I was about to post my latest (and probably final) information about Douglas Gordon Bruce, for my Mystery Challenge,
when I was suddenly whisked back to the end of June last year, at the Winchester Writers Conference, where the indomitable Director of the Conference, Barbara Large, MBE, kindly invited me to attend the plenary address on the Saturday morning, and say a few words about Novel Press and Paper Lanterns.

I was looking on the Conference website to see if the details of this year’s event had been published there yet, and I was reminded of an interview I’d given in the previous year. Some of the university students had been allocated the task of interviewing delegates from that year’s event.

I had walked out after Sir Terry Pratchett’s address to the conference into the blazing sunshine and was immediately accosted by a small group of young people wielding photographic instruments: Would I be willing to answer a few questions about why I was there, and what advice might I give to other aspiring writers?

When it comes to an opportunity for me to talk about writing in general (and mine in particular!) I’m not likely to turn it down, so I rattled on for several minutes, until I came to a natural ending. The interviewers were university students, and it was their project to make a record of the weekend for the university archives, with special reference to Terry Pratchett.

After that, I forgot all about it, so when I saw the yellow boxes on the left of the screen, I clicked on the one that was labelled ‘Delegates reactions to the 2010 WW Conference’. I started watching with interest, but without really expecting to see myself there.

I have to admit, that I did cringe a bit at the sight of me, jabbering away, seemingly non-stop. But on the other hand, I had to give myself some credit for being able talk off the cuff like that. Watching and listening a couple of times, I was slightly reassured to find that the words I’d spoken then were more or less what I’d say now, nearly a year later, (especially my final comment in the second section, on advice to other writers).

Although I’ve seen myself in action on a screen a few times, I don’t think I’ll ever get over the weird sensation of seeing myself in action, and what I must look like to others. Fortunately, I don’t give that a moment’s thought in everyday life! I was impressed by the clarity and calmness of the other five speakers – I wonder if any of them have had similar feelings.

I was pleased to see a pleasant man I’d had a conversation with, the evening before. He’d told me a little about his published book and it sounded very entertaining, but I’d forgotten all about him and his writing till I saw him on the video, so I was pleased to hear the title of his book, ‘Vet in Prospect’ and was able to find it on Amazon. I was delighted to hear that he’d landed a three-book deal as a result of attending the conference.

As you can see from the start of the video, he is not the only writer who has owed his success to this Conference over the last 30 years. I would heartily recommend this event to anyone who is serious about their own writing. There’s always a wealth of useful and encouraging information. Above all, it’s great fun!

If you haven’t yet read my latest posts about the photos and letters from China in the early 1900s that inspired the middle section of my second novel, Paper Lanterns, you might find some of this a bit confusing. (This picture shows the small treaty port of Kongmoon, where several of the pictures were taken.)

To be honest, I’m finding it quite hard to put all these snippets of information into some kind of cohesive whole, so that readers might be able to help me with my Mystery Challenge:

Now that I’m looking back at the process of writing the novel – creating fiction out of real-life letters and snapshots , it’s beginning to seem that Mark Twain was right when he said, ‘Truth is stranger than fiction.’ Whether or not that is true, I’m finding it more difficult to manage than fiction – In my novels I am free to invent what I like but it’s a different matter with these tantalising glimpses of people’s lives nearly a century ago.

Perhaps my best way of presenting the ‘truth’ is to show you the letters, one by one. All of this material must have been part of the effects of Douglas Gragg Bruce (d.o.b. unknown, but certainly the early to mid 1890s) as they were all in a box of papers and photos acquired by my husband.

I’ll start with Bessie, because hers were the first that I read. The final of these five letters was written by her close friend, Margaret Hartle, dated September 1920. From other material, I can assume that Bessie’s letters were written from Canton.

Ah, you are a disturber! What do you mean by upsetting the equilibrium of two highly respectable (!) ladies in their heretofore blissful states of married and single blessedness? And two at once, mind you! And you so young and all. The poor young idlers that we endeavour to teach to shoot must certainly not have got their money’s worth this morning, and now at our first opportunity (recess) we two rush together to weep on each other’s shoulders for what we haven’t got and will never get. It’s a great bond, this being crazy about the same person. I only hope I’ll be able to preserve enough of a sense of decency from the wreck to give her the chance I wish I could take myself.
Does it sicken you to hear me rave? Perhaps if I make an utter ass of myself , you’ll leave me be – which is what I want of course. Any idiot can see that that is all I want.

Margaret can’t come to dinner on Saturday so if you want to change our places and go have tea with her in the afternoon, it will be all right. I’ll take a walk with you Sunday morning. She is going with her mother to Pack Hok Fung sometime Saturday afternoon so you won’t be embarrassed by having us both picking on you at the same time. You’d better write her a chit and invite yourself to have tea with her, and if she doesn’t take you up, you can come along here as we planned. Will you bring Bing with you? I mean it. I thoroughly detest you.
Good bye
The only object of this letter was to tell you that I found the hat & coat in the suitcase)

I haven’t yet been able to identify the woman above, but I like to think it could be Bessie’s friend, Margaret.

I am hoping that once I’ve posted more information and photos, some of you might be able to find someone who knows someone who might know something about a descendant of someone who knew some of these people!

THERE’S A FREE COPY OF PAPER LANTERNS FOR ANYONE WHO CAN DISCOVER MORE ABOUT THIS INTRIGUING LOVE STORY.

This week there’ve been two quite separate items that have made me ponder the art of re-writing. The first was from a poetry blog, describing a process of drafting and re-drafting that chimed with my own experiences of bringing a poem to completion.(I’ll be giving a link to that in my next post) The second was an article in this Wednesday’s Times 2, and it made me wince. To be more accurate, it was the subject of the piece (Jeffrey Archer) that had this effect on me, (not its writer (Erica Wagner).

I’m all for re-writing both prose and poetry as many times as it takes to reach the state of being ‘as good as it can be’. The real difficulty is identifying the bits that need to be changed or cut out entirely.

I’m often asked how long it took me to write my first published novel, The Dangerous Sports Euthanasia Society(my third novel for adults). I never have the full story plotted out from beginning to end – I have a general idea of where I’m heading, but I write in order to find out what my characters actually do and how they achieve this. I tend to do a lot of editing as the story unfolds, and I enjoy honing the pages the following day almost more than creating each new scene. It’s an integral part of the creative process for me.

The Dangerous Sports has 87,000 words (308 pages) but the original version was over 20,000 words longer. Click here to read more about how I made the novel much stronger by doing this. When it finally set out on its journey as a published book, it was, in spite of any shortcomings, a done deal.

What I’ve had to learn all over again, with my soon-to-be-published next novel, Paper Lanterns, is that re-writing each section at least once (and often three or four times) as I work my way towards a satisfactory conclusion of the novel, does NOT mean that this version is anything other than a first draft. I’ll expand on that in another post.

Paper Lanterns hasn’t yet been sent to the printers – there are a few more things to be sorted first, such as copy editing, and the cover design – something that’s put me into in a state of high excitement as I’ve only just received some initial ‘visuals’. I’ll be posting these and other versions here soon and will welcome readers’ views.

But getting back to the re-writing - I still feel fully justified in tweaking parts of some of the scenes in this novel, because it’s still in manuscript form and is yet to be delivered into the world as a finished product. Once it’s been printed and bound, with a lovely front cover and informative back cover, and all the pages in between, there’ll be no more re-writing.

What really made me wince in the Times article was an extract from Archer’s re-written book, Kane and Abel. I read it when it came out thirty years ago, and quite enjoyed it as an escapist read. I hadn’t thought it was presenting itself as anything other than that, and I would never have imagined that he would have bothered to write the whole thing again – especially if his explanation for doing so was really the true reason: “30 years later one is a better craftsman, one is better at one’s job’. I’d have thought that a ‘better craftsman’ would have preferred to demonstrate his improved craftmanship by writing a completely new novel.

I could go on, but I think that this article is available on the Times On-line, if anyone wants to find it. As for the art of re-writing, there’s a lot more to be said about the part it plays in the creation of a poem or a novel and still lots more for me to learn.

At the end of a long and exhausting week at work, it was lovely to leave it all behind and settle down at my own computer, where I can get back to Writing Matters. I felt I deserved a treat this evening – the first week of returning to work after the summer break, is the one week I least look forward to of all the fifty two. I’ll tell you about the treat that was waiting for me, once I’ve got this rant off my chest.

Nothing changes, when it comes to preparations for the autumn term in Adult Education – it’s always hectically busy, and there’s always new information that we, the middle managers, must explain to the hard-pressed tutors at pre-enrolment meetings, with little or no time to digest the implications of the increased complexity of the paperwork they’ll have to use. And, as usual, the printed versions of all the documents they must learn to use and love, are not yet ready for distribution.

Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose - I had to look up the second part of this, because once someone knows that saying, the first three words are usually enough. And that’s enough of my (very long ago) school-girl French.

The biggest difficulty for me at this time of year, is trying to shunt my brain back onto the right track, so it can deal with everything I have to accomplish before next Monday. My memory of all the tasks I had planned for so clearly and carefully at the end of July had dissolved into dreamlike mist, as if a decade had passed, instead of just one month.

That’s definitely enough of that. And anyway, it’s not really all that bad. Just that I’d far prefer to be writing a novel or a poem, and for the next few weeks, I’ll be up to my eyes in ‘work’ work.

It feels like a long time since I’ve mentioned anything about my own novel writing. The last time was in my post
Transita and a Change of Title

The treat I’ve come home to was clicking on to one of my favourite writing sites - Essential Writers - and there it was, the article that Judy had invited me to write. It fills in the few months between having my book accepted by the publisher, and the actual publication date.