Here’s the second blog installment from Escalator 09/10 winner Martin Ungless. He’s keeping us (and you) in the loop with how he’s getting on with the scheme and the joys (and little woes) that we hope will help his writing flourish. Read on!

A new decade and a new blog!

Well, really, a tired-old-Christmas-and-New-Year-hangover-why-haven’t-the-kids-gone-back-to-school-yet blog. I’m desperately trying to find time to write, and beautiful as this all-white world is, and wonderful as it was for school closures to surprise us with an extra week of snowman building with the kids, I had promised myself that their first week back would be my time for catching up.

Darn those pretty little frozen flakes!

As for that New Year hangover – well actually it was not as bad as it might have been… I must have behaved myself… I suppose I’m getting older. Older, yes, but wiser… well, the jury’s out. I feel like a foolish schoolboy sometimes, and I’ll tell you why.

Before Christmas I had the second session with my mentor, Michelle Spring – good to have this extra impetus against prevarication. Now, I’ve taught at University myself, taught Architecture, and I guess I got used to being on the tutor side of that equation. I had not expected to be having to learn how to learn all over again – and I was a pretty appalling  student that first time round – but, yup, I’m going through it. It’s all in the cause of better writing, but it’s none the less painful for that.

My problem was that after Michelle had given me heaps of sage advice, all of which I lapped up and determined swiftly to act upon, I did not consider carefully enough the way in which my characters, my narrator, or even the structure of my book, ought to have informed these alterations. Instead I pushed changes in willy-nilly, completely overstuffing the goose, until amendments leaked out every orifice, and my golden festive bird was turned into a stodgy christmas pud. Blimey, what a chump! Shhh, don’t tell any one. Luckily Michelle is very patient.

So the lesson I’ve learned is this, folks, always listen to your teachers while remembering that the story’s yours. Assuming you agree with the critique, don’t make changes blindly, there was a reason you didn’t include them first time. Be patient with yourself, be creative, your book will have its own internal logic, ask of that what it requires from your new ideas. And if they can’t be made to work consistently? Well then I guess I’d leave them out, or maybe write a different book.

Having learnt my lesson from these fluffings, I’m going to assume that I can fix them at a later date. I’m back to writing new stuff, and it’s a genuine joy. Oh, the piquant pleasure of discovering what a bloody mess my characters can make out of what had seemed a perfectly well wrought plot. No, seriously, it’s a joy!

Released from the necessary claustrophobia of rewriting does feel a bit like writing en plein air, and I’d swear I can even hear a little bird chirping Michelle’s words of wisdom in my ear. It’s great to be able to take advice before beginning to write, and there is a real sense of lightness when it’s someone sitting on my shoulder other than myself.

Wow! I’ve got this far without even mentioning the wonderous Arts Council. Oh yes, the news is good. Thanks to the advice which we all got through the Escalator Programme and from Helen Thorn at Arts Council England, East, I have just heard that I have been awarded an Arts Council Grant. Fan-bloomin-tastic!

All the Escalator winners applied personally, and for different things, and in my case the money will be used to ‘buy extra writing-time’,  one day each week for the next nine months. My aim is to complete a first draft of Blind Justice in this time (I shall be working on it more than that one day a week!). What a luxury, and what a prize the Escalator is – nothing guaranteed, but winning an Escalator certainly helped, because in assessing its applications the Arts Council must consider whether an ‘artists’ work meets their lofty ‘quality threshold’… I won’t tell if you don’t!

Thank you Writers’ Centre Norwich for all your help and support, this will make a very real difference to me.