Words Against Mental Illness Part 2 - Their Words - Interviews With Authors

Transcript

Nobody gave me sin for this That’s reason why I try both This is all that’s old, I can see a thousand times of this Out against mental illness We have an annual book festival in my little corner of rural Scotland Authors and readers get together and hang out, talk to each other, participate in workshops, do presentations and panels, sell books, buy books You know the kind of thing Last year it was held in the cinema next door to my house As is customary for me and since I wasn’t directly involved It only occurred to me at the last minute that I could maybe grab some interviews with some of the authors for my little old podcast And by last minute I do mean last minute, the day before the festival started Given that I’d given myself no time to prepare, my only strategy was to turn up with a laptop and a mic and attempt to abduct unsuspecting authors to a quiet corner in the hopes that they’d talk to me It turned out finding the authors was the easy bit, because as I discovered, authors really liked to talk about their trade But book festivals are not the oasis of calm you might expect Be warned, some of the following sound bites have quite a lot of background noise Anyway, I spent my day lurking around the authors green room And managed to coerce Kajol or otherwise convince authors to come and talk to me And talk they did, which was nice, since I hadn’t prepared any questions in advance And knew nothing about any of the authors before sitting down with them What transpired was some of the most interesting conversations I’ve ever had You see, it turns out that not only are authors adept at putting words down in print They can also speak them out loud too and have a tendency to say really interesting things when given the chance Who knew? And it turns out that my lack of preparedness worked quite well Since I knew nothing about these authors’ works and the characters and the themes within All I could really ask about was the process, practice and art of writing Which was exactly what I wanted and needed to talk about As it turned out, it’s something the authors wanted to talk about too A whole lot So they were quite enthusiastic to talk to me about it Each interview lasted about 15 minutes and having listened back to them all I realised that they are all fascinating in their own way So rather than try to edit them all into one mega episode I’ve decided to release them all as a miniseries over the next few weeks What follows is a compilation of some of my favourite bits As a sort of a moose-boosh to the main course It’s worth noting that all these authors are Scottish Not exactly surprising given where the event was held I think this little cross-section of the British literary community goes a long way to representing The diversity and proud ancient literary heritage of this incredible little nation So I’ll shut up and let you enjoy what the experts think about the art of words I’ll return once you’ve had some time to digest them all with some closing thoughts Enjoy Arts Against Mental Illness Hi, my name’s Anne McKinnon and I’m a poet So I really think poetry, anybody can write it I mean some people think that it’s got to rhyme or it’s got to have certain things in it But I don’t think so I think if you capture a piece of emotion And I also find it’s a very cathartic thing It gets a lot of emotions out And you know, I do think it’s a great thing poetry A poem should just speak, whatever you’re saying It should just speak to people And I don’t think it needs to be technically accurate I’m George Patterson, I’m a writer, a broadcaster and a former musician Well I read a book when I was on holiday a couple of weeks ago by an author who’s long dead And I’ve been wanting to read this book for a while and it resonated so much I mean it was, it kept me awake at night It was that important to me Things were resonating from every line It was just cracking my head open And I desperately wanted to reach out to the author But the author’s dead, has been dead for a number of years But it reminded me of what you’ve just said there This art goes on forever It never ends It will find its people, it will find its tribes somewhere All you’ve got to do is you’ve got to be honest with yourself And you’ve got to stick with what you believe in Because you will find the people that were meant to find you I don’t know who you make your art for but I make my art for me So I’m number one, so if I’m happy with it then I’ll allow myself to share it with other people If I’m not happy with it then I’ll not share it at the moment But it’s like, consider yourself a footballer You do all your training You don’t have to share all your training methods and your training techniques And the hours and hours you spend on the training ground It’s the 90 minutes you’re playing football in That’s what they’ll get to see And they’ll get to see your piece of art or my book That’s what they’ll get to see They don’t need to see the rest of it That’s part of my process If you want it, if you’re interested, we’ll talk about it, sure But it’s not as important to you as it is to me Hi Alex, I’m Val Penny and I write crime fiction I started writing crime fiction when I was recovering from cancer I was being treated for cancer and it’s a very worrying and depressing kind of time I was really quite ill And I don’t know if you’ve tried to watch daytime television But it didn’t hold my interest for very long And I didn’t have the energy to do the things I like to do Like swimming, visiting with friends, seeing family I had no immune system because of the drugs that were helping me recover And so I turned to reading, which is what I enjoy that I could do The problem was that I kept telling my husband about the books I was reading About whether they were good books, about whether they were bad books About what made them good, about what made them bad And eventually he said to me, look, if you know so much about what makes a good book, why don’t you just write one? And I thought, challenge accepted So it took me about two and a half years, but I did write my first book, Hunter’s Chase Ok, well basically what I’m hearing from today is really easy to become a published author Well you know, it’s a lot easier than it used to be Because there are far more small publishing houses than there ever used to be And also the ability to self-publish is available to people What I would commend to any of your listeners who are thinking of self-publishing is do not skimp on an editor Get an editor who knows your genre, who is really quite critical And who will say to you, no, this paragraph doesn’t work You can take out that chapter, you do not need that character You need a brutal editor, especially with the first book And even if you’re self-publishing, it will cost you money, it will cost several hundred pounds But it is worth getting an editor, a good editor I was what they call a pantser, in that, a pantser, in that I write by the seat of my pounds And that’s how Hunter’s Chase was written Because I didn’t know what I was doing, it was my first novel, I had not a clue But I then met a novelist by the name of Sue Murcroft And she writes romantic women’s fiction, totally different genre But what she did do was explain how she sets out her novels beforehand So she actually produces a background And so I have now become much more organized, much more structured in how I approach it I’ll write the background, I’ll write the bones of the work And then I’ll put the flesh on it and make the story I require time for my writing, when I had a real job I used to long for the day when I could have a job that started at 11 and finished at 4 And had an hour for lunch, and now I have that And I think even if you only have a couple of half hours a day, if writing is your thing, write Because if you write a couple of hundred words a day, then it doesn’t take very long Before you have 2,000 words, 20,000 words, 60,000 words and you have a novel So I’m here with Pauline, Pauline tell us about yourself Hi, thank you for having me I am a multi-award winning and best selling children’s picture book author and romantic suspense novelist I’m not one of those authors who can just grab half an hour here and there You know, do something at lunchtime and walk away from it and come back and do 20 minutes later on I can’t do that I shut myself in my writing room and I ideally will spend three days a week in there One after the other and I’m out of there I’m probably at eight in the morning and the brain sort of switches off about two o’clock And then I’ve got to go and do something different But I need quiet, I’ve got the writing room at the bottom of the garden So I leave the house, I go out there, there’s no distractions And it’s just me and the laptop and I just get lost in the world It’s quite chaotic, it’s quite therapeutic, I just get lost in… Further, even if I’m writing the suspenseful side of the novels, it’s still therapeutic You know, the words are just pouring out of you and it’s… You’re in the zone In the zone Part of me thinks that the children’s book bit would be easier because there’s less words But I think from what you’re saying Yeah, it is When you’re writing a novel, you know, I’m an adult writing for adults So I am sitting at the laptop, I’m tinkling it on the keys and I’m writing in the language that I use When you write a picture book, you’ve got to pull it right back You’ve got to take your language right back to, you know, are you writing for three to fives Or are you writing for five to sevens You’ve got to hit your vocabulary You’ve also got to get your whole story told in up to 850 words You’ve got to sort of follow the arc You’ve got to get character development in there You’ve got to get your story in there You’ve got to get your happy conclusion in there You’ve got to get your positive models in there for modern day publishing So I can rattle out a few thousand words of my novel in a day But I’m going back and forward over a picture book Because also in a picture book you’re thinking of the illustrations You’re thinking of the visuals You’re thinking about page turns You’re thinking about who reveals that on page turns So the structure is completely different Hello, my name is Keith Brimfield I’m a nature writer I write weekly nature columns for several newspapers I also write books, I’ve written several books on wildlife It is not possible to go out for a walk and not see nature It’s there, it’s omnipresent, it’s all around us And okay, you might not see a golden eagle It might not be something people class as exciting But you’re going to see snails or insects or butterflies or plants If you just walk in the centre of Edinburgh You get these plants growing in the cracks, in the pavement So that’s nature and the incredible resilience of nature I write bits of Wild Edinburgh There’s cobblestones in the new town There’s pineapple weed and plantains growing in the cracks And a lot of people might not like seeing the thing It makes the city look a bit scruffy But actually, enjoy seeing how nature is living on our doorstep Yeah, nature is resourceful and it’s resilient And so I love spring, I love spring Because yeah, okay, winter’s got its charms But once a year you get this show Nature puts on a show of colour and just growth and renewal And for me, it’s like Disneyland comes to me every year for free And I don’t have to queue because I do not like queuing And it’s just the most spectacular thing And I think people just don’t notice it They’re sitting there on their phones thinking Oh, I’m going on holiday to bloody Spain in two months And that’s what they’re thinking about Are you kidding me? Look around you It’s the most amazing thing and I agree with you It doesn’t matter where you are It’s happening every single inch of every space In every part of every country I guess I have an idea for a book But I don’t have a rigid plan I’m going to do this in chapter one, this in chapter two, chapter three It just kind of evolves Because what I’ve done in chapter three Will lead us onto chapter four It’s just kind of that evolution And that’s how the book works So that works for me I don’t know if that’s a good thing to do or a bad thing But I find that what works for me I just like to kind of, obviously the book drifts As I kind of move into different chapters And different segments of nature