While I’m still thinking about what to do with Alice in Wheelchairland, whether I’ve made the right call with waiting for this agent or not, I’ve been prepping to write Martin and The Flood next month. I’ve given myself a deadline to worldbuild by. Saying this, I know I’m a bit of a “pantser” (someone who flies by the seat of their pants) as well as a “plotter,” and I can’t predict what will happen in the writing. I get anxious if I don’t know what I’m doing but I’m becoming less and less worried. I guess it’s all about practice, knowing who you are and how you work best. That’s just part of growing up and the journey, isn’t it? (Or is it inhabiting the mind of the characters? Martin is much more ordered and worried than Alice).

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Yesterday I went to a final celebration creative writing workshop with the author Kit de Waal for Wimbledon Bookfest. I’ve written blog posts before about Wimbledon Bookfest’s creative writing workshop I went to in the spring. Blog Post 34. talks about the short story I wrote called ‘Martin and The Flood’ which was the basis of the idea for the novel I want to write. Kit de Waal gave us a crash-course in writing a novel that I found extremely helpful. In essence, a story establishes a character who wants something but there is conflict so that they don’t get what they want, until a final resolution that she said should be a balance of surprising but inevitable.

I feel like I’ve done enough courses now that I knew this, but it was a great reminder to hear it summed up so succinctly. As part of the class, our work was printed in a little booklet called ‘Writers of Merton’ (Merton being the London borough that Wimbledon is in). I really enjoy seeing my writing in print! I was sitting next to someone who’d been in my class in the spring, and she had remembered the world of ‘Martin and The Flood’ from when I read it in class and she asked me if I would do more with it. I have to now!

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Part of me doesn’t want to start writing Martin and The Flood until I know what is happening with Alice in Wheelchairland, but I don’t think I’ll have that luxury. It was very inspiring to hear Kit de Waal’s story of how she became author. She wrote a few books before she was actually published and had a formative brutal rejection by an agent. She’s not the first author I’ve heard of who was summoned to the capital by publishing only to be told to her face that this book is not the one.

I really hope that doesn’t happen to me, but I guess being emotionally prepared for the ups and downs is helpful though, as nothing surprises me anymore. You just have to make choices and get on with your life and not let writing be the most important thing to you. I think gifts are just that, things we good at that serve us in life. We don’t serve them. I’d love to work with an editor though, as I want to learn more about how to structure a novel. I’m aware that concept and timing are things you can’t control, but learning the craft is! I feel like I acknowledge that I’m at the beginning and am ready to start the next step on the path ahead!
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(Featured Image is an illustration by Tove Jansson for the front cover of Lars Bäckström’s edited essay collection, Under Välfärdens Yta: Litterärt under femtitalet (Beneath the Veneer of Well-Being: The Literary in The Fifties), 1959)