Another week and another lovely guest blogger. This week the wonderful Poppy Dolan, self-published author of The Bad Boyfriends Bootcamp. Much like me Poppy has climbed the Kindle chart with her funny, fresh take on men and relationships. You can get her novel for just 77p at the moment and I urge you to do before she gets snapped up by an agent and publisher. I'll be back next week with my own blog, but until then I give you Poppy Dolan.
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| Poppy hard at work! |
Working 5 to 9
Like probably 99% of writers out there, I have a nine to five job. A full time, full on, occasional hair-pulling-from-stress job which I absolutely love. But I also absolutely love writing; the thing that doesn’t pay the bills (sadly). So I work at the office 9 to 5 and then at the wip 5 to 9. Not every day; I’m not a robot (again, sadly). But if I’ve still got the mental energy and enough motivation to ignore The Great British Menu, I power up the laptop and try and bash out a few thousand words.
Then on a weekend I get to play at Full Time Writer: I head to my local coffee shop (or Terence, as I like to call him, like it’s a rather weird secret affair) order just one pot of tea – and a flapjack, if they’re lucky – and sit myself down for a three or four hour session. I know this isn’t what a full time writer probably does, but I have the ticking clock towards the Sunday night deadline in the back of my mind. If I don’t make the most of my weekend time, Sunday night will roll in again oh so quickly and it’ll be another 5 days before I have the luxury of daylight writing time.
But I love these weekend sessions – in my sleepy little village, I think someone tapping away at a red laptop in a cafĂ© is a bit of an interesting diversion from the norm so I have a smidge of notoriety (but then so does the manager of the Sainsbury’s Local). It’s also a lovely long stretch of time to get completely lost in the small universe I’m creating in my novel, throw my characters a few clangers to deal with, write a scene between my heroine and Paul Hollywood (I have actually done this), go misty-eyed over a romantic scene and generally play about. Writing is hard, but it’s also completely fun. Like trying to stay upright on a trampoline.
I tend to get my ideas from things in my own life. The Bad Boyfriends Bootcamp was inspired by, well, bad boyfriends but also by my own tendency to just be a teeny tiny bit controlling. So not only did I put right the wrongs of boyfriends past through my characters but I also gave myself a sneaky telling off for being an occasional nag and a constant know-it-all with a heroine who learns her lessons about having these traits. Writing lets you even out the score in a perfect world (though I bet my other half would still say I’m working on my flaws. Well, he still leaves ALL the cupboard doors open) and I love writing those bits of flirty or funny or angry dialogue that you never actually get perfectly right in the moment, but that come to you in the car or on an escalator. So I save those up from my real life and let my characters say everything they want to, in a way I probably never will.
I definitely believe in writing what you know. But, more than that, I believe that you should write what you would love to read. I struggled for a while in trying to write what I thought would sell, in a time when people were very down on commercial women’s fiction. But after a few embarrassingly bad attempts at thrillers, I came back to the truth: I love rom coms. Watching, reading and writing. So that's what I intend to do.
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| Her hilarious debut novel available now |
You can say hello to Poppy and share bad boyfriend stories at @poppydwriter and at her Facebook Page, Poppy Dolan Books.
