My Newcastle writing adventures around the lighthouse

Writing, taking photos, not being swallowed by the sea (hooray!)

Monday through Friday last week, I got to work intensively on my novel next to a hilltop lighthouse in Newcastle. I got back Saturday evening, tired of brain and body but so happy I decided to apply to go.

This was my first proper visit to Newcastle. As I explained in my last newsletter, I’ve technically been there before, but it was such a short visit, I really remembered nothing about the city. This time around, even though I was concentrating on attending my writing residency and not really there for sightseeing, I got to see so much more. I had a 30-minute walk each day from my hotel to the lighthouse, and the residency hours were 10am-4pm, so I got patches of time to explore bookshops, take photos, spot street art, ogle gigantic ships in the harbour, and try out various eateries.

I’ve put up some photos on Instagram already and there’s more to come, so I won’t pepper this page with too many for now. The scenery was absolutely gorgeous, though. Each day, I walked along the harbour, down the pier, met up with the other residents and hiked up the hill to the lighthouse. We had such a great group — Claire writing her second fantasy novel, Catherine at the very beginning of a maybe-poetry project, Diana making fascinating music channelling the elements, and me redrafting a crime novel. All doing very different things at very different stages of development, but somehow we clicked so well.

As for my work, I was there to plug up some of the holes 45,000-word first draft of my novel. Each day, I went up the hill with a loose plan of what I was going to do. Here’s roughly what that looked like each day, from memory:

Monday

• Finished typing up edits suggested by my writing group.

Tuesday

• Skim-read through entire first draft and wrote a list of things I hadn’t addressed later in the manuscript or obvious plot holes.

Wednesday

• Plotted six new chapters aimed at plugging some of the plot holes. These later turned into seven as I realised the last new chapter had enough material to become two.

Thursday

• Started writing the seven new chapters, flitting between them and mainly concentrating on describing the setting in each one first before turning to writing dialogue and characters into it much.

Friday

• Continued writing the new chapters. I didn’t finish them, but I got a decent amount done.

This might not sound like much, I’m not sure, however, I was happy with this. Overall, it felt like quite a breakthrough. While there was no big ‘Eureka!’ moment, the week’s work seems like a surge forward from where I was the week before. Best of all, I know what work I have to do as the next steps.

Here’s to continuing the momentum I’ve gathered, I hope!