Claire Ladds

Crime and suspense author

My writing

Finding a writing process: how I write my books

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When you read (or listen to) novels, novellas, short story collections and any other fiction or non-fiction, I wonder if you can possibly guess the processes the writer might have used to write the book you hold in your hand, or read, or listen to on your device?

I have been thinking a lot about my writing process, recently. I think this has been sparked by the realisation of just how many books I have on my computer that are in partial states of completion and that I’ve been saying I’m going to finish ‘this year’ or ‘next year’. For some of them, I’ve been saying it since 2014! I also have an absolute stack of story ideas and partial plots.

Some people have said to me that I should just write a non-fiction book for writers and put all these ideas in a ‘story prompts’ book, and actually, I would really like to write a series of books on this topic. I’m one of those people who find it extremely easy to begin projects, and I have fantastic starting energy. I also have extremely strong finishing energy. The issue comes once the first excitement of a new idea has passed and the ending is nowhere in sight. In talking to other writers, I know I’m not the only one who, left to my own devices, would have nothing but a string of story starters!

But I’m now a full-time author. ‘Oooh, I’ve got a great idea for a story,’ followed by eating a Twirl and making three cups of tea, and forgetting the book I’m meant to be working on because I want to play around with new places someone could find a corpse, or a whole new setting, or (and I’ve been known to do this numerous times) think that I can write a whole load of books in a completely different genre and play around with that for a while – none of this is going to get novels in any reader’s hands.

I heard someone say recently that if you have all the time in the world to write a book, then that book will take all the time in the world. For me, this couldn’t be more true. It took me ten years to put together The Reason for Everything, even though many of the stories in it had been written several years before I finally published it in 2019. Likewise, it took a similar length of time to write and publish the book that finally became The Secrets That Haunt Us. I put this down to all sorts of factors. I said that it was because I was nervous of the publishing process and I had to figure it out. Publishing is, in fact, very straightforward, so I had to rule this out as an excuse.

I also had to rule out the other ‘reason’ that I had been using to tell myself that any book I write is going to take me a decade. I write out of order, so that must mean that I have no idea what is happening in the book and it takes forever to try and piece the scenes and ideas together. Okay, this is true to a certain extent, but the main conclusion I came to was that I was just plain scared to get the books finished. Because being finished means it can be published, which means it can be judged. And this can be a very scary thing when you’ve poured your heart and soul into your book.

Being a full-time author doesn’t mean I’m not scared anymore. It doesn’t mean that the fear of judgement has miraculously gone away. I’m still the same person I was before, but I’ve experimented with lots and lots of different ways of working and I’ve finally found some processes that work for me. Some work for longer writing projects, some for short ones. But for me, they all start in the same place(s): character, and the ending.

Characters develop in my head long before I write about them. Eventually they have enough ‘life’ about them for me to start thinking about what might happen to them in a story. Whatever that turns out to be, I always know how I want the story to end. So I get paper and I scribble. A lot. I put the story title (a working one will do) in a circle in the centre, then I spider out from there. I put the ending in an adjoining circle and join them together. Then I look for the main plot points: the inciting incident that sets the story in motion, the high points, the twists and turns, the point of no return, and any others that I can see are important. This mind mapping is great if I’m writing a short story, but it gets pretty confusing on one sheet of paper when I want to add in all the extras that you get in a novel. So I use two things: Scrivener, which is a fabulous piece of writing software and allows you to move chapters about easily, and a pen, strips of paper and blu tac.

I love the tactile nature of pen and paper, so with a novel, I write each of my plot points on a strip of paper, and then I stick them on a board (or in my case, currently, my fridge door) and move them around until I’m happy with the order they are in. I also have markers to ensure I have the inciting incident, the point of no return, the highs, the lows, and the other points that make up a crime or suspense novel – discovery of clues, the aha moments, the showdown. That’s the point I turn them into chapters in my writing software.

So far, so good. But then what? I’ve got a story idea, yes, but no book. And I’ve got enough story ideas already, without another one falling by the wayside! Well, because I now know what each of my sections are about, I can start filling in with details. Some people will write a complete story outline, like a summary of the entire book, covering one or two sheets of paper. For some reason this doesn’t work very well for me, so I now do a ‘skinny draft’ to start off. This involves writing each section of the book if I can at this stage, and if not, then I write notes about what will happen.

Once I’ve got a complete skinny draft, I can begin the process I love best: the rewriting. This is where I can throw everything at the book that I want to include, and make it as detailed as I want. I have fun with the book, which keeps the middle part of the process alive for me – an important motivation trick for this author! I can still do this in any order I like, which suits my mentality, and because I edit the book into shape after this step anyway, filling in any plot holes and anachronisms – and hopefully eradicating plainly stupid mistakes.

So finally, this gets me to the point at which the book can have its final edit, picking up on word choices and grammatical errors, and then it gets a proofread, before I format it for e-book or paperback, or other formats. For me, too, the most important thing is that this whole process gets the book written in weeks, for the first full draft, and a few months from start to finish. That’s definitely better (for me) than a decade.

It’s taken me since 2007 to discover that this process works for me, every time. That’s a long time, and has involved a lot of trial and error, and a lot of giving up on one way or doing something and trying a new one. It may or may not work for you. Everyone has to find their own writing processes. There is an awful lot of help and advice for new writers and experienced ones alike, and some of the advice may be useful to you. And some may not. The thing is, you have no way of knowing what kind of processes work for you until you try them out. It may even be that the process you discover works for one kind of story or book but doesn’t work for another, especially if the story is in a different genre to the previous one, or it’s a novel instead of a short story, or a play instead of a novella.

All a writer can really do is take note of all the good advice out there and sift through it, trying out different ways of working until one, or a few, work for you. From personal experience, too, I would have to say listen to your instincts. If you know you’re the kind of writer who likes mind maps instead of lists, then use them. If you know you like being clear on the end of the story and then figuring out how the characters get to that point, do so. Everyone works differently, everyone has different demands on their time. Writing is a creative process; if you’re a writer, let yourself be creative in ways that you discover work best for you.

~

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Short Story Month – I’m addicted to short stories!

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Addicted to short stories

May has been Short Story Month. Anyone who knows me well is aware that I’m a real short story fan, so I’ve loved this, and I’ve been popping images of short story collections that I own on Instagram on and off all month. That’s been great fun. At the last count, I have 79 paperback editions of short story collections, and if I add in those on my Kindle, then I’ve got way over a hundred! It won’t come as any great surprise that almost all of them are pretty dark in some way.

I grab them from anywhere: in bookshops, online – even once at a toddler group where they had a second hand bookshelf to raise funds. I remember the very first collection I read. I was ill and in bed as a twelve year old, and I was given a copy of Ray Bradbury’s The Illustrated Man. Each of the tattoos on the man tells an individual story. I loved these stories! They told a tale in a confined amount of space, and it made everything about each one really punchy, especially the end. This way of grabbing a moment in time and wringing it for every thought and emotion to create a powerful ending is what fascinated me, as did those which left me with a dark twist or consequence, and left me pondering the rights and wrongs.

As I got older, I became fascinated with the blurred lines of moral and emotional choices in collections by great writers such as Graham Greene, Jean Rhys, Ian McEwan, Carol Joyce Oates and Agatha Christie (who wrote many more short stories than you probably realise. I have 16 collections of her stories!). This blurring, and the inner wrangles of the characters, was the thing that got me totally hooked. People are complex, and those events, thoughts and emotions which lead up to a choice between what is right and wrong can make all the difference to the outcome.

It may well have been this endless collection and devouring of short stories (which I think might be my guilty, addictive pleasure) that has enabled me to be fortunate enough to get short stories published in magazines and anthologies worldwide, and to win several competitions. I even got a trophy once! But when I tried to ‘write to market’ for the women’s magazines, I just couldn’t get it right. Envelopes kept winging their way back and dropping through my letterbox, sometimes with explanatory letters that the stories were too dark for the women’s magazine market, and consequently only one or two were accepted (one of them twice in two different countries, which was pretty great!). I had much more success with the literary magazines and anthologies, where the topics can be much more varied, not to mention darker. This suited me perfectly.

The Reason for Everything by Claire Ladds ebook

When I began publishing my own work, I always knew that I would continue writing those dark short stories – the ones full of crimes of the heart, of moral and emotional grappling with right and wrong, and those in which ordinary people are driven to the edge and crime spills over into both reality and the dark deeds which follow. This is what I achieved with my first collection, The Reason for Everything. I’m truly proud of that book. There are stories in it that make me well up and give me chills and heart-thumping moments. Even better – if a reader can leave one of my stories thinking, ‘I woudn’t have done it like that. Would I?’, or ‘I totally get why they did that,’ or it leaves them pondering those blurred lines, then that’s what makes me feel I’ve succeeded in telling the story.

Readers have contacted me and told me which are their favourites, and this always fascinates me. For a start, it always makes me thrilled that someone has taken the time to read my work(!). What interests me are the stories that they pick as favourites. There is usually something that has caused that particular reader to identify with the character in the story – although I’ll add a caveat to that: if your favourite story turns out to be ‘The death of Mr Ackworth’ and you identify fully with the main character there, then I’m more than a little concerned about you! 😂

If you’d like to grab yourself a copy of the collection which left me dubbed with the nickname ‘Mistress of Melancholy’ (I really LOVE that description! I’m very proud of it! 😁), then you can find it on your preferred store here. If you’re quick, it might even be priced at 0.99. Or if you’d like to delve a little deeper into my collection, you can read a couple of the stories from it here.

If you’d like to see which short stories – and other stuff – that I’ve been posting on Instagram, you can find me here.

Happy reading!

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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.

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Magic, Mystery and Agatha Christie (fiction that made me a writer, part 1)

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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.

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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.

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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 on their way. Alternatively, you can find out more information (and read the first couple of stories) here.

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