If you're still writing your magnificent tome, here are some short ideas that should inspire you to greater heights of creative genius. Whether you're writing a novel or a self-help book, you will find something here to help you hone your writing skills and spark your creative fire. It might even help you get published.
Show and tell
Posted on May 16th 2012 by Self publishing guru
The first commandment of writing: show, don’t tell. By
showing you’re letting the reader project something of their
own experience into the writing. Showing is sharing – always
the nice thing to do.
What would be more exciting: visiting
Disneyworld and riding on every roller coaster
twelve times, or listening to a friend going on
about when they visited Disneyworld and rode
every roller coaster twelve times?
Unless you really hate riding roller coasters, I’d guess the actual experience would
be more exciting than hearing about it from somebody else. The same applies to
writing, whether prose, poetry or drama: show, don’t tell.
If we were to conduct a survey into what words most frequently appeared in
workshops and creative writing seminars, we’d probably end up with ‘show’, ‘don’t’
and ‘tell’. It’s so common a phrase now it even has its own abbreviation. But why
should we SDT? Aren’t writers supposed to tell
stories? Yes, but we want to make readers feel
like they are part of our literary world; to become
immersed in our text, not just think they’re
hearing it from an old man at the bus stop.
When writing, we want to transport readers,
convince them that this world of words is the
real thing: we don’t just want to tell them that
the heroine is in danger, we want to make the
reader feel that danger, hear her pounding
heart, sense the killer’s breath on the back of
her neck, try and fight the panic of imminent
danger. People don’t always believe what
they’re told, but they do believe the evidence of their own senses. Likewise, people
don’t always engage emotionally with the characters they hear about in stories, but
if they’re put in that person’s shoes, they can’t help but empathise. That’s where
SDT kicks in.
No, it’s not an insurance term: it’s telling when you really should be showing. If you
start explaining to the reader something that you should be dramatising, you’re not
giving a scene the impact it should have: ‘She wanted to tell him how much she
loved him’ – yawn! And it doesn’t help if you resort to abstract terms either: telling
your reader that a character is ‘madly and deeply in love’ is no substitute for actually
showing how that person feels: ‘She was trembling, her stomach in knots. She wanted to feel his arms around her, his fingers
on her spine. She wanted to fold her body into
his, so whenever he went away next she’d always
be there – warm, ready.’
You have to set your imagination to work full time to show things in a way that is
moving and believable. Yes, telling is much easier, but if you can’t invest your words
with any humanity or any depth, if you just tell the story from a detached viewpoint,
you risk a reader shutting off and thinking about what they’re going to make for dinner,
or what kind of bathroom cleaner to buy next.
By telling, you’re assuming a reader needs things spelt out as simply as possible. You
have to have faith in your reader’s imagination: don’t try and explain everything in
a scene, credit a reader with enough creative power to fill in the blanks, to
contribute something of her own experience. To truly make readers feel like they’ve
been transported to your world, you need to let them bring part of their own life to
the text: telling everything – setting, character, plot – in minute detail denies them
this and makes the text the author’s empire, a world that leaves no room for them.
Showing allows readers to project part of their own experience into the story – it
becomes a story for them, rather than one simply told to them.
There may be trouble ahead
Posted on May 8th 2012 by Self publishing guru
The most memorable fictional characters all face up to some kind of conflict – from global threats to personal dilemmas – so learn to treat ‘em mean if you want to keep the readers keen.
Practically all characters in fiction are driven by the conflicts they face and the choices they make. We're not just talking adventure novels and horror tales. Conflict is at the heart of all good writing, it’s what drives it forwards. Novels, screenplays and poems are all journeys undertaken by their main characters. This journey forces them to make choices, many of them extremely difficult, and through these pressurised decisions your characters show their true colours.
It’s vital to know your characters intimately when you are writing, otherwise the way they face up to conflict may seem unrealistic or insincere, and they won't develop. It doesn’t matter if your characters make wrong decisions, only that their choices are realistic and human. It’s this lack of predictability, the anticipation and surprise of expectation and result, which keeps the readers hooked.
You may already have a plot in mind, and be ready to throw your characters into a melting
pot of conflict and difficulty. But even if you haven’t yet settled on a story, or are waiting to
see where your characters will lead, it’s a good idea to work out where the conflict lies. All
good characters are plagued by an internal conflict (and remember, even the smallest, most
domestic conflict can seem immense in the eyes of whoever is suffering it). You’ll probably find that the characters you have in mind – even if they are only outlines – are troubled in some way. Without conflict, how can your character even have a view of the world?
Your characters must have a history. Do you know the key events of their past, the ones that made them who they are (the bullying at school, the betrayal of or by a loved one, the death of a parent, the birth of a child)? The conflicts your characters will face may well be something to do with an event from the past, and having a clear idea of what your character has already endured and experienced will help you generate realistic scenarios. Even if you’re focusing on plot, your characters’ reactions to events will be largely determined by the events of their past, so it’s vital to look back as well as forwards. Remember, it’s how your characters deal with the world that makes writing interesting, so give them motivations
and reasons for acting the way they do in the face of adversity. You might not use any of this ‘research’ verbatim in your writing, but time spent investigating your characters’ pasts will give you a much clearer idea of who they are, and enable you to keep their behaviour consistent throughout.
As your characters face up to the pressures of the story, they will change. This may be planned (the nerdy cinema usher becomes the hero during an alien invasion, perhaps), or it may come as a surprise. Don’t be shocked if your characters respond to a difficulty in a way you hadn’t expected – when faced with a conflict on the page they may just take action in their own way. The more you know about their past, the greater the sense of freedom and motivation the characters will have, and the more realistic their response. A poorly thought out character will always obey convention, or will defy expectation but in a way nobody will believe. In other words, he will become stereotypical. A character with depth and with a past, however, will surprise you and delight the reader by revealing herself in a new light.
Who’s the daddy: character or plot?
Posted on April 18th 2012 by Self publishing guru
Like it or not, it’s your characters that drive your work. Getting them right will make the difference between writing a masterpiece and an episode of Days of Our Lives. Try to imagine ‘Great Expectations’ minus Pip. Or ‘The Catcher in the Rye’ sans Holden Caulfield, ‘The Great Gatsby’ without Gatsby, Emma without Emma, Harry Potter...you get the idea – if you don’t get your characters right, your work won’t work.
If Aristotle and E. M. Forster ever meet in the Great Beyond the encounter might
just end in fisticuffs. These two had a great deal to say about the written work, but
didn’t always see eye to eye. Aristotle famously stated that plot was more important
than character when it came to dramatic effect. Forster, on the other hand, claimed
that in order for literature to work it has to be driven by its characters. Most writers side either with Aristotle in the red corner or back Forster in the blue. In other words, you either have organic characters in mind who are born into your fiction and left to
develop much like real people, or you have the action in mind and carve your characters to fit. There are pros and cons to both approaches, but one of the similarities between the plotdriven story and the character-driven story is that in both cases the cast has to seem genuine.
Strong, well-developed characters can become so real in your mind that they drive the story. At one point in my own writing career I thought it impossible for the author to lose control, but while writing one novel I was amazed to find that the characters I had created didn’t always want to follow my plan of action – like your own children finally learning to talk back. When they become ‘autonomous’ in this way, let them lead for a while. You might be pleasantly surprised where it takes you. Be warned, however, that when you let your characters off the leash they may wander errantly in circles and end up accomplishing nothing but boring a reader to tears.
For those of you thinking of approaching from the other side of the fence, a plotdriven
narrative can be equally tricky. Writing your characters around a plot will almost always ensure that they do enough to sustain the reader’s attention. The problem
here, however, is whether they will do so realistically. Just like bespoke furniture, your characters can look a little artificial, as though they were constructed to fill a particular role and have no existence or history in your written world outside of this.
While literary fisticuffs are always entertaining, a healthy balance between plot and
character is the path to success. Or, as Henry James put it, ‘What is character but
the determination of incident? What is incident but the illustration of character?’
Plot is basically the result of human activities and adventures, and even if you don’t
know what’s going to happen, your characters’ actions will drive the narrative. In
other words, if you’ve got a detailed enough understanding of your characters, the
plot will evolve itself. If, on the other hand, you’re building your fiction around a plot, then this depth of character is still vital. Remember, even if you know what your plot will entail, your characters still don’t. The incidents that occur in the course of the story will enable them to evolve and grow much like real people, and they must behave and respond like real people in those situations in order to seem real. If you don’t have a grip of who your characters really are, then it doesn’t matter how exciting the action, or how seamless the narrative: none of it will be convincing because the cast won’t seem real.
Blowing your trumpet
Posted on April 5th 2012 by Self publishing guru
If you’re like me, some days you probably think there isn’t much floating around in the memory department of your brain except for a few old episodes of Thundercats. But learn to dive in deeper – your past can be the key to great
writing. I’ll bet when Proust was dipping his pastries in his tea that morning the last thing he expected was his whole life to flash before his eyes. Yet this goes to show just how many memories there are in each of us, a vast tidal wave of experience that could break at any time and flood back into our present consciousness. These memories – these stories – are what give us the power to write realistically and evocatively. The key is learning how to harness them.
Yesterday… all your troubles seemed so far away. And not just your troubles either. Memory is like that: how are you supposed to recapture events or conversations that now exist only in the murky depths of your mind? I don’t know about you, but my memory is hopeless. I find it hard to remember what I was doing last week, let alone last year (and unfortunately this has nothing to do with alcohol). But my memory, or more precisely my history, is the foundation of who I am. When Wordsworth said that the child was the father of the man, he was emphasising that the sum of your past experience, including your childhood, is what makes you uniquely you.
I compensate for my fuzzy mind by keeping diaries. They’re nothing special. Most entries are random observations from events or meetings rather than detailed accounts of treasured moments. These scraps of text only mention the odd scent, like Charlie Red on a date, or a tune, like ‘Abide With Me’ from a funeral. But I don’t need any more than that to remember the event. The senses are the key to unlocking your memories. How many times has a taste or smell dragged you back to a precise moment in your past, often so unexpectedly that you have to gasp for breath? Powerful fiction is based on thoughtful use of all of the senses and the emotional memories they evoke.
These sudden, immensely powerful flashbacks are an essential part of writing, and can be miracle cures for a text that is lacking in emotional or descriptive depth. Of course a piece of writing that only features your memories is autobiography, and won’t always interest a reader, but they will enable you to paint a much more vivid picture of your characters and their setting. Your memories enable to you to construct an image that is unique to you, that resonates with your own history, even if ostensibly the plot you’re working on seems a million miles away. This attention to detail, this engagement with elements from your past, can be transplanted from your mind to that of your characters, creating a much stronger illusion of real people. Incorporating the memorable sights, smells, tastes, sounds and touches that mean so much to you will create a tangible atmosphere in your work, one that might feel like a real memory to everybody that reads it, as well as to you. Building memories into writing is a key to writing powerfully, it is why something that isn’t real can have the strength of something that is.
It’s always fascinating to look at what the mind remembers when asked to do so
spontaneously. What about your five senses: which seems most important? Visual,
most likely, but what other sensory reminders come into play? And how do you
express your emotional experience of an event? Look for the strings of associations
in your mind that help memories flood back to the present. When they do, make
notes, capture the salient details, and allow your mind to follow along the path the
memories lead: where were you, what were you doing, how were you feeling?
Expand and write a little about yourself and the people you knew back then. What’s changed? These ‘oh yeah, I’d forgotten about that!’ moments are the details that can be inserted into your work to make it that much more convincing.
Poetic license
Posted on March 22nd 2012 by Self publishing guru
Novels, stories and screenplays aren’t the only things that need a setting. Poetry also relies on the visual to convey a sense of mood and meaning. But when writing a poem, a
great deal more depends on how you choose to decorate.
Setting the scene in a poem can be a tricky bugger to get right. Finding the right mix of appropriate and illuminating detail, without swamping a poem with surplus, extravagant description, is like trying to balance a human pyramid on your shoulders: one slip and it can all topple into an obscure and meaningless jumble of parts. When setting the scene, stay sharp, and think hard about why you’re including certain elements of a place and discarding others. Only this scrupulous selection of detail can keep a good poem from turning fuzzy.
When writing, don’t be tempted to include every single detail you pick up on. If you’ve been working on a poem for a while, you’ve probably thought about it a great deal, mulling things over in your mind, working on new ways to describe the scene, the events, the characters. It’s easy to build up a vast storehouse of descriptive phrases and symbolic meanings, most of which you’re quite chuffed with. But when it comes to piecing it together into a poem, you need to get out your fluff filter. It’s unlikely that everything you’ve thought of can go in, even if you’re writing an epic, so it’s up to you to pick the parts that do the most work.
It’s important to try and build up detail in an efficient and effective way. OK, that sounds
more like a statement from 52 Brilliant Ideas for Your Business Plan than a writing guide but don’t ignore it because of fears it may impede your creative urge. With poetry, it’s not so much about setting a visual scene as setting an atmospheric one. Of course you want to paint
a picture, but aim to use your images sparsely, allowing them to accumulate, to build on one
another until they create or embody the mood of the whole poem. Even if your single images don’t say a great deal in themselves, if you control them, they’ll work cumulatively, complementing one another to create a whole much greater than the sum of its parts.
Another similar setback to writing powerful poetry is a lack of clarity. If it’s in the right place, then a descriptive image doesn’t have to be long and complex to pack a punch. Don’t dress your images up with clumsy adjectives purely for the sake of appearances. A wrong choice may distance the reader from the image, forcing them to think too hard about what you’re trying to say – what exactly are the contemplative leaves? Even a more pertinent image could steer a reader’s interpretation too firmly, railroading them into a particular understanding: ‘her unkind gaze’. It’s hard to stay subtle, but remember that in most cases, when placed well, a concrete image is sufficient on its own.
Used with caution, metaphorical images – those that hint at something more than the image itself – can add a great deal to a poem, turning it from a literal description into a powerfully symbolic and personal piece of writing. But beware – metaphors used too often have another name, clichés, and it’s best to stay well clear of anything you recognise from everyday usage. Instead, invent your own metaphors. Pick objects that you associate with emotions and experience and ask yourself why? What is it about an inanimate object that brings to mind an ethereal, emotional equivalent? When writing, you should find metaphors popping up almost naturally – your own mind’s way of helping you comprehend the subject of a poem. Use your instinct, and pick the ones that really make you think, the ones so poignant and evocative that they literally make your heart pound.
Who’s got the map?
Posted on March 8th 2012 by Self publishing guru
Whether your plot is driving your work or following in the wake of your characters, there are certain techniques to getting from A to B without losing your passengers. Try the classical approach...
While every book is different, almost all classic plots go through a number of stages:
beginnings, initiating event, quest, surprise, critical choice, climax, change and conclusion.
It’s these stages that a reader subconsciously expects to find when reading a novel, and by omitting them you can risk losing your audience. Of course, you don’t have to use the classical structure when writing – deviating from it can lead to some surprising and rewarding places – but it’s always best to learn the rules before you go renegade.
Every story has to have a beginning, an event that kick-starts everything else into motion, that disrupts the life of a character. This provocation – posh folk call this the ‘initiating event’ – can be a cataclysmic external change, like the breakout of war, or something internal, more personal to a character. It can be something so slight as to be almost unnoticeable.
It’s this initiating event that gets the ball rolling, that sets events in motion. It’s the thing that forces your characters out of their comfortable, everyday world – their once upon a time – into one that is strange and alien. When plotting out events, this initial provocation doesn’t have to come straight away (look at the extended opening of Sophie’s Choice), but it should happen fairly near the beginning. It’s the conflict that will make your characters act, either by choice or by necessity, and it’s their reactions to it that bring them to life, and make
a plot worth following.
The effect of this initial event – this trigger – is to awaken your characters from an inactive state. In other words, it establishes a quest for them. Almost all classic stories can be read in this light: a character wants or needs something, and goes off to find it. Of course the plot for each new version of the story is different – they might need to find a lost love, be looking for meaning and self-revelation, seeking revenge, trying to get hold of some cash, growing from childhood to adulthood; it might even be laughable (think of poor old Don Quixote) – but the underlying story remains the same. A character’s quest doesn’t have to be external or physical – it could be a psychological or emotional journey. And the quest can change –
although if your character starts out looking for power and ends up seeking love, the transition has to be believable.
When plotting, it’s vital to understand how the quest affects your character psychologically. You have to establish resistance for your character to fight against, obstacles they have to overcome. Why? Because paradoxically, the narrative surprises that prevent the character from enjoying a smooth journey to their goal are what pull the story forwards. Your characters’ responses to these setbacks and conflicts – their ‘critical choices’ (posh folk, again) – are what keep readers interested. This resistance can be anything: another character, a global catastrophe, a domestic misunderstanding, a love interest who’s not interested – but what it must do is provoke your character into making critical choices, and acting them out.
The result of these actions is the climax. A man’s father is murdered by his uncle (initiating event), the man decides to get revenge (critical choice) and murders his uncle (climax). The critical choice and the climax might occur almost in the same moment, or, as in Hamlet, they can take almost the entire length of the text to play out. A climax isn’t always the final stage in a plot, however, and you can have more than one, but they have to lead to something, otherwise why did they occur? If a climax doesn’t change a situation, then it’s spectacle – action for the sake of action. Climaxes are the culmination of your characters’ responses, and should change their emotional or physical status. If the surprises, critical choices
and climaxes you use in your work don’t lead to this change, readers may end up disappointed.
What are you looking at?
Posted on February 27th 2012 by Self publishing guru
It’s rare, but when used effectively second-person narration can knock the reader’s socks off. Anybody who read Fighting Fantasy books when they were younger will know the second-person narrative style intimately: ‘You enter the cavern and see a werewolf dead ahead. What will you do?’ This viewpoint is something of an outsider in narrative theory, but when used well it can have a profound effect on your reader. It is ‘you’ at the centre of things, ‘you’ who is now implicated in the story, for better or for worse. Of course, the second person can also be used to express intimacy and companionship, as this book
hopefully demonstrates!
Self-help books aside, you need a good reason to use second-person narrative style
in your work. Think about what you are trying to achieve – do you want the reader
to feel like a character? Do you want to boss them around, to force them into a certain frame of thought? Do you want to convey the sense of a shared, intimate
experience? Or do you want to make the reader complicit in whatever is going on in the
text? One striking novel that uses the second person for precisely this last effect is Iain
Banks’ Complicity. Several of the chapters involve ‘you’ as the protagonist. Although it’s
not immediately clear what you are doing, you soon realise that ‘you’ are a serial killer, and
you’re forced to witness – commit, even – several horrific murders from a very intimate,
and unsettling, viewpoint.
This feels like you’re behind the eyes of a killer. Whereas with a more conventional
form of narrative you could distance yourself from the events, here you literally are
complicit with them. Like it or not, you become the character and have to sit with a
puppet-like empathy as you maraud your way through your victims. On a less
disturbing level, the second person works to make reading the text as strange an
experience as possible. People aren’t generally used to being addressed in a work of
fiction. By doing so, you are creating an intimate bond with each reader, allowing
them to take the front seat in your imaginary world. Used well, and your work will
really stand out from the crowd. Used without good reason, though, or written
sloppily and all it will do is confuse and alienate people.
Writing an entire text in the second person is an ambitious, and some might say foolhardy,
undertaking, but there’s nothing to stop you addressing the reader every now and again.
Back in the good old days when the novel was a relatively new phenomenon, narrators often made conversational asides to the reader. And whilst not as common today, the narrator can still throw in an occasional comment or two directed at ‘you’, just to make sure you’re still awake.
If you’re writing in a first-person viewpoint, especially one confessional in tone, this
seems perfectly normal – just look at D. B. C. Pierre’s Vernon God Little. If you’re
writing with a third-person narrator, however, addressing your readers explicitly
may direct their attention away from the events of the text and towards its
construction. All of a sudden, this disembodied, neutral observer has developed an
opinion, and is talking to you like you’re its best friend.
If you want an example of how second-person narration is used to excellent effect, read Italo Calvino’s If On a Winter’s Night a Traveller. Here, the narrator begins the tale by instructing you, the reader, to lie down, relax with the book, and tell your friends not to interrupt your reading – almost like an instruction manual for enjoying the book. It alerts you to the novel’s artifice, but it also creates a welcome sense of intimacy between the narrator and the reader.
Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?
Posted on February 8th 2012 by Self publishing guru
How do you stop the big things from having little meaning and the little things from getting too big and messy? Confused? Me too. There was a time when literary convention dictated that only certain subjects were fit for poetry. You could write about love, death and beauty, but if you wanted to tackle any other issues you pretty much had to ditch the verse and write a report. Today, thankfully, things have changed. I’ve reviewed poems on every conceivable subject, from woodlice to iPods, medieval warfare to cypress trees, and while not every piece worked (or even made sense, for that matter), it proves there’s no excuse for a lack of topics to write about.
How do you know if an idea is suitable for a poem? Any idea, however faint, that gets you excited, that touches a nerve, or evokes an emotional response can be the spark of inspiration. The trick now is to fan that spark with enough strength to create a fire without flapping so much you blow it out. The biggest pitfall is going for the big topics such as love, death, time, nature and god without sufficient preparation. All poets tackle some of these subjects at some point – it’s why poetry exists, and it would be unusual if you didn’t want to at least try and explain through verse the issues that mystify you. But in order to capture the essence of these abstract phrases you need to know how to keep it personal.
When you embark on a poem that deals with love, or any other abstract term, you’re always in danger of obscurity and repetition. The word love isn’t tied to anything specific, it’s different for each and every person, and nobody can pin down exactly what it feels like. Moreover, when writing (or reading) about love you suddenly find yourself bombarded with each and every love poem you’ve ever heard, which further loosens your grasp on the term. So when you use the word love in your poetry the image it tends to create is a shadowy, muffled one. The more abstract and high-flown the phrase, the less precise and evocative it will be. Try to avoid abstract terms altogether in your writing – it’s difficult to empathise with a vague impression.
So how can you convey an abstraction without referring to it directly? With subtle, personal hints rather than a slap in the face. Instead of using a poem to tell a reader about a terrifying experience, show them. In other words, don’t use the word terrified (a reader’s eyes will brush over it, it means nothing to them in the context of your poem), but try and convey the experience of being terrified – how you felt, what you were thinking. Everybody has been terrified at some point in their life, and if you evoke the way you were affected by the experience you can attract a reader’s empathy.
Say what now? Yes, it’s a tricky phrase to get your lips round, but then it was one of T. S. Eliot’s. What he was referring to was the need to transfer an abstract emotion onto a real, solid object. It’s no use just bandying words like love and death around. You need to tie them down to a concrete ‘thing’ so that they acquire a physical presence: they become real emotions experienced by real people. I’m not necessarily talking about metaphors here: to write a poem about an old man visiting a cemetery might involve a headstone as a metaphor for the inevitability of death. This is a fairly obvious symbolic link. Instead, the same old man may be looking through his dead wife’s wardrobe for things he can donate to charity and come across a tatty pair of shoes she wore forty years ago. The shoes aren’t a direct metaphor, but they embody the sadness he feels at her passing. Through the object you can evoke a powerful, terrifying feeling of loss; the painful flood of returning memories; the distant abstract made flesh and soul. This is how powerful writing is born.
It’s Alive!
Posted on January 17, 2012 by Self publishing guru
So, you know your characters inside out, you can picture them in your head, you can smell their perfume, and you know exactly what drives them to act. Now you just have
to convey all of this on the page. Being at one with your characters is only the beginning. Bringing them alive in a text in a way that readers will get to grips with is an
entirely different problem..
When reading, you automatically build up a physical description of a character in
your mind’s eye. Take ‘the young man entered the bar’. You most probably have an
image of a young man, albeit a very fuzzy one. But every reader will probably be
picturing a different person, and it’s up to you as a writer to ensure they pick up on
the important points.
Victorian novels used to devote hundreds, sometimes thousands, of words to
describing a character, but these days that isn’t always necessary. Think carefully
about how you want readers to see a character. You can say a great deal about them
in a little space: ‘The young man, decked in baggy blue jeans and a chequered,
double-stitched jacket worn lightly over a tucked-in blue t-shirt, entered the bar.’ But you can also risk boring a reader with clumsy description – do we need to know exactly what he is wearing? Description is largely passive, so keep it as tight as possible: ‘The young man entered the bar, his jacket clutched against the blood stains on his shirt.’
Whilst description is a potent means of making a character stand out on the page, it is
sometimes necessary for a novelist to interject. ‘He could barely see, but beneath the drooping lids his eyes still burned, a look of pure hatred the barman would never forget.’ This is obviously the narrator’s statement, but it helps add depth and mystery to the scene. Is the barman responsible for the young man’s injuries?
Physical action is always more effective than passive description. It can say more than any interjection by the author, and in a much more involved way. ‘He staggered forwards, slipping on the crimson pool that had formed beneath his bare feet. There was an audible intake of breathe from around the room as he pulled the gun from his waistband, pointing it unsteadily in the direction of the bar.’
This more subtle form of description leaves the interpretation to the reader, but can be much more effective than a simple list of physical attributes. ‘Everybody could see the silver crucifix coiled around the barrel, and tucked beneath it, creased so many times it was barely recognisable, the photo of his baby daughter.’ These small details in the scene provide hints to the character’s motives and psychology. They are descriptive, but they also suggest a little more: the crucifix could signify the man’s honourable motives, the photo justifies the revenge. Association can be reversed, however, so don’t always use it conventionally.
Another means of putting your character across on the page is by allowing readers access to their thoughts. These interior monologues provide information that cannot be ascertained by description or action. ‘This was it, he thought, trying to make sense of his blurred vision, trying to see past the pain, I’m finally going to kill him. This is for you, Sara.’ Likewise, actual speech can reveal just as much about your character. ‘“Time’s up Frost,” he muttered, centring the gun’s sights on the motionless shape behind the bar, “It’s all over. You should have stayed the hell away from my family.”’ Finally, other people’s thoughts or speech can be used to bring your character to life, adding another dimension to their behaviour. ‘Frost clamped his hands on the worn wood of the bar and faced the wounded man. Payne looked as though he’d been run through a mangle then fed to the dogs – he could barely stand up. ‘“Payne,” he scowled, raising his arms in defence, “You know it wasn’t me that killed your kids. It was you, Payne. You did it yourself.”’
Virtual reality
Posted on December 14, 2011 by Self publishing guru
So, you’ve recruited your characters, you know them intimately and even have an inkling of where they’re heading – but don’t get so carried away with the drama that you forget about the setting in which it unfolds. You can’t cast John Gielgud as King Lear, usher him onto a pink plastic stage set and expect people not to snigger.
Your characters – no matter how existential they are – need a world around them (even the characters of Waiting for Godot have a tree and a crossroad). Readers expect nothing else. Think of your favourite literary heroes (or vilains) and I’ll bet their surroundings pop up with them. Marlow on his Congo steamer surrounded by the dark forest; Winston Smith amidst the antique junk of the store as he waits for Julia, or deep in the bowels of the Minstry, in Room 101. Characters need to be tied down in a place and time, given context, if they are to become believable in the eyes of a reader.
We are instinctively nosy creatures; we want to know how other people live, what secrets lie hidden in their cupboard. Fiction lets you look around characters’ homes without their knowing. What you see isn’t put on for the cameras – smiles, neatness, colour – it’s them in their natural habitat, warts and all. You can pry into every nook, peer into every cranny, poke under every floorboard, without anybody ever realising you’ve been there.
A reader’s relationship with your literary world is tentative: not enough reminders of where they are and they will drift back to their own place and time; too many and the effect will be ruined, snapping them back to reality quicker than a slap on the face. The trick is to tread lightly, stay subtle. If you’re planning to start off along the lines of ‘It was a dark and stormy night in New York’, don’t leave it there. OK, we all know what New York looks like, but our mental picture is general, imprecise, and boring because of it. We don’t know what New York looks like to your character, the details that are important to him, which he notices first.
It’s not enough to assume that readers will conjure up the world around your character based on an initial statement. If you don’t keep laying on subtle reminders, the mental image they have will soon grow fuzzy and unappealing. Start with the small details, the ones that matter most. Think about the first things you notice when you arrive at a new location: the smell of lavender, the way the ivy clings to the graffiti-strewn walls, the cold air on your cheeks, the sounds of a car engine turning over. You don’t necessarily notice the grand picture first off, and your characters probably won’t either.
So when setting the scene, start by describing the details that mean something to
your characters, the small points they might notice above all else – aim to capture a
character’s emotional engagement with his surroundings. That way, not only will
the scene stay fresh and vibrant in the reader’s mind, it will also reveal more about
your characters and the way they view the world.
Of course, there’s only so much detail a person can take in at any given point. If
you’re writing in the first person, or the third-person limited, you need to restrain
your creative urge when describing a fictional world: unless your character is
obsessive, it’s doubtful whether they’d notice the fluff under the couch, the
number of pennies in the jar or how many glittering pendants are dangling from
the chintzy lampshade. Even if you’re taking a wider narrative scope, limit how
much descriptive information you provide. The aim is to make the setting personal
and realistic, not to imitate a scene of crime report. Take D. H. Lawrence’s advice
and look for the objects that are alive, which resonate with energy, which are
special, which are used.
The good, the bad and the ugly
Posted on November 29, 2011 by Self publishing guru
Submitting your work is like dropping your kids off for their first day at school. You don’t know whether they are going to be bullied, rejected or become best friends with everybody and make a real impression. Be prepared for all eventualities.
OK, let’s defy Wild West tradition and start off with the ugly – and it doesn’t get much uglier than this. Rejection. It’s the word that no writer ever wants to hear, but inevitably will at some point in their career. Unless you are extremely lucky, you’ll have to learn to cope with rejection. It isn’t easy: during the abyss of time between submitting a piece of work and hearing an editior’s response you can’t help but build up your level of anticipation. And if the response comes back negative it can crush your confidence and make you want to throw everything you’ve ever written in the fire.
Don’t give in. I know it can feel like the end of the world – I used to hide myself away in my room for days on end debating various forms of revenge against the offending editor. Put it behind you and try again, with a different editor. Contrary to popular opinion, editors want to open an envelope and be delighted by what’s inside, they want to find material worth publishing – they’re not out to try and crush your self-confidence by rejecting your work.
Rejection can take many forms. More often than not, you’ll get a printed compliments slip with nothing written on it. This is the easiest response for an editor but the most frustrating response for a writer – what did they think? Was it not even worth an acknowledgement? Don’t get too wound up, editors are busy and sometimes they simply don’t have the time (or are too badly organised!) to respond.
Sometimes the printed slip comes back with some scribbled comments. These might be complimentary: ‘good but not quite right for this publication’; promising: ‘please send something else’; critical: ‘good overall but you haven’t quite pinned down the characters’; or just plain derogatory. I won’t give an example of the latter, but they do occasionally happen. If you do get a grumpy response, just try to ignore it (the editor’s probably got haemorrhoids from sitting down all day) and move on.
If an editor sees real promise in your work he may take the time to write a more detailed analysis of this decision. Don’t take this as an insult and bin the comments, or get on your high horse and write a scathing letter back justifying your work. It’s an editor’s way of encouraging you to look at certain elements of your writing in order to improve your chances of publication. Take a few days to cool down, then look at what he’s saying: it may not be relevant, but he might just be pointing out a weakness you’ve completely overlooked. Editors don’t often make good writers, but they do know what sells and what doesn’t. Paying attention to their comments will give you a great advantage next time you submit.
If your work runs the gauntlet and makes it from the slush pile, through the juniors or freelancers who’ll read it first, and past the senior editor who’ll try and sell your book and ‘you’ the writer to the big cheeses, then you’ll get a phone call – quite possibly the best phone call of your life – where an offer is made to publish your book. They might not say this directly, but they will most probably want to meet you to talk about possible changes and to get a feel for how promotable you are as a writer. Once the legal and financial blurb is out of the way, you’ll probably have to wait up to eighteen months before you can visit Borders and start drooling over your book on the shelf. It may seem a long wait, but this gives the marketing department time to work their magic and allows the book to be released at the most opportune moment.
Buy one, get everything else free
Posted on November 07, 2011 by Self publishing guru
Having a clear idea of where your work is heading is all well and good, but remember: readers don’t like a giveaway, so keep them guessing by plotting cleverly. Getting the reader to turn page after page is the most important concern for a writer, and the best way to arrest their attention is by raising questions and delaying the answers. If you pose an intriguing enough question at the beginning of a piece of writing a reader will charge through a thousand pages or more to find out what happens – just look at The Lord of the Rings.
Plot, especially in a novel, is like a treasure map. As a writer, you’re guaranteeing to a reader that the instructions you give them will lead them through the dark forest to the golden doubloons at the end – it’s a guarantee that you’re sending them in the right direction, and that whatever lies at the end is worth the trip. If the map you provide doesn’t meet these two requirements, the readers will lose their way, and you’ll lose their trust.
But it’s a little more complicated than this. Readers aren’t just looking for a final payoff – they don’t want freebies. If people were after a quick resolution, all stories would be two pages long; a beginning, then straight away a conclusion. Or readers would skip to the last page of a novel as soon as they’d finished the first. The map you provide has to be one that takes the reader on a number of adventures, that builds up their suspense and relives it bit by bit on the journey to the end. Readers like to be teased. They want to get to the end of a novel (how many times have you cursed yourself for not being able to read fast enough to find out what happens at the end of a book?) but they also want to feel they’ve got something from the whole experience, not just the resolution.
In order to create tension in a plot, to keep readers turning those pages, you need to ask questions and hold back the answers. In most texts, the initiating event poses the big question: readers want to know how a character is going to react, and what the outcome will be. If the uncertainty you create at the beginning of the book is exciting enough, they’ll keep reading until they get to the end, until the question is resolved.
For some, though, the thought of slogging through an entire novel for a final resolution is daunting, so keep up the tension by posing smaller questions in each chapter. Remember, each problem or obstacle you pose for a character is a question raised – every challenge you set a character creates an uncertainty in the reader: will they make it out of this one? Keep your readers hooked by holding back the answer, and posing another question as soon as the previous one is resolved. You can do this at the start of the chapter, or you can end chapters with a cliffhanger, but either way the reader is propelled forwards by their need to find out what happens next. Many thriller writers have got this down to a fine art.
Whether you’re creating a plot from an outline, or leaving it to the actions of your characters, you should be aiming to show how life is a great deal more complicated than a simple story. And in order to do this, you don’t just want to be showing events themselves, you need to focus on how they shape your characters. Plot is a journey, sometimes physically but always emotionally and psychologically. Central characters need to change in the course of a plot: when they arrive at point B they can be anywhere – happier, sadder, richer, poorer, deader – as long as they are not still at point A. Somewhere between each uncertainty and each resolution, your characters change, they evolve. Without this change, for better or for worse, readers will find it hard to empathise with your characters.
Poetry
Posted on October 20, 2011 by Self publishing guru
With poetry, finding your voice and getting it down on paper can seem an impossible task. You may be working with the medium in order to express yourself, to explore hidden facets of your personality. All well and good. But if you can’t learn to shape this torrential subject matter it’ll probably end up as nonsense, not verse. I bet you want to leap right in and write something that outshines The Waste Land, but take your time, breathe deeply and learn to play a little before you start to get serious.
Chances are that when you start writing poetry you stick to your own rhythm. Expressing yourself can be hard enough without having to do so to the beat of somebody else’s drum. There’s nothing wrong with this: if you know the rhythm of your voice, then you can write powerful poetry with a structure all of your own. But there’s a fine line between a poem and a ramble, and if you don’t pay attention to your poem’s structure, it’s in danger of becoming like one of my mum’s cakes: so loose it falls apart. It may appear easier to express yourself without the limitations of a traditional structure, but this attitude can be deceiving. Left to ponder shape, how can you pin down exactly what it is you’re feeling, precisely which elements of your turbulent inner voice to capture on paper? Writing to a traditional form may seem restrictive, but it can actually free your mind by creating a structure for you. When you don’t have to worry about structure, you can devote more of your creative energy to playing with content.
Too many people try to write a beautifully crafted epic poem on their first go. It’s like waking up one morning and deciding you’re going to win Olympic gold in judo, although the only tussle you’ve ever had is trying to wrestle open your Pop Tarts. As a poet, you need to become more aware of the fascinating and surprising powers of language to awaken long-lost ideas and memories, and the best way to do this is to start small.
Look at the fragments of ideas and phrases in your notebook and play with them. Don’t try and craft a masterpiece just yet, simply start scribbling, write without thinking and see where it leads. Automatic writing, as it’s often called, doesn’t have to make sense – in fact, the more arbitrary your subject the better the results. The idea is to open up your unconscious mind, which is such an important part of writing poetry, and to practise using this vast resource of feeling and emotion. By starting small, by tuning your mental antennae for unexpected resonances, moods and memories, poems will begin to shape themselves in no time.
If you’re having trouble finding inspiration for your poems, or can’t seem to knock them into shape, the answer may lie in imitation. Think of it as a kind of flattery. Philip Larkin, for example, claimed that when he started out he always had a copy of Yeats on his kitchen table next to his open notebook. Try imitating a poet you’ve always admired. Don’t blatantly transplant lines from famous poems into your work, but do take a close look at a poem that really moves you and try working out why.
Next, try writing one of your own that has a similar structure, rhythm or theme. Using models is an excellent way to practise probing into the depths of your creativity and to gain a comprehensive feel for language and form. Just remember that imitation alone won’t make you a great poet. Think of it as riding on the shoulders of a mentor: they can only carry you so far, then you have to make your own way. If you carry on using other poems as models, you’ll never be able to get your own unique voice on the page.
Feeling the rhythm
Posted on October 05, 2011 by Self publishing guru
Life is full of natural rhythms – just try walking to an irregular beat and you’ll be falling over yourself in no time. You don’t have to write sonnets to get rhythm into your poetry, just keep your ears open to nature’s pulse.
If you’re like the vast majority of poets out there, you probably started writing without thinking too hard about metre. You may have vague recollections of ‘iambic pentameter’ from school but you may not quite recall what counting syllables has to do with self-expression. You certainly don’t need to write trochees or spondees in order to craft good poetry, but finding your own rhythm is a vital step to making your work your own, and stopping it resembling your dad on the dance floor.
Knowing how to use rhythm in poetry doesn’t require a degree. In fact, all you have to do is look at everyday speech. Take the heading above, for instance: ‘a section that describes pentameter’. It’s made up of ten alternating strong and weak syllables. This is actually an iambic pentameter: one of the most commonly used metrical systems in poetry, adopted by such luminaries as Milton and Wordsworth. You don’t have to speak like Shakespeare in order to write in iambic pentameter – your language can be modern and natural and still be set to that pace – but the rhythm helps order the words, working to make them more fluent, and give them more impact, than those without structure. Some academics make metre sound like a science, but nobody actually reads poetry in this fractured, halting way. In fact, it’s best, for now, to forget about metre (as something a poet imposes on their words) and start thinking about rhythm – the musical movement and flow of speech.
If the word rhythm makes you think of steel drums and samba, great! It’s all about movement, music, freedom; what Robert Frost calls the ‘abstract vitality of our speech’. Try to listen to the way people talk without actually hearing what they’re saying. Don’t focus on the words, tune in to the stresses, the intonation (the rise and fall of pitch) and the voice quality.
Make that your task for this week: go out and listen to the music and rhythm of language. Listen to people on the bus, in the pub, on television, listen to yourself. But hear the noise, not the words – tune the meaning out (a great technique to learn for next time you have an argument with a loved one). We’re lucky in that English is a language in which strong and weak stresses alternate in a fairly evenly distributed way. Next time you’re writing, try and convey these patterns onto the page as honestly as possible: you’ll probably find a rhythm emerging. The most important thing is to always go with your instincts: if your heart breaks rhythm you see a doctor, if your footsteps fall out of sync you fall over, if a line doesn’t feel like it’s got a natural rhythm, you change it.
In short, it doesn’t matter if you go traditional and strike up an iambic pose, or break out and listen to the natural rhythms of everyday speech – you have to have an underlying beat of some sort. Even free verse, with no discernible metre, has rhythm. Writing poetry without rhythm, says Frost, is like ‘playing tennis with the net down’. Experiment with different kinds of metre, but don’t just rebel against it because you feel it might be restrictive: remember, one of the primary principles of poetry is organisation. Keep playing until you find your own balance between the underlying order of metre and the natural rhythm of spoken language. Once you’ve found this rhythm, your lines will always have energy and life.
How to harness personal experiences
Posted on September 23, 2011 by Self publishing guru
I’ll bet when Proust was dipping his pastries in his tea that morning the last thing he expected was his whole life to flash before his eyes. Yet this goes to show just how many memories there are in each of us, a vast tidal wave of experience that could break at any time and flood back into our present consciousness. These memories – these stories – are what give us the power to write realistically and evocatively. The key is learning how to harness them.
How are you supposed to recapture events or conversations that now exist only in the murky depths of your mind? I don’t know about you, but my memory is hopeless. I find it hard to remember what I was doing last week, let alone last year (and unfortunately this has nothing to do with alcohol). But my memory, or more precisely my history, is the foundation of who I am. When Wordsworth said that the child was the father of the man, he was emphasising that the sum of your past experience, including your childhood, is what makes you uniquely you.
I compensate for my fuzzy mind by keeping diaries. They’re nothing special. Most entries are random observations from events or meetings rather than detailed accounts of treasured moments. These scraps of text only mention the odd scent, like Charlie Red on a date, or a tune, like ‘Abide With Me’ from a funeral. But I don’t need any more than that to remember the event. The senses are the key to unlocking your memories. How many times has a taste or smell dragged you back to a precise moment in your past, often so unexpectedly that you have to gasp for breath? Powerful fiction is based on thoughtful use of all of the senses and the emotional memories they evoke.
Powerful flashbacks or ‘memory transplants’ are an essential part of writing, and can be miracle cures for a text that is lacking in emotional or descriptive depth. Of course a piece of writing that only features your memories is autobiography, and won’t always interest a reader, but they will enable you to paint a much more vivid picture of your characters and their setting.
Your memories enable to you to construct an image that is unique to you, that resonates with your own history, even if ostensibly the plot you’re working on seems a million miles away. This attention to detail, this engagement with elements from your past, can be transplanted from your mind to that of your characters, creating a much stronger illusion of real people. Incorporating the memorable sights, smells, tastes, sounds and touches that mean so much to you will create a tangible atmosphere in your work, one that might feel like a real memory to everybody that reads it, as well as to you. Building memories into writing is a key to writing powerfully, it is why something that isn’t real can have the strength of something that is.
It’s always fascinating to look at what the mind remembers when asked to do so spontaneously. What about your five senses: which seems most important? Visual, most likely, but what other sensory reminders come into play? And how do you express your emotional experience of an event? Look for the strings of associations in your mind that help memories flood back to the present. When they do, make notes, capture the salient details, and allow your mind to follow along the path the memories lead: where were you, what were you doing, how were you feeling? Expand and write a little about yourself and the people you knew back then. What’s changed? These ‘oh yeah, I’d forgotten about that!’ moments are the details that can be inserted into your work to make it that much more convincing.
Succeeding with first-person narrative
Posted on September 09, 2011 by Self publishing guru
If you’re looking for an intense and surprising narrative viewpoint, try the first person. Anybody or anything you like can be telling the story – the trick is to avoid ‘I’ becoming ‘you’. The first-person viewpoint is all about the ‘I’, the character’s sight, their frame of mind, their limited understanding of themselves and the world around them. Think of the difference in effect between ‘he thrusts in the knife, feeling her skin rip’ and ‘I thrust in the knife, feeling her skin rip’. The ‘I’ narrator speaks from a privileged position: he or she (or even it) inhabits the world of your text, and is part and parcel of what goes on within. Events therefore have more power to spill off the page and into the reader’s consciousness.
But there are some restrictions to this point of view. How do you describe your character without risking cliché by having her look in a mirror? Also, everything in the text has to be something known by the narrator, and told through her unique narrative style. She can’t see what’s coming, she can’t see what’s happening in another room, she can’t tell what other people are thinking, and she doesn’t know the truth about everything that has happened (four excellent reasons why this viewpoint is often used in detective fiction).
Moreover, first-person narrators aren’t always reliable: how often have you embellished a story to boost somebody’s opinion of you? First-person narrators telling somebody else’s story (think Heart of Darkness) are at even more of a disadvantage. Work out before you start writing exactly what your narrator knows, and how much of what she says should be considered the truth.
We all tell stories from a first-person viewpoint – how many times do you use the word ‘I’ in a sentence? Because of this, it�/div>
