Discover the Thrills and Chills of Young Nightmares
The Writing Cave
Hi there!
Welcome to The Writing Cave!
It's not going to be the biggest section ever, and the updates might not be regular, but hopefully it will give you a little insight as to what I'm working on and the way I go about writing.
Thank of it as a way of seeing how things come together, like one of those background/behind the scenes documentaries they often make alongside a movie...
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My Writing Cave
I can write almost anywhere (the opening of The Day of the Spider was started at my desk in school and then the next part was written in my local garage while I was waiting for my car to be serviced! BUT, having somewhere quiet to work is important. This is my writing space at home, where everything gets pulled together, edited , formatted, covers designed and drawn etc.
The same as reading, find somewhere you can forget everything else and focus on the story at hand.
Why Writing?
I've always enjoyed writing. Even before I could write real words, I used to fill up tiny notebooks with wiggly lines. I suppose today, they would be a little bit like the practice patterns young children do at school when first learning how to make patterns and develop pen control.
Through the whole of school, I enjoyed making up stories and reading. Can't emphasise reading enough! If you want to write then you have to read. You need to know more words than you do at the moment and you need to know how and why sentences work and how things fit together.
At about age 13, I heard about this thing they did in the US called a convention. I had no real idea what it was or how it worked, only that lots of writers got together and did signings etc. I thought that maybe they all travelled together, like a bus picked them up and they all travelled on the same plane. Then I had the weird thought: what if there was an accident on the way? What if the plane crashed? Who would do the writing I was reading then? Then, I had this thought: I could.
That same day I started my first novel. It wasn't very good, but hey I was only 13! I have no idea where the notebooks went that I wrote it in...
After that I wrote loads of short stories, mainly horror and inspired by images I got when listening to music. I listened then to the same music I listen to know. It was an exciting time, with lots of new metal bands records finding their way into record shops in the UK. Bands like Iron Maiden I was already aware of, but there was new stuff being shared between me and my friends, such as Metallica, Megadeth, Anthrax and Slayer.
I continued writing short stories right through secondary school, then at the start of University, I started another novel. It was called Toasted and involved the planet earth after an apocalyptic event, leaving only mutated animals. There were glow-in-the-dark ducks, the Nessie decided to finally leave Loch Ness, the Martians weren't happy that they could no longer invade since there wasn't much pf a planet left to conquer, and there was magic. Naturally there was an evil side, and to counter it the ruling sheep decided that they needed the most evil thing of all to understand how they could be victorious: a human child. Enter Alex (you know Alex from Grimble). He was kidnapped (sheep-napped?) from the supermarket while out shopping with his mum. So, if you've read Grimble (and if not, why not?) you'll know that Alex ends up okay at the end and can tell his amazing story to his friends. Toasted still exists in an incomplete form after several rewrites, but maybe one day Alex's tale will be told in full and thrown out into the world for you to read... and maybe one day soon I'll put an extract from it on this site...
At one point I used to type everything when writing, but my typing isn't great so these days everything is handwritten and then photographed and then some very clever software reads my handwriting and pops it onto my computer. No AI. Don't use AI to write! Writing is meant to be hard. You're meant to spend ages if something sounds better with this word or that word. Practice, edit, improve...
Grimble
First there was the photocopied creature story...
Next there was the long time on a shelf...
Then there was the rediscovery and rewrite...
Finally, there was Grimble the novel... and a huge learning curve!
Grimble started life as a short story - just what is now Chapter One. I wrote it during my first year in teaching to show my Year 6 class how a story could develop in a short number of words. When it got to the creature, I decided to be lazy and didn't want to spend ages describing it, so to take the easy way out, I just made it a pair of eyes; no body. At the time it did have a tiny mouth to make the grimble noise (The Hush hadn't been created yet) and the story ended with it hiding back in the video recorder. I then read it to the whole school during a story-telling assembly and lots of the children, from all of different year groups (we were a junior school) wanted to know what happened next, so I wrote the next chapter for the following week's assembly... then the next and then the next...
It was written with minimum description so that it would remain entertaining when read aloud and the story had to keep moving forward week by week, chapter by chapter. I created The Hush simply because I thought it would get boring if everything was just Grimble. Being lazy again, I didn't even name the wizard who gives them the staff! For 30 years he's always been the old guy from the chip shop! Now, though, I know his name... and it will be important! When we got to the Christmas Fair, we photocopied it over and over and sold signed copies to help raise money for the school. And then it sat on my self for the next 29 years.
When it was used once more, I found that children still really enjoyed it, even if I had to explain some of the pop-culture references such as who was Lassie the dog. Seeing that even 29 years later, children still enjoyed the story and the whole idea of Grimble, I began a rewrite to change it from a quick oral story to one that was worthy of reading in a novel. Since my Year 4 class wanted to know when they could buy a copy, I was spurred on to get it out quickly. I published Grimble with a black cover and green title, but wasn't happy with the result. It looked flat and there was a problem with the formatting which meant that the text was quite small and the page numbers had disappeared. But, it sold well. Reviews were positive. I reformatted it and changed the cover, to the red one. The Hush were obviously hungry because they ate the page numbers again! Third time lucky... sorted!
Then lots of children in my current school wanted to know when the next one would be out, so I started working on ideas. I kind of knew where I wanted a sequel to go and then everything changed... I was working on a writing sequence with my class and, as always, modelled how the writing could be done. And it was a fun story. When it got to characters, I just used the Chess Club characters from Grimble because I thought that they would find it funny. They did... and then they asked if it was going to be Grimble 2?
It hadn't planned to be, but it worked! Virtually no ideas that I'd come up with for the sequel were used (there's always the next one!), and there was the initial problem of the characters choosing to do their own thing. For example (no spoilers), the big event that kicks everything off is the Chess Club attending a movie premier, but for some reason Leslie didn't turn up! She was supposed to be there, but as I was writing, the doors to the movie theatre were opening and she still hadn't arrived. Once I'd worked out why and where she was, the whole story fell into place.
See, that's the fun thing about writing, sometimes the story wants to go in its own direction and then you have to figure out how to get them back on track!
So The Day of the Spider was coming together, but first Grimble needed a few small tweaks; nothing major that changed the story, but just a few small character beats needed to be added and a handful of typos needed fixing. So the final, definitive version of Grimble was published, complete with white cover and (since it was now going to be a series) the Chess Club Novel tag.
As I'm writing this, The Day of the Spider (A Chess Club Novel) is in the stage of being proof-read and edited by the same amazing editor who worked on Footprints for me.
It should be out soon!
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FOOTPRINTS
A Supernatural Mystery Thriller
After Grimble, I wanted something completely different! Grimble, essentially, is a fun little story. I wanted something that felt a little older.
I had a dream on my summer holiday about paint. It was yellow paint and when it got dirty by being mixed with other paint colours, monsters grew out of it and headed up the stairs! When I woke up I remembered paint and I remembered monsters!
So, I started writing Cassie's story. By the time I'd finished it was all sewn up nicely. Except that it was too short. So then, I thought about what would happen in the future, since Cassie and her friends leave a note behind. So I wrote Tessa's story.
The problem with Tessa's story was that it relied on knowing things that only Cassie could tell her, since the events Tessa was living through needed to work that Cassie & Co had done in the past, and I didn't want to repeat Cassie's story but just using Tessa. I'm a huge fan of Stephen King's novels but have never read IT. I can still remember seeing the original mini-series though. Part One was them as children, Part Two was them returning as adults. I wanted to avoid something like this, so didn't want part one (Cassie's story) set in the past and then Tessa's more modern setting to be part two, so I stared to look at where they could crossover and converge so that Tessa could learn of what happened directly from Cassie. I've since been told that the two timelines crossover and converge in King's novel - DOH! Maybe I'll get round to reading it one day. But, never mind. It works for the peppering of clues and red herrings of Footprints. Also, it was intended to be a much older, horror novel, but the story kind of did its own thing again!
That was another problem - what were the clues leading to? Who was responsible? Were there enough hints about certain things? I don't think I've ever gone back through something so much! But, it was fun to write!
I'm thinking at the moment, that that's how I might continue: one fun Chess Club (or similar) novel, followed by a more grown-up one. Of course, the grown-up ones can be more mature, but still suitable for older readers, because I just know that the children I teach will want to read it, so I can't pepper them with naughty words! But I think it's good to write different things...
Which is where Dread Letter comes in... but that's for another day.