Author visit from Emma Carroll

To celebrate her third novel, In Darkling Wood, being published, The lovely Emma Carroll paid a visit to our school to talk to Year 7 about her journey to becoming a professional writer, her writing process and of course to read some tempting extracts from the book itself.

As a child, every summer holiday Emma would buy a notebook and fill it with stories (usually about ponies or Duran Duran fan fic!). This ritual has continued into her professional writing career: each new novel begins in a newly purchased notebook and is usually written straight through from start to finish. Having completed an MA in Writing for Young People, Emma clearly knows her stuff about the different ways that authors work; for example she told us how Hilary Mantel prefers to write the key scenes from her stories and then goes through the process of ‘sewing’ them together to create her narratives.

Emma then shared with the students, three top tips for generating ideas for stories:

1. Ask questions
2. Be Random
3. Think about ‘What If…?’

Each of these tips involved using images of characters and/or settings, although Emma did suggest you may wish to use a piece of writing, a poem or a snippet of an overheard conversation as well.

 An image, or rather images, that inspired Emma to write In Darkling Wood were those of Frances Griffiths and Elsie Wright with the infamous Cottingley fairies. These famous fakes were taken in 1917, in the midst of the First World War; a time when many wanted to believe in something hopeful and magical.

Elsie Wright

Frances Griffiths

Sherlock Holmes’ creator, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, was so convinced by these two photographs that he gave each girl a camera and asked them to capture more photographic evidence of the fairy folk they claimed to see on a near-daily basis. He even makes an appearance in Emma’s book!

Emma spent a lot of time researching all things fay, and told us about ‘real’ fairy doors, chime children and other Somerset lore. It was such a lively and interesting presentation, and having heard all the work that went into the novel as well as a few choice extracts I can’t wait to get reading In Darkling Wood – look out for a review coming soon!

  



Emma signing my copy of In Darkling Wood