Ask the Author: Victoria Lamb
Answered Questions (3)
Victoria Lamb
Hi Areej, I'd love there to be a movie based on them - though I think they would make a better television series, actually. I'm hoping the series will continue in the future, but at the moment, can't promise when that will happen. We are all at the mercy of publishers! All the best, Victoria
Victoria Lamb
Hi Cintia! So sorry I missed your previous question! (I get hundreds of emails a day, the notification must have slipped past me.)
This sounds like a question of confidence. I was blocked as a poet for about three or four years once, and what released me was having my fifth child. I'm not suggesting you should have a baby! But there was something about that 'creative' event that freed the poet in me.
Maybe try a different kind of creativity for a while, see if it suggests things for your writing? I'm thinking painting, drawing, photography, sculpture ... Anything that will engage the artist in you but in a different medium. That might help you reach the blocked words in your head.
I am rarely blocked as a novelist, except when I'm being too lazy to write. But I see prose-writing as more of a job, not an art, and I think that helps me not to be blocked. (You just turn up and do your job, don't you? You don't agonize about it.) So if the above 'creative' suggestion does not work, maybe a more prosaic, technical approach might work instead. For instance, you could use writing exercises to ease you back. Write 100 words from the point of view of a particular character or object (the life story or view point of a coin in someone's pocket is a popular one). Or simply write any old words for ten minutes, not worrying what comes out, and keep doing this every day until you feel easier in yourself about the act of writing. A lack of belief in yourself as a writer tends to be what blocks you, so remove the necessity for what you write to be brilliant and polished, and you should be able to start writing again.
I did some poetry-writing exercises for a magazine called Mslexia once, under my real name of Jane Holland. They're for poets but contain some useful exercises for combating block. Some of them are available for free download. Here's the link to one: https://mslexia.co.uk/pdfs/workshops/...
Good luck!
This sounds like a question of confidence. I was blocked as a poet for about three or four years once, and what released me was having my fifth child. I'm not suggesting you should have a baby! But there was something about that 'creative' event that freed the poet in me.
Maybe try a different kind of creativity for a while, see if it suggests things for your writing? I'm thinking painting, drawing, photography, sculpture ... Anything that will engage the artist in you but in a different medium. That might help you reach the blocked words in your head.
I am rarely blocked as a novelist, except when I'm being too lazy to write. But I see prose-writing as more of a job, not an art, and I think that helps me not to be blocked. (You just turn up and do your job, don't you? You don't agonize about it.) So if the above 'creative' suggestion does not work, maybe a more prosaic, technical approach might work instead. For instance, you could use writing exercises to ease you back. Write 100 words from the point of view of a particular character or object (the life story or view point of a coin in someone's pocket is a popular one). Or simply write any old words for ten minutes, not worrying what comes out, and keep doing this every day until you feel easier in yourself about the act of writing. A lack of belief in yourself as a writer tends to be what blocks you, so remove the necessity for what you write to be brilliant and polished, and you should be able to start writing again.
I did some poetry-writing exercises for a magazine called Mslexia once, under my real name of Jane Holland. They're for poets but contain some useful exercises for combating block. Some of them are available for free download. Here's the link to one: https://mslexia.co.uk/pdfs/workshops/...
Good luck!
Victoria Lamb
Hi Patricia! I know what you mean: there's a daily pull between social media and writing the current novel. But books can't exist very well without readers, and social media increases 'discoverability' as they call it now. But I would have thought the Irish would have no issues with social media, so many of them having kissed the Blarney Stone. ;-) And to answer your question, yes, I do write as well as howl, though not when out on the moors! Have a great day. Vx
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