More than Writers

At the end of his book, ‘A Soldier and a Spy’, a historical novel set in France in the 1890s and concerning the Dreyfus Affair, Robert Harris included a post-script about his sources, which extended for three pages. Ros Kind, of ‘From Story Idea to Reader’ Facebook page fame and author of ‘Vi for Victory’ (about women’s football following World War I) reports that her normal practice was to spend equal thirds of her time researching/writing/editing.     Me,  I’m reading up about Celtic saints, and, yes, I’ve already visited Lindisfarne… in preparation for writing a piece of… flash. So how is that so many authors get things so wrong?  (I’m not naming names, by the way.) A famous fictional detective series (which appears on our televisions as well as in print)     includes a Irish M16 agent speaking in an Irish brogue, but addressing other characters as ‘boyo’ (Welsh).     A different author has one of her characters addresses King Wi...

Soon it will be my birthday. Living in England means it’s going to be a quiet day. That’s not how it should be done. It should mean lots of visitors, especially the evening when you decide to ‘keep your’ birthday. Saturday evening it’s likely close family who will have kept the evening after your birthday free, knowing it’ll be when you celebrate. Parents or grandparents will come on the day of your birthday, for “it would be awful to let the day slip by quietly.” You would go to the supermarket the day before and stock up on standard food. So standard that the girl at the till will ask if it’s a birthday party, meaning you will get a large discount. That was a new one; we never had that when I still lived in the Netherlands. When you’re young you simply get your mum to make a load of cakes and snacks. Of course, there are now lots of modern parties, offering all kinds of foods and drinks. That’s not how it’s supposed to be done. It should be coffee and cake first. Mocha Cream is m...

  Image Credit:  Images created in Book Brush using Pixabay photos. This follows on from my last post about aspects of writing. How easy do you find starting a story? Or is it the finishing which is trickier for you?   I often use random generators to trigger ideas for characters. For me story is about character. For me, character drives the plot. Once I have a character, I outline them. I don’t worry about physical appearance. I’m more interested in their major traits and what can lead from those.    For example, if  my character is brave, I can obviously tell a tale which shows them to be heroic. I can also write a story where, for once, their usual courage fails them. I could also write a story where their courage looks like recklessness to others. So just from that one trait, I have three ways in which I could take things. I like options! This for me is the great place to start a story.   Working out an appropriate ending, I think, can be trickier,...

  “Can I be real?” There is a lady in my church who stirs everyone up with high expectation and interest when she mounts the pulpit. She endears her listeners with what she speaks about and her mannerisms in body language. She goes by a nickname – ‘Can I be real?’ The pic below shows the real me. No make-up. No hair attachments.   No dyeing of hair. No Jewelry or fancy clothes. Just the real me!   Today, I want to be real. How many of you check up their posts on this forum –More Than Writers with some form of expectation?   Can I be real? I was disappointed about my December post. Just 2 responses [aside my comments]! It felt like when one calls out for a book launch or whatever.And just the few!! Thank God for the faithful few!   I can imagine how Lord Jesus must have felt when only one leper out of ten came back to say, ‘Thank you’. There has been so much encouragement given to us writers as Christians and in our writing.   I know that many members ar...

I am in a season of my life where I am needing to let go, to relax my hold, to lay down my hopes and expectations and to trust things into God's hands.  But as the disciples found after the arrest and death of Jesus, it is very hard to give up what we have held dear.  It feels as if we are betraying ourselves if we even dare to think that something can't be as we were hoping for. We may struggle and strive with our whole being to make something happen, but could God be saying 'Child, let go?' Sometimes letting go is so important, for without it, will we really be able to step into all that God has for us now? For example, if the disciples hadn't let go of their dream that Jesus had come to be the mighty over-thrower of Rome and its control over their land, they may have missed altogether the far greater miracle that was staring them in the face.  A few years ago now I made the brave (or foolhardy) choice to do a skydive.  I have shared about it before on here so wil...

A belated Happy New Year to you all! This month, I would like to offer two pieces of encouragement for our writing in the coming year: one practical, and one spiritual. First, a practical piece. Take exceptional care of your journals and notebooks. They are of great personal importance, of course, but they can also become rich sources of inspiration. Yesterday when I was feeling under the weather, I enjoyed a good old read of last year’s journal entries. I meandered through minutiae of family life, the odd song snippet or striking quotation, accounts of my thoughts and prayers, laments over the amount of time I had wasted on social media, haphazard resolutions, and other scribblings of that ilk. Mostly mundane, but precious to me. Inspirational "Trinitarian" three-wick candle on my writing desk Yesterday's meanderings also unearthed a piece of spiritual encouragement. In His great grace, God has fine-tuned us to employ our writing talent for His glory . It’s embedd...

  My work in progress is in the copy editing stage. Which for anyone who has been there, you know how painful that can be. You have written your heart out, and your precious words are innocently sitting there on the page, ready to be judged, altered, corrected, or even cut completely. It’s not an easy process, but it is necessary. I know it will be worth it in the end. I love writing, but I sometimes fall into bad habits, that are instantly picked up by an eagle-eyed editor. One such habit, is 'showing not telling'. I have been picked up so many times on this one, and for a long time didn’t really understand what it was I was doing ‘wrong’. Then a good writer friend recommended a book to me. You might already know it. It is ‘ The Emotion Thesaurus’ by Angela Ackerman and Becca Puglisi*. It bears the magnificent subtitle of ‘ A Writer’s guide to Character Expression ’. You see, apparently it is not alright to keep saying that my character was a happy chap, or even that he gri...

If you follow Bridget and Adrian Plass’s weekly podcast, you’ll know that last Friday they talked about telling a person an unpalatable truth. That rare moment when someone has done something really bad and someone else has to step in and tell them.  They gave a brilliant Biblical example of this. It’s a familiar one. The bad action occurs when King David steals the wife of Uriah the Hittite. She becomes pregnant and David fails to conceal the adultery by getting Uriah to spend a night with his wife. So he gets Uriah put in an exposed position in battle so that he is killed.  Nathan the prophet has the job of bringing home to the King the enormity of his deed. How does he do it? You’ll know of course: he tells David a story, almost a parable, really. It’s a story about a poor man who has one lamb, which he brings up as a member of the family, even feeding it at his table. (Nathan really rubs this in.) A rich neighbour, who has flocks and herds galore, entertains a visitor. Ins...

  Writing, Faith and Impact by Rebecca Seaton Over Christmas, I watched ‘The Man who invented Christmas’, a drama a bout Charles Dickens’ writing a Christmas Carol. I took a lot of inspiration from this, not least the impact our writing can have beyond what we might predict. Some things Dickens was aware of when writing; this was not the first time he had written about the less fortunate in society. However, the impact of his work could not have been foreseen. Charles Dickens’ motivations and methods were not miles away from ours today. He certainly lived out ‘write what you know’. He might have written about the poverty he saw every day anyway but having lived it meant he wrote it with passion. Still haunted by his experiences of the debtors’ prison and the blacking factory, his concern for the Cratchits and frustration with Scrooge is all too real. The process of writing what is now a classic is also a lesson in how our faith has to be bigger than our circumstances. For Dic...

  During a family Christmas get-together, we were all sitting closely in the dining room. A combination of hot food, lots of people, said people talking, meant that the temperature in the room climbed. I felt a drip of water land on my head. Looking up, I realised I was sitting under a pipe, from which the water must have fallen. I said to my niece, who was sitting beside me, “A drop of water just fell on my head! I must be sitting under a dripping tap.” My sister, from a different table across the room, drily responded, "how apt". My niece asked, “why is it apt?” and so the idiom was explained to her. She thought about it, then turned to me: “Sometimes you are a dripping tap, because you talk loads, but sometimes you are not, because you don’t say much at all.” In this blog, I’d like to focus on a short non-dripping-tap phrase found at the beginning of Genesis 12: ‘Go…to the land I will show you.’   Last week, I was in my local Christian bookshop. I chose a book to g...

‘Count off seven sabbath years—seven times seven years—so that the seven sabbath years amount to a period of forty-nine years. Then have the trumpet sounded everywhere on the tenth day of the seventh month; on the Day of Atonement sound the trumpet throughout your land. ' Consecrate the fiftieth year and proclaim liberty throughout the land to all its inhabitants. It shall be a jubilee for you; each of you is to return to your family property and to your own clan. ’                                                                                                       Lev.25:8-10    The above scripture explains the Jewish Jubilee Year counted from the time the Israelites were g...