The index finger of my left hand is bent and sore, and the end joint is badly swollen, but I can’t stop knitting. Knitting? I’m supposed to be a writer and this blog is supposed to be about my progress and process, so why am I knitting instead of writing?

The seventh draft of my current novel is finished, and finally it’s in a state that I’m not ashamed to show to other people. It’s gone to five of my trusted friends and I await their comments. I have also finished the final proofread of my earlier novel The Epidaurus Inheritance so that paperback copies can be printed. Now it’s time to think about the next novel.

One of the best ways to free up your mind to do some creative thinking is to give your hands something to do. Two months ago I joined an initiative I had read about on Facebook: to get enough people to pledge to knit a blanket for some underprivileged person who doesn’t have one, and to do it before winter sets in. Winter in the southern hemisphere, that is.

Driving this venture are two remarkable women. Zelda la Grange was for many years the personal assistant to the late, greatly-mourned father of our nation, Nelson Mandela. When journalist Carolyn Steyn asked her what she would like people do in his memory, she answered that she would like 67 blankets to be knitted for poor people who would otherwise not have one.

Carolyn Steyn took up the challenge and invited people around South Africa to join her in making 67 blankets by July 1, in time for Mandela’s birthday which is on July 18. While anyone is more than welcome to buy and donate blankets to any charity of their choice, this is different: these blankets have to be made with your own two hands, either knitted or crocheted.

Like many good things in this internet age, the request went viral and over the last few months individual people and groups from all over the country have signed up and are either knitting or crocheting. Housewives and mothers, ballet dancers, schoolchildren, even butch rugby-playing men – there are no limits. As people’s friends and contacts on Facebook have read about it, others have joined too, and some members live as far away as Japan, Australia or America.

As of today we have 983 members. Many who started earlier have already finished their first and are onto their second or third blankets by now. The first handover is scheduled for April 7, so more than 1000 cold people are going to be warmer this winter. Now that’s enough to give any hardened, cynical person a warm, fuzzy feeling, isn’t it? Even a writer like me.

When I first signed up, I had no idea just how much knitting I would end up doing. I started with 5mm needles and some leftover double knitting yarn. I cast on 35 stitches and knitted until I could fold it diagonally to form a square. With my tension that’s 70 rows, which makes a square about 21cm by 21cm. Then I moved on to the next colour. I’m not very good at joining up, so I decided to knit my squares in 7 vertical strips of 10 squares each. My 70 squares will make a blanket that’s roughly 147 cm by 210cm. So far I’m on square number 24 and still have a long way to go.

Constructing a blanket stitch by stitch, square by square, reminds me of constructing a novel word by word, sentence by sentence, chapter by chapter. But knitting is much easier (apart from the physical pain of the swollen joints) because you don’t have to do seven drafts of a blanket and re-do almost every single stitch before you are brave enough to let someone else look at it. I will finish this blanket in the next two months, whereas a novel takes me about two years to complete. And my blanket will keep someone warm for much longer than it takes to read one of my novels.

The beauty of something that is handmade speaks for itself, and no one minds a dropped stitch or a wonky seam, because its primary purpose is to keep people warm. If at any time a knitter feels discouraged, a quick visit to the Facebook page results in messages of camaraderie and inspiration, and beautiful pictures of the blankets that others are making with their own two hands. Suddenly the pain in my joints isn’t so bad. Another cup of ginger tea and I go back to the knitting.

Sore joints are not all this blanket has given me. Another thing I didn’t realise at first was how – unlike my novels which serve only to entertain – knitting a blanket could actually serve a basic need and help one person get through winter. Other ordinary people like me can make a difference just by doing this small thing of taking up two needles or a crochet hook, getting a few balls of yarn, and casting on that first stitch.

Have a look at what people have created in Mandela’s name by going to Facebook and typing “67 Blankets for Madiba Day” in the search box. As Carolyn Steyn says in one of her many posts to encourage and support all who partake in this venture: “Stitch by stitch we will be keeping people (around the world) warm this winter!!!”

Maybe you’d like to join us?

In my seemingly endless quest for writing improvement, I return time and again to the three points of my magic triangle: Characters, Plot and Setting. This time I want to look at settings and why they influence a novel so much.

Let me give you an example: One of my favourite stories is that of Romeo and Juliet, and yet I don’t like the musical West Side Story. Why is that? In a word: Setting. Last year I saw an excellent production of this musical, but I still felt the same vague dissatisfaction I had felt as a teenager when a helpful teacher showed us the movie of West Side Story in an effort to help us understand the plot and passions of Shakespeare’s masterpiece.

The story of Romeo and Juliet – to me anyway – belongs in an historical, romantic Italian setting, and no amount of great dancing, fantastic music and memorable songs can sway it for me into the world of warring gangs whose passion and cause is probably even more poignant than those of the Capulets and Montagues. Sorry, Leonard Bernstein – I know it’s just me, but I can’t change the way I feel.  

People often ask me: “When you start a new novel, do you think of the story first and then find characters to fit, or do you think up some characters and weave a story around them?” I can’t answer that, because I have come to realise that I start with the setting: a place that moves me, and then I build both characters and plot around it.

I am a great believer in that old chestnut: Spirit of Place. I love to visit new places and soak up the atmosphere, the weather, the history, and the invisible threads that weave it together. A while back I realised that if I am going to be a writer for the rest of my life, I need to travel to exotic, faraway places and set my novels there.

Sadly, I just can’t afford to do that on my salary and with my country’s diabolical exchange rate, so I have to rely on past memories. I was lucky enough to travel when I was younger. In my wild impetuous youth I also changed jobs every three years or so and started life anew several times in a different city in my beautiful country. Some of the jobs I took involved plenty of travel and in each place I visited, I made copious notes and took loads of photos.

What shines through the most when I look back on these is the memory of how each new place made me feel on first contact, and it is this essence that a writer needs to capture in order to provoke a similar response in the reader. I can’t write about Russia or China because I haven’t been to either. Armchair travelling – books and television documentaries and staring down at Google Earth from above cannot give you that spirit of place that an actual visit can. You need to breathe its air and wonder why it feels different. For example, I have noticed that favourite foods in one place are ignored in another – for no logical reason – and that new tastes acquired along the road often lose their flavour in the next destination. Why? I don’t know but that’s how my senses respond.

A while back I dreamed up a complex plot involving a sojourn in the high remote mountains of Peru, because my best friend had been there. Six chapters into writing the first draft, I found that no amount of quizzing her and reading travel guides could make my words ring true because I had never been there. Since I couldn’t afford a trip there, I had to find another setting – one that I knew.

The answer was on my doorstep. A mere two or three hours from where I live is the magnificent Drakensberg mountain range on the western border of KwaZulu-Natal. Not only is it a world heritage site, but I have been there many times, taken numerous photographs, soaked up the atmosphere of wild beauty and dreamed countless dreams about those mountains on my return home. In fact, I even bought a plot of land up there a few years back for when I retire, because I love the place so much.

A slow process of transition began to take place in my manuscript as my characters and plot adapted to their new environment. Two weeks later I was back on track and clocking up a word count faster than I had done on any of my previous novels. Just over a month later, I wrote those magic words “The End” and my first draft was complete.

Of course, the story doesn’t end there. I have been busy on it for another year and written another six drafts since then. Hopefully all will be revealed in the next few months.

Prompted by a recent discussion on the Amazon Kindle forums, here’s my two cents’ worth about writing groups.

I joined the South African Writers’ Circle (SAWC) back in 2007 and am still a member. It has a countrywide membership and sends monthly newsletters to its members. Meetings and workshops are held in Durban, and local writing personalities are usually the guest speakers. Most important, the SAWC has competitions which are entered anonymously. Not only does each entry receive a personal critique, but the winning entry and a general critique are published in the next newsletter. This means that you always have something against which to compare your work and see where you might have fallen down, what the judge was looking for and why he or she chose the winning entry over yours. 
 
For the first seven months I kept my mouth shut, listened to the speakers, fumbled through the workshops, read my newsletters and never entered anything. Finally, I plucked up some courage and entered a competition called First Chapter of a Novel. After all, it was anonymous unless you won a placing. I won first place in my first competition and from then on, nothing stopped me. As my writing grew, I hungered for more. 

A year later I enrolled for a postgraduate course in creative writing at my local university, and found myself in a group of nine writers. Four were poets and four wrote short stories, and then there was me, with two mediocre unpublished novels to my name. Over the course of the single semester, we each had to present our new work-in-progress twice, and to comment on the work of each other. We agreed from the first meeting that the environment in which we met was a nurturing one and that no statements could be made without substantiation. We became close to each other and to our two tutors – one of whom tutored the poets and the other tutored the prose writers. We each met with them, one-on-one, throughout the course.

After the course ended, I knew I had become a better writer, but sadly my tutor left the country to work in another university and my fellow students were not interested in any further interaction, as most were continuing with their studies and didn’t have time. I completed and self-published the novella I had written during the course, and continued to write alone, re-working one of my previous novels.

Around that time, Penguin advertised a local competition for African writing, and a number of writers in the SAWC speculated about entering. Four of us made the decision to rework our current projects and enter them. Although we had known each other a while, by the closing date we had formed a strong bond, due to the multitude of encouraging e-mails that flew between us as the deadline loomed.

After the submission date, we took ourselves for a celebratory lunch, and one writer suggested that we meet once a month at her house with our laptops to work on our current projects. As would-be novelists with a common goal and a will to succeed, we didn’t need to be asked twice. 
 
Like my previous writers’ group, we had a policy of nurturing and helping. The first result of those monthly meetings was that we all began to fare better in the SAWC’s monthly competitions, simply because we had had the chance, during the previous month, to read aloud bits of our work to the others and get useful feedback.

None of us made the shortlist for Penguin, by the way, but I think we all won something far more valuable.

Some months later we formed a joint blog in order to get web exposure for that far off day when all our writing careers might take off. We began The Scribbling Scribes in
February 2012, and have developed a good following since then. We each write one piece per month and although we don’t always make our deadlines, we have a few loyal fellow-writers who contribute guest blogs from time to time so that, regardless of how busy we are, a new blog goes up on the site every week.

We still get together once a month and write, eat, drink tea and coffee, and then share bits of our work that we want opinions on. We have been joined by two other writers who have become regulars. Six is a good number to fit around a dining table and still have room for the food. And we’re all still members of the SAWC. 

I must say, I think it was one of the best things we ever did, getting our writing group started. To anyone who wants to be part of a similar group, I would advise you to join a large local writing club of some kind. When you’ve been there long enough, find some fellow-writers who are on the same wavelength as you and suggest a smaller writing group. Choose your people carefully. If you start off small you can always add to it, but it doesn’t work the other way around – writers are phobic about rejection. We were lucky with our group and are still reaping the rewards.

I had been having problems with my current work-in-progress, but didn’t know why. All I knew was that, deep into the middle of my fourth draft, the new work wasn’t fun, it wasn’t entertaining, and even I didn’t want to read it in its current state.

So where did I go wrong? I gave it all the usual ingredients – feisty heroine; handsome, self-sufficient hero; deep historical mystery; stolen artefact; exotic location and so on.

I didn’t know – until…

A week or so back I began getting my first novel The Epidaurus Inheritance ready for paperback publication. This involved going through the text that I had originally used to upload onto Amazon Kindle a year and a half ago. Sales had been going well, but several people had suggested that I bring out a paperback edition in addition to the e-book. I had to make sure that all formatting was correct for printing, remove all the double spaces that I used to put at the end of each sentence before someone told me it was old-fashioned, and so on. It was a time-consuming exercise, and took me several days. However, I believe that those few days were well spent, because it forced me – for the first time in eighteen months – to actually look at what I had written two to three years ago.

Like most authors, I have a dread of looking back at something that is already “out there” and I was convinced that I would find hundreds of mistakes, poor grammar, clumsy sentence structure and gauche, over-the-top characters.

To my surprise it held up pretty well, I thought.

Not to blow my own trumpet or anything, but it was fun to read and I fell in love with those characters all over again. Plus, the action never stops. Even in moments of pure dialogue, there is action because of the conflict that continues between the protagonists right through to the end of the book. They don’t waste pages blah-ing on endlessly about their respective hard-done-by pasts; they just get on with things. Chapters are short but each one has some kind of action or revelation that advances the plot in some way. It may not be everyone’s cup of tea, but it is what it sets out to be – an entertaining, romantic, adventure mystery.

So how does my current work compare? Not very favourably. I realised long ago that deep and meaningful, heavily-significant, angst-ridden literature is not really my thing. I don’t enjoy reading it, and I certainly don’t want to write it. For those who want their reading heavy – feel free to scour the bookshops. There’s certainly plenty of that stuff around. However, for those who want a light entertaining read that takes you away from your dull routine or the political horrors on the TV, gives you a bit of wistful wonder at some historical artefact, mixes in a modern-day romance in exotic settings, then you’ve come to the right place.

I’ve been in the entertainment industry for thirty years, so I should know a few things by now. I’ve stood in the darkened wings for long enough to gauge when audiences get bored and fidgety. I’ve taken notes while listening to talented writers, directors and performers who know how to give people what they want in order to lighten their lives and take them away from the world for a few hours. The key word here is entertainment.

Audience members who come to our theatre come because they want to be entertained. They love to be fascinated and they relish being able to suspend belief, even when they know that what they are watching is pure fabrication. That magical combination – the artistry of the performers, the ingenuity of an outrageous set that works almost like a character on its own, and the sheer audacity of the director who knows exactly the right way in which to dish it up – all makes for a most satisfying evening’s entertainment.

So I’m going to go back to my original outline for my current WIP, to find out what first drew me to the idea. And then I’m going to hack it to pieces and rebuild it from page one. It’ll be a long, hard slog, but it’ll be worth it.

I’ll keep you posted on the progress...

So what does a non-political animal write about in South Africa when the books most desired by local publishers seem to be literature dealing with significant political or historical events in our checkered history?

Someone once said “write about what you know” while others countered this by saying “you can write about what you don’t know, but do lots of research.” However, this only works if you combine it with the dictum to “write what you are passionate about.” Still others have said “write the story that only YOU can write.” A quote in my school diary of more than thirty years ago claimed that: “After you hear two eyewitness accounts of the same accident, you start to wonder about history.” And perhaps it is this saying that has shuffled around in my mind for all those years, influencing my historical writing more than others.

I don’t feel qualified to write about those defining moments that other people remember; what they were doing when Kennedy was shot, or when Neil Armstrong landed on the moon. While staring up at the moon in 1969, my seven year old imagination fancied that I saw the spaceship leaving the moon in a bright, graceful arc – a fanciful impossibility even before my eyesight became too bad from all the reading of similar fanciful, fantasy events. Not an eyewitness account to be believed on that occasion!

As a South African too young to know who Kennedy was when he died, I was also too young to remember the capture of Nelson Mandela, the so-called Black Pimpernel, on August 5, 1962. However, I do remember exactly what I was doing on the day in 1990 when I heard that the ANC was to be unbanned and Nelson Mandela was to be released from prison after 27 years. But that’s another story...

The historical chapters that unfold in my latest novel are not seen through the eyes of a South African, but through an Australian who is only vaguely aware of the shadowy political machinations that blighted this country back in 1962. His black companion has to remind him that they are not allowed to stay in the same hotel because they are from different race groups. The party they attend one Saturday night in Durban, in which all races eat, drink, laugh, dance and chat together would have been in violation of the country’s stringent segregation laws in 1962. This at least our Australian knows. Marcus looks around and wishes that the South African government could see this particular party, because it might make them realise how easily all races could get along if allowed to mix. What Marcus doesn’t know is that several people at that party were considered political criminals at the time, Nelson Mandela included.

I found that this naive point of view was necessary for the telling of this particular story. Sometimes an outsider’s viewpoint is not a reliable or even an informed one, but it helps to pinpoint the flaws and prejudices that others grow up with and take for granted as part of their lives because they have known no other way in their lifetime.

The wonderful narration by the child protagonist in To Kill A Mockingbird shows us her country’s volatile history in a way that she doesn’t fully understand. This has always struck a chord in me and consequently it is one of my favourite books. She “tells” us the history as it unfolds around her in her small American town; simply narrating to those who read it and we see far more than she realises she is telling – or more correctly, showing – us.

So what possible things could I write about in this, my fourth novel and the first to have any reference to the political history of my country? If I was to write about what I know, then the novel would be bleak since I did not experience at first hand the dramas of growing up in a politically-charged atmosphere, like so many who were caught in the heart of the Soweto Riots, Sharpeville, and other significant events in our country’s history.

What was I passionate about at the time? Well, sadly I was a rather nauseatingly single-minded, quite ill child, passionate only about the loads of fiction (mainly about ballet and drama) that I was able to read while others did the energetic, sporty things that my weak chest couldn’t handle. I was not an eyewitness to most of my country’s significant political events, so I must take other advice, and write the story that only I can write.

Thanks to Google and the many books I have collected over the years, I have been able to concoct an historical tale about an outsider who has the misfortune to fall in love with a South African woman whose plans go awry, and he gets to meet the great Nelson Mandela without even realising who he is. As that other quote warned years ago, eyewitness accounts of the same accident (or incident) make you wonder about history.

Watch this space...