Lia Keyes

{ Stories make trouble; that’s one reason why we need them—so we may thrill to the magic and mystery and mayhem of ideas, and refuse to settle for less }

The Houses of Parliament, London

Although I was born and raised in time-layered literary London, I now live by the sea in California where the sun nearly always shines, dispelling the natural gloominess of my disposition. I spend my days, and quite a few nights, scribbling tales of murder, magic, mystery and mayhem for those with curious minds. You can find out more about that HERE.

Lia, 3 yrs

A love of books came early to me, though I had unusual uses for them—I stacked them in piles to create city streets that my toy cars could park on. Sometimes I even read them.

I once asked my father to read a bedtime story, but my six-year old self couldn’t resist directing his halting delivery of Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table, with the sad result that he never read to me again. Can’t say I blame him, really. From him I get my topsy-turvy sleep cycle.

The local library was my mother’s favorite refuge from the drudgery of daily life and every few days she’d bring a new pile of treasures home and spread them out on the living room floor while we sat at her feet. We didn’t have sofas and chairs. There was just Mum’s chair by the fire, where she peeled potatoes and drank her nightly whisky and ginger ale. We three kids sat on the floor, perfectly happily, to do homework and watch TV.

I used to dread walking through these gates each morning...

We led a rather reclusive life, not quite sure why, so books and swashbuckling films (my favourite) filled the void. I traveled to Russia with Tolstoy as my guide, and time-traveled with Geoffrey Chaucer’s bawdy Wife of Bath, and ran barefoot on the  Yorkshire moors with Heathcliff and Cathy, emerging only for meals. School was a burden. Nothing I read there was as interesting as what I read at home, with the exception of two classes: English Literature and Religion and Philosophy. There I rolled my tongue over names like Beelzebub, Bartimaeus, Mithredath, Malachi, and Jeroboam and pondered Big Ideas. I explored Howard’s End, running my fingers over the teeth in the Wych-Elm tree and connecting to the spirit of a fading England of hedgerows replaced by Empire and industrial might. I cried for Sebastian Flyte in Brideshead Revisited as though he were my own brother. When my brother died a few years later it felt different, but as time passes my feelings more closely resemble the way I felt on reading about that senseless loss of beauty and charm and potential. Sebastian Flyte was destroyed by family expectations. My brother was too. But that’s another story.

Ivy in Lunada Bay

Since then I’ve traveled the world and lived on three continents, finally settling in California. I no longer have to battle the weather to get the simplest jobs done, and I’m far enough away from the lively social whirl of London to rediscover my love of story. Writing is something that always came so easily to me that I mistrusted it. It can’t be worth anything if it’s easy, right?

In a way, that’s true. You need to know the rules of writing to get published. So I set to work to learn how to set up a conflict in the first act, how to inflict pain of every kind on my protagonist in the second act until he reaches a ‘long dark night of the soul’ where he believes all is lost, how to have him figure out a new way to respond, so that he leaps into the fray for the climax, comes up victorious, and reflects on how his growth has changed his life or community in a meaningful way.

But something was missing.

Along the way, I’d lost the ability to write from a place of joy, and now there was something studied and hackneyed about my writing. My internal demon had grown to mammoth proportions and had the upper hand. My writing froze. I had to begin again.

It’s often said that this writing lark is not for the faint-hearted. I’ve been very lucky, garnering interest from agents within a month of starting to write. But the real work took place during the four years it took me to learn how to write, then unlearn how to write, and return to writing freely, to delight myself. It wasn’t wasted time. I needed to understand the rules, but now I can knowingly subvert them to write my own story.

To keep things flowing I explore other creative pursuits, like painting and visiting art galleries and museums. I take my Red and White Irish Setter, Ivy, to the bluffs above the ocean twice a day, morning and evening, to blow the cobwebs out of our brains. And if that fails I take a shower. The shower is my imaginarium. I never fail to find a solution to a problem there, though Ivy’s not so keen on it.

I do sometimes venture into the big smoke of Hollywood or Beverly Hills, or Venice – but it’s nearly always a relief to return to my book-crammed flat in Palos Verdes, where I can watch the sun set over the sea from my living room sofa.  A far cry from the basement flat in the World’s End area of London where I was born.

~ Lia

Some other things I do:

• I’m the founder of Scribblerati, the social network for writers and illustrators.
• On Thursdays I host #ScribeChat on Twitter at 6pm PT/9pm ET. You can follow pre-chat topic posts and post-chat transcripts via the ScribeChat blog at ScribeChat.com.
• If you write for teens and children you may want to join the official Facebook “Fans of SCBWI” page, administrated by yours truly and SCBWI Creative Director Aaron Hartzler.

Represented by: Laura Rennert, Andrea Brown Literary Agency

Enlarge the photos with one click:

Ivy sleeps while I write. Not fair...

Miko and Sasha, the Bengal siblings