Writing About Nature

I don’t write ‘nature books’ – it sounds like a specialism requiring, at the very least, years living in the country, or a degree in botany / biology / zoology, or some close up lived experience with a wild animal, or a fascination for clouds, or a mix of any or all of these things. Some nature writers may concentrate on newer issues, like climate change, and apocalyptic weather patterns: floods, fires, winds. Again, it seems important to have a good knowledge of the issues, though a few writers will avoid the technical details, and the risk of getting them wrong, to concentrate on a fictional post-apocalyptic world.

I don’t do any of those things, and I rarely read books that do; although when younger I did read Tarka the Otter, Ring of Bright Water, Born Free, and, in my early twenties, a manual on self-sufficiency when I believed living close to nature sounded pretty idyllic – rather than the cold and muddy experience it turned out to be once autumn arrived. But reading any books marketed as nature novels? No. Not my scene.

But hold on! What novel is fully satisfying without any reference to the weather? No novel may actually have opened with the words: ‘It was a dark and stormy night,’ but where would Wuthering Heights be without the odd storm? Or Emma without the sultry weather on Box Hill? What would the main character in Mrs Dalloway have done if she had no flowers to arrange? How many books’ characters travel without ever looking out of the carriage or car window to remark on the changing landscape? Or gaze out of the aeroplane window and marvel at the sun tinged clouds beneath?

My latest book, Silent Echoes, is definitely not a nature novel. But it has a pivotal crisis during a rain soaked holiday by the seaside when family members couldn’t get away from each other – a crisis that certainly couldn’t happen when the weather was better and people could escape into the surrounding countryside. And one of the central characters finds solace admiring how nature is taking over the bomb sites in his native Coventry.

In short, it is hard to avoid writing about the natural world, whatever your genre, and the danger is that you might get carried away with your beautiful / dramatic descriptions. As a critic says of what she regarded as an otherwise great new novel, Something New Under the Sun, by Alexandra Kleeman, ‘[It] could be subtitled A Thousand Different Ways to Describe Wildfire and, fatally, the reader’s attention wanders.’ Sometimes, as the saying goes, less is more. The American author, Anthony Doerr, may have got it about right in his latest book Cloud Cuckoo Land. This, a Times reviewer has described as a ‘fantastical historical adventure’ (think Tolkien) full of ‘… beautiful plants and animals.’

Link to my new book:

NEW!! A story set in 20th century Coventry for Coventry 2021

Silent Echoes: The Carters seem just like any other family. Apart from the life changing events nobody talks about. Will history just keep repeating itself? Ebook-£1.99, Print-£7.99.

getbook.at/SilentEchoes

Silent Echoes – launch of new book

This week my latest novel, Silent Echoes, appeared on Amazon. I have a few dates pencilled in the diary for more public launches but, like so much these days, confirmed dates depend on the progress (or rather recess) of the pandemic.

The novel is based in Coventry which, if you were not aware already, is the UK City of Culture for 2021. It was important to me therefore to ensure the book was published this year while Coventry is a place of interest way beyond the city boundaries.

The novel is in three parts – 1918 – 1930s; the late 1950s; and the early 1970s: three generations of the Carter family with a motif of deafness (the Silent bit of the title) and events repeating themselves (like Echoes). To tell you more would be to give the plot away and then you wouldn’t want to buy the book!

So, no more about the plot, but a bit about my motivation. There is some of my own family history in there, in the section dealing with the early part of the century. It is however heavily fictionalised. One of the comments in the novel is that big, life-changing event, events happen – but no-one in the family talks about them. This was true of my own family, so I’ve had to use my imagination.

Why are a number of my characters deaf? Well, my grandmother was deaf, and I have had (mercifully) brief periods of total deafness. As a writer, I like to try new things and in this book I am forced to see and feel things as a deaf person might. So no overhearing gossip; being aware of doors opening and another character coming into the room, realising a car is drawing up etc. etc. It was an interesting challenge. It certainly made me appreciate how much we normally use our characters’ ears to move a storyline forward.

Link for purchasing Silent Echoes

getbook.at/SilentEchoes

Ebook-£1.99, Print-£7.99.

NEW!! Silent Echoes: The Carters seem just like any other family. Apart from the life changing events nobody talks about. Will history just keep repeating itself?

Links to my other books and social media

You can find all my books and short stories on Amazon books, At least one story always free. ALL BOOKS FREE ON KINDLE UNLIMITED

www.amazon.co.uk/-/e/B00RVO1BHO

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Active or Passive Voice? Words Matter!

A few days ago a terrible tragedy took place in Plymouth, England. The author, Joanne Harris (Chocolat), took to Twitter to voice her concern about the way this was reported in some news outlets.

Many, it seems, reported the story along the lines of: Six people died in a shooting in Plymouth. Perfectly accurate, and makes the people killed the subject of the sentence. But there is an inbuilt sense of detachment from the true horror – it could almost be inferred that the fatal shooting, for some, was accidental.

In other instances, there was reporting using a headline like: Six people killed by a shooter in Plymouth. Again the six people killed are the subject. But, by using the passive voice, the reporting has already become vague about the actual event and tells us nothing about the perpetrator.

Much better, she says to report: A man shot six people in Plymouth Here we have a sense of immediacy. By using the active voice, a writer is able to convey the full horror of the event in simple. direct, words. And give the additional fact that the killer was a man. As a result, and using fewer words, the sentence is both more informative and more shocking.

As Harris said at the end of her Tweet thread: Words (and how we use them) matters.

Links to my books and social media

You can find all my books and short stories on Amazon books, At least one story always free. ALL BOOKS FREE ON KINDLE UNLIMITED

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Compiling Your Holiday Reading List.

The sun is out – for now; the Covid restrictions are being relaxed – or maybe in a month; and the thoughts of all good citizens are turning to holidays. Will you / won’t you be able to get away this summer?

Anyway, hope springs eternal, so, if you are already packing your bags in readiness for the green light, what else will you be including alongside the flip flops, inflatable boats and sunscreen? A few books, or carefully stocked kindle, maybe?

How long you go away for, whether it is an activity based trip, and whether you have small children in tow, will dictate how much reading you will actually be able to do, but you won’t be short of advice from the weekend papers over the next month on what to include on your reading list: celebrities, reviewers and most of the in-house journalists will all have been given space to share their preferred holiday reading matter (or parade the height of their brows in regard to their professed literary tastes).

No particular recommendations from me (apart of course from all all my books currently available on Amazon – www.amazon.co.uk/-/e/B00RVO1BHO) – but here is a general guide for an eclectic mix of books so that, depending on your mood and attention span, you can always have something suitable to hand.

Select one book for every couple of days – so a list for a ten day holiday might include:

1. A classic you haven’t got round to reading so far, but have always intended to. Enjoy that feeling of virtue along with the, usually, excellent prose.
2. A thriller – good escapism from the burdens of the workaday world. A holiday in itself.
3. Something off a recent prize winning shortlist – good for bragging rights back home – and some are even quite readable!
4. An anthology (short stories, essays, letters) – for those days when you know you’ll only have a short time to yourself
5. A volume of poetry (see 4).

Don’t fret if you haven’t read any of them by the time you get back home. There may be a better selection at your holiday destination, and there is always – hopefully – another holiday. Or you may simply be having too much fun to find time to read. Either is a win.

Links to my books and social media

You can find all my books and short stories on Amazon books, At least one story always free. ALL BOOKS FREE ON KINDLE UNLIMITED

www.amazon.co.uk/-/e/B00RVO1BHO

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Twitter: @meegrot

The Origins of the Modern Book Club

Although popular on both sides of the Pond with women of all ages, and some men, it is American women from a couple of hundred years ago who could claim to be the first to start what we would today recognise as book clubs. They were called reading circles initially and then, as now, needed little more to get going than a hunger for reading books, a desire to discuss them with like-minded women, and a suitable venue.

American women had been getting together to study the Bible since the 17th century, but it wasn’t until the late 18th century that secular reading circles emerged, around the same time as their European counterparts.

The reading circles often had a political or social conscious leaning – Hannah Mather Crocker, for example, who founded a circle in 18th century Boston, was an advocate for women’s participation in freemasonry and author of Observations on the Real Rights of Women.

A later proponent was the journalist Margaret Fuller who held her inaugural session of what she called her “conversations” in 1839. Fuller was the first American female war correspondent, a magazine editor and feminist. She saw her club as a meeting place for women to debate “the great questions: what were we born to do? How shall we do it?” 

Clearly many reading circles were not cosy alternatives to a genteel ‘knitting and natter’ type circle! Until relatively recently, women were excluded from philosophical clubs and universities, so intelligent and inquisitive women found these groups were a way of educating themselves and engaging with literature on a variety of topics.

Reading circles were not just for the white middle class female. They crossed racial and class lines, too. In 1827, black women in Lynn, Mass., formed one of the first reading groups for black women – the Society of Young Ladies. Black women in other cities on the East Coast soon followed suit.

Women’s interest in book clubs has helped shape the book landscape in other ways too. Once on the fringes of the commercial side of the industry, women are now one of the most important driving forces in the book world, chiefly because they buy more books – especially fiction, where they account for around 80% of sales. As one commentator wrote: “Without women, the novel would die.”

When celebrities, like Oprah Winfrey in the US, and Richard and Judy in the UK, promote a book in their ‘reading circle,’ sales rocket – far more than they normally would after a favourable review from a professional, but lesser known, literary critic.

The modern book club may take itself a little less earnestly than many of the early reading circles, but its roots in the exclusion of women from other intellectual spaces are not hard to find. Even though many women now go on to higher education, book clubs remain useful settings for more radical activity and are still places where women can continue to engage with the transformative power of books.

Book clubs have survived the pandemic too, with many going on-line – and acquiring an increased membership in the process. As the pandemic eases (surely it will one day, won’t it?), we will be able to see if the numbers remain high. Also if Zoom book clubs will remain ‘a thing.’

(I have drawn on a recent article in The Washington Post by the American journalist Jess McHugh for much of this post).

Links to my books and social media

You can find all my books and short stories on Amazon books, At least one story always free. ALL BOOKS FREE ON KINDLE UNLIMITED

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Happy International Women’s Day

Tomorrow (March 8^th) is International Women’s Day. What better way to mark it than to mention a few books that have a uniquely feminist take on the world?

Aspiring writers may be interested in The Women Writers’ Handbook, by Ann Sandham (available as a special edition of its inaugural publication 30 years ago from Aurora Metro www.aurorametro.com). It includes essays and interviews, as well as a selection of fiction and poetry, from writers like Philippa Gregory, Sarah Waters and AS Byatt. 20% of profits will go to the Virginia Woolf Statue Campaign.

Younger women may be more interested in The Smart Girls Handbook – a brisk approach to self-empowerment by the founder of Smart Girl Tribe, the activist Scarlett V Clarke. (Published by Trigger Publishing www.triggerhub.org.

I am a fan of Elaine Morgan, whom I met when I was working as a probation officer in the South Wales valleys, and she came to deliver a talk at commemorative meeting about the Aberfan disaster (when a coal slag heap slipped and buried a primary school, killing many of the pupils and teachers). Elaine grew up in the Rhondda valley, went to Oxford University and became one of the first women writers for radio and TV, as well as writing on evolutionary anthropology and ethics – see her Descent of Women. A biography to celebrate her centenary, by Daryl Leeworthy, has just been published. Titled Elaine Morgan: A life Behind the Screen, it is available from Seren Books www.serenbooks.com.

Not all women lead lives of virtue, become role models for writers or, or seek to empower us lesser mortals. Some are born bad or, at best, acquire a taste for evil. This includes many of the women in Wendy Lower’s book: Hitler’s Furies. In this she recounts the lives of ordinary women during the Third Reich who become the wives or mothers of members of the SS and, in turn, become killers themselves and perpetrators of genocide.

On a lighter note, perhaps I can put a plug in for one of my own books, which some have described as a feminist take on Shakespeare. Cast Off is a collection of short stories in which the lives of female characters from several of his plays are imagined. What sort of thing did they get up to when they were off stage? Did they like the lines they were given? Or their chosen love interest? What did they really think about all that cross dressing? Cast Off is available from Amazon: www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B08M8BKZKH

World Book Day

It is World Book Day tomorrow (Thursday 4^th March). World Book Day is a charity funded by publishers and booksellers in the UK and Ireland and its aim is to encourage the reading of more books. That this might stimulate the sale of more books must have come to them as a happy coincidence. The event takes place every year on the first Thursday in March, so it is easy to remember when it is on.

Whilst everyone can join in, the focus is on schools and nurseries. Every pupil is likely to get a £1.00 voucher to help with the purchase of a book, and there is a range of free audio books available via the website during this week. Some will be available for a month.

Pre pandemic, World Book Day would be the day that children could attend school dressed as one of their favourite fictional characters, and writers would be in demand to go into schools to read from their work, talk about books and writing and, maybe, sell a few copies. Obviously this is not possible this year and ‘communal’ activities will be taking place on line. And / or parents will have to add celebrating reading to their list of home-schooling tasks for the day.

Despite my apparent cynicism at the start, this special day is very worthwhile. Anything that encourages reading opens vistas for young and old that are impossible to envisage on such a scale(and so cheaply) in any other way. Especially when we are still stuck in lockdown mode, and travel is, for now, a purely imaginary activity.

For more information go to:

www.worldbookday.com/worldofstories/

Links to my books and social media

You can find all my books and short stories on Amazon books, At least one story always free. ALL BOOKS FREE ON KINDLE UNLIMITED

www.amazon.co.uk/-/e/B00RVO1BHO

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Twitter: @meegrot

CHRISTMAS 2020

My last post before Christmas – so here’s a short story about a Christmas like no other. I hope you like it, and go on to enjoy a good, safe – if guest-free – festive break.

Christmas 2020

Standing in front of the bedroom mirror, Mr Porter discovers that he has put on so much weight during lockdown that he can no longer do up his Father Christmas suit, even though the bright red nylon is quite stretchy, and the belt is elasticated.

He sighs. Just as well his daughter wasn’t coming over from Florida this year as his son in law was unwilling to quarantine when they went back home. He’d miss the grandchildren, but at least he’d be spared Chad’s interminable views on the merits of Donald versus Joe throughout Christmas. He had enough of that over Zoom.

He decides he’ll put the suit on anyway when they hook up on Christmas Day. Give the kids a bit of a laugh. After all, he can leave the belt unfastened so long as he stays sitting down.

From the bedroom he can hear his wife taking the Christmas cake out of the oven. Same size as she always makes, even though there’s only the two of them. Eat all that, and if Covid doesn’t finish them off, a coronary certainly will. He bets to himself that she’s probably ordered the same size turkey as last year – though the dog will help with getting through that.

He hopes that she won’t buy the usual amount of veg, especially Brussel sprouts. Never did like the blasted things, and if he has to eat for seven he’ll be so full of wind he’ll probably lift off the sofa during the Queen’s speech. Though a large helping of Christmas pud, should settle the gas for a bit, and allow him remain seated respectfully for Her Maj.

He knows he shouldn’t criticise his wife. He is in charge of buying the drink, and he too has ‘accidentally’ placed the same order he does every year.

He eases himself out of the tight Santa outfit and, puffing slightly, props himself against the dressing table to pull on the new (extra-large) leisure suit his wife bought him last month. As he pulls the sweatpants up over his expanding belly, a slow smile creeps across his face. The order should arrive any time today. So, with no visitors due, he can start on the whisky tonight without worrying about keeping the best for guests. 

Christmas 2020 – it’s not going to be so bad after all.

END

If you enjoyed this story, you may like to download Festive Treats, an anthology of Christmas stories including one of mine – Mary’s Christmas. There’s some really good stories in this anthology and, best of all, it’s FREE. Something to be cheerful about!

Festive Treats http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B01LW1YITM

myBook.to/FestiveTreats

You can search for my other books on Amazon books too.

Top Tips from Ruth Rendell’s Masterclass on Writing.

In 2013, the crime writer Ruth Rendell held a masterclass on writing at the invitation of the Royal Society of Literature and the Booker Prize Foundation. Sunjida O’Connell, author, journalist and Ruth Rendell admirer, described the main lessons from the masterclass as follows:

“Rendell’s guide to being an excellent writer is simple: read a lot, read well, walk to keep fit and strong – for writing is demanding, and write.” 

The masterclass would have been very short, if that was all she had said! Here, in slightly more detail, are her main tips. They can be applied to all forms of fiction, not just the crime genre.

• The writer of fiction writes or longs to write. The writer of fiction needs to be well-read. Not a reader exclusively of crime fiction, not necessarily one who ever reads crime fiction, though to read the best is a good idea. The writer of fiction needs to read biography, history, science – well, popular science – politics, fiction and more fiction, classical as it is called, always to have a book on hand and a book carried with them, an e-book or audio-book if you must. It needs to be the best. Why waste your time with light escapist trash? You are a writer of good fiction and you must continue to learn from the best.
• You must have suspense in your fiction. It is what makes your reader turn the page, long yet dread to reach the end and when reaching it to be shocked by it. All fiction needs an element of suspense. It is achieved by withholding. Poor fiction gives everything away in the first chapter. The skilful writer with a story to tell and a plot will withhold facts, events and characteristics, gradually revealing these mysterious elements until one only remains to be divulged and that in the last chapter or even on the last page. Even in a small way this can be done.
• Remember that lost people are always interesting. Missing people that is. A woman, a child, a man. Missing characters in fiction are seldom men. Is this because the police are generally not interested in looking for young men thought to be missing? But what opening of a novel, crime or not, could be more compelling than, for instance, “When he hadn’t come back after two hours and it got to ten-thirty, she began to worry…
• I am often asked, as all writers of fiction are, if I ever get writer’s block or if I ever sit down to write and have no idea how to fill that blank page – or now that blank screen – in front of me. No, never. Because I always know what I am going to write, or at any rate how I am going to start what I am going to write. I will have thought it through already and thought it in words. Not perhaps the words I shall ultimately use but something very like what they will be. They have been written and re-written in my mind as I go for a walk or before I go to sleep at night.
• [Here is the second helpful hint.] Walking is a marvellous exercise for a writer, the best medium (if that is the word) for thinking of the next bit of one’s novel, honing its prose and listening to the words in one’s head, their resonance and their rhythm.
• Writing good dialogue is not easy. When you have written a short conversation between two or three characters you should repeat it in your head and listen to it. Does it ring true? Is it what you might hear in the tube or in a pub or restaurant or bus queue? Are the words what your particular character would use? People’s ages influence enormously the way they speak.
• Like most of my other helpful hints, this one applies to all writing of fiction. It’s often necessary to make your readers like or love a character. How to do it? How to make a reader care for (or care what happens to) a murderer? Have him or her love someone. I spoke earlier of having a pet animal in your fiction. A character’s love for that animal is enough to make your reader care.
• Good people in your fiction? It’s notoriously more difficult to write about good people than bad ones. Cheer up your good boring people by making them love someone or something. Give them an interesting occupation. Good looks will help as will suffering at the hands of one of your bad people.

Reading list:

The books I have suggested are each of them a guide to you to show what fiction should be. Not all are suspenseful but all have an element of suspense in them.

Josephine Tey	The Franchise Affair
Henry James	Washington Square
John Banville	Ancient Light
Fyodor Dostoyevsky	Crime and Punishment
Samuel Butler	The Way of All Flesh
Dorothy L. Sayers	The Nine Tailors
Sarah Waters	Fingersmith
Jane Austen	Emma
Patricia Highsmith	Strangers on a Train
Joseph Conrad	The Secret Agent
Further reading: Graham Greene	Travels with my Aunt
Charles Williams	Many Dimensions

Ruth Rendell died in 2015 at the age of 85. And still at the top of her game, to judge from the wisdom imparted during her masterclass.

The Power of the Story teller

Michael Morpurgo is a celebrated children’s writer. He is also, not surprisingly, a champion for the art of storytelling. As a small boy he remembers listening to stories and poems that his mother read to him daily. She was an actress, and told stories rather well, but it is a skill almost any parent, teacher and older child can acquire. Or so you would have thought. In fact the writer was dismayed when he actually started school, aged five, to find that his class teacher viewed a story as a means of teaching grammar and punctuation (tested via a dictation test) and nothing more.

I think maybe he had an exceptionally bad teacher. I remember being read to at home and at school and, as an older pupil, sometimes being sent into a class of younger children to read the next instalment of a story if the teacher was away. Pupils seemed to love it, and obviously followed the story as there would be a chorus of interruptions if I mispronounced a name or a country.

In time, Michael Morpurgo became a teacher himself and was encouraged by his headmistress to tell the children stories. These included his own stories before he had actually had anything published, which encouraged him to send stuff off to publishers. Telling stories, he believes, can turn a reluctant reader into a reader, and through this out of the potential ignorance, bigotry and alienation of being illiterate. A big ask, you might say; but certainly an ability to read and write with confidence opens doors to better jobs and prospects for even the children of book deprived homes (in only about 30% of homes are primary school aged children read to).

Not surprisingly therefore, the writer is a big supporter of libraries (see my last blog). He is also an advocate for primary schools to set aside thirty minutes a day as story time – it’s not only teachers who could read the stories; surely there are plenty of students, retired people, grandparents, parents, unemployed aspiring writers, poets and actors who can be enlisted to help? The bar is quite low – you don’t need to be a professional performer to read a story aloud. But enthusiasm and turning up on time are essential.

And for those of us who write for children and whose sales are decidedly modest in comparison to Mr Morpurgo’s – the more potential readers we can foster the better.