‘I realised I came from an unusual family,’ says Charlie Young, and in that moment came another realisation – there was a story to be uncovered and told. That story became a historical novel, Houdini’s Last Handcuffs, co-written with his sister Cheryl.
But to begin at the beginning, I asked Charlie where the idea of the novel was born.
The idea of Houdini’s Last Handcuffs came from a multitude of impetuses. Perhaps the first was the obituary of our father, which sparked within me a knowledge that I came from an unusual family.
Charlie and Cheryl’s father, Morris N Young, was an ophthalmologist with a keen interest in magic and a significant collection of magic memorabilia, including handcuffs that belonged to Houdini. What do you remember about them?
The handcuffs were a part of our father’s magic collection from before we were born. We were aware of the tale of their origin. Our father’s collection also included memorabilia such as photographs, materials relating to magic and other organizations, and personal correspondence.
And all this has gone into your novel, Houdini’s Last Handcuffs, co-authored with Cheryl. Why did it become a novel and not a memoir?
I began writing a memoir about the family and discovered that my high-school English teacher had become editor-in-chief at Random House. He was kind enough to critique it, and suggested that the field of memoirs was quite full at the time and they had to be beautifully written.
I was raising a family at the time, so I put the manuscript aside. After 10-plus years, I began it again as a novel, Cheryl joined in and in 2021 Vine Leaves Press accepted our manuscript for publication. Now we’re working on a sequel.
You and Cheryl are both characters in the novel. What was it like, writing yourselves into it? Are your ‘characters’ completely faithful to your real-life selves or did you make adjustments so they would work well for the fiction?
We both wanted our characters to be true to ourselves, to be the way we might have really responded.
I spent significant amounts of time daydreaming the plot and responding to the scenarios. I often felt that what was happening in the story was what was happening in my real life. I often felt I had gone back in time.
Some of the conversations with my father in the novel were partly from my memory, partly from letters he wrote to me while I was in college and partly from a monograph he wrote, titled Presto Prestige.
Are you sneakier or braver in the book than you were in real life?
In the book we did things our parents would not have approved of. But our parents were adventurous. The dangerous and the bizarre of life were usual for us. They let us stay up late at night watching The Twilight Zone. They also took us with them to nightclubs and to Cuba when the President, Fulgencio Batista was about to be overthrown and Haiti to a night time voodoo ceremony where a chicken’s head was torn off. The blood was consumed by the voodoo dancer and then the chicken was set on fire.
This made it easy to write about children at a young age being brazen and adventurous. In fact, we decided to tone it down for this book. For the sequel we’re discussing where events may take on a more macabre or edgy appeal.
And the novel also includes appearances by your father and Walter Gibson, who is also known for creating a superhero character called the Shadow. They wrote several books together. What do you remember about Walter Gibson?
Walter Gibson and his wife Litzka were frequent visitors to our home in Manhattan and we would travel to their home in Maine.
Litzka wrote books on palm-reading and had been married to an illusionist, The Great Raymond, before she married Walter. She had a bantam rooster called China Boy, who she was very attached to. When traveling she would take China Boy with her in a carpet bag. On one occasion, the rooster had an eye infection and Litzka brought him to our father, who determined that the issue was an ingrown feather and performed minor surgery in our apartment.
Later in life, my father became Walter’s eye physician, and later still, I did.
Again, you must have had to mix fact and fiction, but what a fertile start. What things did you invent, what things did you include from real life?
For the novel, there was some invention about the interaction between Walter, Litzka and ourselves, and compilations of various real-life events. For instance, there was a séance at Houdini’s home, which was a compilation of various interactions where Litzka read our palms, told our fortunes and the adults went to a séance.
How did the co-writing with Cheryl work? Why did you collaborate in this way?
I began the book. About 25,000 words in, Cheryl was intrigued by what I had written and offered to join in. I thought her input would be helpful as she might have different memories of the same events as well as additional memories.
Who did what?
Much of the philosophical side and the history of magic came from me as I had an early interest in the field and I performed a magic act when I was younger. Whatever we wrote, we ran the material by the other for their input.
Did you always agree, especially on the mix of fact and fiction?
There were times we did not completely agree but always came to an agreeable compromise.
Would you ever write books separately?
Probably not. And Cheryl says she enjoys the back and forth exchanging of thoughts and working closely together.
You both have wide-ranging CVs beyond writing. You’re a physician and eye surgeon, a visual artist and vice-president of a music publisher with Cheryl. And Cheryl has qualifications in business (an MBA), has worked in Wall Street and European finance as well as being your co-writer. How did you end up doing art, publishing music and writing books?
Around the age of 65 I decided if I didn’t stop doing what I was doing then, I would never have the time to develop the other things in life I had a desire to do.
Cheryl and I had also inherited a music publisher, Denton & Haskins, one of the oldest independent music publishers in the country. So I began producing programmes for WUCF, one of Central Florida’s NPR-affiliate radio stations, using material from the music companies. I began painting and advertising in the American Art Review. And I began approaching publishers about our novel.
Cheryl was originally supposed to become a physician, like me, but she couldn’t stand the sight of blood. She still works in finance, and she also enjoys nature photography. But she always felt excited by the seances and fascinated by Houdini’s involvement with spiritualism and debunking practitioners while seeking to find a real connection. I think that led her to learn a lot more in a direction that normally would not have accompanied a career in finance.
Do these rich backgrounds emerge in your writing?
One of the chapters in our novel is largely drawn from our true memories of the music business. We really did know Artie Shaw and other jazz musicians at the time.
One of your father’s books was Houdini’s Fabulous Magic, co-written with Walter Gibson, which has just been rereleased as a companion to Houdini’s Last Handcuffs. Here’s another question. If your family background is so steeped in magic, why didn’t you also become magicians?
Well, our father was first of all an ophthalmologist, and our mother was a cryptologist, writer and teacher. So the family background is diverse.
Cheryl says she never had any interest in learning how to perform a magic trick. She remembered seeing our father do tricks with cigarettes and being terrified he would hurt himself. I did have an interest in magic from early on, but I always wanted to be a physician. And both our parents wrote books, so I have no doubt they inspired us to do that at least once.
This is a massive headline, I know. A massive headline for a massive and far-ranging conversation about storytelling.
My host is Heath Robinson, whose YouTube channel has seen a stellar line-up of story nerds, including Christopher Vogler, author of The Writer’s Journey, Christopher Vogler, Matt Bird, author of The Secrets of Story, John Truby, author of The Anatomy of Genres, and Vic Mignogna, creator of Star Trek Continues. I’m honoured that he asked me to be his guest.
We discussed many important fundamentals of stories, including classic story structure, my admiration for the writers of Pixar movies, the reader’s trust in the author (a huge subject of its own) and squeezing the lemon.
Squeezing the what? You’ll see. Do come over. Bring lemons if you have them.
Heather Marshall’s novels are concerned with questions of family. In her first, The Thorn Tree, the characters are rediscovering who they are as family grows up and their life roles change. In her new novel, When The Ocean Flies, an adoptee comes to terms with long-held misbeliefs, seeded from her earliest days. This theme of leading an authentic life and discovering what that should be clearly runs deep for Heather. And she writes from real experience. Heather is herself an adoptee, and has traced her biological parents. I began by asking her about that.
When I found my biological parents, I realized that all that I’d believed about where I was from was false. Then that opened a window to the idea that I could re-examine all of the stories I’d believed about who I really was and what I was supposed to do or be in this life.
But we all grow up with beliefs about who we are that are partly formed by our own inner lives and partly by what family, community, culture tell us we ought to be. So many of us feel forced to shed some of ourselves in order to fit in. We get all tangled up in trying to live whatever our family or culture says is a good life, we get busy, we get lost. I certainly did.
As well as writing fiction, you’re a coach, in the field of writing but also beyond. You coach people through the adoption reunion process and you help teachers with mental self-care. I have a strong sense that you want to help us all be better to ourselves. How did that start?
I started my working life after university as a writer and editor and thought that was where I’d stay. Then one afternoon, a friend who was a teacher said, “You’re a writer. When are you going to come teach my students how to write?”
‘Whenever you like,’ I replied. I didn’t think she’d follow through. Surely she, of all people, knew that just because I could write didn’t mean I could teach. She phoned with a list of dates and told me about her students. She brought me their daily journals so I could get an idea of their writing level. They were hard to read, what these children had faced. The one thing they had in common was that they were at this alternative school because they had been expelled from schools all over our large district. But I’d said I’d do it, so I phoned a writer friend, got some pointers, and in I went.
I quickly discovered that, though I might be teaching writing on the surface, what I was really doing was opening a space for these children to find their voices, and to begin to understand that their voices are worthy.
I ended up working in education for 25 years.
Opening a space to find their voices, and to understand their voices are worthy. I love this.
The last eight years of my career, I taught in a small high school (English, creative writing, and yoga and mindfulness). What I loved about that work was less about content and more about helping people connect with their own inherent goodness, their talents, their potential, and then developing from there.
What I’m doing with teachers, adoptees and writers is similar: I’m meeting them where they are, we’re sorting out goals and blocks to those goals, and we’re using my experience, tools and skills in writing, yoga, meditation, teaching, to meet those goals. Having used these tools through my own anxiety, depression, limiting beliefs, the many adoptee challenges—identity, trauma, grief, loss, fear, shame, and so on—I have an extra window into how these tools can be helpful.
Let’s talk some more about your search for your birth parents. You say it took you until age 40 to gather the courage. What eventually made it possible?
Oof—that’s a big question. I do say it took until I was almost 40 to gather the courage, which is true, and which might make it sound as though I was consciously saving up little by little like you would for a wee holiday. This is not the case.
I was more like a horse who shies at a jump (repeatedly, and for a couple of decades). I had a look at my original birth certificate in Scotland (a thing most American adoptees are denied access to) when I was 18 or 19. I saw my mother’s name and my birth name, right there, side by side.
My adoptive parents did not keep any part of my birth name, so it felt as though there was this whole other self, this whole other potentiality that was separate to me but was also me, somehow. That and the fear of what I might unlock should I find my mother were more terrifying than the dark and big spiders, all the things that lurked under my childhood bed and the childcatcher on Chitty Chitty Bang Bang combined. So I ran away—didn’t even hang around to get a paper copy of the birth certificate.
Years later, I ran at that jump again, getting a paper copy of the birth certificate. It lived in a drawer for a few years, and occasionally I’d get up the gumption to look at it and consider whether I wanted to go further.
When I was 36, I decided I’d ‘just’ walk past the house listed as my mother’s on the birth certificate. I didn’t slow or stop. I told myself I just wanted a wee look at where I might have grown up if she’d been able to keep me. Silly me!
That did it. I was possessed by finding my mother.
I had two friends who had had similar experiences. They had run headlong into reunion, and it had not gone well. So that knowledge, my own instinct, and the practicalities of searching pre-Ancestry, social media, etc, allowed me to take the time to get myself ready to explore the unknowns of my birth and origins.
As I was searching for my mother, I was also searching myself so that I was clear about why I was looking, what I hoped for, what I might find that had the potential to devastate me, and who and what I’d turn to if it came to that. BirthLink in Edinburgh pointed me in the right direction to get the details—not just the birth certificate but also the social worker’s notes from when my mother was pregnant and in the weeks after my birth. They facilitated the initial communication between my mother and me, and they helped me again two years later, when I searched for, and found, my father.
Your Facebook pictures are full of wild places. Hiking in the heather, contemplating a view of the hills over your boots. How does the natural world inform your creative work?
Being in the natural world informs the process of creative work. In both cases, I’m immersing myself fully and exploring what’s there. In the process of drafting, I’m exploring, and there are no wrong paths. I start down a path and if I find I’ve gone awry—reached a boggy place or a cliff edge by accident, I can simply turn back and try another path. It’s not wasted time; each path, though it may not lead to the destination, offers its own beauty and wisdom.
I’m not sure if it’s time in nature or age or both that has led to the sense that I don’t have to be in such a hurry to get where I’m going, or to even get wherever I originally intended. I felt this a couple of years ago on a walk on the Isle of Harris in the Outer Hebrides. There wasn’t a clear path and miles of wilderness stretching out ahead. I felt a frisson of fear (what if I got lost?) and then a deep settling: I had lots of time before the sun set, and the day was entirely my own; at worst, I could retrace my steps, and what did it matter if I wandered higgledy-piggledy and never reached the originally intended destination? The point was to be out there, in the fresh air, under a wide sky, squelching along this new terrain.
Speaking of freedom and new terrains, the pandemic was a time of reckoning and restriction for many of us. Many creative people found they couldn’t work as well in this period. Others found it a welcome refuge and were more productive. How was it for you?
It was certainly a revelatory time for me. I was still teaching high school English, creative writing, yoga and mindfulness and there was the whole turning-on-a-dime to teach online at first. It clarified the delight I take in teaching and also revealed fissures of discontent that I had been ignoring in our education system and my place in it.
To clarify—I felt a freedom to connect with students in ways that were more deeply resonant for me and for them. For instance, I had been teaching mindfulness in my classes and extended that work, making videos for students and families, teaching an online yoga class, making playlists for my classes each week. I enjoyed getting individual responses to every question instead of the smattering that you get in a classroom. I felt less constrained in this new environment. And because we were teaching asynchronously at first, there was more space on both sides for thoughtful response.
Partly because that was taking up a lot of my creative energy, my own creative work floundered a bit. That said, I did manage to continue to work on When the Ocean Flies, which I completed in late 2021.
Let’s talk a little more about When The Ocean Flies. It’s interesting that the central character, Alison, is adopted and when the adults try to explain it to her, they inadvertently set up a terrible psychological burden. They tell her she was taken from a bad place and brought to a better one, which gives her the feeling that she must have an internal core of badness. Where does it go from there?
It takes her to some dark places. She takes wrong turns to try to ease this, sometimes self-medicating with alcohol and cigarettes and disordered eating while constantly feeling the need to prove she’s a decent person. She builds a whole life that is driven not by what resonates with her, but by trying to cover over what she believes is some inherent flaw by constantly trying to please everyone around her and prove her worth.
Is this a common emotional issue with adopted children?
The narrative around adoption, especially in the US, tends to be that adoptees are lucky to have been adopted and have ‘better’ lives than they would have had. Not only is this not always the case, it ignores the fact that adoptees have been severed from their mothers (and from their ancestry), which is traumatic.
For me, for Alison, and I think for a lot of adoptees, that creates a sense of self-doubt and thwarts our ability to trust our own instincts—the whole world seems to be saying I am better off and should be grateful, but I feel something utterly contrary to that, a grief that I can’t, as a child, name and that I feel wrong for even feeling.
Growing up, there is an understanding for many of us that we were not our adoptive parents’ first choice (they typically tried hard to have biological children); we were a last resort.
Then there is the question, usually unanswered or at least not satisfactorily answered: why was I not good enough to keep?
If there’s no space in the family or in the culture to say these things out loud and discuss them, they tend to fester and result in beliefs like the one that drives Alison.
Why that title?
I like reading a book and coming to some part of it, or the end, and thinking ‘ah, so that’s where the title came from’, and I don’t want to spoil that for any reader.
Fair enough! And this search is part of the journey for the reader.
Family ties are another strong element in both your novels.
When my son was around five, I was a single parent and my best friend and I had a house together. My son asked me: ‘Mom, what makes a person family?’
At the time, I couldn’t say: ‘Blood. Our genetic connection makes us family,’ because that would mean I was denying my adoptive family.
I couldn’t say, ‘the people who raise you or the people who you live with’, because that would exclude my biological family (wherever they were). So I had to think about how I do define family and then how I could say that clearly to a five-year-old.
I said family are people who see you as you really are, who love you, who have your back. He took it to heart. He has a huge group of people he considers family.
Being adopted has meant looking at family in a couple of different ways. From childhood, I looked at everyone as though they might be family. On the street, the bus, wherever, I had the sense that I could be looking at someone to whom I was related and not know it. (It turns out that I had a great aunt who lived in the same town as I and that I drove past my father’s house on the way to my grandparents’ without knowing it).
The gift of that is that it makes it harder to ‘other’ people. It pulls closer the sense of our interconnectedness. Through the decades, I’ve had moments when I think about my brother, also adopted and with no genetic connection to me, and that had things spun out differently for us, we’d be strangers, yet here we are, brother and sister, and we’re close.
At the same time, I felt like an outsider, as though I didn’t quite belong anywhere. So when I find people I connect with, who see me and who allow me the privilege of seeing them, I tend to think of them as family as well.
You’ve published several short stories. Aside from family and the sense of finding our natural roles, are there any other main themes in your work?
Coming of age is a main theme. Our culture thinks of coming of age as a one-time event, but really, to be fully alive is to be growing and changing all along. So coming of age in the various seasons of our lives is a theme, and I’m interested in how that manifests for women in particular, as well as the ways in which societal, familial and personal expectations thwart that and how we reckon with those challenges.
I’m also interested in migrations—what happens when we move or are removed from people and place? What happens if we return?
It sounds as though your coaching and fiction-writing inform each other.
In both places, I’m seeking to explore something deeply and to make connections that are revelatory.
In fiction, I’m immersing myself in character and place to uncover the story. I’m researching to see what connections I can make, however unlikely. I’m turning the story one way and then another—if I look at it from this angle, what does it reveal? How does that further or thwart its expansion and development?
I’m doing basically the same thing in coaching—seeing what’s there, how I can help you look at it in different lights as we see what allows expansion and movement in the direction of your goals and what is thwarting that development.
Another of your coaching roles is helping teachers to de-stress and feed their souls. As a coach myself, I can see the need for it. I get passionately involved in helping and giving, and that can be exhausting. School teachers must feel this about a million times harder, but it’s a peril for any teacher. What are three things a person in a teaching role can do to keep a healthy balance?
1: Take time every day (yes, every day) to check in with yourself. You DO have the time to do this, even if it means you have to hide in the bathroom. You can journal, meditate, just sit there and see what your body has to say. What do you feel—all of you, body, mind, heart, spirit. Look in the mirror and ask: how are you? really? What do you need? I know that at times in the year, the answer is that you need it to be the next holiday break. It isn’t. And what is one thing you can do today (not a margarita, though they are really nice) for you? This might mean setting better boundaries for yourself so you can have what you need. You’re entitled to them.
2: Do the thing(s) that you come up with in the first suggestion. Small things matter, like buying the good butter. You laugh, but do you know how many years it took me to convince myself that I was worthy of the butter I really love? It costs a couple of bucks more than the store brand, and somehow I’d convinced myself that it was too luxurious for the likes of me. Every morning when I put it on my toast, it affirms my right to some goodness in my life. If you’re not used to tending to yourself, it’s going to feel strange and wrong to do so. Please persist. BUY. THE. BUTTER.
3. Do reconnect with your ‘why’, but not necessarily in the way that your administrators might be exhorting you to. Sure, remembering why you were originally inspired and energised to enter the classroom can help with tough times, but if that question has started to feel like a kind of manipulation, ask yourself that ‘why’ and see where the answer leads. Not what’s in it for the students—what’s in it for you?
You’re also a longtime practitioner and teacher of yoga. What does that do for you?
It’s a moving meditation that allows me to practise being fully present, to notice the subtleties of what’s going on in my body and with my emotions.
I grew up thinking that intellect was the answer to everything. I was a brain being carted about by this body. But my body knows things and it has messages—when I learned to listen in, I could feel more clearly what was ‘right’, meaning nourishing for me, and what I needed to steer clear of, for instance, on the mat and in my life.
Teaching yoga in particular helped me be more accepting of my own body. In class, I noticed that the people who seemed the most ‘beautiful’ were no particular size or shape or age—they were at ease in their bodies, and it is truly lovely to witness.
Both of these are ongoing journeys for me. I have all the hang-ups about weight and age and so on, but yoga helps to remind me that this body is a gift and it’s wise and a middle-aged tummy is no reason to discredit it.
When did writing and creativity start for you?
Writing started for me as a child. I loved language—the feel of it as I spoke, the way masterfully arranged words on a page elicit feelings.
I tried to teach myself French in primary school. What a shock that my pronunciations were all wrong when I finally got to a teacher! I went to the library for fun, on my own, starting in elementary school.
Both my biological and adoptive fathers were engineers—very intelligent but not necessarily known for facility with language and creativity. I was quietly horrified by the Reader’s Digest condensed versions of books (they’d cut out the gorgeousness of the language) that were the only books in the house of one set of grandparents. And though I had my own bookshelf in my room, those were the only books in my house. In the other grandparents’ house, though, my grandpa reserved the bottom shelf of his bookcase just for me. I still have that bookcase. My natural mother is an avid reader and has been known to pen a poem or two. That has been one of many delights of knowing her.
You have an MFA in creative writing from Queens University of Charlotte, North Carolina. How did it change the way you wrote or the way you saw yourself in the writing world?
It was a life-changing experience. Before I was a teacher, I’d been a magazine writer and editor, I’d taken some community writing classes, had drafted a novel that will never see the light of day (it’s bad and I think it got lost on some old computer), as well as a draft of what would become The Thorn Tree, and the start of what would become When the Ocean Flies, though in very different form. Being accepted to the programme gave me an affirmation that I needed, that there might be something worth nurturing. It helped me to carve out regular time for it—I was no longer doing that wee hobby thing; I was getting a degree, so I had permission to take the time to write amid work and family. I don’t need those kinds of permission, in general, now, but I did then.
The teachers there were excellent—talented and accomplished and encouraging—and there’s power in being in rooms filled with people who love what you love, whose eyes do not glaze over when you talk about craft or what you’re working on—who are truly ‘with you’ along the path.
Why is editing so important for writers? Why is it publishing’s biggest – and best-kept – secret?
How do editors work with writers to ensure clarity and consistency – and yet preserve the writer’s unique voice and flavour? What if the writer disagrees about changes the editor wants to make? How do we keep a dialogue going throughout the editing process so the writer doesn’t feel they’re losing control of their ‘baby’?
I’m thrilled to be interviewed by crime writer and children’s book author Wendy H Jones at the magazine Writers’ Narrative. She devised the questions, which cannily unpeeled how we balance rules and art when we work with authors. Do come over.
I’m not a poet. Certainly I read poetry. I respect the medium fiercely. I am fascinated by how poets do what they do. And now I’ve accidentally found myself tasked with the writing of one, for a series called Where I’m From.
Where I’m From is a blog and podcast series by essayist, graphic novelist, scriptwriter and director Alyson Shelton. I saw Alyson interviewed about it on the Brevity blog, which I love, and was captivated. Participants fill in a detailed series of questions, based on a poem about childhood by George Ella Lyon. A family detail, a sensory memory, a special place or name. Alyson first did it as an exercise in a writing class and felt so changed and moved by the pieces that she decided to make a series out of it.
The whole video is about 30 minutes, and don’t worry, the poem is about 90 seconds. (Starts at 10 mins, if you’re curious.) Otherwise, we talked storytelling and writing, as writers will. There was plenty of nerding about our love of structure, sleight of hand, wrong-footing the reader with relish and also with fairness. And the nature of poems and poetic language – how a genius prompt like Where I’m From can bring you to new kinds of writing that you didn’t, hitherto, know how to do. For Alyson, it brought her to a memoir, which is now in progress.
I don’t know if poetry will become my thing because I like the freedom of prose, but I enjoyed the chance to test-drive a different form. And maybe I’m a bit changed by it too. Do come over.
I’m really glad Dave and I kept our DVD player. If you watch movies and boxsets on DVD you get something that isn’t usually available on streamed versions – the extras, with interviews about the making of the piece, or the casting, or the design, or the adaptation for the screen. Sometimes they’re a bit throwaway, sometimes they’re deep and insightful, but all have a sense of creative energy, a love of the project, a pride in the artform, and a sense of a lot of talents coming together.
Publishing a book is like that too. Perhaps there are fewer people involved than on a movie or a TV show, but there’s still a sense of great and noble effort. Well, I think it’s noble.
That’s one of the things I’m talking about in this interview, with satirical and speculative fiction author Andrew Verlaine on his show Publishing Talks.
Andrew is at the beginning of his publishing journey, with a novel scheduled for 2025. We talk about the surprises he might face in the production process, the different experts who contribute to the polish of a published book, like the different trades in a filmed work. We talk about the constructive nature of editing, how a good editor will help you discover your superpowers and also your blind spots – and then, with luck, open your eyes. And about the finicky and fine work of making something as complex and wondrous as a book, which a person will one day read and experience, will keep on their shelf, will buy for a friend as a gift, and might never forget.
Mary Kole has long been a legend in my online writing life. I’ve followed her since I first ventured onto the internet of writing, when she was a literary agent and wrote one of the smartest blogs about storytelling. Now she has a podcast for writers – as well as a consultancy – and I was massively chuffed when she invited me to guest.
We had a huge, wide-ranging chat about storycraft which boiled down to this – what keeps the reader hooked? Could we identify any qualities that work for any kind of story – no matter what the genre, even in the absence of a clear genre?
Reader, we did. (See the headline to this post.)
We talk about identifying the core of a story – because most ideas start as an intriguing muddle. They lead us and frustrate us, and for a long time we might not know where we’re going – just that this idea is eating our brain, directing us to books we might not usually read, movies we might not usually choose to watch. We also talk about small but vital aspects of craft – pacing, word shapes, learning from other writers, change in a story and when to give the reader a breather.
We talk about coaching writers – the art of wriggling inside an author’s mind to help them create the book they really want, even if they’re not clear what that is. And about ghostwriting – another kind of mind-reading, with the added challenge of absorbing another person’s experience to write the book they’d write if they could. (Did you know I have a course for ghostwriters?)
We’re editors too, so we talk about switching hats from writer brain to editor brain – and the great big interzone where the two overlap.
You can listen to us talk about all this and more, or if you prefer to read, there’s a full transcript. Step this way.
In 2013, I designed the future for my novel Lifeform Three. I wrote about robots that were more human than people, people who were slaves of their devices, and creatures who wanted to escape the algorithms and find real connection and meaningful lives.
Today I’m at the Authors Electric blog, talking to fantasy and historical fiction author Katherine Roberts about the making of Lifeform Three. (Katherine guested on my Undercover Soundtrack series a while back – ‘A ballad of fairyland, but not sweet and innocent’. Find it here.)
Katherine and I discuss key fundamentals of writing a futuristic, science fiction, dystopia or speculative novel: creating a viewpoint character who is non-human yet relatable; designing a world with plausible social systems by figuring out the priorities of the rule makers; choosing names that reinforce the story’s themes and resonance; and lacing the text with warnings that are subtle and not preachy.
So, do androids dream of electric horses? We also discuss homage to favourite books – Lifeform Three is, in part, a love letter to the pony stories I devoured as a kid. (Apologies; I’m bringing you horses for the second time this month. The next post won’t be horsey.)
And here’s a bonus! A bit of bookish chat with Tim Lewis on his channel Book Chat Live. He asked me to make an Amazon wishlist with favourite books that have influenced my own writing. That’s quite a wide brief because I’ve written memoirs, contemporary fiction, SF and writing craft books, but there are literary touchstones for each of those, which you might like if you like my kind of book. Tim has a wildcard question at the end – choose anything you like from the Amazon store and say why you’d like someone to buy it for you. Ever since, I’ve been bombarded with adverts for the thing I chose. People, the algorithms are watching.
Do you write shortform? I have two opportunities for you.
If your forte is piercingly, wincingly, blazingly short, the 50 Give or Take series from Vine Leaves Press wants your work. The editor is my friend Elaina Battista-Parsons.
Does Elaina sound familiar? You’re right. She came to my blog to talk about her memoir Italian Bones In The Snow.
If 50 words is too tight and you like to be thoughtful at greater length, Elaina still wants your goodness. She’s also an editor at Cordelia Magazine.
Elaina also invited me for a brief chat about my writing, my favourite music, my favourite decade and advice for new writers. In the same post she featured the work of pop musicologist Quentin Harrison, and that’s an inspired pairing – Quentin has a series of books (Record Redux) on pop icons, explored through their songs, and I mainlined books on bands when I wrote my novel Ever Rest. We were destined to meet.
I’m thrilled to share this interview with Randal Eldon Greene, who wanted to discuss my World Fantasy Award longlisted novel Lifeform Three.
We talk about the authors who inspired me, the novel’s issues and questions. Actually, where do we start with that? I love novels that pose questions! Here are some of them – what makes us human, how we are persuaded to conform even though we have free will and rights, how our devices enable us but also program us, how nature and animals are an essential escape, how we treat people who aren’t like us, why Ray Bradbury is a genius, toxic capitalism and corporate bullying, climate change, visions of the future and places I would be sad to lose. Here’s more about Lifeform Threeif you want to know about it.
Randal’s also a writer, so we also get into the practical stuff – how I develop a complex set of themes and ideas into a readable story, how I juggle creative writing with other work that uses those same faculties, and why writing is always a long game for me. Do come over.
Nail Your Novel 