Gone Fishing....

I've done a hundred posts - YAY - which I think has earned me a short break, so I'm off on a research trip....

Back next week....

Complimenting Your Reader

I had a tummy bug recently and spent two days in bed -- plenty of time in which to devour Kate Atkinson's new Jackson Brodie novel, Started Early, Took My Dog in a single sitting.

It is a highly enjoyable, sympathetic read and made me feel a whole lot better -- about myself, amongst other things.  Thinking about it now, this was partly because she paid me the compliment of assuming I was intelligent and well read. Brodie, her hero, is a bit of a sucker for poetry and the narrative is liberally sprinkled with quotations and references, some of which I recognised, many of which I'm sure escaped me.  When I did clock something it made me feel a) nostalgic (if it was something that I liked or had meant something to me once) and b) smug, for being able to identify it at all.

In this way, Atkinson wasn't just telling me a story, she was developing a relationship with me, a kind of nod and wink affair: I know you'll get this, and there's another one coming up in the next chapter which I think you'll like as well. She was treating me as an equal, as someone who is in the know.  It's a form of inclusiveness, an unspoken bond.  Now that I'm on side like this, it's a fair bet that I'll buy her next book too...

The moral of the story: think of all the different ways -- obvious and not so obvious -- that you can build a relationship with your reader, as it can only be a benefit to both of you.

Literary Leger de Main

As a writer, you're an illusionist: you create whole worlds for your reader and go to extraordinary lengths to make them seem as real and as plausible as possible -- that is what writing good fiction is all about.

The subversive in me is interested in the effects of setting up an illusion only to destroy it with a kind of devastating sleight of hand.  It can be the most fantastic plotting device and leave your reader open-mouthed with astonishment. Sarah Waters is an absolute genius at this: without wanting to give too much away, in her novel Fingersmith she creates one reality only to whip the rug from under the reader's feet and reveal another, different one. I finished reading it last week and I'm still feeling a little giddy.

So here's a challenge for you: set a wheel turning  within a wheel -- as you're weaving one illusion, produce another like a string of bright silk handkerchiefs hidden up your sleeve. Fiction is bluffing anyway, but take it a step further and go for double bluff. It can be a circus trick: cue drumroll, cue fanfare...

The DNA of Fiction

Gustave Flaubert once said, "We do not choose our subjects, they choose us," and as the author of Madame Bovary and A Sentimental Education, it's safe to assume that he knows a thing or two about it.

When I'm writing, the situation is often a starting point for me - man sleeps with brother's wife, son admits to partner's murder - and I can write hundreds of pages on all the ramifications and nuances of these core events before it becomes apparent to me that what I'm actually writing about is the estrangement and reconciliation between parents and their children.  That's my theme, or so it seems, but it is so profoundly rooted in my subconscious that it only becomes evident to me when the work is completed and I take a step back from it.  Because I am in some way channelling direct from a place deep inside me without having made a conscious decision about it, it really does feel as if the subject has chosen me.

Perhaps as a writer you should creatively ignore the themes which interest you and leave your subconscious -- that creative powerhouse -- to get on with it. Busy yourself with plot and situation, but do so in the knowledge that it is the themes that emerge from your work which will define it - sibling rivalry, unrequited love, whatever they turn out to be - and that they will keep cropping up (choosing you) again and again.  In this sense, they are the DNA buried in your writing, evident in every cell, in every word.

Time for a Change

At the risk of coming over all algebraic here, most stories have change as one of their central themes and the agent for change is time - if I hadn't failed my maths own level twice, I could doubtless come up with a neat formula to show this, but as it is you have to make do with a beautifully weathered door instead....

 


Here  the effects of time are plain to see; time and sunlight and rain and too many changes in temperature. Time and change are perennial themes for writers: they reflect our prime concerns about ageing and mortality.

However, the passing of time doesn't just alter our circumstances or change us physically, it can have an effect on our perspective as well, opening up all kinds of potential for writerly exploration.  To mine these possibilities, why not write about an incident that once seemed tragic and now appears comic, or vice versa, to show the effect that the passing of time has had upon the narrator....

My Adam Phillips Prescription

If you are writing about people in any shape or form, and you must be if fiction is your main concern, then you should have a little pile of books by Adam Phillips within arm's reach pretty much all of the time. Top of my pile I have Monogamy and On Kissing, Tickling and Being Bored. Not only does he write beautifully, making psychology accessible in the way that nobody since RD Laing has managed to, he has a knack for shedding a completely different light on relationships that can seem humdrum and it is this that makes him such a fantastic resource for writers.

This is Mr Phillips on the effects of separation on children: What are children if we stay together for them?  What are we asking them to be? Brilliant!  Straight away I'm in a situation, with a viewpoint, and before I know it I'll be teasing out a plot and characters as well.

Here's another starter for ten : If you've got nothing to hide you've got nowhere to go.  Which is one of the reasons why couples sometimes want to be totally honest with each other.  Thoughts like this can be incredibly helpful in informing how you handle a particular scene; they make you dig deep for motivation, they help you to reach beyond the obvious.

Rush out and buy....

Atmospherics

When you walk into a room and there's a bit of an atmosphere, it strikes you straight away.  Usually, it is generated by emotional tension between the people in the room, or the person entering it, but it can be quite fun to unpick this a little further and discover what supplementary tools may be at your disposal.

Some visual detail can be helpful: is the space well or poorly lit, does it have a sense of order or disorder, is it well cared for or neglected ? The smell of a place can be incredibly evocative, as well -- scents can resonate powerfully in the memory; they can attract or repel.

Another aspect which is often neglected, but which you might like to consider is the soundscape in any situation.  Stop for a moment and think what sounds summarise happiness - children's laughter, wine pouring from a bottle; or desire - a zip being unzipped, slowly; or expectation -- a match being lit; or menace -- the slow approach of footsteps.

Ambiance can be a useful prelude to action, the springboard to a moment of drama.  Why not have a go at working up an atmosphere -- it can help to put your reader in the mood, and you, the writer, as well.

The Reckless Extravagance of Creating a Character

After my agent had read the first draft of my novel The Dragonfly, she asked me what the main character did.  As he's retired, it's not mentioned in the book, but I told her that he worked in insurance, because that was part of the life that I had created for him.  She was interested because she found him interesting and also because she wanted to know that I knew.

I'm only mentioning this because I think it throws light on the process of evolving a character.  As a writer, you need to know pretty much everything that there is to know about the people in your story, but it would weigh the narrative down and slow it almost to a halt if you put all of the information in.  You need to have that level of detail in your head because it is part of your hero's experience and will inform how he responds and behaves, but if you went into every single tiny aspect you run the risk (unless you are Proust) of boring your reader to death.

What I think works best is a kind of reckless extravagance when you are piecing together the characters who will populate your novel or short story: make notes, draw diagrams, do time  flow charts - the whole shebang.  But once you have chronicled it all for yourself and then stowed it for safe-keeping in your subconscious, be judicious - even economic - with what you tell your reader (and when -- there is mileage in doling out information in dribs and drabs, as the plot requires it.)

Here's the doorway to a great weekend ...

"Found" Art, or Literary Thrift

I'm still in overhearing mode (following on from an exercise idea in yesterday's post) and it occurs to me that just as visual artists make works out of bits and pieces that they stumble across, writers can make stories or poems out of scraps of conversation that they overhear.  It's a bit like being an aural magpie: thieving from here, stealing from there and I struck gold twice in one day earlier this week.

The first was a mere phrase that I caught as two young girls walked past me.  One said to the other, "I caught a disease off the boss," and immediately a whole wide savannah of possibilities opened up, involving illicit affairs, office politics, power dynamics, sexual sleaze, exploitation, manipulation,  all of it to be mined from seven simple words.  Just one brief sentence, and there is a whole short story fighting to get out.

The second little pearl came my way via a waiter in a hotel bar, who commented to his colleague, "I've had some weird ones tonight -- a room service who just wanted potatoes."  He's right, it is weird.  Why would somebody sit in their hotel room eating potatoes on their own?  It speaks of faddishness, compulsiveness, greed, a terrible kind of loneliness, parsimony, perhaps; it's quite funny, in a sad way.  It's certainly the seed for some character work of an interesting kind.

The point I making is one of thrift - if something comes your way, make use of it, recycle it for writerly purposes, save it up for future use.  Never throw anything out, as you don't know when it may come in handy.

Making Sense of the Senses

I've just been reading The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers and was very struck by the bravado of having a central character who is a deaf mute, in her first book, what's more, at the age of only twenty-three.  Respect!

If your central character can neither hear nor speak, you automatically set yourself some narrative challenges.  However, if you deny the yourself some of the usual devices for developing a character and relaying and narrative, it can give other elements of your story greater concentration and emphasis.  If your heroine is deaf and cannot use her voice, her inner world of thoughts and emotions becomes particularly vivid and important and how she will relate to other people (and they to her) becomes more subtle and interesting.

It might be stimulating to have a go at something like this yourself. Why not try writing about someone who only has access to four out of the five senses -  it may help you to focus on other resources for narrating a story; you will have to delve further into your imagination and come up with tools that may be new and unfamiliar. At its simplest level, you could try writing a piece about somebody overhearing a conversation and the effect it has, because without the use of visual signals, your hero (and you as the writer) will have to rely on other means to explore what exactly is happening.

Cliffhangers and Coquettes

Once you have got your hooks into a reader with a punchy, dramatic start to a story, the only thing that will keep them reading (apart from your lambent prose, of course) is the irresistible urge to know what happens next and it is up to you to dole out your plot as tantalisingly as possible.  As with affairs of the heart, it is a balance between giving and withholding: you give them a little bit of information, but withhold the critical part.You promise much, but you don't deliver straight away. This is in effect what a cliffhanger is: you march your hero or heroine right to the brink of a major drama - and then you leave them (and your reader) in suspense.

Following a cliffhanger, it is a good idea to cut away from the excitement to something that has a different pace and texture, a different mood, even a different location, involving different characters.  In this way your reader's curiosity - their desire - is inflamed.  Plotting as a kind of flirtation, a come-on? Hmmm.

A Question of Attribution

When you're writing dialogue, it's easy to get bogged down in a he said / she said / he said / she said riff and although it can sometimes be used to stylistic effect, as with everything else, variety is the spice of life.  Here are a few ideas which might help you break down the tricky problem of attribution....

• Sometimes use he / she, but intersperse it with the names of the characters involved - Fred said, Jane said.
• Root around in your Thesaurus for alternative ways of describing speech: he observed, she replied; he declared, she answered etc
• Get verbal - distil the verbs you choose into the most concentrated form of meaning: instead of saying he said sleepily, try he yawned; rather than he said loudly, try he yelled / shouted / bellowed.
• Use action to indicate who is speaking: "I've had just about enough of this," Jane rummaged in her bag for her cigarettes and when she couldn't find them, she clawed her fingers through her hair.  "You think I haven't?"  Fred was standing with his back to her, staring out of the window at the street.
• Vary where you place your attribution so that it is sometimes at the beginning of the speech and sometimes in the middle, not automatically at the end each time: Jane hesitated, "What do you mean?  What are you - ?"  "Well, it's obvious, isn't it?"  Fred cut across her,  "We've both known for months now..." 
•  Establish a rhythm where Jane speaks and then Fred does, so that you don't need to label each exchange, as the reader can work it out for themselves.

Why not write a short piece yourself, putting all of these to the test?  Be as creative and inventive as you can; overexaggerate it so that you get a feel for the different techniques, then you can row back a bit, to a level that feels more comfortable.

Masterclass

I'd give my eye teeth to have gone to the masterclass on the art of fiction which Ali Smith gave under the auspices of the Royal Society of Literature but I only found out about it after the event, or Colin Thubron's on evoking the spirit of a place, but I'm going to be on holiday, but all is not lost...

I think it's perfectly possible to have your own, exclusive masterclass, just for you.   I'm a huge fan of Helen Dunmore: I think her work shimmers somewhere between prose and poetry; she chooses bold and potent themes (incest, blackmail) and her characters are individual and empathetic.  Her books manage to be gripping and literary all at once, a difficult balancing act to pull off. Why don't you think of a writer you admire, and ask yourself what qualities you like in their work, really try to unpick what it is that resonate for you, and then have a go at writing something which tries to embody some of these qualities yourself. Amongst other things it will help to connect what you read with what you write, which can only be good...

I'm Feeling Extraordinarily TENSE at the Moment...

I'm tense about tenses. I'm always amazed at how many students submit work without first having a rigorous look at the tenses they are using: they wander, they meander, they double back, they go shooting forward and for a reader it can be extremely discombobulating.

If you are telling a story in the present tense, stick with it, unless you are writing passages of flashback.  If you are writing in the past, don't go drifting into the present.  Verbs are the spinal column in the body of your work, they are the architecture that holds a story together.  A good verb, well chosen, is an extraordinarily dynamic device, so make sure that you do them (and the story you are telling) full justice by putting them in the right tense.

Here's a consciousness-raising exercise you might like to try: write a story in the present tense, then rewrite it in a past tense and compare the effects.  It might help you to be more tense -- aware.  Write consistently: nothing in your work should be inadvertent.

A Day out with Mrs Dalloway

I've come over all anarchic following yesterday's post -- perhaps it's because I'm getting excited about going on the TUC's march against the cuts on the 26th and I've never been on a march before.  There!  I've admitted it.  I'm feeling better already.  In spite of my apathy I've always had a line drawn in the metaphorical sand and the coalition government is yomping right over it, so -- time for action!

I digress-- this is a creative writing blog -- think of the above as some kind of stream of consciousness moment, because actually that's what I want to talk about, a small and winding diversion wandering off from yesterday's ideas about breaking the rules.

Why not have a fit of the Mrs Dalloways yourself and follow in Virginia Woolf's footsteps by writing something in stream of consciousness mode?   Jot down anything that comes into your head; let your thoughts ramble far and wide.  Throw in some sensations, impressions, observations, memories and emotions as they occur to you.  Let yourself float free...

Then - in order to prevent this from being an exercise in mere self-indulgence, have a forensic look at what you have written.  Think hard about your thoughtless meanderings and try and analyse the themes and preoccupations which emerge.  It might even be worth writing a short list because that in itself is a way of imposing structure on something shapeless, of arranging your material. My guess is that the process will give you some insight into the ideas that inspire and inform your work and that writing something down spontaneously and then dissecting it may help to give you fresh access to your imagination.

It's a bit like opening a new door...

P. S.This is a door of many colours: black, pink, grey/blue, yellow, green, a worn work of art, (or nature) which at a quick glance you might just dismiss as something gray.  Moral: look closely; see with a fresh eye...

Anarchy in the UK

I sit here in my little room gazing across the road (forsythia fully out now, cherry tree in bud, spring hurrying to catch up with itself), occasionally pontificating about the dos and don'ts of creative writing and the thought has occurred to me, once or twice, that in spite of all the advice and suggestions I try to give RULES ARE THERE TO BE BROKEN!!! So in this post I am advocating anarchy: tear the lot up and throw them all in the air.

Before you get too carried away, let me just add this proviso: in order to break the rules, you need to know what they are first, why they matter and how they work.  If you break them unknowingly, the end result can look slack or lazy or ignorant; if you break them in the full knowledge of what you are doing, it becomes a kind of consensual subversion. The poet ee cummings broke just about every rule in the book, but he did it in such an inspired and well-crafted way that the results are breathtaking. In his play Betrayal, Harold Pinter explored the effects of an affair upon a marriage - the classic triangular situation - but he told the story backwards, starting at the end and working to the beginning, and the effect is unsettling, surprising, poignant.

If you have a go at this yourself, you should find that it challenges you creatively.  It may take you out of a comfortable I've always done it this way because this is how it is done kind of a rut. You will suddenly feel bold.  I bet it makes you feel more confident. Some rules or conventions that you may consider breaking:

• Why not remove all quotation marks and  means of attribution and see what happens to your dialogue?
• Why not try writing in the Second Person (you get up, you make a cup of tea, you go and get a paper...) and follow where that takes you...
• Write in a cacophony of different voices and see which one shouts loudest.
• Try Pinter's trick and start at the end.

Apart from anything else, it can sometimes be a way of coping with writer's block, as it will get you thinking in different ways and may help you to change tack.

"W-w-why are you telling me this?" she cried...

It's Monday, so it must be...dialogue! (I know that last Monday's post was on dialogue too - maybe I start the week in chatty mode.)

 When you're working on a passage of dialogue, it might be helpful to remember that it's not just what your characters are saying, but how they are saying it which is important and by this I don't mean he said sleepily / she giggled / he sighed...

With accurate, well-honed dialogue, it should be possible to identify which character is speaking without any kind of attribution at all, just from the way their thoughts are phrased and expressed and from the words they have chosen.  To help you develop this muscle, try thinking about your characters' vocal mannerisms -- their little sayings, their use of repetition; if you are writing a historical novel, you could try throwing in the (very) occasional archaism, although be careful, because these can quickly become irritating.

By making each person's speech as individual to them as possible, you will make the dialogue more realistic but you will also help to define their character more clearly.  The whole process is organic anyway, but this is a handy way to add colour and authenticity to what is spoken and if that is convincingly done it will leach into other areas of your work as well.

World Book Night

I'm filled to the brim with a warm glow.  I've just got back from handing out copies of The World's Wife by Carol Ann Duffy, doing my bit for World Book Night.  It was auspiciously bright and sunny in Bristol and there was a sense of spring burgeoning in a way that I hope this wonderful project will burgeon.

I left one in our local shop, three each in two cafes, pressed some on friends, ensured that some made their way to the waiting rooms, bereavement room and chapel in the local hospital.  For the rest, I flagged down unsuspecting members of the public, old and young, male and female, fit and frail. I gave one to our Big Issue seller, who looked pretty chuffed, and another to a giver who had just finished handing out copies of her Seamus Heaney book. I tried to be as inclusive as I could.  Only two people turned me down.  Half a dozen said they weren't interested in poetry themselves, but they would like to be able to give a copy to someone else.  Several people bit my hand off.  One woman seemed genuinely touched: "It's a real gift, she said, and I could tell that it meant something to her.

It certainly meant something to me.  It felt joyful to be  be part of that sense of inclusiveness and shared passion;  the act of giving really does stir the heart.  I came home feeling elated, rather sorry that it was over and that I hadn't got any more copies to hand out. I hope it will give as much pleasure to all the readers. and it's great to think of the books now beginning their journeys round the country.  A good deed in a naughty world...

(Love Means Never Having to Say...) I'm Sorry, Sebastian

I think I might have been a little harsh on Sebastian Faulks in my post Glitterature.  The first programme in his series Faulks on Fiction was about the hero and seemed to be more travelogue than treatise, but I have just watched his episode about lovers in literature and he had some interesting things to say. Below, I've summarised some thoughts which struck me as helpful to anyone who is contemplating writing about love.

• Given that the main narrative thrust of a story is change in one shape or another, falling in love can be a fantastically transformative experience and therefore a good agent for change.
• A character who needs to be saved from themselves is an extremely attractive prospect and is often the premise on which many relationships, both in fiction and the real world, are based.
• You need both sex and love to create intimacy. Exploring flawed relationships in which one of these is not fully present can give you plenty of literary mileage.
• Society may have changed the obstacles in the way of a happy outcome in love, but the largest barriers remain internal. People have to overcome their own neuroses or bad experiences in order to have a chance of happiness.

If you want to explore some of these ideas in a short story, try writing something on the theme that the end of an affair is present even in its beginnings and see where that takes you...

The Devil's in the Detail

Still on the theme of the watercolour exhibition at Tate Britain -- I wish, wish, wish that I could paint - another thing which fascinated me were two small pictures by Turner: Scarlet Sunset (1830) and Shields Lighthouse (1826).  Under each one someone had done a rough copy, trying to show the effects of the use of gouache, a kind of paint which consists of pigment suspended in water, demonstrating how it made the light more, or less dense.

Admittedly, the copies had been dashed off in order to make a point, but the difference between them and the originals was striking. The copies looked like paint on paper, pretty paint on fine paper, but nothing more than that.  Turner's watercolour looked like a sunset: gazing at it, I could almost feel the last traces of the day's warmth on my skin, hear the birdsong etc

Turner's painting had a kind of visionary quality that I suspect belongs exclusively to genius and can't be worked up by a hopeful learner, but in addition to that it had extraordinary clarity and definition, which leads me on to the moral of today's little story.

Even if your vision isn't as epic as Turner's, it is certainly within your power to convey it with clarity.  This means deciding what you want to say and saying it as economically as possible.  It means being incredibly judicious with your use of detail, a vital ingredient that can obscure as much as it reveals.  To sharpen your skills a little, why not try describing the room that you are in, or the view that you are looking at, with as much detail as possible (the grit in the herringbone pattern on the path, the half-fledged forsythia) and then take fifty percent of the detail out.  This will sharpen your observational skills, help to give clarity to what you are describing, and give you some practice in making difficult editorial decisions, like what to keep and what to chuck. In the spirit of Turner, you could even describe a sunset....

Designer This, Designer That....

....but Designer Alliterations??

I did a double take when I saw this sign on a tired old building backing onto the tracks on the way into London Bridge station. I know I'm a person with literary preoccupations (not to say literary pretensions) but all the same...

I pushed my brand-new specs further up my nose and looked again: designer alterations!  Of course! But  the seed of the idea was sown, I couldn't help pondering what a designer alliteration might be -- lots and lots of different skirts in the same colour, or in different lengths?  And then I started thinking about alliterative blackness -- the different shades of a night sky? - and it seemed to me that alliteration is a delightful device (!) and that you could have fun using it as a warm-up exercise to some proper writing, or sparingly in your actual work.

At the risk of stating the obvious, alliteration is the repeated use of the same consonant in a phrase or sentence and is much favoured by advertising execs and headline writers as it can be a great way of grabbing the attention : I'm Backing Britain  is a good example. Why not have a go at half a dozen phrases of your own (on the lines of around the ragged rocks of the ragged rascal ran, only better) and see if they get your juices flowing: they might work as the basis for a poem, or perhaps just be something you can file away and possibly use later....

Watch this Space

I went and saw the watercolour exhibition at Tate Britain last weekend and one of the most haunting images was  Ruin, painted by Uwe Wittwer in 2008, in which the artist overpaints a digitally copied shot of a Frankfurt bombing raid. It is extraordinarily stark: the remnants of buildings shown in heavy black, while everything that has been destroyed is indicated by plain white spaces in which there is nothing.

The effect is uncannily suggestive.  The devastation is shown in outline, the detail is terrifyingly absent..I stood looking at it for a long time, bringing to bear my own fearful apprehension of what might have been.  The picture was a complete and finished statement in itself, but because of what Wittwer didn't show, it worked profoundly on my imagination.

I think the same applies when you are writing.  A few deft strokes of your pen can be enough to inspire your reader to filling in the spaces for themselves.  Often an allusion to violence, or sex, or extreme emotion can be as powerful as a visceral description of it because it demands more from the reader.  This should never be a substitute for a full exposition of the dramatic moment, but it can sometimes be an alternative, or a supplement, and can introduce different shades and inflections into your work.

In my experience, it's often in the spaces that the interesting stuff happens.  They provide an environment that is ambiguous, unsettling and curious.  By very definition, because nothing is there, the  potential for creativity is huge.  They are the means by which a writer can offer an open invitation to his reader.  Like doors, they beckon you in....