Blog Apologies and General Life Update

Hello!  I realised with some shame that it has been two months (ish) since I've updated this blog!  Partly it's because I've been busy, and then because I wasn't sure I had anything to say.  So, I've decided to break the ice with a quick update on the Easter vacation and Trinity Term have been like for me.

In the last two months, I've...

• Gone to Paris, the Loire Valley, and Avignon on vacation (see obligatory Eiffel Tower photo above - with more pictures to come!)
• Finished another section of my thesis, this time discussing domestic violence and other forms of male dominance in the Bronte novels.  Next up is a short section on male relationships (primarily on how they can be damaging when they impinge on domestic/family life).
• Read many books for fun, including some that I plan to review on the blog in the near future.
• Given the Michael Mahoney Graduate Seminar at my college - a one-hour lecture on my research, which was actually really fun, especially as it was followed by a fancy dinner in the chapel (which is currently serving as our dining hall).
• Completely rewrote the end of my novel for the first time.  The ending is different from what I originally intended, but it fits better with my expectations for and conception of the book now.  I hope to start submitting it really, really soon - after one more proofread and a couple small changes.
• Helped to organise this year's Oxford English graduate conference, "Object", which went really, really well.  I chaired a fantastic panel on Victorian material culture; there was an fabulous panel discussion on the Book as Object, featuring Nick Cross, Digital Products Manager at the Oxford University Press and fellow SCWBI member, Paul Nash, the University's printing tutor, and Stephen Walter, text/map artist.  The day was capped off by a fantastic keynote address on the construction of the author as "object" by acclaimed children's author Frances Hardinge.  (Her most recent novel, A Face Like Glass is amazing and Frances is absolutely lovely in person to boot!)
• Went up to London to see The Book of Mormon (amazing, with brilliant music, and much blasphemy - not for the easily offended) and finally visit the Tate Modern (loved the first floor Surrealists, then became increasingly bored by the abstract art and installations - I am a bit of a traditionalist, I suppose)
• More recently, went up to London to see Neil Gaiman talk about his most recent novel, The Ocean at the End of the Lane.  Amazing.  Also snagged a signed first edition, which is very good so far.
• Plus, I attended the seminars for the Developing Teaching and Learning course run by the Humanities Division and am working on a teaching portfolio to submit in hopes it will gain me Associate Fellow status with the Higher Education Academy.  As part of my teaching training, I ran revision classes and tutorials to prepare first-year Mansfielders for their exam on Victorian literature, which was a rewarding experience.  It was great to really dig into the Victorians with friendly, enthusiastic, and hard-working students.

Okay, I think that's it.  I will try to update more frequently, and will definitely post pictures from our France trip.  The next big thing is that we're going home for two weeks on Saturday, which is shockingly only two sleeps away!  Yikes.

Tales from the DPhil, Part Two: Writing the Thesis Like a Novel

Welcome to Part Two of this upstart series, Tales from the DPhil.  Today is the juicy stuff - writing tips!

Last term, I discovered that the single biggest stress- and anxiety-causing aspect of my doctoral experience was my approach to writing the darned thing.

In undergrad and my Master's, I did quite well writing essays by researching a lot up front, creating detailed outlines, and then racing through a draft with a quick polish at the end.  Because I always had hard deadlines, I always made them, even if this required some crazy writing days.

This is by no means an ideal writing strategy for a doctoral thesis.  A term paper can (but probably shouldn't) be a sprint.  A thesis is a marathon.  A three-year marathon.  A thesis also demands consideration, the evolution and testing of ideas and arguments, the honing of sentences.  I was trying to write chapters in big bursts (which didn't work) and then had no time for proper revision.  I became anxious about writing and avoided it.

So, I decided I had to make writing much less daunting.  I decided to write my thesis as if it were a novel.  I'm quite proud of this revelation.

I've been writing novelish fiction since I was fourteen.  I know how to write a big, multi-part project and just needed to apply the same strategies to my thesis.  I know from experience that I need to write every day, preferably to a very manageable word goal.

Principles that Have Vastly Improved My Thesis-Writing Experience

1.  Come up with a manageable word count and stick to it every day.  I've chosen 500 words, which I think is approximately an hour's writing, but it varies a lot.  It amounts to 2ish sides of A4 or about 3-4 pages in my Moleskine journal or 2-3 paragraphs.  It is extremely doable and non-threatening because it seems like so little.  Also, the more regularly you write, the more natural it becomes.  As a bonus, on the days I force myself to write, I usually end up over-shooting this word goal and write closer to 600 words.  But no matter what, something is better than nothing.  Progress is better than standing still.  And, if you write 500 words a day for one work week, you suddenly have 2500 words.  That's almost a conference paper.

2.  Write first thing every day.  Because I know that if I put off my writing, it probably won't get done and I likely will not get much research done either, out of a general sense of anxiety and procrastination.  Also, writing is always the hardest part of my day.  Everything after it seems easier and more enjoyable.  And, once you've met your word count for the day, you've met a mini-goal, which feels great.  Plus, you don't have to worry about writing any more until the next day.

3.  Don't start with a blank page.  What I've been doing is writing longhand rough words one day and then revising while typing them the next.  This allows me to a do a first pass of revision and gets my writing brain working before I have to tackle fresh writing, which in turns makes tackling the new words less frightening.  In an ideal world, I would also take notes and write down ideas for the next day's rough words - that can be a big help to getting started.

4.  Don't worry if the words are rough/awful.  Once you have words, you can fix them!  If you don't have any words to play with, you can't do anything at all.  It's taken me a long time to come around to revising my academic and creative writing and to find strategies to help me do it.  Sometimes having a pile of messy, meandering words is a gift because it's often so easy to see how they could be improved.  A nicely proofread piece of work can be harder to take apart and put back together again because of its shiny surface.

5.  Realise that words/writing time are not an end but a process.  This is another realisation that made me feel better about my messy, daily words.  I'm not writing just to meet a word count - I'm writing because writing allows me to think through the issues I'm dealing with in a way that research or even outlining can't.  Sometimes I have little revelations while writing.  I realise what my argument is, or discover something new about a text.  I've realised that I need to spend a good portion of every day interacting with my words on the page, whether writing or revising.  If you leave a project for a few days, it's much harder to get back into it and pick up the flow of ideas again.  (Noveling is the exact same in this regard).

I hope these principles might be helpful to any grad school brethren who may be reading this.  Do you have any tips in turn?  (They are always much appreciated - it's very easy to slack off when it comes to writing discipline.)

Tales from the DPhil, Part One: Tips for Better Living and Working

Hello blog,

Last term, I somehow made the leap from Second-Year Slump levels of motivation and high levels of procrastination, stress, and anxiety (chiefly centred on writing) to high levels of motivation and writing.  Hence, I thought I'd write a bit about the life, working, and writing strategies that helped me out in the hope that perhaps they might help you, too.

This is Part One: Living and Working.  Tomorrow: Part Two: Writing the Thesis Like a Novel.


1.  Get a good night's sleep.  I suffered from some terribly off-kilter sleeping patterns over the Christmas vacation.  There were a few mornings I didn't get to sleep until 7 am.  This was not good for my productivity.

When I finally forced myself to wake up at 6:45 am, I discovered I was much more productive.  The days seemed so full of possibilities and I really got excited about tackling my work.  It's much better to find yourself at lunchtime with a few hours' of work under your belt than to have nothing at all.  Also, I quite like working on my novel over breakfast and coffee for my first working hour of the day.  This allows me to dedicate time to my novel revisions without feeling like I'm stealing time from my thesis.  If I put the novel off, I know I probably won't work on it later in the day.

2.  Find or create the conditions that will allow you to be productive.  I've realised over the past year or so that working at home isn't actually the best for me.  There are so many possibilities for distraction.  The internet.  The dishes.  A nap?  Last term, I discovered three ways to make my working day much more productive.

a)  I solved the internet problem (mostly) by using the Firefox add-on Leechblock, in which you can list the URLs of sites that you know you waste time on and block yourself from accessing them at certain times.  At the moment, I'm not allowing myself access to any social media, the Guardian website, YouTube, or my favourite blogs between 8:30 am and 5:30 pm on week days.  I've also prevented myself from accessing the settings in a way which I don't (yet) know how to disable.  (I could, of course, still go on Twitter on Tim's computer or my phone, but that would require more effort.)

b)  I found a great place at school to work.  The English Faculty has a newish graduate work space which is perfect - just tables in a light, bright room and an almost non-existent wireless signal.  Also, often other graduate students are working in there, which allows for much needed human interaction.  And, because it is purely a space in which to do work, my perception of my work day is much different.  At home, it can be a struggle to log the hours I'm aiming for, especially with the temptation to take breaks or a nap.  At school, however, I can be happy working away for hours with minimal breaks because that's precisely what I'm there to do.  I don't even watch the clock that much.  I work until 5:30 or 6 and then I go home.

c)  I can do this because this is a space I can work in while snacking.  I used to work at home more because I wanted access to food and drink (there is no eating in Oxford libraries).  I can snack away or eat lunch in this work room, however, and it's changed my working experience hugely.  Before, if I sat down to work in a library, I would often almost instantly become hungry, which was incredibly distracting.  I've cut many a work day short in order to go home to eat something. Not a problem when I can eat while working.

3.  Allow yourself guilt-free time off.  When I was struggling (and failing) to meet the hours quota I set myself each day/week, I felt like I was always potentially supposed to be working (unless I was on an actual vacation).  This is stressful!  You (and I) need breaks that don't involve the thesis perpetually nudging your subconscious.  Since Tim has a regular, full-time job now, I also felt it would be really nice if I also had (mostly) work-free evenings and weekend.  After a vacation slump (due to the disappearance of the term schedule), I'm back to full productivity levels, which means that I can actually have evenings to myself, guilt-free.  (Confession: sometimes I'll have half an hour or hour of work to do, but since that often involves reading Victorian novels, that's fine).  It's actually strange not to need to work.  I find I don't quite know what to do with myself.

Tomorrow, I will share with you the secret of Writing the Thesis Like a Novel.  It involves word counts.  And happier thesis writing and revision.

Reader, if you are in a commenting mood, how, when, and where do you best work?

The Next Big Thing

Right, so I'm a bit slow to join this meme.  The lovely Sally Poyton (who is responsible for my joining SCBWI) tagged me for The Next Big Thing ages ago and I, being slightly suspicious of internet memes, foolishly declined.  Having read a bunch of other writers' excellent posts on what they're writing (and learned more about some great upcoming titles), I decided to hop on the bandwagon and tell you a bit about my work-in-progress.

1.  What is the working title of your book?

The working title is Belladonna, referencing a poisonous flower in the nightshade family, the translation from the Italian: beautiful lady, and (extremely tangentially) Stevie Nicks's 1981 solo album Bella Donna.

2.  Where did the idea come from for the book?

I was riding the bus home from university on my 20th birthday and I thought of a witch and of a spoiled girl who had to be the witch's servant.  I knew that I wanted it to have fairytale elements; I knew that the spoiled girl (Hazel) and a boy had broken the witch's window in the woods (Hansel and Gretel-style) and that it was set in the nineteenth-century and that my heroine wore white.  It all came to me quite quickly on that bus ride home.  I knew the ending by the time I got off the bus and I think I also knew that the heroine's father was an important part of the story.

So, the answer is sort of "out of the ether".  But it also relates back to the fact that a teenage boy on the bus behind me was chatting away very courteously and kindly with an elderly woman.  And I thought to myself how awkward and shy I would be in the same situation, because I was quite shy with strangers then (I think I'm better now).  Hazel and the witch build their relationship through conversation, some of which is very awkward, and some which of allows for growth on both sides.

3.  What genre does your book fall under?

Young adult fantasy.  More specifically, young adult historical fantasy with fairytale elements.

4.  Which actors would you choose to play your characters for a movie rendition?

Gah!  This is the hardest question ever.  I have visuals of the characters in my head but I've never tried to match them to anyone before, with one exception.  Also, because the novel is narrated in the first-person, I spend an awful lot of time in Hazel's head but haven't bothered to try to picture her facial features, for instance.

The exception to the rule is Melicent, one of the fairies in the novel, who I picture as a young Christina Ricci or Catherine Zeta Jones.

There's a Puritan preacher Tim and I have decided could be played by Benedict Cumberbatch, becasue I describe him as having a really powerful, distinctive voice.

Other than that, I'm drawing a blank.  Maybe someone who's read the book could help me out with suggestions?  

5.  What is the one-sentence synopsis for your book?

 One day late in Queen Victoria’s reign, spoiled Hazel Linwood escapes from her governess, raids an apple orchard, kisses the stable boy, and breaks a witch's window; for her thoughtlessness, the witch curses Hazel: she must be the witch’s servant and cannot return home until she speaks the witch’s one True Name.

6.  Will your book be self-published or represented by an agency?

I hope to be represented by a literary agent.  Not sure I would attempt self-publication at this point.

7.  How long did it take you to write the first draft of your manuscript?

About ten months.  I had the idea for the novel in March and collected bits and pieces of ideas for a few months.  I started writing the first draft on 17 August 2006 (after being inspired while reading Wuthering Heights one afternoon) and finished the draft in late June of the next year.  I've been revising on and (quite a lot) off ever since.

8.  What other books would you compare this story to within your genre?

Books that feel similar to me include Chime by Franny Billingsly, Keturah and Lord Death by Martine Leavitt, I, Coriander by Sally Gardener, The Merrybegot by Julie Hearn, and A Curse Dark as Gold by Elizabeth C. Bunce.  They are all YA fantasies in historical settings and draw on fairytale and/or folklore.  I think they all have quite strong narrative voices as well.

9.  Who or what inspired you to write this book?

See above.  Also, see the books I've just listed.  I read most of those either before or during the composition of my novel and I'm sure they've left creative imprints on my work in one form or another.  Also, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince had a big impact on me in the months leading up to writing this book.

10.  What else about your book might pique the reader's interest?

Let's see.  Witch hunts.  Incredibly dangerous fairies.  Love.  Revenge.  Victorians.  A flawed heroine.  A dreamy (but also considerate and sweet) stable boy.

I'm not tagging anyone (as I'm afraid many of my writerly friends seem to have been tagged already), but please check out these other Next Big Things for upcoming books that look great!

Elizabeth Wein on the companion book to Code Name Verity, happily due for release next fall!

Erin Bow on her second novel, Sorrow's Knot.

Chapter-Writing Survival Kit: Chapter Three Edition

You can find my must-haves for chapters one and two if you follow the links.

1.  Notebooks!  I've been keeping a small notebook with me for the last year or so to write down my daily to-do lists, track my hours, jot down ideas or library call numbers but all of sudden, I've become a notebook fiend.  I've been using medium soft-cover Moleskines for the last couple months to jot down ideas, brainstorming, lists of books to read, rough paragraphs, lists of quotations and page references - all the messy-ish work that goes into writing a chapter.  I used to do this on loose leaf but I think that began to feel too serious or formal or finished.  If it goes in a notebook, I have permission to do unfinished writing and thinking.  Also, they're fun to carry around.  I like the feeling of them.  I like the heft of a nice black Bic pen in my hand.

Please don't mock my terrible penmanship.  I can handwrite quickly but only I can usually read the scrawl.  This is something I wrote up two days ago, outlining my thoughts for Chapter Four.  This excercise, helped by multiple colours of pens, helped me to realize that I had a much better idea of what I wanted to cover in this chapter than I thought I did.  So, hurrah to notebooks!

2.  CBC Radio.  This is also a weird one.  For years, I've enjoyed listening to music while I worked - school-work, novel-writing.  I can happily listen to music with English lyrics; I know some people can't. I think Philip Pullman has said in interviews he can't listen to music at all, because it throws off the rhythms in his head.  But writing this chapter, for some reason talk radio was my go-to for a background track to run through my head.  I'm not sure how much radio I actually absorbed, but I learned some interesting things from the many episodes of As It Happens, Ideas, Quirks and Quarks, and The Sunday Edition I listened to.  I think it also made me feel not quite so far from home and, when Tim is at work, less all alone in the flat (?)  Hard to say.

3.  This isn't to say that music didn't help me a great deal.  It did.  I listened to and enjoyed the new Kamelot album, Silverthorn, towards the end of this chapter, plus the usual mix of Florence + the Machine and classic rock.

4.  In the beverage department - hot chocolate and chai.  Hot drinks make writing so much more fun.

5.  Also, going down the road to our local Costa for coffee after Tim is done work.  Sometimes it's just really nice to have a change of scene, a place that feels less like "work".

(I think I had ten things in my survival kit for each of the last two posts in this series.  I can't think of ten this time.  Alas.)

A List: Adventures Since the End of September, Plus Photos

Some of my current work materials

Goodness, I've been a bad updater.  I intended last week to do a post on the excitement of the first two weeks of term, but now we're at the end of 3rd week already.  So, instead I offer up a list of my adventures since the end of September.

1)  I attended the SCWBI Agents' Party in London, where I was very brave and pitched my novel to four literary agents.  Pitching was terrifying at first but became easier when I reminded myself that agents are book nerds just like writers.  We're all just looking for a great book to read.  Now I need to finish my polish/proofread and make sure all my spellings are British (rather than Canadian or American: see my last post) and start sending it out.

2)  Having previously seen Vertigo as part of the BFI's Hitchcock retrospective, Tim and I also went to see Rear Window, which was also even more amazing on a big screen with great sound.  Also, I realized it's much easier to see what the characters in the other apartment buildings are up to on a big screen and in high resolution.  (As opposed to the fuzzy VHS version I'm sure I originally watched the film in).

3)  At the very beginning of First Week, Tim and I went back to London to see the Original Practices production of Twelfth Night at the Globe, starring the one and only Stephen Fry as Malvolio.  It was amazing and very funny, especially since they milked the comedy of men playing women (and in Viola's case, a man playing a woman playing a man) for all it was worth.

Before we went to the theatre, we popped into the famous Daunt Books in Marylebone and finally made it to Regent's Park.

4)  Also, in first week, I taught my first ever Oxford tutorial on Oscar Wilde (Paper 7 - the special author paper).  Now three weeks in, I must say I'm really enjoying myself.  It's lovely to get my teaching muscles working again.  Tutorial-style teaching is definitely very different from the teaching I did during my Master's degree of the University of Saskatchewan.  It's strange going from having, say 15-30 students down to just one.  At its best, the teaching resembles a supervision meeting or a really productive conversation, with ideas and interpretations zinging back and forth.

5)  Then we had EGO (English Graduates at Oxford) committee elections.  I will be serving on the committee for the second year in a row, this time as Academic Affairs Officer.  I'm really excited to be involved again and will aim to do my best.

6)  I'm also on the organizing committee for the graduate conference again this year.  We decided on the theme for the conference just a couple days ago: Object.  We're hoping to here some really interesting papers on materiality, tangibility, Thing Theory, and also more political/theoretical/critical objections.  A CFP will probably go out in December with an abstract deadline in March(ish).

7)  Last week, I also had the opportunity to hear a bit of a children's publishing celebrity speak.  The Oxford branch of the Society of Young Publishers hosted a public talk by David Fickling, head of the Random House imprint David Fickling Books, which publishes some of my very favourite authors in the UK: Linda Newbery, Kenneth Oppel, Margo Lanagan...  David Fickling was a fabulously energetic and enthusiastic speaker, running off onto fascinating tangents like some of my very best university professors.  He spoke really engagingly about what an editor must do (recognize talent, add energy, provide stability, communicate to the author).  It was fascinating to hear about the editor-author relationship from the editor's point of view, especially because unpublished writers tend to focus more on getting published and the submissions process.  Also, it was lovely to hear David speak so passionately about importance of publishing good books and great stories, rather than focusing on market issues.

8)  Last week I also got to meet another hero of mine, David Mitchell, who was in town at the Oxford Waterstones signing copies of his memoir Back Story.  If you haven't seen David Mitchell and his comedy partner Robert Webb in Peep Show or their sketch show That Mitchell and Webb Look, do so.  Fantastic British comedy.

9)  My 9th adventure comes later today when the Interdisciplinary Nineteenth-Century Forum is hosting a tour of Oscar Wilde's rooms at Magdalen College, which I am very much looking forward to.

This image isn't related to anything in this post, except that autumn has come to my favourite churchyard by the English Faculty.

 And to close, some general thoughts on beginning the second year of my DPhil.  First of all, where did first year go?  It went by so quickly.  I'm a third done now!  But, really, everything feels a bit more comfortable this year.  I have friends inside and outside my program; I'm used to the city; I'm well into my research (though writing is still a struggle).  It's also scary, however, because I recently realized that instead of applying for scholarships next fall, I'll be applying for lectureships, post-docs, teaching roles and really thinking about the transition into an academic career.

Out on Submission

As of about half an hour ago, a query and sample chapter for my novel are out there in cyberspace, sitting in an editor's inbox.

Yikes.

I was prepared.  The chapter was polished; I'd been over the query letter so many times I was getting slightly sick of it (in the best possible way).  I'd gotten outside criticism on both parts of my submission.  I'd researched the guidelines and formatting.

I knew all of this.  I knew it was okay; it was ready to go.  But it took me a good minute before I could hit "Send".  My finger was hovering over the mouse, ready to click, and I felt really almost paralyzed, or like a leaden ball of dread had built up in the pit of my stomach, so that I couldn't move.  But the moment passed, and off it went.

Now, of course, comes the obligatory waiting and almost certain rejection (plus more rejection after that).  That's fine.  I've read up on the publishing process and spoken to writers in various states of submission.

I remind myself that it's really all about finding an agent/editor who loves my book enough to want to dedicate a lot of time and effort to improving and selling it.  Out of the thousands of books sitting on bookstore shelves, how many would I want to read?  A small percentage.  How many would I like?  Love?  Smaller and smaller percentages, all based on the quality of the books and my own finicky readerly preferences.  So, on an intellectual level, I can understand how finding an agent/editor could take a very long time.

In any case, my novel is out there.  I started writing the first draft August 17, 2006.  It seems fitting to send it off so close to that anniversary.

And perhaps now that I've set it free, some new idea will take hold of my imagination and I'll begin writing the next one.  That will bring its own possibilities, joys, and terrors.

Chapter Writing Survival Kit: Chapter Two Edition

1.  Classical music - Beethoven, Verdi, Saint-Saëns, Mozart, Shostakovich, Khachaturian, and Tchaikovsky most recently
2.  Other music: Apocalyptica, Lacuna Coil, and lots and lots of Florence + The Machine
3.  Werther's Hard Candy
4.  Emerald green gel pen - to make writing by hand more fun
5.  Peppermint tea
6.  Kitchen timer for writing sprints
7.  Moleskine notebook for tracking progress
8.  Laptop
9.  Sitting in bed - to trick myself into thinking the writing isn't stressful
10.  College library - so I can spread out my work on a big table and stare at the beautiful ceiling when I need to think

Here's the Chapter One Edition, which is slightly different.

Planting Seeds

I'm partly writing this post to see if anyone else does this.

That is, consciously planting seeds in one's subconscious.

I'll explain.  As we all know, our subconscious never shuts down.  We dream at night; we discover the best comebacks after the moment has passed; we figure out the crossword clue days later.  When our conscious mind goes off to other things, the subconscious keeps on rolling.

When I know I need/want to write something and I have only the foggiest idea of what my argument or approach might look like, I've discovered it's useful to do two things.

1)  Write it out.  While organizing papers last night, I discovered a few sheets that had my preliminary planning for thesis Chapter Two on them.  One of them I had very boldly titled "Things I Know About Chapter Two" and contained really early notes on areas I wanted to cover, books I knew I needed to read, conclusions I thought I might draw.  I've discovered that almost freewriting out or brainstorming ideas on purpose and on paper really helps me to think better and sparks off ideas that often make perfect sense, seemingly out of nowhere. 

This is also how I came up with my Master's thesis topic.  I knew I wanted to do a thesis (I had originally signed up for the shorter project-based course), but I didn't know what I wanted to do it on and I figured that if I was going to make English Department staff go to all the administrative trouble of helping me switch programs, I had better have a decent idea of what I wanted to do.  So, I sat down with a piece of paper and wrote down the bits of English Literature that most interested me.  On that list were the Brontes, the Gothic, and Heathcliff, which eventually led into my thesis on Gothic masculinity in three Bronte novels.

Most recently, I've used this scattershot method to try to shape a conference paper abstract whose deadline is not so very far away.  I wrote down everything I thought might be interesting to talk about.  And then I did Step Number Two.

2)  Walk away and tell one's Subconscious to figure it out.  I couldn't push my idea any further, so I left my scribbled-over notebook pages and quite sternly told myself to take those ideas and come up with an argument, or at least, a narrowed down, more complete version of my initial ideas.  And lo and behold, later that day, I suddenly figured out the perfect primary work to use as the centre of my discussion.  (Which then led to an exploration of the town centre of Kidlington, as I already owned the book I wanted to use, but hadn't brought it to the UK with me.  So, off we went to the public library to pick it up).  Now, I still have to write the abstract and, if it's accepted, the paper itself, but my subconscious certainly seemed to have done something with the seeds I planted.

I think this is another area where academic writing and creative writing overlap, but it's hard to say.  As Robin McKinley has said in essays, the imagination (at least, mine) is not nearly as "biddable" as my academic writing brain.  But I'm trying.  I've told my subconscious that after Belladonna is finished and, hopefully, out on submission, I would really like it to come up with a nice juicy Victorian-style ghost story or sensation fiction sort of plot.  I'll just have to wait and see what it comes up with.  (I should also mention that I've been trying to help it along by reading Wilkie Collins, Sheridan Le Fanu, and M.R. James...)

Oxford Literary Festival 2012: Days 1 and 2

To my delight, the Oxford Literary Festival has begun and will be running through to the end of next weekend.  So far, I have attended three events and had three books signed.  Not bad at all.

The bookish fun began Saturday morning, at a panel discussion about Dickens and children's literature featuring Philip Pullman, J. D. Sharpe, and Christopher Edge and chaired by Mario Dickens Lloyd, an editor and great-great granddaughter of the great man himself.

I was heartened to find out that all three authors had come to Dickens through various adaptations as children and teens and started reading the books themselves as adults, which is much the same way I came to Dickens.  I was afraid they would all be terribly precocious and have read David Copperfield as young children (I think I've heard Claire Tomalin say she did this). 

Perhaps the best part of this talk was having Philip Pullman sign our lovely Everyman's edition of His Dark Materials.  Also, he confirmed that Will's portal at the beginning of The Subtle Knife is very close to where we live.  I will do my best, however, not to slip into alternate universes.

Then, in the evening, there was a panel called Life, Death, and Other Grown-Up Subjects, with YA authors Patrick Ness, Moira Young, Tim Bowler, and Sally Nicholls.  There was much discussion of the necessity of a certain degree of darkness or extremity in constructing stories with high stakes and that won't come off as "humbug" to teens.  Tim Bowler pointed out that even tragedy with the everyone-dead-on-the-stage ending has its place in our literature; after all, if we didn't have Shakespeare's tragedies, we would be missing quite a lot.  There was also interesting discussion around the benefits of writerly doubt and terrible, lovely difficulty of writing novels.  Teri Terry over at Notes from the Slushpile has blogged about the panel in much more detail.

After this, it was off to the pub for an evening of chatting books, writing, and publishing with some lovely Oxford-area Society for Children's Book Writers and Illustrators members (I became a member about a month ago - a great decision!).

Then on Sunday morning, I attended a three-hour workshop called Bookcamp: How to get a Children's Book Published, with Julia Churchill from the Greenhouse Literary Agency and Leah Thaxton, publishing director at Egmont UK.  Julia and Leah gave similar talks at a recent SCWBI Professional Series meeting in London, which has been blogged about in much more detail by JE Towey and and Caroline Hooton.

However, some general observations.  First of all, it's really lovely to know that agents and publishers, apart from anything else, are really just looking for great books they can fall in love with.  Of course, then the challenge is to write a really great book.  Yikes.

Julia explained that for writers, there's really not much point in paying attention to publishing trends, because the timescales involved in selling and then publishing a book are so long.  By the time your book comes out, say, 2 years after signing with an agent, the field will have changed a great deal anyway.  Leah described the ideal editor for one's book, as well as a publisher's ideal author (in part, a writer who is willing to work hard to improve the manuscript!).  Also, apparently people within the industry are getting worn out by vampire novels, unless they have a humorous spin to them (perhaps like Eat, Slay, Love).

Because the Bologna Book Fair was just last week, I asked if there were any interesting trends that had come up there.  Leah said what she is looking for in particular is joyful, life affirming stories and humour, especially for a younger audience.  Julia said the only trend she discerned was the publishers were looking for contemporary romances with a twist.  Very interesting, even just from the standpoint of a reader who loves children's books.

I came away from the morning with a head packed full of information and a keen desire to get back to editing my MS.

P.S.  That last event was held at Queen's College, which is beautiful!  I must go back soon with Tim and play tourist.

Chapter-Writing Survival Kit: Chapter One Edition

1. Coffee - with caffeine, not from instant crystals.  Preferably fresh Tim Hortons (what I am drinking right now)
2. Tea, preferably chai
3. Hot chocolate
4. Real chocolate
5. Laptop + narrow gauge lined paper
6. Black Bic pens + red and blue gel pens
7. Sympathetic partner for back rubs and for keeping ethernet cable away from me
8. Healthy snacks: fruit and yogurt
9. Mind-clearing walks
10. iPod loaded with music to distract me from the agony of the writing process

When Is It Time to Start Writing?

As I embark on actually getting the words down for the first chapter of my doctoral thesis (on heroes and hero-worship in Charlotte and Branwell Bronte’s early early writings), I’ve been thinking a bit about taking the leap from research and planning to actually writing.  I’ve realized that my process for academic writing is in many ways similar to my creative writing and since I suspect some other grad student and writerly types may be reading this, I thought I would attempt to explain how this works for me.  As with everything concerning the writing process, this is highly individual.

Before I start writing, I need to know where I’m going.  If I start in on an essay or a novel without having worked out what my end goal is and, at least in general, how I’m going to get there, I flail around hopelessly.  I'm totally lost in the woods.  Generally, I just don’t go in to a piece of writing until I know my major road markers, unless I’m trying to write an abstract or a proposal, when getting my ideas down messily and then shaping and cutting for word count after seems to work quite well.

I know some writers can go into a book and not know what’s hiding behind each corner (I’m thinking about fiction writers particularly here, but I know students who write this way too – it boggles my mind).  But then they go back and revise and work their book, essay etc. into a workable shape after the fact.

For whatever reason, I can’t do this.  For essays, I need to know each major point I’m trying to make before I start.  I need to see the shape of the argument in my head.  I also know it’s time to start writing when the essay, in a sense, begins writing itself, when I hear random sentences in my head that belong in the essay, when I come up with a way to describe something I’m trying to prove.

I used to plan out my essays in great detail, writing down every point and every quotation and page reference in a gigantic outline, then typing everything onto the computer.  That way I got to put off the actual writing for as long as possible. I think I’m better at embracing a bit of mess now, and have found that roughing out a paragraph or a section on paper and then typing and refining seems to work quite well.

I seem to need less detail going forward on a novel, but like an academic paper, a novel also needs to have enough complexity in the ideas and plot to move it forward.  Now that I am hopefully coming toward the end of revisions on my current novel, I’ve begun thinking about what the next one might be like.  Over the last couple years, I’ve had about three reasonably novel-like ideas, but none of them is tugging at me, shouting at me to write them now.  I suspect they are rather half-baked.  I don’t think there is enough imaginative force there to propel me through an entire novel.  I started, and even finished, so many longer stories that were really just dead inside as a teenager and discovered in the process that novels need a critical mass of ideas, so that a chain reaction occurs and ideas spark new ideas and pull up old ideas and rework them for the new context.  I think that’s what I’m waiting for at the moment.

And even then, when will I know when to start writing?  Well, I’ll need an idea of the plot structure and my end point.  And, as occurred with this novel, I’ll know it’s time to start when it begins writing itself in my head.

I remember this quite clearly.  I’d had the original idea for this novel back in March of 2006, and then on August 17^th, after I had just finished a summer Latin class and put another old (and frankly not very good) novel to bed, I was sitting on my bed, eating strawberries, listening to CBC radio, and reading Wuthering Heights, and I think the cadences at Emily Bronte’s language set something going in my mind and the book began writing itself.

At that point, you really do just need to start.

Tricking Myself Into Writing: 5 Strategies

This post is brought to you by ... Procrastination!

Well, here I am.  Tomorrow, I have to turn in a conference paper to my supervisor, which is great, because that means I'll have the rest of the week to tweak and improve.  However, this also means I have to finish the darn thing in the next 24 hours.  (I'm sitting at 3 pages at the moment.  I have at least 7 to go).

In the old days, by which I mean, undergrad, I would think and plan and collect primary source quotations and usually write papers in the last day, maybe two before they were due.  They were always done on time, but they were also usually completed at a bit of a sprint, over the course of a few very painful days.

Toward the end of my Master's thesis, a much longer and more involved process, I began to come up with some strategies to help myself approach writing, an activity that I love and hate, that is easy and brain-achingly hard, and that I will apparently avoid at all costs.

1. I figured out that if I could convince myself to refine and enlarge my outline enough times, I would end up accidentally starting a draft.  That draft would also be relatively easy, because I would have laid out all my points and page references and quotations ahead of time.

2.  A bit later, I discovered that writing longhand, especially at the beginning of the paper worked well.  I couldn't obsess over word count; the white page seemed less foreboding that the flickering white screen.

3.  A bit later, I learned the trick of "messiness".  This works especially well if I'm writing to a constrictive word count for a proposal or abstract.  I tell myself, well, I'll just get my ideas down first, and then I can shape the proposal later, even if my sentences don't make sense or are hugely wordy.  If I start on paper, I can easily refine as I type everything up.

4.  Cannibalize from other documents.  Starting an a paper is hard.  If I can steal an opening paragraph from a related essay (even if I have to change it around a fair bit later), I can skip the difficulty of opening and play around with tweaking and shaping raw material instead.  Afterwards, continuing is much less difficult.

5.  Rewriting.  I discovered today, yet again, how hard transitioning from one part of a paper to another can be.  Answer?  Rewrite the previous paragraph or section and then write what comes next.  I know that once I get back into the flow of writing, words/ideas will probably show up in my head without too much more effort.  Rereading previous material can also serve the same purpose, and is something that has worked well in the past for novel-writing too.

I'm actually feeling pretty good about this paper (on male homosocial bonds and sibling rivalry in Charlotte and Branwell Bronte's early writing).  It feels like the ideas are snapping and sparking against each other.  I've got primary and secondary sources ready to be referred to; I'm surrounded by my books and papers; I actually have a firm argument (hurrah!).  So... now I guess I really just need to get back to it.