Beverly Edited

To whom it concerns, Beverly has just come back from it's editing holiday covered in crossings out and sticky notes. I'll be working on the final, final draft over this summer but it won't be my usual sprint, it will be more like a meandering walk taking in a weekend here and a week evening there - due to a new job that is eating into my work-life balance at the moment.

But I've had a good break from thinking about the story and I'm looking forward to getting back into it with editor's comments, friends comments and a fresh perspective.

Stayed tuned for exciting updates over the summer about book covers and marketing ideas!....

In the meantime, here's the Beverly story so far.

The Do's and Don'ts of The Hook

Earlier this week, my writing group invited literary agents from Greene & Heaton to talk to us about first paragraphs, the do's and don'ts. Before the event, we were able to submit our opening paragraphs for feedback. I submitted the first page of Beverly and arrived for the evening, assuming mine would not be one of the examples chosen for discussion. There's nothing remarkable about the start of Beverly after all, except it turns out there is a remark that can be made - don't do it! I was sitting at the back of the room and strained to listen, taking notes as the comments started out encouragingly - nothing wrong with the writing per se - while a big BUT was clearly looming...

So here's the sample and the feedback:

      Beverly woke up as if arriving from another world. The image from her dream came with her, and for a moment, before moving, she imagined her bed was in a playground. It was a memory, that she had been reliving in her sleep, of being on a roundabout and trying to say stop to the children pushing it – lightly tapping the bars that whizzed around – but only being able to say the ‘S’ and the ‘T’, while the rest of the word was snapped away by the wind. The spinning settled and Beverly shifted to let air in under the covers. Her lungs billowed and a headache began. She was properly awake now and the childhood memory was replaced with memories from the night before. Singing in the taxi – taxi drivers had a hard job – they opened a bottle of wine when they got back – who came home with them? She jerked, reaching a hand out to the cold side of the bed. There was no one there. She retracted her arm with relief.
      Other things came into existence: coffee, a clean tracksuit. She dressed herself with a heavy, detached feeling and then opened her bedroom door. No noise. The T.V. wasn’t on so Ella wasn’t up yet. And no voices from Ella’s bedroom. Beverly moved to the bathroom and then the office. She sat at her desk and shook the mouse to waken her computer. The fan started humming. Beverly checked her email, which was already open on the screen, and then clicked over to Facebook – a shoe ad; a baby picture from Dave; A cat with a human expression from Lucy.
      She knocked on Ella’s bedroom door. The voice was muffled but strong: ‘It’s your turn to go.’
      ‘Shit.’ Beverly whispered, shrinking slightly.

First of all, apparently a lot of us start our stories with a person waking up. This being an irritation for these particular agents - and possibly others - because it's hard to make it interesting if it's going to be the usual mundane steps and we see it in a lot in movies so it has become a cliche. One of the agents was strongly against describing a character's dreams but I got the feeling this was a personal choice. After all, Margaret Atwood uses character dreams and interpretations so I think we can agree it has its place.

Secondly, the switch in the second paragraph left both agents confused. They couldn't see a link between the dream and the following action. This confusion was further deepened with the introduction of Ella. Who is Ella? A daughter? A friend? She is mentioned later with the knock on the door but this doesn't clarify the relationship. Then there's the casual mention of the office - Beverly moves from bedroom to office - does she work from home? Where is she?
 
They did like the last two lines though. These had a hook: what does Beverly have to do that seems to be habitual, but is something she clearly doesn't want to do? Their curiosity kept coming back to this question until they asked if the author was in the room. So I stood up and explained over audience heads what Beverly had to do that she didn't want to do: Go get the coffees, I said. This seemed like an anti-climax, so I added: See, she hates having to speak or interact with people. She has a stutter and tends to rely on Ella a lot. Ah... that made the whole piece clear. That's what the dream is about, I continued, encouraged. Even asleep, she's thinking about her speech. There was nodding at this. It's an emotive idea but it's not clear, one agent said. Gone-Girl-it, he concluded. Gone Girl had been one of the extracts read out before mine. Here it is:

      When I think of my wife, I always think of her head. The shape of it, to begin with. The very first time I saw her, it was the back of the head I saw, and there was something lovely about it, the angles of it. Like a shiny, hard corn kernel or a riverbed fossil. She had what the Victorians would call a finely shaped head. You could imagine the skull quite easily.
      I'd know her head anywhere.
      And what's inside it. I think of that, too: her mind. Her brain, all those coils, and her thoughts shuttling through those coils like fast, frantic centipedes. Like a child, I picture opening her skull, unspooling her brain and sifting through it, trying to catch and pin down her thoughts. What are you thinking, Amy? The question I've asked most often during our marriage, if not out loud, if not to the person who could answer. I suppose these questions stormcloud over every marriage: What are you thinking? How are you feeling? Who are you? What have we done to each other? What will we do? 

I was grateful for the feedback but left feeling a bit unclear about what I was supposed to do. One reason being this: In the next scene of Beverly, which wasn't part of the extract, Beverly comes back from the shops with the coffees and she and Ella chat about the night before. Here it becomes clear that they are old friends, that Beverly relies on Ella introducing her at parties and that Beverly has a stutter. It is also the conversation where Ella admits that Beverly's ex, Roland, has asked her out. Before the workshop, I was thinking the story unfolds pretty fast. So how soon do I really need to get all the facts out? Do they need to be jammed into the first paragraph? That doesn't seem right... Also I was confused because I began to think: Didn't I Gone-Girl-it? The opening paragraphs are the husband thinking about his wife's head, with overtones of violence. In my story Beverly is thinking about her speech. So what's the difference?

It wasn't until I went to bed and was drifting off to sleep that the difference hit me: In Gone Girl, although nothing actually happens in those opening lines, the suggestion of action is there. As this man describes his wife's head we can imagine him hurting her. The passage is foreboding, threatening, creepy and that fires our imagination to think about what he might to do to her. I think when our brain starts to speculate like that, that's when we want to know more - maybe because we want to know if we are right. In the Beverly passage, that speculation doesn't start until the last two lines. So while the dream is representative and we understand its significance later, initially, the information is flat. The brain is taxed with understanding the scene but there's nothing to fire the imagination, make the reader project possibilities, speculate, in other words, get drawn in.

I slept well.

Violence Entertainment

I read this article by Will Self recently where he links Western passivity in the face of the Iraq crisis with a mindless consumption of entertainment violence. It's an old argument that violence on TV desensitises us, making us indifferent to the image of others suffering and it is invoked whenever something horrific happens and we want to explain how we let it happen. But I think it's one big red herring, brought on by a sense of Western guilt: A disgust with our appetite for violence and meaningless entertainment which might be causing plenty of problems but is not necessarily to blame for our attitude towards war. 

If we look at it, it seems violence is a natural component of society. Go back 1000 years, across Western countries, violence was commonplace: duels, tribal feuds, slavery, torture, capital punishment and disease made life cheap. Comparatively speaking, by now we live in sterile, orderly societies where we have swept up all that violence and put it on our TV for entertainment. We can't really imagine that going back to any time where we had more violence on our own streets and less on TV that we had more empathy for others on far away shores?

But let's suppose the argument is correct: violence on TV is impairing our ability to empathise. What is the solution? To ban certain types of violence in entertainment? But where do we draw the line? Entertainment is not our only source of TV violence. We also get it from the News. When I saw someone falling to their death from the Twin Towers I remember thinking that it wouldn't have been shown a few years before because it would have been considered disrespectful. Recently a reporter covering the downing of flight MH17 said they couldn't show some footage from the Ukraine crash sight because there were dismembered bodies. How long before it's okay for that to be shown? I guess the violence for entertainment argument is that if we didn't have violence dished up for fun, we would be suitably shocked by the violence dished up by the News. But wouldn't we also become desensitised to that? How do we expose people to shocking things and keep their sense of shock at the same level? You have to keep getting more shocking.

The most shocking thing I have seen on screen is a picture on Facebook, which I clicked on by accident, showing a scene in the wake of an ISIS massacre, including the image of a beheaded child. It seemed unreal to me, like I was looking at a large, discarded doll. I probably thought of a doll because that's the only way I can relate to such an image. There's a theory that all information we receive we automatically and can only understand in relation to what we already know. If this is the case then is it possible that unless we experience something shocking first-hand and have it thrust into our psyche, we can never muster a suitable reaction to shocking images, instead only relating them, inaccurately, to our own references? I think we have a built-in mechanism to block things out - it's probably necessary for our sanity - imagine if you could picture all the pain and suffering at any one moment in the world? Maybe it's that protective mechanism that makes some images too shocking to process and the viewer click away.

However, I did see some images recently that brought me to make changes in my life: those contained in food documentaries. Suffice to say I'm only buying organic meat from now on and I'm going to try to avoid makeup tested on animals. So why did these images have an affect? Well, I'm directly involved. I'm the consumer supporting how a product is made. Also, I know exactly how to help: I can stop buying those products. In contrast, when it comes to war, I think there is a sense here in the safe zone of helplessness. Not because we trust our Western governments' promise to "fight terror" on our behalf, but because we don't trust them. Hindsight shows over and over that the bodies charged with upholding our moral code are demonstrably corrupt - this inevitably becomes a factor in our reaction.

So I am surprised to hear the old TV violence argument being rolled out to explain our collective apathy when it comes to the Iraq crisis. It's over-simplifying the matter, a red herring and is a culprit in another argument.

The Business of Cards

I did a post just over a year ago about making business cards for Orla's Code, or, The I.T. Girl, as it was then. Without an eye for design I really struggled with a few attempts at this. Recently I came back to the exercise for the updated Orla's Code. Again, I played around with a few formats. I even went fancy with Vista, putting the book cover on one side and the cover again on the other side, but as a water-colour behind the information. It looked nice online but when I received the cards, the information printed over the water-colour was just hard to read. 

Again, companies that produce cards: please let us print samples of different designs. Fifty cards that all have the same fatal space aren't that much help to me.

So I went back to moo.com and after more experiments, I went back to the advice given on the previous post above and would now like to add this bit of advice to the list: if like me you don't have a flair for layout then just make sure everything is even. With the blurb I went to quite a bit of trouble to write something that fitted perfectly on the card so that every piece of information is separated by exactly one line. I also tried to keep the width of the writing consistent and I think this adds to the sense of symmetry. So that's all I got - keep it symmetrical!  Oh, and simple. I tried varying the font, I tried making my website information a different colour/size so that it would stand out. I found it hard to tell looking at it online but when I held these cards in my hands, I could just see the design looked odd - amateur.

Here's the final result. On the upside, after all this messing, producing cards for Beverly is going to be quick!

Beverly, Draft 3

And now, draft 3 of Beverly is finished! The last few weeks have gone quite smoothly overall with lots of editing and re-reading and a little research. Sending it to friends to proof-read draws a real line under the work and stops me from tweaking here and there. I'll be going back to polish off a final draft in December, with my fresh perspective plus friends' feedback.

In the meantime, I can't promise to leave it alone entirely. I'll be thinking about the synopsis and blurb and already I find myself saving draft text messages with thoughts. 

For now, here's the first draft of the blurb. Please don't judge a book by it's initial blurb! This is just a starting point. As with Orla's Code, I'll probably change it about a million times before I'm happy.

Beverly has made her life manageable. Her best friend and flatmate, Ella, answers the phone, answers the door and introduces Beverly at parties. She could be jealous of Ella's gregarious charm and the spotlight she lives under, except her long-term boyfriend Roland provides romance and security and means she never has to face the dating scene. She works from home and only corresponds by email because she has a bad stutter.

We join Beverly's story six months after Roland has broken it off. Ella has been her rock more than ever but on this regular Sunday morning, as they dissect the night before, Ella confesses that Roland has asked her on a date and she intends to say yes. Beverly is ready to end their friendship. But shortly after, she is faced with a bigger dilemma: she has to do a presentation at Work or lose her job. Now she needs Ella's help more than ever...

Thoughts and comments are of course welcome.

Back Stories: Beverly, Roland and Ella

I have finished draft 2 of my short novel Beverly and now have a checklist of things I want to fix and enhance for draft 3 which I hope to have ready for my proof-readers - er, I mean my friends, in a few months time. Exciting! For me.

We join Beverly's story as she and Ella - her old friend and flatmate - have a falling out that threatens to end their friendship. A deal is struck over their crisis but as the story unfolds, resentments come to light and Beverly faces the unknown, watching her carefully structured life unravel in every way.

The three main characters meet in college and though there are flashbacks to this time, the story is set in present day. I have written the below biographies to share more of these characters with you, since posting character descriptions back in March. Most of the information here will not be in the book as it's irrelevant to the story but back stories help grow characters in the mind of the writer, so I thought it would be fun to share them.

Beverly

Beverly went to a large school in a small town. Her parents were religious and older than the other children's parents. They had a quiet house and Beverly found school overwhelming; All the noise and talking, she felt rushed and preferred to play by herself. But her parents and teachers were concerned and so she made an effort to be amongst other children on the playground. Her first memory of stuttering was asking to go to the toilet during class. She remembers the other children's curious eyes and a worried look on her teacher's face that pushed her glasses down her nose. Beverly felt ashamed but she pretended she didn't mind. She did well academically and tried to keep her parents from worrying or praying more! She didn't believe in God, and even young, she was surprised by faith.

Luckily, Beverly thought, she never had to change schools and be the new girl. She was part of the old gang in her school, as new children joined. Never confrontational but sometimes sarcastic and funny behind a teacher's back, Beverly was accepted, a bit like a pet, to be looked after. Finally she found a way to express herself, online, as gaming communities and chat rooms were growing. She became drawn to coding sites where she could compete on programming problems and convinced her parents to get her a computer.

School discos were a particular hell for Beverly who would try to fit in by hovering around a group of girls she knew. Until she discovered how easy it was to entice boys - not the gorgeous looking boys but the ones to the side, like her. Words were not needed - only a look that held an offer. Though she enjoyed the moments of relief in french kissing, she never had an actual boyfriend.

Instead, she dreamed of leaving home, creating her own, independent life without having to perform or pretend. Going to college was the first step. And there she met Roland and Ella.

Ella

When Ella was a little girl she went to a talent school during the holidays and danced on stage. She loved making people smile and she loved to be charming. It made her feel kind and good. She grew up with three older brothers and played with their cars and soldiers and later with their games console. She discovered coding through a games community and when she worked on coding problems, found it made her forget about other things so afterwards she would have a feeling of peace. Being behind a computer became her quiet time which was a relief from her otherwise fast-paced, sociable life.

Ella fell in love when she was 15. She was taller than most of the boys in her class, including her boyfriend. People made funny comments about it and she wasn't sure if it bothered her. But she really liked him and forgot about it after a while. They lasted a year. Ella would say he was jealous and cramped her style. But really she fancied Ron, who had joined her school mid-year. He was funny and became popular quickly. When he asked her to go for a walk after school and then asked her in the park if she wanted to go out, she thought her life was falling into place. They hung out with their friends and went to the cinema. But he was mean to her in private. She thought he misunderstood her so she tried to be more sensitive. But when they became sexual he said things to put her down - like that she was self-centred and if she had short hair she would look like a boy. She watched a TV programme about abusive relationships and realised this was a bit like that. So she tried to help him to see what he was like so that he could be happier but instead she became more miserable. Ron broke up with her just before the end of school dance. She saw it as her failing for a while but over time, her mind kept presenting the facts in new ways until she realised it wasn't her fault. She decided to keep things casual from then on and only date the less serious types. As a determined party girl, before college she bought new clothes and got highlights in her hair. She wanted to be a glamorous computer programmer. That would be her thing. 

Roland

Roland is from Amsterdam. Like Ella, he has three older brothers, with a 7 year gap between him and the second youngest, Eric who was the rebel of the family, skipping school and getting involved in drugs. When Roland saw him high he would think Eric was the same but different and it would upset him. There were bad fights at home. Eric talked about making documentaries but as Roland grew he began to hate Eric's carelessness with his own life and the pain he caused. Instead he looked up to the two older boys - the twins - and tried to be included with them, acting older than his years. When Eric died in a motorbike accident, Roland went to live with the twins for a time, while his parents tried to reconstruct a healthy living environment for him. Later on, Roland's father, Peiter, told Roland that he had been like Eric when he was young. His father, Roland's grandfather had died a soldier on duty and a psychologist told Peiter he was acting out as a result of not having a father - to express the pain of missing his father. After that, Peiter took an interest in psychology and that became his profession. Peiter said he should have been able to save Eric. Like his dad, Roland also has an analytical brain and likes solving problems. He applied his to computers.

Roland was an earnest student who kept an amicable distance from his class mates and was a bit too intense for girls. As a good looking boy he was able to take their interest for granted and unfairly belittled their attention, but he had a crush on one of the twins' girlfriends and eventually dated her younger sister, Tabatha, who was 2 years his senior. They had an on again - off again relationship. Both cheated on the other and Roland was torn between a restlessness and a desire for security. Tabatha broke up with him when she finished school. Roland's parents decided the best thing for him would be to start somewhere new and he was sent to live with his uncle in London. There he went to college and met Beverly and Ella.

What Can Be

A great thing about writing and having work published is getting to be a part of literary magazines. Each one has its own view on what makes literature interesting and how it should be presented. There's always a buzz around each magazine because everyone involved is in it for the love of words. I was really excited last year to have my poem What Can Be become a runner-up in the Thynks Healing Poems competition! Now it is part of the Thynks anthology Little Book of Healing and I have just bought my copy from Amazon here.

Thynks is relatively new and already publishing a broad scope of prose and poetry, with a focus on compassion and healing. Check out their website  for other anthologies and information.

Also, click here to see my poem, What Can Be.