Write now

 When people talk to the Nottingham-based novelist Nicola Monaghan about her fiction, the most common questions they ask are: How do you get ideas? And, how do you start writing?

“What they don’t realise is that for me they are the same question,” the award-winning author of the Killing Jar and Starfishing told attendees at a workshop on writing a novel held in January on the University of Nottingham’s Year of the Writer Programme.

She said that as she writes new ideas occur to her and as the characters and story develop the whole project starts to become more substantial. “The best thing to do is to put you pen on the paper and just write,” he said. 

Several of her pieces started out as exercises on creative writing courses, including the Killing Jar. One piece was inspired by a suggestion by the late Julia Casterton, who encouraged Monaghan to revisit scenes from her childhood, although the published story was eight years in the making.

Monaghan said that her own method of creating fiction relied on a lot of trial and error. Once she has an idea for a novel, she likes to write an unplotted piece of up to 15,000 words. This helps her develop the central characters, their world and provides episodes of the story that may appear in the finished narrative, she said.

She then plans out the whole work and starts again, keeping a flexible approach about how the story is to develop. A lot of people get stuck because they try to edit their work before they have finished a first draft, she said. She expects to spend at least as much time on the editing of each of three of the drafts she makes until the manuscript is ready. “Don’t edit too early,” she said. “Just keep going forward.”

Comments

[Neil]

Thanks for another great post!