I'm very happy to welcome Pat to my blog today. Pat is the author of Citizeness. Pat tells us a little about her life as a writer:
My stories and books would be described as literary,
although that can sound pretentious. It means good old-fashioned plain writing,
like the cooking in our childhood.
I was in Art School, but painting was not enough for
expressing all the ideas chasing round, and I had always written poems and then
short stories too. A couple of discarded would-be novels date from that time
and I might resurrect them now, they are almost history.
There’s no routine at all. I’d say it was more to do
with phases of the moon (joke.) Nothing for weeks or months and then total
dedication all day. Being retired helps.
My writing space is a gigantic desk set in the
living room. It is the kind of desk from old black & white films, the solicitor’s
office or the Head of Police. It’s strange to be sitting this side of it. I won
second place in Poetry Pulse and the prize-money paid for most of it.
I never call myself a writer, as it is such an easy
occupation to claim. For most writers it is not a 9 to 5 five days having to
clock in each weekday with only two weeks and official days off a year. Many
writers I know use the label as a way to social climb and claim grants and
allowances. If pushed, I’d say I was an artist.
Friends and family support? Patchy. Two friends are
interested and my family never comment.
I am most proud of presenting situations clearly so
that they can stand on their own without any need for explanations.
Research is fatal! It’s like going off on a short
walk and ending up miles away, happily lost. It just entices you to unearth
more and more, absolutely fascinating details - and then you have totally
useless pages and pages of notes and printouts. And then you don’t like to
throw them away.
First I
write by hand on A4 pads, 160 pages, narrow lines. Then off to the computer and
type, sifting through the lot. Then print off all the pages, make a pot of tea
(well, several,) and with a red pencil, go through each line. I went to a
grammar school and we learnt to parse, ‘Parts of Speech,’ which does not happen
these days. Each word has its dedicated function. There are only eight : noun,
verb, pronoun, adjective, adverb, preposition, conjunction and exclamation.
There is a fashionable movement against using adverbs and I even read in one
magazine’s requirements that adjectives should be as sparse as possible. That
will lead to an excessively pared-down style, if we are going to be left using
only six items from the ‘toolbox’ as Stephen King calls it. And we don’t often
use exclamations, so that leave us with only five.
My future goals are to finish the next three semi-done
novels. The notes and pages cluster beside the desk in baskets and I try to
avoid them.
Writers who I have always admired since a teenager
are: Nathaniel West - Miss Lonelyhearts,
The Day of the Locust and A Cool Million. Georges Simenon – everything, there’s 53 books of his in English and French so far
on the shelves here.
And then I discovered Janet Frame. The Daylight and
the Dust is a selection from four collections of her short stories. Her novel
Angel at my Table is the best-known of her 20 works and was filmed by Jane
Campion. Also from New Zealand, she is a modern Katherine Mansfield. Her
writing is seamless, enticing and a joy to read.
My latest work is Maryland Street, life in 1950s
Liverpool, it is on Amazon with previous books.
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