Where have I been?

Getting ready to start teaching
 at Oxford University
Summer School for Adults

It’s a while since I last blogged so this is a round-up of what was going on and advance notification of what is coming up!

Summers equate with creative writing teaching: no sooner had I finished running a part time course for Oxford University during the spring, but I taught at Winchester Writers’ Festival where my subject was the power of point of view, then two summer schools on two different programmes for Oxford University. This was my fifteenth  year at OUSSA and my fourth at the OUDCE Creative Writing summer school at Exeter College.

As ever, I was blown away by the quality of work I was assessing and hearing. I loved meeting my students and hearing their stories. Summer schools bring together the most extraordinary mix of nationalities, backgrounds, life experiences and writing dreams.

With lovely tutor and writer
Judy Waite, at Winchester Writers' Festival

By mid-August I was just desperate for a holiday, though! I hadn’t had a break since our holiday in Cornwall in early spring. But before I could relish any down-time, I had to face tasks I had been putting off for months – nay, years! I moved my website host, I created an opt-in PDF, I learned how to use Convertkit and moved my mailing lists to it, I got all the elements talking to one another!

Before we left for our holiday in France in September, I set up my new website landing page. I felt tired but pretty damned chuffed. What would be a walk in the park to some people was like climbing Everest to me, but I had done it – I had got that far.

Roussillon, Provence

We went back to Provence, which we had visited last year. And oh, it was still gorgeous. For two weeks I genuinely unwound and it did me a power of good. I even wrote something!

Back home, I soon got all wound up again. Life has been full on since then. I have been editing, mainly, for long-term clients. I’ve also been the co-ordinating judge of the short story competition Writers in Oxford has been running for young Oxfordshire writers. Now, our choices have been made and sent to Philip Pullman, our head judge. The prizes will be announced next week at the Writers in Oxford 25^th Anniversary party, held in conjunction with the Society of Authors.

Being interviewed at Radio Oxford
to publicise Writers in Oxford's
Young Oxfordshire Writer competition

 And what about the website, you may ask?

Ah. Ahem … a work in progress still, but progress is being made!

Well, do go and visit: you can download my free PDF on leading a productive writing life!

In other news, I got published!

More of that in my next post too …

Download your free guide to launching a productive writing life by visiting the website here

Triskele book launch: the power of writing communities to create connection, promotion, celebration

Jill Marsh and Catriona Troth
of Triskele Books

We’re stronger together

Phew! As I look back at June, I wonder what happened – it went by in the blink of an eye. What I want to do with this post is celebrate the power of friendship in this often challenging world (see the heading above this paragraph). Whether we’re writers or readers – or, indeed, both - it’s an absolute joy to make connections and discoveries, to support and celebrate one another’s successes.

Alison Morton, Antoine Vanner,
Anita Chapman and you know who

My June started with a book launch in London on the 3^rd, at The English Restaurant in Spitalfields. An amazing group of writers got together to send their books out into the world. After my rather hermit-like winter it was good to see so many old friends all gathered together.

The party had been organised by the Triskele book collective (see my blogpost on the last launch of theirs I attended). A nicer, more professional, more sickeningly productive bunch of women you are not likely to meet!

Jane Dixon-Smith aka JD Smith

Here’s the list of their new books:

JJ Marsh was launching the last in her successful Beatrice Stubbs series of crime novels, Bad Apples.

Gillian Hamer – the latest in her Gold Detectives series set in Wales, Sacred Lake.

JD Smith – The Rebel Queen is the fourth in her series about Zenobia, Queen of Palmyra (exotic or what? Who could resist such names?)

Liza Perrat – who sadly could not be with us on the day – was launching her suspense novel, The Silent Kookaburra

Gillian Hamer

Jessica Bell

Plus, the Triskelites had invited two more writers to join the launch. Alison Morton had just published Retalio, the latest in her Roma Nova series of alternate history thrillers, which have been a huge success. Jessica Bell was launching her powerful memoir, Dear Reflection: I Never Meant to be a Rebel.

Every single book looked absolutely gorgeous, with excellent production values and brilliant covers. 

Readers, we had a ball! Catriona Troth very ably compered a series of readings and interviews, there was fizzy wine, lots of food, and the chance to meet other friends again – Roz Morris, Rohan Quine, Clare Flynn, Glynis Smy, Anita Chapman, Jane Davis, Helene Halme, Antoine Vanner, Debbie Young (who had just published her latest, the brilliantly named Best Murder in Show), Carol Cooper and Karen Inglis - plus Jessica Bell’s amazing mother, musician Erika Bach.

Erika and Jessica

After such an afternoon of fun on a very hot London afternoon, I took the train home and came back to earth heavily when I heard the London Bridge terrorist attack had just taken place, so the end of the day was spent checking Facebook to make sure everyone was OK and texting my son to make sure he hadn’t been in the area (he wasn’t – but he had been just 22 hours earlier …)

It was a salutary reminder of the preciousness of friendship and of celebrations on warm, free summer days, of the freedom to write what we want and share it. Let’s cherish it all.

Glynis Smy and Clare Flynn

I’ll be blogging again soon about this year’s Winchester Writers’ Festival, but in the meantime, Clare Flynn will be guesting on Literascribe tomorrow, talking about her fifth novel, The Chalky Sea, an exciting wartime drama – don’t miss it!

You can visit the Triskele website and their blog here, Alison Morton's amazing Roma Nova website here and Jessica Bell's multi-dextrous website here. Is there nothing these people can't do?!

Ros Morris

Want to be a writer? Visit my website to download your free guide to launching a productive writing life.

Historical Novel Society Conference Oxford 2016 Part 2: The Next Big Thing, Re-enactors and Rebellions

Take a deep breath, dear reader; we’re going in. Saturday 3^rd September marked the central day of the HNS conference. It began with a panel discussion ‘The Next Big Thing in Historical Fiction, featuring Carole Blake as Chair, with David Headley of Goldsboro Books, Nick Sayers of Hodder and Stoughton, Simon Taylor of Transworld and Jane Johnson of HarperCollins. Quite a powerhouse panel, all trying to answer the unanswerable question – yet a question asked at every conference: where is HF going? Which era will be the most fashionable?

David Headley wants to see more sweeping World War 2 sagas. Simon Taylor thinks ancient Greece. Jane Johnson wants more diversity, having ‘had enough of Tudor/Elizabethan’ and she’d like more cross-cultural HF. Nick Sayers is keen on literature in translation, referencing as an example Christina Eckhart’s Wolf Winter, the subject of which is the relationship between Sweden and Lapland in the 17^th century. Carole Blake asked him if that had been ‘an easy sell within the publishing house’ – he replied that ‘It was easy because it was a wonderful read.’

Carole Blake, Nick Sayers, Simon Taylor,
David Headley, Jane Johnson

When I’m giving workshops on self-editing or pitching, I always draw people’s attention to this very point: that selling isn’t just about selling your book to the reader, the end-user. There are many different selling junctures throughout the process: you ‘sell’ to the agent, the agent sells to the editor, the editor sells in-house to the sales and marketing people who then sell to the bookseller – and eventually, if you’re lucky, your book is sitting on a shelf ready to catch the eye of the browsing customer. Phew! As Carole Blake said: ‘Every book has to be sold half a dozen times. … The editors here are not the gatekeepers. The gatekeepers are the sales teams.’

The panel members highlighted how, at every stage, a clear sense of the book’s essence is necessary. However ‘fresh’ the voice, however individual the topic or treatment, we seek to encapsulate it, whether by comparison with other established writers, or by period, or by genre or sub-genre such as historical crime. This, as Jane Johnson said, is why Tudor or Roman HF is successful: ‘It’s seen as an easier sell’. David Headley commented that ‘It’s difficult to sell a period that’s not sexy’ and Jane said that HF ‘often has feet in different genres but sales teams want to pin it down’ before adding that ‘centralised buyers … don’t seem to read. If they don’t like the look … they simply won’t stock it’, reminding us how crucial the cover treatment is to that instant assessment of what the book is, without the bother of ploughing through all those pesky words … Nick Sayers said that ‘people might think a cover beautiful but walk past, not knowing what it is.’ He also said ‘Booksellers like a label.’

You’ll have noticed by now that the conversation had strayed from ‘the next big thing’ to ‘reasons why the current big things are big’. The panel also segued into a discussion of publicity, particularly with regard to social media now that newspaper review space is shrinking more and more. Carole Blake uttered a heartfelt ‘Thank God for bloggers’. Jane Johnson highlighted how poor publicity departments in big trade publishing houses can be sometimes when it comes to tweeting about books and authors on their lists. Carole echoed this: ‘It takes up time and some authors don’t enjoy it …  there are times when the publishers sit back and let the authors do all the marketing.’

Jane’s comment that ‘As a writer you don’t want to be doing the hard sell. … Writers want to write’ will have struck a chord with many in the audience. Carole stressed, quite rightly, that if you engage with social media you shouldn’t shout ‘Buy my book!’ all the time, but instead take part in natural ‘water-cooler’ chats, establishing a presence and creating relationships rather than indulging in a digital version of marching up and down with a placard.

Finally, the panel returned to that old chestnut – that ‘You can’t write to the market. You have to write what’s in your heart – it’s the only thing that will let the voice shine out.’ (Jane Johnson). Yes, that’s true. I probably talked about this in the aftermath of the last HNS UK conference and the one before that. Heart v head, Muse v Mammon, the individual voice v genre expectations. We writers square circles like these all the time!

As I was on front of house duty after that, I couldn’t attend any of the interesting panels – though I did see the 1066 Re-enactors demonstrating an Anglo-Saxon shield-wall to the war-cry ‘Ut! Ut! UT! – great fun!

Before lunch the keynote address was given by Melvyn Bragg whose latest novel, Now is the Time, focuses on the Peasants’ Revolt – or as he’d prefer, Rebellion – in the fourteenth century.

Melvyn’s keynote was passion: he was tripping over himself at times, in his enthusiasm and his indignation. He drew contrasts between our world and the time of Richard II but at the same time highlighted the similarities. He felt the peasants – not that they were peasants, in his view – were like those who recently voted for Brexit: tired, quite simply, of not being heard, of being disregarded by the high and the mighty of the land, taking drastic action to be listened to. It was an unsettling parallel to draw – the Revolt/Rebellion didn’t exactly turn out well …

He mentioned the focus on mortality back then, perfectly understandable in the wake of the Black Death, where ‘the only cure at their disposal was prayer’, and the rise of English as the language of political debate and poetry – how Wyclif and Chaucer were creating new audiences for expression in English words, not Latin or French. He told us how much he hated William the Conqueror. He asserted ‘the rights of fiction’ to inhabit that space I was discussing in my previous post, that space between what happened and what is imaginable. If Herodotus and Shakespeare could reimagine history, why can’t we?

Delegates had much to discuss, then, over lunch. I’ll tell you about the story awards, afternoon session and gala dinner in my next post!

Essie Fox - whose novel The Last Days of Leda Grey
 comes out in November. I can't wait to read it!

Karen Maitland, one of my favourite writers

Details of the new season of my Fictionfire workshops, a day course and a retreat can be found here, and you can sign up for my Fictionfire newsletter - articles, recommended reads and resources, competitions and more.

An Oxford Vengeance is available to buy on Amazon here and here.

Part 1 of these posts on the 2016 HNS conference is here.

Historical Novel Society Conference Oxford 2016 Part 1: Dreaming of History among the Spires

Welcome to the first of my posts on the HNS Conference of 2016, this time held in the glorious city of Oxford, last weekend.

Historical fiction has been on my mind all summer. I gave a lecture at the Oxford University Creative Writing Summer School at Exeter College at the start of August, the title of which was ‘Writing Historical Fiction: Spinning Fact into Fiction’. That was a title decided upon a very long time ago, so it was ironic to see on the HNS conference programme, that Tracy Chevalier would be talking about ‘Fact into Fiction: A Historical Novelist’s Relationship to the Past’ and Lord Melvyn Bragg’s speech would be ‘Now is the Time: Historical Fact or Fiction?’

This highlights the constant concern debated in HF: the interface between fact and fiction, between what is known and what can be imagined. A couple of days before the conference opened, I published an ebook, An Oxford Vengeance, because I wanted to celebrate the privilege of living here, in a city where extraordinary facts jump out at you, crying out to be turned into fiction. Oxford has inspired writers for centuries and those who attended the conference could very well see why. Their eagerness to come here, their joy and fascination during their brief stay, served to remind me how incredibly lucky I am to be surrounded by such beauty and tradition in a location that oozes history from every pore.

The title story of An Oxford Vengeance straddles fact and fiction: in it I imagine what might have happened in the aftermath of the events of Chaucer’s ‘The Miller’s Tale’, one of the famous Canterbury Tales. He located it in Oxford, in Osney – so I set about researching the 14^th century history and creating a darker set of consequences from the farcical scenario he relates.

But, back to the conference! Friday afternoon saw willing helpers and members of the committee, who have been dedicating themselves to the preparation and smooth running of the event for many months now, gather at the Mathematics Institute to fill goody bags for delegates. The logistics of this operation were quite something and very well described in Nikki Fine’s post on the subject! Hundreds of bags were stacked against the wall, to vanish quickly during the course of that evening and the following day.

The conference proper got under way in the evening. Conference co-ordinator Carol McGrath welcomed Fay Weldon and Jo Baker to discuss The Big House Story. Fay wrote the first parts of Upstairs, Downstairs and Jo Baker wrote Longbourn, which focuses on the stories of the servants in the household of the Bennets of Pride and Prejudice fame.

They started with an analysis of the importance of servants – how, as Jo said, they were ‘the clockwork of the house’. Fay said that ‘The life downstairs is the real life’. They went on to discuss the paradoxical position of servants, able to eavesdrop and observe, but in some cases not even allowed to make eye contact with their employers.

Broadening the discussion from the central topic, they discussed their writing practices and aims. Jo said she’d discovered she’d been writing a large part of her current work in progress in a stage of ‘indignation’ – ‘Indignation is a great thing’, Fay reassured her, before asserting that ‘You have to choose your characters to make your point and your novel has to have a point.’ When discussing historical fiction and the accuracy of research, Jo told us ‘If you become too mimetic you make it less accessible to a reader’, so there we are, at that interface between the actual and the imagined once more.

As for what counts as historical fiction, Jo claimed that ‘Books start to be historical when clothes count as vintage.’ That’s a goodly portion of my life turning into history, then …

The evening concluded with a wine and canapés reception. I’ll tell you all about the packed Saturday programme in my next post – in the meantime, enjoy the photos!

An Oxford Vengeance is available to buy on Amazon here and here.

Details of the new season of my Fictionfire workshops, a day course and a retreat can be found here, and you can sign up for my Fictionfire newsletter - articles, recommended reads and resources, competitions and more.

Winchester Writers' Festival 2016: Meg Rosoff and Magical Fierceness

Meg Rosoff giving the Keynote Speech
at Winchester Writers' Festival 2016

Rather unbelievably, it’s time for my annual follow-up post on the Winchester Writers’ Festival, where I gave a lecture on self-editing and a day course on building character. There was the usual buzz of creativity and connection as writers milled around, attending readings, talks, courses and one-to-ones with agents, editors and writers like myself.

What do writers talk about at events like this? Well, their writing, of course, their hopes and their struggles, their frustrations and their triumphs. All of this against the backdrop of the annual review of the State of Publishing. We listen to those in the know, those in the trade – but also those in the independent sphere. Both schools of publishing practice have learned to co-exist fairly amicably, really. Perfection doesn’t exist on either side: indie authors sometimes haven’t taken on board the need for professionalism in presentation and content. Trad publishers are often way behind the times in their view of the indie world. But, catching up has been done, on both sides.

Every year the Festival officially opens on Saturday with the Keynote Speech. This year featured Meg Rosoff, with a quirky Powerpoint sequence behind her, discussing the nature of ‘voice’. This it turns out, is your ‘DNA’ as a writer. It’s your individual personality in words. It takes some finding and developing. When found, it creates that state we all seek and sometimes achieve:  the zone, ‘writers’ magic’, the state where you tap into your true self and meaning, where inspiration and expression fuse.

The Stripe Auditorium

In case this all sounds a bit airy-fairy, let me assure you that Meg was sharp as a tack, cynical, acerbic and total fun. She introduced us to the wonderful German word Durchlässigkeit, which means ‘throughness’, for that sense of a perfect flow of energy between conscious and unconscious mind. The term comes from dressage, referring to the harmonius co-operation of rider and horse. She said that a wall exists between the conscious and the unconscious and it’s up to us to establish and encourage connections: ‘If there’s a wall, you won’t get resonance.’

Meg went on to stress that we need to access the ‘dreamy state’ by such practices as morning writing, when ‘the brain hasn’t closed the bridge’. She herself waits for her books to come to her and tell her what their meanings are, what their resonance is. This is a process you can encourage but not force: ‘Sometimes you need to wait for the brain to be ready.’ If you want to home in on what is important to you, storywise, she recommends you to consider the turning points of your life and what they meant to you.

Throughout her speech the audience responded with laughter and murmurs of agreement: she really spoke to us, part-reassuringly, part bracingly. It was clear that writing – which she came to at the age of 46 after a rocky career in advertising – was as frustrating and rewarding to her as it is to the rest of us. She described the months when the book won’t come, the glorious breakthroughs of meaning, the buzz of inspired productivity. She spoke to an audience resonating to her message.

I came away struck in particular by one thing she’d mentioned: early in her career she’d written a pony book, which was no good, she claimed, but which got her an agent. Her agent said, ‘There are no rules. Write as fiercely as you can and I’ll find someone who will read it.’ I loved the idea of fierce writing – and the idea of a champion who would fight for that writing to be read.

During my one-to-one appointments

A couple of hours later I was meeting writers for one-to-ones in a room full of agents and editors, all listening to pitches, all responding to dreams and aspirations in a world that is commercially hard-headed and has always had to be. Yet I know that in that room, a writer or two will have fired up an agent or an editor with enthusiasm and months down the line we’ll hear of the book deal and the dream fulfilled.

Keep crossing that bridge into your inner life and self. Keep writing fiercely. Keep trusting that out there is the agent or editor or reader who will look at your work and ‘get’ it and champion it.

Finally - shout outs to my lovely friends at Winchester: Judith Heneghan, Sara Gangai, Barbara Large, Adrienne Dines, David Simpkin, Judy Waite, Nik Charrett, David Evans - and also to Imogen Cooper, Beverley Birch, Jenny Savill, Eden Sharp and Andrew Weale for fascinating conversations.

After the Festival Dinner

Conference Director Judith Heneghan at the Festival Dinner

With Adrienne Dines

Moonstruck: Meeting Buzz Aldrin

I’m sitting in the gallery of the Sheldonian Theatre, one of the most beautiful if not one of the most comfortable venues in Oxford. Looking down across the packed floor, I see a tanned face and a white beard through the glass of a side door. Moments later, in he comes, wearing a beige blouson jacket with embroidered badges on it. He waves like a king and air-punches like a prize-fighter as he makes his way through the applauding crowd.

He’s Buzz Aldrin.

His sassy, witty ‘Mission Director’ Christina Korb conducts the interview, trying to keep him on the straight and narrow, but even she has trouble managing the blurted reminiscences and anecdotes. The man is bursting with things to tell us. He’s opinionated, forceful, waving be-ringed hands, boasting about the Omega watch he wore on the outside of his spacesuit because it’s kinda hard to see the time otherwise.

I read Andrew Smith’s fascinating book Moondust: In Search of the Men who Fell to Earth several years ago, struck by the poignant reason for its composition. At that time, only nine men were alive who had walked on the surface of the moon, so he set about interviewing them while he could.

Well, there’s fewer than nine now. That is why several hundred people have queued in the chill rain outside and will later queue for the best part of an hour to get their books signed. I’m one of them. For a moment, we’re in contact with history, with what now seems a lost idealistic era. I grew up with the sense that space held all potential. I’d read Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Martian and Venusian series, and Isaac Asimov and Arthur C Clarke and Ray Bradbury. The stars, the planets and the dear old moon itself held out dreams of human aspiration, adventure and fulfilment.

So we lap up the bombast and the showboating, enjoy the clearly oft-repeated wisecracks, the whole display of it, because although this man is 86 now he is more alive than most we’ll ever meet and this man walked on the moon! He wears a T-shirt saying ‘Get your ass to Mars’ and is passionate about sending humans there, saying that a human can do in a week what took Spirit and Rover five years. He describes his spacewalk, saying he ‘wanted to putt putt putt around like George Clooney in Gravity.’ He’s contemptuous of the Russians – yes, they put Sputnik up there but ‘if you put up a dumb satellite you don’t give it a parade and everybody loves a parade!’ What’s more, they put a dog in orbit and left it there – ‘at least we brought our monkey back.’ He expresses regret at the loss of Neil Armstrong and talks of his family and the kind of destiny he’d felt – his mother was called Marion Moon and his father knew the Wright brothers – yup, it was all meant.

The door of the Sheldonian open with a view
 of the Bodleian's Divinity Schools behind

When I eventually reach the head of the queue and he signs my copy of No Dream is Too High, I burble something about looking up at the moon from a Scottish garden when I was a little girl, amazed to think he was up there. ‘My mother came from Edinboro …’ he smiles and I pass on, past the selfie-taking crowd. Outside the Sheldonian I wish the clouds would part and I could see the old man’s stamping ground.

I remember another night, years ago, when I looked at the moon and it gave me an idea for a story of ‘something strange, spectacular and out of this world’ that grew into a children’s book, Hinterland, still not published though it made it to the shortlist of a significant prize in 2013. I remember the magic of writing that story, of describing grey dust and a terraced crater like an amphitheatre and ‘hanging like a jewel against the dense black void, with fat blue oceans and swirling white clouds’, our planet. And I think to myself, I need to rediscover what that story meant to me, and maybe, just maybe, roll it out onto the launchpad once more and send it into the ether myself.

So thank you, Buzz.

And thank you, Blackwell’s Oxford (best bookshop in the world), for hosting this event!

Further reading:

Buzz Aldrin: No Dream is too High – Life Lessons from a Man who Walked on the Moon

www.buzzaldrin.com

Andrew Smith: Moondust: In Search of the Men who Fell to Earth

Andrew Chaikin: A Man on the Moon: The Voyages of the Apollo Astronauts

Raindrops really, but these white globes
lend a suitably otherworldly tone to this picture of the Sheldonian!

Oxford Literary Festival 2016 - events and intersections

You can’t live in Oxford and not be aware of intersecting circles of literary activity. As the year rolls round to spring again, so the gargantuan Oxford Literary Festival swings into action. I’ve mentioned in previous years how I attended the very first OLF back in 1997, when it was a weekend affair held at the Oxford Union. Since then, it has grown, just a bit …

This year I attended David Grylls interviewing Tracy Chevalier about her career and her latest novel, in the Divinity Schools of the Bodleian Library. Here’s the thing about OLF - the locations are a great draw in themselves, regardless of who’s speaking. Over the years, I’ve sat in the Oxford Union debating chamber, various rooms in Christ Church and Corpus Christi, the Convocation House … History swirls around you as words fly up and lodge in arches and carvings, dart under oak doors, swirl down stone spiral staircases …

The Divinity School beckons you to crane upwards at its remarkable stone hammerbeam ceiling, studded with shields and angels, or out through its many-paned windows to the Sheldonian Theatre looming just outside. 

Tracy Chevalier and David Grylls

Tracy Chevalier, meanwhile, discussed her career trajectory, talking about being supervised by Rose Tremain at the start of her career, about being an American living for many years in England, about how her career has developed without any rigid plan: ‘I never really know what I’m going to write next’. She focused on the importance of research – ‘It triggers the story’ - and how research methods have changed from hours in the library to the treacherous ease of the internet: ‘I’ve learned what I can trust and what not’. She then gave a reading from The Edge of the Orchard, which is set in 19^th century America, and features the Californian gold rush. (Tracy Chevalier will also be appearing at the Historical Novel Society Conference here in Oxford, 2 – 4 September. See www.hnsoxford2016.org)

Exeter College Chapel

Historical fiction was also the theme a few days later: Paul Blezard interviewed three HF writers in the no less glorious surroundings of Exeter College Chapel. Once again I found myself gazing up and around at the general gorgeousness while the three novelists answered questions about their work and about HF in general.

Robyn Young, who has written about the Crusades and about Robert the Bruce, is embarking on a new series set in the 15^th century, starting with Sons of the Blood. She talked about ‘method writing’, meaning that she learns skills like black-powder firing to bring the history to life – she could describe the ‘mad, fizzing noise’ of the powder in the barrel of an arquebus, adding ‘How can you put it into a book unless you’ve experienced it?’

Antonia Hodgson sets her work in the 18^th century, a period often overlooked by readers – her latest, The Last Confession of Thomas Hawkins, is a sequel to the very successful The Devil in the Marshalsea. In the debate about whether historians are justified in looking down their noses at fiction-writers, she reminded us that ‘every historian is writing a story as well’. For her, research ‘triggers the story’ because something in it ‘will just resonate’, but that ultimately the research must be ‘put to one side’ for the story to thrive. 

Jason Hewitt

Jason Hewitt’s second novel Desperation Road is set at the end of World War Two, which he regards as ‘a huge vat of stories’. He walked two thirds of the route his main character takes in his search for identity. For Jason, to be exhausted and ‘folding in on’ himself was ‘inspirational’ and far better than just sitting in the British Library. (I knew Jason already from his appearances at Short Stories Aloud in Oxford and I’m looking forward to reading Desperation Road, one of several purchases during OLF week.)

Clare Armistead chaired a discussion the art of short story writing at Jesus College – the location this time a less romantic modern lecture theatre. I was particularly interested as I’m teaching a Fictionfire workshop on writing short stories on May 7^th. Helen Simpson described her process of composition as a slow accumulation: ‘they build up like a coral reef’, the stories often triggered by a situation where ‘someone is uncomfortable’. Frances Leviston is a poet now making the ‘journey’ from poem to story and finding the ‘discomfort’ of expanding, having to force herself to be relatively ‘long-winded’. As you’d expect, both celebrated the precision of observation and the economy of composition the form demands, while highlighting the problems of readers assuming stories are autobiographical or inhabit a peculiarly feminine sphere. They also compared short stories with novels, describing how ‘the mundane is freighted with more than it is in the novel’ and how readers are more forgiving of a novel, implying that there’s more effort involved, paradoxically, in reading a short story, precisely because of that weighted quality. They both talked of the discipline of editing: Frances said ‘nothing on the page is sacred’ and that you should experiment with how much you can take out.

Worcester College

Finally, dear reader, I appeared at the Festival this year. I’ve been a member of local organisation Writers in Oxford (www.writersinoxford.org) since the 1990s: this year we were offered a spot during the festival to promote how we can be of use to local published writers. I was one of those volunteering to give a short talk and reading at the free event at Worcester College.

Barbara Lorna Hudson

We were delighted by the numbers who turned out to our event and the Q & A session afterwards was a lively one. My fellow writers Marcus Ferrars and Barbara Lorna Hudson gave readings – and Barbara later also gave a reading at a free event in Blackwell’s Marquee. She has just published her novel Timed Out and her reading went down very well – and the book was a sell-out! She was accompanied by fellow WiO member Sylvia Vetta, whose Brushstrokes in Time was recently launched at Blackwell’s. The intersections of literary activity have been working brilliantly lately. A couple of weeks previously, I’d chaired a Writers in Oxford panel on the book-retailing industry at Waterstone’s, with representatives from local independent bookshop The Book House and Blackwell’s giving us detailed feedback from the bookselling front. They were quite optimistic about the current state of book-retailing. People, it seems, still read and love books and booksellers have become ever more imaginative and resourceful in the way they sell books.

Blackwell's Marquee at the Festival

In OLF week, our local newspaper, the Oxford Times, included in its Limited Edition magazine an article on Oxford as a city of inspiration to writers – the feature included contributions from Robert Bullard, the chair of WiO, and from me.

Coming up:

Literascribe interviews with novelist Paul Cranwell and book cover designer Jane Dixon-Smith.

Fictionfireby the Spires: Get into Character weekend workshop/retreat takes place May 21-22 2016! You can come for the full weekend or on a single day basis: still time (just) to book! Four workshops will help you create and develop believable and engaging characters, there's delicious food throughout and you'll have time for your own writing too. Find out more at http://www.fictionfire.co.uk/fictionfire-by-the-spires - places are very limited.

Two Saturday afternoon workshops in May:

How to Write Short Stories: May 7^th

How to Edit your Submission: May 14^th – details of these are at http://www.fictionfire.co.uk/focus-workshops