Just William - and how to succeed

School heads are a redoubtable breed. I’ve met loads in my time and most of them have bowled me over with their enthusiasm, clear-sighted focus and commitment to education.

On one occasion I interviewed the super-inspiring head of a girls’ school. She wore leopard-print stilettos, knew every girl in the school by name and when she spotted a pupil using her mobile phone during school hours (strictly forbidden) showed her supreme displeasure by raising an eyebrow just ever so slightly. She was one of the most impressive people I’d met in a long time.

But quite apart from the shoes and the raised eyebrows, the thing that’s stuck in my mind ever since is the advice she gave to her pupils.

“If you want to do something then set your mind to it and make it happen,” she told them. “Think ‘I can and I will succeed.’”

The idea sounded like Just William’s arch enemy Violet Elizabeth Bott (“I’ll thcream and thcream ‘till I’m thick”) stamping her foot to get her own way but I reckon there’s something in it. So here are  my aims and objectives for the day. I’m going to write two articles, finish my new e-book, research a press release and book my car in for a service.

Will the plan work? Hmmm, I’m not so sure…

A parents' guide to bringing up teenagers - by teenagers

What a brilliant idea. As parents scratch their heads in puzzlement about their teenagers, two 17 year old girls have written a new guide to help them navigate their way through the tricky teenage years.

Louise Bedwell and Megan Lovegrove (above), who are both sixth formers at Nonsuch High School for Girls in Cheam, spent six months researching their book. It’s called Teenagers Explained: A Manual for Parents by Teenagers and not only is it full of sage advice, but it tackles everything from social networking and mobile phones to friends, clothes and messy bedrooms. All the things that make parents tear their hair out, in fact. 

Above all, the two girls reckon that three things are crucial when it comes to understanding teenagers - communication, understanding and compromise.

“We wanted it to be a real ‘tell it like it is’ manual from teenagers’ perspective,” says Louise. “Teenagers can feel awkward and self-conscious and that can make it difficult for them to talk about sensitive issues so they end up bottling things up, which makes them stressed and moody.

“It can lead to those awful tense moments and stand-offs, usually followed by big emotional explosions which end up in blazing rows. Parents need to read the signs – there are times to talk and times not to. But teens also have to realise that their parents are usually only asking out of concern and in your best interest.”

So, if you’ve got a teenager in the house, here are some tips from Louise and Megan:

1. Listen to us. Pay attention to what we say. Don’t ask questions about stuff we’ve just told you as it feels like you don’t care.
2. Chat a lot. It doesn’t matter what it’s about.
3. Bribery by means of food (brownies always go down well) is a good idea, from encouraging to talk with you or to reward them for doing schoolwork.
4. Don’t patronise. Treat your teen as a fellow adult (when we deserve it).
5. Support us emotionally, whether we need a big bear hug or someone to moan to.
6. Don’t try and dictate our lives. Be there to guide us through.
7. Don’t laugh at your teen, whether at their choice of clothes, the way they act or the fact that everything is one big drama. Try to see things from a teenage perspective.
8. Pretending to be “down with the kids” is not funny, especially in public or in front of our friends!
9. Don’t pressure your teen to bring their boy/girlfriend home (it will make us more likely not to).
10. Lastly, cliché, but it will get better. Every nice, civilised person you know was once a moody teenager.

Teenagers Explained: A Manual for Parents by Teenagers by Louise Bedwell and Megan Lovegrove (White Ladder Press, £9.99)

A round-up of writing tips from top authors

Over the past week, I’ve collected some brilliant tips on how to write from novelists at the top of their game.

Jill Mansell says she doesn’t write in chapters. She writes her novels first, then goes back and looks for natural breaks afterwards. Veronica Henry declares all writers get writer’s block at some point and if it happens to her, she goes for a walk along the beach or takes a nap. And Rachel Joyce says that if a brilliant idea strikes her when she’s driving she asks one of her children to write it down for her – she never simply assumes she’ll remember it.

If you’d like to read more of their tips, here are my three writing posts from this week – and good luck!

Katie Fforde, Jill Mansell, Veronica Henry and Fiona Walker at the Chipping Norton Literary Festival

Veronica Henry on Discipline, Displacement and Dipsomania

Rachel Joyce in conversation about The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry

PS. My absolute favourite comes from a Robert McCrum piece in The Observer I stumbled across this morning. “Put a body on page 1,” is his advice.

Friday book review - Silver by Andrew Motion

From Robert Louis Stevenson’s classic novel to countless movies, we all know the Treasure Island story. There’s something timeless about the tale of Jim Hawkins, who sets sail across the world with the devious one-legged Long John Silver and a mutinous crew in search of buried treasure.

Stevenson intended to write a sequel but never did, so now Motion has taken up the challenge. His book starts in 1802, 40 years after the events of Treasure Island, and this time round it’s the story of Jim Hawkins’ son, confusingly also called Jim.

Young Jim’s mother died in childbirth and he lives with his father at an inn called the Hispaniola (after the ship that sailed to Treasure Island) in the Thames marshes. He spends his days roaming the estuaries, running errands and listening to his father’s memories of life on the high seas.

But one night, Jim spots a mysterious stranger beckoning to him from her rowing boat. The girl introduces herself as Natty, daughter of the infamous Long John Silver, and persuades him to go and meet her father. Long John Silver’s a bedridden wreck of a man now but even so, when he instructs the young pair to sail to Treasure Island and find the remaining treasure they jump to his command.

Jim steals his father’s original map and the duo set off across the Atlantic on a ship chartered by Long John Silver. But their voyage turns into a nightmare when they finally drop anchor and discover that Treasure Island is not as uninhabited as they expected.

Motion originally set out to write a children’s book but Silver is a novel that will appeal to readers of all ages. Beautifully written and genuinely exciting, it features noble seamen (including a sailor amusingly called Stevenson), murderous pirates and stories of love, heroism and mind-numbing cruelty.

Best of all, Motion’s novel stays true to Stevenson’s original. His descriptions of the Thames marshes and the bizarre island landscape are outstanding - as is his depiction of Jim’s realisation that he’s never going to be the same innocent boy again.

Silver by Andrew Motion (Jonathan Cape, £12.99)

Rachel Joyce in conversation about The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry

The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry is one of those special books that only comes along once in a while. Male or female, young or old, I can’t think of anyone who wouldn’t love it.

Rachel Joyce’s debut novel has inspired such devotion that on a drizzly Monday night (World Book Night, in fact) scores of us grabbed our umbrellas and dashed off to Abingdon Library in Oxfordshire to hear more about her writing.

Rachel was introduced by Alison Barrow, director of media relations at publishing house Transworld, who confided that during the course of her 25-year publishing career she has never experienced “such love for a book” from readers.

The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry is the touching, uplifting story of a man in his sixties who leaves home one morning to post a letter to Queenie Hennessy, a friend he hasn't seen for 20 years. She's dying, and on the spur of the moment he resolves to walk from one end of the country to the other to see her. He has no walking boots, no map, no compass and no mobile phone, but he’s adamant that he’s going to keep on walking till he gets there.

Rachel, a tiny figure with a mass of dark hair, started her career as an actress. Over the past 16 years she’s written more than 20 original afternoon plays for BBC Radio 4 and, as she told us this week, The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry began life as a radio play. She starting writing it for her father when he was dying of cancer - "but I'm not sure he knew." After it was broadcast she realised that there was a lot she hadn’t said in the play “that I wanted to say” and decided to turn the 7,000-word drama into a 100,000-word novel. Best of all, it meant she could write about what was going on in her characters’ heads, which she couldn’t do in a play.

It took her a year to write the book and she had no idea if anyone would ever read it. As she explained: “Just as Harold’s walk was a leap of blind faith, so writing the book was for me.” She'd throw herself into writing the moment her four children left for school each morning and was completely taken over by it. Sometimes, when she got ideas while she was driving, she’d ask her children to jot them down for her. “I couldn’t stop thinking about it,” she said. “It was like having knitting in my head. You know you won’t have any peace till it’s done. I felt I had to write a book with my heart in it – true to what I feel, true to what I see, true to what I love.”

Rachel is ultra-disciplined when she’s writing. She works in a shed (now painted “an aesthetically pleasing pale blue”) in the garden of her Gloucestershire home. “But sometimes I have to be at the kitchen table,” she said. “And I have sometimes been known to write at the cinema while my children are watching a film.”

From Harold Fry’s starting point in Devon to his Berwick-upon-Tweed destination, Rachel writes beautifully about the English countryside.  A Londoner by background, she moved out of the city when, pregnant with her third child, she suddenly found herself pushing a buggy across the South Circular to get to “a tiny green patch.” Now she and her husband live on a farm in a peaceful valley - she’d left her children at home that evening feeding four orphan lambs. “When I was writing the book I was writing about my feelings about the land and the sky,” she said. “I increasingly don’t want to be inside.”

The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry by Rachel Joyce (Doubleday, £12.99)

PS. A huge thank you to the lovely staff at Abingdon Library for saving me a ticket.

Veronica Henry on Discipline, Displacement and Dipsomania at the Chipping Norton Literary Festival

It’s all very well having a stack of ideas, but how on earth do you carve out the time and space to get cracking with your book?

After hearing the brilliant Contemporary Women’s Fiction discussion at the Chipping Norton Literary Festival I blogged about yesterday, I hared down the street to hear novelist Veronica Henry’s talk on Discipline, Displacement and Dipsomania.

Veronica – known to everyone as Ronnie – is well-placed to talk about the day-to-day reality of writing for a living. She lives in north Devon with her husband and three sons and for the last 20 years has combined her hectic family life with a hugely successful career as a scriptwriter and novelist. Her latest book, Marriage and Other Games, is out in paperback and her new one, The Long Weekend, will be published in July.

First of all, she told us, “writing is a business and you have to treat it as a business. It’s not just about floating around with a pen and a notebook.”

But how do you go about combining “creativity and real life?” Well, for a start, said Ronnie, you need “head space” - the time and space to get on with your writing. That means no distractions – no mobile phone, no TV, no internet. She sometimes negotiates three days away in a rented cottage or hotel by herself so that she can write without any interruptions. “Your productivity shoots up,” she said. “I can write 10,000 to 15,000 words in three days.”

Personal space is vital too. Ronnie writes on the dining table in her open-plan house and uses a Mac PowerBook. She backs everything up on Dropbox and has an inspiration board where she pins pictures of what her characters look like, where they live, even their wallpaper, and “a smallish library” (dictionary, thesaurus, book of names, brochures, index cards).

She also reckons writers have to be ultra-disciplined about how they manage their days. She works office hours and has a target of when she is going to finish a book – “a mental meter about where I am aiming to be.”

Ronnie mentioned a few apps she finds useful. Pomodoro (Italian for tomato!) is a timer that sits in the corner of your computer screen. Apparently 25 minutes is the perfect time to complete a task so Pomodoro sets the timer for 25 minutes and at the end of it you can allow yourself a five-minute break.

And what about Twitter? Ronnie agreed that on the one hand it’s “an amazing tool for writers” and “just like having all your mates in the room with you,” but there’s no doubt it’s a massive distraction too. It was news to me but there are apps available (Freedom is one) to stop you sneaking on to Facebook and Twitter.

When it comes to writer’s block, Ronnie told us that “everyone gets it, and if they say they don’t, they are lying.” Her strategies to combat it include going for a walk on the beach or taking a power nap. “Don’t let it paralyse you,” she declared.

Finally she had a word of warning about writers’ clothes. She confessed to wearing “skanky leggings, my brother’s old rugby shirt and a pair of tights to tie up my fringe” while she works. But, she said, “try and dress up sometimes. Treat yourself as a real person and dress for success.” Dress for success - my new mantra.