Christine Coleman tells us about her 25-year journey to become a published author
Christine Coleman
Christine Coleman writes novels and poetry as well as teaching creative writing to adults. Her debut novel was The Dangerous Sports Euthanasia Society, which was published by Transita in 2005. Her current writing project is her blog, www.christinecoleman.net, which tells the story of her writing career, including her search for a literary agent.
What inspired you to become a writer?
I’ve loved writing stories and poems since I was a child - I’d guess that my love of writing was partly inspired by my love of reading, and partly by my mother - she used to make up long, rambling bed-time fairy stories for us that continued over several evenings and I took it for granted that anyone could make up their own stories if they wanted to.
Did you receive any formal training?
Not really. Apart from English lessons at school, I think I taught myself by writing - it’s been a very long apprenticeship, and I’m still learning. I decided to join a creative writing course, but before I could do that I was asked to take over an Adult Education class myself.
One of the books on writing that helped me to prepare material for my sessions was The Way to Write, by Fairfax and Moat (founders of the Arvon Foundation).
Years down the line, I went on an Arvon course myself and that led to all kinds of opportunities for me to develop my writing - both poetry and fiction. One of these was a Creative Writing M.A. at Nottingham Trent University. I’d joined this because I wanted the challenge of working with others at that kind of level and I’ve learned a huge amount since then from my own writing projects and getting feedback from other writers.
How did you find your publisher?
That’s a rather a long story. I’ve posted quite a lot about my hunt for an agent - probably the most relevant post on this subject is the one headed There’s a Hole in my Bucket.
The novelist Sara Maitland, is one of the readers for The Literary Consultancy and while giving me some constructive comments on my novel in December 2004, she also informed me that a new publisher called Transita was about to launch its first few books in April 2005, and she felt that my book was likely to appeal to them. It did!
What was your first published book about?
The Dangerous Sports Euthanasia Society is about Agnes Borrowdale, seventy-something woman who escapes from an old people’s home where her son, Jack, and his new partner, have placed her.
Agnes’s quest to find her grandchildren is complicated by unexpected encounters. These new friends include: Joe, the helpful lorry driver; Molly, the garrulous hotel-owner; Gazza, the student; and Felix, the retired barrister’s clerk, whom Agnes pulls back from attempted suicide.
Hoping to rekindle Felix’s desire to live, she invents the Dangerous Sports Euthanasia Society, but soon fears that this falsehood, having acquired a momentum of its own, will end in tragedy.
What inspires you?
All sorts of things - an over heard snatch of conversation - watching small children absorbed in play - Mozart, Chopin, Vivaldi - a new discovery about the way the brain works - the slant of sunlight through leaves - Mainly, it’s people, people, people - trying to understand what makes them tick.
Where are we likely to see your work?
The Dangerous Sports Euthanasia Society is still available on Amazon (where there are 26 favourable reviews and one terrible one! (That one was a bit of a shock at first - but then I took it as part of the authentic experience of being a published author).
On my Amazon page, it says it’s temporarily out of stock. This is probably because Transita, have sadly gone out of business. However, there seem to be lots of copies available on the site from other sellers. It’s also available in public libraries. I’ll be setting up Paypal on my site soon, so people can buy it direct from me at a greatly reduced price.
As for my poetry, I’ve got a Poem of the Week category on my blog, and there are links to some of my other poems on the My Poetry page. My small collection, Single Travellers
, (published by Flarestack 2004) is also on Amazon
What are the biggest challenges of writing?
I find that poetry and novel writing pose different challenges, but there’s at least one that they have in common, and that is: starting from scratch. For me, the difficulty in writing poetry is that there are so many occasions of facing the blank page. I can spend hours at my computer, and come away with virtually nothing to show for it - the ideas and feelings have refused to get channelled into words.
Starting from scratch with a novel is a bigger challenge, but at least I can scribble down loads of notes about the main themes and the characters, their motivations, secrets and critical turning points. Once I’ve started on the story itself, I see-saw between extremes of excitement and dread. Even with three completed novels behind me, when I started on my fourth novel, Paper Lanterns, I realised with a shock that being a ‘published author’ didn’t mean that I now had the secret of how to write a novel. If anything, this one was even more of a challenge.
What do you enjoy most about it?
The challenge of writing! To be more specific, what I enjoy most about writing poetry is when I manage to find the exact phrases or words that will capture the essence of the poem - the way it reveals itself as a kind of recognition. That sounds a bit woolly, and sometimes, when I re-read it the next day, it turns out to be fools’ gold, but when it works…!
The best aspect of writing a novel is that I’ve always got somewhere to go in my head, working out part of the plot, or getting inside the head of one of the characters to discover more about her or him. I tend to have a general idea of where the book is heading, but I write to find out the details of what actually happens. Even if I’m temporarily at a loss for the next development, I can go back and re-work a previous passage.
That’s something else I really enjoy - I love re-working a part of a paragraph or chapter, just as I enjoy the fine-tuning of a poem.
What has been the highlight of your career so far?
Without a doubt, it was the launch of my novel, The Dangerous Sports Euthanasia Society in October 2005. That was one of the best evenings of my life.
What advice would you offer an aspiring writer?
Don’t try to be ‘a writer’. Just write. Keep a notebook and jot down details of anything you hear or see (or taste, touch or smell) that interests you.
Read a lot of contemporary poetry or fiction. Write your stories, poems or general musings. Re-read them a day or two later and highlight the parts that you particularly like. Put them away for a few weeks, and see if you still like the same things.
The chances are, that some of those bits don’t strike you as being quite as good as you’d first thought. Be ruthless. Cut them out. Don’t worry. Just carry on writing. Maybe get hold of The Way to Write. I’ve also been helped enormously by Dorothea Brande’s classic book, Becoming a Writer.
What are you working on now?
I’ve just finished another novel Paper Lanterns. As I’ve mentioned already, my previous publisher, Transita, has gone out of business, and having finally accepted the stark reality that I’m not going to be taken on by anyone else, I’m now working at producing the book myself.
For more on Christine please visit www.christinecoleman.net
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