In the company of avid followers and new-found friends...

# "Look around, leaves are brown now… and the sky is a hazy shade of winter…" # – Simon & Garfunkel

I’ve been spending the last few winter months with some new-found friends and having a brilliantly creative (if a little chaotic) time of it...  I’m lucky enough to have a day job where I’m able to spend some of my time at work following my creative leanings, especially in the area of books and writing, and recently I was given the chance to begin training on “AVID Media Composer”, learning how to put together short video films, specifically for a website that my own department at ITV runs called “Signed Stories”.

The site has been running for about 3 years now and has already garnered rave reviews, as well as winning a prize for "Plain English" and has even attracted an award for its humanitarian efforts.  I’m quite new to the role, so thus far my involvement has been minimal, but slowly and surely I’m getting to help out with various projects that lead to a completed “signed story” in British Sign Language. The process is a collaborative one and very much a team effort, which is a great way to work – we go through quite a lengthy schedule of filming the sign-language-user in our own TV studio and then taking an original children’s picture book and recreating the narrative with inventive visual effects...  My former incarnation of a day job working with television subtitles even comes in handy, as to help viewers of the site and stories, we provide captions to add to these TV tales…

Still smiling at the creative times
I'm spending in my new day job...

It’s really satisfying as an aspiring author, having the chance to work in such an environment, and for a while now I’ve been given the opportunity to help contribute to the development of the “Signed Stories” characters, including some of their back-stories, as well as their future adventures… But all that’s still a little way off and residing as rough sketches in various notebooks, suffice to say that the main challenge to myself having been traditionally a writer of "older" fiction is to hone the art of writing for a much younger age group with these characters (but I'll get there with practice!)

For now, I’m being taught the joys of the AVID machine itself, getting to know its useful tools and less-useful foibles, (and learning to curse every time it crashes!) But the toils and effort put in does yield some stunning results… Leading up to the festive season, I got to work collaboratively as an editor on some Christmas carols which were hosted on the Signed Stories site:

To see the entire list of Signed Stories carols,

CLICK HERE now!

(the particular carols I worked on were: 

"Once In Royal David’s City”, “O Little Town of Bethlehem”, 

“We Three Kings” and “We Wish You a Merry Christmas”)

Earlier in the year, I also had the opportunity to help produce some AVID-edited videos from CITV’s Share-A-Story competition in which children were invited to send in a short one-minute story, which if picked would be turned into an animated film.  Our department then took the animated films and added signing and our own animation to create a BSL presentation for the Signed Stories site:

To watch CITV's fantastic "Share-A-Story" series in BSL, CLICK HERE now. 

(the particular Share-A-Story videos I worked on were:

“A Robot Who Comes to School”, “Farmer Frank”, 

“When Some Aliens Came to my School” 

and “A Giant Robot from Space”)

Most recently, I’ve been working on my first full-length book for Signed Stories, and it’s a BSL adaptation of Maisy’s Christmas Eve by Lucy Cousins. It’s an interesting process as an editor, working closely with the director and sharing a creative vision of how a final signed story will look… As I mentioned above, the development consists of a first stage where we film our signer in studio, against the "magic" bluescreen, retelling the words of the book in British Sign Language, and then in “post-production”, we use the actual pages of the original book (with author and publishers' permissions) to create our own animated take on the narrative, using moving images, wipes, fades and dissolves, as well as sound effects – all of which the AVID engine provides.

To see & read “Maisy’s Christmas Eve”, 

CLICK HERE now!

As I’ve said, the experience of now working in a more creative day job and particularly on Signed Stories (you should check out the rest of their website when you have the chance, as well as the TV show on Mini CITV!) is not only personally satisfying but it’s also teaching me a lot about how a variety of stories are told and put together (and makes me think more about being a writer in the multimedia age…) Heading into 2012, then, my outlook for continuing this creative life on all fronts is a positive one, but it’s also going to definitely be a year where balancing a busy creative day with the amount of creative writing I want to get done with my nights of scribbling will be tested – I’m hoping I can finally get the balance right... Or maybe I shouldn't stress too much about all the mechanics of writing, and just keep on enjoying the process - maybe that's how classic characters like Maisy the mouse manifest themselves out of nowhere in a real author's mind…

On The Road To Publishville # 8 - "Multiple Voices & Continuing Adventures”

# "Waiting for the trains that just never come, beginning to believe in the disappearing nature of the people we have been - we have... begun... to change" #  - Counting Crows

As the year draws to a close, I've been starting to cast my eye back over my creative writing year and take stock of what I've achieved and learned, and it occurred to me that it's been a while since my last "On The Road To Publishville" post.  So far there's been 7 entries in this occassional series in which I attempt to document and pass on my trials and tribulations in trying to make the leap from amateur scribbler to published author by gaining an agent for my writing...

I was content to leave my “On the Road” series alone for a long while until there was some ‘real’ news to report on, but having gone on a much-needed 2-week laid-back holiday back in September where we did little but walk and relax in the sun of France, I came to a bit of an epiphany with my writing.  And that red-letter day idea was that my first adventure novel still needed redrafting (yes, the one that I’d already been sending out samples of to potential agents – doh!)  The manuscript is just overlong for the audience I’m trying to target and I’ve been avoiding admitting it for a long while but it needs some serious trimming and refining in each and every chapter… 

Added to this, though, there was a crucial new angle I also came up with (which gave rise to this new “On the Road” post) to help with this new redraft, one which would help inspire my creative approach and could potentially bring new strengths and surprises (even to myself as the author of the work) to the story… And that new literary device was to turn the book into a “multiple-point-of-view” novel.

Deconstructing a novel is good...
as long as you can put it together again!

Now, since getting back from that holiday with my notebook of scribbled ideas and a master plan of how to turn my first novel from a single-viewpoint (from the perspective of one main character) to encompass a story told from the view of 3 main characters, I’ve been doing some reading up on the subject (and this is where I’m trying to pass on my own research to any other wannabe writers out there, with this post!) 

Most multi-POV novels take the stance of a chapter-by-chapter separation, so with each succeeding chapter, you get a switch in the character that the overall story follows.   Additionally, each chapter tends to end on an event or a hook or cliffhanger (nothing new there for adventure books) but where it can get interesting narrative-wise, and where the art of writing can really come to the fore, is how the resolution of this cliffhanger is shown from a different perspective or Point Of View at the beginning of the next chapter through a NEW character’s eyes…  PLUS… there’s another clever twist that using this device gives you, and that’s that the crossover between chapters and switches in narrative perspective doesn’t have to necessarily be in “real time” – that is, with the beginning of a new chapter, you could jump back a little in time to show where the second character was at the time of the hook of the previous chapter, and then they come at the cliffhanger from a different angle and show familiar events to the reader in a new and interesting light.  This is used in TV shows a lot today and it can equally work well (with a little hard graft by the writer) on the page too, to help bring the story alive at it’s high points…

There's multiple characters inhabiting
multiple novels on the bookshelves
of my mind...

All sounds quite brilliant, right?  Well, a few months after coming up with my bright idea to inject “new life” into my first book, I still really like the idea of a multi-viewpoint novel, but ultimately, although it’s been a valuable research exercise, and after all the hot-air I’ve cast over this post, I’ve decided to stick with my single-POV for my first novel.  That’s not to say it doesn’t need redrafting and editing down (cos it does!), but I’ve realised that it depends on the story you’re trying to tell – this first novel is the story of ONE person only, not three – the themes and overall narrative I’m trying to explore is related to one character’s journey and will have more impact if they’re told from this more “honed-in” view… That’s not to say I’m not going to use the multi-view technique in a future book, it’s just that it’s not right for this one.  BUT it’s also been good to explore and report back on, here, in my “On the Road” series of posts (hopefully) for anyone else potentially thinking of setting out on a journey towards publication, but who might not have decided just how to tell their story yet…

I guess the final piece of advice that I’m going to pass on in this leg of my “On the Road to Publishville” journey is a major lesson that I’ve learned in that you shouldn’t send  out your manuscript to agents or publishers too early.  It’s something I was told and read about back at the beginning, but I guess sometimes you need to make your own mistakes and learn these lessons for yourself… (I’ll etch it up to a “classic rookie mistake”!)  BUT I do take comfort in the fact that although  I first came up with the idea for Novel #1 way back in 1999, it wasn’t until 2003 that I first seriously began to commit the story to the page and started to write the chapters out… SO if by 2013, I’ve finally finished my first novel, I’ll be content, because the old adage for scribbler-types is that it typically takes 10 years to write your first book…

By 2013, I wonder what results I'll have found in my shattered search to be a published author...

I always write way too much in these posts, so I’ll end with a look at the next things I’m going to pass on my journey “On the Road to Publishville” – namely the 3 books I’ve currently placed on my writing plate for the next year or so…

The first is “my history mystery”, which I guess I could categorise as the “past”:

The next is the redraft and edit of my first novel, which is foremost and “present” on my mind:

And last but not least is “Simulacrum”, which is very definitely the “future”: