Runes: Reflections

Process, Story, Thoughts

I shared my first Scribbles and Sketches notebook in September 2023, and Runes has been my eighth notebook. It has also been my first in a narrative fiction format.

The idea behind my seasonal notebooks is that I run with an idea for each day of the month (four notebooks a year), and then close off with a Reflections piece on the first of the month after. This post is a day late, because there was so much to say and I didn’t get it edited in time last night as it was a gorgeous evening and, with storms due today, we opted to eke out as much sunshine as possible and sit in the garden watching the girls playing.

The Process

When I announced this notebook on the first of May, I said:

“I first had the idea for Runes several years ago, not too long after we moved into our previous house. I sketched out some key parts of the story, but I could never really see the whole arc. Time slipped by, life got in the way (daughters, specifically), and it sat there gathering digital dust.”

Announcing the notebook was a proverbial firework, meaning I had to actually write the story. As I know how my brain works, and I don’t like to accept that there are things I can’t do if I really put my mind to it, I knew that I would do everything I could to make it happen. There were times when life in general throughout May and June did test my mettle a tad, but I am ridiculously stubborn when it comes to it.

At the beginning of May, I only had what I thought of as a list of headline beats - I had sketched out a handful of words per chapter, to make sure I had the rhythm of the serial. This amounted to 183 words. I started writing about halfway through May, and my final tally was 21,332 words, meaning I wrote 21,149 words in about six or seven weeks. I started June with a bit under half that amount.

But having established the beats in advance, I had a plan, and I just had to stick to it. Some chapters were more or less fully formed by the start of June, others had a single line, to set the scene and get me started. Some of these, I found I tweaked slightly when I got going - the pace between two chapters didn’t quite fit, perhaps.

I mentioned before my love of serials, the structure and tone. I also love the history, especially in relation to Victorian newspapers. I leant into the “serial” aspect of the structure of the story, thinking about how I wanted to end certain chapters. This also had an interesting effect on how I approached the story - on some of the finer details, I found I was surprisingly comfortable about being confident that I would capture them when I needed to.

Being restricted by my aim of each chapter being between 500 and 1,000 words long was both a blessing and a curse. I had to strike a balance between speech and description, and the balance wasn’t the same throughout (which I wouldn’t have expected it to be). But, for some of the more talkative chapters, so to speak, it did mean that I didn’t have the luxury of being able to spend a few more words on some of the more descriptive sections. This is one of the things I’m looking forward to on the rewrite: having fun with really delving into those aspects of the text. And, because rules are meant to be broken, I did exceed my own 1,000 word cap once or twice. On the flip side, in some instances, the limitations of my self-set chapter limits meant I could short-cut to the bits I wanted to write.

For this particular story, having thirty key beats (as I saw them) worked well. Perhaps this was because it has been percolating in my head for so long, the structure and the story morphed into what became the final serial. I do almost feel like some of it just wrote itself, but of course I have been thinking of this story, absentmindedly working and reworking it in my head, for about seven years. Now was the right time to finally capture it. When a couple of plot points or details clicked into place, I even had some “of course!” moments, wondering why I hadn’t thought of that before.

I read each chapter of Runes to Auri (aged six and a half) each night before bed, and before sharing it online. This was a wonderful experience in itself, but it also gave me a curious insight into what she absorbed, how she approached the story, and what stayed with her. As I do with every serial, before reading I would ask what had happened the night before - it was interesting, sometimes, how she had processed and synthesised what she had heard. One of the joyous things about reading a bedtime story like this one is the process of writing a bedtime story like this one. As anyone who makes up stories for children (and probably adults, too) understands, the stories don’t need to be perfectly formed, because the majority of the forming is really taking place inside the heads of your miniature audience - when I reflected on this, I realised how powerful that was as a frame of mind for capturing that early full draft.

Once again, I found my (mostly) daily walks with Scapa helped me work through problems - and, this time, the focus on having to write or edit what was coming next, for reading and sharing in only a handful of hours, really helped solve some of the trickier bits. I had a definite deadline to which I had to adhere, which meant I couldn’t slope off to write the really fun bit later on that I was itching to write unless I’d covered off that evening’s chapter. Interestingly, I also felt that I genuinely was following the characters - I knew the beats, but I didn’t actually figure out what would happen to arrive at one or two of them until into June (after I’d started sharing chapters).

I have always said that readers shouldn’t expect polish from my seasonal notebooks - they are a shared exercise in creativity, beginnings rather than ends. Some of them may grow legs beyond the end of the month. But, despite all this, I can honestly say that I am surprised how much the process of writing Runes in the way I have described has shifted my way of thinking, and of creating.

The next section of this reflection focusses on elements of the story, so just in case you haven’t finished Runes yet, here’s a photograph so you don’t accidentally see any spoilers - come back later to read the rest once you’ve caught up!

The Story

Much more of Runes is true than you may initially think. The house (both design and situ) is based on our previous home, though I did make it a bit bigger and add in an extra room or two so it would be feasible that a family of four would return back to live there. The woods, and just about everything described within the woods, is very much real. The four families of the wood - the Pinewood, the Larchwood, the Brushwood, and the Greenwood - are based on areas of the woods. A few years ago, around Covid times, I shared a picture tour of the woods on my (now defunct) Twitter account, mostly for a specific friend, but also for anyone who was interested, and I mapped out the walk with featured photos. These areas of the wood each featured (except the Pinewood, as that is in a slightly different direction when you first walk past the gate, as it is in Runes). The obelisk is real, and it really is a monument dedicated to a previous landowner’s dogs, with carved initials (and dates). The tree graffiti is real, and, in fact, part of the inspiration for the story; but nothing was more of an inspiration than finding the rune stones round the Douglas fir when we first walked in the woods all those years ago. The whole story very much grew out of the landscape. (Interestingly, the first story I imagined was actually what has ended up as being referred to almost as a prequel - it was about Alastair and Maggie, and their initial confrontation with the Wildfolk, where they discovered what they were capable of doing. I realised several years ago, though, that story wouldn’t be as fun to write as what became Runes.)

The bridge is real, the castle is real (I wanted the character of Rose to have that name for several reasons, but the one thing that put me off is that it also happened to be the name of the family who owned the castle since it was built in the fifteenth century until the mid 1980s - eventually, I decided to go with the name anyway). The castle also does have a very beautiful, and little-known, arboretum, which includes all the Giants mentioned. The castle was sold recently, and sadly I suspect the arboretum may no longer be open to the public.

Skoodern Humpi is the name of a trow mentioned in Ernest W. Marwick’s The Folklore of Orkney and Shetland. And, believe it or not, there is - as you may have guessed from the photograph above - a trow door with the very sign mentioned in Runes. My brother, Alexander Crow, made it for our family as a Christmas present when most of them were living in Argyle Square in Wick. It was designed to replace a small door to the water stopcock cupboard, and is even hooked up to a battery which lights the stained glass from within when Skoodern Humpi is home and working in his workshop.

Some of you may recognise the description of the Ckel as being based on the Nuckelavee of Orcadian folklore, as documented by Walter Traill Dennison (and shared as part of my last seasonal notebook).

Many, though not all, of the characters mentioned are very much based on real people. And Osa, The Osa, was indeed our old dog who died when I was pregnant with Auri (the picture for chapter 6 does depict Osa).

I found chapters 17 and 18 the hardest to write for the simple reason that some of these scenes were borrowed from somewhere else in my mind - they weren’t tethered to our old village and woods, but were based on other local markets I’ve attended. The market was set in the grounds of the local Primary School (which we had indeed visited for school events, including a summer fair with stalls), but it wasn’t the same as visualising and describing something very specific and real.

All the pictures were taken in our garden or the woods in question whilst we were living in our previous house - I was hoping to share more relevant photographs, but most of them had people or other dogs in! (Our Scapa did sneak into one photo, because it was just too good not to share.)

In many ways, the story of Runes feels like an alternative family history.

What’s Next for Runes?

I now have not just the beats but a full and edited draft, and I already know I want to rework this in due course into a full book. I’m excited about filling in the finer details, and relaxing into writing a bit more description here and there, though the experience of writing and reading it that way will be very different than serial form. I also have some explanations and facts that I would like to include if word length allows.

Please do let me know any feedback you have. Of which bits would you like more? Are there any unanswered questions that you would have expected to be answered? Are there any inconsistencies (I don’t think I was entirely consistent on “peoples” and “people” of the wood throughout!) What do you think of the characters? And the pacing? It has been a marvellous experience having what I suppose are alpha, rather than beta, readers - and I’m interested to hear your thoughts.

I do also have very specific plans for how a redraft might make it out into the world, which I have shared with one or two people - there is a lot more thinking and research needed, but hopefully I’ll be able to pull it off. More news in due course.

Closing Thoughts

Writing and sharing Runes has been a special experience, and one that is hard to describe. For all the things I have captured above, perhaps above all I have learnt the lesson that, sometimes, there may well be a wrong time to try writing something - but that doesn’t necessarily mean there won’t ever be a time to write it. On the flip side, sometimes you just need to kick yourself into gear.

Hopefully, you’ll have picked up from this post just how fun it was to write Runes, and to write it in this way. This structure won’t fit for everything I do moving forward, but it feels like it was the right story at the right time in the right format - it wasn’t easy all the time, but, overridingly, there was a sense of joy and excitement to the entire experience.

There is one other incredibly important - possibly the most important? - thing that I need to mention, and that is the engagement and feedback I had from people who were following this story in real-time as it unfolded. Not just Auri (or Euan, who listened in most nights whilst Elfi-wrangling), but from you all, here on Substack, who messaged or commented to say how much you were enjoying it, or liked the posts. I cannot emphasise enough what a unique experience it was to write and share in this way, for such an appreciative audience, and how grateful I am for those who got in touch throughout the month. It wasn’t just that it was invigorating, but it really did feel collaborative in some way. From those who followed from day one, to those who caught up in a burst partway through - I very much appreciated it all. So, thank you!

I’ll be back on the first day of August with an update on the theme for my next seasonal notebook, which will run throughout September.

Lydia Crow
The Highlands, Scotland

P.S. I do send out a newsletter more or less once a month, capturing where I have been (in a creative sense) and where I expect to be, as not everything I do is shared on Substack as a seasonal notebook. If you would like to receive that, you can sign up here.