A short tale of international harmony

Some good people at Lenape High School, New Jersey, USA wrote to me asking if I knew whether Braille copies of She Is Not Invisible were available in America. They've chosen the book to be their One Book/One School title for 2015/2016 and wanted to make it accessible to a couple of blind/visually impaired students. The whole point of One Book/One School is to make a book available for everyone in the community to read, after all.

Sadly it seemed that there isn't a Braille edition in the US, so I thought it was worth asking the RNIB over here in the UK if they could help. They'd produced a Braille edition for publication day of She Is Not Invisible back in 2013, but I thought there might be some obstacles. I wasn't sure if UK Braille and US Braille are the same, for one thing, and for another thing Braille books are VERY expensive to make. That's the main reason why so few Braille books are produced (less than 1% of published titles) and that's a shame because it is terrible that being blind should stop you from having access to as many books as a sighted person. Yes, there are other options, and yes, not every blind person reads Braille, but when I spoke to various people when I was writing She Is Not Invisible I couldn't help but feel that some more money to make more books accessible to blind readers through Braille would be very welcome.

Fortunately for me, and for Lenape High School, the RNIB are just a truly wonderful organisation, and though their school is all the way over the ocean in another country, they made the decision to gift a Braille edition of the book to the school. (It turns out that UK and US Braille are almost identical: I'm told the differences are only when you come to write it, not read it).

The impact of this act of generosity is not just of benefit for the blind students, and to explain why, here's what Jaime Fauver, Media Specialist at Lenape High had to say when she received the book:

"It arrived yesterday and we are so excited about it! I spoke with our special education teachers and they are also excited - not only for students who are blind or near blind and read Braille but also for the other students in the MD classes (multiple disabled).  These students in this class suffer from a range of disabilities and the teachers are going to use this as an opportunity to discuss differences and unique challenges.  When we took the book to the classroom today, all of the students were fascinated and intrigued.  Most of the school materials for our partially/fully blind students are audio; however they know how to read Braille (we just didn't have the resources). The teachers are going to spend the last week of school turning this into a lesson about diversity and acceptance and how interesting and exciting each of the students' unique traits are!"


Diversity and acceptance. What better goals could we aim for?

Finally, the Photography II students at the school made a range of posters to advertise the book around the school, and put together this short video to showcase their work. It's worth looking at: there are some great interpretations in there, and some cover designers in the making, I think.

Finally, I want to say a massive thank you to Cathy Wright, Librarian at New College, Worcester for her ongoing advice when I don't know something about the unsighted world, to Lenape High for doing such good work with the book, and to the RNIB for their wonderful act of kindness.

Nabokov on coincidence

Since it's the birthday of Vladimir Nabokov, here's a little quote from this great writer. 

"A certain man once lost a diamond cuff-link in the wide blue sea, and twenty years later, on the exact day, a Friday apparently, he was eating a large fish - but there was no diamond inside. That’s what I like about coincidence."

I didn't know this quote by Nabokov when I wrote She Is Not Invisible. I wish I had because it sums up perfectly the way some people have tied themselves in knots trying to explain and find meaning in the phenomenon. And it makes me smile. 

Winner of the She Is Not Invisible writing competition

Last month I ran a small competition on the website  - the challenge was to write a short story about coincidence in exactly 354 words; 354 being the number that's hidden throughout my new book, She Is Not Invisible.

It's a cliché to say it was hard to choose a winner, but it really was, especially as I was left choosing between four very different pieces. I would like to commend Kieran Salmon, Rob Perry and Joe Greaves for their entries, each so different from each other, and each very different from the winner, more of which below.

For me, the purpose of such a writing exercise, i.e. writing to some kind of restriction, even one as simple as an exact word count, is that it forces you to consider your words. When you're paring down that 400 word draft to 354, you are made to consider every word for its merits. Every single word gets inspected and peered at and tested, and, if it doesn't really merit being there; it has to go. So once in a while it's a good exercise to try, to really sharpen up what you write. It's all too easy to throw words on a page as if good ones are easy to come by. Personally I think it's better to write fewer better ones, than more average ones...

If you entered the competition, thanks for doing so. Sorry we could only have one winner; competitions kind of suck, really, don't they? But it was good to see so many cool stories, and as I said, it really was hard to choose the winner.  (Incidentally, I was able to read the stories without knowing a thing about who wrote them).

The winner is called Of Grace and God and it's by Ian Kenworthy. I liked it because it manages to do many things in a short space of time; it's well written, it builds a small world in your head, and it's poignant. Most of all though, I chose this story over the many other great entries because it manages to do one of the hardest things of all; it actually conveys that sense of strangeness that we feel when a coincidence happens to you. Having just written about book all about coincidences, I know that's a deceptively hard thing to do, and Ian gets it just right. I hope you enjoy it too.

Of Grace and God by Ian Kenworthy

No atheists in foxholes? Wasn’t that the saying?

Sergeant Lane could see why. A foot deep scraping, the only shelter on a muddy battlefield.

Hardly more protective than a prayer.

“INCOMING!”

Another barrage. Shells thundered from above. Ground erupted nearby. So close. A rain of fine grit –Patter-patter. Pitter-patter. Thump. A body flung itself down into the dirt beside him.

Inches above, cracks and flashes and sounds of Apocalypse.

“God save us.”

So I was right.

The barrage subsided, ushering in an eerie silence.

“Is it over?”

Slowly sitting up. Close in the scraping.

“For twenty minutes or so. You get used to it. I’d say don’t worry, but you will.”

Shaking hands. Close as brothers.

“Frank Lane.”

“Eddie Parkes 76^th  Infantry. Just got here today.”

 “Quite a welcome.”

 “Yeah.” Eyes tilted to the heavens. “Funny, you’d think the sky would be grey, not blue.”

“The sky is always blue when the angels descend.”

“Ha, used to know a priest who said that, old Father Margrove.”

Silence. For once not dreadful silence.

Familiar.

“Not, Saint Agatha’s Old Unitarians?”

A shared smile. Dare they speak it?

“Ashwell?”

“Used to holiday there.”

A spark.

“Eddie Parkes…?”

Away from this foreign field to a church field. Beneath the layer of grime and age were two boys. A summer spent defending battle lines with a bat and ball. Days of laughter, of trying to win hearts. Of hopes. Of japes and jealousy.  Eddie who could always hit a six. Always smiling. Always said he would…

“…work for my dad’s cotton company, worked.  Not been to Ashby in years, not since I met my girl. I got a picture, want to see?”

Everyone says that. I’ve seen so many pictures.

Except this was no girl. This was Grace Hopkinson. Darling Grace. ‘Met a lad from the city and moved away’, found happiness.

“You okay?”

“Just, remembering. Remembering home.”

“Feels so far away, right?”

“What are the chances of us meeting like this? From the same church, meeting up in the same field. What could be more of a coincidence than that?”

The answer, the whistle of an incoming shell.

© Ian Kenworthy 2013

Read for RNIB

Less than 1% of books are published in Braille. No more than 7% of books are published in some format which makes them accessible to blind or visually impaired readers; formats such as audiobooks, Daisy readers, large or giant print, and even if a book appears in one of these formats; it may be months after the publication of the traditional format or e-book version.

Yes, it is possible for e-readers to 'speak' a digital copy of a book to the blind, but text-to-speech systems typically offer an unrealistic electronic voice. If you think you'd wouldn't mind having a full-length book read to you by something like that, you should try five minutes of it to see...

I am therefore extremely proud that my newly published book, She Is Not Invisible, is available in a wide range of accessible formats, and from day one of its life.

The book is about a 16-year-old girl whose father is a writer. He's a writer obsessed with the question of coincidences, and when he goes missing, Laureth decides to follow clues left behind in his notebook to try to find him. This is somewhat harder than it would be for most 16-year-olds, because Laureth has been blind from birth. That’s what made me convinced the book should be published in accessible formats from the start, and I’m delighted that my publisher, Orion, agreed.

The book is part of RNIB’s Read for RNIB Day, and is one of six titles that have blind protagonists which have been chosen as suggested books for reading groups to read, in the Reading Group Challenge. This is a wonderful scheme aimed at raising money for the RNIB so they can continue their work of enabling the blind to have a better reading experience. The mere existence of certain charities in our society has always appalled me. The RNLI, the RNIB: aren't these services which any wealthy, civilised country ought to provide from central government? But they don't, so in the meantime, it's up to the rest of us to fund them, and help blind and VI people have an equal share in our country's culture.

It was, of course, an enormous challenge to write a book with a blind protagonist, not least because I chose to write from her point of view, in the first person. I had no idea just how great the challenge was until I started my research. Over the last two years I've made a series of trips to New College, Worcester, where I spoke at length with blind and VI students. Every single one of them was open, honest, generous and patient with me, and slowly, I began to get a little understanding of what life is like for them. How it is different, of course, but just as importantly, how it is the same. I cannot begin to pretend I know what it's like to be blind from birth, as Laureth is in the book. How could you ever forget what colour is, to give just one example? If I have achieved anything at all in this book, however, it's thanks to the help I received from the students there. I literally could not have written this book without them. It is their book, and I am grateful beyond words for the kindness they showed me.

Here's a short film made the RNIB about the day I went back to New College, with a finished copy of the book in my hands. And yes, I was really nervous.

Co-inky-dinks

Or, to give them their proper name, coincidences...

Co-inky-dinks is what they get re-christened by 7-year-old Benjamin, brother to Laureth, the heroine of my new book, She Is Not Invisible. Laureth and Benjamin's dad is a writer, a writer who's obssessed by two things: coincidences, and the number 354. He's been trying, and failing, to write a book about coincidence for years, and as the book opens, he's gone missing. Always a little away with the fairies, when his notebook turns up in New York when he was last heard of in Switzerland (or was it Austria), Laureth knows something is seriously wrong.

I also love coincidences, and coincidentally, have also been trying to write a novel about them for a very long while. I'm glad I've finished, now, so I can get obsessed about something else, but before I leave them alone for good, I just wanted to record a further coincidence that happened this week.

I've had some pretty weird ones happen to me over the years, and this is not the most spectacular, but it amused me a lot. Since in She Is Not Invisible, Laureth and Benjamin's dad is obsessed with the number 354, I thought I would work it into the text in as many ways as possible. It's there, sometimes deeply hidden in various ways, at other times very obvious.

Here are a few examples: each chapter title is composed of three words: three, then five, then four letters long. 'Two Dried Mice', for example. With one exception; the chapter which is simply called '354'. One chapter, 'The Final Clue', is comprised of a sequence of words that are 3,5,4 letters long in turn, and furthermore, there are exactly 354 words in that chapter. The page count of the book is 354 pages. The blurb conforms to a 354 structure. The word Dad is used 354 times in the book. The 354th word of the book is 'coincidence'. There are dozens more, but you get the idea.

So, the latest coincidence: Last week, a wonderful actress called Anna Cannings recorded the audiobook version. Last night, I got an email from the editor of the audio, saying he'd just finished the final cut of the reading, which, without him being aware of it as he was working, has ended up at 354 minutes long...

So, what coincidences do you have to share? I'd love to read about all and any in the comments, so feel free...

Less is more

This post first appeared at the wonderful blog site, This Craft Called Writing, which really gets into the techniques behind writing.

LESS IS MORE

I’m a great believer in less-is-more. That should be apparent merely from the page extent of my books – they tend to the shorter side, in some cases, very deliberately so. Revolver, for example, is only about 33,000 words long. It’s my belief that many books, films, operas are simply too long, and that if you’re working well, you can actually achieve a more powerful overall effect by keeping your writing on the sparer side.

Of course, there’s an immediate risk that if you are going to keep things shorter, that you won’t sufficiently ‘build the world’, or ‘develop character’, or any one of the many others things you’re supposed to do when you write a book. But I think it’s just a question of choosing just the right things, just the right words, to do your work for you, and I would always rather err on the side of leaving a reader wanting more than overwhelming and boring them with a five page description of a new character the protagonist has just met, or three pages of detailed depiction of the room into which they have just walked.

In any case, I read somewhere that studies have shown that a reader only remembers three things from a lengthy description of a new room, for example, and if that’s the case, then why overload your passage with much more than that? The goal is to bring the scene to life, and I think there’s a false belief that some people have which means that as the writer, you have to describe everything. You don’t. One of the principal beauties of writing is that you can allow your reader to do half the work for you. If you choose just the right details to mention, and mention them in the most powerful or elegant way you can, you will immediately trigger a wealth of other images and suggestions in your readers’ minds.

I’ve got a new book out, called She Is Not Invisible, and it’s taught me something I found very interesting. I run creative writing courses from time to time, for Arvon and other places, and one of the short warm-ups I sometimes get the students to do involves describing a scene without the use of sight. I always feel a bit GCSE English at this point, but the results are often worthwhile – after the initial protests that it’s too limiting, the final pieces of writing are sometimes the best pieces of the week.

This is pertinent to She Is Not Invisible because the book consists of a first person narrative by a girl who has been blind from birth. The whole book, therefore, has to let the sense of sight go completely unused; but here’s the thing I found interesting: only when it was done did I realise that far from finding it limiting, I actually found it liberating. It was such a joy to be freed from the tyranny I think we often all feel; of ‘describing a scene fully’.  With no sense of sight to have recourse to, I instead built scenes from the other senses, predominantly hearing, of course, but others too.

Here’s a short extract that shows this at work.

‘Benjamin!’ I called, waiting for him to come back.

It was probably only a second or two but I freaked out and rushed after him, then kicked into a bag or something, and went sprawling full length on the floor.

Even in the noise of the airport I heard everyone around me go quiet as they watched and I knew I’d made a stunning spectacle of myself. I’d landed with my legs over the bag and my arms flung out in front of me.

‘Am I invisible?’ a man said, angrily.

My sunglasses had shot off my face somewhere and I heard him sigh.

‘Why don’t you look where you’re going? My laptop’s in there.’

I got to my feet and managed to kick his bag again.

‘For God’s sake,’ he said.

‘I’m sorry,’ I muttered. ‘Sorry.’

I kept my head down as the man unzipped his bag, grumbling.

‘Benjamin?’ I said, but he was already back at my side.

‘Are you okay, Laureth?’ he asked, pushing something into my hands. ‘Here’s your glasses.’

I slipped them on quickly.

‘I’m really sorry,’ I said in the direction of the man, and held my hand out for Benjamin to take. ‘We’d better get a move on.’

No need for the sight of anything in there. Who cares what colour the man’s bag is, for example, or what make it is? The embarrassment of our narrator is the point in hand, and though I will of course return to the visual in my next book, it was a good experience to have.

In fact, in She Is Not Invisible, I decided to impose a few more restrictions on my writing. I’ve long been wanting to write a book that follows the maxims of Oulipo, or writing that is constrained in some way. Oulipo is a fascinating thing, and includes some extraordinary works, such George Perec’s famous A Void, written without once using the letter ‘e’.  The proagonist’s father in She Is Not Invisible is a writer obsessed with two things; coincidences, and the number 354. I decided to see in how many ways I could incorporate this number into the text, from the chapter headers to the word count of the book even to the blurb on the jacket and the page count of the novel. And once again, far from finding this limiting, I actually found it stimulated me to be more creative than I might otherwise have been.

So try taking something out of your writing once in a while. You might indeed find that less is more.

Icebergs, and What I've Been Doing

It hasn't escaped everyone's notice that I didn't put out a new YA novel in 2012, and in that time the question has been levelled at me from time to time; what are you doing?

Well, I haven't been twiddling my thumbs, not all the time anyway. I've been working on the Elf Girl and Raven Boy series, and on that graphic novel I'm doing with my brother, and on a screenplay with him too, and on a play version of My Swordhand is Singing, and all of these things are taking slow steps forward into the world, but they take a loooong time to actually arrive. So to the outside world it looks like I've been slacking :-(

And I did want to write a new YA novel, only the problem was, I couldn't think of one. Did I have writer's block? Maybe I did, but despite two years of failing to get a book written, I'm still not sure if it actually exists. That must sound pretty stupid, and I can't really explain what I mean. Only that I had ideas during this time, but something about them wasn't happening. They didn't develop properly, despite the fact that I tried everything I know to make them do so. I tried smothering them with attention, and I tried ignoring them, and everything in between, but nothing worked.

In increasing desperation I read everything and anything I could on creative blocks, spoke to every sympathetic author I could (thanks, people:-) ) and generally tried to figure out what was wrong. Everyone I spoke to, without fail, told me that the ideas would come back and that I'd know what to write again soon, but I'd managed to spook myself thoroughly by reading about various composers and writers who just stopped creating one day, and never took it up again. In the case of Sibelius, that was the last thirty years of his life. In the case of Rossini, most of the last forty. That scared the hell out of me, and anyway, the problem wasn't that I wasn't having ideas, but that they weren't growing like they should.

Never the most frequent of bloggers, my entries fell away to nothing, simply because I felt like fraud talking about writing when I wasn't doing it.

And then an iceberg sailed over the horizon. What I mean by this is that an idea that I've been thinking about, on and off, for seven years, finally decided to let me get a hold of it. I finally knew how to write it, having started once five years ago and having abandoned it. This time I knew it was going to be all right, and so now I'm very glad to say I've just finished the second draft of my next YA book, due out in October. Phew. It's called She Is Not Invisible.

Why's it an iceberg? Because the book has ended up being relatively short, at around 45,000 words. But there is more thinking and more planning and more research under the visible surface of this novel than anything I've ever done before. But of course, only the top 10% can be seen. I think Hemingway said something like that about all his writing, and you can be sure he said it better than me, with much more grandeur, and with a drink in his hand, too ;-)