The Rights & Wrongs of Writing

April 19, 2018

Unexpected benefits – the London Book Fair 2018

Fran Macilvey, The Rights & Wrongs of Writing 6 Comments

Unexpected Benefits – the London Book Fair 2018

Going to the London Book Fair 2018 over three days during the Easter holidays had some rather unexpected benefits: It was good to have a change of scene and to see flowers, their colours enlivening trees and roadsides, lightening the streets under an overcast sky. (After more snow in April, Scotland has just sprung out of hibernation in the last few days.) And after a bout of illness at home during the school holidays, I slept incredibly well in my hotel room in London, uninterrupted for hours at a time, high up on the third floor.

I finally met up with my good friend Frank Kusy, whom I have known for almost a decade since our days on Authonomy. How nice it was to meet up and chat over a meal. Thanks to Frank for making the trek into town to meet up.

I also met other friends from Authonomy – thanks to HarperCollins, the benefits of being part of Autho just seem to keep rolling – and as I was strolling the corridors of the exhibition centre at Olympia, I listened to interviews at the English PEN salon, as well as meeting and chatting with many other good folk: authors and editors, distributors and readers all willing to take a chance on meeting like-minded professionals, and watch the hive of business that is the book industry at work: to marvel at its complexity and its evolving place in the world, as it takes on and embraces new technology. I appreciate the show more with every year that passes.

It was marvellous to watch the whole unfolding of this expertise in one place, and to appreciate the organisation and attention to detail that makes it all work so smoothly. Thanks to everyone who made my trip south so enjoyable.

And thanks for reading.

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April 6, 2018

Going to the London Book Fair 2018

Fran Macilvey, Fran's School of Hard Knocks, The Rights & Wrongs of Writing 4 Comments

Going to the London Book Fair 2018

I have long planned to go to the London Book Fair 2018.

I booked my accommodation for the London Book Fair 2018 in October last year, my train tickets in January, and have my rucksack packed with the basic essentials – one copy of each of my books, folders with my current works in progress and a copy of my radio play… the rest – the clothes, the details, will I hope not be too long in resolving.

The main issue I have – I will not call it a ‘problem’, though perhaps ‘opportunity’ is a tad too new age for the realities of travel – is that I have to be able to carry everything I need in my rucksack, which is not one of these tall main-frame types, more a middle-sized packers rucksack. In any case, I’m limited by weight, and by my rather precarious balance.

Also, I seem to have developed an aversion to using these moving escalators which we find everywhere in airports and conference centres and railway stations. For some unaccountable reason, they fill me with a most unhelpful fear and dread. (The alternative is usually a lift out of the way behind a corner somewhere, grossly slow and overused…) (Or never used and apparently out of order.) If I have one wish for my travels, it is that this fear of using downward travelling staircases might leave me. It becomes a nuisance.

That said, I’m fairly organised, which is a relief, since I have a lot to do – and am recovering from some vague, annoying illness – before I can actually catch my train on the 9th of April and sit back in standard class with a sigh. I really, sincerely, hope I make it, as I enjoy the London Book Fair, which has a lot for authors to get excited about, and many events that are open and participatory.

Thanks so much for reading.

 

 

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March 28, 2018

Reading Agatha Christie

Books I Have Reviewed, Fran Macilvey, The Rights & Wrongs of Writing 4 Comments

Reading Agatha Christie

My mother has, at one time in her life, had every Agatha Christie book. Perhaps, like me, she feels that reading Agatha Christie is a good bet: not especially demanding, intriguing and an interesting insight into a way of life – house parties, butlers, and maids who lived up the back stair – which has disappeared from all but the most privileged households. (And recently watching episodes of ‘The Crown’, I’m not even sure I would ever want to be part of that kind of privilege.)

AC’s books also offer intriguing insights into the moral standards of the time, for example, that it was shameful for a woman of a certain class to work, to earn her way by serving others behind the counter, or in a dress shop. No young lady worth her salt would stoop to anything too grubby – she would certainly not serve as a waitress in a Lyon’s tea house – but even helping others to choose dresses was considered rather shameful. (Coincidentally, understanding this kind of social nuance also helps me to grasp why Jane Fairfax, in ‘Emma’ is so utterly appalled at the prospect of working as a governess…) How times have changed.

Social mores apart, Christie’s books are also intriguing because of the way the plots are set up, the old device of having a fixed number of characters, all congregated in the same place. “And Then There Were None” (I regret to say, my daughter’s favourite AC book) gives one of the most contrived examples of this; so contrived that I have great difficulty admiring anything else that might be considered ingenious about this particular story. If some old bam-pot wrote anonymously to me, I’d hardly be likely to turn up chez lui… but then, perhaps we are also expected to suspend our sense of reality, when reading mystery stories.

Except that, for me, one of the most compelling elements of thriller writing is realism – or at least, an integrated reality, however fanciful its premises might be.

Since Mum has left her home in France and come to live in Scotland, I am sent regular packages with AC books in them. I am reliably informed that, “The Murder of Roger Ackroyd” is considered her masterpiece, so I’m saving that for last. I’ll let you know what I think of it, when I finally read it.

 

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March 14, 2018

Writing Blog Posts

Fran Macilvey, Magazine articles, The Rights & Wrongs of Writing 0 Comments

Writing Blog Posts

In the last few years I’ve learned a lot about writing blog posts. So far, this is what I’ve learned to help me to write a blog post that can pass as good.

  • I aim to publish two or three blog posts each week, to keep the blog active and ‘live’; this my hope, though I do take a long break during the Summer holidays.

 

  • Each post should, ideally, be more than three hundred words, but not so many more that readers will be distracted.

 

  • That each post may contain links to external content such as previous blog posts, links to other material on the web, articles, references or video links.

 

  • That ideally, each blog post will contain an image, low res of between 250 – 350 pixels. Any larger, and the image size threatens to swamp the website, which is not geared to carrying lots of additional pixel content. So I have learned how to reduce the size of mega pixel images, to accommodate that.

 

  • I try to make each blog I post compliant with Search Engine Optimisation recommendations, which are carefully explained at the foot of each new entry. The ‘traffic light’ system is very useful to help with this, though, depending on the categories I list for my blog, it is not always possible to get a green light on that. If I post a blog on a subject that is not listed in my categories – which I try to make as broad as possible – a blog post may struggle to get the green light.

 

  • Having subject categories listed for my blog helps to focus my mind on relevant content which, I hope, will stay pertinent and will evolve even when I decide to ‘Spring-clean’.

 

  • It helps if each blog is tagged to a minimum of two categories. If one category then falls out of use or I delete it later on, the posts do not slip into the universal ‘uncategorised’ category, the catch-all which would need to be deconstructed later on, by re-listing each post within the other categories.

 

Thanks so much for reading.

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March 3, 2018

The unbearable insecurity of writers

Fran Macilvey, Path To Publication, The Rights & Wrongs of Writing, Women's fiction and chic lit 0 Comments

The unbearable insecurity of writers

Lots of those we call great authors – okay, almost all the authors I know or have read about – suffer from an insecurity, a question they ask themselves all the time: Is my work any good? Have they done themselves and their characters justice, this time? Such is the unbearable insecurity of writers that even famous and very successful authors suffer from angst and mental health problems.

And to the general public who read books, or who simply watch the show from the side-lines, the answer is – of someone like Stephen King or Marian Keyes or Lee Child – “Of course they are good enough. They sell millions of books. What more do they expect? Perfection?”

Writerly insecurity looks a bit like – and is often mistaken for – an ego needing a good massage, but, I believe the reason for the endless quest for reassurance is more subtle.

When we first set pen to paper – okay, when we sit in front of our PCs with a new file open – we have the whole field of possibility open to us, rather like a child’s first day at primary school. We can write literally anything; excuse the pun. But as a story takes shape and the characters show us where to go, as words and plots are tied down, increasingly there arises the question, is this where I am meant to take this story? What if there is a much better line to follow out there, that I have missed? What if all I have written is but a poor reflection of what I should be writing?

And to that, I can offer only the age-old adages that, “What’s for you won’t go by you..” or “If it’s meant to happen, it will,” or “All things work out for the best…” which may be scant comfort, a bit too much like the superstitions that our forebears relied on, but what else can we do? There is no way to know definitively whether what we have is the best finished article we can make; and, we can always console ourselves that a finished book – or even a half-finished book – is probably better than no book at all.

Thanks for reading.

 

 

 

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February 25, 2018

My new screen saver

'Trapped: My Life with Cerebral Palsy', Fran Macilvey, The Rights & Wrongs of Writing 6 Comments

My new screen saver

This is going to sound maudlin, but I promise you, it’s not. I have a new screen saver. That’s to say, my new screen saver is wonderful. I have sometimes struggled to get images that were not pixelated to death, or fuzzy, or that gave me a headache after a few days.

But recently, mucking about with my PC, a photo of my brother, wearing a genuinely lovely smile, a grin which says, “I’m happy here, now” ended up as my screen saver image, and it is beautifully clear.  Unusually, because my brother was oddly self-conscious, forever pulling faces when being photographed, playing the fool, this picture has his happy likeness to perfection. He’s wearing a red t-shirt with the legend, “Moved into a new flat – my neighbour has broadband wi-fi…”

As as IT expert non pareil, that fits him well…

The thing is, I can feel his joy motivating me. Pieter was an incredibly hard worker, obsessed, almost, with his projects which were legion and complex. And seeing him there, grinning, is all the motivation I need to keep working when I’m tempted to slack off. Not that I don’t rest, and not that he would have disapproved of a good time off. But knowing how much effort he put in, and knowing that his advice still motivates me (“write, because the only thing other people can’t do for you is write your books.”) it seems like a double dereliction of my intentions, to shut him away for the night without at least giving my projects a bit of quality time.

I don’t much like the expression, “quality time” but it works, when applied to my work. I can fritter time away playing computer patience, or I can watch Netflix, or I can spend lots of time on YouTube. But, since I enjoy writing, and since I want to write, I really should, when the opportunity suggests itself to me as I turn on the PC and there is my bro, encouraging me, saying, “Come on, girl, you can do this…” I will get my work done and I will finish what I set out to do. Thanks, bro!

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February 22, 2018

Character and plot overlaps

Fran Macilvey, The Rights & Wrongs of Writing, Women's fiction and chic lit 2 Comments

Character and plot overlaps

In the series of novels I am writing, there are character and plot overlaps among the three books. Each book has its own cast of characters, all of whom are important in their own way, and each book has overlaps with the others, particularly books 1 and 2.

For a long time, I was worried about that – how can I write each story convincingly, not forgetting the details of what went before? How to manage without being repetitive or predictable? I’m not sure I can stay two steps ahead of my readers, but I might like to aim for one, though I’ve not been quite sure how to do that, when each book rather anticipates the next…

Though internal consistency in plotting is a must, it turns out that I need not have been so worried. Each of my books has a different feel from its neighbour, and the two main characters whose lives  intersect have, it turns out, very different ways of seeing the world, of dealing with its challenges. Each character has very different priorities. So, conversations that Lisa the lawyer might recall with exact clarity, are turning out to be a fuzzy nightmare to Susan, her client – which is good. I can hardly hope to make my books interesting if I find myself forced to replicate long sections of dialogue.

It turns out, Susan is, in some ways, so out of her depth that the last thing she cares about is the details of conversations. My characters turn out to be so different, that even when their lives intersect, they do not remember the same things, or the same events in the same way.

It is a solution I could never have dreamed up; yet it seems to answer most of my questions, and frees me to write more fully in character. It does seem, with these books, that my role is to trust, and allow the stories to unfold while I take dictation and allow the plot to speak to me, as it were. I am sure we often find that when we relax and allow ourselves to be open to new discoveries like this, they come to us from all over the place.

Thanks for reading.

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February 15, 2018

A thousand blog posts

'Trapped: My Life with Cerebral Palsy', Fran Macilvey, Path To Publication, The Rights & Wrongs of Writing 4 Comments

A thousand blog posts?

I think I must have written, by now, almost a thousand blog posts. (I had more than are currently listed at https://www.franmacilvey.com because I had to delete some posts from my original WordPress site, they having only a very tenuous connection with the categories that I set up for my current blog.)

At three hundred words for each blog posts, that is – yes, I know, but arithmetic has never been my strongest suit, quite honestly – three hundred thousand words, more than enough for three books. Wow. That feels good, and I begin to appreciate the value of all those backups, having wonderful web support and help with SEO and all that jazz. It has been an interesting journey to get this far.

I started out as a tad bewildered author, uncertain of all this on-line media networking jive, and over the years, my hope and optimism trajectories have had more lifts and dips in them than a five star hotel, but now… now I come out of it all, feeling more ready, willing and prepared for what the rest of the year brings: the London Book Fair in April, the Frankfurt Bookfair in October – and I’m not concerned, as some industry insiders would have it, that Frankfurt is only for industry insiders. So what? Writing is a lonely enough occupation without the added isolation imposed by barriers that reek of exclusivity. We take our chances where we can find them.

I’m pleased, in all this time – more than ten years of writing, networking and hoping – to have had the support and encouragement of so many others, writers, readers, industry professionals and neighbours. Thank you so much, for all your encouragement. Without that, my writing career would still be an embryonic hope, stifled by regret and what ifs. Even if my path were to end today, I would feel grateful for the last eleven years of endeavour, experimentation, trial and error.

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February 11, 2018

Reading a book to the end

Fran Macilvey, Fran's School of Hard Knocks, The Rights & Wrongs of Writing 4 Comments

Reading a book to the end

I used to read lots of books at once. Five was about right: two long fuses, a couple of interesting reference books and at least one of the ‘sit up all night’ variety.

These days, I am more inclined to read one book at a time – though I still have a couple of reference books I dip into and am determined to finish one day. Rather like the Bible, these tend to be on a long lease… but I remain determined with them, and they do provide daily interest.

But, whereas I used to persist with books that I was less than keen on and make a virtue of reading a book to the end, nowadays, I will usually give such volumes a heave ho after, perhaps, managing through one half. It seems I haven’t the time or inclination to hope that the last chapters of a book might yield an interesting denouement, if the first half of a book has been okay but not fantastic, overly violent or simply not what I want to read, right now.

Hubby – my infinitely better half – will not only read every book to the end, but will choose all kinds of books – about the first world war, the Irish wars of independence, ‘Les Miserables’… – worthy books about worthy and serious subjects, as if, by reading them he will in some way atone and make the world a better place. He is immensely patient, or perhaps proud, that he will not be found slacking on his watch, and that no man will ever be able to accuse him of skimming his duties, missing the greatest opportunity for wisdom the world has ever known or passing by on great enlightenment.

Such motives as these may, at one time, have inspired me. Now, they make me tired, so that I long for some gentle escapism. Thankfully, I have lots of that ready to read on my i-pad. Each to his own.

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January 26, 2018

Time and tide wait for no woman

'Trapped: My Life with Cerebral Palsy', Fran Macilvey, Fran's School of Hard Knocks, Happiness Matters, Path To Publication, The Rights & Wrongs of Writing 0 Comments

Time and tide wait for no woman

Time and tide wait for no woman…. Just occasionally – Not at all often, I am pleased to note – I encounter comments about my book, ‘Trapped’ along the lines of ‘miserable book, miserable git’ or words to that effect.  Not that I mind – different strokes for different folks; and these days I’m more likely to smile at that, than get upset.

‘Trapped’ took me four years or so to write, and was first published in hardback in 2014.  In the intervening period my hopes, attitudes and beliefs have undergone several revolutions.  I guess I’m hardly an impartial witness, though readers can also scan my web content to find my second book, ‘Happiness Matters’ a modest tome about how to be happy.  So I can’t be that much of a miserable git these days.  The test would be whether such comments as these reduce me to an indignant, grumbling mess.  They don’t.

What we are, who we are and what we think about what matters in life, are facets that are constantly evolving.  There is not much I would wish to alter about my books, or my writing, but all things change, and writing ‘Trapped’, my sincere attempt to reflect on my first forty years of life, changed me, and changed my attitudes to life in general, and my life in particular.  I learned a lot from the process, mostly, about the importance of doing our best, and of being as happy as possible more of the time.  Valuable lessons that have empowered me to move forward.  I can’t say I would write or do anything else differently, or speculate how my life might have turned out if I had opted to become a visual artist, say, or stayed on working as a solicitor.

The publishing industry calls memoir, ‘narrative non-fiction’ which is a very polite way of saying that the content is largely true, but reads like a novel and will probably contain some plot holes and a few examples of poetic license.  But after ten years, the truths that held true when we first wrote THE END to finish our memoir, have probably changed, as will the authors themselves.

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