WHO IS VIVIEN? WHAT IS SHE?

Vivien Hampshire reveals the inside story of the woman behind the pen

When it was suggested that, for the theme of this blog during November, we all write a few interesting snippets about ourselves, for some reason I found myself singing the opening lines of Shakespeare’s song from The Two Gentlemen of Verona!

Who is Silvia? What is she,

That all our swains commend her?

Holy, fair and wise is she.

Nose in a book as ever!

It’s easy to hide behind our writing. In our stories, given the right research, we can visit places we have never been and act out thrilling, romantic or even sexy scenes we have never experienced in real life – and hopefully make our readers believe every word. Many of us may take on a pen name, maybe going so far as to change gender in the process, so our readers, and maybe even our nearest and dearest, don’t have to know who we are if we choose not to tell them. Writing is a wonderful smoke screen behind which we can happily hide our true selves and revel in make-believe.

So, who is Vivien? What is she? What can I tell you about me that you are not able to guess from looking at my Amazon author page or from reading my fiction? Well… holy, fair and wise I cannot claim to be, but (in case you’re curious) here’s a potted history of me – the me when I am not wearing my writer’s hat – and leaving out most of the boring bits!

I left school earlier than planned because my dad was ill, but that didn’t stop me from finishing my exams. I managed the second year of my A level studies while holding down a full-time job in a bank, thanks to a couple of close friends who brought me their lesson notes and passed on homework details, and teachers who continued to mark it even though I was no longer a pupil. I took time off and joined my former classmates on exam days, and passed three subjects with flying colours. And I’m pretty sure the experience has been an enormous help to me in managing my time and juggling the conflicting demands of work, children and writing in the years since.

After around ten years in banking I went to work for a London council in their accountancy department and stayed there for a further eight, before leaving to bring up my children. I was always surprisingly good with money, figures, balance sheets and budgets, even though, had anyone asked, I would have said (and still do) that I am a words girl, not a numbers one! Give me a crossword over a Sudoku any day. But somehow I had fallen into a career path that I would never have consciously chosen. Again, handy in later life though. I never have trouble balancing my bank account, sending out invoices or filling in my tax returns, and apart from a mortgage (now repaid) and a not-to-be-missed interest free deal on my new car, I have never had to take out a loan for anything either.

From the age of sixteen, although I worked with numbers, I really just wanted to write. Poems at first, then stories, and eventually a novel – the opening to which won a national competition and brought two literary agents knocking at my door without me having to seek them out at all. Oh, dear. The book didn’t sell, despite some very near misses, but I went on to write another two, both unpublished but great practice for later on. And while all that was going on… I gave birth to twins! After an ectopic pregnancy, years of infertility and five rounds of IVF, the miracle happened and life changed – more hectic, different priorities, and less time. I registered as a childminder and, for the next ten years (still writing as a hobby when I could), I looked after other people’s kids as well as my own, followed by my best job ever, helping very young children to gain a love of books and reading in a children’s centre and running storytelling and rhyme sessions in libraries. All this daily contact with toddlers turned out very useful for helping me create the character of Lydia, a childminder who ‘loses’ a baby in her care, in my first (self-)published novel, Losing Lucy  – and in writing my newest book about a child left alone at home. This novel, the one I have enjoyed writing the most, is still trying to find itself an agent and ultimately a publishing deal.

I just love crosswords!

But, always, whatever job I was doing, bubbling underneath were words! The constant urge to read (here I am in the photo above, reading the fantastic charity short stories anthology Diamonds and Pearls ), to dip into dictionaries, to play around with words and learn their meanings, to complete ever harder cryptic crosswords, and to write. It never went away. And now I’m sixty, the kids are grown and gone, and I have a new husband who follows his own hobbies and leaves me plenty of time to pursue my own. Life feels right. And the time feels right too. I have written well over a hundred published woman’s magazine stories and a book about my crossword passion, How to Crack Cryptic Crosswords – and now I’m back writing novels again, with a vengeance!

If I could go back, I doubt I would do anything very differently. I don’t feel I’ve missed out on much. Marriage, children, good health, enough money to get by – I’ve been lucky enough to have had all those. I have never dreamed of setting off on major foreign travel trips, of doing a parachute jump or learning to play the piano, or even of winning the lottery. No, my dream is much more modest, but sometimes feels just as unattainable. I want that bestseller, and I want it NOW!

 

 

Deadlines… or just dead lines?

Viv Hampshire talks about the effects on her writing of being put under pressure

There are times when we all have to write to order. If we want our work to be accepted for publication, it’s vital that we remain open not only to suggestions from editors and publishers, but to directions too! And one of the most important of these is the dreaded deadline. Whether it’s a magazine article, a seasonal short story that could miss its slot, or the submission of a completed novel manuscript, there will always be a date by which it HAS to be done… or we are in big trouble, quite likely missing our chance to see our work in print, and probably getting a bad reputation as a non-professional time waster along the way.

But having to finish writing by a certain date means added pressure. When it comes to a novel, it’s bad enough juggling plot, sub-plots, research, setting, characters and everything else that goes towards a great story. Now we have to finish it on time too! For me, this year, that meant getting my unfinished novel ready to send off for its critique under the RNA’s New Writers Scheme before the end of August deadline. Yes, they will take a partial, but having paid for a reader to look at a whole book, it’s a terrible waste to only send a few chapters. The last couple of months as the deadline approached saw me scribbling away at such a furious pace that I went way over the word count I had intended and actually wrote the last half of the book in about triple the time it had taken to write the first! 

It’s not a hobby any more

But what can happen when writing becomes a race against the clock instead of the pleasurable and leisurely pastime it used to be when it was just a hobby and not a way of life? The most obvious problem for me is a potential drop in quality. When I don’t have the time to carefully consider every word, rewrite every clanky paragraph, and rip up my synopsis umpteen times and start again, there is a real danger that what I write won’t be as good as it could have been, or as good as I would like it to be.

What if the dreaded deadlines do nothing more than push me into producing just that – dead lines, that don’t spring to life on the page and that nobody will want to read? But, how will I know if I don’t plough on and get to the end? When weighed up against not finishing at all, perhaps that’s a risk we should all be willing to take. Novels that are not quite perfect have the chance to be seen and edited and ultimately accepted. Novels languishing in drawers because they are never quite ready have no chance at all.  

Trying to achieve perfection comes at a price, and for me that price is definitely time. Therefore, I have made the decision to just do my best, get the words written, and stop worrying about every little comma or trying to become the next literary sensation. There are many less than perfect books out there – all accepted and published – so why shouldn’t mine be one of them? I can no longer afford to take three or four years playing around with a novel to tweak it into submission. Submission… there’s a pun there somewhere! So, until I acquire an agent who will no doubt be only too keen to push me on at a pace, it’s going to be self-imposed deadlines for me. A novel a year from now on, and I’m already three chapters into the next one!

 

 

NO MORE EXCUSES

Viv Hampshire wonders where all that spare time went!

Back in those long ago snowy days of January, with a whole year stretched enticingly out in front of me (the first year ever of not having to go out to work to earn a crust), I thought I had all the time in the world. Fitting the writing of a novel into my new life was going to be so easy, what with all that extra spare time I was going to have on my hands. I even, perhaps a bit foolishly, made myself a promise – and published it very publicly here on the blog – I will, without any more procrastination, get on and finish my novel in progress and get it ‘out there’ to be critiqued and maybe even accepted for publication – in 2014. Without fail. Without doubt. No more excuses. 

Six months later, and I’m starting to panic! It’s getting there, but it’s nowhere near finished, and the Romantic Novelists Association’s New Writers Scheme (NWS) August submission deadline is looming ever nearer. Where did all those extra hours disappear to? Well, the trouble is… I don’t have to be anywhere important any more, so I get up later. I go for a wander around the shops or to watch the other half play bowls, because the sun’s shining, and because I want to spend time with him, and because I can. I fiddle about on facebook and read every page of the newspaper online, making sure I complete the crossword, obviously! I pop round to my daughter’s during the afternoon (earlier than I might have done before, so I can miss the school traffic) and help her with her uni essays, and then I make a start on dinner. Add into the mix a bit of a health scare (thankfully now resolved) and the fact that I have, rather unexpectedly, recently got engaged and now have all the finer details of an imminent wedding to plan, and it’s hardly surprising that the novel has started to slip onto the back burner. Oh dear! Oh no!!

In fact, by the time the quiz shows and the soaps are over (I can’t possibly miss out on them. I love them too much, soap plot lines are great for inspiration and ideas, and a girl’s got to have some fun!) it’s 9 o’clock and I’m finally just about ready to write. But, hang on… that’s exactly when I have always written. Somehow my body clock just can’t adjust itself to any kind of new routine. It’s got far too set in its ways. My head, my heart, my feet, all lead me up those stairs to my desk at 9 o’clock and there I sit, quite happily, in my new study (featured, by the way, in the July issue of Writers’ Forum magazine), far away from the football that is dominating the TV at the moment, and write until bedtime – just like I always have.

And, even then, I still have to find time to write my articles – commissioned ones that bring in an income – and I still love to write short stories whenever an idea strikes… but a promise is a promise. As I write this, almost at the end of June, my novel’s word count stands at around 75,000. It’s going to take another 25,000 words or so to get to the end. And so I keep working out how many weeks I have left and how many words I will have to write in each of those weeks, and the more I put it off the bigger that weekly target has to grow! At this rate I will be scribbling out the last 10,000 in the last week (or even on the last day!), and I won’t get to sleep at all!

But I did say no more excuses, so I won’t make any. As this post goes live I will just be back from a little holiday at the Chocolate Hotel in Bournemouth. Well, I couldn’t miss out on that one, could I? And then I will get down to the novel again. I really will. Honest!