Author Nick Churton tells us how he became a binge writer: ‘I wrote when I could at home, on a plane or anywhere I had time’.
I sat with my notebook in my local cathedral. It was evening and I had thirty minutes to write a piece on a meeting between two people. Who they were and why they were meeting I didn’t know.
A few weeks previously I had enrolled in a creative writing class run by the cathedral’s education department. Before I started I was curious but not convinced. My work in property involved a great deal of writing – press releases, commentaries, etc. So I knew I could write 300 words on my subject but writing 301 plus words on anything but my subject was new territory for me.
Did these two people meeting in the building know each other? What sort of meeting was it? These and other questions couldn’t be answered in the time given but I really enjoyed sitting in the quiet ancient cathedral with my thoughts, notebook and pen.
Thwarted by Time
Several weeks later everyone in my writing group was asked to randomly select a photographic portrait from a pile on a table and then write about the image. I chose a black and white photo of a young, intelligent-looking woman with the hair style and clothes of, I guessed, the late 1930s or early 40s. Who was she? What was her name? Again I was thwarted by time.
It was some days later when I was alone on a longish car journey that I revisited these unanswered questions. As I drove names came to me; the two in the cathedral were called Felix and Dimity and they were meeting for the first time in decades. Slowly their personalities and back stories developed. The woman in the photo was Eliza and she was still alive and in her nineties. Thoughts were surging through my head – too many to contain. I had to stop. I found a roadside McDonald’s, took my notebook and pen, ordered coffee and wrote for three hours straight. It was my first time visiting the zone and I was hooked.
I had just banked the first hours of the many hundreds it would take for me to even begin to understand the craft of creative writing.
Creative Writing
I found it rather absurd to think that without any formal training I could write a book rather than short stories, but the more I wrote about my characters and used my experience with historic houses the more my manuscript began to resemble a book. Over the next weeks and months, and suffering from an enormous bout of imposter syndrome, I ploughed on. Of course what I wrote was rubbish but the more I learned and the more I edited the less like rubbish it became. What I was doing was beginning the journey that every writer, good, bad or indifferent, has to take.
I wrote when I could at home, on a plane or anywhere I had time. I was becoming a binge writer. Snatching minutes here and there was no good. I craved five, six, seven or even eight hours. I needed to be in the zone.
It took years of rewrites, editing and polishing to get Witch’s Lawn into shape enough to self-publish. Why did I self-publish? Because I am late to this party and haven’t the time to scout out literary agent. I haven’t the years to wait for an email that might never come. As if writing a book isn’t hard enough, getting published I’ve found is harder still. I had to have some sort of control over the process.
Writing a Book is Hard
Writing a book is hard. It is a huge undertaking. I had to learn how to write dialogue, how to narrate, how to show not tell. I had to understand pace and I had to develop characters that a reader would care about. Then there was the plot. In Witch’s Lawn, a house and family history mystery, I had to write five Elizabethan style sonnets that contained clues to a mystery. I had never written a sonnet before, never mind an Elizabethan one. I learnt how to package my words in fourteen lines, traditionally written in iambic pentameter with ten syllables per line and an alternating rhyming scheme. It was like three-dimensional chess. But I walked in the steps of Shakespeare and they are pretty incredible steps.
What have I learned from writing? I’ve learned that I didn’t leave my imagination behind in childhood, that I do have a book in me – in fact I have a series – and I’ve learned that imposter syndrome be damned, I am a writer and I have the book to prove it.
What next? The Art Department is now available on Amazon. It’s a sequel to Witch’s Lawn. Ahead will come Centenary and Mizzen Top. I cannot think I will stop writing now. I’ve become addicted to the zone.
(c) Nick Churton
www.nickchurton.com
About The Art Department:
The thrilling sequel to Witch’s Lawn.
It’s 2022 and Dimity and Felix have barely settled into married life when they are caught up in a high-stakes Secret Service investigation led by MI6 chief Sir Bidian de Butts. Russian billionaire Yuri Volkov, flagged as a potential threat to UK security, commissions Felix’s firm to restore his newly purchased Cotswold manor house. This gives Sir Bidian – under the watchful eye of his mentor, Eliza Arrow, Felix’s grandmother – a chance to get closer to the oligarch.
Felix is drawn into The Art Department, a covert operation at Somerset House that uses Volkov’s love of fine art to uncover his true intentions. Meanwhile, over in Russia, retired spy Róisín Kelly continues to send intelligence under the codename Mara, and when she signals her desire to leave the Motherland, a dangerous operation is launched to bring her home.
As worlds, cultures and loyalties collide, Dimity, Felix, Eliza and Sir Bidian discover that, once again, nothing is ever quite as it seems.
Order your copy online here.
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