In praise of phone writing

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Yesterday, I had a difficult scene to write. It wasn't difficult because of the action - I could see that in my mind - but it was a difficult subject and I knew it would be very, very tricky to get the tone right. I sat down yesterday morning determined to do it... and proceeded to get no end of other scenes edited, paperwork updated, emails answered and games of spider solitaire played while I was putting it off.

By the evening I still hadn’t written it. I shut the computer down and went downstairs to do the washing up.

And then I wrote the scene.

On my phone.

The thing about using OneNote on my phone is that by its very nature, I know whatever I write won’t be a finished copy. My fingers are so clumsy that there are typos all over the place. The phone makes heroic and occasionally ludicrous attempts to guess what I mean, rendering the text even less readable, and I often can’t see the screen properly to know what I've done wrong anyway.

There is no tabulation, hit and miss punctuation, but the great thing is that none of it matters. I know I am going to email it to myself and correct it on the PC tomorrow.

Here’s a confession. I love editing. I have stupidly high standards. That quote about spending all morning moving a comma and spending all afternoon putting it back again could have been made for me. I adore going over and over a paragraph until it flows properly, getting the words exactly right. It’s just the writing in the first place that’s the tricky bit.

And that is the beauty of writing late at night on my phone. It satisfies my inner deadline (at least I've acheived something by bedtime). It means I can think about the current problem while I wash up - often the right word or phrase will come to me moments after I plunge my hands into the soapy water - knowing I can note it down straight away and email it.

Most importantly, because writing on my phone is so wildly inaccurate, I can gloriously ignore my inner editor. I know it’s going to be full of mistakes, sentences in the wrong place, characters with the wrong names, all dialogue and no action, or all stream of consciousness. None of that matters because it is impossible to do on a phone anyway. The transcending joy for me is that THE WORDS ARE WRITTEN. None of them may survive tomorrow’s edit in the particular way I've written them tonight, but they are there.

Trust me, it is so much easier to edit words in a manuscript when you actually have words to work on.
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Poems as character snapshots

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Poems are helpful for all sorts of things, from celebration to closure. I also use them to capture moments, to capture feelings and sometimes, to capture characters.

This is one I wrote a long, long time ago. Every time I read it, I can conjure her up. And every time, I understand her a little more.

Cutting Chips  by  Jan Jones


She cuts chips the long way
One slice at a time
Thanked me with remote eyes
when I told her how it could be done faster
but said there was more to life than speed

She fills whole afternoons shopping
Looking for things not to buy, reasons not to buy them
Changes her clothes several times a day
as an excuse to move from one room to another

She inhabits the kitchen distantly whilst we crack beers,
Eat dinner at peak acceleration, rattle through the washing up
Sits alone in the lounge in the evenings
with a CD and a glass of sherry on a drinks mat.
He always hated rings.

We ask, does she want to come out with us tonight?
She smiles and shakes her head
She’s going to watch television
There’s a programme later on about making ravioli

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My Writing Process


Lovely Lesley Cookman tagged me to carry on with the 'My Writing Process' blog hop. Lesley writes enjoyable murder-mystery novels published by Accent Press featuring her splendid amateur sleuth Libby Sarjeant.

There are only four questions, so here goes:

What am I working on?

In theory, I am working my way through editing and extending all my magazine serials, and then publishing them on Amazon Kindle. However, having just vastly expanded my romantic suspense Fairlights to the length it always should have been, a couple of spinoffs are waving at me, begging to be written. This happens to me A LOT. A secondary character in one book becomes so interesting, with such a lot of hidden backstory, that they turn into the subject of the next book. Generally this happens in sequence, but one of the Fairlights spinoffs will be a little different. When I was originally describing the house, I wrote a throwaway line of explanation ... which has since become a fully fledged storyline! So I am currently revisiting a previous genre of mine and writing Ravell’s Luck: the Regency Fairlights story!

How do my stories differ from others in genre?

Everybody writes with their own voice. Every writer has an idea of what they want to include in their story. I write in several genres (contemporary, romantic suspense, Regency, cosy mysteries), but whichever one it is, I like to think that my stories are the sort of thing that could happen to anyone - even the slightly paranormal elements.

Why do I write?

That's simple. I write because I can. And because I can’t not.

Most people have some sort of creative urge. We need the satisfaction of making something that wasn’t there before. It could be growing plants, knitting or writing computer programs. It could be painting, playing music, inventing sudoko grids, doing cross stitch or even tackling double-entry bookkeeping and seeing all the numbers adding up the way they should at the end. I feel very strongly that not doing something you have a talent for is a waste. It frets us, niggles at our minds. People should play to their strengths because it’s why we have them. I can write, I can entertain, so I do. Also it significantly reduces the likelihood of my laying waste to a large swathe of my surroundings in frustration.

How does my writing process work?

 Each book starts with an idea. A phrase, perhaps, or a character. Maybe a line of dialogue or a setting. That idea rolls around gently in my head, gathering new bits and pieces. I often scribble it all down on paper, stream-of-consciousness style, over and over again before it begins to make sense and I have a story. By the time I actually start writing I will usually know the beginning and the end. I’ll also know my characters and a few hazy milestones along the way. The rest often surprises me - and I wouldn’t have it any other way.

The hard part is writing the story. I write best at night in the early stages of a book, when everything is quiet and there are no distractions. I then go over it the next day, and add some more. I repeat the process until I’m only changing the odd word here and there,
then I move on to the next section. It really is two steps back and three steps forward the whole time, but hopefully the manuscript is getting smoother and more cohesive with every iteration.

After it is finished, of course, I have to let people read it - and then the editing starts all over again!


So, that's my writing process. Next, I am passing the baton to the very talented writer Beryl Kingston. Beryl doesn't have a blog of her own, so she is being hosted by the equally splendid Jenny Haddon.
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On being a jobbing writer

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It isn't easy being a writer. Not my sort of writer, anyway. Without contracts or security, but still with an aching need to write, to entertain, to tell stories that readers want to read.

On with the motley by Jan Jones

Doing makework
Hopping from project to project
My whole life spent in the remaindered aisle
eyes darting from shelf to shelf for the
bargain-of-the-moment

Motley, always motley

A scrap of beauty here
A half-elegant phrase there
Buried in the rush for a temporary high
I long for a year’s space
To cloak myself in a world of my own fashioning
To explore leisurely
Spending a day finding just the right word
Knowing my characters down to the base of the iceberg
Security

But the car needs petrol
The children need MP3 players
So it’s on with the motley and smile
And pare the ease of sleep to the bone.

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A Wonderful Coincidence

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The story behind Part Three of this year's Penny Plain Mysteries is one of those  serendipitous coincidences that we are told never to use in our writing, because no one would believe it. But this one DID happen, so I did use it - albeit in a fictitious manner.

Earlier this year, when I was writing the second series of Penny Plain, I received an email through my website from Betty, now living in Canada, to say that she always had People's Friend sent to her from the UK and had thoroughly enjoyed the first Penny Plain story.

Betty in 'them thar' days

She went on to say that she had particularly liked the unusual jigsaw-code-breaking strand, and mentioned that back in the 1950s she had worked on aircraft crash data, trying to establish the weak points in the new aeroplanes then being developed.

At which point I leapt off my chair shouting "Yes, yes, yes!" and "FABULOUS!" and "I don't believe it!" Because - as I immediately emailed back to her - I was at that very moment writing the new series of Penny Plain which included a mysteriously crashed plane from the 1950s!

We have since kept up a regular email correspondance, and I was so grateful for the easiest research ever, that I wrote Betty - in very fictionalised form - into this week's episode.

Whetted your appetite? Good - go buy it.

Capturing the moment

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All writers are observers. We carry notepads, murmur into recorders, rattle fingers over netbooks. Which is all very well if you are scribbling overheard scraps of conversation, or if you are gifted enough to be able to produce spot-on descriptions with zero notice. (I'm not, by the way. We are talking blood, sweat and concentrated staring into space here.) But what if you want to capture the essence of a moment? Something that you can refer back to months or even years later. Something that takes you back to Yes, then, that was it, that was how I felt at that exact moment in time.

As I'm sure I've said before, I use poetry. It doesn't have to rhyme. It doesn't have to be grammatically correct. But done right it will have its own internal rhythm and it will have the right keywords, in the right order, to capture the moment.

Last night, waiting in the car park to give my son a lift home from the late bus, I saw something I'd never seen before. It was beautiful, scary, left my heart pounding in my mouth and was over in seconds.

So once it was settled in my head, over my last mug of tea, I wrote it into a poem. A tiny, reusable, time capsule.

This is an example. There was no time to film it.

Otherworld Running
by Jan Jones

After dark is a lawless world
of energy and dares
of scary, arc lit follow-my-leader
of grace
streamlined running
lithe darting
dodging
one-handed hurdling
trellis climbing
roof sliding . . .

Then, gone
all of them

as suddenly as they were there

melted away

The last bus rolls in
With yellow windows and solitary passengers

As I start the car my heart subsides in painful jerks to my chest
the echoes of slapping feet held suspended in my mind

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Poetry of place

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Having been discussing poems recently, I thought I'd post one of mine. (If it looks familiar, I put it on the Transita Authors blog ages ago)


I write poems for myself, to capture a moment or a mood or a person or a place. I find when I look at them again sometimes years later, they bring to mind exactly what I wanted to remember - a very handy brain-transportation device for a writer!

As I blogged last about Lady Mary Stewart and the way she brings her settings so vividly to life, I'm presenting you with a 'place' poem. This was written while sailing on the Norfolk Broads one time. Many people go there on holiday to enjoy the water and the scenery, but the landscape is so ancient and brooding that I always get the feeling we mortals are merely tolerated as we scull across it.



No Postcard by Jan Jones

Pretty? You couldn’t call this pretty
This land defies the roundness of the Earth
Grey-green under grey sky
Archaic in its horizontal heaviness
When man falters, stumbles to nothing
The land remains.

Incomers live on the surface. Try too hard. Never see
That line of mud around the ankles. Never notice
Those eyes the remote grey of the sky. Just
A micrometer of pulled petroleum.

Driftwood tree, taut amongst summer reeds
Grey water with a purpose of its own
Inexorable. Unremitting.
This land is no postcard.
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Show, not tell

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I've been busy this week editing my People's Friend serial, which is why I've not been blogging. There "wasn't a lot to do" said lovely editor Shirley, apart from "pick up the pace a bit" in the final part.

Pick up the pace.

Oh, God.

So off I hared to the phone and had a nice chat with her. It transpired she thought that while the final part (it's a four-part gentle mystery) obviously needed to include a lot of denouement and explanation, the last third felt a bit flat. Could I perhaps inject some action into it?

It is a sad fact of life that editors are rarely wrong, so I sat down and re-read the episode. And yes, she was right. Could I see how to fix it? Could I heck.

So I wrote down the sequence of the last third: Penny goes to the boat, Penny listens to one side of Leo's phone call, Penny sees the point at which Leo regains his memory, Penny listens to Leo telling her what happened, Penny and Leo solve the final mystery together.

Oops. All Penny's viewpoint. But if I rewrote the middle three segments from Leo's point of view it should suddenly become much more alive because the information is coming to the reader first-hand instead of second-hand.

This is the gist of the original (with some spoilers removed)
Penny saw memory hit Leo with almost physical force. His face drained of colour. “I’ve got a meeting. I’ll ring you back.” He turned off the phone, dropped it with a clatter and slumped forward, covering his face with his hands.

"You've remembered, haven't you?"

"I'd had a terrible night and was still going over what she’d said next day. I drove around a bend on a road that I must have travelled a thousand times before - the sun was low, it dazzled off the wet tarmac and I went off the road into a tree."

And this is the revised version
Why did he still have this gap around the time of his accident? They reached the bottom of the road, Penny started to make the turn and the sun glanced off the wing mirror straight into Leo’s eyes. A kaleidoscope of images rushed at him. A bend. A quiet suburb. The road slick with rain and the sun dazzling off it. The steering wheel jumping. The scream of tyres...

“Stop!” he yelled, covering his face with his hands. “Stop!”

The car braked to a halt. “Leo, what is it?” said Penny. “Are you ill?”

Leo opened his eyes. A child skipped down the pavement with her mother. Seagulls screeched overhead. “I’ve remembered,” he said.


And guess what? It works. Just as I've always known and had temporarily forgotten. And that is Show, not Tell.


PS: the photos are of the hellebores that I transplanted from my mother's shade-garden so I'd always have a permanent reminder of her. I could have told you that today (top photo) they are bushy and thriving and twice the size they were two years ago... or I could show you (bottom photo). I know which works best for me.

My one resolution

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I'm only making one resolution this year on the grounds that it'll be less easy to break it if I don't have half a dozen others in hand.

It isn't to eat sensibly, because I promise myself that after every meal. It isn't to exercise more, because I vow to do that every time I'm out of breath racing to beat the free-parking limit. It isn't to drink less because I remember that after every RNA meet-up.

It's a resolution that's really quite difficult.

Put Writing First

I believe women are conditioned to look after others first and themselves later. I certainly am. I have this huge sense of responsibility that has me saying "yes, of course" when I really mean "no, I don't have time".

But this year I'm totally going to try. I have short stories waiting to be written, I have the third Newmarket Regency floundering at the Midsummer Fair, I have an exciting new project that needs me to concentrate on it right now.

I don't think I can write before I clear my emails in the morning - tried that before and it was a disaster - but I'll whizz through the posts, answer quickly and succinctly, and then I'll write.

So, one resolution that I honestly want to make work. What's your one?
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Tick, tick, tick

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ME
7 copies of short story manuscript, ready to win me £25,000, all parcelled up ready for the post - tick

16 sets of 5 handouts for Writing Romance course in Stoke - tick

course notes - tick

tatty comfortable clothes to travel in - tick

posh clothes to give course in - tick

box of my books to sell having convinced coursees during the day of my brilliance, wit and readability - tick

DAUGHTER
Other half of bedroom that we didn't take to Uni house last week - tick
er, apart from the computer
and the frozen food
and the stuff in the fridge
and her pillows

So that's tick-ish, then
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Lemon season

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Sorry for not blogging - have been in withdrawal since the end of the fabulous Romantic Novelists' Association conference last week.

However, if anyone would like to read my 'Lemons' story, it's in the Woman's Weekly Summer Special 2 out now!

Right. Time for a big mug of tea and finish off the proofs of Fortunate Wager.

Handling lemons

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Way back in February, my good friend Julie Cohen (whose new book Girl From Mars has gone into reprint in its launch week!) handed me a 'lemons' award. As in "When life hands you lemons, make lemonade"

Nice pressy, I thought. I could make a story out of that.

So I did. And Woman's Weekly have bought it.


It will be in the WW Summer Special No 2, out next month.

Cheers, Julie, I owe you one!
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Rejection

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Okay, so here's the thing about writers. Nobody makes us write. Nobody puts a pistol to our head and says, "Your words or your life." We might write for money but still when we write, we put something of ourselves into the result.

I send work out into the world regularly. I iron its spotted handkerchief, tie its little pack with the best knot in my repertoire and polish its stick. I don't have stupid expectations, I fully expect it to come back - but even so, when it does I HURT.

All of which is a long way of saying that my two-part jigsaw serial has just returned home rather less jaunty than when it set out.

I know it's not a bad story. I know it's simply that it wasn't quite right for the editor I sent it to. C'est la vie. Tomorrow I'll look through it, make it a nice new packed lunch and send it somewhere else.

But right now I feel like drowning my sorrows.

Serial musing

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Oh dear. Another week vanishes into the past without me noticing. This is mostly because I have been working out how to write a serial from first principles.

I always knew that the idea generated from this jigsaw (see below) would be too long for a normal short story. What I hadn't fully appreciated is that creating a magazine two-parter isn't a straightforward matter of chopping an 8000 word story in half. You have to make each half satisfying in itself. You must also keep minor characters (a fault of mine) to their own episode otherwise you have to re-explain them. And you can't drop clues to pick up later, because people are reading the sections a week apart.

There's also the fact that Part Two must be able to be read as a stand-alone if necessary. Oh, and Part One definitely has to have that "Memo to self: buy next week's issue" message.

But boy is it fun learning!
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The long, dark, mid-afternoon of the soul

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Right, here's the thing. I have written a 5000 word, perfectly competant, setting-the-scene-and-presenting-the-first-dilemma first chapter of An Unconventional Act. But - 1800 words into Chapter Two and knowing exactly where I'm supposed to be going next - I have ground to a halt.

Why?

Because... well, all sorts of reasons but principally because there's no humour. And you wouldn't believe how long and how many mugs of tea it took me to work that out.



On the other hand, the other day I wrote a 500 word prologue that starts in the wrong place and would mean so much back-story being brought in it's not true... but it feels right.

So - what do I do?

Ms to go

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There. In the interests of sanity, Fortunate Wager has been polished, printed and packaged ready to post to the publisher tomorrow.

Wish it well.

(Mind you, I'm not sure it's really ready to be sent - I mean, I'm not throwing up at the sight of it yet.)
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Short Story Alert!

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And as if Fair Deception coming out this week wasn't enough good news, I also have a story in Woman's Weekly!

Building Up A Story had its origins several years ago when the then owner of the-house-next-door got the builders in to gut and modernise it in order to sell it on. I lived with those builders for MONTHS! Believe me, the stereotype image doesn't go nearly far enough.

However, the pain has receded and I now have really lovely new neighbours - and a short story to boot! It just goes to show that a writer never throws any experience away.

(WW on sale 29th October to 4th November - and in addition to my story you get gratuitous pics of Sean Bean as well!)
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Easy - not!

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My manuscript is 67,695 words.
Ideally, I'd like it to be 70,000 words.

2305 words short
272 pages

So that's an extra 8 or 9 words per page needed.

Sounds easy, doesn't it?
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Losing it!

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Aaarrghhh! I've lost a timeline.

I'm having a last-ish surge through Fortunate Wager and am at the checking all the dates and all the facts stage - and I can't find the timeline!

I know I've made one because I can't not have done. I make one for all my books as I go along. Being just slightly control-freakish, I need to know when I am as I write (one of my pet peeves are books where it isn't clear how much time has passed between one scene and the next). It's also helpful to know which character is appearing too much or too little. Or if the hero and heroine are spending more time apart than together. Plus it's a tremendous way of procrastinating whilst still legitimately claiming that I'm working.

So I know I've written/drawn/annotated this one. I can even see it in my mind's eye with large arrows swooping all over it where I needed to move scenes around. BUT I CAN'T FIND IT NOW!

It's obviously been misplaced somewhere in this lot.


I'm going to have to make another one, aren't I?
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