Gilli Allan - Cutting out the Boring Bits

We’re delighted to welcome Gilli Allan to the blog today explaining how the bits you leave out are as important as the bits you keep in…and make for a better story!

Just a few pages long, my first book, begun and abandoned when I was ten, was set in the olden days. Three women, one a young teenager, went by boat to visit a lighthouse - you know the kind I mean, one set on a rocky crag, surrounded by sea. I no longer recall the relationships between the women, but I suspect mother and daughter, and possibly aunt. No sooner had the party arrived (there was presumably a boatman as well) than the weather deteriorated, trapping them there. The whole enterprise was patently a plot device to isolate the women, but I don’t remember what reason, if any, I came up with to explain their original desire for visiting the lighthouse, other than that it was the kind of jaunt well-brought up ladies of the period engaged in to fill their time.  

The lighthouse was manned by two men and a teenage boy. (At the time my ideal age for a romantic lead was sixteen). Braving the storm, my hero went outside to secure the wave-tossed boat which had brought the women. He fell on the wet rocks, injuring himself. From then on he was forced by his unspecified, and not very serious, injuries, to recline on a sofa, while my young heroine tended to him.

After setting the scene, my imagination stuttered to a halt. I had a sense of the romance of the situation but, at this point in my life, had no idea how to convey the journey from attraction to actual cuddling. But even more than the difficulty for ten year old me to visualise a budding romance, I found myself put off by the sheer amount of domestic detail I felt I needed to get through, before I could even arrive at my romantic interludes. There was just too much connecting stuff, like the preparation and consumption of meals, walking from one room to another, going to bed, getting up, combing hair and brushing teeth. It was all just too boring!

I continued to write ‘novels’ throughout my secondary school days. Many were started, none finished. They all foundered on the same obstacle. By this time I thoroughly enjoyed writing the juicy bits - the smouldering glances, the smoochy dances, the kisses and embraces - but I soon ran out of steam when it came to writing the rest of the story. And yet I felt guilty, as if it was cheating not to detail the passing of time by giving every dot and comma of my heroine’s life - her journeys back and forth on the bus, her visits to her mother, her shopping trips, her excursions to the launderette. I believed a ‘real’ writer was somehow duty-bound not only to describe his character’s adventures, but to describe the minutiae of everyday life as well.

It was only much later that it really came home to me that these descriptions of the mundane are rarely needed, unless you are making a point. If you find it tedious to write a particular passage, it’s a fair guess that it will bore your reader.  Of course you need to set the scene. You need to convey the passing of time. You need to evoke smell, taste, touch, and to create a believable world in which to set your story. But unless a minor domestic detail is crucial to the plot - in which case it is cheating not to let the reader know it - then it’s unnecessary to follow your characters’ every move from waking in the morning to pulling the duvets up to their chins at night. You can trust your reader to fill in the blanks.

  

Life Class is written in third person throughout, but each of the four main protagonists has his or her own, interleaved viewpoints. As I began each passage, I realised that seeing the developing plot through different eyes gave me gave me far more flexibility. It reduced the temptation to follow a character’s every last movement, and it cut out the need for a lot of “And then....” type exposition. More importantly, it treats the reader as a grown-up. I realised more than ever before that I don’t need to hold her hand. She is able to fill in the spaces between the dots for herself.

About art, life, love and learning lessons, Life Class follows four members of an art class, who meet once a week to draw the human figure. All have failed to achieve what they thought they wanted in life. They each come to realise that it’s not just the naked model they need to study and understand. Their stories are very different, but they all have secrets they hide from the world and from themselves. By uncovering and coming to terms with the past, maybe they can move on to an unimagined future.

Biog:

Gilli’s childhood hobbies were art and writing. She went to Croydon Art College. Before being employed as an illustrator in advertising, she did a variety of increasingly desperate fill-in jobs. Serious writing was only considered when Gilli was at home with her toddler son. Her first two novels were published, but after her publisher’s demise, she went independent. 

Gilli designs Christmas cards and has begun book illustration. Life Class is the third to be published in a three book deal with Accent Press.

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Thank you, Gilli, for illustrating so well how sometimes less is more, and good luck with Life Class.

If you would like to write about the craft of writing please contact the blog on elaineeverest@aol.com

Gilli Allan: Finding her Wings

Gilli Allan on her novel Fly or Fall and how she gave it wings

I didn’t go to university. I only studied English up to the age of sixteen, but I was always a story-teller. When I first decided to write seriously, I simply found a notepad and a pen, and started. It was only after I’d had two novels published that I began to take on board some of the ground rules of successful fiction writing. There are very many pitfalls and trip wires for the new author, and I’m sure I’ve fallen into, or over, most of them.   

‘Point of view’ was something I knew about, but only in the sense that I understood what was meant by this term.  I’d read and enjoyed many multi-faceted novels, told from a variety of viewpoints. But I hadn’t understood or mastered the skill and craft required to make such an approach work seamlessly. The vital importance of keeping a grip on POV was an aspect of writing that had simply not occurred to me.   

At the start of my writing career most women’s fiction was written solely in the third person, from the viewpoint of the heroine. I’m not a natural rebel so, for the majority of the action in my early books, I too followed the heroine, telling her story in the third person. But when there was something I wanted my reader to know, something my heroine had neither seen nor understood, I used a scatter-gun approach, going to whichever character was in possession of the facts. Head-hopping is a bad habit that very often afflicts novice writers, and I embraced it wherever necessary, but if I couldn’t use another random ‘head’ from which to convey important messages to the reader, I’d simply drop the information into the narrative. The use of the God-like authorial voice is yet another story-telling method disapproved of in contemporary commercial fiction writing (in literary fiction you can get away with anything.) And if there were things I didn’t want my reader to know yet, like the fact my hero really really fancied my heroine, I just kept quiet.

For very many reasons, which I won’t go into now, Fly or Fall, was written over a number of years. I started and stopped and started again. But at the time I began it, I was at least in possession of some newly absorbed wisdom about the craft of writing. Fly or Fall is a complex story with a larger cast of characters than I’d previously handled. I knew that each of the protagonists had a history, they each had flaws and failings, they each kept secrets. All, that is, apart from my heroine, Nell. She is straightforward, principled and honest. It never crosses her mind that others are not like her; that the people in her life might deceive and hide and lie. She’s not stupid, but her default position is to take life at face value - to believe others’ accounts of themselves. It’s not until halfway through the story that Nell begins to comprehend that she has been massively duped. Some of the deceptions are serious, some trivial, and in some respects she’s deluded herself. But, like a house of cards, take one support away and everything begins to topple. 

I had faith in my story, but although I was now very much more aware of what I was doing - solely telling the story in the third person, through Nell’s eyes - it sat leadenly and lumpily on the page. A plate of cold porridge springs to mind. One problem was the back-story. It was important. I needed to convey it. But it was complicated. There were far too many conversations of the “Didn’t you know that...?” variety. I realised I had to do something radical. I started by asking myself some ‘back to basics’ questions. For example, does Nell, and, by extension, my reader, really need to know this yet ... in fact, do they really need to know it at all? 

After the brutal cutting, I began to question the point of view. Not the direction from which the story is told, I knew it was Nell’s, but I wondered if the use of third person was hampering its direct communication to the reader. I put the whole of the manuscript into the first person - initially just to see what difference it would make.

It used to be an accepted wisdom that the readers of women’s fiction are resistant to novels in the first person. They won’t buy them in the same numbers, apparently. I don’t know if this is still true, but even if it is, getting the story right was far more important to me, than any theoretical commercial advantage. To my delight, when ‘she’ became ‘I’, Fly or Fall flew.

Fly or Fall follows the dismantling of all of Nell’s certainties, her preconceptions and her moral code. Unwelcome truths about her friends, her husband, her teenage children and even herself are revealed. Relationships are not what they seem. The hostility between brothers is exposed and finally explained. And the love that blossoms unexpectedly from the wreckage of her life is doomed, as she acknowledges the hair’s breadth between wishful thinking, self-deception and lies.

By the conclusion of Fly or Fall everything has altered for Nell, the woman who doesn’t like change. But she has rebuilt herself as a different person, a braver person, and she has embarked with optimism on a totally transformed life, a life that offers the chance of love

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Blurb

Wife and mother, Nell, fears change, but it is forced upon her by her manipulative husband, Trevor. Finding herself in a new world of flirtation and casual infidelity, her principles are undermined and she’s tempted. Should she emulate the behaviour of her new friends or stick with the safe and familiar?

But everything Nell has accepted at face value has a dark side. Everyone - even her nearest and dearest - has been lying. She’s even deceived herself. The presentiment of disaster, first felt as a tremor at the start of the story, rumbles into a full blown earthquake. When the dust settles, nothing is as it previously seemed. And when an unlikely love blossoms from the wreckage of her life, she believes it is doomed.

The future, for the woman who feared change, is irrevocably altered. But has she been broken, or has she transformed herself? “

About Gilli Allan

Gilli Allan started to write in childhood, a hobby only abandoned when real life supplanted the fiction. Gilli didn’t go to Oxford or Cambridge but, after just enough exam passes to squeak in, she attended Croydon Art College.

She didn’t work on any of the broadsheets, in publishing or television. Instead she was a shop assistant, a beauty consultant and a barmaid before landing her dream job as an illustrator in advertising. It was only when she was at home with her young son that Gilli began writing seriously. Her first two novels were quickly published, but when her publisher ceased to trade, Gilli went independent. 

Over the years, Gilli has been a school governor, a contributor to local newspapers, and a driving force behind the community shop in her Gloucestershire village. Still a keen artist, she designs Christmas cards and has begun book illustration. Gilli is particularly delighted to have recently gained a new mainstream publisher - Accent Press. Fly or Fall is the second book to be published in the three book deal.

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It’s been fascinating reading about how you found your own ‘voice’, Gilli. Thank you for joining us today

The RNA blog is brought to you by

Elaine Everest & Natalie Kleinman
 

If you would like to write for the blog please contact us on elaineeverest@aol.com

Gilli Allan: Writing from experience

Today we welcome Gilli Allan to the blog.

At school, as soon as we’ve mastered writing, we’re told to ‘Write about what you know’.  But what do children know?  Their world is necessarily limited, their experiences - hopefully - benign.  To a young child, the imagination can be almost more real than reality. My imaginary world was peopled with princes and princesses, red Indians, knights in armour, fairies, witches and magic.

As a teenager I was fascinated by the gothic. I sought out books about cavaliers, highwaymen and pirates; stories where the heroine is imprisoned by an evil relative; books about houses riddled with secret passages and priest holes.  To be set an essay about ‘what you did in the holidays’ was not only boring, it was also divisive.  I would have spent most of my summer in prosaic occupations - drawing, reading and writing, and taking our dog for a walk, then holidaying in Cornwall. Lovely though it was, in the one-upmanship of the playground, Cornwall was no match for sailing around the Greek islands, flirting with waiters in Majorca or camping near the French Riviera. Always far safer and more interesting, to invent something

. 

For most of us, it isn’t until there are at least 3 decades under your belt that you can understand what writing from experience really means.  By then you will have been touched by one or more of life’s big events - falling in love, marriage, childbirth, divorce, heart-break, illness, bereavement - and now have the maturity to draw something deeper from the life you have lived.  But ‘write about what you know’ is still a misleading adage.  If you were only ‘allowed’ to write truthfully about what you had personally experienced, you wouldn’t be producing fiction: you’d be writing autobiography.

Fiction is fiction because you’ve made it up.  It’s a story!  There are some authors who almost make it a point of principle to set their novels in countries they’ve never even visited.  I admire their chutzpah, but I haven’t the courage, or energy necessary to do the research. I set my stories in a world I know, but seen through the distorting glass of my imagination.  And I draw on events from my past, but only after a passage of time has filtered the rawness of the emotions as well as the irrelevant detail.  The experience is then trimmed, tucked, tailored and embroidered, to fit my story.

But ‘writing what you know’ isn’t just taking events from your own past and reimagining them. It can be a far more subtle and nuanced than that.  When creating your protagonists, you also invent a landscape to set them in; you give them their own problems and their own hopes and fears. In doing so, you are mining everything you have absorbed about life, about people, about motivation and instinct. And to make your invented characters’ experiences come to life, you call up your sense memories of sight, sound, smell, taste and touch.  These may be nostalgic - a hill top in early summer, the fields below gilded by a sheen of yellow buttercups; the scent of may blossom, lady’s lace and nettles;  the feel of the chill, dewed grass against skin; the song of a skylark; a distant tractor.   But there are some sense memories you recall which may be horrific, like the jarring impact of a car crash, the screeching tear of metal, the smell of petrol, singed rubber and asphalt, and those long, cold moments of stunned silence, before the first cry of a baby. 

Nothing is forbidden to the writer’s palette.  Everything you have ever known, seen, felt, smelt, suffered, is there to be used, to turn your imaginary world into a world the reader believes in.  

About Gilli:

As a child writing and art were Gilli’s hobbies. Writing was side lined in adulthood, when she worked in advertising as an illustrator.It was only after having her son that Gilli began writing seriously. Her first two novels were quickly published but her publisher ceased to trade. After years in the wilderness Gilli went independent with the emergence of E-book. Still a keen artist, she designs Christmas cards and has begun book illustration. Gilli is delighted to have secured a three book deal with Accent Press.

LINKS:

Amazon: Torn

TORN  by Gilli Allan

Jess has made a series of bad life choices and all have let her down. 
Escaping London, she sets out to recreate herself in the idyllic countryside, and this time she wants to get it right! 
She wants to lead a responsible, tranquil life with her young son Rory, but soon discovers stresses which pull her in opposing directions – conflict over a new bypass, between friends, and worst of all, between lovers. 

Educated, experienced, and pragmatic, James is a widowed farmer whose opinions differ from, and enrage, Jess. His young shepherd, Danny, is an uneducated and inexperienced idealist. Jess is attracted to them both, and realises if she wants her idyllic countryside life to survive, she must choose her Mr Right. 

Thank you Gilli and good luck with your novel.

The RNA blog is brought to you by

Elaine Everest and Natalie Kleinman

If you have a book to promote or would like to write a piece for the blo please contact us on elaineeverest@aol.com

Independent Releases for May

Eileen Ramsay NEVER CALL IT LOVING 

ebook  

April 2012

£2.60

When Fern Graham, a happily married wife and mother, is invited to Tuscany to meet her hero, a famous Italian tenor, she little knows that her entire life is about to be turned upside down. Fern, a moral woman, finds herself involved in a passionate love affair and nothing will ever be the same.

Mary Nichols In Love and War
Ebook
April 2012
£2.05
When her parents were killed in a dreadful coaching accident leaving Louise, at nineteen, suddenly and devastatingly alone in the world, it is to her neighbour, Richard Oakingham, she turns. He supports her through the ordeal, stands beside her at the grave, offers her his love and protection and, after the funeral, when she is at her most vulnerable, asks her to marry him. She does not realise he is an inveterate gambler until it is too late.


Before a year is out, she endures the loss of her own money, the pawning of her jewels, the move from house to apartment, from apartment to furnished room, one room, then another, each smaller and more sordid than the last. She is appalled when she discovers he is prepared to gamble with her life and she has been won in a game of cards by Captain Paul Fourier, home on leave from the Peninsular War. She finds herself with Paul in Portugal, following Wellington’s army as it goes to war, and here she learns why so many women follow their men into battle and here she discovers the true meaning of love.

Eileen Ramsay  THE MYSTERIOUS MARQUIS

ebook

May 2012

£1.95

Against a background of forbidding Highland castles and sumptuous London town houses, Elizabeth Ridgeway, more at ease in ancient Egyptian tombs than in the haunts of the ton, finds herself embroiled in rescuing a kidnapped child from the clutches of a wicked but totally inept villain and returning him to his father, the unbelievably handsome, elegant and very mysterious Marquis.

Mary Nichols THE HEART OF THE LION
ebook
£2.00
May 2012

Stella Gardiner arrives in Mexico in 1867 to search for her missing naturalist husband and immediately finds herself caught up in Mexico’s civil unrest, not helped by the reappearance of an old love, whom Maximillian, the troubled Hapsburg ruler, instructs to escort her on her quest.

Gilli Allan LIFE CLASS

e-book

1 May 2012

£2.40

Life Class. Four very different people attend. They come to realise it’s not just the naked model they need to study and understand. All have secrets hidden from the world and from themselves. By uncovering and coming to terms with the past, they are freed to move on. http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B007XWFURQ

Http://gilliallan.blogspot.com

Liz Fielding ELOPING WITH EMMY 

ebook

£1.91/$2.99

Tom Brodie, has been landed with the uneviable task of preventing headstrong heiress Emerald Carlisle from marrying a fortune-hunter. 

http://tinyurl.com/cx5pyte

http://www.lizfielding.com

On The Eleventh Day of Christmas - Gilli Allan Decorates the RNA Tree

On the tenth day of Christmas Gilli Allan shares a special ornament...

I don’t have one favourite Christmas ornament.  I could offer several, some because they are beautiful, like my feather peacock, or some because they’re cute and funny and make me laugh, like my flying sheep, or my fairy, who looks like an eccentric Ophelia at her most crazy.  Or I could go for sentiment, and offer the red sparkly Santas that my son picked out in Woolworths, when he was tiny, which have graced our tree ever since. 

My mother died in 1986, the year my first book was published. Then Christmas irrevocably changed. No more large, fun, family gatherings at my parents’ spacious home.  From then on my siblings and I did our own thing.  Yet I still try to recreate the Christmases of my youth.  I make my own mince pies, sausage rolls, Christmas cake and Christmas pudding.  I even make bread sauce, solely because the scent of milk and bread crumbs, simmering with the clove studded onion and bay leaves, evokes the warmth of my mum’s ‘Christmas Eve’ kitchen.  

So the ornament I’ve chosen is the one I rescued, after my father died in 2009.  It goes back as far as I can remember   ̶   to those days when we hung the tree with threaded puffs of cotton-wool, to mimic snow.  Those were the days when we woke early, in feverish excitement, with a heavy, crackly knitted stocking across our feet; the days when grandparents, aunts and uncles all visited. The Christmas of my own childhood. 

You can follow Gilli on Twitter here.