I’m Nina Milton, and this blog is all about getting out the laptop or the pen and pad to get writing. My blogposts are focused on advice and suggestions and news for writers, but also on a love reading with plenty of reviews, and a look at my pagan life, plus arts and culture. Get all my posts as they appear by becoming a subscriber. Click below right...

Wednesday 27 December 2017

Wishing You a Very Happy 2018





It's nearly 2018 and I hope that all my subscribers and readers have a happy and healthy new year, and that this coming 12 months will prove prosperous for you, in whatever way you wish it to be.




In this blog, I'm looking back over the 2017 highlights of Kitchen Table Writers and my top seven most popular blogposts

NUMBER SEVEN
I'm starting at number seven with  Torturing a Poem, which I wrote after listening to Philip Pulman read from his recent non-fiction book about writing, Daemon Voices, which is full of his wisdom. Why 'Torturing a Poem'?  Pullman suggests, in Daemon Voices, that if you ‘interrogate a poem’ the results will be worthless, ‘as the results of torture always are’. …Poetry is in fact, enchantment, that it has the form it does because that very form casts a spell…

NUMBER SIX
I talk about the relationship I have with my writing soul-mate, who I've know for over 25 years. Thank you Gail!

NUMBER FIVE
In June, I wrote a blogpost for the Open College of the Arts, Questing Your Plot  which proved the fifth most popular post this year, as I explained my wall charts, among other ways of working.

NUMBER FOUR
People seemed to love my rundown on what is happening on the Ness of Brodgar, in of Secrets of


Orkney's Ancient Captial which came right at the beginning of the year.

NUMBER THREE 
In third place,  is my review of an amazing BBC radio Four programme by Neil MacGregor.

Living with the Gods draws on objects taken from the British Museum to tell the story of the world's history of belief, festivals, and religious faiths.


NUMBER TWO
In March, my blogpost was a personal history of how I sometimes find myself Working with Spells...The secret always seems to be desire (LOADS of it), strong intent (preparation and concentration are important) and then… pwuffff! allowing the wish to go…out into the ether, the astral, the spaces between particles…wherever you think wishes might go once you release them.



NUMBER ONE!
In the top spot this year as the most-read blogpost is our encounter with Larry and George Lamb, as they came to Wales during their TV programme Britain by Bike. People also loved our appearance on the show! 


Older posts are still proving popular. In third place, comes http://kitchentablewriters.blogspot.co.uk/2015/02/the-mood-board-different-way-of.htmlThe Mood Board where we look at the 1000'd of different ways to breathe life into new writing projects. 

 In overall second place, is BIRTHING A NEW DREAM - my account of the SHAMANIC GATHERING in September 2016. 

And, in the number one spot since I wrote it in January 2015, is Books of the Year; an interactive post.

I hope you have many New Year's resolutions that will come true for you. Mine is to write more and read more.
 Do let me know if your dreams come true!





Tuesday 28 November 2017

Finding a Writing Soul-Mate

I’ve been writing professionally now since the 90’s, and I know just how solitary a job it can be. Like a lot of people who are drawn to the writing life, I enjoy my own company…and the company of my characters!

But being alone with my work can sometimes feel too huge a deal. The challenge of maintaining confidence, plus keeping the motivation high enough to actually get on with it, grinds me down, especially at the bad times, when things aren’t going so well.

To help me, I use a winning resource which I
Nope, not in there....
recommend to all students. This resource is stimulating, user-friendly and without financial cost. It needs no technical know-how, power supply or insurance policies.

You can learn more about the efficacy of this method by clicking on this link

Saturday 25 November 2017

Living With the Gods


The Lion Man


I'm in the middle of an arts course, because I don't know much about fine art, and would love to understand it better, and I'm unsurprisingly finding that one of the easiest ways I can penetrate and decipher art is through the delight of story. 

Not all art tells a story, but at the moment, with my little knowledge, this seems to me to be the overarching theme of most art, from its very beginnings, and often the story that the artist wants to tell, is that of the gods. This led me to recall the programme I’ve been listening to on Radio 4, Living With The Gods, a 30-part series of fifteen minute talks, written and presented by Neil MacGregor, a former director of the British Museum. To run alongside, the British Museum have an exhibition of some of the artefacts MacGregor is using to illustrate his talks.



Taranis
 Throughout the radio series MacGregor draws upon objects and curatorial insights from the British Museum to talk about daily and weekly religious practices, festivals, pilgrimages and sacrifices, power struggles and political battles between beliefs across millennia. He uses the artifacts, some thousands of years old, to illustrate and explore how the human race has lived with gods. This week, he took an earthenware cooking pot, about 1,750 years old, discovered to contain many little bronze statuettes…a household Roman god, two tiny birds, perhaps a raven and a dove which are often found in pre-roman societies in Northern Europe to symbolise deities,  plus some gods of more import – the Greecian god Minerva, the Roman God Jupiter, god of sky and thunder, and a spoked wheel, a symbol of Taranis, a Celtic god worshiped in Gaul and Britain. As Taranis was also a god of thunder, the Romans and accepted him alongside their own Jupiter.


The Roman Baths, Bath
MacGregor explained how the Romans exported their gods to the newly conquered lands, but were also able to ‘go global’ and assimilate the gods they found there, building temples to new and old, such as the Temple of Sulis Minerva at Bath in the UK. The Romans seemed to understand that if you honour other peoples gods, they become less strange. As McGregor says…The Romans will change, and so will they. It was an approach which allowed the Roman Empire to become a long-lasting multi-racial, multi-faith state. As the Roman Senate is recorded to have written; “The Immortal Gods are the same everywhere.” This allowed them to live on good terms with very many very different peoples, absorbing many cultures into what became a world view.


MacGregor explained that polytheism –  the worship of many gods – has had a bad press which has left us almost blind to the fact that across the span of human history, multi-theist one god systems have been the exception rather than the rule. And in the very distant past, the acceptance of what other people believe, or what previous people believed, was possibly stronger than it is today.
It’s not just in Bath, at the Roman baths, that I’ve understood this fact for myself.  There is a wonderful landscape on The Gower, in South Wales, called Parc le Breos. This is a Norman Deer park with a hunting lodge you can stay at if you have sufficient readies. It is also a walkers, climbers and campers paradise, and it contains not only a  many-chambered passage grave, but also a cave, called Cathole, high up on a cliffside, which hides an exciting secret.

Cathole has recently been discovered to hold a prehistoric carving. It’s a reindeer, scratched in with a sharp flint too, to expose the redness of the rock below. It may be 14,000 years old – the oldest rock art yet found in Britain. I’ve been to Cathole many times, climbing up a steep, wooded path through the gorge to reach it. There are inner and outer chambers, and although it’s not that deeply cavernous, there are parts that are very dark indeed. So, despite my exploration of the cave, I’d never spotted the carving, and neither had any of the parties I’d been with. Since it’s official discovery, the cave has been gated, to prevent the public entering, so I’ll probably never see it now. 

http://www.stone-circles.org.uk/stone/parclebreos.htm
Thirty metres scrabble down into the valley of Parc le Breos Parc is an even older monument to ancient peoples; a  Neolithic chambered burial tomb over 5,500 years old. Locally known as the Giant’s Grave, it was partly restored in the 1960s, which is sad in a way as it no longer looks as it did when discovered, but it does mean we can have a reasonable idea of how it might have been (minus its capstones, which were plundered, probably for a 19 century building project). The layout is perfect for the games we liked to play in such places. The Giant’s Grave, or Parc Cwm, as it’s properly called, was where we fought off Tolkein’s Wargs as members the Fellowship of the Ring, and became a brilliant crossing place over the River Styx, on our way to Cathole, an even more brilliant Hades.

Inside the tomb, the human bones of at least 40 people were found. Examination showed that the women were all petit, the men all big and burly. Like many Neolithic sacred sites, it was used for almost 1,000 years – generation after generation – each passing down the stories of what this tomb meant to the people. There is a link to Cathole, too; it’s possible the cave was used to dry out and expose the bones of the dead before they were placed in the tomb.

Those people lived long before Cathole was used again. Then, during the last Ice Age, the people who came after the hunter-gatherers buried their own dea there. In the Bronze Age, it was used again for ritual burials. People came back to Parc Le Breos time and again, for over 3,000 years, to use the landscape, and especially the cave, time and again. 

McGregor gives a very ancient example of ‘more gods work better than less’ – he explains how the story of Noah, in the Bible, is echoed by a cuniform tablet from Mesopotamia, ‘The Epic of Gilgamesh’,  which tells the exact same story of a flood and an arc. The difference, apart from the names of the characters involved, is that in the Bible, only one God, Jehovah, orders the flood and drowns his disobedient people. In Gilgamesh, there is a council of the gods in which the main god, in a dictatorial move, orders the flood. However, mankind is saved when one whistleblower god secretly tells a local family to build an arc. After the flood is over, the gods understood that the flood was a wrong decision, and too much power can be bad, even for gods. 

It would be nice if we could all listen to that Roman advice that The Immortal Gods are the same everywhere, and try to accept other peoples' belief systems, while never trying to impose our own upon anyone.

You can learn more about Living with the Gods, at http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b09fj9mt
and listen to the programme, if you’re in the UK. You can also buy the book (https://www.amazon.co.uk/Neil-MacGregor/e/B0034PYKSQ/ref=dp_byline_cont_ebooks_1


And if you’re in London between now and next April, you can see the exhibits MacGregor talks about in his work at the British Museum. 

Monday 13 November 2017

Odd Child Out by Gilly Macmillan

Which d'you fancy? 


Gruesome detail?
or

Cosy Crime?

Recently, Rebus creator Ian Rankin forecast that extreme bad news in the real word is killing it off the violent thriller. In the Scottish paper, the Daily Record, Rankin claims that the rise of Donald Trump, terrorist attacks and mass shootings have left people yearning for 'kind and gentle' books…The world seems so crazy and irrational that many novelists have difficulty trying to shape it into a coherent narrative…Fiction must be credible, the real world right now feels to me like the opposite of that. People crave normality and stories of kind people helping each other… He added…I think this may happen – a move away from serial killers and bleak dystopian crime fiction towards something with a more comforting message...

source; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ian_Rankin
Is he right? In turbulent times do we turn away from turbulent fiction? Are we ready for more cosy crime and less violence and gore?

Interviewed on the BBC Radio Four Today Programme, Simon Kernick, with 15 novels under his belt, including The Hanged Man, 2017 and The Bone Field, 2016, suggested that…books where there’s a good level of tension but there isn’t the nastiness, such as Big Lttle Lies [by Liane Moriarty] are more comforting to the reader… Asked if he was tempted to tone it down himself, he admitted…I now prefer to write books where I rely heavily on the tension rather than the nastiness.

Denise Mina, who writes the Alex Morrow Books, suggests that one of the reasons why crime fiction is compelling is because that a belief in a just world is fundamental to human beings, and that is what most crime fiction affirms…In all the evidence that life is not fair, we have this fundamental belief…and she suspects that…In these very grizzly ones there isn’t a restoration of order. It's often leaving things open at the end in order to continue a series…

I must admit I like the books I read – and the books I write – to have a just and fair ending, with a denouement that’s believable as well as gripping. And although I can 'take' a certain level of blood and gore, I don't need it. The beauty of the language and the profoundness of the characterisation is far more important.

I’ve just finished Odd Child Out by Gilly Macmillan (HarperCollins), and it’s a perfect example of this. Set vividly in my home town of Bristol, it’s about fifteen year old Noah, found floating unconscious in the Feeder Canal, and his best friend Abdi Mahab, whose parents arrived in Britain after terrifying experiences in a Somali refugee camp. I don’t think it’s a spoiler alert to tell you the book ends by affirming there is justice in the world, and that those who deserve a better chance in life should be offered it. The parents of both the teenaged friends have to face personal suffering, and their own demons, before the case is resolved by Jim Clemo, returning for his second case in Macmillan’s series. This is a police procedural at its heart, with Clemo and his team arduously sorting through lost iPhone records, searching out CCTV images and interviewing recalcitrant witnesses, as they determine if foul play, or even a racially motivated crime, has been committed. But to balance this, Macmillan includes a host of different points of view – first and third – to allow the various characters to have their say. This is a precarious device for a crime novelist, but it worked perfectly for me, allowing me to hear Noah’s story as he drifts in his deep coma, as well as see into the personal life of the detective, Clemo. Each of the Mahab family…the high achieving Abdi, his sister Sofia, now a midwifery student, his taxi-driving father Nur and his mother, Maryam, who speaks little English…all offer important perspectives to the story.
Gilly Macmillan

This is not a book that has high octane gun fights or car chases. Instead it steadily delves into the lives of ordinary people who find themselves in extraordinary circumstances, just as I have tried to do in my Shaman Mystery trilogy. It is a study of human nature and human dilemmas, deeply absorbing and full of tension and suspense.

This is certainly not ‘cosy crime’, but neither is it filled with gruesome gore. It’s not even clear, at first, if anyone is going to die at all, and then, suddenly, a lot of people are in danger. By the end, I was gripping my Kindle as if that would help the good guys survive. 

Gilly Macmillan lived in Northern California in her late teens, but now she’s in Bristol (West of England) and writing full time. You can hear her talk about her previous book, The Perfect Girl, at https://soundcloud.com/harperaudiopresents/gilly-macmillan - in a very revealing interview. It's already downloaded onto my Kindle and I can't wait to start the read.

Friday 3 November 2017

Torturing a Poem – Philip Pullman

I've been guesting on the OPEN COLLEGE OF THE ARTS blog this week, talking about Philip Pullman's new book on writing. 


Pullman has been busy writing – in October he released two new books. The first is the beginning of a new series which will be a sort of prequel to His Dark Materials. The second, released on 26 October, is his first non-fiction work, Daemon voices. This is a must-read for all writers, as well as readers who love his work. It's also a must-listen at the moment, on iPlayer. Go to the OCA blogsite to read the whole post and find the link.



Why 'Torturing a Poem'?  Pullman suggests, in Daemon Voices, that if you ‘interrogate a poem’ the results will be worthless, ‘as the results of torture always are’. …Poetry is in fact, enchantment, that it has the form it does because that very form casts a spell…



Saturday 28 October 2017

Do Not Say We Have NOT Won the Booker

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/oct/08/madeleine-thien-interview-do-not-say-we-have-nothing#img-1

DO NOT SAY WE HAVE NOTHING 
By MADELINE THIEN. 

Praised by Alice Munro (whose name is on the back cover), Do Not Say We Have Nothing earned Madeline Thien the Canadian Authors’ Association Award for most promising Canadian writer under the age of 30. Then went on to win a Carnegie Medal, the Scotiabank Prize and the Stanford Travel Writing Award (Wikipedia 2016), but although shortlisted for The Man-Booker and the Bailey’s Prize, it didn’t win. I was shocked. The reviews I’d read suggested a forgone conclusion…It speaks to the humanity that continues even in the harshest, most self-destructively paranoid conditions, and it shows how the savagery of destroying culture comes hand-in-hand with the destruction of human bodies. For this reason alone, I hope it wins the Man Booker prize(Boland 2016)

I found it compelling, important. I thought a close second read would determine why it hasn’t gained a glittering crown. Long, with a rambling, fractured narrative, covers many aspects of the Maoist revolution. The story is told in sewn-on patches, revealed slowly with huge difficultly, almost like a labour. This immediately felt right…as if structure and style represent the dreadful hardships the Chinese people experienced.

Do Not Say We Have Nothing  opens in Vancouver in 1990. Marie’s father has killed himself in Hong Kong jumping from a high building, and Marie (also called Li-Ling) and her mother take in a young woman from China. Ai Ming arrives at their home without ‘papers’. 10 year-old Marie is enamoured by the teenager, but ask as she might, cannot discover what has happened to her. Marie tries to get closer by showing the girl something that belonged to her dead father…

The notebook with her father’s writing, the Book of Records, was easy to find. I picked it up, knowing it would please her. But when I offered the notebook to Ai-ming, she ignored me. 
I tried again. “Ma told me it’s a great adventure, that someone goes to America and someone else goes to the desert. She said that the person who made this copy is a master calligrapher.”
Ai-ming emerged from her coat. “It’s true my father had excellent handwriting, but he wasn’t a master calligrapher. And anyway, no matter how beautiful the Book of Records is, it’s only a book. It isn’t real.”
“That’s okay. If you read it to me, I can improve my Chinese. That’s real.”
She smiled. After a few moments of turning pages, she returned the notebook to the bedcover, which had become a kind of neutral ground between us. “It’s not a good idea,” she said. “This is Chapter 17. It’s useless to start halfway, especially if this is the only chapter you have.”
“You can summarise the first sixteen chapters. I’m sure you know them.”
“Impossible!” But she was laughing…(Thien 2016)

Politics, time, place and generations of characters are intertwined within the story, and echoed in the handwritten ‘Record’ of the extract above. It was like reading a half-lost Chinese legend, or a guide to survival under hopeless oppression. I loved the way stories and music are powerful threads connecting the lives and times of a Chinese family. Often, I felt I was reading Dostoyevski. I agreed it wasa beautiful, sorrowful workthe mind is never still while reading it…(Senior 2016)

At the core of the story is a true event. In 1968, the director of Shanghai Conservatory of Music, He Luting, was dragged from his office by Red Guards, physically abused in front of TV cameras and accused of ‘non-revolutionary thinking’ over his  approbation of Western classical music. He did not confess, as most did, instead, crying out, “shame on you for lying!” (Isobel Hilton 2016). Thien incorporates this into her story.

I have this idea that … maybe, a long time ago, the Book of Records was set in a future that hadn’t yet arrived,” one characters says (Thien 2016). The covert record, written by hand and passed secretly from writer to writer, allows them to express what they cannot tell. Almost entirely unrevealed on the page, I thought the notebook was a metaphor for the half-lost history of three generations. 

Bach’s Goldberg Variations (always played by pianist Glenn Gould), becomes the score in our head. – the words echoing the complex counterpoints in the music. It’s a symbol, I believe, of how brilliant creativity is suppressed and punished in the Cultural Revolution (CR), but also of how music is universal. Early in the novel, Marie says…I was drawn toward it, as keenly is if someone were pulling me by the hand. The counterpoint, holding together composer, musicians and even silence, the music, with its spiralling waves of grief and rapture…(Thien 2016) She might be talking about the story she’s about to unfold.

Tieananmen Square in the 80s
We only find out Ai-Ming’s full story as the book progresses to its climax in Tiananmen Square. However, this is the beauty of close reading, and doing so made me sit up. There are a lot of clues in that first chapter in Vancouver. I had tried to keep them in my head on my first read, but it was almost impossible. The sweep of the book wipes them away. It’s only at the end, as things come to a head, that we learn how Ai-Ming and Marie are intrinsically connected.

Marie narrates short sections of the novel as an adult, in the present day. She’s become a mathematics professor, which links with the contrapuntal nature of music and story. She’s still seeking the truth about her family’s history. Meanwhile, the lives of the families of two sisters over fifty years of Chinese revolution is revealed in a wide-ranging viewpoint, allowing one after another of the characters to catch and take up the tale. It’s never clear who is in charge of this omniscient-like third person. It might be Ai Ming, remembering all she knows of the Book of Records, even adding to it. Maybe this is all Marie’s story, told at the end of her quest. Or perhaps the overarching view is Thien’s herself.

I became intimately involved with these lives, the ambiguities of the story, and the glorious sounds of music; Chinese and European, violin and piano. From Vancouver we go back to the colour and gaiety of the 1940’s, where two teenaged sisters entertain by singing in provincial teahouses. We follow Big Mother Knife and Swirl through the land reforms, re-educations, the arrival of the Red Guard and the Cultural Revolution, and on, to the protests at Tiananmen Square in 1989.

Big Mother has three children, including a boy called Sparrow, who becomes a musical prodigy. Swirl and her husband, Wen the Dreamer, have a girl, Zhuli. Wen is the ‘master calligrapher’ and principle contributor to the Book of Records. He and Swirl are caught up in the punishments devised to expose counter-revolutionaries… anyone deviating from the norm of communist orthodoxy. They are tortured and given hard labour in a desert area of China, where they barely survive. The young Zhuli is sent to find her aunt in Shanghai. She takes up the violin under the influence of her cousin, the shy composer, Sparrow, and is destined for great things, until the Cultural Revolution rises up. At the Conservatory, Zhuli becomes unable to cope with the humiliations, brain-washings and destruction of music and musical instruments.students began writing essays asking, “What good is this music, these empty enchantments, that only entrench the bourgeoisie and isolate the poor?”(Thien 2016). Some musicians form a clandestine resistance group, and this seems to finally topple Zhuli. She kills herself. 

In Moa’s China, history is manipulated or suppressed unless it toes the party line. And so, from the safety of Canada, Thein has attempted to tell the entire truth, using music as her theme. It feels off-key, literally, to write about musicians when so much of the history is political. They quietly go about their business of writing, playing and teaching music. They have brilliant minds, but are quiet people, not necessarily politically articulate.

Sparrow becomes deeply intimate with a piano student, Kai, whose family didn’t survive the starvation times of the Great Leap Forward. But Sparrow is unable to consummate their love, perhaps because of his timid reserve, perhaps due to the shock of Zhuli’s death. Kai is determined to live whatever the cost. Ruthlessly, he compromises his art and prospers as a musician, lauded by the establishment, while Sparrow, who cannot dishonour classical music, is forced to leave the Conservatory, reassigned to work in a radio factory for thirty years.

And what of the Book of Records? In an interview, Thien explains…It’s a book with no beginning, no middle and no end, in which the characters are seeing an alternative China where they recognise mirrors of themselves and which they write themselves into.” She is speaking literally as well as metaphorically. “The act of copying is different in China because part of the art of calligraphy is that you learn to write as the masters did. It’s a lot about breath and pressure and line. (Armistead 2016)

When I surfed the net, I discovered the notebook is an allusion to China’s most celebrated work of pre-history, Shiji or the Historical Records. Like the novel and the notebook, the Shiji is non-chronological, fractured…overlapping units that interpret rather than document. Completed in 91BCE  it was kept hidden for fear of the wrath of an emperor who had had its author, Sima Qian, the ‘grand astrologer’ castrated. (Vioatti 2014).

I followed one family for sixty years, across vast Chinese landscapes, puzzling about the ‘book of records’, carrying Baroque music in my head through 450 pages of traumatic experiences and moral complexities. Although it’s not an easy book to read, and I wasn’t alone in finding I always wanted to read on… Thien's reach—though epic —does not extend beyond her capacity, resulting in a lovely fugue of a book…(Chalfant 2016).

China has always been a dangerous place to state the truth, rather than toe the line. Then chose characters with great gifts, extraordinary yet quite ordinary, who fall foul of the absurd doctrines of a regime. Through them, I understood the consequences of Mao’s revolution on both the Chinese national identity, and the personal identities of its people.

The duplicitous Kai finally agrees to help Sparrow’s daughter, Ai-Ming, to escape China, but soon after Marie meets her, Ai Ming disappears into the USA. Marie is still searching at the end of the book. As if both girls, mirror-images of the girls who sang in the teahouses, resonate what the previous generation had to go through; to disappear emotionally or physically, or to wander, in search of reasons and identity. There’s no final answers, especially as to why it did not win the Booker. That is a puzzle as great as the Book of Records.


Saturday 21 October 2017

Why do Books Win Prizes?


https://www.womensprizeforfiction.co.uk/about/now-we-are-20

Is the reader as important as the writer? Does their opinion of what they read count as much as what the writer believes about what they are writing? I think most people do believe the reader can and should interpret what they read and make this public.

In Death of an Author, Roland Barthes argued that readers should ‘liberate’ their reading, from the ‘interpretive tyranny’ of the critic who first looks at the writer, their ethnicity, politics, religion, even personal attributes and relates these to the reading. For instance, if the writer was a known 30’s fascist, then that would be immediately taken into consideration to be part of gaining the meaning. The essential meaning of a work depends on the impressions of the reader, rather than the passions of the writer; a text's unity lies not in its origins, or its creator, but in its destination, or its audience.

I like the idea that the reader has opinions that count, but how can we make our opinions felt? Apart from sites like Goodreads.com and Booklikes.com, there are the glittering book prizes, where readers decide who will win. But most of those readers are writers or editors, or in some other way associated with the book trade.


http://www.naomialderman.com/about/
Recently I finished ‘The Power’ by Naomi Alderman. The story begins when teenage girls worldwide simultaneously develop a 'skein' – a strip of muscle in their collarbone which conducts electricity, allowing them to instantly inflict pain and even death. Some girls have more power than others and they are able to wake up the force in older women too. Virtually overnight, the world changes beyond recognition. Women are elected as political leaders virtually everywhere, the army is almost completely composed of women, while sex-trafficked women break free from their bonds. 

If the book had been written the other way around, with men being all-powerful, we would more or lesws be reading about the real world, the one we live in. So how does Alderman visualise such a dramatic change as this? You’d think the prediction for a sudden matriarchal society would be that it’s more caring and nurturing than this one, where men are generally in charge. But the story is dystopian, suggesting that absolute power really does corrupt absolutely. Men become second-class citizens and this world unfurls into a mirror image of the one it left behind.

Readers had mixed opinions. It won the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year and Granta Best of British writer. It’s getting five stars on all the review sites (mostly from women, which made me wonder if men are reading it). But when I went to my book club, all women, I was surprised to find that they all agreed with me, that this book, although a thought-provoking read, should not have won a major prize like the Bailey’s Women’s Prize. My reading friends agreed that the writing in The Power is not elevated or illuminating, that it read at the same level as something like The Hunger Games; fast-paced and easy to race through – a thriller, yes, but the language is basic and at times clumsy, and the characters are thinly revealed or developed. We didn't rate it as a work of literature. Perhaps that was mean of us. We already knew that Atwood had loved the book; did that influence us adversly? And in any case, does our opinion change what the book originally meant? 

Finally, we asked this…was there a more worthy winner on the short list? 

The approach in Death of an Author works well for literature written by peoples we’ll never known or have chance to understand, possibly because they are long dead, or a recluse like DJ Salinger. Are the author's intentions and views about their own work, more or less valid than a reader’s interpretation? In the past women often had to publish under a male name, like the Bronte sisters, or anonymously for other reasons, as JK Rowling did, when she wanted to see how her crime novel would be accepted. 

On the other hand, readers don’t seem to be interested in the idea that we should make up our mind only through our reading, and not from any outside inflences. The Radio 4 favourite, Book Club, wouldn’t be so loved if that were true. In this programme, you are told in advance which author will be attending with a studio audience, who will ask questions about the author’s recent work. For the same reason, Book Festivals, are massively attended. We all want to hear what the author says about their own work.

Would The Power have won the Bailey’s if the judges hadn’t known that Margaret Atwood ‘mentored’ the book and gave it her wholehearted support? Atwood is justly renown for both her early works, which gave her a ‘name’ and for her later science fiction, but mostly, she’s in the news at the moment for the brilliant TV adaptation of Handmaid’s Tale. At our book club we couldn’t understand what she saw in this book, which we agreed was original and inventive, but concentrated on pursuing the idea that girls could now inflict pain, and describing gratuitous acts of violence, death and rape. What if a man had written this self-same book? Would it have been lauded, especially by feminists? Or would they have suggested that the dystopian nature of the outcome was due to a ‘male view’? What if the athour had reversed the theme, so that it was men who were born with electrocuting ‘skeins’? Would this book, as it stands, but gender reversed, have been read as literature? Or marketed under a lurid cover?

Meanwhile, my book club had all read the rest of the shortlist, and we all preferred one particular book. It didn't win, but nevertheless it's a total winner in our opinion. 

Which was was it? Well, that's what suspension is all about folks. I'll review it, as my favourite book of 2017, in my next blogpost. 

Friday 13 October 2017

STARTING TO WRITE A Drama in the Shower


In her latest post for the Open College of the Arts, Nina Milton is writing about how to inject tension into your writing, and looks at the difference between tension and drama. 

How to do that? Try confronting a spider in the shower...

I do not like spiders, especially when bare-skinned and soaking wet. The pulse under my all-too exposed neck quickened. I watched its orchestral movements. I knew it planned to move...

You can read the entire post, bare-skinned spider experience and all, HERE

Monday 2 October 2017

Britain by Bike, Druids and Larry Lamb



We were having a wonderful time at the Gors Fawr stone circle in the Preseli Hills, Pembrokeshire. We had created a short ritual to ask the stones, and their spirits and ancestors to allow us to continue working at this sacred and ancient place, just as those who erected the stones had done, thousands of years ago. When all of a sudden, out of the blue, two boys in Lycra on bikes came by…Larry and George Lamb!

Of course it didn't quite happen like that. George Lamb had particularly asked to meet druids in Wales to find out more about this spiritual path, and we agree to be there on the day of filming. But we did create a lovely ritual, which we'd almost  completed by the time they came riding by, tinkling their bells to attract yet more fairies and joining in with smudge sticks to the ready…

You can watch us chat about Druidry to Larry and George Lamb on Britain by Bike, 
Channel Five 13th October – Pembrokeshire – 8pm.

Sunday 24 September 2017

Clear Up Your Writing Info Dumps



The information dump is a phrase used colloquially by scriptwriters, but it’s also something that can be an issue for writers of novels and short stories.

It’s a type of exposition, commonly a gambit used when the writer wants the reader to know something that the characters already know, but also used to overcome other information issues. The trouble with the info dump is that it’s boring to read, to listen to, or to view.
Steering clear of dumps can be a bit of a balancing act. Writers h

This is a common a gambit used when the writer wants the reader to know something that the characters already know, or something that the reader doesn't need to know yet. It's also used to overcome other information issues. The trouble with the info dump is that it’s boring to read, to listen to, or to view and horribly difficult to clear up once in place. 

Of course you have to allow sufficient data for your story to be understood, but the reader does not want to drown it in particulars. Often, you’ll have heard authors say ‘readers are more intelligent than the writer supposes’. It’s all too easy to over-explain, repeat what you’re trying to say, or forget that both narrative and dialogue has already recapitulated a point. But the opposite can be as deadly— forgetting that readers and viewers are not acquainted with the information you’ve thought through in your head, but somehow forgot to make plain. The happy medium between these two problematic states of play is hard to achieve. That’s why writers end up in the info dump, and that’s why it’s hard to scramble back out.
The dumping problem can come about for several reasons…

You’re trying to shoe-horn in too much back-story
You need to explain complex issues
You want to provide sufficient detail about character traits, etc
You assume the reader, on opening the first page, will need to know lots of background to get going.

Often, we are too close to our plot and characters to determine how much is too much. First attempts at a story often begin with loads of explanation – an entire chunk of exposition on the first page or in the first chapter. This calcifies the opening and jars the narrative voice before you’ve got going.

In science fiction and speculative fiction, there is even a specialist jargon…expospeak…for intense info dumping. When you’ve created an entire world, or specific magical abilities for your characters, it is difficult to explain these without piling the material onto a dump. Sci-fi writers can find themselves climbing over dumps every few chapters…even every few pages.

In crime fiction,thrillers, and high-concept novels, the info dump can be a problem during the final denouement. You’ve carefully kept the identity of the killer a secret, which means you now need, not only to reveal who this is, but allow their explanation and motivation to become clear, too. As it all spills out, the action slows dangerously, just when the tempo must be reaching its top speed. At that stage of a thriller, the reader wants to be on the edge of their seat, and long-winded confessions put a break on action and movement.

Dialogue, in both prose and script, is not immune from becoming a dumping ground. Here, it’s often described as the ‘Well, as you already know’ syndrome. It appears as creaking, ‘stagey’ speeches…

‘How are you Mary?’ asked Sue. 
‘Well,’ said Mary. ‘As you already know, Sue, since the death of John, six months ago, I’ve been very depressed.’

If you’ve become lazy in your writing, you may be allowing info dumps to develop in your work. You might actually be so piling them so high, you can’t see over the top. If that’s a problem, you need to start cleaning up.

You might ask … ‘Am I using information dumps?’ 

In fact, they are quickly identifiable, by using this guideline…
inside one, nothing happens. The scene remains static while you dump.

Info dumping is an issue that is as old as the hills; in the Book I of The Iliad, Homer even manages to poke fun in its direction. Here Achilles, weeping, calls to his mother, Thetis, who sits beside him and strokes him with her hand, and says…Why then, child, do you lament? What sorrow has come to your heart now? Tell me, do not hide it in your mind, and we shall both know. To which Achilles replies (with a groan)…You know. What need for me to tell you all when you know it? (Penguin Classics edition, pg 12)
Homer’s method of overcoming the problem of the info dump might not work for everyone, so what other strategies can you take?

If you’ve got an issue with presenting back story that needs to be told, it may be a sign that you’re starting the story too late. Sometimes info dumps occur early in a manuscript because you are explaining stuff to yourself. You need to do this…but it’s best done in your writing notebooks.

There may be a need to prioritise information. Read through what you’ve written, and decide what information is essential immediately, as the story starts, and what can wait. Seed information throughout later sections of the story.

Determine what you can hold back without confusion. For instance, historic data, or detailed explanations of how things work, can be held off. Instead, give the reader/viewer enough to work on for now.
In fact, ‘Show, don’t Tell’, is an extremely important facet of clearing info dumps. For instance, show the way your fantasy world works to avoid long-winded explanations
Allow explanations and confessions to become interrupted. This works best when characters are speaking, but if you use your writer’s imagination, you can achieve this in narrative sections, as well
Instead of demonstrating character traits as exposition, allow them to develop through actions, body language, and dialogue.

 Avoid allowing characters to fall into ‘as you already know’ speeches. Try interior monologue: ‘Hi, how are you?’ Sue knew that Mary had been depressed since John’s death, but even so, she was hoping for more than a grim sigh in answer to her question. ‘No better, to be honest with you,’ said Mary.
Or allows the reader to draw their own conclusions :
‘How are you Mary?’
‘No better.’
‘What is it now…six months?’
‘Yes. But I still think John’s going to walk through the door any moment.’

Another approach is not to worry too much about imparting a mass of information in the first place. Readers like mystery, even if the story isn’t actually genre mystery. They like to be teased, so long as the mystery is solved somewhere along the line:
‘How are you Mary?’
‘No better.
‘What’s it now? Six months?’
Feels like six years sometimes and six hours at others.’

In my first novel, In the Moors, I had to tackle the issue of the ‘denouement info dump’. (Sorry: spoiler alert here!) I could see that in the first draft, I’d left far too much explanation to a confessional in the penultimate chapter, which weighed it down. Instead of my first-person protagonist being able to get on with trying to extricate herself from a life-threatening situation, she was having to listen to the killer’s diatribe explaining their psychological issues. I got around this by setting up a scene at the middle of the novel in which a character innocently discloses a lot of their past life…long before they are unveiled as the killer.

Check out how science fiction writers like Terry Pratchet and Douglas Adams manage long pages of info dump by making their reader laugh.

If you really need this information, try distracting the reader’s mind. In  his  proclaimed novel Golden Hill, Francis Spufford introduces his protagonist, Smith, who arrives in 18th century America with a huge money order he needs cashed. But Spufford manages to keep us entertained for a large proportion of the novel without revealing any more about Smith’s intentions.

Dumping of rubbish can be almost as much of an issue in creative writing as it is in the countryside. Keep your writing shovel to hand, so that, once you spot the dumps you can clear them up promptly – although this is an aspect of writing you can start to address once you've written a first draft. The unformed first draft is the time to let the writing flow and overlook such flaws. But once you have a piece of writing, start your search and make sure the dumps are cleared as you redraft for assignment, assessment or any other kind of submission.

Nina Milton is an OCA tutor and assessor. Her crime series The Shaman Mysteries is out now from Midnight Ink, and available from Amazon.