WHAT DO YOU CALL A MAN WITH NO NAME? by Victoria Cornwall

I am one of those writers who prefers to plot out a novel before I begin to write. It stops me from going down an avenue that I can't get out off, going off piste or forgetting where I am in the story if I take a short break. I felt confident in this foolproof method ... until I wrote The Daughter of River Valley.

Despite plotting the story, I soon discovered I had a major problem I did not plan for. I was only a few pages in at the time and I knew I had several hundred to go before the problem would be solved. "What on earth was the problem?" I hear you ask.

At the beginning of the story Beth Jago, the feisty heroine, finds an intruder in her home. Acting on instinct, she does what any feisty gal would do, she knocks him out with a frying pan. The intruder, which just happens to be our handsome hero, soon regains consciousness, but it quickly becomes apparent that he is very unwell and has no clue who he is. He has lost his memory, cannot recall why he is in Beth's house and, more importantly, who he is. Yes, that's right, he has forgotten his name.

This is the main thrust of the story. Who is this intruder? Will he die? Will Beth be arrested for murder? Should Beth care for him until he recovers? Can she trust him? Is he as dangerous as his nightmares suggest?

So I was happily typing away when I came up with my first problem, namely what do I call him if I don't want to reveal who he really is? Each time he spoke I couldn't simply tag his words with his name, so I had to resort to typing the man/stranger/intruder.  There was a limit to how many times I could use said the man or the man replied. I feared that using the man might form a barrier between the reader and the character and I certainly didn't have the energy (or motivation) to use it for several hundred pages. It's difficult to feel as if you are getting to know someone if you don't even know their name. What was I to do? Simple ... let one of the characters give him a temporary name, thought I.

A temporary name seemed the perfect solution, but even this has its pitfalls. There is the risk of the reader bonding with a character who has one name, then feeling a little disconnected when it is finally revealed what he is really called. Imagine reading Pride and Prejudice, you have bonded with Elizabeth, the heroine, for several hundred pages, yet towards the end of the book you discover she is called Annabelle. There is a slight disconnect, a feeling she is not exactly the same woman you have accompanied through the novel. It was something I wanted to avoid, yet it seemed impossible not to.

So it was a conundrum. How did I solve it? You will have to read The Daughter of River Valley to find out, but the first thing I had to do was go back to the drawing board and re-plot parts of the story. Will I write another story which involves memory loss? I don't plan to, but you know what they say ... the best laid plans ...

The Daughter of River Valley is available in the following formats:-

Paperback 

Audiobook download

Ebook

CD Audiobook

Victoria Cornwall

SO WHAT'S NEW? Linda Mitchelmore

I make no apologies for saying I like new things. That's not to say I spend endlessly - I do cherish the old as well; the favourites, the sentimental things. But there's something about new things - shoes, clothes, jewellery, bags, a food mixer even - that can lift the spirits. Finding a new author to read and enjoy can be one and I well remember 'finding' Elizabeth Berg and then devouring just about everything she's written. I got that in first because this is a writers' blog. But it was actually a photo of a friend's newly-born pigeon pair twins that sparked this blogpost. There's just something so scrumptious, so full of hope, with a new baby, isn't there?

I extend that sentiment to all new life, be it wild and domestic animals, bird life, insect life .... it all seems such a miracle. (I will draw the line at reptiles, but that's probably another blogpost!) And then there's the new romance. You know, that butterflies-in-the-tum feeling you get just thinking about the new person who's come into your life and with whom you are falling in love. It colours our days, doesn't it? Consumes our thoughts. Again there's that full-of-hope feeling for a future we get. There is the ecstasy and the agony of it .... the ecstasy being that we can feel how their hand felt on our cheek, or smell their unique scent, or hear their voice, even when they're miles away. And the agony is sitting by the phone just willing it to ring - will they still feel the same as they did half an hour ago when you parted? Will you be able to detect a cooling off or a hotting up of the relationship?

And I don't know about you but I find we get to a stage where we don't really notice our surroundings .... the couch has been there for ages, the lamps came out of the ark, the footstool was your grandmother's or whoever's, and then suddenly it all seems so deadly drab and we have to do something - it needs something new. Cushions do it for me, which is probably just as well for my bank balance.

So where, I hear you ask, is this all leading? Obvious really, this being a writers' blog - I have a new book out. Oh yes, I do. It's called THE LITTLE B&B AT COVE END and is out already in ebook format and paperback will be in early August, although I've got my author copies now .... and very lovely they are too. There's that new paper smell of them, the pristine way the pages almost crackle as you turn them for the first time.

But a new book won't be new for very long .... soon it will be last month's publication, last year's. So I have to start working on a new book .... and I have. Its working title is PAST PERFECT and I am 72 pages in .... watch this space for the next new thing.

The Devil in the Detail

Historical research:
time-consuming but rewarding.

So I decided to write a historical novel.

This isn’t strictly true. What I actually decided to do was write about a set of characters whose story wasn’t set in the present day. Although I love reading historical fiction I’ve always consciously avoided writing it, because the necessary research seemed time-consuming, unwieldy and difficult. But one character, in particular, has niggled at me for a while. She’s a woman whose husband survived the First World War but might as well not have done. He’s physically healthy but the war broke him and he’ll spend the rest of his life in an asylum.

Where does this leave her? In her early twenties with a young child, she’s effectively a single mother. The ring on her wedding finger means her reputation is intact but she’s trapped in a limbo made for her by her own loyalty to her husband and society’s expectations. What if she wants more children? What if she wants to marry again?

This character was my starting point. Once she’d settled in my head there was no option but to write a historical novel, but the process is overwhelming. I’ve read extensively about the period so that gives me a good start. Much of the area in which she lived is relatively unchanged since the inter-war period and if you can close your eyes to anything post-1939 (there are historic maps which help) it’s easy to envisage the location.

I’ve read a lot of books about the social side of it and I’ve spent time reading old newspapers, which taught me that people don't change. Some men fell out in pubs, others were abusive to railway staff, and their counsels appealed for mercy on the grounds of their background. (“On the Saturday immediately previous he had been discharged from a Carlisle hospital where he had been for five months suffering from shell shock.”) Young women tried to kill themselves and left heartrending little notes. (“Please forgive me, Granny, for all that I have done. Everything is against me and there is nothing left to live for.”)

The big picture, then, is fine. People were pretty much the same as they are now. So I cracked on, only to fall down over the details, not of what my characters do or think or feel but of how they actually lived. So far I’ve completed 1000 words and the following questions have stumped me:

What was a first World War demob suit made from?
How much was a country bus fare in 1920?
How big did a village have to be before it had its own policeman?

It’s going to be a long process. Historical novelists….how do you do it?

SURPRISE! SURPRISE!

Something a bit different for our joint blog this time. We all answer 3 simple questions:

    1. Do you like surprises? Have you ever had a memorable surprise from anyone?





 2. Have any of your characters surprised you by 'talking back' or doling something you hadn't plotted?

3. What makes you smile?

    KATH starts us off:

1. Ye-es... I do like surprises... but sometimes they can be a bit overwhelming, so I always urge caution to people planning them. My most memorable surprise came on the weekend of Valentine's Day, 2000. I had thought we were going to visit friends for the weekend, then going out on Valentine's night (the Monday), and had booked a restaurant and babysitter. Unknown to me, my husband had thought it would be nice to spend the first Valentine's of the new Millennium in Athens. So, on the Friday morning when I thought I was spending the day working from home, my parents turned up to babysit for the weekend. I was asked to pack quickly, then whisked away, with no idea where we were going until we arrived at the airport check-in gate. My husband had arranged my days off work, cancelled my meetings, phoned the friends I thought we were visiting and asked them to play along, phoned the babysitter I'd booked and explained the situation to her as well, and cancelled the restaurant reservation I'd made. It was a litle disorienting!

Anyway, we had a wonderful few days and it was a memorable long weekend, but a part of me felt I'd missed out on what I'd planned. Also, anticipation of an event is half the pleasure, isn't it? Since then I've said I like surprises BUT I like to know that a surprise is coming. Does that make sense?

2. Oh yes, my characters don't always do what I had planned for them. I remember one in particular, in The Girl from Ballymor, who told me in no uncertain terms he'd grown up and was a different person now, and just wasn't going to do what I thought he would, and therefore I'd need to work out some different motivation for him. Actually he was right and the book was all the better for his intervention, so it worked out in the end. Half the fun of writing is getting to know your characters, and finding out how they react to the situations you put them in!

3.  What makes me smile? Mountains. I have what my family call a mountain smile, which only appears when I am half way up one. I also smile at kittens, cute children and large cups of tea being handed to me by my husband.

JO:

1. Hmm…it rather depends on the surprise. A delivery of flowers I wasn’t expecting? Lovely. A dead (or worse, live) mouse in the kitchen (courtesy of the cat)? Not so much. And then there’s context. If the loving note I find on my pillow is from my other half, I’m over the moon. If it’s from a complete stranger, I’m calling the police.

2.  My characters always surprise me, partly because I write the first draft as a way of learning about them. I won’t give details because of spoilers, but at the end of one of my crime novels one character revealed themselves to me as the killer. I had written the whole thing convinced it was someone else…

3.What makes me smile? Cute animal videos. Clever visual jokes. Good guys triumphing against the odds and bad guys getting their comeuppance. Sunny days. Happy endings.

LINDA:

1. I like surprises unless it’s a surprise meal out somewhere posh and I haven’t been warned and am in scruffs! One of the loveliest surprises I’ve ever had was coming up to my birthday when a parcel from Amazon arrived and inside was the most glorious book, The Lost Words by Robert Macfarlane and Jackie Morris. A whopper of a coffee table book I would never have bought for myself it is full of the most exquisite paintings of nature with calligraphy letters and short verse.

2. My characters speak to me always. But it was Janey in Christmas at Strand House who surprised me most by announcing she wanted to be an artist – that wasn’t in the script – and it meant I had to do a bit of extra research on art on her behalf!

3. Trees make me smile, always. I love the almost silk fabric texture of emerging leaves, sparse at first, as though some unseen hand has magicked them onto the bare winter brnaches. Then they fill out, week on week during summer getting so dense you can’t see the centre, before the bonfire flame display of autumn. And we go full circle again with bare branches against a steel-grey winter sky ..... how can all that not make you smile? 

VICTORIA:

1.   I would love to have a surprise party thrown for me (as long as I am dressed for the occasion and not looking as if I have been dragged through a hedge backwards!) Or a surprise holiday (as long as I have nothing already planned). Hhhmmm, I always thought I liked surprises, but perhaps the reality is that I don't!  

2.  I am a great plotter, but I didn't plot the twist in A Daughter's Christmas Wish. Nicholas, the hero, was keeping a secret that even I wasn't aware of until I wrote and exposed it.

3.  What makes me smile? My husband when he is being funny. The sound of birds on a summer's day. Animals and little children doing silly things. My adult children when they are happy about something. Lots of things ... too many to list here. They usually cost nothing and has something to do with nature and the positive (or innocent) behavior of animals or humans.

RAE:

1.Yes, I love surprises. Although when I think about it, I haven't actually received that many. The most recent was tickets to see Michael Bublé in concert in Hyde Park. I've had a crush on him for years and practically hyper-ventilated when I opened the envelope. Perhaps it's for the best that I'm not surprised too often!

2.Yes! In my current emotional fiction novel I mapped a whole strand for a main character who, half-way through, decided to take a different route. She is someone who doesn't trust authority, so perhaps it was to be expected!

3.What makes me smile? The brilliance of nature in all its forms - a wild coastline, snow-covered mountains, the baby crow I found, my pet cat, the perennials that bloom in my garden despite being irnored, wildlife documentaries - all lift my spirits. As does listening to the La La Land playlist.

JENNIE

1. I think I do like surprises although like Rae I haven't had any real surprises recently. One I remember though happened a couple of years ago. We'd taken the dog for his five minute mid-day stroll the usual 200 yards down to the river and as we walked back up we could see a car parked outside the cottage. Our daughter and family had come for the weekend. 'We wanted to surprise you,' daughter said. Well they did that!

2. Yes, my characters often take me down plotlines that I hadn't anticipated. I wish I could be more of a plotter than a pantster but I can't. Writing a synopsis before I've written the story is my béte noir - once I know the ending, as far as I'm concerned the story is finished!

3. What makes me smile? Phone calls from friends, watching Django our rescue collie play with Gus our stray cat, walking along a Devonshire shoreline in winter,

baby goats, hearing happy news from my children and watching Mama Mia always without fail makes me feel happy. I'll finish the post with the picture of Gus on the roof because he's always making me laugh.

FREEING UP YOUR WRITING

Over the next few months the Novel Points of View team will be inviting guest writers to the blog. Their brief is to write a post connected to writing, reading, books and creativity. I'm delighted to introduce writer, Morton S.Gray to the blog as she shares her experience of facing and overcoming the times when the words just don't want to flow.

Victoria Cornwall

Morton S.Gray
Author

We all have times when our writing isn’t flowing. I never like to use the much-worn phrase of writer’s block, as to give the unfortunate phase of your writing that label seems to give it far too much importance. Instead, you need to get writing freely again before the problem becomes entrenched, so don’t give it the courtesy of a name, just move past it. I hear you cry - how? Probably accompanied by much gnashing of teeth, cleaning of the oven and fridge and eating of chocolate and ice cream.

Please be assured that I am not trivialising this wilderness you find yourself in – been there, done that, got several T-shirts.

Try the following methods to get you going again and good luck. This is by no means an exhaustive list, so if you have any other ideas please add them in the comments below – you might just save someone’s manuscript and sanity!

• Take a step back for a specified period you agree with yourself, preferably no longer than a week. You may just be exhausted.

• Rewrite the last scene you wrote from a different point of view and see if that helps you to move forward.

• Have a shower. This never fails to work for me, as evidenced by the soggy opened out toilet roll tubes with writing scribbled all over them in my study.

• Write a short story or poem about one of your characters, or your setting to gain a different perspective.

• Take a walk. It is surprising how often a sight, smell or noise on your journey can evoke a new thought or even a memory that can be incorporated into your work in progress.

• Go out for a coffee and listen to those sitting around you. Write down a few phrases you hear people saying and see if you can write on from there. Examples from my own eavesdropping – ‘Lucy disappeared you know.’ ‘Nothing has been the same since I dropped my favourite mug.’ ‘I just walked in on them …’

• Listen to what you have written so far by getting voice software to read it to you. Microsoft Word now has this capability and I find it so useful, almost as if someone else has written the manuscript.

• Write a character study including backstory for your main characters. You will often find this enriches your story and gives you a new avenue to explore in the plot. Write questions for your characters to answer about how they are honestly feeling about their role in your story.

• Have fun by writing a list of things that can’t possibly happen in the next scene or chapter. This often clarifies what can actually happen.

• Use a timer to reduce pondering (procrastination) time. Begin by writing for five minutes, then do something else for ten. Then write for ten minutes, and so on.

• Join one of the 1000 words in an hour challenges on Twitter. Search the hashtag #1K1HR.

• Draw a spider diagram – put a dilemma from your story in a circle in the middle and then any thoughts about it on branches around the edge. Keep expanding until something strikes a chord for you to write from. I have an example in my second novel for Choc Lit The Truth Lies Buried, where I actually managed to incorporate most of my spider diagram into a scene. See if you can reconstruct my spider diagram from the following extract.

“She searched through a drawer in the old-fashioned sideboard. She had the feeling that Carver was watching her. She was pleased she was wearing skinny jeans and that her back was turned, as she was sure her face was bright red.
     She sat down opposite him with her pen poised over the pad of lined paper. ‘How do you want to play this?’ She hoped the colour had faded from her cheeks.
     ‘Just throw out ideas however silly and then we’ll discuss them. I’ll kick off with “abducted by aliens”.’ He laughed. ‘That’s the favourite explanation my mother and I had for the disappearance of Dad, by the way.’
     ‘Russian spies who had to leave the country.’

     ‘Good one. How about intelligence service operatives?’

       Jenny wrote the ideas in neat columns on the page.

      'You mean like James Bond?’

      ‘Possibly. Your turn, let’s keep the thoughts coming. Don’t think too much, or you’ll dismiss ideas.’

     Jenny sipped the strong coffee and watched the expressions flashing across Carver’s face. She was enjoying this and the thought made her go quiet while she questioned why.

    ‘Come on, don’t censor your thoughts, just throw them out.’

    ‘Okay, some sort of crime, bank robbery, murder, fire, fraud.’

    ‘So, they could have got away with it and been living abroad, South America, perhaps?’

     She wrote South America in capital letters on the page, followed by a large question mark.

     ‘Or they might not have … maybe they’ve been in prison for twenty-five years.’

     ‘Surely we’d have known if there had been a trial?’

     ‘Not necessarily, we were both quite young.’

     ‘True, but I can’t think news wouldn’t have got out. We’d have been teased at school, surely?’

     She rubbed the side of her nose with the pen as she thought. ‘Maybe our dads were witnesses in a trial and had to be whisked away to a safe house somewhere.’

     ‘But wouldn’t they have taken us too?’

     ‘Not sure. I don’t know how these things work.’

     He sat looking miles away for a while and then his face became animated again. ‘Horrid thought, but maybe they murdered someone and fled.’”

Thank you, Morton, for joining us on our blog this week and sharing some great advice. To find out more about Morton, her novels and latest releases, plus purchase links,  just read on ... 

About The Truth Lies Buried

Two children in a police waiting room, two distressed mothers, a memory only half remembered …

When Jenny Simpson returns to the seaside town of Borteen, her childhood home, it’s for a less than happy reason. But it’s also a chance for her to start again.

A new job leads to her working for Carver Rodgers, a man who lives alone in a house that looks like it comes from the pages of a fairy tale – until you see the disaster zone inside …

As Jenny gets to know Carver she begins to unravel the sadness that has led to his chaotic existence. Gradually they realise they have something in common that is impossible to ignore – and it all links back to a meeting at a police station many years before.

Could the truth lie just beneath their feet?

Available in eBook
paperback & audio formats.

Biography for Morton S. Gray

Morton lives with her husband, two sons and Lily, the tiny white dog, in Worcestershire, U.K. She has been reading and writing fiction for as long as she can remember, penning her first attempt at a novel aged fourteen. She is a member of the Romantic Novelists’ Association and The Society of Authors.

Her debut novel The Girl on the Beach was published after she won the Choc Lit Publishing Search for a Star competition. This story follows a woman with a troubled past as she tries to unravel the mystery surrounding her son’s new headteacher, Harry Dixon. The book is available as a paperback and e-book.

Morton’s second book for Choc Lit The Truth Lies Buried is another romantic suspense novel. The book tells the story of Jenny Simpson and Carver Rodgers as they uncover secrets from their past. This book is available as an e-book, paperback and audiobook.

Christmas at Borteen Bay is Morton’s first Christmas novella. It is set in her fictional seaside town of Borteen and follows the story of Pippa Freeman, who runs the Rose Court Guesthouse with her mother, and local policeman Ethan Gibson, as they unravel a family secret as Christmas approaches.

Morton previously worked in the electricity industry in committee services, staff development and training. She has a Business Studies degree and is a fully qualified Clinical Hypnotherapist and Reiki Master. She also has diplomas in Tuina acupressure massage and energy field therapy. She enjoys crafts, history and loves tracing family trees. Having a hunger for learning new things is a bonus for the research behind her books.

You can catch up with Morton on

Twitter - @MortonSGray

Facebook - Morton S. Gray Author 

Instagram - Instagram Profile 

or on her

Website mortonsgray.com