MARCH'S WRITER SHOWCASE - Ruth Loten

 I’ve decided to showcase a different writer at the end of every month, beginning with the talented and hard-working Ruth Loten. Ruth was a fellow student of mine on the Masters in Creative Writing cohort who graduated in 2020, and she is currently a valued member of the Twenty-Twenty Club, a group for MA alumni to give writing feedback to each other. Since then, she has continued writing prolifically alongside co-founding and co-editing the literary magazine, Makarelle. She has also worked as Writer-In-Residence at Brightlingsea lido.  Her most recent project is setting up an independent publishing company with her friend, Jane Langan, called Castle Priory Press. Scroll down to find out more about Ruth and her writing, including one of her stories and an in-depth interview containing many insights into the life of a writer. 

Ruth Loten

BIOGRAPHY

Ruth was born in Saltaire, West Yorkshire but grew up in Cleveleys, Lancashire. She  graduated from Exeter University in 2000 and qualified as a Religious Studies teacher in 2001. Having met her future husband at university, they got married and moved to the South East - him to do his MA and her to start her teaching career.  

​Ruth worked full time as a teacher, writing odd bits here and there whenever she found the time, in between the job, the dogs, the husband and the small boy who was added to the family in 2005. 

​In 2014 she gave up teaching to become a full-time writer, but after a few months, life decided it had other plans for her and she went back to running around after another small boy. At the same time, the family moved to the Essex coast and started building their family life in a new town.  

​When the littlest member of the family started pre-school, however, it was time for her to dust off the fountain pen and notebooks and start writing again. She decided to study for an MA in Creative Writing with the Open University and in December 2020, she graduated with a Merit. 

​Since then, she has published two novels for adults, one for middle grade children, and a children's picture book, as well as being involved in editing and publishing various anthologies. Along with Jane Langan, Ruth has just launched the hybrid publishing company Castle Priory Press.

Publication and links:

                                                   

     
 

 

www.reloten.com/blog

www.castlepriorypress.com

QR codes which should take you straight to Ruth's books:

Social Media (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram): @lotenaut   

CASTLE PRIORY PRESS:

When Jane and I decided we wanted to venture into the world of publishing, we were very clear that we wanted to do the same for novelists as we had done for short story writers and poets during our time at Makarelle. We know that publishing your own work is hard and requires a particular skill set that not all writers have. Consequently, it can be an expensive business. We wanted to target people who wanted to retain control of their work, set their own deadlines and produce a professional product, but didn’t necessarily have the skill or the time to do it themselves and can’t afford the potentially thousands of pounds it costs to use vanity/other hybrid publishers.

We are not looking to make a fortune out of other people’s work and so we have set our prices as low as possible and long-term, our aim is to grow a conglomerate of authors who cross-promote each other’s work so that everybody who publishes with us gets maximum exposure. Eventually, we also hope to be able to offer editing services alongside our publishing ones, but for now we are focusing on the publishing side of things.

Here is a sample of Ruth's writing:

THE FEW 

I stare at the sky; clouds chasing each other, vapour trails cutting a path across the wide blue expanse. The sun is warm on my upturned face but I am cold. I stretch out my suit-clad legs, the thick black fabric scratchy and unfamiliar on my skin. I’m more at home in blue chinos these days. They’re comfy, you see. Soft. Not like the blue trousers from then. They were rough and didn’t fit properly. That’s the one thing they never get right in the films – those fighter pilots all look very handsome and terribly British. Most of us didn’t have that plummy accent and our uniforms never fit as well as theirs do.

1940 was a scary time for all of us and it feels odd to sit in a cinema and watch it dramatised. No matter how exciting the plot is, the fiction never comes close to capturing the heart-stopping terror we felt. Not that I ever see much of the action. As soon as it starts, I close my eyes and I’m back in the skies, a Messerschmidt 109 on my tail. Every burst of machine gun from the surround sound has me flinching in my seat, certain that every bullet is tracing straight for me. Why do I go, you ask? In some ways, the answer is simple and, in others, it’s complicated.

The simple answer is: to remember. Every death played out on that screen I saw tenfold. Such films are always dedicated to the memory of ‘The Few’. Those few were my friends.

The complicated answer is that I can’t help myself. I tell myself not to go. That it doesn’t help. It won’t bring them back. And yet every time a new one is released, I’m at the front of the queue, urgently thrusting my money at the ambivalent cashier. Sometimes they note my age and comment.

‘Reliving old glories, Sir?’

I smile and nod. ‘Something like that.’ I could never tell them the truth. That there was nothing glorious about it. It was nothing more than a fight for survival. And now I see it all happening again. Different arena. Same lies. Same disaster. It never changes.

I remember because I can’t forget. And I wouldn’t want to. When we forget, we don’t learn the lessons. We make the same mistakes.

There was only me and Fran left from the old days. He never went back after the war. What would have been the point? He was the only one of his family left, so he stayed here with me. We muddled along alright together, him and me. We didn’t talk much about the war and he never truly understood my need to see the films, but he was my best friend and now he’s gone. 

František Svoboda 1921-2022. Beloved and much missed.

It’s not much, is it, for a lifetime of companionship? It’s more than many of the others got though, so I don’t complain. Churchill famously called us The Few and I was proud to be numbered among them. It may have been a living hell at times, but I’d give anything to go back and be with them all.

The Few.

The Fewer.

The One.

[first published in Makarelle, and also in the anthology The Silent Pool And Other Stories]

And finally we come to The Big Interview, where Ruth kindly answers writing-related questions and lets us into some of her writing secrets...

How old were you when you first knew you wanted to be a writer, and what set you off down that journey?

It wasn’t something that I considered as a career when I was younger – I was very much told that I had to do a degree that would lead to a ‘proper’ job – but when I gave up teaching in 2014, the plan was that I would write books and attempt to make a career out of it. I was extraordinarily naïve about it, but did start going into my local school for author visits and to work with gifted creative writers. I wrote a few children’s books and self-published them, but did almost no promotion of them, so unsurprisingly they didn’t sell massively well! It wasn’t until my youngest son went to pre-school in 2018 that I started to really take writing seriously and applied to do a Masters in Creative Writing with the Open University. Doing the course made me realise that I could actually write and I just needed to work at it, if I wanted to turn it into a career.

 

Tell us about the books that have shaped your life and your writing career.

Books have always been a huge part of my life and every book I’ve read has influenced me in one way or another. However, if I had to just pick a few… Terry Pratchett’s Discworld books taught me about the importance of world building, Susan Cooper’s The Dark Is Rising series taught me about weaving myths and legends into my children’s books and Kate Mosse’s Languedoc books taught me about the beauty and importance of landscape descriptions and how they can be used effectively to reflect the plot/atmosphere of a story. On the MA we had to write about authors who had influenced us and it was Cooper and Mosse I wrote about. (https://www.reloten.com/post/writing-a-picture-how-the-themes-style-of-susan-cooper-and-kate-mosse-have-influenced-my-writing)

In terms of my writing, Stephen King’s On Writing gave me the push I needed to become a more ruthless editor and Save The Cat! Writes A Novel gave me the help I needed to sort out the structure of my books.

 

 Have your children inspired any of your writing? In what way?

Definitely! The Reign of the Winter King started life as a book for my eldest son (The Forest Children) and featured him and his friends. When I decided to rewrite it and turn it into a proper book that other people might enjoy, I added my youngest son as a character and included King Arthur as well. Elements of the original story are there, but large parts of the plot have changed beyond recognition and it’s become the first book in a planned trilogy (The Courts Series). Whilst I’ve made it clear to them that the characters are inspired by my boys, but are not meant to be them, much of their personality did seep into the characters. In fact, when I had it edited by someone who knows my boys, she told me I had to make changes to them, particularly the eldest, because he wasn’t demonstrating typical teenage behaviour. Her comment read something along the lines of ‘I know they’re based on your boys, but your boys aren’t normal!’. Of course, she was absolutely right and they found it hilarious, but I did make the changes she suggested.

 

Does the place you live have any impact on your writing, do you think? 

Location is always something that is hugely important to me in my writing – far more than the characters in many ways because I think everybody is shaped by where they live. Although I was born in Saltaire, I grew up just outside Blackpool and I’m very conscious that I view it in a very different way to my husband, who has only ever been a visitor. Consequently, the Blackpool I described in Unforgettable is my Blackpool. My latest book Folly is set in a fictional version of Brightlingsea (where I now live) called ‘Avonstow’ and is inspired by much of the town’s history. I was meant to be starting a book set in Cornwall, but we had gone back into Lockdown and I like to visit the places I’m writing about, so – as I couldn’t go to Cornwall – I decided to put that book on hold and write Folly instead. We have a little flat in Cornwall, so there are lots of ideas in my notebook for novels set there, but I have at least two more books in the Avonstow series left to write and two more to finish of The Courts series, so Cornwall is going to have to wait for a while.

 

How would you describe your own writing? 

When I’m writing for adults, I like to have dual stories going on, preferably across different time periods. At the moment, I’m very much writing historical fiction, although I am collaborating on a romantic comedy and have the basis of an idea for a cosy crime series, but I think I’m more comfortable in historical based books. I also like to use real history where possible as a backdrop for the story, so in Folly, the 1917 story was set during the time the ANZAC soldiers from the Australian Engineers Training Division were based in Brightlingsea and the 1995 story used the real Brightlingsea protests against live animal exports as its basis.

 

Are there certain themes that draw you to them when you are writing?

There always seems to be an element of romance in my writing, but the actual romance isn’t usually the main theme. It might be the catalyst for the action, but it’s not often the action itself. In Folly, the love story of Alice and Will drives what happens, but the story is as much about John’s obsession with Alice and Alice’s desire to be her own person. There is a hint of romance between Jack and Ellie in the modern half, but when I was editing the book, I took out most of it because that part of the book was about Ellie’s quest to uncover the truth. I’m now writing the sequel and after much debate with myself, although there are a number of relationships within the plot, ultimately it’s about the two main character learning to love themselves and make peace with their pasts.

 

Tell us about you approach to your writing. Are you a planner or a pantser? 

When I first started, I was very much a pantser. I knew where I was going to and sort of meandered my way through the story to get there. Unfortunately, it often meant I got to about 50,000 words and then got stuck. More recently, I’ve known the basic plot, but ‘pantsed’ it to halfway as I got to know the characters and then plotted the second half. With the current novel I’m working on, however, I had a much clearer idea of the plot and so I started to plan properly after about 20,000 words. Because I was writing it in two sections, however, I have to plan them separately and the 2017 story I have planned out before I’ve actually started writing it, which is a first for me! I think the more I write and the less I worry about whether or not I’m capable of writing enough words for a novel, the more I plan before I write.

 

Do you have any advice for someone who might be thinking about starting to write creatively?

Don’t be afraid, just do it! So many people worry about whether or not they are capable of doing it and whether it’s any good or not, that they become paralysed and end up writing nothing. Lots of writers say that a blank page is the scariest thing they face, but for me, that’s the exciting bit. There are so many possibilities, so many directions to take your story in and anything can happen. The scariest part for me is hitting the ‘publish’ button because after that, my babies are out in the world for other people to judge!

 

Are you, or have you been in the past, a member of any writing groups, online or face-to-face? Do you run any? What do you think is the value of such groups?

I’m a member of two face-to-face writing groups and two online ones – one via Zoom and the other via email. One face-to-face makes me write short stories, which I would rarely do otherwise, and the other one is encouraging me to write in a different genre, which is very much out of my comfort zone. The online ones are both focused specifically on novels, so it’s nice to have people who understand the structure look at your work and give feedback on specific elements you’ve asked them to consider for you. All four are invaluable to me because writing can be a very lonely profession and building a community around you helps alleviate that. It also means that you can talk to people about your work without sounding crazy. Fellow writers understand what you mean when you say that your characters are arguing with you and deciding where they want you to go with it, or telling you that they simply wouldn’t react in the way you’ve written. I’m also very lucky that people from all of these groups have contributed to other projects I’ve been involved with – they’ve contributed to anthologies I’ve been putting together and allowed us to publish their own work through our imprint.

 

You have an MA in Creative Writing from the Open University.  What do you think you have learned from such courses? Do you think they are worthwhile? Have you ever done any teaching of Creative Writing yourself? If so, did you enjoy it and did you learn anything yourself?

The MA is the only Creative Writing course I’ve done and I learnt a huge amount from it. It gave me the confidence to accept that writing was something I was good at and people weren’t just being nice to me! Having the qualification has also opened other doors for me and I’ve been given opportunities that I simply wouldn’t have had without it. It made me far less sensitive about criticism and helped me to move from the thinking of ‘well it’s just rubbish’ to ‘it’s good but this is how to make it better’. I have taught a handful of creative writing workshops for both adults and children, most recently as part of the Brightlingsea Literary Festival, which I was involved in setting up and running. I’d definitely recommend doing writing courses, for the simple reason that they do help to improve your writing, but more importantly they give you confidence in your own abilities and get you used to the idea that a critique is a positive thing!

 

What do you think about getting feedback on your work from other writers and/or non-writers?  How often do you act upon suggestions made by feedbackers or beta-readers?

In my experience, it’s incredibly difficult to get good quality feedback from non-writers. It generally tends to be along the lines of ‘it was really good and I enjoyed it, can we discuss X plot point because it was really interesting’ rather than ‘there are too many adjectives and there’s a glaring plot hole between X part and Y part’ which is often the kind of feedback you really need. Consequently, I use different people for different purposes. I have one reader I use to make sure the book is readable and engaging and others who I ask for more ‘writerly’ feedback and then I have Jane to sort out my sex scenes (I hate writing them but sometimes they’re necessary) and to do my detailed editing before I send it to my copy editor who checks for any SPAG mistakes I’ve missed. I’ve used professional editors in the past as well – once to untangle a plot I’d got in a muddle with and once to do a final structure edit. Both were helpful and relatively inexpensive.

 

You have experience of editing a literary magazine (Makarelle) and of self-publishing. What have been the challenges and rewards of such experiences? 

Working on the magazine was an incredible experience. I learnt so much from it, both in terms of my own writing and of the wider publishing world. However, in the end, we all found that it was taking over our lives. It was incredibly time consuming to read all the submissions, make decisions about them and then actually put the magazine together and promote it. We had gone into it, wanting to have a platform to showcase our own work and that of others, but we ended up only writing the stories we did for the magazine and ultimately, that was why we stopped doing it. We loved working together, but we just weren’t writing what we wanted to. Learning from that, when Jane and I decided to launch Castle Priory Press, we were very clear about the amount of time we were prepared to devote to it each week and agreed that if we began to get lots of submissions, we would simply close submissions until we were ready to open again. It allows a far greater degree of flexibility than a magazine that has to be out on a specific date.

In terms of advice, the main one would be that if you’re going to do it, make sure you do it with people you genuinely get on with. Jane, Dini and I never fell out over what we were doing – we had a policy in place about the criteria for accepting a piece and we stuck to it. Our friendship was far more important than the magazine and even though Dini isn’t involved in CPP (she’s having a great time travelling the world) we still message each other and we still have our group chat, it’s just that now we share cat memes and funny anecdotes rather than questions about Makarelle. The rest of it, I’m afraid, is learning on the job and being prepared to put an awful lot of hours in!

 

Where do you get your ideas from?

Usually from places I visit. I’ll quite often walk into somewhere and think ‘I have to write a story about this place’. Unforgettable came from me visiting Beth Chatto Gardens – I was walking round and had a vision of someone walking in, seeing someone on a bench and falling instantly in love with them. The other half of that book came from me sitting in the ballroom in Blackpool Tower and realising that, much as I loved the place, I’d never written anything that used it as a major setting. The novel I’m currently editing, Blythewode, was born from a visit to Warley Place. That version didn’t work (I now have another idea for a novel set there) but I went on a writing retreat to Northmoor House in Somerset and everything suddenly fell into place and I wrote the first draft in six weeks.

 

They say that successful writers need to be selfish. How far do you agree with this?  

I think there is definitely an element of truth to this. I have to fit writing in around my family so I tend to try to write Monday-Thursday in school hours and on Fridays, when I’m in the Lido Café as part of my Writer in Residence role, I tend to do admin – book reviews, social media, editing for other people etc. I need quiet and an extended period of time to write properly so I don’t get a lot done in the school holidays – I do a lot more reading then, so I tend to use holidays for research, note taking and planning. However, I have said that if I need to, I’ll either take myself down to the flat for a week or go to the library in the holidays to get on with some writing. By choice, I write at my desk in my study, although if I’m writing about a particular place that is local to us, I take myself off to write on location. On an ideal week I aim for a minimum of 2,500 words a day, but often other commitments get in the way. If the writing is going well I’m pretty disciplined with it, but if it’s not going smoothly I find myself doing lots of writing related things that don’t actually involve me writing the novel – in the first two weeks of March when I was struggling, I managed about 2,500 words in total. In the last two weeks, despite meetings and other distractions, I added 7,500 words and planned the second half of the book in detail!

I know you’re interested in history and often use historical settings in your writing. What sort of historical research have you done in connection with your writing?

I’m hugely interested in history – most of what I write is historical in one way or another and in researching my Avonstow books I’ve learnt lots about our local history, but also about wider historical events. Over the last few years, I’ve researched, amongst other things – alcohol prices and pub opening hours in 1917, various WW1 battles, the history of RAF Duxford and RAF Debden, the work of the Double Cross team in WW2, the history of the WRNS, the history of Lidos, Australian trench slang from WW1, live animal exports and the moral debate behind it, the history of Essex railways and army camps and pre-WW1 Melbourne. If I can visit a place I’m writing about, I will, simply because I want to describe the feel of a place as much as the bricks and mortar and it’s not always possible to achieve that just by looking at photos. As I said before, much of what I write, both in short and long fiction, is inspired by real events, which I then fictionalise and adapt for my own purposes. As to whether writers need to know about historical events, I think that depends on what they’re writing about – if it has an impact on their characters, no matter how small, they need to know about it. If the book is set in modern times then it is important to be aware of what’s going on in the world, but perhaps not to the same degree. If you’re writing a rom-com then the war in Ukraine might be going on, but unless you want to refer to it directly it’s not necessary to research it in detail. A character might make a passing comment about the price of cereal rising because of it but that might be it. The problem that this causes of course, is that it very much locates the book in time and it may date quickly as a result. The same applies to Covid, Brexit etc.

 

How did the Covid pandemic affect you as a writer?

I basically didn’t write very much. I was home schooling my then 4-5 year old who wanted to do all the work, all the time, so I did nothing but home school and read for the most part. I nearly had a nervous breakdown in the 3^rd lockdown and reading was the only thing that kept me sane. However, there were two quite big things that came out of it for me. One was that I realised how much my writing and my mental health are linked. My sister died unexpectedly at the end of 2019 and her funeral was in January 2020. My family are spread all over the country and so I didn’t physically see my brother or my mum for well over a year after the funeral. During that time, I was writing the final assessment piece for the MA and my first draft was incredibly dark. It wasn’t a pleasant story anyway, but by the end the characters were all left in horrible places in their lives and there was no sense of anything but tragedy before them. My tutor told me I needed to lighten it up and inject some sense of hope at the end and by the time I came to edit it, I was in a much better place emotionally and was able to do as he’d suggested. The benefit of this first draft though, was that I’d poured all the hurt and negativity into the characters and their story and worked through my own grief by writing about theirs.

A more positive thing to come out of it was that the rise of online meetings meant the birth of Makarelle and from that came my role as Writer in Residence at the Lido, my first proper venture into self-publishing and everything I’m doing today in my writing career.

There is a lot of talk at the moment about political correctness, about the Woke movement, about cultural appropriation, about diversity. What are your thoughts on this, with regard to writing?

This is a really difficult question to answer and one I’m continually wrestling with. I am a white, heterosexual, cis-gendered, middle-class female and in all honesty I would find it very difficult to write about characters who are not within my own life experiences. Unforgettable was written from a male perspective, which was tricky but manageable, but I don’t think I would write anything from the point of view of someone from a different ethnicity or a different sexual orientation. It’s partly because I don’t think I could do it well enough and partly because I think we should be encouraging people who have those life experiences, to tell their own stories. Writing is still dominated by white writers – you only have to look at book displays in supermarkets and bookshops to see this and I think that there are plenty of other people who are far better qualified than me to write those stories and they should be encouraged to do so. When I’m reading, I’ve had to actively seek out books by people from different backgrounds and it’s required far more effort on my part than if I wanted a book by someone from a similar background.

That said – I want to have my books reflect the real world and so its important that they are populated with characters from a range of backgrounds and with a variety of experiences. In both The Reign of the Winter King and Folly, partway through writing them, a character informed me that they were gay. It wasn’t a conscious choice on my part, they just told me it was who they were. For both books, I spoke to people who knew more than me and got them to read the relevant sections to make sure I had got the characters right. I think sensitivity readers are important – there are so many stereotypes that we don’t necessarily even realise are such and personally, I would far rather have this pointed out to me, than risk inadvertently upsetting someone.

Where would you place your own stories, on a continuum with PURE FANTASY at one end and COMPLETE REALISM at the other?

My adult stories are definitely at the complete realism end of the scale, but my children’s books are probably edging towards the fantasy side of things, but I think they’re technically on the cusp between magical realism and light fantasy. The more traditional fantasy doesn’t always appeal to me, but I love things like Terry Pratchett, Eoin Colfer and Jasper Fforde that are more light-hearted in tone. Pure sword and sorcery isn’t really my thing, but something that incorporates elements of that and puts them in the real world is far more to my taste, which is why I think that Susan Cooper’s books have always had a massive hold over me. It’s the idea that something magical could happen in our world – a lot of the fantasy feels too remote for me to really engage with that world. Does it have value though? Absolutely. I’d find it hard to make a case that anything that gets people reading doesn’t have value. I talk quite often about how the Twilight books are my guilty pleasure – I know as a writer, that they are not massively well written, but I still love reading them. Romance is another genre that frequently gets dismissed as valueless and I think it’s inherently unfair and actually incredibly disrespectful to the authors who write in those genres. All styles of book have their good examples and their awful ones, but for me, to dismiss a whole genre is wrong. (I wrote a blog about why books should never be a guilty pleasure - https://www.reloten.com/post/guilty-pleasures)

  E A R L Y  M  A R C H   2 0 2 3

In 2020, the first lockdown was just starting and we were all talking about the gorgeous weather...

3.00, Friday 10 March 2023

It has snowed.

It wasn’t exactly a surprise as the weather reports had forecast it, but I tend to view weather forecasters as being hyper-vigilant easily-excitable gloom-mongers. They’re always predicting massively disruptive weather which turns out to be extremely disappointing in reality [an example of hyperbole followed by litotes, if any of my English students are reading].

‘FLASH FLOODING EXPECTED THROUGHOUT THE NORTH-EAST!’ turns out to be a slightly faster-than-usual beck in Huddersfield. ‘TSUNAMI HEADING FOR FILEY: RESIDENTS TOLD TO BE PREPARED!’ eventually arrives as a pleasant curler that splashes the promenade and wets a few joggers wearing cagoules.

Even weather-related events that have already happened are reported in such sensational language that it’s difficult to get them into perspective. ‘EARTHQUAKE DESTROYS HOUSES IN BIRMINGHAM’ turns out to mean that a few roof-tiles were dislodged; ‘FREAK HURRICANE BLASTS PICTURESQUE VILLAGE’ is accompanied by a photo of a village green dotted with a snapped-off branches and the pub-sign bent awry.

Obviously, sometimes we do get genuinely serious weather-related disasters in the British Isles. I’m old enough to remember the infamous 1980s hurricane (recreated so effectively in the climax of A.S.Byatt’s novel Possession), and the second one that happened a year or so later. I was at teacher-training college in Greater Manchester, and newly-in-love, so I spent the night wide awake in the arms of my boyfriend, occasionally wondering what the hell was causing all that noise outside (oh, how I miss the era known as ‘back in the day’!). At that time, student accommodation wasn’t what it is today (no modern university student would stand for the conditions students used to accept as normal). We lived on the top floor of an old block of damp council flats perched on top of a steep hill, and the hurricane’s fingers rattled the single-glazed windowpanes, sneaking round the gappy edges so the notoriously chilly flats were cold enough to cause frost-bite. Great howls and creaks could be heard, along with the occasional bang as flying wreckage hit the building or bounced off cars. It felt as if we were in a storm at sea.

I remember at one point my boyfriend said, in another example of litotes: ‘Sounds a bit blowy out there’.

On that occasion, the storm provided a suitable background for our torrid emotions. [An example of The Pathetic Fallacy, for any student reading this].A friend and I had planned to go home to my mum’s house for the weekend, the next morning, and I remember walking to the railway station, feeling dazed through lack of sleep, in a weird silence, the sky lit by a silvery-grey light and the streets strewn with debris like the aftermath of a riot.

However, despite these occasional flurries of exciting weather-related drama – the winds that force people to walk home more or less horizontally, fighting all the way; the floods that lead to Instagram shots of Volvos floating down high streets and old ladies in rain hoods being helped into dinghies; people huddled like refugees in cars topped with two feet of snow on the M25 – we’re not really a country of extreme weather. We don’t suffer volcanic eruptions, tornadoes, hail-stones as big as a fist, permafrost. 

Not yet anyway. Who knows what Global Warming will do to our generally sedate climate.

What we do get is a bit of snow now and then. Like yesterday. It fell steadily, feathery and picturesque, coating the grass and rooftops like royal icing on a cake, but leaving the roads and pavements relatively clear. The worst that happened in our household was that our elderly cat refused to go out to pee. We had to gently force her through the patio doors when the snow abated a little, and she then huddled miserably under the garden table staring at the lawn in terror until we let her in again. As far as I knew, unless she had done the job very quickly when we weren’t looking, she hadn’t emptied her digestive system since 7.00 am. Personally, I need to pee about every thirty minutes these days, so I don’t know how she does it!

Interestingly, it snowed more heavily overnight and today our part of the world is coated in beautiful snow and the sky is that gorgeous bright blue you get after a snow-storm. P has gone out for a walk and is probably lying in a snow-filled ditch as I type (last time he went for a walk alone he ended up caught in the vicious embrace of a bramble bush after falling over a stile). The cat went out quite happily an hour ago – it is obviously the actual precipitation she hates – but I’m slightly concerned about where she’s gone. She’s probably paying her previous owners a visit, on the basis that we have fallen short of her expectations by not only failing to stop the snow but also pushing her out into the garden several times against her will. Or she’s also lost in a snow drift.

Of course, when it does snow, all the anecdotes about previous snowfalls emerge from your memory. Like the time when my niece and her partner came to our house with their baby and my mum, one evening round Christmas, and by the time they were ready to leave the ground was thick with snow and the roads ungritted. It was impossible to drive in. My niece tried but the car spun in the road uncontrollably. So they were forced to stay at ours, but my niece and her partner decided to walk back to their house, a couple of miles away but up a steep hill, to get their baby’s travel cot. It took them a long time, but they eventually got back with a bag of stuff they needed and a large ungainly box containing the dismantled travel-cot, which my niece had carried through the snow all the way down the hill to our house, slipping and sliding all the way. She was utterly exhausted, freezing, soaking wet and pissed-off. And it didn’t improve her mood when she opened the box to discover it was empty! We never found out what happened to the travel cot.

My own personal memory of that night, however, is of sitting on my sofa cuddling my great-nephew, who was about eight months old and was still awake, with the light turned low so we could see the twinkling Christmas fairy-lights, and the snow falling in the garden outside the patio doors, singing to him, while he stared wide-eyed at everything. It is a memory I will always cherish.

For every awful snow-related memory there is another wonderful one.

Today’s snow has scuppered our plans for today, though. We were going to take my mum out for an afternoon tea as a birthday treat. The place we’d booked is a nice little tea-room in the middle of the Loxley Valley on the edge of Sheffield, and unfortunately it has had to close today due to the snow. This is particularly irritating as this is the FOURTH time we have booked a table at this particular café in order to take my mum for an afternoon tea, but we have yet to actually get her there. The last three times we had to cancel ourselves (Philip got Covid, mum had a tummy upset, mum was at my niece’s house as she’d forgotten we were going out for afternoon tea). On the third occasion, P booked the table but forgot to tell them we wanted afternoon tea, so it was just as well Mum couldn’t make it as she would have been deeply disappointed – she has an incredibly sweet tooth and loves a plateful of cakes, and she particularly loves taking home the leftovers in a box so she can indulge herself for the next couple of days. This works well as I’m pre-diabetic so shouldn’t really eat cakes, and there is a definite limit to P’s pleasure in eating such things, so mum ends up with most of our share too. Anyway, not today. Maybe there's something eldritch in the Loxley Valley that is refusing to allow my mother to enter its domain, some unseen presence in Oughtibridge silently shouting 'Thou shalt not pass, Woman!'.  Or maybe it's just coincidence.

The cat has just returned, in case you were worrying. She was desperately hungry after her adventure, and - after eating a packet of cat-food and sitting on a towel looking doleful - she has now gone upstairs, presumably to go to sleep on our bed…

Drabbling: The results of the Twenty-Twenty Club Drabble Competition 2023

The pleasures of a 100-word story

Writing a story in only 100 words might seem, on the surface, like an easy task, and there is no doubt that it takes less time than writing a longer piece. However, writing a good story in exactly 100 words is a serious challenge. Such stories are like poems in that the writer has to give a lot of thought to every word. They have to ask themselves many questions: Can I make that same point but in fewer words? If I strip this sentence down to just three words, will it still be clear enough for the reader? Have I organised my material in the optimum way to achieve my effects?

It takes real skill and confidence to pare a narrative down to its bare bones, and real judgement to leave enough room for the individual craftsmanship of the writer, for their ‘voice’ to emerge. It is the judiciously-used flourishes, the carefully-placed image, the clever structural decisions, the knowledge of when to use a sentence fragment or when to leave out a speech-tag, which often make one drabble stand out from the others. The writer needs to trust the reader’s ability to make the necessary leaps in understanding without having everything spelled out for them.

One thing that struck me about the drabbles submitted for this competition was the way that some writers really used their creativity to push the form as far as they could. Ron Hardwick’s ‘Smiler’ and Sue Davnall’s ‘In The Wall’ both use dialogue as the method by which they get their stories across; Jane Langan’s untitled drabble takes the form of a list, inspired by ‘The Very Hungry Caterpillar’ by Eric Carle; Ruth Loten’s untitled drabble uses the three-act structure of a play.

The theme of the competition was ‘cats’ but this could be interpreted in whatever way the writers wanted. Several of these drabbles were written from the point-of-view of the cats themselves, and writers took on the persona of the cat with real ingenuity. The narrator in Antonia Dunn’s chilling ‘Misfortune’ is ambiguous until the end, when we suddenly realise how vulnerable this poor animal is; ‘The New Sofa’ by Lisa Gotts uses sentence fragments to convey the cat’s self-centred thoughts; the cat narrator in Ron Hardwick’s ‘Master and Servant’ is a knowledgeable and knowing creature who can easily outwit his supposed master; in Wendy Toole’s ‘Remember Me’, the narrator is more indeterminate, probably the cat who left the paw print but not necessarily.  Others were written in a more straightforward way, from a human viewpoint, but focused on a pet cat: Beck Collett’s ‘Tiddles’, for example, expresses the poignancy of cat-ownership very effectively; Sue Davnall’s ‘The New One’ shows us an inter-species friendship from the viewpoint of a pet-owner who wishes humans could be more like such animals.

Though most of the drabbles were about domestic cats, some weren’t. Ron Hardwick’s ‘Smiler’ considers a comic relationship between a human and a re-engineered talking Smilodon (sabre-toothed tiger); D.H.L.Hewa’s ‘The Nick of Time’ focuses on a magnificent tiger in a zoo and ends almost with a moment of magic realism as the tiger is transformed into Blake’s Tiger, Tiger, Burning Bright; her drabble ‘The Symbol’ uses the image of a lion on her birth-country’s emblem as a starting point for considering loss and grief; the ravenous kitten in Jane Langan’s untitled drabble metamorphoses into a spectacular tiger; Sue Davnall’s ‘In The Wall’ considers a creepy mummified cat hinting at pagan witchcraft; Ruth Loten’s untitled drabble uses a performance of the musical ‘Cats’ to tell part of a love story; and Beck Collett’s ‘Sometimes Even Tina’ tells the tragic story of a girl called Caterina. The theme of ‘cats’ was explored fully and in highly interesting and imaginative ways.

The other thing that struck me in this small collection was the variety of moods and atmospheres they created. There was humour, horror, sadness, realism, drama. Some drabbles covered long periods of time (‘Remember me’, ‘Tiddles’), while others were much more focused in time. Every drabble was more than merely an anecdote or a joke – all had a narrative arc of some sort, some surprisingly profound. It is incredible what writers can do with just 100 words!

The judges wish to remain anonymous but I'd like to thank them here for their hard work. Prizes will be sent out to the winner and runner-up this week. Below, I have posted a selection of drabbles from the competition (some people didn't want their work publishing here):

CONGRATULATIONS TO OUR WINNERS AND THANKS TO EVERYONE WHO TOOK PART.

And a big thanks to our unpaid judges.

Painting by Louise Wilford

First Prize Winner: Antonia Dunn

[won a copy of The Unadulterated Cat by Terry Pratchett and a small box of chocolates]

Misfortune by Antonia Dunn

 There's blood everywhere. Splatters all the way up the wall. A fall, they said. She was ninety two, they said. 

          They don't know about the man. He was always doing odd jobs and shopping for her. He was arguing with her about money. She wanted to leave it to the Cats Protection League. 

          Now the police are here, he's back. 

          Why won't they listen to me?

          'This poor cat's been making terrible noises since we arrived. Is there anyone who can look after her?' asks the policewoman.

          'Leave her with me' says the man. 'I'll take care of her.' 

JUDGES' COMMENTS:

This is a beautifully-structured drabble which uses the cat’s naïve perception of events to create a moving and horrifying story. The judges were impressed by the way it incorporated several features of much longer stories, such as dialogue, description, inner thoughts, and a rhetorical question, and how it moved confidently between past and present. It used all 100 words to excellent effect, using structure to maximise the impact of the final line.

Photo taken by Wayne Miller

Runner-Up: Ruth Loten

[won a small writers' notebook and a small box of chocolates]

Untitled By Ruth Loten

First Act.

My life was a mess. Bad boyfriends. Lousy job.

My new start in London begins at the theatre.

Cats. Singing. Dancing. Twirling. Terrifying.

 

Interval.

The man next to me turns. ‘Any idea what’s going on?’

I shake my head. He gestures to the empty seat beside him.

‘Got tickets for my ex. Dance teacher - didn’t know it was based on a book.’ He smiles. ‘I did. No point wasting my money as well as my life.’

A pause.

‘Do you fancy a drink after? Untangle the plot together?’

I hesitate, then nod and smile.

 

Second Act.

Begins.

JUDGES' COMMENTS:

The judges were very impressed by the originality of the form this story took, being set out in three acts, echoing the theatrical performance the characters are experiencing. It was a love story, and conveyed a lot of information for so few words, including dialogue and narrative. They felt the story was clear and told with verve and imagination, and they believed in the characters. They did feel that the tenses were slightly muddled at the beginning (‘was’, ‘begins’).

A selection of other entries

photo taken by Louise Wilford

Sometimes even Tina by Beck Collett  

Caterina was dull. Everyone who met her as a babe remarked that she was ‘no trouble at all,’ which translated as ‘she doesn’t do much, does she?’ By the time she started school, everyone had forgotten Caterina’s name. She answered to all sorts, sometimes even Tina. She didn’t know to correct them, so she didn’t. Everyone who met her remarked how ‘clean and quiet’ she was, which translated as ‘she’ll never leave her mark.’ So, it was rather ironic that when Caterina disappeared that day, everyone finally looked for her. But by then it was too late.

JUDGES' COMMENTS:

The judges particularly enjoyed the repetition of the idea of certain platitudinous or euphemistic phrases actually implying other things about Caterina. They felt that the central character was clearly and vividly portrayed despite very little being revealed about her, and the ending was shocking and moving. One judge commented that Beck might have left out the explicit reference to the ironic nature of the climax of the tale, as this perhaps was telling too much. However, the ending was an effective response to the first part, leading to narrative satisfaction.

photo taken by Louise Wilford

Untitled by Jane Langan

In the light of the moon, a kitten curled into a ball.

On Sunday, she woke to warm sun on her fur. She uncurled.

Kitty started looking for food.

On Monday she ate one fish but was still hungry.

On Tuesday she ate two voles but was still hungry.

On Wednesday she ate three mice but was still hungry.

On Thursday she ate four eggs but was still hungry.

On Friday she ate six rats, seven birds, a mole, a bat, and a rabbit.

She felt better and fell asleep.

On Saturday, she woke up and was a beautiful tiger.

 

*Inspired by ‘The Very Hungry Caterpillar’ by Eric Carle

 

JUDGES' COMMENTS:

Inspired by Eric Carle’s famous children’s book ‘The Very Hungry Caterpillar’, Jane’s story took on the form of a myth or fable in which a mundane creature is transformed into something magical. Unlike Hans Anderson’s ‘The Ugly Duckling’, this kitten is beautiful right from the start, but it becomes strong and powerful as it ingests more and more food. The judges enjoyed the fairytale quality of this narrative, with its use of repetition and the accelerated growth span of the kitten. It had some of the qualities of a poem.

photo taken by Philip Badger

The New Sofa by Isla 

The new sofa’s here. Delivery men gone. Wrapping off. Human not paying attention – time to pounce!

Edge of the arm, my tailed curled under me, claws digging into the new fabric. Mmmm, it’s softer than the last one. Kind of them to buy me this giant new bed.

I give it a scratch. This is the life… Tuna…tummy rubs…sunshine naps…

 

“Oi, Tabitha…off!” The human’s shout interrupts my daydreams!

Oh – guess it’s not mine! I jump down, swish my tail to show some attitude (I was comfy there before being shooed off) and disappear through my cat flap...

 

JUDGES' COMMENTS:

The judges enjoyed the lightness of this drabble, which depicts the thoughts and actions of a mischievous domestic cat when its owners buy a new sofa. The narrative has an effective ‘volta’ in the middle, where the cat suddenly realises the sofa wasn’t bought for him. The cat’s emotions are conveyed clearly and anyone who has ever owned a cat will recognise the realism of this cat’s behaviour. The judges liked how Lisa had got inside the mind of the cat in a plausible way, though they felt that the ending could be strengthened slightly.

Photo by Louise Wilford

 

Master and Servant by Ron Hardwick 

My master is a little bald man with a Hitler moustache.  I say master, but it is I who is master, not he.  He gets annoyed when I exercise my claws on his sofa.  He feeds me disgusting Kattomeat, which I happen to know is made from the offal of horses.  He left a dish of smoked salmon on the table the other day, which was delicious.  He flipped his lid.  'When I catch you, Minky, I'm going to ring your bloody neck.' I smile, because, inadequate little berk that he is, he needs me more than I need him.

 JUDGES' COMMENTS:

This humorous tale gets inside the mind of a domestic cat with authenticity and comic appeal. The judges enjoyed the tension between the cat’s cynical view of the world and the master’s lack of comprehension of his pet’s opinions. They did wonder how a cat would know about Hitler’s moustache, but felt that this reference was acceptable given the humorous genre. They felt the drabble was well-structured.

 

Photo by Louise Wilford

 

Tiddles by Beck Collett

I loved you from the moment I saw you lying upside-down in your litter tray. Eighteen months old and mad, you were meant for me. Nobody else could cuddle you; your pointy black face and moss-green eyes staring up at me in bewilderment. Always.

We removed the wallpaper because you kept climbing it, got used to mopping up puddles of water, puddles of wee when you started to forget, when you went blind.

Now, I hold you to my chest like a new-born, so you can feel my heart beating as your own runs out. I love you. Always.

 

JUDGES' COMMENTS:

The judges (all cat-lovers) found this very poignant and realistic. They commented on how Beck had covered so much time in so few words, and praised the story’s structure. They felt that the examples given of the cat’s behaviour, all told from the owner’s viewpoint and revealing the indulgence with which we treat our pets, were very well-chosen and vivid. They liked the phrase ‘so you can feel my heart beating as your own runs out’ and the simplicity of the ending.

Photo by Beck Collett

 

Smiler by Ron Hardwick 

‘G-r-r-r-r.’ 

‘Come again?’

‘G-r-r-r-r.’

‘Are you threatening me?’

‘Of course.  I’m a smilodon.’

‘Smilodon?’

‘Are you stupid?  Smilodon. Sabre-toothed tiger.’

‘Didn’t expect to see one in Runcorn.’

‘I’ve been cloned.’

‘Cloned?’

‘What are you - an echo?’

‘Sorry.’

‘DNA - from thigh-bones, under the ice in Alaska.’

‘How come you ended up here?’

‘Millionaire from Timperley bought me. Private zoo. Escaped yesterday.’

‘You’re one of a kind.’

‘I know.  I’m so desperately lonely.  Don’t suppose you need a pet?’

‘I could do with someone to guard my collection of rare acetylene lamps.’

‘Splendid.  Name’s Smiler, by the way.’

 

JUDGES' COMMENTS:

 The judges enjoyed the nonsensical absurdism of this tale of a talking Smilodon clone who had escaped from a private zoo. Ron tells the entire story through dialogue in a clever and humorous way. The deadpan incongruity of the exotic creature paired with the mundane and highly specific references to places such as Runcorn and things such as the collection of acetylene lamps made the judges laugh.

 

Photo by Louise Wilford

JUDGES' COMMENTS ON THE OTHER DRABBLES: 

‘The New One’ by Sue Davnall

This was another sweet-centred tale, showing the tension and ultimately the intimacy between two creatures of different species. The judges liked the sentence fragmentation at the beginning and the examples of why the dog finds the kitten irritating and confusing, but felt that maybe the final sentence stated the ‘moral of the story’ a little too explicitly and could have been implied more.

‘In the wall’ by Sue Davnall

The judges were impressed by the way Sue told the story entirely through dialogue, and her confidence in leaving much to the reader’s imagination. The dialogue was realistic, and the subject was fascinating, if creepy! The writer managed to convey what was happening in the story very cleverly simply through the words characters spoke. It was simultaneously scary and humorous, and told a clear and complete tale in a very succinct way.

 

‘The Nick Of Time’ by D.H.L.Hewa

This is an interesting story with an effective ‘volta’ in the middle, as the observer of the tiger (a child, we assume) is whisked away from the glass window through which she has been watching the huge cat. The judges particularly liked the reference to Blake’s famous tiger poem and the way the writer included this almost like magic realism, as if the tiger is transformed into the creature from Blake’s poem. This intertextuality made this drabble unusual and was very effective.

 

‘The Symbol’ by D.H.L.Hewa

This is an unusual drabble in this collection in that it uses a symbolic representation of a cat to explore emotions of homesickness, national pride, loss and grief. The judges liked the use of literary flourishes such as the onomatopoeia of ‘crashes, crumbles’, and felt that the story ended on a powerful note, expressing deep feeling. The judges commented that perhaps the symbol could have been linked to the death a little more thoroughly, however.

 

‘Remember Me’ by Wendy Toole

The thing that most impressed the judges about this story was Wendy’s use of the future tense. This speculative voice, expressed with a tone of confident expectation, was very effective. It wasn’t absolutely clear who was narrating, though the judges decided it was the cat itself, and they felt that this slight ambiguity enhanced the piece. The story was beautifully structured and well-controlled, and the judges commented on how confident it sounded.

photo taken by Louise Wilford