CLAIRE LADDS

Author of character-driven psychological literary fiction and other darker books, all with an emotional pull

claireladds

Writing goals for 2021

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Happy New Year to you!

It’s that time of the year when we all make our resolutions, and authors like me decide what our goals are going to be for the coming year.

I’m not completely convinced that I’ve ever got on too well with the word ‘goals’. For a very long time, goals have felt to me like those things other, more established, well-informed writers who actually have a clue what they’re doing can set and achieve, whereas goals for me have seemed to live in the same make-believe land as dreams.

For me, the last five years of trying to start something that resembled an author business has seen me wading in the mindset of ‘wannabe’ and ‘wannado’. I’m being brutally honest with myself here when I tell you this. I’ve flailed around, experimenting with a couple of different kinds of fiction under different pen names. I spent an inordinate amount of time under one pen name releasing fiction on my website to drive traffic, which it did. The problem was that it resulted in almost no actual reading customers. And, as my partner has pointed out to me on numerous occasions when I became a bit obsessed with driving traffic through unpublished fiction, why would they buy it when they can read it for free? Okay, so, lesson learned there!

There were a couple of things that altered my way of thinking during 2020. One was that I released a book that had been living under my skin, in my dreams and in every part of me for over a decade. It was a book I needed to write. I forced myself (as was possible in the utter nightmare that was 2020) to set myself a non-negotiable deadline and get the book written and published, which I did. And then… nothing. I don’t just mean I heard crickets when it came to sales. I realised two other things: despite this being the kind of book I had aspired to write, very little about it gave me joy. This sounds a bit crazy: I loved the characters, and one in particular for whom I think I ended up actually writing the book, and I loved the process of actually writing it. And more than anything, I loved, and will always love, the story I wrote – for me it will probably always be the book.

So what the hell was wrong with me? It was the story that filled me with passion to tell it and emotion when writing it. Yet it wasn’t the kind of story that made me want to get up in the morning. In fact, I actively avoided writing it for so long that it took a pandemic and a lockdown to put me in a position to write it. I had become so emotionally attached that I felt like I had to rip parts of me out and put them on the page. And when I released it, I felt – nothing. No elation, no joy, not even relief. It was as if it had removed my soul and left me with a shell, and it took a while to get over that.

All pretty weird and miserable, you think (this helped you how, Claire?!). But without this, I wouldn’t have done the next thing. Two things, actually, but they occurred simultaneously. I returned to drawing, which I’ve enjoyed all my life. From this, and through conversations with my loved ones, I decided that I was perfectly capable of creating books in a different way. So I set about creating my very first adult colouring book. Now, I’m the most un-techie person you could ever have the misfortune to meet, certainty if you want to talk about how computer programs work. I’m a ‘tell me what to press and I’ll press it’ kind of person. And this was pretty much how the colouring book came into existence!

I spent hugely joyful hours wading through my sketch books, drawing and re-drawing old and new ideas, and then turning it into a book with the amazing tech help and skills of my daughter and partner. Without them, and their encouragement to go back to something I enjoy doing, I would never have produced it. I can’t remember the last time I focused on a project with such enthusiasm and ferocity, so much so that the book went from initial conversation to release in just over six weeks. After a decade on my previous two books, this was something I never expected, and it really altered how I saw my future in publishing progressing.

The second thing that happened was that I remembered what my first love was. It was, and has always been, mystery fiction. I grew up with it, fell in love with it, and can’t leave it alone. It truly is my obsession. The pandemic really hasn’t needed to be an excuse for me to watch Poirot, but I’ve done it anyway. What has changed is my rediscovery of the mystery book. I have hundreds and hundreds of them at home, but I know that I’ve spent so long trying to ‘be a writer’ that I’ve forgotten that I’m a reader, too, and that I’m actually allowed to read for enjoyment. The latter part of 2020 saw me returning to curling up with mystery fiction – and I can’t believe just how much I’d forgotten how wonderful it is, and how I can get completely lost in a story. In a year which has been so awful is so many ways, spending some time just loving what is going on in my head as I absorb the mystery has done wonders for my mental health.

Coinciding with this are also the discussions I have had with my partner over the possibility for writing a historical mystery series, which I’ve wanted to do for a long time. Once again, fun came into the equation, as we chatted about how the characters could behave, and bounced around different ideas for plot elements and had a great time trying to figure out whodunnit and why.

So, as I got into the last few days of 2020 and I sat in my flat, still eating up the Christmas food and devouring books and mysteries, something in my brain just clicked. I owned up to the fact that I’ve been spending too many years in the ‘wannabe’ and ‘wannado’ mindset of being a writer/publisher. I was angry with myself, but also forgiving of all the mistakes I’ve made, because without them I wouldn’t have been failing, which means I wouldn’t have been trying, either.

Up to this point at the end of December, I’d told myself I was a professional, full-time indie author. I’m really not sure whether I’ve ever believed it, because if I had, I wouldn’t have felt so unnerved at the thought that I could actually put the work out there and publish it and keep doing it, instead of wasting so much time avoiding actually doing the work that I know I want to do, just in case it fails, or maybe in case it actually succeeds. I went from wondering what gives little me the right to think she is an author to telling myself that I am an author, and that it’s my full time career and it’s also the thing I love, and it allows me to deal with those things I enjoy most in the world, every single day. I told myself that I’m allowed to focus on those parts of an author/publishing business that I know I can do well and that bring me joy and learn the parts that I’m not so good at or that I’m clueless about one at a time, rather than letting overwhelm about all those things I think I should be doing take over and prevent me from doing anything at all.

Most of all, I gave myself permission to enjoy what I want to do and to tell myself that this career isn’t just for those who know what they’re doing, and for those fantastic authors I respect and who I take advice from through their books and podcasts. I can do it, too. Because there is absolutely nothing to prevent me, except me. And I can set goals, even if I play mind games with myself to treat them as challenges.

So, and with apologies for the long-winded arrival at this point, I’d like to let you in on my creative goals for 2021. These are my watch words for the year: focus, content, visibility. Creating content with a focus and purpose is something that will help my books become visible to readers who might like them, and it will take a concerted, consistent effort.

But my overarching theme for the year is ‘finish what you’ve started’. I’m really good at beginning lots of projects; I get excited by an idea and I begin, and it’s wonderful – but it’s also a recipe for disaster when that initial fervour doesn’t last, and I lose interest in the project. It does become a means of filtering out the ideas that really don’t have ‘legs’, but it can also leave me with a computer and notebooks full of unfinished work which I haven’t time to complete, which seem too vague and fluffy to finish at that time, or sometimes which I’m just too scared to try and tackle. There are so many books that I could have written, if only I’d finished everything that’s lurking in folders buried somewhere in the depths of my hard drive and writing cupboard. I’m also very, very good at detracting from the job at hand (cue staring out of the window, doing the washing, hoovering, taking out the recycling, washing up, wandering off and doing umpteen other things not in the slightest bit related to the thing that I’m meant to be focusing on).

I often find that these ‘beginnings’ sit in different genres, too. I think that, sometimes, I get so bogged down in what I should be trying to do with my project that I can’t unravel it in my head – hence the detraction jobs. So this year, I’m taking some of these unfinished projects and creating work that fits exclusively in that genre I love so much: crime and mystery fiction. Now, these are going to fit in various sub-genres, which I think gets me around the worry of what I should write and leaves me to concentrate on what I want to write. But there will always be dreadful deeds at their heart. I am going to focus my writing on three types of crime and mystery fiction:

Dark, gothic-style crime

Historical crime

Cosy mystery

I’ve taken a lot of time to think this over, and I don’t see the point in writing what makes me emotionally pained and leaves my loved ones suffering around me because they’re not sure how they can help me get over it. Therefore, the three sub-genres of crime and mystery fiction are now my focus, going forward. I have read and watched extensively in these sub-genres, and they will definitely overlap when it comes to my stories.

As I mentioned my art, I also want to declare here, that I intend to continue to create more colouring books for adults. I know it’s not part of the grand crime fiction plan, but I do already have a dedicated website (claireladdsart.com if you’re interested) and a clear readership, so that’s running parallel with my writing.

Thinking, too, about the overarching theme of starting what I finish, I need to translate into my publishing. There are books I have published in one or maybe two formats, but that’s all. There are sales platforms that I’m not currently selling on and I’m telling myself I should be. Both my future books and my backlist need to be available to as many people in as many formats, and sold in as many ways, as I can manage.

The other focus of my creative output this year is content. I don’t mean my books, the finished products, but the other content I create which (hopefully!) readers find interesting and useful, and which creates a more direct connection between me and the people who read what I put out there.

So, my writing (or maybe my creative and publication) goals look like this:

Writing

Tick, Tick, Tick (Gothic crime set in Victorian times)

Book 1 in Gothic crime/mystery series, title yet undecided

Book 2 in Gothic crime/mystery series, title yet undecided

Book 3 in Gothic crime/mystery series, title yet undecided

Book 1 of a historical crime trilogy – I think)

Book 1 in Victorian mystery series

Book 2 in Victorian mystery series

Book 3 in Victorian mystery series

Short story/novella crime collection

Also in planning – 3 books in new mystery series, time period yet undecided, although likely 1920s/30s

Book 2 in adult colouring

Book 3 in adult colouring

Book 4 in adult colouring

Book 5 in adult colouring

Book 1 in cute colouring range

Book 2 in cute colouring range

All books to be available direct from me in ebook (fiction) or downloadable PDF (colouring)

Publishing

Baby up the Chimney in paperback in places other than only Amazon

The Reason for Everything in paperback in places other than only Amazon

Tick, Tick, Tick in ebook and paperback

Book 1 of historical crime trilogy in ebook and paperback

Book 1 in Gothic crime series in ebook and paperback

Book 2 in Gothic crime series in ebook and paperback

Book 1 in Victorian crime series in ebook and paperback

Short story/novella crime collection

Content

Readers’ Club get an email every couple of weeks (plus extra at launch times), with some content that is exclusively for them. This gives me direct contact with those people who want to know even more about what I do, how I work and find that I or my work resonate with them.

Release a blog post every week on this website to connect with more readers and give a general insight into me, my books and the stuff I love to write.

Set up and release a weekly blog on my other website (which currently you can’t access, but I’ll keep you informed of progress). This deals exclusively with mystery fiction and the themes which occur

The big, scary one – start a podcast linked to the website I’ve not named. I’m not going to say any more about this one right now, but as one of the shyest, most introverted people you could ever meet, this one presents a challenge that takes me right outside my comfort zone.

There we have it – my possibly unrealistic, challenging and a little bit scary goals for 2021. I promise to report back on these creative goals at the end of the year, and we will see just how I got on.

Happy reading!

Magic, Mystery and Agatha Christie (fiction that made me a writer)

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fiction that made me a writer by Claire Ladds

I am almost positive that, if you’re reading this, you have memories of books and stories which have stayed with you long after you first read them, or that have inspired you, or influenced you in some way. I know I have. There are some that have been way more inspirational than I ever could have realised at the time, and these have definitely influenced, not just me as a reader, but the writer in me, too.

The tiny reader ‘me’ gobbles stories

There are books I remember reading as a small child which gave to me, I’m sure, a love of the written word and the power of its magic. I remember vividly my one and only hardback copy of Twinkle. For the life of me now, I can’t remember what was inside, but the feeling I get when I think of it is that books are magical, transportive; the feel of it, the sight of it, the formation of the pages gave me joy and still does, even in memory.

I had a number of Roger Hargreaves’ Mr Men books on my shelf, too, which I devoured every day, over and over. Okay, I’m going to admit now that I have a bit of an OCD thing going on when it comes to books and films I love. I obsess about them and read or watch them compulsively and repetitively to the point of driving others bonkers! Anyway, back to the Mr Men… I absolutely loved the characterisation, which is no surprise because character is my favourite aspect of any book. When my brother was in the bathroom, I used to get him to call out two Mr men titles and I’d read the stories to him through the bathroom door (he’ll love me for sharing that!). This reading aloud, though, may well have given me an appreciation of the weight and function of words, and of sound patterns such as alliteration – even though I didn’t know it as such then, but I’m a complete alliteration lover in adulthood.

On a slightly darker note, and much more in keeping with me as a writer, the Mr Men stories also gave me a huge appreciation for the way a threat may come to pass, or a lesson can be learned the hard way, and the endings of these books left an indelible mark on my child sponge brain. I loved this unnerving aspect, the psychological element, and this feeling of just desserts, which created an easy point of transition to my subsequent obsession with Enid Blyton’s Secret Seven books. In fact, I’ve still got all fifteen of them, spines and edges a bit tattered and well-thumbed. The mystery and the need to solve it completely captivated me. The characters felt like friends, right down to Scamper the dog! Reading each mystery adventure, I felt a thrill as each clue was uncovered and I was with the gang all the way, trying to solve the case. At the age of seven or eight, I had no idea that my brain was in training for what was going to become the big passion of my life.

Everything changed with Agatha Christie!

At the grand old age of ten, my dad bought me my first Poirot novel, The ABC Murders. This I devoured quicker than a bar of Cadbury’s (and that’s saying something, believe me!). I absolutely fell in love with Poirot, if that’s a thing you can do with the little Belgian detective. Ever since then I’ve had an enduring and obsessive passion for Agatha Christie’s work and, more generally, the detective story.

Author Claire Ladds' Agatha Christie bookcase
I’m a Christie fangirl!

I used to go into WH Smith’s and stand there, staring at the giant triple shelving that held all the Agatha Christie books. The poor man who served behind the counter where the posh fountain pens were, must have been absolutely sick of me standing with my back pressed against his glass case while I gawped at all the Poirot and Marple mysteries. My passion for Poirot only got deeper when I went home one day, clutching Sad Cypress. Even writing this now, the memory of reading that book is creating a feeling inside me that I literally have no words to describe. I will come back to my utter obsession for Agatha Christie and, in particular, Poirot, in another post, but it’s safe to say that the ball was set rolling for every spare penny I had to be spent on indulging my need to read mysteries and crime fiction.

Writing as a reader

People have said to me for years that I should write my own crime or mystery books, that I would be good at it. For decades I’ve struggled to believe that. The accepted notion that, if you read obsessively in a genre then it will make you more instinctively pulled towards writing it has, up to now, not seemed to work for me. I admire the structural complexities of the crime and mystery plot immensely, possibly to the point of reverence. For years, though, I’ve not thought it was something I could emulate. I convinced myself that I wouldn’t be able to construct such a story very well: the red herrings would be too obvious, the perpetrator too easily guessed. I just kept adding to this list or reasons why I’d be no good at writing a book with crime in it.

But, through my own written work, I’ve come to recognise that it’s not the thrill of the chase, or even necessarily the ‘whodunnit’ element that intrigues me, but the ‘why’. Why does a character commit a physical or moral crime? What drives them? What circumstances could cause someone to do something that goes against their own character and beliefs? The psychology of the characters is what I’m interested in (is that possibly because I’m a Poirot fangirl to my core?!). This essential notion of what intrigues me as a reader and a writer is what I’ve extracted from my decades of reading – and watching, it has to be said – crime and mystery fiction: the truths behind the characters, the truths that inhabit human nature, the thoughts, passions, torments that we hold inside ourselves and the ways we choose to act on them. Or not. The way they enact themselves on our psyche. How they form and re-form characters.

So, it seems that I knew exactly the kind of books I loved, and the kind of stories that were bound to be the ones I’d write. I figured out that character psychology was my ‘thing’. It was all falling into place, wasn’t it? Well, not exactly, because something came along to throw a massive spanner in the works. Why would I make this easy for myself? After all, I love stories in which you’ve got to try and figure out what’s going on…!

Next time, I’ll explain just what it was – or who is was – that threw the quest to discover the answer to my writer self into a turmoil that lasted for decades.

And lastly, but my no means least, I’d like to say a big HAPPY BIRTHDAY to Agatha Christie, who was born on 15th September 1890. She would have been 130 today!

[For the sake of transparency, any links in this post are my affiliate links. I may make a tiny commission if you purchase through them, at no extra cost to you.]

Release Day for Baby up the Chimney!

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It’s release day – finally – for Baby up the Chimney, and I couldn’t be more excited!

This novel has been a long time coming, beginning as a short story in 2010, developing into an unwieldy monster of a first draft by the end of NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) by 2014, and eventually turning into the book I am incredibly proud of today.

My ARC (Advance Reader Copy) readers gave me some fabulous feedback, which was enough to make me realise I’d done the right thing in completing this book. Then people started pre-ordering, and today readers have already purchased. Thank you SO much to anyone who has. I find it an immense honour and extremely humbling that someone wants to part with their cash to read my work, and I know that my feelings about that will never change!

In case you don’t know what the book is about, here’s the blurb:

Baby up the Chimney - an historical novel by Claire Ladds
Baby up the Chimney by Claire Ladds

One day. That’s all it takes for four lives to be changed forever.

London, 6th March 1971. Women pour into London to take to the streets in solidarity for equal pay and equal rights. But while public spectacle and a friendly call to arms pervades the day, in private, one family is about to find that everything they thought was the truth about their loved ones has the potential to blow their world apart. And one man, back from the dead, has unfinished business with them…

A novel of dark secrets, lies, betrayal and vengeance, in which the shadows of history, haunting memories and the truths they dare not tell come back to try and destroy them.

When the truth is not what you thought it was, do you ignore it? Do you try to rewrite history to protect those you love? Or do you seek revenge?

You can purchase Baby up the Chimney from the following stores:

[Post edit: links removed – see below]

If you’d like to read more about my inspiration for this book, the writing processes, and all sorts of other little revelations – including how the Brontës made their way into the novel, I visited the Auto.erraticism blog earlier today to discuss it. You can read the post here.

[POST EDIT: This book has now been re-released as The Secrets That Haunt Us. You can find out more about the book here.]

Writing what you know (Part 2)

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I can’t believe that the release of my novel, Baby up the Chimney, is only a week away! It’s taken ten years, since I first wrote a short story with the same name, to get this book onto the shelves of Amazon, Kobo, Apple, Barnes & Noble and lots of other stores. I don’t mean that I’ve been writing the same book incessantly, squirrelled away like a little hermit (and I say ‘little’ because I just about scrape five feet tall on a good day!). No, the original version of this book was originally written a number of years ago, although it has changed a lot since that initial draft.

I almost couldn’t explain it, even to myself, but this book became immensely personal in many ways. I obsessed over it for years, nothing I wrote made me feel like it was good enough, and I put it down and restarted it half a dozen times before biting the bullet the year, ripping it apart and rebuilding it, chapter by chapter. And then it dawned on me what the problem had been: it had begun to incorporate all sorts of things that meant a great deal to me, or I had experienced in some way, big and small, even though I fictionalised each one and placed them in the hands of completely fictional characters. And if you read the book, you’ll probably be very glad that they are fictional.

One of the major themes of this book is motherhood – actual, impending, miscarriage and loss. My own relationship with my mum is absolutely amazing, open and honest, and so is the one I have with my kids, but I wanted to explore an alternative version of a mother-daughter relationship. So I twisted everything about my own relationships into a mother-daughter relationship with tensions, secrets, lies and trauma, the kind any person can only hope never to experience.

Within that tension, I found myself exorcising a few of my own ghosts, however. In late 2002 I had a miscarriage, and it is something I have never got over. I blamed myself, even though I did nothing wrong, and the guilt and the self-blame became something I lived with daily. Without giving too much away about the book, this kind of loss does feature very heavily in the female characters, although the essence of my own feelings has been heavily fictionalised and distilled into two characters and their very, very different lives to my own. But this became the thing I obsessed about, dreamt about, and why I struggled to complete the book, I think. I was finding it difficult to let go – of my memories, my guilt and self-blame, and ultimately the story itself.

What I also noticed as I was rewriting, and especially when I was editing, was that snapshots of experiences I’ve had managed to filter their way into the book. For instance, I remember vividly what it was like to go into the shoe shop and get measured for new shoes, so the first draft contained a massive section all about my character, Julia, being fitted for a pair of shoes. Luckily for you, I trimmed that right down. When I say it was long, it went on for about six pages!

I think that, besides the memory and the emotions of my own miscarriage, one of the biggest things that fed into this book that was based on personal experience was a fear of spiders. I gave my character David a morbid fear of arachnids which was a useful plot device, but the first version of the book took this much further, as David recalls, in extreme and painful detail, an experience my ex-husband and I had shortly after we moved into our first rented house. This house was built in the late 1800s. It had a brick fireplace, a loft we daren’t ever venture into for fear of what might be up there, windows that were painted shut, an airing cupboard which contained a tank which flooded the cupboard every time the immersion heater was switched on, and a front door that the woodlice loved. Oh yes, and spiders. Lots of them. And there was one particular spider that was bigger than the rest…

The following is how this experience made it into the first draft of the book. While the characters themselves and the context to this scene are fictional, the spider part, the events after we spotted it, is completely true (and the feelings of the characters about the aforementioned arachnid are very much mine):

***

He honestly had never been truly arachnophobic, not even after Paul’s juvenile stunts – he told himself this regularly – until that day in the kitchen a week after they had moved in. Julia had been in the kitchen, making some sandwiches next to the cooker and he had been engrossed in the Vauxhall Viva manual which would hopefully explain where the oil on the road came from every time he moved the car. 

“Do you want a cup of tea with this?” Julia had said, nodding towards the sandwich. 

“Um, yeah, okay,” He had replied, glancing up and smiling at Julia’s underskirt showing about an inch below the rest of her dress. She would be so mad if she realised. As his eyes drew in a sweeping motion about the room to return to the confusion of the diagrammatic nonsense which was meant to represent the manual’s car engine, he spotted something large – about the size of one of Julia’s gloves, in the right angled crevice between the kick-board near the cooker and the one which veered to the left towards the sink. He was just about to mention it to Julia when the black glove grew tendrils. Their indiscriminate loops slowly began to morph into definite shapes, and the whole black mass of fur began to move itself slowly away from the corner and out onto the first printed tile on the black and white lino floor. 

“Julia,” he said, the calm in his voice wavering every time he swallowed. “Come over here a minute.”

“I will, when I’ve finished making your dinner,” she responded. “What’s so important.” She laughed momentarily at his still and grey face. “Do you want me to try and figure out what you’re supposed to do?” Her face stiffened as he stood up. “What’s the matter?”

He hadn’t been able to help himself. His eyes had not left the black crawling nightmare since he had realised it was moving. Very slowly – at the moment. Julia took one look at where his eyes seemed to be stuck to the floor.

“Bloody hell!” He could not remember ever seeing her move so fast, before or since. Making more noise than a cacophony of every sub-species of primate communicating simultaneously through the trees, she yanked a chair out from under the dining table and stood on its seat, her back to the creeping arachnid. “Get rid of it!” she screamed. “Where the hell did it come from?”

What could he do? He struggled out of his frozen state and shook all over. He had absolutely no idea that spiders in England could ever grow to be that big. How many decades had the thing been creeping around this house? Eating all the other spiders. Anything that moved. Oh, he felt sick. Edging around the kitchen, he grabbed a washed-up and stored plastic Christmas pudding basin from the nearest cupboard. He had no idea what he was going to do. He just knew he could not look at this thing while he made his mind up. It was as big as his outstretched hand. Throwing the pudding basin on the thick black body, he searched around for some way of scooping it up from underneath its current temporary prison. He found a thin tray and turned back to brave the scooping and removal episode which he knew was coming next. Julia was still standing on the chair, making awful noises and refusing to look.

When he had looked down at the floor, the spider’s legs were sticking out of the edge of the bowl and the whole thing – spider and bowl – were moving steadily across the floor. It had made its way into the middle of the room, and the legs were still bending, crawling, trying to give him a heart attack. It was lucky that Julia was not in a position to see: David’s shoes did their job. One lucky aim with the left shoe and the pudding bowl came off; before the gigantic arachnid could scuttle away to torment them from another hidey-hole, David’s other shoe came down hard – and again – and again.

It had taken Julia over half an hour to bring herself to look, and another half an hour to wash the mess from the lino.

***

You have no idea how terrified my ex-husband and I both were after that – but if you’re arachnophobic, you can probably guess!

So, for me, writing about what you know can mean internalising vividly remembered experiences and snapshots of other, less traumatic memories and turning them into the essence of something that my fictional characters have to deal with in their daily lives. I know that if I write with the integrity of the feeling the experience conjures up inside, then however fictionalised the character, the events or the places, the feelings expressed are authentic, because they come from a place unique to me: my heart.

I feel like these posts should have been entitled, ‘Writing what I know’, as I’m describing lessons I’m learning along my writing journey, and things I’m noticing about my work. My next full novel is a crime story set in the 1700s and about a really horrible hangman, so I’ll be interested to see if I end up writing what I know into that one!

*

You can read ‘Write what you know, Part 1’ here.

[Post edit: Please note that this book has since been re-released as The Secrets That Haunt Us. You can read more about it here.]

Newcastle Writing Conference 2019

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Newcastle writers conference 2019

On Saturday 18th May, I had the pleasure of attending the Newcastle Writing Conference, at Live Theatre. This is the second time I’ve been to this conference (I last attended three years ago), and I can honestly say that both have been very different and I’ve learned new things at each one.

The venue was exceedingly pleasant, providing multi-level space for the many different group sessions and one-to-one meetings held throughout the day. However, we all began our day in the fabulous and intimate auditorium.

The conference structure and sessions

After the welcome speech by Claire Malcolm, Chief executive of New writing North, and Michael Green, Professor of English and Creative Writing at Northumbria University, the Keynote speech was delivered by poet Tony Walsh, who described his journey to publication. The overall theme of the day was ‘working class writers’, and this is where Tony focused his energies. It was easy to see why he is so acclaimed. By the end of his speech, his poetry had filled me with goosebumps and reduced me to tears. What a fabulous, inspiring way to begin the day!

There were three main breakout sessions, and a choice for each one, so every writer could find something which suited their needs and level of expertise.

Session 1 gave us a choice of perfecting your elevator pitch, the mighty power of the small press, reflective writing, and what to do if and when you get a rejection. Because I am a real advocate of small, independent presses and magazines (online and in print), I plumped for this session. Both Debbie Taylor of Mslexia and Sophie O’Neill on Inpress were present to discuss how useful it is for authors, especially those starting out, to submit to the small presses. It forges a self-perpetuating cycle, one which gives exposure to authors and allows them to gain confidence in their own writing, and keeps alive the indie presses through subscriptions by readers, many of whom are also writers or publishers.

Session 2 had choices of ‘the novel inside you’, developing a professional profile, finding a peer support network, and a discussion about working class writers. I opted for the session on peer support networking which was facilitated by Sophie Hall-Luke, writer and founder of The Table writing community. For an introvert like me, this was really beneficial. While the session itself was structured to accommodate ideas for developing writers’ networks and this was useful in its own right, this close-knit tasking initiated conversations which led to like-minded writers finding one another.

Session 3, once again, had four options: pitching in practice, the writer’s plan, the novel inside you (a repeat of the earlier session), and how to edit your work. The notion of a writer’s plan really appealed to me, so I attended the session hosted by Carmen Marcus. In keeping with the overall theme of working class writers for New Writing North that particular week, it very much focused on how working class writers can create a plan for themselves, firstly by giving themselves permission to write and then by forging that time and remembering that it is a priority for the writer’s own wellbeing. I think the idea of giving oneself permission to devote time to writing is one which a lot of writers struggle with; often so many other things in life seem much more important than our desire to write. Being reminded that writing is important to us and giving ourselves the time and scope to do it is something many of us need. Carmen is creating The writer’s Plan on her blog, which you can find here.

The day ended with a discussion between Sara Collins, author of The Confessions of Frannie Langton and Stacey Halls, author of The Familiars, who talked about their journey to publication with their debut novels. It was a very candid and often amusing session, setting the tone for the feel-good factor I think we were all left with by the end of the day.

Why I recommend going to writers’ conferences

I love going to conferences about writing and publishing because, no matter what they are, I always learn something – and often a great deal – that I didn’t know and that I can consider and implement once I return home.

Attending conferences for writers isn’t all about the knowledge you gain from the sessions. Sometimes it’s also about the people you meet, and the alliances and friendships that are seeded at such events. I had the good fortune to meet some lovely writers, right from the moment I got off the train. Here I will mention the lovely Janet Dean Knight, author of The Peacemaker, whom I met outside the station and with whom I spent various parts of the day, and the equally lovely Matthew Smalley, author of The Song of the Butcher Bird, with whom I spent an interesting part of the afternoon discussing the intricacies of independent publishing. The reason I know who they are is because I have their postcards and leaflets. Tip: make sure you take some kind of business card or promotional material with you, or no one can email you after the conference is over.

If you are a writer at any stage of your development, I would encourage you to find an event and go along. You never know what you will learn or who you will meet, and chances are you will leave with a notebook brimming with ideas.

Writing what you know (Part 1): Relatability and familiarity in The Reason for Everything

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Writing what you know part 1 by Claire Ladds

This is my first blog post on my shiny new website. It’s all very exciting for me, and it comes straight after the launch period of my first collection, The Reason for Everything. This is a book which focuses on the lives of ordinary people who, through circumstances or due to their own memories and emotions, often find themselves driven to feel, or do, the most extraordinary of things. It also explores the ways in which people react to what they know – their version of reality and the truth – which may be very different from someone else’s as an outsider looking in.

Relatability and familiarity

Given these themes, ‘writing what you know’ became something that hovered in the background throughout the creation of this collection. In writing terms, not for one minute do I believe that writers should meticulously stick to only writing what they know, or where would be the place of reading and research and the sheer love of discovering things to write about? But I did find that, in all of the stories, somewhere, there’s an essence of something that I know, or have felt, or have experienced (now, there are a few murderers among my cast of characters, and I can categorically state that that’s pure fiction!). Put simply, there’s an empathy with the characters and their circumstances at some level. They are all relatable to me in some way. And I came to understand that, somewhere, there was always a reason for everything that happened to them.

I’m struggling to think of even one story that doesn’t have a personal connection to me in some way. Some are tenuous – ‘Little star’, for instance, is the story of a mother with her small son on Christmas Eve (I won’t spoil it, in case you want to read it), and it came about because I was staring at our Christmas tree, all packed away in the box and in desperate need of being shoved back into the loft. ‘In two minds’ was written using three pictures cut from magazines that I found one Sunday. I was playing Scrabble with the kids and… bingo! A story about two men playing the ultimate game of Scrabble. Similarly, others contain pinpoint observations I’ve made over the years, one way or another. After all, that’s what writers do – soak up characters, costume, settings, snippets of conversations and anything else we can squirrel away for later, which becomes eventually another way of ‘writing what you know’.

However, there are others in which I really have written from a depth of personal experience which has infiltrated the fiction. This is, therefore, the first in a short series of posts about those particular stories and the experiences which shaped the stories in which they occur. Some are comical, some uncomfortable, some heartbreaking, but maybe, just maybe, you might relate to them.

Jeff the travelling fish

To the first experience, then, and this is one I intend to keep light. It tells the story of a fish and its bizarre journey one May weekend in 2015…

My main character in ‘Joy is a bubble’ wins a fish at the fair, and it becomes integral to the story. This fish is, or was, in reality, a goldfish called Jeff.

The fair has always come to my home town during May. I loved it as a child and I can picture every part of it vividly: the painted swirls of colour, the aromas of candyfloss and hot dogs, the bustle and the music. I haven’t lived in that town for almost thirty years, yet I still really miss it.

The other year, while I was visiting my parents with my daughter, we took a trip to the fair. Amid the excitement and the chaos, we found a hook-a-duck stall, where, to my astonishment, one of the prizes you could win was a goldfish. I thought that kind of thing had been outlawed years ago.

My daughter was desperate to have a go, so she did. And what else but promptly won a fish! Without thinking (and, to be honest, to rescue the fish), I said she could have it, and we carried it around the fair in its little plastic tub, went and bought a tank, and… only then did I remember we had come on the train and now we’d got to get a fish home on it, too.

My dad tried to persuade my daughter to put the fish in his pond. Well, she was having none of that. So Jeff was duly named and my mum put him in one of those large cereal tubs (those ones with a lid that opens so you can pour out your cereal), we hid him in a plastic bag, and took him on a train ride.

When we had to change stations, we went to get something to eat. I’ve never been thrown out of a cafe before, but this was a close call due to our extra passenger, until I pointed out that the fish was unlikely to be much of a health hazard at it was unlikely to jump out of the water and into the sandwiches. At which point, the waitress left us alone.

Jeff seemed not to mind the train ride, and was oblivious of the conductor giving us a strange look, although he didn’t question our oddball travelling arrangements. Jeff lived happily in his tank for three years before old age finally got the better of him last year. My daughter came into the room to find him floating one afternoon. She was distraught and insisted he was buried in the garden, deep enough for the cats not to find him.

So… you can see that ’Joy is a bubble’ is grounded in a bit of unexpected reality! The rest of the story just snowballed from the notion that something as small and benign as the sight of a fish can imbue someone with such strong feelings of possession and empathy.

Where can you find the collection?

Claire Ladds - The Reason for Everything and other short stories

If you would like to buy my collection, The Reason for Everything, you can find it as an ebook in many digital stores here. Paperback and other variants are also available.