It’s Spooky Season – the perfect time to read stories of Gothic mansions, mysterious paintings and unsettling secrets. The House on Howling Hill ticks all the boxes! Recently published by debut author Angela Churm and Tiny Tree Books, it’s a fantastic read for age 8+ this October.
I’m thrilled to welcome author Angela Churm to Scope for Imagination with a guest post about her writing process.
The House on Howling Hill is my first published novel but I’ve been writing since I was 6.
The headmaster at junior school kept a 100 page story I wrote when I was 10, which he showed me 15 years later when I visited, just before he retired. I wrote on the bus, in lunch breaks, when I got home on a portable typewriter (which I still have). I wrote fan fiction, then, graduated to magazine features, then TV Scripts and Radio Drama, then finally, the thing I wanted to do more than anything, books.
Everybody’s writing process is unique to them. When I get a fragment of a story idea, a glimpse of a character, a snapshot of a setting or place, I pick a journal and jot it down. A different journal for each story – that way I not only keep track of the myriad of characters and worlds clamouring for attention, all my notes, thoughts, ideas, rantings and random bits relating to that story are in one place. As I start to write the book, the journal is my anchor and my inspiration. When I finish one story, I sift through those journals for a spark that catches my attention and tells me what’s next.
With ‘The House on Howling Hill’, Izzie and Tip had been chilling out in one of those journals for far too long, it was their turn. I just had to figure out what their story was.
For me, that starts with listening. Listen closely enough and the characters will tell you their story. When I write, I’m reading, I’m listening, and I often get surprised. Something will happen, then a few pages on, occasionally several chapters on, something else happens and I go, oh, right, that’s why that thing happened earlier. Basically my first draft, which nobody ever sees, is me telling myself the story, or more accurately, my characters telling it to me. It sounds a little crazy, but the only time I get stuck is when I’m trying to make my characters do what I want them to do, not what they want to do. Izzie and Tip are real to me, as with all my characters, the more I write, the more I learn about them until, at the end of the book it’s really hard to leave them. Although, there’s a certain amount of pride in seeing them go out into the world so that others can get to know them too.
The House on Howling Hill is my first published novel. My second is already well under way, I’m about to embark on a fifth draft, these new characters have captured my heart just as much as Izzie and Tip and I can’t wait to see where they take me.
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