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)