Booktrust Guest Blog - Part 2

The Pen is Mightier than the Pin-Up

In her second guest blog for Booktrust, aspiring writerRebecca Woodhead talks about how she used social networking site du jour Twitter to mobilise an army of literature lovers and 'word nerds' to help her win an X-Factor-esque Twitter contest and raise her profile, for the benefit of her career, and as it emerged, potentially for the benefit of the future of literature in this country as well.

The pen is mightier than the pin-up

With a crop of loyal blog followers to run home to, I decided to dip my toe into the world of Twitter. When I was at university, I had lucked out in the most spectacular way and interviewed Stephen Fry. That couple of hours: the pizza; the chat, and the ‘pinch me, I’m dreaming’ wonder of it all is a gilded memory. I knew it was pathetic but I tapped in my name, surfed to his Twitter page and hit ‘follow.’ Almost immediately, he followed back. Now what?

It seemed likely that Twitter could be used for more than sending direct messages to Stephen Fry. Maybe there was even a literary application. In my bio I wrote ‘word nerd’ as a kind of bait for readers, writers, publishers and other delicious lovers of books. It worked. #Followfriday confetti floated through the air and life was a giant treacle sponge of sweetness. Rather than settle into this smug twittery pudding of success, I decided to view it as a launch pad. Being chummy with publishers on Twitter was not, I decided, the pudding but rather the amuse-bouche of the bookish Twitter experience.

In online book-deal mythology it is foretold that upon the magical follower number of ‘1000’ a three book deal will appear. The journey towards the magical 1000 is called ‘building a platform.’ My platform was not yet built. I grabbed a helmet and some scaffolding poles and drew up some plans. The construction site was the Ms Twitter UK Competition: a kind of ‘X Factor with avatars’ but you compete against celebrities as well as ‘normal’ people.

In my batch was Web 2.0 darling, Lily Allen. It would be a tough race. As I had no celebrity credentials of my own to fall back on (pizza with Fry only takes one so far) I came up with the idea of ‘literary stand-up.’ In return for votes, I wrote haiku and six word stories against the clock. Later, timed medieval translations were also thrown into the mix. It was exhausting. Writers, publishers, librarians and all kinds of ‘word nerds’ supported my Ms Twitter bid. They became known as The Word Nerd Army. We even had a slogan: ‘the pen is mightier than the pin-up.’ We talked about literary ideas and these ideas grew into the issues that our campaign stood for. In the final moments of the contest, we all agreed on the eleven issues that we wanted to start wider discussions about, and I promised I would use Ms Twitter publicity to do just that.

As the only non-celebrity in the final, and as the only 30-something on the top line, I was shocked to scoop the top prize. With a lead of 1291 votes as I crossed the line, it felt like a victory for literature over liposuction. The eleven issues – from literacy to libraries to the importance of choice for girls – now have their own blog:http://WordNerdArmy.blogspot.com

When I entered the competition, it was a platform building exercise but by the end of it I was far more concerned about the issues that mattered to the people on the platform I built. The market may be unstable, the future of the printed book may be uncertain but this experience has shown me that the core of the creation and consumption of stories – ‘word nerds’ – is stronger and more determined than I could ever have imagined. Whatever the recession delivers, the future of words and stories is in safe hands.

Rebecca Woodhead

Booktrust Guest Blog - Part 1

From post-its to pin-ups – a writer’s journey [1]

Posted on Booktrust blog - Monday August 17th 2009

Our Twitter page has put us in contact with diverse parts of the publishing industry, from publishers to writers to book bloggers to parents and carers who benefit from our bookgifting. One of the more interesting personalities on our Twitter feed has been aspiring author Rebecca Woodhead. Author of two books and unpublished, she has been using the internet to her advantage, to build up a loyal following of visitors to her blog and writings. Then she was nominated for Ms Twitter UK, a Twitter competition pitting her against celebrities like Lily Allen and Fearne Cotton and their extensive fanbases.

Mobilising her band of followers, cutely named the Word Nerd Army, and rallying publishers, agents and literary types alike (including Twitter god Stephen Fry), Rebecca won Ms Twitter UK, with the motto 'the pen is mightier than the pin-up', promising to help promote literature and reading and aspiring authors and libraries, all issues close to the heart of Booktrust.

Now with a land of opportunities awaiting her following her victory, Rebecca has written two blogs for us, this week on how she came to write her novel and use the internet to help promote it and in the next blog on how she won Ms Twitter UK and what it means and how other writers can follow in her example of using the internet to pursue their dream of being published.

From post-its to pin-ups – a writer’s journey [1]

Life is a giant mess of events and if you have a motto, it helps. Some people spend years analysing books and following gurus to find their life’s motto. I found mine on a block of novelty post-it notes in a gift shop in America in the late nineties- Today’s mighty oak is yesterday’s nut that held its ground.

The path that led me to post-it enlightenment was an exciting one. With a coma and a nasty run-in with ME/CFS behind me, I wangled a place at Southampton University by offering to conduct my interview in iambic pentameter.

Three wonderful years later, with a degree under my belt and an American under my skin, I set off for a year in the States. My relationship with The American was tumultuous but my relationship with Boston was beautiful. Something about the place pulled out the writer in me.

When I returned to England, the first thing I did was to write a book. It was a thriller. It was terrible: way too scary and way too complicated. By the middle of it I was terrified and decided to lock it away. Years passed. I fell out with The American and fell into a very dull job trying to convince the Public Sector to save money. It wasn’t me at all. Despite the high point of meeting and marrying my dream man, a bunch of ‘think you’ve hit rock bottom? Try this!’ events brought on ‘ME/CFS – The Sequel.’

After years of relative normality, I was knocked flat. My doctor advised me to stop work. The incapacity benefit people were happy for me to try to write a novel, however, so I wrote. Sometimes I wrote from my bed and sometimes from the cupboard-with-aspirations that became my writing space. No matter how ill I was I could always write. After a year, I had a first draft of Palaces and Calluses but our accommodation was intolerable and was making my health worse. We could afford nothing privately and with four thousand people after each place on the social housing list we had no chance. When we heard a landowner was offering to rent out a house at well below market value and was keen to fill it with struggling locals, we grabbed it.

The reality of living in a place without curtains or carpets scuffed the romance off the experience, but with help from a carpet-laying family member and my passable sewing skills, we finally made the place habitable. We found a computer desk by the side of the road, dusted it off, put a computer on it and a few months later, the next novel in the series: Muddles, Puddles and Pearls appeared.

A couple of months before I finished the first draft, I decided to blog my experience. The blog began a journey that would create a group of book enthusiasts called The Word Nerd Army and lead me to beat Lily Allen in Ms Twitter UK using the phrase ‘the pen is mightier than the pin-up’. A nut I may be, but I am holding my ground.

Rebecca Woodhead

Next we'll learn how Rebecca mobilised the Word Nerd Army to help her win Ms Twitter UK and promote literature.

How to Sharpen your Literary Senses

The expression, ‘show, don’t tell’ is missing four things. Your readers are not content merely to see your story; they want to hear, smell, touch and taste it as well. Here are some simple ways to make your stories tantalise the senses of your readers, and make the writing process even more enjoyable for you.

Sense Perception

Set a time limit – maybe an hour or a day – where you notice everything. Carry a notebook with you and whenever you have the chance, note down your experiences. For instance:

‘When I press my fingers down slowly on the keys, it feels like pushing into the foil top on an old milk bottle’ or

‘the heating has just switched on and it sounds like a distant steam train’ or

‘the table shines like a freshly opened conker.’

You’ll put down a few clichés and a few bizarre descriptions that you may never use but you’ll start off your literary senses collection and your brain will begin to think about the use of senses in a creative way. After you’ve done this a few times, it will look out for things for you and throw them at you while you write, or in your dreams.

Sight

Colour is a marvellous place to start. Your heroine has brown hair and it is summertime. You could say that she has brown hair with highlights from the sun and that would work fine but a more interesting way to put it would be that it is ‘mocha with buttermilk streaks.’ Think about the exact colour. Maybe the streaks are buttermilk but the main colour is actually ‘latte’ or even ‘espresso.’ Be specific. A good tip to help you become more creative with colour is to keep some paint colour charts on your writing desk. Make sure you don’t use trade marked colours directly but you can take your inspiration from the names of the paints and play around with variations on their ideas.

Go free range and use your notepad to make sensory observations. Leave your desk, go to a coffee shop and observe people in their natural habitat. Watch people who pass in the street. Try to describe them fast in your notebook. Be specific. Do they have a thin and tired face or is it ‘drawn,’ ‘haggard,’ or ‘pinched?’ Their walk may be fast or it may be ‘hurried,’ ‘panicked,’ ‘desperate.’ You may even use this five second portrait to develop a character. Give your character a name, a reason for the tiredness and the speed of their walk. By the time they’ve gone out of view, I’ve usually worked out a whole back story. I pick people in the street and imagine they know each other and are just ignoring each other. Why are they doing that? What happened that their friends don’t know about? You may have a short story, poem or novel right there. If not, it is a handy character sketch for a secondary character or simply a bit more practice at using your literary senses. Just don’t let anyone see you or they’ll ask to see your notes and that could get embarrassing!

Sound

Think yourself into a sound. The clock might tick like a mother’s heart, for example. What is the sound really like? Feeling your way inside a sound, or any other sense, is not only a descriptive exercise, it can also help you with the tone of your piece. If the clock doesn’t sound like a mother’s heart to you but the rapid second-hand sounds like the tiny feet of a child running from their mother then you have a different story entirely.

The other tip with sound is to make use of it while you write. I put lots of different types of music on my MP3 player and play sets of tunes depending on the mood of the scene I am writing. I also give my characters ‘theme tunes’ – like in the movies! When a romantic scene is about to go right for a particular character, or they are feeling nostalgic, or they are feeling super confident, there is a specific tune I play. This really works for me and helps me ensure consistent development of the characters as I feel a set of emotions specific to the character when I play those tunes, so even if I haven’t written that particular character for a while, I snap right back into their head. When I am editing, I switch it off to make sure I am not relying on the music to create the mood and that helps me to know that it has worked.

Smell

This is so important to me. I measure out my novels in Yankee Candles. I use their jar candles because you can reuse the jars and they are safer than normal candles. I use them in the same way as the music. I have different smells for different moods and I have general fall-back candles which immediately get me into the mood for novel-writing – anything with coffee in it. If I drink coffee, I’m too jittery to write well but the smell of it really does the trick.

The same rules apply when describing smells. Be specific. Do research. Does a rose really smell sweet? Find one and work out the smell for yourself. Maybe it did to Shakespeare but your nose might pick out words like ‘dense,’ or ‘heady,’ ‘musky’ or ‘cloying’ or even something totally unexpected. I mixed a very expensive oil blend once, with rose oil in it, and when I let my brother smell it he said:

‘Yum, hot cross buns.’ When I sniffed it again, that was all I could smell.

Touch

This is where your notebook comes in most useful because we don’t spend an awful lot of time thinking about touch. For instance, you might look for the blue pen but when you pick it up, you won’t spare a thought for the way it feels in your hand. It is easier for you to call to mind ‘the blue pen’ than it is to locate ‘the pen that feels medium weight in comparison to the heavy pen.’ Sight is a short cut. You don’t go around the room feeling things to identify them if you are able to see them, so drawing your attention towards the sense of touch deliberately is a good exercise. It seemed improbable to me just now that my keys felt like pressing on a milk bottle top but, if I do it slowly enough, that is exactly what it feels like.

Another ‘touch’ exercise is to remember an experience you have had in the past – pick something nice like a first kiss or the first time you went from polycotton mix sheets to Egyptian cotton and talk yourself through every part of it, making notes on all the feelings you had at the time and the memories sparked off by those feelings.

Another fun exercise, is to put your Egyptian/polycotton sheets to good use; spend some ‘research’ time with your partner and make notes – but make sure they’re nice comments or you could end up with a very stroppy other half!

Taste

Buy some chocolate. (Any tip that starts ‘buy some chocolate’ has to be good, doesn’t it?) Eat the chocolate really consciously, focusing on everything about it. You can actually use this to help you with the other senses too. Write in your notebook: what it looks like; the sound of the chocolate snapping as you break it; the smell as you bring it closer to your lips; the feel of biting into it for the first time; the way it melts in your mouth, and every little nuance of the taste. Repeat until full.

Use these tips and, not only will your readers experience your books more fully but you will too. Have fun!

©Rebecca Woodhead

Published work http://rebeccawoodhead.blogspot.com
Journey to Publication http://frombrain2bookshelf.blogspot.com

First published in 'Today's Woman'

‘Bees on Earth’

‘They are dying,’ they said. As the words left television-mouths and buzzed towards my ears, they moved my eyes towards the window and through the window to my little garden. Unknowingly, its end loomed. No more bees.

At once, I knew our salvation lay in books and bulbs and seeds. The garden centre would bring us – the garden and myself - new, better, stronger bees and our future would be secure. If, whilst in this seductive retail Eden, I should happen upon some essence-drenched candles or succulent, hand finished chocolate treats that would be a fortunate happenstance but my quest was to recreate the perfect bee-friendly haven to usher in a new generation of fluffy, Gloucestershire bees.

Bombs are falling. The news is full of ‘if only’s and terror. A perfumed candle flickers hopefully on the table. The weather may turn against us. Guns may end us. Chocolate melts the sharpest edges from the pictures. A new, unseen foe may be pushing up through our society like an angry spot… but I have a garden. I have a little patch of rented earth and in that earth I can plant a new world. I cannot save the people dying alone in foreign lands. I cannot mend a society full of individuals each of whom has their own demons, their own pains, their own secret resentments but I can help a bee. I can make a little, safe society whose border control is hedge and Cotswold wall. There will be no vehicle pollution – I can cross the whole land in two strides – but whole communities will live there in harmony. A rainbow of bees will call it home and I will let them. I cannot fix the world but I surrender my garden to buzz and fuzz and pollen toes.

My husband was informed that we were at the brink of a New Garden Order. He listened.

‘So we’re making it a bee garden?’ he asked.

I saw the pictures in his mind. He was playing through the morning walk from door to car – buzzing borders on each side. He was calling to mind my bee allergy. He was weighing anaphylaxis against apocalypse. He was imagining Cotswold honey melting onto buttered toast.

‘OK,’ he said.

A year has passed: the new country has been built and handed over, by mutual agreement, to its democratically elected government. An alliance of bees maintains absolute harmony over roses, snapdragons, jasmine and geraniums. Huge bumble bees levitate over a lawn which is now home for many months of the year to little blue bees. They have no queen but live in their own little homes in the ground and happily share space with their golden honey bee friends in the borders. When my husband mows over their roofs, they glide out of the way of the blades without a cross word.

Peace on Earth may be a long way off but until it comes, in this little corner of Gloucestershire we are giving bees a chance.

©Rebecca Woodhead
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‘Bees on Earth’ by Rebecca Woodhead was first published in the anthology 'Write Around Gloucestershire' - in celebration of the county's 1000th birthday

Recession Expression - A Guide to Writing Through the Fear

We’re in it Together

We’re all in the same boat: it’s sinking, but we’re all in it. This is the time to give thanks to your chosen deity that you are not a banker. You were born creative and with creativity comes inventiveness and resilience.

Your laptop is your life raft. As a writer, your job is not to stand on the sinking ship complaining that the brochure said it was ‘unsinkable.’ As a writer, your job is to chart the progress of the journey. The vessel may not be heading towards its intended shoreline – it may, in fact, be going down – but it is still on an historic journey and your fingers are the ones that can tap that journey out.

Why Write in a Recession?

Why not? This is a decisive moment in history and anything you write now will be valuable. Does that mean it will make you a millionaire? Probably not but it will certainly make you more wealthy. In a recession lots of bad things happen. People lose their jobs; creditors call in debts; houses are repossessed… none of this is good news. These external factors can affect you badly and make you feel trapped and fearful but none of them should stop you writing.

The things that trap us and make us feel truly hopeless are what William Blake called “mind forg’d manacles” and these, not the external factors, will have an effect on your ability to write. If you decide to write no matter what is thrown at you then, while other people are able merely to complain about what they have lost, you will be able to create new things: books; articles; blogs... Creation in the midst of destruction: that is true wealth.

Releasing the Mind Forg’d Manacles

Well, now we’re all fired up to write, and feeling great about our creativity and place in the scheme of things, it might be time to throw in a few practical tips.The theory’s sound but if the manacles are clamping down or the raft has sprung a leak what then?
Forget everything. Forget the money you hope to make from your writing; forget the collapse of the global economy; forget the endless to-do lists. Simply find a space to write and commit to doing so.

Understand that the space doesn’t have to be a location, it can be a time. Give yourself a set period of time when you will not allow yourself to be disturbed. It doesn’t matter if you’re in a room on your own or a busy coffee shop. You have to decide that this moment is your writing space and it will not be disturbed. Once you’ve done that, write. Don’t edit it or criticise it. Let it flow. Let yourself write unutterable garbage. The point is to keep the pen moving or the fingers tapping. You can edit it later.

Know that you are doing something important. I have read many letters from writers saying that they lack support. They frequently express a lack of confidence in their work because their friends or family members mock them for thinking they can be a writer. Tune it out. You know you are a writer. That is enough. If you act as though your work is important, your mind will pick up on it and make the time and space for you to write.

And Finally…

Even with the best intentions, it can be hard to focus on writing when you haven’t enough money for food or heating. You need to know that this is no excuse. It is perfectly possible to be living in subsistence level poverty, scraping by on benefits and still be creative. I have had two brushes with hypothermia over this winter and we can’t afford to go food shopping more often than once every two weeks, so I’m not writing from an ivory tower myself, but I’m in a far better position than many writers and I’m sure the same is true of most of us. Anne Frank was creative. What do we have to complain about? That said, here are a few tips to make the process easier.

Writing on a Budget – Tips

Keep your food costs down by buying in bulk. If you buy unbranded sacks of rice and pasta and store them in airtight containers, you’ll save a fortune. They keep for ages so, if you find yourself with some spare pennies one week, stock up. Also, stock up on vitamin pills for the weeks when a food group or two goes astray.

If you’re an omnivore, buy chicken but don’t buy chicken breasts. When you buy chicken breasts, you’re paying processing and packing costs you don’t pay when buying a whole chicken. You can get 16 meals out of a chicken (see my blog for more info on this obsession of mine!) Let none of it go to waste. Make stock from scratch and you’ll have soups, stews, pasta sauces etc for the week.

I don’t choose to be a vegetarian, but I strongly believe in being an ethical omnivore. I don’t buy ‘battery’ chickens or eggs however poor we get. If I can’t afford free range, I don’t buy the chicken. If you scrape together the money to buy a free range chicken and you can get 16 meals out of it (or 20 as my husband managed the other week – don’t think I’ll beat that) then the food is way cheaper than the price of some breast meat from a battery-farmed animal.

Make friends with your freezer. If you’re on a real budget, freeze everything you can. If you make meals from the chicken as soon as you get it home and freeze them, you can live on the food from the fridge in week 1 and the food from the freezer in week 2.

Now you’re equipped to thrive through the recession as a writer. If you have a shaky moment when The Fear grabs you, ask yourself one question:

‘If Shakespeare were alive today, would he complain because his television had been repossessed or his games console had been sold or his electricity had been switched off?’ Would he? Or would he pick up his pages, sit at his table, light up a candle and write?

To follow my writing journey and for more tips on writing through the recession, go to my blog:
http://frombrain2bookshelf.blogspot.com/

©Rebecca Woodhead

This piece was first published in The New Author