The Good Sex Guide

As the bells ring out to celebrate the Royal Wedding (notice I'm blogging, not watching), now seems as good a time as any to write about what Josephine Hart refers to as, "the choreography of desire."

A friend of mine once rang me up, slightly moithered, to say that he'd spent the whole morning trying to write a sex scene with out using the word throbbing, and I think he was on to something.  Unless hardcore is your thing, less is definitely more.  As with the sex act itself, what goes on in your head (and therefore in your readers') is every bit as important as what happens physically, so as with all things to do with creative writing, it's a question of striking a balance between firing the imagination of your reader and doing all the hard work for them.

The inestimable Margaret Atwood once said, "Sex is not just what part of whose body goes where.  It's the relationship between the two participants, what gets said before and after, the emotions -- act of love, act of lust, act of hate, act of indifference, act of violence, act of despair, act of manipulation, act of hope.  These things have to be a part of it."  Anticipation is a key element, and the context of the lovemaking is important, as are all the undercurrents - in the real world, sex can be a vehicle for other emotions and needs, it can be a transaction,  it can also be a moment of sublime consummation, and the same is true in fiction.

I'm instinctively reticent about using my own work as an example to show how I would tackle something, but I guess as sex is my subject  then I'm likely to be blushing anyway. So, in trepidation, here is ashort excerpt from my current novel, in which nothing actually happens - it's all about what just might...

She didn't speak.  Her smile widened, not flickering this time, and his mouth moved a fraction as if in answer, although he had no idea what he might say. Phrase by phrase, in stealth, a silent dialogue began.  They talked of kissing, of the slow stroke of tongue on skin, of clothes sliding, of the serration of a sigh, of the endless raising of an arm, of a head turning blindly; they talked of the thready feel of a sheet, of a hip jutting white, of saliva and sweat mingled and sweet, of the delicate violence of touch.

They never drew breath.

Have a go yourself.  Be oblique; with the erotic, indirection often finds direction out.  Use euphemisms if you feel you have to (think DH Lawrence's John Thomas) although try not to be coy. Be heartfelt, or wry, or cynical or romantic as the occasion demands, but enjoy what you are writing - it's difficult to fake it!

Obssessive Compulsive?

Well blimey, that didn't last -- since deciding last week that I was going to lie fallow over the summer and only write my blog so that I can concentrate on moving house, what did I do, but settle down and edit the first two chapters of my novel?  Proof, if any were needed, of the old adage that you should only write if you can't not.  And being back with my characters, my head full of Burgundy sunshine, felt incredible.

The relationship's back on.

Where Do I Stand?

Almost the first thing you have to decide when you are starting to work on a story, is where the narrator stands in relation to the narrative.  It sounds complicated, but actually what it means is working out how the story will be told.  One option is to use the third person (he /she), relating events from the all-knowing point of view of the author, who sees with equal clarity into the heart of every single character -- this is the classic approach, and probably the most straightforward. Using the omniscient third person, you can eavesdrop on the most private thoughts of the hero and heroine and you don't have to explain how you know what is going on at any moment in any given situation - you just tell it like it is.  That is its great advantage; its main drawback is that forming an intimate, personal relationship with the central character can sometimes be hard to achieve.

This is why many writers opt for the first person narrative, where the story is told from the point of view of "I".  This creates the impression for the reader that they are actually inhabiting the psyche of the protagonist, getting under their skin, and it makes it much easier for them to bond.  The fiendish difficulty presented by this kind of storytelling is that the narrator - I - can only describe what he or she has  actually witnessed themselves -- everything else required for the development of the plot has to be overheard / reported / surmised, which has obvious limitations.

To explore which approach might be most comfortable for you, write a paragraph in the third person on the theme of, say, infidelity, then rewrite it in the first person, so that you can compare and contrast the challenges and benefits of each and see which works best for you and your story.

Thank You, Maggie O'Farrell

I've just finished reading The Hand that First Held Mine, by Maggie O'Farrell (at last) and  her portrayal of the alien landscape of new motherhood completely blew me away.  She perfectly captures the sense of being displaced from the centre of your own life, the dragging exhaustion and the transfiguring, drenching feeling of love, which combine to make being a mother for the first time such a confounding and elating experience.

As you can see, it spoke eloquently to me, reflecting my own experience back at me, creating that spark of recognition and empathy that draws a reader into a narrative - the prime duty of a writer - so it was extremely instructive in that sense.

There were other lessons here as well. O'Farrell writes crystalline prose.  Each page yields delight -- she talks about "a sting of pleasure" and it is easy to be stung by a phrase here, an image there; I'm very susceptible and I was quickly seduced.  What stops her work from being just artistry (it's so tempting to indulge in  luscious and flashy writing if you have an aptitude for it) is precisely the fact that she doesn't write for show, her work is suffused with great washes of emotion and it is this that gives it resonance and meaning.

That's what she illuminated for me -- the need to harness your talent to the story you are telling, rather than using the story as a vehicle to display your skill.  The first may conceivably enable you to produce good fiction, the second runs the risk of being merely narcissistic.

Letters to a Young Poet

My first agent gave me a copy of Rainer Maria Rilke's Letters to a Young Poet (thank you, Xandra) and over the years I have found it to be the perfect primer.  It doesn't cover the nuts and bolts of getting published or the technicalities of structure, but it is a wonderful meditation on how to live receptively, to tune in to your surroundings and your own experience, in order to be able to write sensitively, accurately and to the best of your ability.

At one point, Rilke says, "Why should you want to exclude any anxiety, any grief, any melancholy from your life, since you do not know what it is that these conditions are accomplishing in you?" Astute guidance for ordinary living, but indispensable advice for a writer, both in terms of the process of writing, which can indeed be fraught with anxiety, grief and melancholy, but also in terms of the subject matter you may want to choose -- sorrow is a great catalyst for change, which is in turn the fulcrum of good fiction.

Apart from zooming over to Amazon (or better still your local independent bookshop!) to lay your hands on a copy of the Letters, try writing about a testing episode from your own life, either as a piece of autobiography, or as the preparatory work for a story.  See if you can achieve critical distance from what happened without losing any emotional intensity.  It's that rubbing your tummy while patting your head thing and when it boils down to it, that's what writing is mostly about.

Have a very Happy Easter...

and here's a seasonal door with St George strutting his stuff to add to the sum of your happiness.

The Essence of Drama Is Conflict

...according to Syd Field and just about anybody else who has ever had anything to say about the process of creative writing. It is conflict which causes the tension that gives rise to the compulsion in your reader to keep on turning the pages.

As you will doubtless know from your own observations and experience of the world, conflict erupts in different ways and varies in its intensity, but it can all be used effectively in your imaginative work.  On a sliding scale of significance, here are some different kinds of conflict that you might like to consider as subjects to write about, or to include as elements within an existing project.

• International conflict -- excellent fodder for war stories which can encompass a huge range of diversity: think  Erich Maria Remarque,  then think Andy McNab and all stations in between.
• Political conflict - grist to the mill for writers of spy stories like Len Deighton and Le Carre, but also lifeblood to Robert Graves in  I Claudius vein and more recently Michael Dodd. There's plenty of scope..
• Family conflict - Cain and Abel in Biblical and even Jeffrey Archer versions.  Any unravelling of the tight weave of the family carries huge emotional freight and therefore makes good fiction.
• Romantic conflict -- people in love often have different agendas and different expectations and this creates turmoil.  A number of romantic situations -- adultery, unrequited love -- are shot through with the potential for conflict.
• Internal conflict - this can crop up in any character and any situation and can help give depth to your protagonists. Somebody who is racked with doubt (Hamlet) or torn by conflicting loyalties (Cathy in Wuthering Heights) is infinitely more interesting to read about than someone less riven, (or driven).

As humans we find it almost impossible to live in total harmony with our environment and the people around us, so it would be inaccurate, not to say dull, if this were not reflected in your writing. Get conflicted, and get busy...

Try Talking the Talk

For a descriptive writer, the prospect of setting a scene can really get the juices flowing as there is endless scope for painting vivid pictures with words - bliss for the author, but sometimes uphill work for the poor reader.   If I'm finding the going a little tough in a book that I'm reading, it is always the descriptive passages that I'm tempted to skip, and you never want to put anyone in a position where they feel inclined to stray.

Proceed with caution.

Description should never exist purely as an end in itself - it should always have another agenda as well: throwing light on character, creating atmosphere, breaking the tension, providing a contrast -- whatever. If description exists only for its own sake, you run the risk of telling the reader something rather than showing it happen, one of the cardinal sins of creative writing.

To save yourself from this, try writing a scene in which the setting is conveyed solely through dialogue.  In this way, you will not only create an impression of the location itself, but also the characters' attitudes to it. Have they been there before? Is it sympathetic?  Threatening? Does it give one person an advantage over the other (that territorial/home ground thing)? Does it provoke boredom, or provide an escape?  Is it inviting or alienating? Each character could have a different response to it which would give you even more potential to exploit.  In this way, rather than offering a straight description of a room, or a house, or a street, or a garden, you incorporate this into your characters' experience of it, and of each other within it, so that your readers can involve themselves in something with more complexity and depth.  Result!

Put a Spring in Your Step...

I had tea in a friend's garden yesterday, sitting under an apple tree, blossom sparking along bare branches, cowslips at our feet, the spring spendthrift, throwing its gold around.  Time off for good behaviour.  Perfect for recharging the batteries and firing up the imagination.  April is cruel, but jubilant as well.

Moral?  Live to write - it's a more certain way of finding fulfilment than writing to live.

Gossip

I had it from one, who had it from one....

I was once in a production of School for Scandal, Sheridan's irrepressible social satire, where a coven of wits and rakes assemble in various different salons for the sole purpose of character assassination; the result a kind of venomous meringue -- sugary lightness laced with poison. It's irresistible because the bitching is always elegantly done and everyone is fair game -- each of the characters gives as good as they get.

I'm mentioning it because this particular Restoration comedy is a fantastic example of how you can use other people's points of view and opinions to throw light on character. Even the spikiest observation can be informative, both about the speaker (why are they being so malicious?) and about the subject themselves.  It is possible to blend unreliable comment with something percipient and to the point, so that the reader has to exercise their own judgement and sift through what can be relied upon and what should be discarded, and in that way they become active participants in the story.

If you're looking for a little weekend exercise, give yourself license to have a really good gossip. Invite the characters in your story to a social function and let the backbiting begin.  It will provide you with the opportunities are some wicked humour, but also give scope for some poignancy and a few darker notes: sniping about people behind their back is a dangerous occupation, with consequences and the risk of casualties.

Going to Seed

I'd be lying if I said it didn't feel odd not to be writing ( surely too many double negatives there?Ed). We'll soon beon the move, having sold our house, and will shortly find ourselves in what estate agents refer to with unaccustomed delicacy as temporary accommodation. I wonder if My Summer in a Suitcase would make a good blog?

With rare serendipity, I have recently finished the second draft of my novel and am awash with constructive criticism from my agent and a few trusted friends. And I'm not going to do anything about it.  Not yet. I'm switching into removal mode. I'm going to chuck out the detritus accumulated over eleven years - catharsis - and then affectionately pack up the remainder, laying to rest this period in our lives. I'm going to spend a couple of months wandering, opening up some new doors...

...and turning my back on a few others.

In short, I'm going to let myself lie fallow.  As someone who likes to have her head filled with phrases and dreams and ideas and plans and schemes through every waking minute, it's a scary prospect.  But  I suspect that you give to your imagination a good spring clean, just as you would a cluttered attic, in order to create space for new thoughts to take seed.

However,  I know that anytime I care to look, I will find my novel just beneath the surface of my thinking, like reeds in slow water shifting as the current changes, catching the light and then winnowing away. 

I suspect the characters will be getting on with their lives without me and we'll have lots to say to one another when we meet up later. Perhaps I'm naive to imagine that I will be able to give up my novel for the summer --  will my novel be able to give up me?

The moral of all this whimsy is that just like the land, perhaps a writer needs to be unproductive for a season or two, to have a period of reflection and renewal, in order to burst back with new growth and greater vigour.

I'll still be blogging though...

What Kind of Writer Will I Be Today?

Imagine yourself as the hero or heroine of your own novel and then describe yourself. But wait a minute; before you get started, think what kind of novel it will be.  Begin by casting yourself in a romance and write a paragraph or two along those lines, then switch to a sci-fi fantasy and see if that suits you, then change to thriller mode, then chic lit, until you have sampled a range of different genres.

Tthis may help you in a couple of different ways.  Firstly, you might discover a facility for a kind of writing style which would not otherwise have occurred to you.  Secondly, it will help you to explore how the presentation of a character is affected by the setting in which you place them. It is self evident that the hero of a science fiction story will behave very differently from the protagonist in a romantic comedy, but you need to understand the nuts and bolts of how that works.  Your characters will have different qualities, applied in different ways.  You will learn about appropriateness.  You might also discover that you can cross-pollinate and take something that you would normally associate with one genre and subtly insert it into another: humour into a thriller, or suspense into a romance.

It's like trying on a new outfit - you might find that yellow isn't your colour after all, but you won't know until you try...

Page One Hundred

I once had a friend who always chose books on the basis of how good the hundredth page was, flipping past the first page and going up country into the interior of the story.  If things looked good on p100, then he bought the book.

To put this theory to the test, here are three hundredth pages taken at random from my bookshelf:

The Siege of Krishnapur by JG Farrell
A small portion of the graveyard had been reluctantly allotted to Father O'Hara by the Padre for his Romish rights in the event of any of the half-dozen members of his church succumbing during the present difficulties.  But when Father O'Hara had asked for a bigger plot, the Padre had been furious; Father O'Hara already had enough room for six people, so he must be secretly hoping to convert some of the Padre's own flock to his Popish idolatry.  The Collector had settled the dispute by saying with asperity: "In any case, nobody is dead yet.  We'll talk about it again when you can show me the bodies."

Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
The remembrance of this admonition gradually faded, and he continued as before giving innocuous consultations in his back room.  But the Mayor was against him, some of his rivals were jealous, he couldn't be too careful.  His kindly attentions were meant to put Monsieur Bovary under an obligation and ensure his silence in case he ever noticed anything. 

Spies by Michael Frayn
I watch in growing agony as Keith's mother walks unhurriedly away into the evening sun, towards the end of the street.  I should be out there after her, watching from the corner as she enters the tunnel, from the near end of the tunnel as she reaches the far end...but how can I, when I'm being watched myself?

If these are anything to go by, I think it does hold water.  JG Farrell combines a comic take on petty rivalries while hinting at an imminent catastrophe; Flaubert leads us into murky waters where manipulativeness and duplicity are rife and with Frayn we find surveillance with added spin.

The reason I'm mentioning this is that it is easy to get hung up on creating impact at the opening of a novel or story and to overlook the need to sustain this well into the middle of the book.  It's a classic trap to write a brilliant first three chapters and then to come unstuck.  If you are going to hold the tension, you need to think ahead, to anticipate.  If it inhibits you to plan in too much detail, do be aware of the need to have some forward momentum.  You need to know where you are going, even if you're not sure how you will get there...

Prospecting for Gold

I once went prospecting for gold in the Australian outback. It was THE most exciting thing. My companion was a real life, professional prospector called Cranston Edwards and armed with a state of the art metal detector, he showed me how to read the geology of the landscape,  to interpret the signals the detector gave off and how to identify false alarms with the magnetised end of a pickaxe. We made our survey in one direction and where the bleeper lost its head completely, we drew a line in the dirt.  We then swept back and forth along our mark and when the bleeper sounded off again, we drew another line and at the junction of the two (X really does mark the spot) we started to dig, until Cranston unearthed a nugget of the palest gold.

It's a similar process for writers finding their voice.  It's not a random process; you need to be methodical and wide ranging.  You set off in one direction, writing about this and that, until you find a subject that resonates with you.  Then you start to tackle this subject from a number of different angles, developing the plot, working up the characters, drafting away and then re-drafting, experimenting with different styles until the tone of your work, its musical note, stops sounding muffled and flat and rings true -- maybe only for a single moment, in one sentence, but it is here that you start to dig.  It becomes the focus for all your excavations.  You find different strata and uncover many  layers and it is a delicate and labourious process. As with proper prospecting, the secret lies in listening diligently to begin with, in remaining alert to possibilities, and being sensitive to the material you are working with.

However, if you are painstaking and keep sifting through the dirt, like Cranston, you'll find one nugget, and then maybe another, and another. It's not bullion -- it doesn't come all at once in a solid and reassuring block, but a little bit at a time, glimmering here, glittering there, but that way the search is more exciting and rewarding.

Epiphany - in April

Still working those characterisation muscles, helping to give you core strength as a writer (I can feel a bit of a Pilates metaphor starting to take shape), here is an exercise that you might like to think about over the weekend.

Write a scene in which your central character has a moment of epiphany.  This is a classic term for an instance of realisation, or total clarity.  The dictionary defines it as a sudden revelation or insight into the nature, essence or meaning of something. In this case, try showing your hero or heroine in a situation where something happens which makes them realise they are not the person that they thought they were.  This will give you the opportunity to show two different aspects of their character, a before and after point of view, which will get you thinking about how you can resolve two contrasting or conflicting aspects of their personality and will ultimately lend greater depth to how you portray them.  We are all a mass of contradictions and complexities, but we often have a particular narrative to account for the person we've become: I think/behave like this because such and such happened to me. In this scenario, blow that narrative into smithereens and see what your hero is left with, and what they make of it.

April is the cruellest month, after all....

Appearance Isn't Everything

One of the reasons that Radio Four's long-running soap The Archers is so popular is that the faceless inhabitants of Ambridge take on a vivid and distinct reality within the listener's head.  I really don't want to know what the actress playing Caroline looks like, because I have such a clear image of her already.

The same applies to fiction. I hate it when I'm reading a novel and halfway through the writer makes casual reference to the heroine's dark hair when for 200 pages or so she has been immutably fixed in my imagination as a redhead. It completely destroys the illusion I have been working so hard to create for myself, but it can provide a small lesson for the writer...

When it you are describing a character (n.b. don't ever have them looking at their own reflection in a mirror, it is the oldest cliche in the book), try to avoid saying she had dark curly hair and brown eyes, search instead for something less literal.  Think of it in terms of attempting to bring to life her personality by describing how she looks, rather than just going for appearance for appearance's sake. Describe her bearing, her mannerisms, how she speaks, the texture of her skin, how the light catches her (you can use setting to great effect for this). By approaching the task in a lateral and slightly elusive manner, you leave plenty of scope for the reader to colour in the picture for themselves.  In that way, they invest in your narrative and take possession of it.  If you hand everything to them on a plate, they will stay passive, like passengers along for the ride, whereas you want them to be active participants in the story you are trying to tell.

I saw this pretty fountain on my recent trip to Burgundy.  You might like to try describing the woman's face applying the techniques above.  See if you can bring out her qualities rather than how she looks and this will lead you to the essence of who she is....

Throwing Down the Gauntlet

What we want as readers is to see characters triumphing over adversity, partly because that is inherently exciting, but also because it makes us think that when trouble strikes are us, we too will be able to overcome it.  So, once you have created your hero or heroine, conjuring up a well-rounded, sympathetic, plausible person, your next job is to turn up the heat on them, to put them under pressure. In this way  their weaknesses will be revealed, giving you, the writer, the material you need to work with as your plot unfolds.

In order to calibrate things properly, first of all you need to identify what fears, neuroses, emotional scars, dependencies and self-imposed limitations afflict your protagonist. Have they been hurt in the past? Are they so frightened of failing that they are reluctant to commit themselves to anything? Conversely, do they have a wildly over-inflated opinion of themselves and need cutting down to size? It is probably best to focus on one central flaw, in the knowledge that it might also spawn a number of other minor glitches which need putting to the test.

You ought to frame the challenge to your characters fairly early on, as a large part of your story will be concerned with how they cope with all the hardship you throw at them.  Part of the gratification for your reader is to see your hero behaving -- well, heroically! It's a vicarious pleasure that lifts our own humdrum lives into the realm of the extraordinary.

So take a deep breath, and throw down the gauntlet. It's not always easy stuff to write as often what confounds your characters is actually what confounds you too, so you may well find that in challenging your protagonist, you are, in fact, challenging yourself as well.

Beginnings -- It's Not How but Where

How to start writing a story is relatively straightforward: you have an idea in your head, pen and paper or a computer screen in front of you, and you sit down and slog away until you have a few pages of matchless prose to show for all your efforts.  How isn't the problem....

It's where to begin which is the real poser.  Which strand of the yarn you have in mind do you knit up first and does it matter if you drop a few stitches along the way? (Probably not.)

If I were telling the story of my life, I definitely wouldn't start at the beginning, which was in an RAF hospital somewhere in the Fens and awfully flat, as Noel Coward observed. I'd cut to the chase and go for drama: some near death experience, perhaps; or first love; or first heartbreak; and I'd use that incident to hook the reader in, for sure, but also to give them an impression of what the story is going to be about; to set the tone, so that they'd know from the first page whether this was likely to be a romance or a thriller, or something elusive and literary.  A good beginning provides a kind of map and compass: this is the terrain and here is the direction we will be travelling in.

Having started with a Big Moment, I would then take care to thread in essential information from the past and interweave this with some key scenes heavy with plot, in order to give some forward momentum to the story.

You could think of it in terms of:

situation + character x drama > plot = great opening sequence

On the other hand, you could picture it as a beautiful old door (another one) weathered and mysterious,  a threshold, full of beckoning possibilities...

Memory and Imagination

 I've just got back from Burgundy -- time travelling through ancient villages - where I've been checking a few details for the novel that I'm writing the moment, which is set on the Nivernais canal. There were doors to die for on every corner; here's one I saw in Noyers sur Serein, its faded yellow paint a bit like a sunset scorched into the wood...

I spent some time in Chatillon en Bazois, a little town in the Morvan where the denouement of my story takes place.  I'd been there five years ago and looked at pictures of it since, but visiting it again having written about it for my book, I was  struck by the interplay between memory (how I thought it was) and imagination (how I wanted it to be) and how fiction begins at this intersection.  Revisiting Chatillon was almost like seeing the alchemy taking place: the town was less beautiful than I remembered and I could see at once how  my imagination had been at work.  All the details were there, but the reality was like looking at a landscape that is overcast compared to one in broad sunlight.  It made me think that that is what imagination -- creativity, if you like - does: it sheds light.  

So keep writing, and shine brightly....