Category: On writing

Playing in the graveyard

I spent a lot of time in graveyards when I was a child.

Well, I guess it wasn’t a lot of time, but my mum had a thing about stopping at old cemeteries and walking along reading the headstones out loud to us, with suitable asides about the names, the dates and the mundane tragedy of death as experienced by complete strangers a century before.

So there are graveyards in the story I’m writing, and I added in another one when I was writing a scene today. Despite working on historical fiction, I was aided by Google maps – I knew exactly where I wanted the event to take place, around 300 years ago. I had a look at the street view of Duns to get a sense of the layout, and there directly across the road is a fabulous old cemetery, raised up above the road. What a perfect stage for a dramatic declaration.

Stuck for an elegant simile

Where’s the perfect simile when you want it?

You know, you can stand around all day here, waiting for a metaphor, and then three of them arrive at once!

Actually, I was thinking about how I suck in and pour out stories and I decided I was a story silo. But, no. Because the grain that goes in is the same grain that comes out. There’s no sense of the process of absorbing stories and creating new ones, inspired by what’s been absorbed.

None of which is helping the two things I am working on tonight:

The first is a title for my book to include in the synopsis. IMPOSSIBLE!

The second is beginning to build an online presence of myself as an author.

So the blog post is productive writing. Pondering whether I’m a silo is not.