Posts by Victoria Holmes

Allison’s first post (welcome, Allison!) was particularly interesting because I was planning to write about the role of autobiography in fiction for my next post: when we come up with new stories, are we spinning webs from thin air, or are we just rewriting our own experiences? This debate is hot in the British publishing industry at the moment thanks to the recent winner of the Costa (formerly Whitbread) Award. Stef Penney set her novel The Tenderness of Wolves in the Canadian wilderness without having once set foot across the Atlantic; instead, she brought her locations to life with the help of maps and articles in the British Museum. Some people dared to question how she could make Canada sound convincing without seeing it for real; a larger number of people replied that invention is the whole point of fiction, that the writers of Dr Who haven’t been to different galaxies, that JKR isn’t a wizard, and historical writers don’t possess handy time machines. It’s like acting: Liam Neeson didn’t actually rescue hundreds of Jews during the Second World War, but he does a great job of looking traumatized in Schindler’s List.

On one level, I agree with Ms. Penney’s defenders. My most recent horse novel was set during the English Civil War, but I claim to be neither Cavalier nor Parliamentarian. And much as I hate to disappoint thousands of hopeful Warriors fans, I’m not actually a cat.

Marsha’s recent post made me think some more about my reputation for unhappy endings. Am I like her, realistically and maturely aware that life is untidy and doesn’t have chapter endings the way stories do? Or do I have a cynicism about life that means everything leads at best in circles, and more often nowhere? When I sat down and thought about the endings for the books that are most personal to me – the sixteen Warriors manuscripts I have worked on and the four historical horse stories – every ending seems to involve some sort of loss or promise of further doom. The possible exception comes in Warriors Book Six: The Darkest Hour, when Firestar vanquishes a great enemy and seals his leadership of ThunderClan for good. But this comes after a vicious battle involving all the feline Clans with much blood spilled and the loss of some major beloved characters, so it could be described as something of a pyrrhic HEA.  As I mentioned in my last post, for my most recent historical novel I had to be coaxed away from killing off my heroine’s entire family and leaving her standing, literally, in the ashes of her burnt-out home. Okay, maybe I was having a particularly bad day when I conjured up that scene, but all my other endings seem to revolve around the knowledge that this is only a pause, not The End. My hypersensitivity to loss could be due to personal experience – my family doesn’t breed old bones and an awful lot of people close to me have died a long way before their time – but I don’t wallow in doom and gloom on a daily basis. In fact, I have a startlingly black sense of humour and frequently shock people by laughing at things with no obvious comic element. I also have a terror of writing anything remotely autobiographical, but I’m saving that for another post. So where does it come from, and why am I so happy to kill off my central characters?

Part of the answer might lie in contemporary children’s fiction. Is it just me, or are children incredibly morbid these days?

I’ve been following, with many a wince of sympathy, the comments on Marsha’s blog about what to do when you hit the metaphorical brick wall. We all suffer from it, though in my case it stems more often from succumbing far too easily to distraction – the lure of a packet of Maltesers, a sale in the Debenhams coat department, or even a sardonically raised eyebrow on a brown-eyed man.

My symptoms are a little different for two reasons: first, I plot, plot, plot, plot, plot to the nth degree so I don’t write so much as a chapter heading without knowing exactly what will happen in each scene, all the way until the end. I do this partly because I hate surprises and partly because a large chunk of what I do for a living involves creating storylines for other people to write out in full, so it stands to reason that the more detail I put in at synopsis stage, the closer the finished product will be to what the publisher is looking for. As a rough guide, my storylines extend to around 10,000 words for books up to 35,000, while Warriors synopses can ramble on to 25,000 words for a 75,000 word script.

I have clearly become storyline-dependent because I do the same for my own novels and spend weeks muttering darkly to myself about how Character A will get from Location B to Emotional Crisis C, all before I have a document open in front of me. By the time I start writing, the aim is to be able to rattle through 4-8,000 words a day, as if I were describing a movie playing out in my head, with my trusty synopsis printed out at my side so if I get remotely stuck I just have to look at the page and say, What happens next? Oh yes, Helena comes out of the stable having been bitten by Oriel and Jamie sympathizes but says she was a bit dumb to go in with the stallion in the first place… The very idea of writing a book without knowing what happens at the beginning, middle and end of every single chapter brings me out in hives. I am in awe of people who talk of setting off on an adventure with their characters, and letting the story wend where it will. Am I a control freak? Scared of taking risks? Weirdly scientific about my approach to random acts of creativity? Maybe a little bit of all of the above.

In theory, this means writer’s block happens for me at storyline stage, when I frown at my keyboard and wonder what on earth those melodramatic feral cats can do next. Or when I know that my heroine’s brother must be dramatically unmasked as an impostor, but I’m not sure how that can be done without the accompaniment of soaring strings and a tragic bassoon to prompt readers to feel aghast NOW. The ways I tackle The Block are connected with the second reason that my symptoms are a little different than most; quite simply, I don’t have time for writer’s block because I am always working to a publisher’s stone-set schedule, so if the dread mist descends, I have to do […]