Writers' Rooms

The Guardian newspaper has an ongoing series called Writers' Rooms. This reveals where many famous authors sit and create their masterpieces. It also seems to reveal them all as being incredibly wealthy, owning at least two heirlooms (owning just one is so passé) and being able to namedrop a famous designer who created their shelves/chair/desk/lamp/ancient parchment notebook on wish to compose.

This is my take on the series - written in the style of The Guardian. In fact - please read this first, and then come back...



Writers' Rooms: Jayne Ferst-Second

It’s the back of the house, and only seventeen years ago stars shone through the gap between the ill-fitting curtains while the floor was ankle-deep in computer magazines left behind by my older brother. I love the sound of sirens and view of the motorway in the distance. Who says London is overcrowded? True, the room is often noisy but silence addles my brains.

I’ve got cat hairs round the little window, and type by hand at the chest of drawers awkwardly positioned in front of it. The corkboard was made by Argos.

The bookends are stacks of historical books to bring me good luck, because my debut novel covers a span of decades. On the window ledge stands a strange plastic pot with plastic flowers my mother brought back from a car-boot sale.

On top of the shelf containing my essential reference books is a 1960s dolls house and a lustrous feather duster – both from my Nan’s in Stoke Newington. And there’s an unholy mix underneath: a Matchbox scooter, a Camden-era candle and a cobalt pot thrown by me in anger the last time I was looking for something.

I bought my shelf unit when I was 19 with my pay cheque from Woolworths, and that’s where I store crap. The shelves don’t really fit, but I jam everything into it. There’s a photograph of me when I was grumpy and small on the shelf, and in the corner a 21st-century embossed double-whammy candle. Books, coasters, paintbrushes, mugs…everything in the bedroom either relates directly to my mum or is rich in personal association. Everything is here by accident.

The half of the room out of shot has wooden wardrobes, their slats all covered in dust, a Hackney ottoman and a dresser piled with perfume and projects. There’s also a primitive painting of flowers by the Swedish shop Ikea.

Each of the walls are the same colour, but what you can’t see is the hidden blue tack stains from teenage posters – pictures of childhood. So the walls are as merry as a bog-standard bedroom, dressed in the colours of suburbia.

***

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Seven hours

Today I have sat here for seven whole hours and how many words did I redraft? Exactly 979. Speedy Gonzales is my new nickname. But the good thing is that I tightened the last page of chapter five, did a read-through of the whole thing, still liked it, and have proceeded onwards. I can now officially say I am redrafting chapter six. Maybe one day I will end up with a story that I am happy to let people read!

I really wish I could invest more of myself in this blog. Sometimes I feel I have nothing new to say – work is work, life is life, things are still in the doldrums of recession. Every so often I get a burst of creativity with no time to play – ideas that I think are terrific but I have no money to back them, no time to let them grow, and so they flare and then flicker out. I think I should resort buying lottery scratch-cards – maybe it will happen, right? Or maybe it is just a poor woman’s tax after all. I hate feeling despondent. This is my golden age, my time of infinite possibilities – and all that happens is I grow older one day at a time. I want to be able to throw back the windows and be happy in my skin.

Chapter five in the bag

It was a dark and stormy day. The budding author squinted at the keyboard in the summer gloom and realised that somehow she had reached the end of editing chapter five. Yeay!
--Thunder crack--
Yeay!
--Lightening flash--
Why am I humming the theme to The Omen? Chapter five isn’t that scary, is it?

Scary thunder sound track aside, I am not quite done with chapter five yet. Now I will read over from chapter four and see if it all keeps the tone. I will then probably pick a little at the end paragraphs to make sure everything stays tight and there are no unravelling threads, and then – finally – chapter six!

Chapter six at the moment (on only three redrafts) stands at 13 pages. Technically this should be quicker to sort out, as a lot of the work I have done in chapter five will stand me in good stead.

The reason chapter five took so long is that I had to change a crucial scene. I kept coming back to it and wondering if it was a little under-whelming, and finally I decided that yes, it was dull, and yes, it needed to change. And then I got The Fear, and sat on my hands and wibbled for two weeks, until I just plunged in and went for it – and now the scene feels punchier and more dramatic – which is exactly what I wanted it to be. Phew.

And now chapter six!

--Thunder crack--
--Lightening flash--

Frankenstein awake!

Video Jukebox Omnibus

It was general election night in May 1986, and while the main channels scrambled for coverage, BBC2 decided to roll with a documentary on the history of rock video. It was an Omnibus special called ‘Video Jukebox’, and was presented by two gentlemen sadly no longer with us – John Peel and John Walters. It was excellent.

My memories of it on the actual night are a little sparse, mainly because it started late (after 10pm) and I wasn’t allowed to stay up. So I made my older brother promise to tape all the bits with Madonna in it (my new idol and the reason I unfortunately wore lace in my hair) and was sent to bed, presumably in a slight grump. My brother meanwhile stayed up until the early morning hours with his finger on the record and stop button of the remote control, ever mindful that he only had two VHS tapes and that he might run out of tape before the long documentary ran off air.

So I actually got to see it the next day, which was thankfully a Saturday, and that meant I had control of the TV before dad took over with Grandstand. So after watching various mad people roller-skate around children’s morning TV show Number 73, I no doubt eagerly put on Video Jukebox.

This was the first real chance I had to see the videos to the music I loved at the time. TotP occasionally played videos when the artists couldn’t make the studio, but it was really hit or miss if you would see the actual video. And this documentary charted the time when video had begun – the musicals and jazz sound films of the 1940s, the rock 'n' roll films of the 50s, the television pop programmes of the 60s and finally to the first true pop videos of the 1970s and the 1980s. It covered The Beatles and The Stones, had lengthy interviews with David Bowie and Madness, and charted the rise of MTV. You can look at the running order of the show here.

But the main thing I remember was my brother doing a dive Ronaldo would be proud of in order to grab the remote when the ‘banned’ video of ‘Relax’ by Frankie Goes To Hollywood started playing. This of course meant that I watched it as soon as no-one else was in the house in order to see what all the fuss was about – ooo… it was rude! Fab.

Video Jukebox remains one of my favourite music documentaries of all time. I still have the two VHS tapes although I am scared to play them too often as I fear the day the tape snaps. They are on my list to upgrade to DVD just as soon as I have the spare cash for such things, but ever so occasionally I will put them on and enjoy these young-faced pop bands and directors talking about the wonderful new world of pop video.

Steady Edit

Managed 2000 words today on the editing front – wow! Actually that does feel like a huge achievement, so I will not be too harsh on myself, although I am still on chapter five. It’s like the chapter which refuses to get off the stage. Six pages left to go of it, but I can’t carry on now, not if I intend to get up for work tomorrow.

I have decided to try at least to stop being over-critical with the editing and to start just plain old writing again. My editing is mainly more rewriting than editing anyway – what I am mostly doing is going over paragraphs and making them flow better – in most cases this means a whole rejig, hence taking so much time. So it is nice to cut loose and just go where the words take me. This morning they were taking me to the delete button mostly, and I had a short paddy around 2pm when I thought I couldn’t write for toffee, but by 7pm I had rewritten around seven pages and everything suddenly seemed brighter.

I then re-read the whole thing up to that point in chapter five, just to see how it all held up, and that also felt good. So that is 22,467 words I am happy with so far. Not bad! I am ignoring how far there is to go yet, and my goal of August. If I think of all that I might wibble into my pillow.

Even though I have said on my profile that my aim is to get this ready to go for August, my real goal is for September, my birthday month. I absolutely refuse to get another year older without having completed this. I wrote the actual story a while ago now – September 2007 to February 2008 I think it was – and I can’t believe I am still not happy enough with it to let people read the whole thing. I know there have been ups and downs money wise (and career wise and home wise and generally everything wise) but this part is taking me far longer than the actual original writing! Madness. I obviously spend far too long talking in the bathroom mirror pretending I am being interviewed by Jonathon Ross as the next big author person. Ahem. But it is so much fun!

Writing backwards

One thing I have come to realise during the course of writing and editing this book is that I tend to jumble up sentences. I am forever coming across sentences where I have constructed them the wrong way around. Take this one for an example:

She triumphantly pointed up to a painted road sign on the wall opposite.

Now this reads perfectly ok to me, and is pretty much how I think and how I speak. But it really should be:

She triumphantly pointed up to a painted road sign on the opposite wall.

This is a mild example – there are worse! (And probably you will notice them in this blog long before me). But it does illustrate what I mean, and I find I have to pay double attention to everything I write in case it really should be the other way around.

I do this sort of thing with nearly every sentence – my natural inclination is to write things slightly in a jumble. I wonder if it is me being incredibly bad at typing… or thinking, perhaps. Or maybe it is a form of dyslexia – I have never been tested for it, and yet there are plenty of things I do that seem to be related – if writing I may write words backwards, or join the wrong words together. I may get the sentence order wrong, or the structure of the paragraph. I absolutely hate being under pressure to write and come up with something original – e.g. birthday and Christmas cards, cards that do the rounds in offices, wedding guest books. I can never come up with something witty, and I will invariably spell something wrong. Several times I have had to go and buy two or three cards for the same person’s birthday as I made a mistake with the first card and it looked too awful when scribbled out. I nearly always keep a drawer full of cards for this reason.

And spelling! I used to be the world’s worst speller – until I started writing every day. But if asked to spell a word out loud I always have to write it down first to see how it looks – possibly as I have learnt my spelling from reading lots of books – so the appearance of the word, not knowledge of how words are structured. This also means I know a great variety of words that I have no idea how to pronounce – which is probably my biggest confidence buster. Nothing worse when talking to a room full of people and the next word you want to say is ‘superfluous’ and yet you grind to a halt as you cannot pronounce it. So then you have to think quickly for the next word down the vocab food chain, and it ends up dumbing down to ‘extra’. This then doesn’t have the same power or connotation as originally wanted and the whole thread of conversation is lost. It is my worst thing in the world. But there is a way out – I am trying to listen more to talking books so I get an idea of pronunciation. It was either that or reading the dictionary to get an idea of where to stress letters – (soo-pur-floo-uhs) - and just hoping you will be near one when you need it.

I actually just did an online dyslexia test (as online tests are surely the beacon of accuracy) and my result was a ‘likely indication of dyslexia’. Apparently it would help if I speak to a specialist (them, handily) for a small fee to help me out further. Codswallop, I feel.

If I do have dyslexia I do think it must be a very mild version as I have always loved reading, my handwriting is generally neat (when really trying), I religiously write down messages, and I know my left from my right. Actually thinking about it I am a vigorous note-taker – is this because I think I won’t remember clearly? And I have to secretly waggle my hand to know which is left and right. And I am ambidextrous… AGH! What does it all mean?!

Idea to Author: John Grisham

Name: John Grisham

Job at time: Lawyer and politician

Book idea: In 1984, after overhearing the harrowing testimony of a twelve-year-old rape victim, John Grisham was inspired to write a novel exploring what would have happened if the girl’s father had murdered her assailants. This turned into his first novel A Time To Kill.

Written where: He got up at 5am each day to write before work, and during courtroom recesses, and he mostly wrote in long-hand. Nowadays he says ‘The books are written from August to November, from 6 a.m. to noon, five days a week. Old habits die hard." (source: Page One Lit)

Writing time for first novel: Three years

Number of agent rejections: 15 or 20. According to the book 'Write and Sell your First Novel’ (I must get that book!) John Grisham made a list of 'all the literary agents he could find - some fifteen or twenty' - and sent his first three chapters of A Time to Kill to all of them. Those who bothered to reply said that novels about lawyers and courtrooms were hard to place. Only one agent saw the potential.

Agent said yes: The late Jay Garon, an independent agent in New York.

Number of publisher rejections: Approximately 15. It took a year to get a publisher.

Publisher said yes: Wynwood Press.

Copies printed: 5,000. It didn’t sell well, and apparently John Grisham himself bought 2,500 books to try and shift them, but eventually got rid of the ones that didn't sell at the local dump. After The Firm, the movie rights to A Time To Kill sold for $6 million. Those books that came from the first 5,000 printed (and survived the fate of the dump) are now collector's items, and trade places for up to $3,000 each. (Source: 'Write and Sell your First Novel’).

Windfall: Getting the attention of a clever agent like Jay Garon. In a bid to get John Grisham’s name known, Jay bypassed all the publishing houses with the second book, The Firm, and took it straight to Hollywood. Paramount bought it for $600,000, and the film starred Tom Cruise. Doubleday then bought the book rights. To date the film has grossed over $260 million worldwide.

Books sold to date: 235 million John Grisham books are in print worldwide. Nine of his novels have been turned into films (The Firm, The Pelican Brief, The Client, A Time to Kill, The Rainmaker, The Chamber, A Painted House, The Runaway Jury, and Skipping Christmas), as was an original screenplay, The Gingerbread Man. (Source, John Grisham’s own website).

Approx money earned overall: $25 million (source Parade, April 2009)

Lives now: Splits his time between his Victorian home on a farm in Mississippi and a plantation near Charlottesville, VA.

Advice for writers: “Write at least one page every day, without fail. If you’re trying to write a book, and you’re not writing at least one page a day, then the book is not going to get written.”

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I think the one thing a novice novelist can take from John Grisham is the old adage ‘write about what you know’. In which case I should write about... (deletes words behind her, as actually all that sounded quite good!). Hm...

Also it is interesting to note that he also got up very early each day, like Dan Brown, in order to write his debut novel before going to work. I did try this last week - and got up at 5.30am in the hope that I would get in an hour and a half of solid writing before getting ready for work. But what happened was I got in half an hour of solid clicking before an hour of puzzling over one paragraph. I then went to work and was knackered by 3pm. There must be a system to doing this - some sort of regimented 'bed at 10, instant refreshing sleep, wake at 5' type thing. It's the 'instant refreshing sleep' thing I seem to lack. It probably doesn't help that the local neighbourhood Tom cats have decided to launch their latest nightly battle for supremacy outside my bedroom window.