Write Through The Roof | For writers who want to improve their writing

Interview with alternative history novelist Alison Morton

‘Exercise your writing muscle in different ways on different days.’

• 30% plotter and 70% pantser
• Black moments: when it all falls apart for the main character
• Writing versus marketing
• Tea imported in from England – sergeant major’s tea
• Wanted to explore female-led action stories with a Roman flavour. But needed to create an alternative history world to feature strong female leaders. Values, betrayal, rebellion, resilience
• Alternative history research: taking history and twisting it but anchoring back to the facts.
• Using historical logic – what would have happened if?
• Collaborating with other writers, exchanging ideas, being accepting and giving
• A team effort to produce a book
• Robert Harris’ Fatherland, William Boyd’s Restless, Sebastian Faulks, Lindsay Davis, Georgette Heyer
• Aurelia: going back to write the backstory of the grandmother of the main character of the Carina Mitela series
• Writing short stories and novellas

‘30% plotter and 70% pantser.’

‘You do need other people to get a successful book out.’

• Alison Morton – website
• Alison on Twitter
• Alison on Facebook

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Podcast interview with historical novelist, Clare Flynn

‘Read everything I could get my little hands on.’

• Instinctive pantser who occasionally tries to plot
• The first book took 15 years to write but now tries to be more disciplined
• Writes most days
• Two solutions if the words are hard – walk away or force herself to write
• ‘Edit as you go’ person
• Once a week writing group to share work-in-progress
• Nanowrimo – to kick start a book or finish a book off
• Tea, coffee and water and wine o’clock
• Displacement: theme comes from childhood experiences, relationship problems, PTSD and impact of war, self discovery, religious bigotry
• Reading: taught to read by her father
• Learnt from editor; tough but also positive
• Read aloud
• Writing two books at once; keeps the writing fresh
• Classics: Hardy, Brontes, Anya Seton, Jean Plaidy, Agatha Christie, Mary Stewart, Tolstoy, Zola, Kate Atkinson, Amor Towles, historical research
• Hybrid publishing
• Storms Gather Between Us

‘A competitive person, even if the competition is myself.’

‘It’s got to have highs & lows and lights & darks.’

• Clare Flynn
• On Amazon
• On Facebook, Instagram & Twitter

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Interview with horror and fantasy writer Christopher Ruz

‘Look for people who are one or two stages ahead of where you’re at.’

• Doesn’t know how to write short stories any more.
• Tries to write every day – most productive when writing every day
• Rituals – encasing in a bubble, getting rid of visual distraction and white noise.
• Pomodoro method – 100 words every 5 minutes.
• Themes – horror-based but fantasy and sci-fi. But also spy fiction
• A narrow focus on character – even with epic fantasy using a single narrator.
• Using a single narrator to create tension with a timeline
• Finding a group of writers who were better than him
• Penny Arcade, Discord, Reddit, Twitter
• Dictation in the car with a lapel mic
• Cormac McCarthy, Emma Osborne, NK Jemesin, James SA Corey
• China Mieville and Joe Hill – horror short stories
• The Ragged Blade – epic fantasy – inspired by a vivid dream – started as a short story
• All These Shiny Worlds
• Working on The Ragged Blade 2 (yet unnamed)
• Originally self-published the first two parts of The Ragged Blade
• The journey from self-published to traditionally published

‘The novel is the lazy form’

‘Every change they recommended made it a better story’

• Christopher Ruz on Twitter
• Christopher Ruz’s website

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Interview with best-selling romance & mystery writer Toby Neal

‘People are preoccupied by crime because we want to recognise the wolves in our midst’

• Writing is like a muscle – needs regular workouts
• 2000 words a day target
• Both a plotter and a pantser. More pantser for romance and plotter for mysteries
• Recording affirmations and listening prior to writing session
• Themes of good versus evil and the shades of grey in everyone and how love can overcome a multitude of problems
• Dark themes but with hope – fascinated with the duality between dark and light
• Mastering your craft – Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell – the 10,000 hour rule
• Take off your pants – Libbie Hawker – the hero needs to find a cure for their flaw
• Unconventional childhood – Memoir – Freckles
• Putting off writing goals for security – started with an anonymous blog – using real life experience as a school counsellor
• Speeding up the writing process
• Dictation, health and accessing creative brain by writing longhand
• Where the Crawdads Sing – Delia Owens, The Outlander series – Diana Gabaldon
• Wired Truth: multi-cultural kick-ass female main character. Pushing the envelope for what’s acceptable with female behaviour. Experimenting with different kinds of love.

‘Nothing but writing is going to make you a better writer’

‘I tried to do literary fiction and I bored myself by page 40’

• Toby Neal

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‘The best kind of fairies, you know, the nasty ones’

• A natural pantser but learning to plot and outline. A structure helps to hit the right beats
• Making notes every day but not writing every day
• Tea and chocolate – freckles
• Connection between music and writing: lyrical and poetic.
• Themes of lack of belonging, search for self or a home, life and music
• Learning that the language is secondary to the story and the interaction between characters gives rise to the plot
• Writing novellas: taking up an opportunity
• Jeanette Winterson, Patricia McKillip, Margaret Atwood, Neil Gaiman, Angela Slater
• Importance of word of mouth for recommendations
• Portals and evil fairies in ‘Silver String in between worlds’
• Novella for Broken Cities shared world for Falstaff Books.
• Upcoming stories in Syntax & Salt Magazine

‘The language is inseparable from the story itself’

‘It’s a good thing to learn your bad habits.

• Suzanne J Willis

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‘We need to figure out our own path and plod along steadily.’

• Benefit from writing both fiction and non-fiction: entertainment v exploring own worries
• Take a day off once a week
• Tea – English breakfast with milk
• Bacon controversy
• Fiction – light-hearted escapist women’s fiction but dealing with finding yourself as a person before getting in a relationship.
• Quirky cultural differences between the UK and the US.
• Non-fiction – productivity for writers – purposeful productivity.
• Comparisonitis. Humans learn by comparing.
• Listening to her own advice.
• Mindfulness – catch own thinking before it spirals out of control. Ten-minute daily meditation – listen to own breath.
• Dividing week into blocks of time. Writing, business, promotion and marketing.
• Creating a parking lot for ideas
• Jane Austen, Marian Keyes, Emily Giffin, Laura Vanderkam, Gretchen Rubin
• Indie With Ease
• Ten Things my Husband Hated

‘Try to compare when you’re having a positive day.’

‘I’m definitely not sitting there on a fluffy cloud of zen.’

• Pauline Wiles

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‘I find inspiration but analyse the inspiration to speed up the process’

• Type of writing depending on mood and deadline
• Both a plotter and a pantser – wearing two hats
• Successful writers are very productive
• Writers being hermits
• Winning a competition but having an unsatisfying experience with a Hollywood guru
• Explaining the story craft without telling the writer what to do
• Storification – what jumps off the page and lives in the reader’s mind e.g a moral message in a fairy tale
• The author doesn’t need to know the ending half as much as they need to know how the story storifies. Then you can work backwards.
• Encoding knowledge gaps which are decoded by the receiver (the reader) as meaning
• Leaving gaps makes the reader create meaning in their own mind – puzzles for the reader to do the work
• PG Wodehouse – books released after his death
• The Primary Colours of Story coming out in 2019

‘He’d been rubbish but he became a genius because he worked’

• David Baboulene’s website
• David on Twitter

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‘I didn’t get published until I was 50.’

• Written 35+ murder mystery novels as a pantser
• Coffee or gin
• Themes of natural burials & anti-technology.
• British cosy mysteries featuring a village pub.
• Mobile phones affecting crime stories & the inclusion of drones
• Practice – millions & millions of words
• Writing groups didn’t help
• Mentoring others helps own writing – seeing the good & bad in aspiring writers
• Brutal feedback
• Long apprenticeships & writing competitions
• Biography of Sabine Baring-Gould – writer of ‘Onward Christian Soldiers’
• Research – a lot of research done for the biography & historical fiction but little research for murder mysteries
• Celia Fremlin (domestic suspense), Agatha Christie, Lee Child, Kate Atkinson, William de Morgan
• Settings – real & fictitious
• The Grasmere Grudge, Secrets in the Cotswolds, the Patterdale Plot
• One draft

‘Readers don’t mind if they think their house is the scene of a murder.”

‘I only really do one draft.’

• www.rebeccatope.com

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Welcome to Write Through The Roof, the podcast for writers who want to improve their craft.

‘Don’t bore the reader. Don’t annoy the reader. Don’t confuse the reader.’

• Do something on the manuscript every day
• Being a rebel and going with the flow
• Writing after 4pm and into the evening
• Themes – down to earth, gritty and difficult topics – sex, religion and politics. Duality in the problems the characters face.
• Writing workshops – the value is not the critiques you receive but what you learn from reading other people’s work. The bigger the group the better
• Handling critiques
• Online Writing Workshop for Science-Fiction, Fantasy and Horror
• The three rules for writing; don’t bore the reader, don’t annoy the reader & don’t confuse the reader.
• Concentrate on telling a good story. Get a reader and an editor and don’t sweat the small stuff.
• Non-fiction reading – the psychology of marketing and political biographies. In fiction, writers who can write across genres – Harry Potter/Robert Galbraith
• Ambassador series – different ecosystems, politics and conspiracies, action, Kiwis in space. Currently working on book 9.

‘It is up to you. It’s not up to them to write your book.’

‘It is a fantasy setting but it obviously has reverberations in the real world.’

• Patty Jansen

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Welcome to Write Through The Roof, the podcast for writers who want to improve their craft.

‘Tell us what characters think about what they’re seeing.’

• Writing the type of fiction she’d like to read
• Defining ‘weird fiction’
• Science facts writing and reading informs science-fiction
• The benefits of writing a poem a week
• Coffee with milk
• Themes of real-life loss and trauma mixed with the supernatural
• Epiphany during a Clarion Writing Workshop – learning about the five-point plot structure
• Using description as an opportunity to reinforce characterisation – what matters most is what the character thinks about what they’re seeing.
• Popular fiction and literary fiction
• Writing a space opera web serial – Broken Eye book Patreon – Eyedelon Magazine
• Launchpad workshop – astronomy for writers
• Caitlin R Kiernan, Christa Faust
• Garden of Eldritch Delights – a collection of fantasy, science fiction & horror stories. Batching up stories of similar themes
• Next up is the fourth book in the Jessie Shimmer urban fantasy series
  
  

‘Poetry is great cross-training’

• www.lucysnyder.com

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