Tim Lott: Award-winning novelist and writing teacher joins the team.
Sunday, May 29th, 2016
Have started, or want to start, writing a novel or memoir? Are you trying to finish a piece of fiction that is defeating you? Writing at book length is a daunting prospect – both in terms of the skills required and the commitment necessary to keep going through tricky patches and ‘writer’s block’.
Now you can get individual, bespoke help with your work from award winning novelist and writing teacher Tim Lott.
Tim has successfully taught and mentored dozens of authors, including Ben McPherson whose novel, A Line of Blood, was published to acclaim on both sides of the Atlantic in 2015, and Rebecca Thornton, whose The Exclusives was published in 2016.
McPherson commented “I started out very cynical about the idea of mentoring (but) my novel is a much stronger novel for Tim’s involvement. I’m extremely grateful to him, and would recommend the experience highly. “
Thornton writes. “Without Tim’s words, I can safely say I would still be flailing around in piles of rejection slips. If you are looking for a mentor that will get you out of that, you must call him. But be prepared. He will challenge you.”
What authors Tim has help over the years say:
Kirsteen Tait, “Tim is a wise and encouraging teacher as well as a talented writer. He has the sense of humour so needed by those doomed to trying to write. It is always interesting working with him and he manages to make you feel supported, whatever is going badly.”
Paul Gould who has just been taken on by the Curtis Brown literary agency writes, “On my difficult journey to completing a first draft and starting on my second, Tim has been a merciful source of encouragement and guidance. I found Tim to be an exacting tutor (which is just what you want!). As a mentor, he is also nurturing, offering encouragement and – crucially – the insight of an experience published novelist:
In his own right Tim has published ten books over the last 20 years, won both the PEN/JR Ackerley for autobiography for his memoir The Scent of Dried Roses (now a Penguin Modern Classic) as well as the Whitbread (now the Costa) First Novel Award for White City Blue.
Tim spent three years teaching at the Faber Academy, and now teaches the Guardian Masterclass/University of East Anglia course on ‘How to Tell A Story’.
Tim is offering his services on a one-to-one mentoring basis, which means he will assess your work personally, and meet with you face to face to discuss how to move forward. He can come to your home, or you to his office in Kensington – or you can Skype. This can be offered either on a periodic basis – ten assessments and visits over the course of a year – or on a one-off basis where you will meet him for a day or half day and be taken, step by step, through the basic techniques of novel or memoir writing, as well as the best way to sell your work to publishers and agents.
Kirsteen Tait, puts it in a nutshell when she says, ‘Tim is a wise and encouraging teacher as well as a talented writer. He has the sense of humour so needed by those doomed to trying to write.”
Tim offers a variety of services to writer through The Oxford Editors:
- Manuscript assessment and personal tutoring with TimTim will assess your manuscript or what you have written so far, at a rate of £200 per 7,500 word (minimum fee £600) (plus VAT). He will mark up the manuscript with notes and write a brief report/summary on what has been written so far.
- Personal consultationTim can also meet you for either a morning (3 hours) or a day (6 hours) to talk to you about your manuscript and teach the craft of writing in general, including character, plot, dialogue, structure, voice, theme etc. He will brainstorm your book with you, helping to develop new ideas and ways forward. If you meet in Oxford there will be extra travel fees for Tim, or you can meet at his London offices.The cost of this would be £900 for a half day, £1850 (plus VAT) for a full day plus the cost of any reading. Tim will include a reading of up to 7,500 words in the service, but for longer pieces, there will be a charge of £200 (+VAT) per additional 7,500 words.
- Manuscript assessment and single consultationTim will assess manuscripts at rate of £200 (plus VAT) per 7,500 words (minimum fee £600). He will then spend an hour either on Skype or in person to discuss the work. This session will cost £500 (plus VAT).
- Mentoring over six-monthsTim would read and assess up to six submissions of up to 7,500 words each, and meet/Skype with student for an hour after each submission to discuss and come up with creative ways forward.The fee would be £2,500 (plus VAT).
- Mentoring over 12-months:Tim would read and assess up to ten submissions of up to 7,500 words each and meet/Skype with student for up to an hour after each submission to discuss.The fee would be £3,400 (plus VAT).
Places to work with Tim are limited but you can pay and book in advance to save a place.
Charlotte Green: On Writing and Motherhood
Sunday, May 29th, 2016
On Writing and Motherhood
In his essay Fires, Raymond Carver writes that, of everything, the greatest influences on his writing have been his children. Not because of who they are or what they meant to him, but because of the “unrelieved responsibility and permanent distraction” they have caused him over the years. In effect, they stopped him writing. If he was unable to sit down and write, they were most often the reason why. His essay continues, “I understood writers to be people who didn’t spend… every waking hour subject to the needs and caprices of their children. Sure, sure, there’ve been plenty of writers who have had far more serious impediments to their work, including imprisonment, blindness, the threat of torture or of death in one form or another. But knowing this was no consolation…. I could see nothing ahead but years more of this kind of responsibility and perplexity. Things would change some, but they were never really going to get better. I understood this, but could I live with it? At that moment I saw accommodations would have to be made. The sights would have to be lowered. “
A rather bleak sentiment for one of America’s best short story writers.
In July 2015 I became a new mum. Like Carver, all I had ever wanted to be was a writer and a parent and suddenly I was balancing both. Or rather, not balancing both. Being a parent is all consuming. As Carver said, children are an “unrelieved responsibility and permanent distraction”. For the first eight months of my daughter’s life I wrote nothing. Not a single word. No short stories, no writing exercises, not even a diary. Prior to maternity leave I had, rather naively, imagined my year ‘off’ as being blissfully filled with milky cuddles, reading stories, dressing my daughter up and of course there would be hours when she would sleep soundly and I would be able to rework the first draft of my novel and send it out to agents. Hah.
Eight months in and things are getting easier. I’m writing this for a start. But I can see Carver’s point. Things are unlikely to change much and I need to adjust my expectations, refocus my energies and ideas into something realistic. For Carver that was writing short stories. He could only snatch an hour at a time so he would use that hour to write a short story and the subsequent hours he found that week would be used for editing. And it worked. Raymond Carver is considered to be one of the best short story writers of the twentieth century. But it took hard work and dedication. He had to want it bad. To find the time between work and parenthood and to choose to write above everything else, that takes serious commitment.
One thing having my daughter has taught me is that I too want it bad. It’s not just about the escape, having a break from the responsibility of being a mother; it is about creating something that is uniquely mine. It is about achieving something for myself outside of growing a human (and then keeping it alive). Not only that, but in the years to come, when she is looking towards adulthood and thinking about her own life choices, I want her to respect mine, to know that she can achieve any goal she sets herself because she watched her own mother achieve hers.
So in answer to Carver’s question: can I live with it? Yes, I can. I understand that accommodations will have to be made, but I don’t agree that my sights will have to be lowered. Perhaps deadlines extended and priorities adjusted, but for my daughter’s future respect, I will achieve every damn goal going. She maybe the reason I get up in the morning, but my own personal goals are the reason I make it through to the end of the day.
Charlotte Green: What is a story?
Sunday, May 29th, 2016
What is a story?
To tell a story, American short story writer Flannery O’Connor once wrote, is “to create life with words”. It takes a supreme talent to write a story that can recreate life, but is that really the goal of any story? Do people not immerse themselves in fiction for the sole purpose of escaping real life? And if that is the case, then what is a story?
If you ask anyone, writer or no, to tell you what a story is, they will know. Most people have been reading and telling stories since childhood. But if you ask someone to actually sit down and write one, the task can prove somewhat challenging. People become obsessed with plot and structure, characterization, and meaning. Do those things make up a story? Or are they the art of telling a story? If they are the techniques, then what is a story? And what differentiates a good story from its mediocre counterparts?
For the novice writer, early stories are often mongrel things. Combinations of sketch and essay, editorial and character study, case history and parable. They are often about problems rather than people. Abstract issues rather than concrete situations. Beginning writers are somehow possessed less by the story than by what O’Connor calls “unfleshed ideas and emotions”. They are so desperate to pass on to the world an idea or feeling – or even what they see as their own wisdom – that they fail to tell a story in the process.
So what is a story? Put simply, in a story something happens. There is a character and he is driven towards an action, usually by outside forces. The story is the showing of that action. It can be told through different mediums (short story, flash fiction, novel, novella, screenplay, or script) but the essence is always the same: there is a character or characters and they are forced to act. In other words, a story is a dramatic unit of literary art.
At their core, stories are about human existence, about real life, what Raymond Carver called “common place things”. In order to write about human experience, the writer must begin with the human element: the protagonists, in particular their senses. Fiction deals with reality through what can be seen, heard, smelt, tasted, and touched and it often takes at least three of these to make an object come to life. Take this sentence from Flaubert’s Madame Bovary where Emma plays the piano and Charles sits watching:
She struck the notes with aplomb and ran from top to bottom of the keyboard without a break. Thus shaken up, the old instrument, whose strings buzzed, could be heard at the other end of the village when the window was open, and often the bailiff’s clerk, passing along the highroad, bareheaded and in list slippers, stopped to listen, his sheet of paper in his hand.
At the start of this sentence we are with Emma at the piano “whose strings buzzed”. At the end we are across the village with a clerk in his list slippers. Given what happens to Emma by the end of the novel, the reader would be forgiven for wondering why these details are important. But Flaubert had to create a realistic and believable village for Emma to live in. For if the reader didn’t believe her surroundings, why would he believe her outcome? It is this level of detail that makes the village and thereafter her outcome believable. It is what makes the story believable.
Detail is essential. Ford Maddox Ford famously taught his students that a writer should not include a man in a story long enough to sell a newspaper, unless he appears with enough detail to make the reader see him. How does a writer achieve that? By writing what he sees. Learn to see – not just look – but really see the world. Writing fiction is not a matter of saying things to the reader, but of showing them the world as it really is.
That said, art is selective. A story should not be a piling up of details. Every detail must work hard to be there. It must be essential to the action of the story. Otherwise that story becomes cumbersome and suddenly the reader no longer believes.
It is this level of detail that turns a mediocre story into a good story. A truly excellent story, however, is one where the reader discovers something new each time he reads it. In order to achieve this, the story must operate on several levels. A meaning or several meanings must be incorporated into the story. They are not tagged onto the end, but embedded into the very heart of the story. By doing that morality and drama are combined. The characters illustrate the story’s meaning through their actions.
And so we have come full circle. If a story is a character driven to action and that action illustrates a moral or meaning. Then through that story the author has offered up the original idea they wished to impart on their reader. And if beliefs are the lights by which we see, then by simply detailing the world as it appears, the writer will be incorporating his morals into his writing. It is through the human eye that writers make judgements and by using his vision, a writer not only details the world as it appears to him, but makes moral judgements on what he sees. Those judgements become the morals embedded in any story.
It takes true talent to “create life with words”. But by writing only what we see and by practicing each and every day – that is to make art a habit – we can almost certainly come close.
Embracing Rejection
Saturday, May 14th, 2016
Embracing Rejection
Victoria Griffin
Nobody likes rejection. Nobody approaches a crush and thinks, I really hope they shoot me down! It’s tough to put yourself on the line, and that’s exactly what you’re doing every time you submit your writing. It’s a piece of you, and having your work rejected often feels like being rejected as a person—like being told, You’re not good enough. So how do you deal with that? It’s extremely difficult, especially in an industry often approached by insiders and outsiders as a pipe dream. Wow, you really think you can be published someday? Good luck! As a writer, rejection and failure are not possibilities—they are absolute certainties. And how you deal with them will make or break your career. Here are some tips for facing rejection and using it to drive your success!
Celebrate it
This is often the easiest thing to do early in the submission process. You’ve finished your novel-baby. You’ve polished it until it shines. Now you’re sending it into the world. Got that first rejection? Yes! It has begun! You’re one step closer to publication! This might come naturally. But if it doesn’t, take a moment to celebrate. Buy some streamers and throw a party. That rejection begins a new stage in the journey of your writing project.
Grit your teeth and smile
When the celebration wears off and the rejections start taking their toll, bear down and keep smiling. Do what you have to do to keep submitting. Did you get that? Keep submitting. That’s the key here. Write it on your wall. Tattoo it on your arm.
Get angry
Rejection pisses you off. You know what that means? You care. You want it. There’s nothing wrong with getting angry, and there’s nothing wrong with doing what you need to do to work it out. Go for a run. Take up boxing. Throw your lamp at the wall (provided there are no humans or animals in its trajectory). Get angry, but don’t get discouraged. Use your emotions—don’t let them stop you from working.
Recognize Each Rejection as a Stepping Stone
Every rejection is a step toward acceptance. There’s no doubt about that. Fifty rejections put you a hell of a lot closer to acceptance than five rejections. So if you’re strong enough to bear more rejection, you’ll be rewarded. The easiest way to handle that burden is to know and believe that a high enough pile of rejections becomes a stairway.
Ask for help
You’re not alone. You’re not the first person to put pen to paper or the first to have your work rejected. There are people out there who have gone through the same trials and have come out the other side. Reach out to them! Ask them how they got through it and what it’s like in that bright, sunshiny life of a published author. Ask them what you can do to make the process easier, to be more productive, to increase your chances of reaching your goals. And while you’re at it, find some people who are also trying to scape out that first publication. Encourage each other. Writing is often solitary, but it does not have to be lonely.
Recognize the Myth of the Overnight Success
Everyone loves to talk about overnight successes. We look at the people on top and think, They have it all. Why do they deserve success more than I do? What makes them special? The answer: They’re not special! They weren’t out for a stroll when fruit from the success tree fell and bonked them on the head, and they don’t deserve success more than you do. They are simply at a different point in their journey. Everything they have, they’ve worked for it. They have stacks of rejections, just like you. The difference is their stacks are higher.
They are not rejecting you!
It’s so easy to feel every time we see Thank you for your submission, but… that we are being told we’re not good enough. There is something intrinsically bad about us as writers and as people. And that’s just not true. The key, the write this one down you’re gonna need it trick, to withstanding rejection is being able to separate yourself into three people—the writer, the submitter, and the human being. Keep them separate, and keep them safe. Understand that each rejection rejects only the piece. It does not reject you as a writer. And more importantly, it does not reject you as a person. Your value as a human being is not tied to your writing, and when that becomes clear, submitting becomes a whole lot easier. Because you’re not risking your self-worth every time you send out your stuff. You’re taking a chance with that piece. You’re placing yourself in a position to fail. And you are giving yourself the opportunity to succeed.
Friends, I leave you with one final piece of advice for coping with rejection, one last thing to remember, one last mantra to repeat in your mind whenever the strain of rejection begins to wear on you: Without rejection, there is no success.
Without rejection, there is no success.
So go out there, and get rejected! Count up those letters because they’re forming a stairway and bringing you closer, one at a time.
Luke Harding talk
Tuesday, May 10th, 2016
Oxfam Author Talk with Luke Harding
Award winning Guardian journalist and author of the Snowden Files and WikiLeaks talks about his new book A Very Expensive Poison: the Definitive Story of the Murder of Litvinenko and Russia’s War with the West
Friday 13th May 12pm-1pm (refreshments from 11.30am)
at the Quaker Meeting House, St Giles, OX1 3LW
Tickets £5 available from the Oxfam Bookshop, St Giles
All proceeds to Oxfam
