2016-17 Session
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Edinburgh Writers’ Club The Bulletin 2016-17 WHAT EDITORS WANT stories and key features of their by Sheila Adamson personalities, so that you understand them and how they behave. Most of the At this year’s Edinburgh Book Festival, information will not end up in the actual four editors from different publishers text but it will help you to see them as across the UK took the time to deliver a three-dimensional individuals. session explaining what they look for when signing up a new author. Note that an editor will be thinking about what will be successful in the market, not It is worth clarifying what an editor’s role what might impress a literary critic. is. This is the person who works with the Similarly, when a new author is taken on it author to get the book ready for will be because the publishing house publication. Sometimes the original believes the books will sell. manuscript can be radically changed, with revisions to structure or characters or the What features are they looking for, then, resolution of the plot. In other cases the in deciding what to take on? Some of changes may be minor. The editor these will be more obvious than others: attempts to see the book from the point of view of a potential reader and make it Good voice work best for them. Good story Good villain In light of this, it is no surprise to hear that Imagination editors particularly appreciate writers Humour who are willing to receive feedback Drama – don’t be afraid to let your constructively. (Bringing work to the club characters suffer for feedback and entering competitions is Surprises and (if appropriate) excellent practice for this!) It is normal for scares the writer to be asked to do at least one Dialogue - listen to how real complete new draft of the novel, no people talk. Read it aloud to check matter how much the publisher claims to how it sounds. Vary the way love it. Editors like it best when they different characters speak. identify a problem and the writer comes Most of all – originality. “An editor up with their own creative solution. can fix problems with the plot,” Writers like it least when the editor one said, “but we can’t make a dull demands they kill off a character, but book original or memorable.” sometimes it has to be done. Even if you have no plans to submit work One tip was to write one page character for publication, this is all good advice that studies for each main character in the can help to improve the quality of your book. This should include their back work. 1 CLUB COMPETITION WINNERS allowed to enter one competition free of charge. Flash Fiction 1 – Cecilia Rose "Blind Date" CLUB NIGHTS 2 – Jenny McDonald “Stuck” Zoe Strachan 3 – Olga Wojtas “The Winner” Zoe talked to the Club about writing short POETRY stories prior to our submitting our stories st 1 A Journey through Lisbon – Beverley for her adjudication. Casebow 2nd Winter Mindins – Mary Johnston Her own favourite short story writers 3rd The Long View – Anne Stormont include Lucia Berlin and Muriel Spark. She Commended: quoted Muriel Spark as saying that a short Trees in Autumn – Beverley Casebow story ‘deals mainly with the middle’. Zoe Sea Eagle – Anne Stormont added to this by saying that you should have very little set-up for the action in a short story – the writer must involve the GENERAL ARTICLE st reader in the ‘middle’ as soon as possible 1 Catherine Sinclair: A Forgotten Scottish and must trust the reader to pick up what Writer – Beverley Casebow is happening. Have one commanding idea nd 2 Park Life – Anne Stormont or theme. 3rd Prickly Wanderers in Bonnyrigg – Joan Sumner Introduce your main character right in the first paragraph, even the first sentence. It SHORT STORY is the characters that drive the plot in a 1st Photo Opportunity – Olga Wojtas short story. Everyone in real life has a 2nd Voice of Tomorrow – Cecilia Rose secret side – so too should your characters, and although you needn’t 3rd Boundaries – Beverley Casebow spell out a character’s most private Highly Commended: thoughts or actions you can hint at them, Nailing It – Anne Stormont have them bubbling underneath. Commended: The Shimmering Shores – Kate Blackadder Zoe asked us to write down three things about ourselves that we are happy to tell YOUNG ADULT NOVEL others – and then to write down three 1st What Monsters Want – Sheila secrets. It was an interesting and useful Adamson exercise, because if you apply that to your 2nd The Murder Game – Dorcas Wilson characters you get to know them better and make them more believable. DRAMATIC MONOLOGUE If your story seems flat she suggested 1st Down the Car Boot – Kate Blackadder nd trying for a change of tense or a change of 2 Mandy – Cecilia Rose viewpoint. Or lob in something rd 3 A Simple Life – Lorna Fraser unexpected and work out how your characters would react. Worried about entering a competition? When reading a story she prefers not to Remember that new members are have too much resolution, not too neat an 2 ending. Leave the reader with an such as letters and diaries to hear how atmosphere in their mind. people used to express themselves. However, a balance has to be struck Margaret Elphinstone between recreating old dialects and leaving your text readable. Take care to Our opening speaker was Margaret avoid modern idioms. One trick she Elphinstone, the author of numerous shared was that when writing about historical novels, including The Sea Road, Vikings she used mostly Germanic root Voyageurs and The Gathering Night words – that gave the impression of a (published by Canongate). rugged pre-Norman language without employing actual Old Norse. Margaret’s approach to historical fiction was surprising in some ways. She revealed But when it comes to using ‘artistic that often she picked the location for her licence’ regarding known facts she advises story first and only then looked for the against. “Someone somewhere always historical time period that would provide knows,” she said. The writer has to accept the most story possibilities. For example, that sometimes inconvenient truths will having lived in Michigan for a year she throw a spanner in the works of the plot decided she wanted to write about the when it turns out that the characters area. She chose the time of the 1812 war simply can’t do what had been planned. between the USA and Canada, also More often than not, this will inspire a bringing in the confrontation between creative solution that is actually better. Europeans and native Ojibwe tribesmen. If this all sounds like a lot of hard work, it Margaret admitted that the themes of her may be worth knowing that it usually books often only became apparent once takes her around four years to complete a she had finished them. Conflict between book. cultures often features in her books, and times of historical change are a natural For Margaret, historical fiction draw for any novelist. complements non-fiction – its mission is not to tell you what happened but to try Research is always crucial for historical to get inside the heads of people in the fiction. Margaret spoke about how past and imagine their inner lives. Her understanding place is as important for preference is to invent all the main her as reading up on facts. She will visit characters in her novels, drawing on real the location and take notes, so that she people from history and real events only can set scenes in real places and describe as background characters and context. them in detail. For example, as research for the book Light, about Victorian To read more about Margaret, see: lighthouse-keepers, she spent time with http://www.margaretelphinstone.co.uk/ bird-ringers on Sule Skerry. A full, tactile description of a stormy petrel features in Valerie Gillies the book, including an evocation of its smell. On 17 October, former Edinburgh Makar Valerie Gillies came to the Club with a She also advised talking to the locals and single mission – to help us overcome our supplementing desk research with oral fear of poetry. She focused on haikus, tradition. To add authenticity to which normally take the form below: characters’ voices, read primary sources 3 5 syllables the National Library of Scotland’s 7 syllables collections to help understand and 5 syllables promote the history of the language. However, it turned out that variations on From this work the website ‘Wee that are allowed (shorter length lines, not Windaes’ has been developed: longer). She demonstrated this through examples of well-turned haikus from http://wee-windaes.nls.uk/ other poets. The key features are: Take a look if you are interested in Scots writers from ages past. As examples, observation Hamish talked about The Buke of the a sense of the season Howlat, possibly the oldest printed book colours and the natural world in Scots. This is a fifteenth century fable some sort of surprise in the final and performance poem featuring an owl, line the Pope and a number of other birds as always in the present tense representations of human society. We punctuation not required also heard about the work of Alexander Wilson, an eighteenth century weaver and Valerie advised that a poem should be like radical from Paisley, who later turned into a photograph of a moment, and should be a respected ornithologist. based on first-hand experience and emotion. Brevity is important and good poets will pare out every redundant word To those who argue that Scots is a dialect to come down to the essence of the rather than a language Hamish counters poem.