Category: Writing

Lucy Strange: How Scary is too Scary? | Mark Stay’s Creative Differences Episode 14

Lucy Strange is an award-winning children’s author whose books feel like classic children’s literature, but are written in a style that is engaging and accessible for today’s younger readers.

Most recently she’s collaborated with artist Pam Smy on their spooky, funny new series Lockett & Wilde’s Dreadfully Haunting Mysteries! Often inspired by folklore and fairy tales, Lucy combines historical settings with touches of magic and fantasy to create utterly convincing worlds in which anything might happen.

And before becoming a professional writer, Lucy worked as an English teacher for fifteen years. Having also trained and worked as an actor, Lucy narrates her own audiobooks, winning the 2019 Audie Award for The Secret of Nightingale Wood.

WE DISCUSS:

Collaborating with illustrators

What Lucy learned from abridging Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein

Writer’s Block and how to deal with it

And how scary is too scary when writing for children?

And much more!

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LINKS

Lucy’s Website: https://www.lucystrange.org

The Episode with GB Ralph: https://markstaycreativedifferences.com/2024/12/12/episode-5-with-gb-ralph-share-the-excitment/

What’s Giving Us Joy…

Essex Serpent, Sarah Perry: https://serpentstail.com/work/the-essex-serpent/

Instead of a Letter, Diana Athill: https://granta.com/products/instead-of-a-letter/

Once Upon a River, Diane Setterfield: https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/437745/once-upon-a-river-by-diane-setterfield/9781784163631

Death at the Sign of the Rook, Kate Atkinson: https://www.kateatkinson.co.uk/books/death-at-the-sign-of-the-rook/

Buckingham Nicks: https://www.roughtrade.com/product/lindsey-buckingham-and-stevie-nicks/buckingham-nicks

Superstore: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superstore_(TV_series)

Robert Redford: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Redford

A huge thanks to Emily for production assistance, to Kai Newton for the edit, and Dominic Currie for the jingle.

I Love Editing… Am I Weird?

I’m in the depths of edits of THE END OF GODS and I’m loving it… Does that make me a weirdo?

Rowan Coleman: “I Was a Bit Grumpy…”

Special guest Rowan Coleman, bestselling author of Never Tear Us Apart, reveals how a research trip to Malta started with her being ‘a bit grumpy’ but resulted with her making a magical connection with the island…

TRANSCRIPT

MARK: You went to Malta to research this. So what’s your process when you go to a place to research? Do you have like a shopping list of things to do, or do you just step out the hotel and go, right, where do I go now?

ROWAN: I was a bit grumpy about it, actually. Because, believe it or not, because the island itself is… but it’s sort of tied up with my own feelings about my relationship with my father. And so I was like, well, I expect I’m just gonna hate it and it’s going to be rubbish and I won’t like it. But when I turned up, it was the opposite. I did actually feel weirdly, immediately connected to it. And my shopping list is… I don’t really have a specific set of things for this book, because I first visited before I started writing it, really. If I’ve written a book already, like with The Summer of Impossible Things, I knew that I wanted to get to various locations in Brooklyn. But for this book, I was just getting a sense of the island for the first time, and so I just let it lead me. And it’s very small. It’s about the size of the Isle of Wight. And so the first thing that drew me were the ancient temples, and there are many Mesolithic temples on the island that are absolutely magical and fascinating. And that kind of was like my my first step on a very organic journey into putting all the components of the book together.

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Rowan Coleman: “I Forgive Myself…”

Special guest Rowan Coleman, bestselling author of Never Tear Us Apart, reveals how forgiveness has become part of her creative process…

TRANSCRIPT

MARK: What small thing has made a big difference to your creative process?

ROWAN: I think the thing that’s made the biggest difference to my creative process is forgiving myself. For not… Sometimes going quite slowly to sometimes just doing small bits at a time. I am a late diagnosed, unmedicated ADHD woman, and I used to think… I was convinced that I had a very strict writing regime and sat at my desk from 9 to 5, and wrote every day, and I didn’t realise that this was, in fact, not true until I took my kids with me to a book event when they were quite young. And I was saying this and I heard this laughter from the back of the hall, I was like, what? Why are you laughing, darling? “You don’t do that. All you do faff around all day on the internet.” (laughs) I thought, that is true. That is all I do. So now I sort of just think, well, if it’s not… if you can’t… you know, sometimes you have to write when you have to write because we all have multiple things that we’re juggling, you know, proper jobs and, teaching courses and all that stuff. And sometimes you just have to go, right. Well, this is my time to write, and I have to write, but if it’s… if I can’t be that disciplined, I just say, all right, well, it’s not happening today, but it will happen tomorrow. And you only write ten words. That’s fine, because that’s ten more words and you’ll add to it tomorrow. And I sort of just let myself off the hook and I don’t let myself feel shame about it anymore, which is a big part of growing up with neurodiversity. Undiagnosed neurodiversity particularly is kind of constantly feeling that you’re not trying hard enough. So I try to tell myself now that I am, in fact, trying hard enough, and it does somehow work out in the end. I don’t know how, but it does.

MARK: Yeah, I think the moral of the story is be kind to yourself and don’t invite your kids to book events.

ROWAN: I mean, I don’t know what’s worse: that one, or when they came when they were a little bit older and were sitting in the front row on Switches.

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Nicola Whyte: Write What Makes You Happy

Special guest Nicola Whyte, debut writer of 10 Marchfield Square, reveals how writing for herself led to a breakthrough…

TRANSCRIPT:

MARK: What’s the best happy accident of your writing career?

NICOLA: Well, it might have been that Times Chicken House one. Subbing that in at the last minute… But actually, it kind of turned me off writing for children for a bit because the subbing after that was brutal. And so I thought, I’m just, you know what: I’m done. I’m done trying to please people and do whatever… So I’m just going to write whatever makes me happy. And of course, that was Marchfield, so…

MARK: You said earlier about writing for yourself and writing super long books or whatever, but I think that’s the key to it, though, isn’t it? You’ve got to write… You can’t chase the market. You’ve got to write what you love, and what you’re passionate about. And when those stars aligned in terms of; the market’s ready for it, then great things will happen. So, I think that’s the lesson to be learned from that. And writing for kids… I’ve tried it. It’s the hardest thing ever. It really is such a such a difficult market.

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Sarah Pinborough: “I Triple Write.”

This month’s special guest bestselling author Sarah Pinborough reveals when she knows that’s she finished a draft and how she ‘triple writes’ her books…

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TRANSCRIPT

MARK: How do you know when you’re done?

SARAH: Well, Mark, invariably, I am skating in the last knockings of the deadline. So when I write the end, I literally think ‘I’m going to scan through this and I’m sending this fucker off,’ so… But, because I do triple write, as it were, like I plan in a notebook, then I rough write into Scrivener, then I copy it over into Word, tidy it in Word. I do it in like 8000 word chunks. I’ve kind of… if it’s not untidy and it’s not…. You know, it’s probably most people’s second draft, when I hand it in. And I kind of think… I mean obviously this would be different if it was on spec, but I’m like; they’ve paid for it. Let’s see if it’s holding, you know, because if it’s not holding, it doesn’t matter how pretty I make it. (If) there’s a massive structural problem, let’s get to that. You know, so I kind of figure that’s the way.

Tracy Buchanan: Writing and Walks

This month’s special guest Tracy Buchanan reveals how her dog inspires her creativity…

TRANSCRIPT:

MARK: What small thing has made a big difference to your creative process?

TRACY: Oh, having a dog in my office. A small thing: it’s walks. I know that sounds really… Going out for walks when I get stuck on something or trying to come up with ideas. And that’s what my dog — my dog assistant is snoring at the moment — comes in. So that’s that is a small thing for me, because if I’m sat there and I cannot figure out this plot hole, if I go out into nature, walk around… It untangles. So I’d always recommend that to anyone: going out for walks.

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Or watch the whole interview on Youtube…

My Writing Process on the Real Writing Process Podcast

I had a great time talking to Tom Pepperdine about my writing process in great depth. This gets very nerdy, very quickly. This is an excellent podcast for writers, so do check out the backlist, too…

The Real Writing Process of James Goodhand – The Real Writing Process

Tom Pepperdine interviews author, James Goodhand, about his writing process. James explains how important human psychology is to his books, why inspiration doesn't always equate to quality, and the great advice he got from his childhood drum teacher.James's Instagram is here: https://www.instagram.com/james.goodhand/And you can find more information about previous episodes of this podcast on the following links:https://bsky.app/profile/realwritingpro.bsky.socialhttps://www.threads.net/@realwritingprohttps://www.instagram.com/realwritingpro
  1. The Real Writing Process of James Goodhand
  2. The Real Writing Process of Caitlin Rozakis
  3. The Real Writing Process of Mark Stay
  4. The Real Writing Process of Eliza Chan
  5. The Real Writing Process of M. R. Carey

A Tip for Finishing First Drafts from Nadine Matheson

This month’s special guest Nadine Matheson shares a great tip for finishing first drafts…

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TRANSCRIPT

MARK: What small thing has made a big difference to your creative process?

NADINE:  What I do now… Before I just used to write my first draft — and it sounds like a big thing, but it’s not, it’s a small thing — I write the first draft, and then after that, then do the rewrite, brief re-structure, whatever. That’s the second draft. But now I don’t. I write up to act two, and then once I finish act two in the first draft, that’s when I start doing the rewrite. Because now I’m doing the rewrite, I have a clearer idea of how… I’ve fixed everything now, so I know exactly how that last third is going to finish. And I started doing that. I think with… I think I did it with The Kill List, and I think it was just a timing issue I had. Like, a personal time finishing, I thought, I’m not going to get this done if I wait to finish it. I thought, let me just start rewriting it now. When I did that, I thought, this is a better way for me to work. So that’s what I do now.

MARK: And when you get to that two thirds point, you just plough on and get straight through to the end.

NADINE: Yeah, because I’m not thinking… When I’m writing that first draft, I’m already thinking, well, I already know I need to change this now. I need to change this character, put it in a different location, or I’m just going to get rid of that subplot. I just know these things aren’t going to work. And by the time I’ve done the second draft, I’ve already done that. And then I said, that last third is… I can’t say seamless, but it’s a lot smoother. I’m not fixing things.

MARK: Yeah, it’s so weird because I’ve just done that myself actually. You know, I’m talking about trilogies being hard. I got about I was 80,000 words on this, and the ending is there, and I’m kind of thinking, hmmm… And then I’m writing, I thought, ‘Oh, that’s what this is about!’ So I’ve realised, actually, what it’s about. So I’ve had to go back and sort of, you know, make changes. And now the ending just feels so much… Not, like you say, not easier, but I know where I’m going now. I know I’m going to do it. Yeah. 

NADINE: You have a much clearer… There’s no debris in your path. That’s the best way.

MARK: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It’s a lot less cluttered, isn’t it? 

NADINE: Yeah, definitely.

Will META do the Write Thing?

META (who owns Facebook) has used pirated versions of my books and those of pretty much every author I know to train its artificial intelligence software. We need the government to step in and ensure that META will #DoTheWriteThing

If you want to help, there’s a petition you can sign here…

sign the peTition