R. L. Stedman

Writer

About my Books

What Makes You Happy?

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What Makes You Happy?

What Makes You Happy?
Image Source

If you follow me on Instagram or Facebook, you’ll see I’ve recently been on holiday.

I’ve been cycling through Dutch tulip fields. This was something I’ve always wanted to do, but never made the time. After all, Holland is a long, long way from New Zealand. BUT – over the last year I’ve had three friends diagnosed with cancer. All are doing fine, and are in good health, but it was a wake-up call. You know how we always say: ‘one day I’ll do …’. Well, this year I decided to make one day = some day.

windmills and clouds

The Benefits of Flowers, Travel and Appreciating Small Things

Holland, being flat, is an ideal destination for a cycling holiday. The towns and villages are close together, so refreshment is always close. The coffee is good, and the beer is better. And because everyone cycles, most drivers are well behaved.

Although Holland is a small, densely packed country, it has wild places; strips of water and fields of wildfowl: swans, geese, ducks. We surprised a few herons fishing beside the cycle trails; they flew away with long, graceful wing strokes when we came too close. The sun, though not hot, was warm enough, especially when we biked fast, into the wind.

The tulip fields were amazing, of course. Long strips of bright colour, and so densely planted it was like some heavenly painter had stooped down to paint the land. But what I hadn’t expected was the hyacinths! Spring hyacinths have a gorgeous scent, and so strong that to stand downwind felt like standing beside a perfumery. And a flower festival in a country church was so steeped in spring bulbs that to stay there too long was to invite a headache.

Scent is something that’s difficult to explain in words; it’s one of those things you have to experience to fully understand. Like flowers, and the wild birds flying. But like flowers and travel and wild birds, the smell of flowers makes me happy.

a sea of flowers

Happiness is ephemeral. The result, textbooks say, of neurotransmitters like serotonin and adrenaline. A byproduct of our environment; a positive stimulus. Marketers exploit our craving for happiness. ‘Buy this,’ they say, ‘and you will get laid/look good/be rich.’ But happiness is rarely found in impressing others. For me, happiness is in appreciating small, wonderful things — the graceful flight of a wild bird, the sight of fields of flowers, the warmth of spring sunshine.

I don’t know why I had to travel to the other side of the world to understand this. Perhaps that’s the point in travel — because everything is new and different, you notice it more.

So the main thing I learned from travel is to stop, and to take notice. To watch, to wonder and inhale.

What Can I Write About?

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What Can I Write About?

writer's notebook

1. Inspiration

Dying to write, but short of ideas? Here’s some ways to come up with stories.

If you’re very lucky, the idea strikes hard, in the middle of the night. And you wake and scribble down a story and bang, that’s it, you’re ready to go. Like me, when I had a dream of a girl, fighting in a forest. (You can read more about my dream, and what it led to here)

There might be a ‘what-if’ moment:
– What if a whole planet is sentient?
– What if the world was just a computer programme?
– What if a necklace could destroy its wearer’s heart?

Sometimes there’s a feeling of ‘tell-me-more’. Alexander McCall Smith developed Precious Ramotswe after meeting an extraordinary woman.

If you’re short of material, idea generators are available on line or in writing magazines. Tumblr has a few. I like Pinterest (although you have to watch you’re not being the same as everyone else).

Questions on School Visit

2. Perspiration

Develop your idea

Your idea becomes the premise of your novel. It’s the 5 minute plot summary, the elevator pitch.

You can do a lot with a premise. You can elaborate it into several paragraphs, into a short story, into a novel. Randy Ingermanson has an interesting technique called the Snowflake Method. I’ve played with this concept, and while I quite like it I haven’t yet extended it from basic premise into full-blown plan.

Persistence

Just remember, that an intriguing idea is only that. You need characters and conflict to make a novel. Also, you need patience.

3. Market

Some people advise checking to see if there’s a market for your idea before developing it into a novel. In an earlier blog post I said: “Markets are fickle. Write what you like.”

Two years on, I have to admit (albeit rather sadly) that this was naive.

After four years of writing and selling books, I have learned a hard truth: ignore the market at your peril. Obviously, don’t write crap. Don’t plagiarise. Don’t try to write something just because you think it will sell – mostly, you’ll be wrong – but also, don’t ignore what is selling. And if you’re considering competing story ideas, it’s helpful to think: what’s doing well.

Because if people like a work similar to what you write, chances are they might like your work, too.

4. BONUS: Extra Resources

Here’s a short e-book crammed full of resources to kick-start your writing ideas. Feel free to download!

~ Download ~

Behind the Scenes with A Skillful Warrior

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Where is A Skillful Warrior Set?

writer's notebook - behind the scenes

Paulo Coelho’s advice to aspiring writers: don’t keep a notebook. Just live your life. The things that are important will remain, and those that are not will fall away.I do keep a notebook, but not for recording thoughts and impressions. I keep my notebook for when I don’t have a computer with me. Sometimes this bothers me, as though I’m not a real writer.

But surprisingly, when it comes to story setting, I don’t need a notebook. I rely on memory. Take A Skillful Warrior, and its settings.

 

The Settings of A Skillful Warrior…

The story opens with Will, Dana, Jed and N’tombe travelling beside a river towards a moorland plateau.

Later, Will and Jed find a hotel in a fishing village just north of a town called Abervale. Nearby is a tower, like a castle, set into the sea, and accessible from the clifftop by a narrow bridge. Jed falls afoul of its owner, a woman named Ma Evans.

Rock Towers - behind the scenes

A little later there’s a scene where Dana meets a goat herder. He takes her to meet his family, and they share food and a lice-infested cave.

The last scenes of the book are in a maze-like network of narrow canyons. Once, long ago, people lived in hollow caves, carved from the rock. Now, all the caves are abandoned; the only sound is the wind, whistling sadly through the empty holes.

River Trail

…And The Real-Life Places

The river valley of my imagination was the Conwy River, in Gwynedd, North Wales. I worked as a physiotherapist in Llandudno Hospital in the 90s. Many of my patients were small-holding sheep farmers, wiry tough little men who eeked out a living in the harsh pasture of the Upper Conwy.

I went hiking in the Conwy Vale in my weekends, and gained a first-hand insight into why my patients had such bad knees!

Where the Conwy River meets the sea lies a castle, one of my favourite castles in all Wales (and there are plenty there to choose from, thanks to Edward I and his bottomless treasury), and the gorgeous medieval market-town of Conwy.

Back in the 90s I had no idea of writing a book, let alone a trilogy, so never really meant to cast these places as locations, but they crept into the book nonetheless.

Conwy Castle
Conwy Castle.

Abervale and the nearby fishing village of Towyn are totally fictional, but I used drawings of old Exeter – the Exeter from before the bombing raids of WW2 – and Chester (which was not so damaged) to form the idea of the narrow streets and over-leaning tudor-style post and beam buildings of Towyn. The tower in the sea is totally made up, although Tintagel Castle, built into the clifftops of North Cornwall, and Mary Stewart’s Merlin Trilogy (see an earlier blog post) acted as a catalyst.

The goat-herder lived in the Sinai Mountains. I holidayed on the Sinai Peninsula nearly twenty years ago – diving and snorkelling, as you do – and the camel-riding, landrover driving Bedouin were a familiar sight along the coast. Later, we travelled into Petra. If you’ve ever been to Petra you’ll understand how powerful the landscape is; how evocative, and how lonely. Once you leave the beaten tourist trail you realise just how vast the place was. Once it must have been simply crowded with people. High in the cliff walls are thousands of holes – cave homes, now empty. Except for the lice that are legendary among backpackers.

Petra
Petra, Image by Pete Rojwongsuriya from Bucketlistly Photos

In one of these lonely caves we met with a goat-herder and his family. This wasn’t their regular home – the government had moved all the inhabitants away – but periodically they’d return, bringing their animals and their furnishings with them. They welcomed us into their cave-home, plied us with hot sweet tea and offered to be our guides for the day. Such hospitality is common among the Bedu, or so I’m told.

It’s strange how tiny events, not even important at the time, remain in the subconscious and eventually make their way into a story.

Makes me glad I didn’t bother with a notebook.

An Exclusive Snapshot: The Backstory to the SoulNecklace Stories

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Just as Every Person has a Past…

…every story has a backstory.

Because nothing really starts (and nothing really ends), my stories are just a snippet of a grander, larger whole. I plan the larger whole just as I plan the snippet that constitutes the little pieces that make up the books. Today I’m sharing a part of the backstory of The SoulNecklace Stories.

 

Imagine…
A castle on a hill. A small girl plays a chasing game along its ramparts. Mid-stride, the girl pauses.
‘Daddy,’ she stares at the castle tower. ‘Look! I see someone!’
As her father grabs her into his arms, his crown falls. ‘No, Dana. There’s nobody.’
Peeping over his shoulder, the girl sees: a flash of red at the tower window, and a figure smiling. Her father is wrong. There is someone there.
‘She’s waving at me,’ Dana whispers.
Her father hugs her tightly…

 

My story-world begins in fire and ice. First came the fire, and then the ice, and then, much later, the fire returned. This second time the fire came it changed the world, and my story-world split away from our own Earth. So my story-world, the world of The SoulNecklace Stories, is similar to our own, but is also very different.

With the second fire came the Kamaye, creatures of great evil. Seeing the world, so beautiful, so small, they wanted it for their own. The Kamaye struck a bargain with a powerful emperor: they would ensure he would never die, provided he gave them his eternal obedience.

Of course, the emperor agreed (after all, who wouldn’t want eternal life?) and so the Arm of the Eternal was born. A side note: the emperor should have asked for eternal youth, but being young when he made his choice, he did not consider the effects of age. Youth was all he knew; he took it for granted that it would remain.

Over time the emperor grew old, but did not die. And being old and full of malice and a most efficient ruler, the Arm of the Eternal gradually spread throughout the world. Eventually the entire planet came under his domain. Except for one small island, far out to the west.

 

There is a castle on this island, and a tower within the castle and a woman within this tower. The woman wears a necklace, and the necklace protects the castle from the Emperor. This woman is called the Guardian.

There’s one catch.

There’s always a catch.

 

The necklace protects the land by taking her strength and magnifying it, but …At the base of the necklace is a ruby. The ruby lies over the wearer’s heart. Over time the ruby becomes the heart; the wearer’s ribs dissolve and her heart dissolves and they grow into the ruby, and the Guardian becomes the necklace. Unfortunately, it’s impossible to live without a heart, so when this happens the body of the Guardian dies. Another Guardian must be found.

Almost always the Guardian comes from the royal family. Almost always she is the oldest daughter of the King.

As The SoulNecklace stories begin, Dana is the daughter of the King.

At the beginning of A Necklace of Souls, Dana wakes from a dream of a necklace and an old woman, dying…

This is only part of the backstory. There is more. Because nothing really starts, and nothing ever ends.

 

Everything you ever wanted to know about The Prankster and the Ghost

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(but were afraid to ask)

spooky stories
image source

Why did you decide to write this book?

My son was on holiday at a school camp. On on the first day, there were three accidents: a girl was caught in the doors of the bus, the same bus nearly ran over a girl’s arm and my son broke his wrist on the confidence course. ‘Mum,’ he said, when we were at the hospital, ‘it was like the camp was haunted!’

This got me wondering: what would a haunted school camp be like? I ended up writing a short story about this, and in this story was an old school house. The idea of a haunted schoolhouse stuck with me, so although I never used the first short story, I recycled it into Prankster.

Are any of the characters in Prankster based on real people?

Not really, although the inspector was strongly influenced by an old teacher of mine. In the olden days, when I was young, teachers were often scarey (unlike the lovely people they are today :)). So I suppose Prankster was a way of getting even with someone I used to find totally terrifying!

Why did you write that Jamie came from Scotland? Why couldn’t he come from another country?

There were three reasons why I chose Scotland. The first is because I live in Dunedin, which has a strong Scottish heritage. The second is because of a true story: my son was starting at a new school, and I went along with him for his first day. A boy in the class was really friendly, but unfortunately, neither of us could understand him, because his Scottish accent was so strong! The other kids had to translate for him! Which made me think about how isolating it can be to have no-one understand you. Parents move kids around the world – mostly without asking them first and this can be really hard on the kid, because they have to go to a new school, and perhaps no-one will understand you. I wanted to use these ideas in a story. The third and final reason for using Scotland was because of a (true) ghost story that a friend told me about Edinburgh Castle. You can read about it here.

Do you speak with a Scottish accent?

No! But my boss does (he’s from near Glasgow), so everything Jamie said I mentally imagined my boss saying first! I listened to Scottish podcasts and BBC radio too but they weren’t much use, because when the Scots really get going I find them almost impossible to understand!

Which part of writing Prankster did you find the hardest?

Chapter Twelve was definitely the hardest part to write. This is the scene in Jamie’s classroom. In this chapter the Ghosts start to write on the whiteboard, Milly vanishes into the iPad and Tayla realises that he can travel through the internet.  The reason I found this scene so hard was because it has about eight characters in it, and they’re all talking at once! I ended up breaking the scene into little pieces, and each piece only having two or three people talking at one time. So there would be Becky talking to Tayla, then Tayla arguing with Milly and then Jamie talking to Tayla. This kept it a bit simpler! Roald Dahl worked a bit like that in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, I think, and now I know why. If you want to see what it’s like to read a scene with lots of people in it, try and write one, and you’ll see exactly what I mean!

How did you come up with all the practical jokes?

The internet! – google and youtube…

 

 

3 Ghostly Facts Behind My Ghost Story

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Do You Believe in Ghosts?

Spooky Image - From Deposit Photos
Image from Deposit Photos. Used under license.

My new book, The Prankster and The Ghost, is a fun-filled story about ghosts and practical jokes and friendship. While Prankster is totally made up, it does include some actual ghost stories…

Ghost Story One:

In Prankster, Jamie remembers seeing a strange lady in Edinburgh castle. This is based an actual encounter. My friend was on a tour through Edinburgh Castle and was creeped out by a strange lady in an old-fashioned dress. No one else could see this woman, but the tour guide was not surprised. ‘Oh yes,’ she said, ‘she’s often seen.’

Ghost Story Two:

I’ve worked in hospitals all my working life and thirty years ago there were still many Victorian buildings. There were plenty of tales of figures in white, or unexplained drafts, or a feeling of clutching hands. These old hospitals were the spookiest places; they had long echoing corridors and high dusty ceilings.  We didn’t like being called out at night in those wards! But even in modern facilities there are rooms with histories of unexplained figures being seen by patients, and there are still places where staff prefer not to go – especially at night, when the hospital is quiet. I’ve never heard a story of hospital ghosts being violent; it’s more like ghosts are part of the hospital, rather like the furniture.

Ghost Story Three:

In Prankster, Tayla floats out of his body. This is based on something a patient told me – when he’d had a heart attack; he’d floated free his body. He had returned when he was resuscitated. He said it was quite peaceful, and that he’d had no fear or pain (until returning to his body. He didn’t like the resuscitation so much!) I took this idea a little further in Prankster, though – I thought a kid might find floating around intensive care kind of boring. Surely, a floating, invisible boy would do exactly what Tayla did – go straight for the computers!

And now you’ve read this – do you believe in ghosts?