Welcome to the Gravy Post
A brand new feature from Northern Gravy. News direct to your inbox covering our thoughts on all things Poetry, Fiction and writing for Children. Plus tips on how to get published by us!
Introduction
Nothing, in this world, is truly free.
How’s that for an opening line? Do anything for you? They do say an opening line should be arresting as well as thought provoking, so that seems to fit that bill at least.
It was hard thinking of a way to start this first SubStack email. After all, you’ve come to expect a lot from us, and we don’t want to disappoint you. So this has to be every bit as good as what you’d expect from a regular Northern Gravy edition, but it’s just the three of us. No other writers to hide behind, just three Northern blokes giving you your moneys worth.
They won’t all start like this, by the way. This is a special case. The very first edition. Because we’re hoping that this will grow, like Northern Gravy has, and in it’s way it’ll provide us with additional funds to put on events, pay writers, and carry on being a force for good in Northern creativity and arts.
But nothing comes for free. We aren’t just expecting you to hand over your hard earned cash for no reason. So we’re making it something you’ll find value in. We’ll be giving you exclusives you won’t find anywhere else. We’ll be lifting the curtain to show you behind the scenes at Northern Gravy, giving you an idea of what it takes to run a venture like this. We’ll be reviewing work, both stuff we like and stuff we don’t. We’ll be giving you insight into what makes us tick as writers, what we look for in submissions, and what makes us choose something for publication.
It’s gravy, but not like you’ve ever had it before. This is gravy straight from the source. We’d say “unvarnished”, but it’s not like regular gravy has varnish in it. There’s better and safer ways to get that brown colour.
So, instead, let’s call it undiluted. A free pour, thick as you like. No half measures and no half truths.
And absolutely brilliant value. You deserve nothing less.
Submissions update
We have now closed for submissions and have backed away into our various hiding holes to READ, READ, READ. A longlist will be communicated in the near future and everyone who submitted will receive a response either way.
Didn’t submit to us this edition? We will be open again in a couple of months, start writing now! The best way to increase your chances of getting published (other than following this amazing Substack) is to read the previous work at northerngravy.com
Northern Gravy Events
Our next LIVE AT HOME event is “How to and how not to write a memoir, with Vicky Foster” - Thursday, 18th July · 7pm - 8:30pm
Vicky Foster is an award-winning writer, performer and poet who has broadcast extensively across the BBC. She has published two collections of writing and her memoir, It Happened Like This, is due for publication by Bloomsbury in June 2024. She is also studying for a PhD in English and Creative Writing. She won The Society of Authors’ Imison Award at the 2020 BBC Audio Drama Awards for her Radio 4 play Bathwater, and her Radio 4 documentary, Can I Talk About Heroes? was reviewed in the national media. She has written poetry for radio, podcast and TV, delivered writing projects and creative writing workshops for a wide range of organisations, and performed at festivals and events across the North. She is a writer-in-residence for First Story, working with schools to help young people tell their own stories.
In this practical workshop, Vicky Foster discusses her new memoir, "It Happened Like This." There will also be essential exercises on how you could write one too!
The following section will be FREE for the first few editions as a thank you to all the kind support we’ve received over the last three years.
If you want to support Northern Gravy considering becoming a paid subscriber. All money received will go directly towards paying our writers.
A Sense of an Ending by Nick Jones
When I write something, I always get the ending first.
That’s it. That’s my whole methodology right there. I know, from the first moment I begin writing a short story or a novel, where it’s going to end.
I find that, if I don’t, I’ll never get there. Now you can turn that into some elaborate metaphor for life and how we all process things, but I mean it in a really literal sense. If I don’t know what happens immediately before THE END, then I can guarantee you that I won’t find out. I’ll run out of steam, determination and that general feeling of being bothered, and the story will never be finished.
I’ve got a hard drive full of proof of that, by the way. Sometimes those bits find a home somewhere else, in some other strange brew, but more often than not they just float off into the ether to be forgotten.
Endings are important to me. I like to have an ending that leaves me with a sense of satisfaction. My favourite ending for a book ever belongs to The Teleportation Incident by Ned Beauman, which in a series of wacky codices gives you an ending for every character you’ve come across throughout the novel. Some are funny, some aren’t, some are strange, and some are just plain cathartic. If you want a masterclass on how to end a novel, there’s your lesson. There’s a load of endings all in the one book, you can literally just pick your favourite.
And, while openings are certainly important, endings in short stories are, to me as an editor, absolutely vital. So many times I’ll read something promising and it doesn’t end, it just… stops. Almost arbitrarily, in some cases.
I mentioned my favourite book ending, to illustrate my point my least favourite: NW by Zadie Smith. I think this one hits doubly hard because not only does it just stop, but it comes at the end of a book I genuinely loved up until that point. It ends when it feels like something major is about to happen, which to me felt crushingly disappointing.
So, what am I getting at here? Does an ending have to be a definitive Full Stop at the end of a narrative? Not necessarily, sometimes it’s enough to leave me as a reader with a question, a feeling, or a sense of some profound change being made. It doesn’t have to be “and they all lived happily ever after”. But it does have to be SOMETHING. It has to make me feel like there was a reason I read all that. It has to build towards something that, at the very least, doesn’t feel like a waste of time.
Because the stories that don’t are the ones I pick. The ones that leave me with a lingering image, a sense of something, an emotional response are the ones that stick in my memory. They’re the ones I come back to, after I’ve read everything. And they’re the ones you’ve read in Northern Gravy.
The Poem and the Poet by Ralph Dartford
Introduction:
Each month our poetry editor, Ralph Dartford takes a personal look at a specific poem he loves and investigates his own relationship with the poem and the author’s motivations to write it. Does the poem reflect the poet’s real life, or is he or she writing outside their own experience? For this first edition, Ralph looks at Philip Larkin’s late poem, The Mower.
Here’s a story. A few years ago, I was asked to go on a radio programme to discuss art, politics and racism. It was a time when statues were being attacked by protesters and being chucked in the sea, defaced with paint etc. You might remember it. I was asked on air if I thought that there any statues that were fair game to be uprooted. I flippantly said I thought that the wonderful Philip Larkin statue by artist Martin Jennings that stands at Hull train station was fair game for the crane. The interviewer was aghast at my response and asked for my rationale. I stated that it was common knowledge that Larkin was often racist, misogynistic, sexist and deeply conservative in his politics. A simple online search will reveal all sorts of stories and dreadful behaviour: his letters, the other burnt correspondences after his death, and of course the big authorised and unauthorised biographies that either confirm or deny his sometimes troubling behaviour. I also said to the presenter that I loved Phillip Larkin’s poems and he was one of my favourite poets and that will never change. It’s the same with Morrissey, I stated. We love his music but despair of the sewage that comes out of his mouth a lot of the time. At the end of the conversation, I retracted my ridiculous statement and concluded that sometimes we must divorce the artist from their work and vice versa. I also said that it is also almost impossible to do that. Artists can make a mess of us, can’t they?
I often think that Larkin was very aware of his cruelty to others and regretted it late in life. In his late poem, The Mower I sense that he is attempting to make amends of sorts. There are other theories that the poem is about a wider global meanness: war, inequality, power etc, but it’s such a quiet poem with a domestic setting that personally, I think otherwise. We all have our own ways of working out our relationship to art, and that’s fair and stimulates debate (and argument). Let’s have a look at this poem.
It’s a short poem. Technically brilliant in its tight language and narrative. There is an oddity of the use of the semi colon in the first line, but it works as a pause in the revelation to what the poet has found in his garden, in his lawnmower, the horror of a butchered hedgehog. The relationship that Larkin had with the deceased is touching, ‘I had seen it before, and even fed it, once.’ This admission perhaps reveals the poet’s famed reticence in displaying outright emotion, his noble restricting Englishness that is apparent in virtually all his great work (‘An Arundel Tomb’, The Whitsun Weddings’ for example). As the poem progresses, Larkin’s wit surfaces and acts a clever stalling trick for the poems heart breaking denouement, ‘Next morning I got up and it did not.’ The line is funny, throw away, rooted in the coarseness of the music hall and ‘Carry On’ films. I can imagine Kenneth Williams reciting the line, nasal intonation and all. The poem then takes its abrupt turn, a revelation of grief, and by its end, an attempt of atonement:
The first day after a death, the new absence
Is always the same; we should be careful
Of each other, we should be kind
While there is still time.
To me, what Larkin is doing here is apologising for his own sometimes awful behaviour. He recognises in himself that he has come up short and maybe should act differently. Here he is not only telling us that we should be kind, but above all, instructing himself to be better whilst the ticking clock counts down to what is left of his life. I may be talking absolute rubbish here of course, and even maybe looking for a get out clause from my own bad behaviours that I have committed over the years. Once a piece of art is released to the world, the artist no longer owns it, we the consumer carry it in our hearts and minds, but here the universal message is clear. Kindness trumps everything.
Further reading:
Philip Larkin. Collected Poems (Faber & Faber)
Philip Larkin. Letters Home (Faber & Faber)
Andrew Motion. Philip Larkin: A Writers Life (Faber & Faber)
James Booth. Philip Larkin. Life, Art and Love (Bloomsbury)
Clive James. Somewhere Becoming Rain. Collected Writings of Philip Larkin (Picador)
Roland Barthes. Death of an Author (Essay)
Reading like a Children’s Writer by Jonny Syer
I love reading the submissions in our Kid Lit inbox. Some of them humble me, varying in quality and craft and I wonder if what I'm reading is within my own capabilities. Some of them remind me of younger writing self, making those simple mistakes we all fail to see at the beginning. And let's be truthful, that some writers choose to ignore.
Often in these "what I'd love to see in our inbox" type discussions, you'll find the phrase "I don't know what I want until I see it". This type of writing advice is completely useless to me and the way I approach writing. I think this is because I approach my writing, like most things in my life, from an analytical perspective. As a former research scientist (and fish packer at Youngs in Grimsby, you'd be amazed how repetitively similar these two jobs are) words have a place and it's my job as a writer to figure out where that is. It's all nonsense of course, if the amount of books on our shelves today tell us anything it's that there is more than one place to put those words, but this is mine... and in my head, for now at least, it's working.
What you'll get from me here is honesty, it's the only way I know how to think. We'll talk about the craft of writing for children and for this first article why I can spot a writer who hasn't read a children’s book published in the last decade a mile off.
So let's start with some advice we all know but don't often always take - if you want to write for children you must READ CHILDREN'S BOOKS. Preferably from this century, ideally ones published in the last five to ten years. Too often do I read a story that feels completely out of place because it sounds old or written with an adults “voice”. We receive stories written from the view of an adult, looking back at their life as a child, rather than from the lived experience of the child in the moment. Stories littered with out of date references. Stories where the sentence structure is far too complicated or the paragraphs go on for pages before dialogue kicks in. All of this can be fixed by reading, reading, reading, especially what’s getting published TODAY.
Not long ago, with the help of a DYCP Grant from the Arts Council, I took several classes with the Avron Foundation. One that always stick in my mind is a masterclass I took with the author Maisie Chan. As well as some very in-depth knowledge about the industry, and the importance of well rounded peripheral characters, Maisie had some very sound advice that went something along the lines of:
Find a book similar to what you want to write, figure out how they did it, and base your first draft on that structure.
Although we all know getting the actual words down on to the page is the hard bit, this short piece of advice is deceptively simple. Masie was telling us to read like a children’s writer.
But what does that even mean? We’ll lets have a think..
In contemporary middle grade you will be hard pushed to find more than a few opening paragraphs before the dialogue kicks in. One agent once told me that if they see more than three paragraphs without dialogue it’s a red flag for them, not sure I full believe it… but the point was fair enough. Paragraphs should be used to make writing palatable but what a reader can digest for the most part varies with reading age. Too much and it can become daunting. I’m not suggesting you dumb down your writing, you have to trust that your reader can handle big themes, but how you present them needs careful consideration. Read, find the beats, find the breaths within genre. Dialogue is a chance to introduce something else interesting about your characters. The Nevermoor series by Jessica Townend and Orphans of the Tide by Struan Murray are good examples of how to achieve this. Of course, as with all “rules” they’re made to be broken. A copy of The Worlds We Leave Behind by A.F. Harrold is right in front of me and allows for eight or nine paragraphs but the sentence structure is incredibly short, creating the same immediate story telling effect. And the voice is just fantastic. Do yourself a favour and get into the story right away. As a side note, if you’re tempted to submit something where your protagonist wakes up in bed, gets ready, goes downstairs for breakfast… please cut the opening and start the story when something finally happens. I read this start at least 5 times per submission window. Sorry.
Ditch the Oxford Comma. Not really, this is just a sarcastic way of saying focus on your sentence structure. I’ve just finished re-reading Tyger by SF Said and for the most part the sentences are straight forward, plot is the focus. Don’t be fooled into thinking this style of writing is easy, to be able to craft a complex idea into an easy to read narrative and keep the young reader turning those pages is an absolute skill of its own. Too often I’ll be reading a submission where the sentence structure would be better suited for our Fiction editor, but the story is Kid Lit. The length of a sentence is key in writing for children, too many long drawn out garrulous, loquacious, babblings often make me think the writer has themselves in mind rather than the reader. Again, the answer is to read.
That’s all from me for now. As a bit of a cheat sheet with regards to submissions, my ears will perk up if you happen to send a story in the style of the following:
Anything Middle Grade by Alex Wheatle or Cane Warriors if looking at Young Adult.
Northern working-class settings. Perhaps something not so bleak and with wider representation, we laugh up north too. See books by Lisette Auton.
MG adventures with humour. Think Jasper Fforde.
An offbeat style of writing that shouts back in time, think The Magician's Elephant by Kate DiCamillo.
Anything based in Grimsby (because i’m from there originally).