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GJ Minett (The Hidden Legacy) – My Writing Commandments

The Hidden Legacy has been gathering rave reviews since it first released as an e-book earlier this year. The paperback edition released on 25th August and is now finding its way into the hands of many new readers.

I am delighted to welcome the author of The Hidden Legacy, GJ Minett, to the blog today to share his 5 writing commandments.

Five Writing Commandments I Live By

Here we go. In no particular order, and with no guarantees that I manage to live up to any of them:

GET OFF SOCIAL MEDIA, FOR GOD’S SAKE!

This used not to be a problem. For years I resisted the siren call of Facebook and tweets were something I welcomed through the bedroom window. Nothing … NOTHING was going to tempt me to goo over pictures of puppies and kittens or start taking an interest in what someone had for breakfast. Then I got a book deal. First meeting with my editor, I told him confidently: I don’t do social media. His response: you do now.

Now I find it desperately difficult to ignore it. I can be approaching the most dramatic moment in the chapter and it will suddenly occur to me that I haven’t checked for 20 minutes to see whether so-and-so has responded to my last tweet or how many places my novel has risen or fallen in the Amazon rankings.

TURN IT OFF. Turn off the notifications, the beep alerts, the silly little pings that whisper insidiously in your ear that if you don’t check now, you’ll miss out on something momentous. If you don’t, you’ll never get anything done.

Tell a story

People read novels for a variety of reasons. Not many though, I would hazard a guess, will have picked up your novel because they want to have a personalised agenda thrust down their throat. Very few will be expecting to dive into a dictionary to look up every fifth word because you’re so keen to demonstrate the extent and complexity of your vocabulary. Just tell the story and avoid trying to be too clever.

Give them characters they can believe in

Not only that, make them characters they will care about. It’s only a personal preference but I tend to start with a character rather than a detailed plot. I carry them around with me in my head for a month or two, developing them while I exercise, asking myself how they would react to a news item on TV. I draw up checklists of what they eat, read, wear for different occasions and at different times of the year, what their guilty secrets and deepest fears might be. Then, once I have them clearly defined in my head, I start thinking about the situation I want to put them in and the dilemma or crisis I want them to confront because without conflict of some sort there is no real story.

Appeal to the senses

Ellie, one of my fellow workshop students on the MA in Creative Writing at the University of Chichester, was an invaluable help to me whenever I started to ‘plot-trot’. She would send work back to me complaining that she felt excluded from what I was writing. She felt like a detached observer, denied the opportunity to empathise as much as she would have liked, because I wasn’t giving her enough to get hold of. “Put me in the scene,” she would implore me. “What can I see? What can I smell, hear around me? Let me touch things.” I needed frequent reminders and was grateful for them. The scene in The Hidden Legacy when Ellen first visits the cottage has attracted a certain amount of favourable comment and a lot of that is down to the advice I received. Bring the senses into play and include your reader at every opportunity.

Trust your instincts, but …

There must be thousands of novels I’ve considered and not written. Ideas keep popping into my head and out again. Sometimes though an idea comes back and that’s usually a sign for me that it has legs, as they say. We might be able to go somewhere with it.

By and large I trust my instincts about whether it’s the right story and also regarding the quality of what I’m producing. I’m far from infallible though and it’s at times like this that you need the right people around you.

A while ago I dashed off a second book to follow on the heels of The Hidden Legacy. I persuaded myself it was good enough. It wasn’t … and fortunately my agent, Peter Buckman, told me to put it in a drawer, chalk it up to experience and write a better one.

And when I completed Lie In Wait, even though it had sneaked past this redoubtable gatekeeper, I received several pages of notes from my editor, Joel Richardson, with suggestions as to things I ‘might like to consider’. It’s not exactly a different book now but it is a much better one.

So … 5 commandments that work for me. I hope they do the same for you.

The Hidden Legacy is available in paperback and digital formats and can be ordered here: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Hidden-Legacy-Gripping-Psychological-Drama/dp/1785770144/ref=sr_1_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1472772377&sr=1-2&keywords=gj+minett

Lie in Wait released on Kindle on 25th August 2016 and can be ordered by clicking through on this link: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Lie-Wait-gripping-crime-thriller-ebook/dp/B01F91HUPC/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1472772442&sr=1-1

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March 1

Guest Post…Deborah Bee: Writing a Dual Narrative

Two protagonists/dual narrative – rooky error or good plan?

Why did I do it for my novel, The Last Thing I Remember. I don’t really know. It just seemed eventually (after two years of thinking about it) like a good idea.

Writing this blog piece, I just googled “a novel with two protagonists” and now I’ve been put off the very notion of a two-hander. Basic fiction writing, it says, warns against prologues, dream sequences, flashbacks, adverbs and dual/multiple protagonists. Oops. I’ve got some of them as well. And it says they are absolute rules. ABSOLUTE. RULES. Shriek.

The problem, it seems to be, is that apparently you can’t tell a compelling story if it’s split down the middle, UNLESS, each protagonist is equally weighted, with their own story arc that contains similar highs and lows, conflicts and resolve, leading to a balanced conclusion. But even if you do that, it’s never going to work.

I didn’t know that. I haven’t been to a creative writing class. I wish I had. But now I do know, I’m in the foetal position under my desk. I’ve made a rooky error. Are my protagonists equally weighted? Do they have similar highs and lows? All I know was that it was sodding complicated running two stories at the same time. Even though they are tightly woven together, I got lost so many times along the way.

Then there’s the dual narrative bit. Similarly, that’s considered a bad idea, mainly because it’s so easy to get confused over who is speaking. The received wisdom seems to suggest that unless the story calls for it, a dual narrative is a bit of a triumph of style over content. The secret to success…to create two utterly distinctive voices that cannot be confused.

So thinking about it, the reason I did a two-hander? Well, to start with my first protagonist, the one I really started with, is in a coma. She has Locked-in Syndrome. She can’t move, blink, see, swallow, breathe. However she can hear. And she can think. She can’t remember how she got there, but she’s piecing it all together by the conversations she can hear, and from her slowly-returning memory. The problem I created for myself was how to keep the audience interested in a woman who is totally stuck in her own head. She’s sad, frightened and desperately trying to grasp hold of her memories.

Protagonist 2 then was really a pair of eyes. An undercover agent almost, who could describe life on the outside. Kelly is fourteen and should be the innocent of the piece. But right from the start we discover that she is far from innocent, far from her school-girl appearance. She’s mouthy. She swears constantly. She uses the wrong words. She’s funny. I wanted Kelly to be the antidote to Sarah.

The reason that a dual narrative was a useful structure – because Sarah can tell you things about Kelly that Kelly would never say. And vice versa. And both of them are fantastically unreliable witnesses.

Then, anyway. Along came Gone Girl. Two protagonists, dual narrative. It worked so well they made a film out of it. Rules out the window. It’s all her fault. Blame Gillian Flynn. You maverick Gillian Flynn. ABSOLUTE MAVERICK.

The Last Thing I Remember is published by Twenty7 Books and is available to download now:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Last-Thing-Remember-emotional-thriller-ebook/dp/B0196P0S4W/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1456867082&sr=1-1&keywords=the+last+thing+i+remember

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March 1

The Last Thing I Remember – Deborah Bee

Sarah is in a coma.

Her memory is gone – she doesn’t know how she got there. And she doesn’t know how she might get out.

But then she discovers that her injury wasn’t an accident. And that the assailant hasn’t been caught.

Unable to speak, see or move, Sarah must use every clue that she overhears to piece together her own past.

And work out who it is that keeps coming into her room.

My thanks to at Hannah at Midas PR for my review copy and the chance to join the Blog Tour

When I read the description of The Last Thing I Remember my immediate reaction was that I HAD to read this story. Narrative from a character who cannot interact with any other characters, who cannot remember what has happened to her and who is scared that someone may be out to cause her more harm? I couldn’t even begin to think how that story may play out…but I wanted to see how Deborah Bee could make it work. Brilliantly as it turns out!

This was a very cleverly constructed book. Much of what we learn from Sarah (as she lies in a coma in hospital) is prompted by the interactions of the people around her. Her family chat while they visit, the doctors and nurses in the hospital share gossip while at her bedside, the police are investigating what happened to Sarah and then there is Kelly – she is Sarah’s neighbour and something of a mystery character.

Narrative switches between Sarah (recollecting events which led to her hospitalization) and Kelly who offers an alternative window into how Sarah’s life may have been prior to THE INCIDENT. The unpicking of memories takes time as Sarah slowly pieces together how her life may have been before the hospital.

The nature of the reveals through the story make it hard for me to dwell too much on what we learn about Sarah. I should make it clear that I loved this book. It is cleverly written, it is engaging and from very early in the story you are willing Sarah to recover and have the danger she faces taken away. No spoilers is the rule here but there are some nasty shocks ahead for Sarah.

This is definitely a book that I will be urging people to read, it is memorably different and wonderfully written.

The Last Thing I Remember is published by Twenty7 Books and is available now. You can download a copy here: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Last-Thing-Remember-emotional-thriller-ebook/dp/B0196P0S4W/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1456867082&sr=1-1&keywords=the+last+thing+i+remember

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