Guest Post: No Idea Is Wasted: Nicola Morgan

I am a big smug show-off because I have lots of writer-friends. But I almost never ask my friends to discuss their own books on my blog because it gets embarrassing when I don't like their books.

There's no danger of that happening today. When the wonderful Nicola Morgan (who we all know, right?) asked me if I'd host one of the stops on her blog tour I was pleased to say yes because I knew it would be a good book; now I've read Wasted, I know that it's a fabulous one. Wasted is one of the best books I've read all year and if you feel even slightly put off by the idea of reading a book for young adults, don't be: if ever there was a crossover title, Wasted is it.

Right. Nicola now owes me at least a tenner. Over to her.


First, thanks so much to Jane for letting me visit her blog! [I should hope so too! -J] I've never done a blog tour and it feels like a lot of fun. Since Jane's blog is about publishing and how it works, I thought I'd say something about ideas and how they work before publication - and if any of you writers are at that horrible stage of feeling that your idea just isn't going to work or isn't going to be published, I hope you'll take heart from what I'm about to tell you.

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In theory, I don't believe that "everything has a purpose". In practice, I make damned sure it does.

It was a simple chance event on a London underground station that got me thinking about luck, chance and randomness and led many years later to my new novel, Wasted. It wasn't an earth-shattering event but it got me thinking. Obsessively. So, I began a novel for adults - I'd two unpublished ones languishing already - about chance, quantum mechanics, and unpredictability, involving repeated multiple possibilities. The idea was that if there is a god - which I know there isn't - he will either play dice or at least have a lot of fun observing. But halfway through, a completely different idea hit me, this time for teenagers. I abandoned god and quantum
physics.

That new idea became my first published novel, Mondays are Red. And then came others and suddenly I was a YA novelist and left the adult stuff behind. The other book lay half-written somewhere. But ideas are never wasted. They become other things. They strengthen the foundations of our writing lives. Sometimes, later, they seek sunlight. So, after 15 years, thedormant seed sown randomly in a London underground station began to grow and I began to write it. I didn't look at the first version because this one would be different. I was different by then, though still fascinated by chance and luck.

A bit of my heart is in all my books, naturally, but Wasted has all of me. When I started it this second time, I didn't care about publication. I decided not to show my editor and or get my agent to ask for a contract. It was a case of, "If you like it, you can have it; if you don't, I'm writing it anyway and sod anyone else." This was my story and no one could stop me writing it.

She loved it, as did my agent. It was a wonderful feeling: writing the book I always wanted to write. And although I want some people, enough people, any people, to love it too, the odd thing is that I slightly don't care if lots of people don't. Obviously, I hope readers don't say horrible things...

I guess you want to know about the incident, the random event on a London Underground station? I had travelled from Edinburgh, where I live, to London for my first ever business-trip, first public-speaking event. (I was a dyslexia specialist then.) I'd done the event and my head was spinning; I was high on adrenaline and seeing things in a brighter light. For some reason which I will never understand, I decided to take a different underground route from the obvious one. So, I was on an escalator at Charing Cross station, when I should have been at Victoria.

What happened was trivial really, the sort of thing that happens all the time: you see someone you know, somewhere they shouldn't be. So, I saw a friend from Edinburgh, on the same escalator. We were both shocked, laughed, and had that "fancy meeting you here, 350 miles from home" conversation. Nothing happened - we didn't have an affair or even a drink!

Now, maybe it was my heightened adrenaline, something getting the creativity going, but I had a light-bulb moment, a kind of "thought experiment" which has absolutely obsessed me ever since. It was: "What if there was something like a god, who could observe every human and know everything about them; and what if he could see everyone passing and meeting and mostly not meeting and weaving unpredictably from place to place, NEVER aware how narrowly they had just missed an important encounter with someone they knew or someone who might influence their lives? What if humans could be tracked like radioactive particles, bobbing around in a kind of Brownian motion, in patterns, and that the god was sitting there cackling at the powerlessness of these poor humans as they went down that street or took that turning or missed that train or smiled at that person or had this thought caused by that sight or sound or breath of air on their face? What if he could show us all that, and we could observe the almost happenings, the near-misses, and if we could, just by observing, change the tiniest things that affect lives invisibly? And what if we could then tell the story of some of those things, show the inner workings of our world?"

And that, essentially, is the idea behind Wasted. And if it hadn't been for that trivial coincidence on a London escalator, in my state of heightened adrenaline, I would never have written it.

To all writers: when you have to give up an idea - if it wasn't working, didn't get published, whatever - it's not wasted. One day, you might see how to write it entirely differently, and better. If not, the seed can lie dormant for as long as it's needed, and when the right time comes you will find a way to grow it. Or if you don't, it will still strengthen you. So, never view an idea as wasted.

Nicola Morgan


Wasted is Nicola Morgan's new young adult novel, published today. She has created a special blog for the book, with competitions and stacks of background information, ideas, snippets and fascinating discussions about chance, risk and luck. Do visit it for some really interesting fun!

Synaesthesia In Literature

Synaesthesia is a tricky thing to pin down. While brain imaging techniques have established that synaesthesia is real, and neuroscientists have acknowledged language’s debt to synaesthesia (and in so doing have gone some way towards reducing the music-hall novelty perception of it), little work has been done to acknowledge synaesthesia's position in the literary world. To achieve that we have to rely on the dangerously unreliable: the work of the literary synaesthetes. These include writers who proclaimed themselves to be synaesthetes (some of whom, quite obviously, were not): Nabokov’s autobiographical writing described his family’s synaesthesia* while Rimbaud described synaesthetic experience through his poem Voyelles, although he later admitted to having made up the various responses that he catalogued; and writers who have been proclaimed synaesthetic following close reading of their texts, as has happened with Woolf. While these texts provide a rich resource, we have to remember that we are dealing with fiction writers here which makes them somewhat unreliable as reporters of the precise, as-it-happened truth.

* Nabokov, Vladimir. 1967. Speak, Memory. Weidenfeld and Nicholson.

Synaesthesia (Part I)

Synaesthesia means “joined senses”. There are many different forms of synaesthesia: each of the five senses can be joined to each of the others leading to conditions where, for example, a certain taste or smell will trigger a visual or auditory response.

I am a synaesthete. I experience coloured hearing, and see visual representations of time. For example, when I hear squealing brakes I see silver zig-zags floating before me; when I hear kettle drums I see slowly-expanding, dark red, upright ovals; when I think of the year, I see before me the outline of an upright oval with the months of the year strung on it like beads, with February always in that two o'clock position, and the portion of time just ahead of the present always slightly expanded.

As synaesthetic experience is exclusive to the person who experiences it, while each particular synaesthetic experience is real and infinitely repeatable for its originator it can never be duplicated in anyone else—not even in another synaesthete, who will have his or her own unique response to every particular stimulus. So, other synaesthetes with coloured hearing will each experience their own, unique visual response to the stimulus of squealing brakes, while other reported synaesthetic responses to time include coloured days of the week, and a completely linear representation of the shape of a year.

Synaesthetic responses are fixed: I have always seen that silver zig-zag in response to squealing brakes, and always will. I won’t see blue spheres, or green clouds: for me, that squealing noise IS silver and zig-zag-shaped, and cannot be anything else. It is only when I try to communicate synaesthesia to others that I alter it: in my attempts to record the synaesthetic experience (to describe it, to write it down or to paint it), it is immediately translated from concrete experience into the more fluid realm of metaphor.

So, what does synaesthesia have to do with a blog about publishing?

Consensus is that we are all born synaesthetic but, as our brains and nervous systems develop and grow in those first few months, our senses separate. In synaesthetes, however, some of this sensory separation remains incomplete. Perhaps we all retain an echo of it: perhaps it is the faint, unconscious memory of a more complete, connected whole which we respond to when we read a subtly synaesthetic text.

Laurence Marks, a Yale University psychologist, has described synaesthesia as “the basis for metaphor”*; Pulitzer Prize-nominated neuropsychologist Richard E Cytowic has stated, “If it were not for synaesthesia, we probably would not have language”;** and V S Ramachandran, Professor of Neurosciences at the University of California, went further when he said, “We begin with a disorder that’s been known for a century but treated as a curiosity. And then we showed that the phenomenon is real, what the underlying brain mechanisms might be, and lastly spelled out what the broader implications of this curious phenomenon might be…. finally all the way to understanding abstract thought and how it might have emerged, metaphor, Shakespeare, even the evolution of language—all of this in this one little quirk… synaesthesia.”***


* Marks, Lawrence E. 1990. Synaesthesia: Perception and Metaphor. In Frederick Burwick and Walter Pape, eds., Aesthetic Illusion: Theoretical and historical approaches. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter.

** Cytowic, Richard E. 13 June 2005. Well, what is synaesthesia? Interview in Eyebeam Art and Technology Center online journal.

*** Ramachandran,V S. 2003. Purple Numbers and Sharp Cheese. Reith Lectures 2003: The Emerging Mind.

E A Markham

I have only just read of the death earlier this year of E A Markham, who I was lucky enough to be taught by at Sheffield Hallam University.

You can read a little about him here, and here.

Archie's intuition, intelligence and mercurial mind made for fascinating workshop sessions which always overran, and tutorials (when you managed to pin him down long enough to arrange one) which cut right to the core of your work. After my sessions with Archie I would usually find myself with nothing more than a sentence or two left of a long story: and although such criticism would have hurt coming from anyone else, Archie always delivered his opinions with such charm, wit and persuasion that I always ended up feeling immensely flattered that he had taken the time to comment on my work.

Archie was an inspiring tutor, a wonderful writer, and a dear, if occasional, friend. I shall miss him dreadfully.