Jennifer Pittam

So, day 3 of my impromptu writing workshop.  Still Diamond Jubilee weekend, so I gravitate to Buckingham Palace, and follow a detachment of gorgeous police horses. Once more, there are punters who camped out all night, desperate to reserve a place for the concert this evening. For me, I'm stalking the final third of my Thomas Tarling novel, and I lap up the atmosphere, which is a bit akin to that of the fairground. The rain has been torrential in the night, the St John Ambulance work through the crowd dispensing first aid and hot drinks. Me, I'm surviving on porridge - I've discovered what the Scots have known for centuries; it's nourishing it's cheap  it's great for those on a diet. My first task is to list the final scenes by bullet point, and then to mirror the first day's work by jotting twenty 'last lines'. I can't believe I never thought of this 'twenty first lines, twenty last lines' idea before. In fact, I didn't think it up, ...

Today I got down to the Tower of London at dawn, to work on deepening the 'middle' episodes, the heart and backbone of my novel. Already at that hour preparations were in hand for the Queen's Diamond Jubilee, with police officers on duty at the Tower of London and the first sight-seers surveying the scene. It takes dedication to 'get down to it' that early, but of course, it's what the experienced royal-watchers do, on every occasion - be there, with your mac, your flask of tea and your flags. So my goal today was to work on the dramatic - the backstabbing, the weeping, the scintillating dialogue - well, that's how every writer hopes their work will turn out! As the first of the crowds settled themselves, and bear in mind this was 6.30 hrs, for a Pageant due to being at 14.00 hrs, I sat on a wall with my coffee and asked myself a series of questions: 1) Have I added complications for poor Thomas? 2) Is he changing? Is he affected by the events that have land...

So, four days' creativity, no interruptions! Must get the plot for my 19th century novel down in scene-by-scene form. Britain is in the grip of a once-in-a-lifetime public holiday to celebrate the Diamond Jubilee of HM the Queen; ideal opportunity for writers like me to shake off the cobwebs and get out on the streets. Began with bed & breakfast in the seaside town of Margate. Ye Gods, Margate Old Town serves the largest breakfasts in the world. Hugely full but content, I sit down at my window overlooking the bay, to focus on my story's timeline. It's become a monster, like one of those dogs that has to have counselling because it's become pack leader in charge of the human family. I tell it to sit, nicely, and divide it into the classic three parts: beginning, middle and end. Traditional model? Boring? Hope not. We expect to know where a novel begins.  I come up with 20 first lines, each supposed to set the scene for my hero's knife-edge journey...

Been working every hour of the day on setting this week. I'm fascinated by the way mood in a story can be implied by the setting - that includes the season, the weather, the wildlife, the antics of the general public. As a Londoner born and bred, I love to be out and about in my beautiful, diverse city. It's like a character itself, with its many moods and changes. Today, on Good Friday, Trafalgar Square was sombre Passion of the Christ, Trafalgar Square and grey, as thousands gathered around Nelson's Column to watch a bloody but beautifully acted Passion of the Christ. It was a great moment to make notes for the lowest scenes in my current novel - the haunting, the despair, the bits where Thomas can see no way out. It seems barely a couple of weeks, in fact it is barely a couple of weeks, since the same square was bright and full of laughter for Chinese New Year. On that occasion, too, I took my notebook and tried  to etch the details on my Chines New Year Ce...

I've been working on the characters I need for my second novel. When I started my first book I knew nothing about planning a novel so I just launched in and typed away until I ran out of steam (around one and a half chapters in). I didn't want to be one of those ghastly people who say, at every social gathering, 'I've got one and a half chapters in my desk drawer but of course I've no time to finish them' so I joined a writing group. One of the first things they taught me was how to make a character chart - by taking 10 or so names, and writing each at the head of a long column in your notebook. If, like me, you're comfortable with spreadsheets, then do it electronically. Then, you start to fill in the columns with names, characteristics, relationship to the others, jobs, and so forth. It's vital that you have this material noted down in order to avoid those awful mistakes, halfway through a novel or maybe in your third, when the blue-eyed boy becomes ...

So, we're all getting hot under the collar about the bankers' bonuses which are, apparently, 'not even enough to brag about in a coffee bar'. You could buy five coffee bars of the kind I frequent for one banker's bonus, only we call them cafes out here. Still, it's been a good week - lost 3lbs now, still amazed that Cheesy Wotsits are only 3 points but a nice piece of apple pie is 7. Where's the justice in that, eh? Extended my work on plot to include 'setting' and this week I've been learning all about the secret agenda. Tried this exercise in which you describe a garden shed as seen by a man who's just lost his son in the war. You don't mention the son, or the war. Let it roll around in my subconscious while prowling about London until I came upon Covent Garden, the setting of Bernard Shaw's Pygmalion. Eliza Doolittle - now there was a girl with a secret agenda. I think of my almost-finished WIP, the one about the glassblower, a...

So Wikipedia has gone dark but most of Britain are watching the stars with dishy Professor Brian Cox in any case. Meanwhile I've lost a pound on my Weightwatchers' diet, progressed to drinking two bottles of water a day and made pleasing progress with my outlining. I never realised it could be like this - usually I'm wrestling with the plot and the prose at one and the same time, and the plot points get all lost in the 80,000 words minimum it takes to write a novel. I've been able to construct my plot using real details from actual crimes, as it's a mystery. That's stage 1. Then, of course, I'll be letting the creative voice take over, and the real work of fiction will begin - the true life crimes are just a beginning point. To use a real-life crime only barely disguised, especially when the many victims, including the family and friends of the deceased, are still alive - very poor, in my opinion.