that had left her bedridden and unable to speak, had reached the point where people were questioning whether she’d lost her mind. In the past she and I had often discussed books and one day, not long before she died, I decided to read her one of my all-time favourites – Richmal Crompton’s William (1929). The chapter I chose was one in which 11-year-old William tries to distract a gullible woman from her gold-digging suitor by interrupting him with preposterous stories. Halfway through one of these, my friend opened her eyes and laughed. I felt the bond between us; it was a precious moment.

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Another friend, who lived to 105, found life in a care home unbearably restrictive (she always referred to herself as an inmate). Her father had worked for Henry Ford – she’d met him as a child – and she’d lived an incredibly full life. Now she was mostly confined to one room, and books were a lifeline, especially certain children’s books. Even though she was 44 when Dodie Smith’s The 101 Dalmatians was published, this one was a favourite. Her reaction when I turned up with it was just wonderful.

This is how Katherine Rundell finishes her 63-page essay: ‘Go to children’s fiction to see the world with double eyes: your own, and those of your childhood self. Refuse unflinchingly to be embarrassed: and in exchange you get the second star to the right, and straight on till morning.’

How can you refuse?

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Exeter Novel Prize

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Competitions

Huge congratulations to Rebecca Kelly for winning this year’s Exeter Novel Prize with her novel Skin-whistle. Unfortunately, Rebecca was unwell on Saturday and is therefore not in this line-up pic of the prizegiving.

However, ninevoices‘ own talented Sarah is there (in her spotty dress), having been shortlisted for the second time in two years. Many congratulations to Sarah and to all this year’s longlistees and shortlistees.

L to R: Freya Sampson (shortlistee), Cathie Hartigan (CWM), Broo Doherty (DHH Literary Agency) Sophie Duffy (CWM), Kathleen Jowitt, Sarah Dawson, Emma Albrighton, Debbie Fuller-White (all shortlistees)

The thrill of being shortlisted

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Being shortlisted

I’m always heartened by writers’ honesty about disappointment – and, TBH, I have a lot more time for posts with titles like ‘The Rejection Diaries’ than for ones like mine above.  But … yesterday Maggie posted her excellent monthly round-up of forthcoming competitions and as, minutes later, I found I’d been shortlisted for the Colm Tóibín International Short Story Award, I thought I’d just say how jolly grateful I am to her for her monthly reminders.

Do have a go at one of the October competitions she lists.  You might get placed – and it’s such a boost!

Mitchell & Webb on Jude the Obscure …

Thomas Hardy experiments with some adventurous punctuation: https://soundcloud.com/bbc-radio-4/that-mitchell-and-webb-sound

The stature of waiting …

I love it when authors share what they go through while awaiting feedback. In her recent autobiography, Claire Tomalin describes how she ‘tactfully left the room’ after giving her husband a chapter of her first manuscript – only to find him asleep with it in his hand when she crept back. Fortunately, ‘We were both able to laugh.’ Later, when she ‘nervously’ sent the whole thing to her editor, Tony Godwin, she says, ‘Silence fell. After four days the telephone rang, Tony on the line. He seemed stiff and odd, and I, embarrassed, thinking he must have hated the book, tried to chat about nothing much. Then he exploded: “What about my telegram?”’

Apparently, he had sent a ‘glorious message of enthusiasm and congratulation’ – to the wrong address.

This ending is pure wish-fulfilment – but for me the real interest lies in the description of Tomalin’s uncertainty beforehand.

Stephen King is still more endearing when it comes to self-disclosure. In his 2000 memoir On Writing he says he always writes with one ideal reader in mind – his wife – and that when something of his makes her laugh ‘out of control … I … adore it’. He recounts a drive during which she read the manuscript of his latest novella: ‘I kept peeking over at her to see if she was chuckling … On my eighth or ninth peek (I guess it could have been my fifteenth), she looked up and snapped: “Pay attention to your driving before you crack us up, will you? Stop being so goddam needy!”’

(In case you’re wondering: five minutes later he heard ‘a snort of laughter’.)

Of course, it has to be easier sharing moments like this when the outcome’s good but if you have any kind of ‘author waiting’ story I’d love to hear it.

The History Boys and a Thomas Hardy poem

It is thirteen years since Alan Bennett’s The History Boys premiered at the National Theatre – and I’ve finally got around to seeing the film adaptation. I was bewitched and bedazzled for much of it.  Its depiction of a group of 1980s sixth-formers preparing to take their Oxbridge entrance exams was immensely watchable. But – and at the risk of sounding like ‘one of those picky-ass readers who apparently live to tell writers that they messed up’ (as Stephen King calls them) – there was a moment that stood out for me, and I don’t think it was intended to.

The students’ maverick English teacher Hector – who wants them to learn poetry for its own sake, not in order to pass exams – should surely be a master of his subject. Admittedly, he is described by his own creator as ‘not an ideal teacher … he is sloppy and quotes stuff almost at random.’  But even if Alan Bennett wants to show us that the boys ‘know more than any of the teachers,’ Hector’s USP is that he believes that ‘All knowledge is precious whether or not it serves the slightest use,’ so why make him the mouthpiece for the wrong interpretation of a poem?  He says of Thomas Hardy’s elegiac war poem Drummer Hodge that ‘the important thing is that he [Hodge] has a name’ because ‘… these were the first campaigns when … common soldiers … were commemorated, the names of the dead recorded and inscribed on war memorials.’ But Hardy did not intend the reader to understand ‘Hodge’ as the boy’s real name. It is in fact society’s pejorative nickname for the peasant class to which he belongs. Which makes him indistinguishable from its other members – the reverse of Hector’s point.  The fact that Drummer Hodge’s bones will not, as in previous times, be ground up with those of his fellow lowly soldiers into fertiliser doesn’t change that.

When Hector says ‘So, thrown into a common grave though he may be, he is still Hodge the drummer.  Lost boy though he is on the other side of the world, he still has a name,’ he is, in my view, missing some of the vital pathos of the poem.  Drummer Hodge has made the ultimate sacrifice for his country but in death, as in life, he is treated neither with respect nor as an individual.  Victorian society is snobbish to the end.  It has always tended to lump such people together as ‘Hodges’.  And a Hodge is, as Hardy explains in Longman’s Magazine in 1883, ‘a degraded being of uncouth manner and aspect, stolid understanding, and snail-like movement.’ Hardy’s lifelong mission was to show that this is a deeply unhelpful caricature, and that individuality shone out among the labourers of his native Dorset just as much as among the so-called higher classes of London.

It’s interesting, too, that Alan Bennett gives the sport-loving son of a former Oxford college servant – a student who, in the Head’s disparaging words, ‘might get in at Loughborough in a bad year’ – the name Rudge. Maybe this is a nod to Dickens’ simple but goodhearted eponymous hero Barnaby.  But the name is inescapably similar to that of ‘Hodge’.  When Rudge is unexpectedly offered a place by his interviewers at Christ Church, Oxford – he doesn’t have to wait for a letter like his peers – it is a telling moment.  Rudge represents a type that they want – ‘college servant’s son, now an undergraduate, evidence of how far they had come, wheel come full circle and that’.  He is not, therefore, valued as an individual – and he knows it.  And although he trots out his party piece that Stalin was a ‘sweetie’ and Wilfred Owen a ‘wuss’, we know the dons are not deceived because they say, wittily if cynically, that he is ‘plainly someone who thought for himself and just what the college rugger team needed.’

It seems to me that the correct reading of Drummer Hodge earlier would have enhanced this moment.

Thanks for letting me get that off my chest!

 

Would you like to become a literacy volunteer?

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Beanstalk, News

 

There are few moments more rewarding than when a six-year-old looks up at you in boggle-eyed amazement that she’s just managed to read a whole page without a falter.

Or when a smiling teacher tells you that the little girl you’ve been helping to read all year has unexpectedly passed her English SATs.

I’ve had several moments like this – and they are, quite simply, thrilling.  I’ve also had a lot of fun as, twice a week, I go into a primary school to listen to six- and seven-year-olds read, then play literacy games with them.

If you think you might be interested in doing this too, then the charity Beanstalk (www.beanstalkcharity.org.uk) would love to hear from you.  They are always looking for new volunteers. They provide a short training course and lots of books and games.  Most reading helpers go into a school twice a week and work with three children one-on-one for half an hour each. They usually work with the same children for the whole year.

If, like me, you’re writing fiction for children, this has a huge side benefit: you find out what your audience really enjoy reading. But the real value is that a child who might otherwise have very little one-on-one help receives it twice a week from someone who really wants them to succeed.

 

 

 

The Exeter Novel Award

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Briony Collins, Broo Doherty, News

Many congratulations to Briony Collins who yesterday won the Exeter Novel Award with her wonderful-sounding civil rights novel Raise Them Up.  Here she is sitting next to Sarah (front row, second from right).

Our lovely judge was Broo Doherty of DHH Agency. If you’d like to see her thoughts on the six shortlisted novels, go to: http://www.creativewritingmatters.co.uk/2016-enp-award-ceremony-and-judges-report.html

Check out the competitions

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News

There’s a scene in Chariots of Fire where a disheartened Harold Abrahams declares that if he can’t win he won’t run – to which his girlfriend replies that if he won’t run he can’t win. I don’t have Olympic gold in my sights but without my writing pals’ encouragement I’d never have entered my novel for this year’s Exeter Novel Award. Which means I’d never have received yesterday’s email telling me it had been shortlisted. This is a first for me – so I hope our blog-readers won’t just think ‘smug git’ when they read that! I feel so grateful (as well as amazed) that I want to encourage everyone to listen to the positive voices in their lives – and act on what they hear.  Maggie’s monthly round-up of competitions (below) is a particularly helpful spur for me.