Elin Gregory

I’ve been out of bed for half an hour – awful night thanks to the cat who spent several hours thundering around the house and is now curled up on my lap sleeping the sleep of the totally knackered. And in the half hour I’ve been up I’ve been very severely plot bunnied. Normally the stealthy little so and sos creep up on me over months so i get multiple ideas that coalesce into something useful but often I’ve forgotten where they come from. Bt today they all happened so fast that I thought I’d share the thought process.

It’s all Nigella Lawson’s fault.

Photo from BBC iChef

Yes you can smile, you baggage!

So there I was under the cat, cwtched up to the dog, zombily sipping tea with Saturday Kitchen on the telly when Nigella said something about not wanting something to come to a ‘rollicking boil’.

Wham! There was a title AND a character. Rollo Boyle, Irish, of course, a groom turned off by his last master who moved up in the world and wanted someone posher and more servile to run his stable, so, totally pissed off, Rollo heads for home but ends up – wrong place, wrong time – hunted as a highwayman.

Charles Keeping of course, from his illustration series for Albert Noyes rollicking poem

Thump – now I’ve got that damned ‘riding riding riding’ hoofbeat rhythm running through my mind.

Naturally Rollo is a gentleman highwayman, rather than the reality which were mugging bastards who’d smash the fillings from your teeth if they saw the flash of gold. Maybe something along the lines of Jack Carstares in Heyer’s Black Moth?

There are better covers but this is the one on MY copy.

The Black Moth reads like the ecstatic outpourings of a dedicated fangirl – and that’s about right because it’s Heyer’s first book and she was only 19 when it came out. So much angst and passion!!

*considers* naaaaah I cant do that but I can have a bit of fun with the trope. Naturally Rollo must have a great love and make an amazing ride to save him but who could that be? Working on the principle of Sellar’s and Yeatman’s adage that history is what you remember, how many highwaymen do people know about – errrrrrmmmmm – YES Swift Nick!

So Swift Nick was Dick Turpin’s apocryphal sidekick and I don’t see why Nick, Dick and Rollo can’t be a love triangle. Come to that Turpin can be the villain, Rollo’s past employer be a receiver of stolen goods, and at the end Rollo and Nick embark on a ship from Bristol to the Indies where they can enter into happy matelotage.

Believe me when I say that if you read the Newgate Calendar some of the REAL guys did things that the average m/m reader would say ‘no too far fetched’.

And highwaymen were popular subjects of popular songs:

Did you ever hear tell of Rollicking Boyle,
A hero of great renown,
Who boldly bestraddled a galloping nag,
Eastward of London Town

Now when he rode on the highway,
He always had money in store.
And whatever he took from the rich
He freely gave to the poor.

He ne’er robbed a poor man of tuppence
And he ne’er took innocent life.
But the militia took to the road in his wake
Because he’d ne’er take a wife.

And probably a whole load more verses but my head is spinning now and I need another lie down.

Anyhow, yeah – that sort of violent invasive plot bunnying happens to me frequently.

So remember today, because if ever a book called The Ballad of Rollicking Boyle comes out you’ll know you can blame Nigella Lawson.

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I see a lot of  How To Be A Writer posts and they always cheer me up.

The internet is full of other people who seem just as anxious as I am to nail down the process into a series of simple instructions. Wouldn’t that be great? Wouldn’t it be super if you could buy “On Writing” by Stephen King, follow it page by page and end up with a novel, very much as one might follow a recipe to make apple crumble [peach cobbler if you come from a place where apple crumble does not exist].

Sadly it doesn’t work like that. There are too many variables. Every single writer has something about themselves that nobody else can quite manage to emulate. Every single writer NEEDS to work in their own particular, unique and sometimes peculiar way.

• Scribbled secret notebooks, and wild typewritten pages, for yr own joy
• Submissive to everything, open, listening
• Try never get drunk outside yr own house
• Be in love with yr life
• Something that you feel will find its own form
• Be crazy dumbsaint of the mind
• Blow as deep as you want to blow
• Write what you want bottomless from bottom of the mind
• The unspeakable visions of the individual
• No time for poetry but exactly what is
• Visionary tics shivering in the chest
• In tranced fixation dreaming upon object before you
• Remove literary, grammatical and syntactical inhibition
• Like Proust be an old teahead of time
• Telling the true story of the world in interior monolog
• The jewel center of interest is the eye within the eye
• Write in recollection and amazement for yourself
• Work from pithy middle eye out, swimming in language sea
• Accept loss forever
• Believe in the holy contour of life
• Struggle to sketch the flow that already exists intact in mind
• Don’t think of words when you stop but to see picture better
• Keep track of every day the date emblazoned in yr morning
• No fear or shame in the dignity of yr experience, language & knowledge
• Write for the world to read and see yr exact pictures of it
• Bookmovie is the movie in words, the visual American form
• In praise of Character in the Bleak inhuman Loneliness
• Composing wild, undisciplined, pure, coming in from under, crazier the better
• You’re a Genius all the time
• Writer-Director of Earthly movies Sponsored & Angeled in Heaven

Elmore Leonard’s “10 Rules for Writing”

So now you know! I bet that’s a sure fire recipe for writing something that looks a bit similar to Jack Kerouac.

Sure you can follow Elmore Leonard’s advice and that will be fine if you want to write stuff set in the same kind of places and periods as Elmore Leonard  enjoys writing about. But the tight terse laconic style that is fine for hard bitten PIs investigating contemporary crime capers is going to look a bit odd if you apply it to Regency romances.

I’d be inclined to read the advice – some of Elmore’s ten are spot on – but how the hell do you guess which bits readers skip? I know that I often skip the bits that other readers say are the best parts.  What do you think?  Sing in your own voice or try and lip synch to one of the great operatic tenors who write ‘how to’ books?

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