A guest post from author Mary Hooper. Mary writes for children and young adults. Her historical novels including At the House of the Magician and The Remarkable Life and Times of Eliza Rose have a huge fan base, as do her contemporary novels for teenagers.
I used to write hard-hitting teenage books about modern problems: teenage pregnancy, the dangers of going off to meet internet friends, how to cope with family break-ups and so on – and then, after a good number of years, I ran out of ideas. Everything that could happen to a teenage girl seemed to have happened in one of my books. What on earth was I going to write next?
I thought for a long time, began various things and gave up on them, then bought a pile of teenage magazines and read through the problem pages – usually a fail-safe source of story ideas.
After more deliberation I started a new book about a girl who was adopted into a large family and found herself with a mix of new brothers and sisters. Getting bored with this after two chapters, I began again: one about a girl who tries to trace her birth mother. Discarding this with a yawn, I started a third about a girl who discovers she was born a twin.
Good themes in other hands, maybe (feel free to use them yourself), but I couldn’t seem to make them work however much I twiddled, changed viewpoint or began from a different beginning. Whatever I tried, my characters sat on the page as dull as ditchwater and when I read back what I’d done, I found my critical self responding with a “So what?”
For a moment, a long moment, I was scuppered: a writer without anything to write about. I could find themes all right, but my heart wasn’t in them. They didn’t ring true. Why not? Because they weren’t true. I’d tried to use modern jargon, but the kids I was writing about didn’t have ipods, or use Spotify, or constantly text, Twitter, or Facebook. They didn’t do these things because I – their creator – didn’t know how to.
What was more, I didn’t want to know how to. I didn’t want to be brought up-to-date and to have to incorporate all that techie stuff in my novels.
So what was I going to do? I’d been a writer for 20 years and it was the only thing I was any good at.
To be continued... in an upcoming post from Mary Hooper.
Have you ever been at a loss for themes?
Mary Hooper’s latest book, Fallen Grace, is published by Bloomsbury in June 2010. It is set in the reign of Queen Victoria and features an illegitimate baby, the Necropolis Railway, an undertaker’s business and a stolen inheritance.
I've created a world within a character in the book I'm writing. As for themes, I'm forever coming up with ideas to write about, the problem then is getting on and writing it. A combination of laziness and fear of failure I suspect, even tho I don't necessarily need to show them to anyone. Does the bad writing you do benefit the good writing I wonder?
It won't be for everyone, but I've found recently that instead of struggling to come up with a specific story (how my block plays out), just outlining a world can be good. You can have a theme in mind or not, though one will present itself, the important is to make it complete - at least to the degree a "Series Bible" is in TV circles. The world needn't be fantastic either, just a bunch of people in a place will do, long as it's interesting.
I did this for fun, but ended up with some fairly unique ideas. Not all ones I wanted (no interest in sci-fi), but the point was to get creative juices going, whole worlds under my belt.
Anybody else do this? i'm new to writing, really. Hope I've not reited a standard exercise as my own invention...
Fallen Grace has a lovely front cover. There's something Saloméish about the whole thing. I empathise with the blog, yet my problem seems to be: having many ideas, but finding it hard shepherding them into one coherent story. Getting there though, I think (sigh.)