BLOG
Welcome to my blog
My name is Helen Carey. I am the author of a number of novels (see menu above), some of which have managed to creep into the best-seller category! If you haven’t read them already, I hope you will enjoy them.
I have taught creative writing at university level and have, in the past, worked as a reader for a literary agent. I am also a bit of an artist and an avid environmentalist! I live in beautiful Pembrokeshire on a small organic farm which my husband and I run as a wildlife haven. Also living with us is a rather large dog who had spent ten years on a chain in Greece before we found her and brought her back to Wales.
I don’t post very often, but you will find pieces here about my books, my writing, my reading, my art, and sometimes about other elements of my life. I hope you will find something to interest you.
Please feel free to get in touch via the comments tab if I can answer any writing or reading questions. Or if you would like news of my upcoming book, a brand-new wartime adventure, click here.
With all best wishes, Helen
The Olympic Flame
On Sunday the Olympic flame will come through our little town. Now, I am not particularly a sport lover, I usually watch Wimbledon and the Cup Final, but I must admit that the attraction of field, track and beach volleyball rather passes me by. So why am I bothering to rearrange my weekend so that I can go and see the Olympic torch going past?
Well, for one thing, it is quite something that someone bothered to send it this way – Newport, Pembs, is by any standard at the very edge of the UK, one more step and you’d be in the Irish Sea! But the allure of the torch is more than just the novelty factor, more than some weird sense of national pride (or dismay that we are hosting this ridiculously expensive event at a time of horrendous recession.) I think it is more something to do with the spirit of the Olympic athletes themselves, that grit and determination, that sense of people striving to the very limit of their endurance, the effort, the dedication, the incredible personal and physical sacrifices they make to get to the peak of their ability.
So why do they do it? It can’t just be about winning a gold medal. For most of them the chances of winning a medal is actually pretty slight. But like Mount Everest or the world’s oceans, the Olympics exist and are therefore a challenge. And the one thing the human race can’t resist is a challenge. (Even the term ‘human race’ gives the game away.)
Whether it be to swim the length of the River Thames, to trek to the North Pole, to bungee jump off a bridge, to turn some wilderness into a garden, to learn a language, to start a business, to care for an elderly parent or to write a novel, there is nothing we humans like more than pitting ourselves against adversity. (You don’t often find dogs voluntarily putting bones to one side in order to lose 10 pounds!)
Some challenges are clearly more extreme than others, but they all require determination and courage, they often involve some kind of sacrifice, at the very least a few sleepless nights. And is the putative reward actually worth the effort? Is it worth giving up years of your life to come tenth in the pole vault or to write a book that languishes at the bottom of the Kindle lists?
Well, as my readers know, I am a bit of a sucker for courage – in one way or another it forms the basic theme of all my novels – so I would say ‘yes’, even just taking the initial decision to ‘have a go’ is a significant achievement in itself.
So I will be out there on Sunday, cheering as the torch goes by, and reminding myself that I have often intended to have a go at synchronised swimming …
Castaway on the Island of Books
To make a change I am directing you to my Castaway interview for Felicity Lennie’s Island of Books. You might find it amusing and there are some reading/writing tips in there too …
http://bookislandcastaway.blogspot.co.uk/2012/05/helen-carey-scissors-knife-and-dvd.html
Life gets in the way
Life gets in the way of writing. Actually life gets in the way of a lot of things, but it is a particular culprit in the pantheon of things that prevent writers writing.
Displacement activity moves in mysterious ways and takes many forms. It can manifest itself in things that we just ‘have’ to do before starting a new chapter, novel, (or even sentence), or in emotional issues that stop us from feeling in the ‘right’ creative mood.
Some of these excuses are real of course. Some of them really do have to be addressed before starting work, but some do not. Sorting out the difference between these categories is a nice little piece of displacement activity in its own right. In this scenario the inhibiting effect often manifests itself in the activity of creating lists.
Now clearly lists are useful things, (or ‘organisational tools’, as a time-management guru might say) and there is something very satisfying about crossing items off a list. The only problem is that the one thing we really need to do – our writing – often doesn’t actually appear on the list. Instead of ‘take goldfish to vet’, ‘find fresh sardines’, ‘apologise to Cynthia’, ‘check recipe’, ‘ring estate agent’, ‘update telephone list’, ‘pay off rent boy’, ‘get eyes tested’, we should have ‘work on character motivation’, ‘finalise story structure’, ‘research Iris Origo 1942’, ‘ask Paul how long it would take a submarine to get from Algiers to Sicily’, ‘rewrite sex scene’, or even, ‘finish first draft.’
Some wannabe writers take it to extremes, their lists include things like ‘buy and read 150 How-To books on Creative Writing’, ‘enrol on Creative Writing MA’ or ‘ask Arts Council about Creative Writing PhD funding,’ when what they could be doing is writing a novel.
So why do we constantly put off the very thing we want (need) to do, the thing that bring us so much pleasure, so much reward, both emotional and, if we are lucky, financial?
I don’t know the answer, but it could be something to do with the fact that in our mind the envisaged novel or short story seems like a perfect jewel, the brilliance of which just might stun the world. But we suspect that when we write it down it’s not going to be quite the same, it won’t sparkle in quite the way we intended (or, sometimes, at all!) Maybe we are frightened of getting it ‘wrong’, of letting ourselves down, of our hopes being dashed?
Perhaps. But we also know we are writers, interested in things, and thus easily distracted.
Last week I spent a lazy afternoon reading a book about time management which recommends that I set a stop watch for three quarter of an hour sessions in which I do nothing but write. I subsequently spent a couple of pleasant hours finding and buying a stop watch. As soon as I finish this I am going to see if the technique works. I just have to get some crucial Tweeting done before I start, oh, and I’ve just remembered that the compost heap needs digging over …
Courage as a ‘controlling idea’
Last week we were away staying in a friend’s cottage in mid Wales. On one of our walks we had to cross a fast flowing river by way of some strategically placed stepping stones. Marc and I and one of the dogs went over without thinking about it, but our other dog , Phoebe (normally very placid), balked on the river bank, clearly frightened by the thought of slipping on the wet stones and falling into the river. We were reluctant to carry her (also frightened by the thought of slipping and falling into the river!) so we tried some bracing encouragement while she trembled on the bank with her little claws spread in resistance. Eventually we decided to walk on a bit to see if she would come. Sure enough, surreptitiously glancing over our shoulders, we saw her summon the courage to make the first crucial jump. After that she was fine, she hopped across the rest of the stones easily and rejoined us, clearly somewhat embarrassed by our fulsome congratulations.
Here’s a question. Which dog displayed the most courage?
I have always been interested in the concept of courage and its various manifestations. There has been a lot in the news this week about the people of Malta being awarded the George Cross in April 1942 for their ‘heroism and devotion’ in resisting four months of intense Nazi air-raids. The stories of incredible courage and personal sacrifice reminded me of the research I did (and am indeed still doing) for my series of novels set in wartime London.
Quite early on I realised that courage was going to form the basic theme (or ‘controlling idea’ as they call it in the film world) of my novels. Having a ‘controlling idea’ really helps in the writing process, keeping an author on track, giving the novels a point of focus. And the concept of courage was a great theme to explore.
I was fascinated by the accounts I came across of people going out on a limb, putting themselves at risk, physically or emotionally, for a variety of reasons, patriotism, duty, love, or to save or protect someone else, as when a terrified young woman crawled through the collapsed cellar of a bombed house to rescue a child trapped under unstable rubble next door. Certainly of all the examples of bravery and heroism I came across, the ones I found most moving are the ones where ordinary people (or dogs) first had to overcome a very real fear in order to take the necessary action.
Courage takes all forms and guises and can be found in so many situations. It takes one form of courage to charge a machine gun post or parachute into Nazi occupied France, quite another to go to the doctor when you find a lump. Even writing a poem or a novel takes courage – it’s just one more way of laying yourself on the line.
Five tell-tale signs of a novice novelist
Kindle and its friends have opened up new opportunities for writers. No longer do wannabe novelists (or any kind of novelists come to that) have to go through the frustrating rigours of trying to find an agent and publisher. Nor do they have to expose themselves to the resultant weeks of silence, or to the eventual soul destroying rejection slips sent out by the brutal, clearly blind-to talent, self appointed guardians of the ‘real’ publishing world! No, they can bypass all that nonsense and within a few days of completing their manuscript they can pop it up on-line and it can be available for sale to the world’s readers.
But there is a catch. The world’s readers may not be quite as picky or fussy as agents and publishers but they are still going to be quite picky and fussy. In the good old days publishers were prepared to work with authors to polish their books to a ‘professional’ standard. But times have changed, and all authors, especially self published authors, now have to do the polishing themselves or find a good editor to do it for them. Readers don’t particularly care how a novel is published but they will care if it fails to live up to their expectation of what a ‘good’ novel should be (even if they can’t quite pin down why).
Here are five of the tell-tale signs of an ‘un-polished’ novel by a novice novelist.
1. Lack of Story Structure – (different from plot, a good story structure provides a sense of pace and progression that makes a story really work.)
2. Insufficiently rounded characters – (novice writers tend to make their characters too good or too bad. Nobody likes a goody-goody, and baddies become less sinister if they are just caricatures of evil.)
3. Muddled Point of View – (it’s hard for the reader to engage with a character if the writer allows the viewpoint to jump from one character to another every other sentence.)
4. Dialogue being used for exposition – (when characters start telling each other back-story or other things they both already know the reader starts yawning.)
5. Too many typos, grammatical errors, and continuity mistakes. (Some will creep in inevitably, but allowing too many gives a bad impression.)
Lots of the self-published novels on Kindle are great, virtually indistinguishable from ‘traditionally’ published novels. But many of the others carry at least some of those tell-tale signs of a novice writer (and lack of editor). That’s not to say they are not enjoyable. But I would suggest that writers should try to iron out at least some of the issues above before either approaching an agent, or publishing their own work. In the competitive market in which we now find ourselves, the more professional a writer seems, the better chance they will have of achieving the acclaim and readership they deserve.
Researching WW2 – treasuring those memories
However you define the term ‘historical novel’, there can be few things more daunting than being asked to write about events which you yourself don’t remember, but which other people do. This was the position I was put in when Rosemary Cheetham at Orion commissioned me to write a series of London based street sagas set during the Second World War.
When my agent set up a meeting to discuss the project, Rosemary’s first words were, ‘Oh dear, I didn’t realise you were so young.’ Obviously this was a matter of opinion! Nevertheless the implication was that she had hoped for someone with at very least a few childhood recollections of cowering under a Morrison shelter in the corner of the kitchen while V2s whistled overhead.
Clearly this was not the case with me but I was reluctant to be defeated at the first post by the trifling problem of my age: ‘Goodness,’ I said. ‘There’s so much material available about the Second World War. I can easily research it.’
It sounded easy enough. But what I hadn’t quite appreciated was exactly how much material there was.
That was over ten years ago. Now, as I start researching the fourth in the Lavender Road series, on top of the published (and unpublished) histories, diaries and letters, the museums, the themed ‘attractions’, the official reports, the local history libraries, the films, film footage and endless BBC documentaries, there is also the internet with a million WW2 sites and a plethora of WW2 online enthusiasts.
But what there aren’t so many of now, sadly, are real live people who remember those eventful years. And it was people’s memories that I found the most interesting element of my research last time around. Yes, historical records are great, but nothing compares with someone telling you at first hand what it was like to be caught in Balham tube station when a bomb severed the water main, or to crawl through the cellars of a collapsed 
building searching for a trapped child, or to take a tiny riverboat over to rescue soldiers marooned at Dunkirk, or to be parachuted into occupied France. And it’s not just the big events, it’s the small memories too, Americans soldiers sticking their chewing gum on the door of a hospital ward while they visited injured colleagues. a precious pound of sugar carried in a tin helmet, the terror of a war office telegram, the delight in a fresh egg.
Yesterday I interviewed a ninety year old doctor who had been present in the laboratory where they developed the first penicillin cultures. He told me that they had to use bedpans to grow the cultures in, they simply didn’t have anything else suitable. Later on he casually let slip that in 1941 his ship was torpedoed at night crossing the Atlantic and he spent several hours tossing about in the dark on a makeshift raft in his dressing gown and slippers, waiting to be rescued.
That is one of the odd things about the war years, people who lived through it often look back as though it was all quite ordinary. But it wasn’t, it was extraordinary and it forced people to show extraordinary amounts of courage and resilience. That’s what makes it such a fascinating period to write about. At the very least it is a way of preserving some of those precious personal memories.
Readers have responsibilities too
So here we are as writers, locked in our garrets, eschewing social life and family responsibilities, slaving over a hot laptop for hours on end, week after week, maybe even year after year, our entire focus on creating a cast of fascinating characters and a make-believe but believable world for our readers to get lost in for a few hours.
A few hours? Yes, that’s right. A few hours is pretty much all it takes to read an averagely paced 100,000 word novel. Then they close the book, (or switch off the Kindle,) lean back in their chair, take a deep satisfied breath, smile to themselves, stretch, scratch, check the time and realise that dog/ family/Guinea pig hasn’t been fed, and with a last fond glance at the novel (or Kindle) they put it to one side and rejoin the real world.
And all the months the writer spent in the garret didn’t even include the time spent in editing, packaging, marketing, and promoting (let alone Tweeting). That’s another whole time consuming (and uncomfortably competitive) ball game, one which writers are obliged to enter into just at the point when they want to start writing the sequel!
Now I’d be the last to complain, even about the non-writing aspects of being a writer, because I love the process of writing. There is nothing I enjoy more than creating a page-turning story with characters that live on beyond the page. Or is there?
Yes, actually there is. Knowing that people have really enjoyed reading it, on balance, probably just has the edge. (It is a shame that one of a writer’s rare vicarious pleasures has been removed at a stroke by the advent of eReaders – the chance sighting of some stranger on a plane or train engrossed in your novel. I can confess here that I once missed my stop on the London underground because a fellow traveller was reading one of my novels and laughing out loud (with some obvious embarrassment) at the funny bits.)
The moral of all this is that although it is clearly the writer’s job to create the best possible book they can, those of us who are readers also have some kind of a responsibility too. Not just to let the poor, socially deprived writer know that we have enjoyed their book, but also to tell other people, even to write a review. It’s a competitive world out there and we want our favourite writers to survive. Spreading the word is the best way to do it.
A poem for St David’s Day by Marc Mordey
My Angels were Singing – a poem for St David’s Day by Marc Mordey
I stood near the house
where Grace once lived,
My angels were singing.
I watched as birds
and daffodils dived.
My angels were singing.
It’s spring and the sun
bursts fat and alive.
And my angels were singing.
Old crow, silhouetted against Carningli rock,
purple shadowed on blackened burnt bracken,
gorse and heather reeling :
the after shock.
But my angels were singing, still.
As seagulls wheeled across the bay,
catching sea breezes,
tumbling at will.
The Irish Sea lies beneath
becalmed and silvered blue,
and my angels were singing.
Wales’ favourite saint remembered
the new season breaks forth, springing,
flowers dancing, church bells – ringing.
His angels – singing.
Seasons, people, live and die,
here and now is for the living.
But remember those you love or loved –
do try.
And let your angels be singing.
Let your angels be singing.
Words are like local shops
Words are like local shops – it’s a case of use them or lose them. I was shocked to hear that ‘charabanc’ and ‘aerodrome’ have been expunged from the Oxford English Dictionary. But how can that be, when there is a sign for Haverfordwest Aerodrome just down the road from here? And last summer Marc and I went with a couple of friends on what can only be called a charabanc, a (hilarious) local coach trip to the Brecon canal.
But clearly we didn’t use charabanc or aerodrome enough so both those have gone and the problem is that once they have gone, however much we suddenly realise we loved them, we can’t easily get them back.
The people behind the ‘shop local’ organisation are trying to promote local shops and businesses, maybe we should have a similar campaign for words. Some kind of system of encouraging people to use our favourites in order to keep them alive. Louis de Bernières suggests that it’s a good idea to scour the dictionary and to put a couple of pretty obscure words into the first few pages of a novel as it sets a good tone. (I have just scoured his book Birds Without Wings, a wonderful engrossing read, and quickly found ‘kaval’, ‘mendicant’ and ‘Circassian’!) But finding underused words in books and magazines from time to time isn’t enough, we have to use them day to day. I hardly dare say it, but we need to spread the word!
Some years ago I went through a period of having to go to some pretty dull cocktail parties, and to make it less of an ordeal my partner and I selected a couple of words before going in that we would try to bring casually into the conversation. We gave each other points for how successful we were. I scored particularly well I seem to remember for an inspired combined use of ‘intransigent’ and ‘giraffe’.
In memory of that success I have decided to start my own ‘use them or lose them’ campaign by introducing some of my favourites into my blog, my tweets and possibly even my day to day chit chat. I am starting with ‘equanimity’ and ‘detritus’- two of my favourite underachievers. So, unless you are able to accept the demise of your words/local village shops with equanimity, I suggest you start using them, otherwise they will become part of the inevitable detritus of globalisation!
Romantic novels to cry for …
Everywhere I go at the moment there are hearts and roses. Love is in the air and we might as well enjoy it. Some of us are lucky enough to have our own Valentine waiting for us at home (!) but whether we have or not, reading a romantic novel is another great way to celebrate …
As an author I am often asked about my favourite books and whether they have influenced my writing. I have always been an avid (and eclectic) reader. My reading has definitely influenced not only what I write about, but also how I write it. I might add here how amazed I often am when I talk to other writers (especially wannabe writers) and discover how little they read.
I’m convinced that analysing how successful authors structure their stories, how they create characters and achieve that all important ‘page turning power’ is the best training a writer can have. ‘But I get far too engrossed in novels to stop and analyse them,’ people say. But of course it is exactly those extra-engrossing novels that we should be learning from – so read them again! Certainly all the novels on my favourite romantic reads list below are ones I have read at least twice.
Stone Virgin by Barry Unsworth – a very clever, beautifully written, literary novel set in Venice in three different periods of history.
The Map of Love by Ahdaf Soueif – a sweeping desert adventure set in North Africa, wonderful writing and compelling story.
Thornbirds by Colleen McCullough – the big Australian saga about impossible love. Choose this for a long and engrossing read.
Eightsome Reel by Magda Sweetland – an intensely emotional sweeping Scottish love story.
The Far Pavilions by M. M. Kaye – a hugely satisfying historical saga set in 19th Century India, amazing sense of time and place.
Frederica by Georgette Heyer – a Regency romance with humour, elegance and style, one of her best.
The Bridges of Madison County by Robert James Waller – if you are short of time, read this and weep!
My own books all have elements of romance in them too, Some Sunny Day is probably the most emotional of the war series. The Art of Loving is specifically designed to make you laugh and cry. And of course Slick Deals contains the enigmatically sexy Nick Jardine!
Enjoy!
