The Wrong Handle by Sheena Wilkinson

 Writing is so weird. 

This time last year I finished a book. Nothing weird about that; I'm a writer. My agent sent it on submission. Nobody bit in the first round – sadly, nothing weird about that either, these days. But this wasn’t the usual ‘it’s too quiet to be commercial and too accessible to be literary’ verdict. Instead there was a suggestion that the book lacked something more fundamental; people didn’t even like the pitch.

I wasn’t thrilled, obviously: in my mind I had written a fine historical novel, women-centred, gritty and heartfelt. Exactly the kind of book I – and, I thought, thousands of women, liked to read. But that didn’t seem to be what editors were picking up on. My agent was keen to pull the book from submission rather than flogging a dead horse. I was working on three something elses – True Friends at Fernside and Miss McVey Takes Charge, which came out in the second half of last year, and an untitled and troublesome dual timeline, so the fiction-writing-and-editing part of my brain was not idle.

Sometime, my agent and I agreed, I would have a good look at the abandoned book and see if I could rejig the pitch to make it more appealing/commercial. I didn’t envisage having to do a major rewrite. 

And then, on retreat in December, I read the book again for the first time in months. Not only did I now agree that there was something fundamental missing; I knew was it was. Not only that, but all the ingredients to make the book hookier, tenser and darker were already there. Always had been. There was even – something new for me – a murder. Or rather, there was a death which I – the writer – hadn’t realised was a murder. As for the murderer? Well, she’d been there all the time too. 

my view on retreat 

I’d love to say that I rewrote the book quickly, that my agent fell upon it with glee, that six editors went into battle for it and that it sold at auction for squillions and became the book that revolutionised my career and my fortunes. I mean, that might happen; if I didn’t believe that such things were possible I wouldn’t still be a novelist. So far, after that wonderful week on retreat when so much revealed itself to me, it’s been a matter of trying to steal an hour here and there in between mentoring, teaching, report-writing and school visits.

the kind of thing that stops me writing all day every day 

But every few days I realise something new about the story – sometimes I even wake up with it in my head, and I feel so glad of the chance to remake it. I’m reminded of Cousin Helen’s advice in What Katy Did. Not everything saintly Cousin Helen says has stood the test of time, but her idea that ‘Everything in the world has two handles… One is a smooth handle. If you take hold of it, the thing comes up lightly and easily, but if you seize the rough handle, it hurts your hand and the thing is hard to lift’ fits in very neatly with my book.

I had got hold of the story by the wrong handle and I couldn’t grasp it easily. Now I have the right handle and it’s only a matter of time. 

There's still hope for those squillions! 

 

Puzzling

I wonder whether other SASSIES suffer from the same problem I'm regularly confronted with?

I have an idea for a story. I start to write and the ideas flow. I'm enjoying myself. But when I reach - roughly - the halfway point, the ideas that got me going just... dry up. I sit there, trying to think of ways to proceed and everything I come up with feels wrong. I might even write it. But it keeps feeling wrong. 

And I know it.

What started out as fun becomes anything but.

I haven't found a solution yet.

An Ordinary War

 This year, I am planning to publish a book which has been a very long time in the making. It's inspired by the experiences of my father during the war: he was one of those who didn't get away at Dunkirk. He was captured on the way, and was a prisoner of war for five years.

Like many - probably most - survivors of war, he didn't talk very much about his experiences. Eventually, he began to tell a few stories, mostly funny ones. Towards the end of the last century, when I started writing seriously, I began to write some of them down. We would sit by the fire drinking whisky - me with ginger, him with water - and he would talk about things that happened in the forests of Poland all those years ago. Often, the stories were the same ones repeated: sometimes, his face would darken, and he would say something that hinted at grimmer truths. Once, we were talking about eating - he always ate hearty meals, but never snacked, never put on weight. He said something to the effect of: "You don't know what you're capable of until you've been really hungry." And then lapsed into silence, clearly remembering things that he wasn't going to talk about.

Some time after he died (which was in 2004), I decided I wanted to write a novel based on his experiences. Because the books I was writing were for children and young people, it seemed natural to aim it at young adults. I soon realised that there were massive gaps in my knowledge about what had happened to him, and I began to do research. I'm not a trained researcher, I'm not an academic - I have a degree, but it's in English, not history. So it was an exploration, perhaps, rather than an investigation.

And it was fascinating, and immensely rewarding.

I will write more in future posts about this process. But in this one, I just want to tell you about one little thing - the thing that, if I was trying to be poetic, I could say fanned what was a spark into a flame.

I knew that at the end of the war, Dad had ended up in a camp called Fallingbostell, in north-western Germany, from which he was liberated and then repatriated. In a book I was reading called The Last Escape (a wonderful book, by John Nichol and Tony Rennell), I came across a picture of several emaciated prisoners sitting on the ground, smiling and chatting. One of them looked very much like Dad. The photo was attributed to the Imperial War Museum, so I rang them up to see if they could tell me any more about the men in the picture.

They suggested I should make an appointment to go and see someone there, so I did.

They couldn't tell me any more about the identities of the men in the picture, but they did give me useful suggestions about other avenues I could follow. Their first suggestion was to go to the National Archives in Kew. Every prisoner who came home was supposed to fill in a form, detailing how they'd been treated, which prison camps they'd been in and so on - information which I didn't have.

So off I trotted to Kew, and explained what I was after. The assistant warned me tat the records were not complete: everyone was supposed to fill in a form, but not everyone did. My heart sank. A trait I shared with my father was a deep dislike of form filling. There wouldn't be one for him, I felt sure.

The assistant produced for me a large folder - I expect now that everything's online, but that wasn't the case then - containing the forms for Dad's section of the alphabet. I turned the pages carefully, aware that this was a precious resource, not really expecting to find one for Dad.

But then, there it was. Reginald Bernard Course. I hadn't expected it to be in his handwriting, instantly recognisable from all the letters I'd received over the years. And it wasn't just the handwriting. The answers were brief and to the point, and some were quite brusque. I could absolutely picture Dad, impatient with forms and pen-pushers, wanting to be away, wanting to go home, not interested in making a fuss about what had happened to him. I could almost hear his voice.  I stared at the form, and tears came. I wiped them away surreptitiously, and hoped that no-one had seen.

Brief as the form was, it gave me some answers. it told me where he'd been. It told me he'd tried to escape, three times, once with his old pal Shep, whom I'd taken him to see a few years before.

And it gave me the urge to carry on, to follow the trail.

On deadlines & writing deliciousness - Rowena House

Oops! Long time no post. Apologies. My excuse: I’m finally on a deadline after nigh on six years nibbling away at my seventeenth-century witch trial work-in-progress, with three (max four) months to get Draft 1 developed, polished, and proof read, including an entirely new narrative perspective on the same events, told in alternate chapters, decided upon last year.

So, about one quarter to one third of a novel to write in three/months. That’s do-able, right?

The writing gods are [ATM] being kind in letting me get on with it, but that’s very unlikely to last on recent form with life duties, so I’m writing and editing daily whenever I can.  

Updates on RowenaHouseAuthor on Facebook if anyone feels like joining me for this last dash, followed by more reflective thoughts about the story, its history, how I’ve bent history and invented stuff, and whether that’s justifiable etc. That’ll be from May-September as I write the critical commentary for the PhD, of which the novel is the main part.  

More good news. I have four readers! Two supervisors and two examiners. Hurrah. While not exactly No. 1 bestseller stuff, four readers are enough to order myself not to waste their time with any residual Draft 1 slop (slop being a 2026 version of Hemingway’s more graphic/honest description of Draft 1). 

Luckily, last November, when I should have been writing an ABBA post, I was en route to one of the classiest, most instructive and motivational retreats I’ve ever been on.

It was a week at the Moniack Mhor writing centre in the hills outside Inverness, Scotland, a place that lots of fine writers have recommended and was high on my wish-list even before they announced that the historical fiction retreat would be led by Lucy Jago, author of A Net for Small Fishes, set just after mine and a lovely, very well-researched read, and Andrew Miller – squee – fresh off the Booker shortlist, whose Land in Winter was the winner in bookshop if (sadly) not on the podium. His Pure has been a touchstone for the voice of this WiP for years and a comfort go-to read for more than a decade. 

To top it all, the other retreaters were super talented, including a dear writer friend off the MA in writing for young people at Bath Spa, Eden Enfield, whose prose for both young people and adult I vastly admire. Honestly, who needs to get published when such deliciousness awaits?

To keep the deliciousness going, I’m thrilled to have been invited by another writer-for-young-people-turned-adult-historical-novelist, Liz Flanagan, to one of her launch events for her English civil war novel, When We Were Divided. 

So looking forward to celebrating its publication with her up in Heptonstall next month (where I haven’t been since 1985) and then getting lost in her story.

Happy writing, editing, reading, plotting, dreaming.

PS I got both copies signed. :0)

Turning an argument around? By Steve Way

 

Hello. I hope it’s not too late to wish you a happy, healthy, prosperous and well published 2026!

Just sharing a few idle thoughts, the tenuous link between them being that they are linked to the fascinating way we use language, often in ways that don’t make logical sense.

For one thing, why do we insist on calling it a ‘duvet’ when the French call it ‘une couette’? If we’re going to steal from other languages, we could at least do so correctly! For years the adverts for Audi cars ended with the phrase ‘Vorsprung durch technik… as we say in Germany’. I once asked a German student what that phrase meant and he looked at me blankly. He’d never heard that phrase before and insisted that they would never say it in Germany!?!

This morning, quarter of an hour before I was due to give an online lesson to a couple of Spanish students, we had a power cut and therefore no internet connection. I sent an email explaining the situation to the teaching agency I work with. The reply asked me whether I thought we should cancel the lesson, or whether I would be able to sign on in five or ten minute or not. I wasn’t sure if I should feel complimented or exasperated at the thought that they believed I could psychically predict how long a power cut would be.

There’s a phrase I’ve heard used many times, though one occasion that sticks particularly clearly in my mind was when I heard a lady passionately describing a heated discussion she’d had and declared, “And then, she turns around and says…” My first thought was to wonder if that meant that the lady she’d been arguing with now had her back to her. How rude. No wonder lady number one was upset. Alternatively, was object-of-derision lady originally facing away from deriding-lady and had she now turned around to confront her? More bizarrely, did she perhaps spin around balletically through 360 degrees, believing this would add drama, weight and credibility to her cause? As on other occasions I was too timid to interrupt deriding-lady, who was now if full flow, to explore these options with her, which on reflection was probably for the best.

I also find it funny when people say things like, ‘It was the last place I looked’. Would you continue looking for something you’ve already found? When someone for example ask a lady, ‘Can you give me your number?’ I always want to say ‘One… there’s only one of her’. Do you perhaps want her phone number?’ I’m also tempted to pick a chair up off the floor when someone says, ‘Pull up a chair’. Shouldn’t it be ‘pull along a chair?’ My long-suffering wife often insists, when sharing a cake or such like, ‘you have the bigger half’. Well in my defence on that last one, I do sometimes teach maths. Wouldn’t it be somehow wonderful though if the concept of ‘the bigger half’ could be introduced into the GCSE syllabus? Technically inaccurate, though real life.

A comment that amused my wife recently was when she asked about the length of a coat being sold online. The brilliantly unhelpful response was, ‘Well, I’m five foot two and it comes down to my knees’. In my case I can’t help wondering if those are metric knees or imperial?

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

I’ve just self-published what’s effectively a work of many years, a compilation of ideas I’ve used to inspire creative writing called ‘Reluctant Writers Resource’. What amuses me most, as it contains many sections, is that the paperback version weighs over a kilogramme!*

The original idea was to provide ‘an idea a week to stimulate creative writing’, with the aim of giving teachers springboards for writing to encompass the 38 weeks of the school year, though in the end there are a lot more than 38 sections. The example pieces used to get the children’s creative juices flowing vary in length and complexity but the core of them are deliberately short, with the aim of not outfacing the children and supporting them in believing they could write pieces of similar length. I’ve road tested the ideas in many schools in the UK and abroad and they’ve always worked well. Many teachers told me that they’d never seen their children, including the reluctant writers, produce so much work!

*At least there’s one way in which it’s a weighty tome!

 

 

Kindle ASIN : B0GF8RQ7WX

Paperback ISBN : 979 – 8241950987

Hardback ISBN : 979 - 8242528680

 

 

Let's all talk about ourselves - by Lu Hersey

When I was a child, my grandmother came to live with us. Born and bred in Yorkshire, she still had a strong Yorkshire accent after half a century of living in Surrey, where she and her husband moved after their first child was born. Here's a photo of her with me and our dog Bumble (a long time ago, obviously).

One of Grandma's favourite sayings was "I've that many stories to tell, I should write a book!"  In fact her stories were almost on a tape loop, consisting entirely of things she wanted to remember, and many that made her laugh, As a teenager, I'd bring my friend Gina home for tea sometimes after school, and buy jam donuts on the way - just so we could hear her jam donut story. It went like this:

"Our Pauline once had a job int' donut factory, but she got t'sack for putting too much jam int' donuts!" 

She'd laugh at the memory, and being mean teens, we'd laugh too, but only because we'd set her up to tell the same old tale. Of course I'd love to hear her tell it again now. To this day I miss my grandma and her collection of stories, and regret not asking more about the rest of her life outside the golden moments. Things my mother told me later, that grandma never mentioned. 

Like how Grandma was the one who found her father after he'd slit his throat in the bath, the year before she was due to be married. About her child, Bessie May, she'd loved so much, who died of pneumonia when only two years old. The tragic side of the life of a woman who was the thirteenth of fourteen children, had knitted socks for a brother fighting in the Boer War (she told me about that herself, though the story was about learning to knit socks, not what happened to the brother). She'd survived two world wars and a lot of harrowing experiences. But the stories were always about holiday larks, and pranks her Percy (my grandfather) had played, and fireside tales of her family life back in Yorkshire. The first car that drove through her village, the first aeroplane she saw. Things of joy and wonder. And I admire her for having such a wonderfully selective memory. Seeing the best in life. 

Of course, many people want to relate the sad, or tragic elements of their lives, and their stories are equally valid. I'm currently on a memoir writing course - not because I want to write my own memoir, but because remembering forgotten aspects of your own life is a fascinating exercise, and I'm really interested in how everyone tells their stories. 

The course is held by writer Jenny Alexander, who holds inspirational workshops on various aspects of writing (see https://jennyalexander.co.uk/) for anyone of any writing ability. In the memoir writing workshops, I'm learning that by focusing in on something small - a favourite object or perhaps one seemingly insignificant experience - you can suddenly bring back memories of an entire era in your life. 

Whether you're interested in memoir writing or not, focussing on detail is an important key to any story. I see an element of truth in what my grandmother said all those years ago. You don't have to write a book about it, but we all have interesting life stories to tell. AI just steals stories from us. If nothing else, writing about your own life reminds you that you have something AI can never have - lived experience.

by Lu Hersey

PS Here's my grandma's Yorkshire parkin recipe, hand written by her. One of my favourite memories is the smell and taste of her wonderful parkin...

https://www.lu-hersey.com/

New You For Ever, written by Steve Cole, illustrated by Chris King, reviewed by Pippa Goodhart

 

The title of this book makes it sound like a self-help manual, but its actually a futuristic thriller aimed at teenage readers. Published by Barrington Stoke, it's a short novel designed to be accessible to struggling readers. It's fast-paced, exciting and thought-provoking.

Anders works with his Dad on a short good news slot of television news. But this is in a future where climate change has destroyed much of our world and enabled those in power to manipulate world populations. The immediate threat is being advertised as a panacea. Swap your human body for a Pleeka one, short of 'Replica'. Those fake bodies are perfect, not needing food or exericise or to learn anything, and they'll never get ill. They're already programmed, even promising perfect dancing skills! They're sold as a solution to climate breakdown because they save on foods and medicines. But their batteries die, and only the richest can afford to replace them. And how much power is used to create them? Worse than that, the authorities can control Pleekas. In a clock-ticking life or death adventure, we battle with Anders to get the truth out to the world, and change things for the better. 

A story to make young people think about the future ahead for themselves and their world, and to question what is, and isn't, true.