Nicola Williams

Letters of Note

After seeing this book on numerous coffee tables, I finally have it in my possession thanks to a thoughtful birthday present from a thoughtful family member.

. Letters of Note by Shaun Usher

I’m three pages in and have already re-read one particular letter a few times. From 1973, the author E. B. White responds to a gentleman after receiving a letter about the ‘bleakness of the human race’.

His words are comforting even today, in the sometimes frantic world we live in. I will be sure to keep this collection close to me and peruse in those moments of doubt.

Here’s to those people who feel themselves struggling for whatever reason, perhaps troubled… ‘hang on to your hope. And wind the clock, for tomorrow is another day.’

Dear Mr. Nadeau,

As long as there is one upright man, as long as there is one compassionate woman, the contagion may spread and the scene is not desolate. Hope is the thing that is left to us, in a bad time. I shall get up Sunday morning and wind the clock, as a contribution to order and steadfastness.

Sailors have an expression about the weather: they say, the weather is a great bluffer. I guess the same is true of our human society- things can look dark, then a break shows in the clouds, and all is changed, sometimes rather suddenly. It is quite obvious that the human race has made a queer mess of life on this planet. But as a people we probably harbour seeds of goodness that have lain for a long to waiting to sprout when the conditions are right. Man’s curiosity, his relentlessness, his inventiveness, his ingenuity have led him into deep trouble. We can only hope that these same traits will enable him to claw his way out.

Hang on to your hat. Hang on to your hope. And wind the clock, for tomorrow is another day.

Sincerely,

E.B.White

Thanks for the beautiful reminder Mr. White.

Sunday Reading: A Fire & The Power

After winning the Bailey’s Women’s Prize for Fiction Award last year, The Power has been on my ‘to read’ list for a while now. Fellow readers were split in their opinion of the novel so I wanted to see for myself what it was all about.

It seemed quite apt that I started reading this around the time when the ‘Me Too’ movement ramped up a gear and dominated headlines. Most reviews call it speculative fiction, which seems correct considering the supernatural elements, but I was more interested in the world within the story where females have the absolute power over men and rule all aspects of society. Trying to imagine this was real life and ‘the way of things’ is a tricky thing to do given the history of all societies and cultures across the globe. It just doesn’t seem fathomable.

The more I read the more I focussed on the act of abusing power and not being able to come back from that point. All the main characters abuse their power at some stage of the novel; sometimes their intentions appear to be for the greater good, but mostly because their circumstances dictate them and for personal gain.

Thinking of all these accounts from female celebrities that have come out as part of the Me Too/Times Up campaigns whereby males have supposedly abused their power, how would things change if females in our world had the physical power to stop negative behaviours, as is such in the novel’s storyline.

The Power definitively provides food for thought through the dystopian style. Deep down I know I’d be slightly worried if I had the power that the character’s possess. God knows where I’d start with it all…

I think I’ll stick with developing my internal power and do my own little bit to change the world. Who needs an ‘electrical skein’ anyway when the females in my world simply have brilliantly powerful minds!

Disconnect to Reconnect

The novel I’m working on is set over 24 hours, from beginning to end, and I’m currently working my way through the second draft. Whilst editing this week (thanks to some annual leave from the day job), I started thinking more deeply about ‘time’ in writing, more specifically how to slow it down and balance pace for 24+ chapters…

This thought, tied in with a wee bit of procrastination (oops) led me somehow to a newspaper article about the recently absent clocks on one of The Liver building’s towers. Now if you’ve perused my website at all, you’ll know that the novel mentioned above is set in Liverpool and that the Liver Birds are an absolute focal point of the story. I suddenly didn’t feel so bad for mooching the internet instead of actually writing, it all became relative!

Over recent months it has been strange to see the building with only one clock face, particularly at night when the clocks, with their deep orange backgrounds, contribute to the magnificence that are the Three Graces of the waterfront. So, after having read many a different article, text book, quote etc. I began to think to myself, ‘take the clock out, disconnect it.’ By this I don’t mean the pace or the particular era in which it’s set, but the specific mentions of time throughout the story, the thing that appears to be jarring the process at the moment. Don’t worry about making sure the reader knows the specific, trust them, take the pressure away and the editing may just became a tad easier.

Disconnect the clock for now, fix the hands and the mechanics, set the pace right, and when it’s ready to go back in, all will tick along nicely…hopefully, that’ll be evident in draft number three!

The Room of Love

The above is in no way a reference to anything ‘Fifty Shades-like’, but to one of my most favourite pieces of prose, so dear to me that it hangs on the office wall next to me as I write this entry.

It’s taken from Hannah Coulter: a novel by the brilliant Wendell Berry but I stumbled across it in A Little Aloud, with Love, a very beautiful anthology and quite apt for February, the month of love, right? 🙂

It feels good to revisit the familiar words and to me, it’s simply lovely…

The room of love is another world. You go there wearing no watch, watching no clock. It is the world without end, so small that two people can hold it in their arms, and yet it is bigger than worlds on worlds, for it contains all the longing of all things to be together and to be at rest together. You come together to the day’s end, weary and sore troubled and afraid. You take it all into your arms, it goes away, and there you are where giving and taking are the same, and you live a little while entirely in a gift. The words have all been said, all permissions given, and you are free in the place that is the two of you together. What could be more heavenly than to have desire and satisfaction in the same room?

Sunday Musings

Linguistics lessons throwback on this moody Sunday evening…

The Architecture of the Sentence:

‘The architect is the master of the represented space of every kind, and that means he is the master of the making mind.’ William H. Gass and Mary Gass.

#TenTweets

If you follow Joanne Harris on Twitter, check out her #TenTweets from today all about Rewriting. Very helpful little nuggets of info if you’re in the rewriting stage. Good to ask yourself these questions…

Get to know the introverts

This is my all time favourite TED Talk from Susan Cain (author of Quiet). Resonates completely with me…

Listening to it again today, it’s interesting to hear that a third to half of the population are introverts and those individuals have extremely good leadership and creativity skills, but they likely don’t ever get the opportunity to show their force. Get to know them, collaborate.

See what you make of it. Watch here – The Power of Introverts