Rebooting by Neil McGowan

 

I’m not long back from a few days’ break. Nothing too exciting, just a wee trip from Scotland to Yorkshire to spend a few days with my parents. The original idea was to take one of the kids with me and use up some of my annual leave before the end of the leave year. Due to various factors beyond my control, I ended up going on my own, and for five days did very little apart from eat, drink, and generally relax. No laptop, or anything like that – the plan was not to write for a few days and spend quality time with my folks.

But a couple of things happened whilst I was down there – firstly, I met their cleaner, and it turns out she’s a writer, too. We had a very engaging chat about writing, and the wider process of publishing including book design, illustrations – she writes for small children – and so on.

What occurred to me was, despite the fact we write in completely opposite genres, a lot of the considerations we had were the same, albeit sometimes arriving there from a different perspective.

Font choice was one such question we had – we both agreed it was important, but where I was looking at it from the perspective of the page being legible and having enough white space for general readability for someone with dyslexia, she was considering the shape of individual letters in terms of someone new to reading, She was also looking at how the shape of certain letters may complement the illustrations.

One thing we did agree on – Comic Sans is an abomination. It seems to me it’s the marmite of fonts – I know people who think it’s brilliant, and those who loathe it; I’ve never met anyone that is indifferent to it yet, though. (Yes, I should probably get out more.)

The other thing that happened was more when I got home – I found a renewed interest in writing. I hadn’t appreciated just how much I needed a break away from my usual routine to reinvigorate my love for words. In the month or so since I got back, I’ve jotted down several ideas for stories, a couple of which really excite me; I’m already starting to play with scenes in my head, in preparation for starting to write them. I also realised I’d written myself into a bit of a dead end with the book I’m currently working on. Whilst I’ve not completely resolved that, I do have an idea how I can fix things – it’ll be around 7 to 10 thousand words to cut and rewrite, but as my own worst critic, that chunk is not particularly good – there’s lots of standing around and talking with groups of people but nothing much happens.

So, a big thank you goes out to Rachel for getting me talking about writing in a different way, and making me think about story and how it looks on the page. It feels like just the kick I needed.