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Tag Archives: writing

You really should write this…

02 Thursday Sep 2021

Posted by la Clarina in Scribbling, Stories

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narrative licence, reality and fiction, Stories, story ideas, writing

They come to you, and say that they have a story, a really good story that you should really write.

In time you learn to recognize this, a certain gleam in their eyes from the very first moment someone mentions that you write. Then they sit on it, they observe you, sometimes they ask questions, trying to determine whether you might be the right person… Continue reading →

A small lament

19 Thursday Aug 2021

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Flash Fiction, freewriting, not writing, Procrastination, writing

I’m not writing enough.

I’m not writing enough.

I’m not writing enough!

And I could go on, you know. I could go on for a rather long time, because… yes, well: I’m not writing enough. Continue reading →

“The author of a detective story…”

10 Thursday Jun 2021

Posted by la Clarina in Books, History, Scribbling

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Elizabethan espionage, History, John Bossy, The Tom Walsingham Mysteries, writing

You know those moments – those moments when a book speaks to you? When you read something that might have been written exactly for you to find it? Well, I had a rather peculiar moment of that kind, yesterday… Continue reading →

#StoryADay 2021

29 Thursday Apr 2021

Posted by la Clarina in Scribbling

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#StoryADayMay, Flash Fiction, Julie Duffy, writing, writing challenge

Yes, yes – I’m doing it again. Because I liked the jolt it gave me last year, and because otherwise, considering the writing course I’m teaching, and the looming Summer Season, and a couple of largish jobs I’ve taken, I might be tempted to push my writing aside for now… Continue reading →

Freewriting, freewriting, freewriting…

15 Thursday Apr 2021

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freewriting, writing, writing practice

Oh, the joys of Freewriting…!

Or Timed Writing, or however you like to call it. The deceptively simple act of sitting down with a pen and a piece of paper (or perhaps a keyboard and white screen), set a timer or a goal, and then… just write. Never stop, never edit, never overthink it, never mind grammar of spelling, never go back. Just write, as fast as you can. Just let if flow – until the timer rings, or the goal is met. Continue reading →

The art of counting words

01 Thursday Apr 2021

Posted by la Clarina in Scribbling

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craft, limits, wordcount, writing

There is always at least one pupil like that.

Whenever I teach a writing course, the first time I give a maximum wordcount for an exercise, someone will look puzzled: how do you even know how many words are in a piece? Continue reading →

French museums and tarring brushes

11 Thursday Feb 2021

Posted by la Clarina in History, Scribbling

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France, historical novel, Montreuil-sur-Mer, museums, research, Road to Murder, writing

A few months ago, as I was working on Road to Murder, I found trouble in the form of a French town called Montreuil sur Mer.* Well, for various reasons, my sleuth Tom Walsingham finds himself spending a night there, much against his inclination, and I needed to have a good idea of the place for that… Continue reading →

Sometimes it is the small things

28 Thursday Jan 2021

Posted by la Clarina in History, Scribbling, Stories

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Historical fiction, murder mystery, Sapere Books, Sir Francis Walsingham, Sir Henry Cobham, writing

 

They stopped Walsingham and Paulo, my Italian, whom they seemed resolved to rob [… and] another Englishman in his company, called Skeggs, as I remember.

On the twelfth of November 1581 Elizabeth’s Ambassador in Paris, Sir Henry Cobham, wrote to the all-powerful Secretary of State – and spymaster – Sir Francis Walsingham . It was almost in passing that the ambassador slipped in this bit of information about the misadventure of Sir Francis’s much younger cousin, nineteen-year-old Thomas, riding as a diplomatic courier between London and Paris. Continue reading →

A slightly gloomy person

14 Thursday Jan 2021

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literary gloominess, New Year's resolutions, Stories, writing

A new year begins, and everything – and I belong to the list-making sort, if only marginally. So, with a lovely new notebook to start, what was more natural than making a list of writing projects for the new year?

It is, of course, one of those hopeful lists, with way more items than I can reasonably expect to tackle – although you never can tell – and written down in full awareness of the nature of the best laid plans. Continue reading →

A tall and freckled wench – or, the (French) R in “character”

05 Thursday Nov 2020

Posted by la Clarina in History, Scribbling, Stories, Theatre

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characterisation, characters, Charles Nicholl, distance learning, playwriting, shakespeare, the lodger, writing

Teaching in the Covid era – even teaching playwriting in a drama school – means that we are back to distance learning, these days. My corner of Italy is shut down again, and last night’s class happened on Zoom.

It was all about dialogue, you see, and using it to either forward action, or enhance characterization. Well – both, ideally, and all the more when writing for the stage, where dialogue is one of only two tools the playwright has to tell a story, the other being action.

But as we discussed ways to use dialogue to build character, I was reminded of a bit in Charles Nicholl’s The Lodger. Now, The Lodger is wonderful nonfiction, focusing on Shakespeare’s time as a lodger with the Mountjoys, a family of successful tyrers (or wig-makers) of French origins.

Shakespeare managed to get himself embroiled with a lawsuit between Christopher Mountjoy and his son-in-law, and let us say that the Bard doesn’t cut his finest figure – but that’s hardly the point. The point is the Bard’s landlady, Marie Mountjoy, who went from Huguenot refugee to tyre-maker to Anne of Denmark, no less. Well, at one point Marie, a wealthy businesswoman and perhaps an adulteress, goes to see astrologer and physician Dr. Simon Forman, in the hope of recovering a couple of lost ring and some equally lost money. It was a common practice, at the time, and Forman was a man of huge renown in the field. The good doctor used to take copious and detailed notes of his cases, and his notebooks have largely survived, to provide us with a treasure trove of details. Details like the very short list of Marie’s suspect thieves – one being Margery, a servant in the Mountjoy household. A tall and freckled wench, in Marie’s words.

These few words, jotted down by Foreman as he listened to Marie, have always given me the shivers – in the best possible way. It’s a bit of a voice from four hundred years ago, unphiltered by the conventions of literature, law or ritual. It’s a small window thrown open across the centuries to show us, to make us hear this long dead woman… Nicholl loves it just as much as I do, and goes a step further: Whenever I try to conjure up a sense of Marie, he writes, I imagine her while she pronounces “freckled” with a French accent.

Try Nicholl’s little game – and here is Marie at thirty, leaning forward in her seat in the flickering light from a pair of candles, with a disapproving frown, and pursed lips, with her hands folded in her lap, and her French ‘r… So vividly alive, after four hundred something years, and all because of five words told to an astrologer. Five words that keep a trace of her origins, her mindset, her beliefs, her voice, her personality. Five words.

It goes to show how a few well-chosen words of dialogue  can go very far in creating a voice and a character – whether history kindly provides them, or we make them up ourselves.

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