A La Recherche du l’Eau Perdu…

Am  skittering around on the River Yonne in Burgundy as I write and thought that the Proustian illustration below would give you a sense of the challenges we face in the drawn-out drought in central France. 

We've never seen the waterways so low and are bumping about on the bottom with frightening regularity - we had to be pulled off the floor of the first lock we went through - but around each bend in the river are sights so beautiful that they melt your heart and make you forget everything, except how you might conceivably find the inspiration to put it all into words…

Out of My Comfort Zone

Our strange, dislocated summer goes on: kind of homeless and yet not, everything up in the air and unsettled, and although sailing through the French countryside is one of the most profoundly relaxing, inspiring and spiritual things I know, it does have its moments. You can be catapulted from a state of contemplative bliss into one of impending catastrophe in a single heartbeat: you’ve hit a rock (or a submerged car), there's a fire in the galley or your rope has got caught in a down lock and you are hanging off the side of the wall. 

All in all, it can have the effect of taking you right out of your comfort zone, a perplexing and challenging place to be.  France feels more foreign than usual, and our passage through it in the white heat of this dry summer surreal and more intriguing.

So although it doesn't always feel exactly comfortable, as a writer, I am convinced that it’s A Very Good Thing.  Playing safe is not a creative state to be in, but if you put yourself at the edge of what feels secure, bizarre and interesting things may start to happen, or perhaps it is that you start looking at your ordinary life in a more bizarre and interesting way…

Taking a Break...

In the spirit of my last post about RSI and the importance of taking regular breaks, I'm off on holiday for a while, boating in Burgundy, doing a bit of  research and idly dreaming.  I'll keep posting when I have access to the Internet, but it may be a little sporadic as we'll be in the forgotten wilds of mediaeval France...

Back soon x

The Best Advice for a Writer...

...isn't how to get published, or how to find an agent.  It's simpler and more mechanical than that.  Make sure that your workspace is arranged as ergonomically as possible.  If you become as obsessed with writing as I have done, you will sit for hour after hour in one place, possibly in one position, typing as if your life depended on it -- maybe it does.  If you want to stay the course as a writer and put in the hours that it will take you to improve your craft until your work is publishable, you must do everything you can to protect yourself against the writer's greatest curse - RSI or WRULD (Work-related Upper Limb Disorder)as we must now call it.

I am speaking as one who has just come back from the doctor having had a cortisone injection into my shoulder to keep me going until I have finished editing my novel.

There are a number of things that you can do:

• You can invest in voice dictation software.  Dragon NaturallySpeaking is the market leader and more recent versions than mine have a high level of accuracy.  It doesn't take long to get used to speaking your thoughts out loud and once you get used to it you will find that you can dictate about 75% of your output, which will take the strain of your arms and hands.
• Buy yourself some support bands for your wrists and elbows - most chemists have them and they are great at holding the tendons in place in order to minimise the wear and tear on them.
• Download some software to prompt you to take regular breaks.  I use Workanomics, which doesn't just flash up a reminder, but suggests useful exercises for you to do as well.
• Get yourself a decent chair and make sure you are sitting at the right height in relation to your desk and your computer screen. An ergonomic keyboard can be helpful and I use a Wacom tablet and stylus instead of a mouse to cut down on clicking.

Prevention is obviously better than cure, because once you start showing symptoms it is hard to make them  go away.  Hopefully some of the ideas above will help you to manage your condition, so that you can keep on doing what you love best of all -- writing.

Reading Aloud

When you are reading aloud and stumble over a phrase, it could be because that phrase does not ring true.  I think it's the literary equivalent of the flicker in the gaze which betrays a lie. It's a foible you can put to good use in your work: when you have finished a paragraph or a page or a chapter, if you read it out loud to yourself and note which sentences trip you up, you will usually find that the structure is awkward or the syntax awry, or that you have loaded on too much alliteration.  You can bet your bottom dollar that something won't be quite right. It can feel like a self-conscious exercise to begin with, but it's time well spent.

In the Beginning Was the Word (or how I came to write).

I'm always interested in how people become ensnared by writing, what it is that tips them over the edge into the skewed and intense world of the creative arts. With me, it was a kind of curiosity.  I was in a play (Rookery Nook - my finest hour) and didn't come on until the third act, so I used to sit nattering in my dressing room with another actress (Nichola McAuliffe - hello Nichola) and one day she mentioned that an ancestor of hers had been involved in the Rebecca Riots in South Wales.

You could have knocked me down with a feather.

One of my ancestors, a radical solicitor called Hugh Williams, was also involved in these riots, which took place between 1839 and 1842.  I was so struck by this coincidence that I began doing some light research into the subject and the information I uncovered was so particular and colourful and dramatic that it seemed like a story waiting to be told and that maybe it was even waiting for me to tell it.  So I started writing and my novel was published and I've kept on writing, because I've found that I just can't stop.

Inflation Warning

I had to phone a call centre the other day and was reassured by a recorded voice that one of their experts would be with me shortly.  While I waited...and waited...it occurred to me that given my query wasn't exactly rocket science, talking to an assistant or an adviser would have been fine by me, but the company was so keen to ensure that I had the best possible experience as a service user that only an expert would do.

If their expert had been unable to help me, who would have been next in line?  A specialist?  A professor? The thing with inflated language is that if you come on too strong to begin with, it leaves you with nowhere to go.  The old adage that you should never use two words when one will do is true, but here's a postscript to go with that thought.  Make sure that the single word you choose is simple and clear.  If you over-gild what you are trying to say, it won't provoke admiration in your reader, but a kind of mistrust or unease.

Summer Shorts - Tension

Here are a number of suggestions for ways in which you can notch up the tension in the story you are telling:

• Plot twists
• Cliffhangers
• Red herrings
• Change the tone
• Change the pace
• Change the point of view
• Change the location
• Finish a paragraph
• Finish a chapter
• Introduce some dialogue
• Vary sentence length

Mix and match - experiment!

Summer Shorts - Originality

The great David Lodge's fantastically helpful book The Art of Fiction contains some interesting and original thoughts on, well, originality.  He says, "The essential purpose of art is to overcome the deadening effects of habit by presenting familiar things in unfamiliar ways." You should take this to heart, as it is a crucial part of what makes a story interesting. To sharpen up your way of looking at things, follow his advice and take something with which you are incredibly familiar -- it could be a place, or a person, or even or a fairy story plot - and rework it into something fresh and unusual.  Stamp your own personal vision onto it, because no matter how mundane it is nobody will see it in quite the way that you do.

Summer Shorts - Form

Here's a toughie (although the end result will only be eight lines long, but you'll have to sweat blood to get there).

Sometimes it can be helpful to constrain yourself, so that once you cast the constraints off, the liberty to write as you please feels particularly potent and exciting.  With this in mind, try writing a troilet. This is a poem which consists of eight lines of verse in which you use only two rhymes: the first line is repeated as the fourth and the seventh, and the second as the eighth. Still with me? It should come out something like this:

First line
Second line
Third line
First line
Fourth line
Fifth line
First line
Second line.

It's a question of cramping your style in order to be able to develop it further. It's wonderful for concentrating the mind, as well.

Summer Shorts - Endings

Plan a narrative that has one ending and then write a second equally feasible conclusion.  Once you have decided which one you prefer, you may be able to incorporate elements of both, which will help you to structure the plot of your story with greater subtlety, keeping the reader guessing how it will turn out right until the last moment...

Summer Shorts - Authenticity

With the call of the great outdoors sounding loudly in my ears -- the sun is shining as I write and it's a perfect drying day - I thought that this week I would do a series of summer shorts: quick thoughts and ideas to stimulate your creativity.  Here is the first...

AUTHENTICITY

Successful writing, writing that is powerful and convincing, comes from the heart.  Write with as much emotion as you can muster about something you care passionately about -- it could be a political polemic, issue-driven, or it could be about an experience which had a profound effect on you; in a sense, the subject is incidental to the urgency with which you write about it.  The important thing is to communicate with utter conviction, as this will give authenticity to your voice and help you engage more directly with your reader.

Plotting with Polonius

In Hamlet, Polonius suggests tso his son Laertes that he should, "by indirection find direction out." In other words, it can be helpful to take a lateral approach to something, that by going the long way round you will eventually arrive at the heart of the matter. It's advice you could well apply to creative writing, as it can be a  helpful device when you are structuring your plot.

Think about the possibilities of your hero laying a false trail, either to ensnare another character, which will provide delicious opportunities for dramatic irony (where the reader knows more than the characters they are reading about) or, indeed, to trip up the reader themselves.

A little red herring for the weekend, perhaps...

Verisimilitude, or the Magic of the Footlights

My first job in the theatre was as Acting Stage Manager -- general dogsbody, gofer and maker of tea.  I used to help at fit ups, when the set was assembled on stage for the first time, and was always amazed at how rough and ready it looked.  The floorboards were just (apparently) clumsy lines painted on the stage, the scenery was sketched onto flats, using heavy shadow to suggest perspective, and most of the props were approximations, knocked up in the workshop in very little time. Don't worry, it'll read okay from the front, the designer kept saying.  Just distress it a bit more and it'll read okay…

You had to walk round to front of house and stand in the auditorium to see what he meant. With proper lighting, everything was transformed - the streaky picture frames looked like the finest gilding, the floorboards seemed so real you could imagine them squeaking as you walked on them and with not too much suspension of disbelief you could picture the rolling acres glimpsed beyond the open french windows.

What the designer conjured up was a kind of verisimilitude - providing just enough detail to engage with the imagination of the audience. It's the same with research, when you are writing.  You need to provide enough detail for your reader to believe that you speak with authority, because then they will accept what you are telling them.  Everything else is superfluous - it may be riveting to you, especially if you have slaved and toiled to find it out, but including it will only hinder the telling of your story.

It's All in the Edit

When I worked as an actress, I once met a film editor who said rather mischievously that in the movies, all performances were made or broken in the editing suite and that he could sabotage an actor's reputation with one flick of the razor blade (this was in those long-ago misty, pre-digital days). 

Although I didn't agree with him at the time, with the wisdom of years (I wish) I can see how the same might be true in fiction writing. It's easy to think of the blank page as the writer’s challenge, but in many ways, the real test comes when you have completed your first draft.  You have gathered together all your raw material, and now you have to work out how to shape it. You may find you have to do some character work -- flesh out some details here, change the emphasis there -- and almost certainly you will have to polish the structure, perhaps deconstruct and rebuilt it entirely.  In between the first and second drafts of the novel that I am working on at the moment I added 10% to the length, expanding the back story and adding greater drama to events in the present, and it gave me a real sense of satisfaction.

Imagine my surprise on reading Stephen King's excellent book On Writing to discover that his formula for a successful novel is 2^nd Draft = 1st Draft - 10%.

 

Minus 10%?? 

Is he serious? 

I’ve worried away at the idea since then, and I think he probably is.

As well as adding detail in, you do need to take a great deal of flab out.  Read with a critical eye, entire scenes, whole paragraphs and countless over-embellished phrases could be dispensed with.  So I'm going to set myself the challenge.  At the moment I'm dealing with notes from my agent that will almost certainly involve putting in additional material, but when I've done all that I'm going to go down the Stephen King route and see if I can take 10% of the total out again.

Watch this space…

Literary Terroir

I'm still writing in my little Devon bubble, away from the real world, and in the last couple of days we've visited Greenway and Coleton Fishacre, homes of Agatha Christie and the D'Oyly Carte family respectively. Coleton was more beautiful (and the bedroom curtains were designed by Raoul Dufy - how fantastic is that?) but it was Greenway which made a greater impression on me.

I think it's hard to separate the lives of writers and the locations in which they are lived, from their work.  I know that great novels exist as an entity in themselves, but I can't believe that what occurs in a writer's imagination isn't profoundly influenced by what has happened to him (or her, or her).  Winemakers say that the most important factor in making wine is the terroir - that geographical combination of landscape and climate -- and I suspect the same is true of fiction.  It was wonderful to walk through the woods of Greenway, listening out for subliminal echoes (almost drowned out by the sound of squirrels on the rampage).  There has always been a fascination with writers’ rooms, perhaps Dylan Thomas's evocative boathouse started the trend, but as someone who gazes out of her window for hours on end, thinking, searching for words, what really interests me is the views that writers look out at.  The vista from Agatha Christie's house was breathtaking, although I've never been a fan of her books, so it wasn't surprising to learn that she did most of her writing in London…

In Favour of Flashing

One of the challenges of writing a story is the question of where you start it.  In order to hook the reader's attention, the received wisdom is that you open with a moment of drama, but that can leave you with the knotty problem of how to fill in the back story, the background information that the reader will need to understand and appreciate the narrative .

Cue flashback, where your hero or heroine  looks back (but NEVER via her reflection in a mirror, the worst of all possible cliches) at recent events.  This can be a delicate manoeuvre to pull off, partly because if you are telling your story in the past tense, you run the risk of getting yourself bogged down in the pluperfect - she had thought, he had believed - which can weigh heavily on your prose, encumbering your sentences with too many words.(To get round this, you can always explain to your reader that you have moved into a different time zone: Six months ago, when Josie first started working at Findhorn's... after that you can stick to the simplest, most accessible/recent version of the past -- she feared, he hurried etc).

A criticism levelled against the flashback is that it is undramatic -- that the real action is happening in the present, which you have already established, so that the reader knows the outcome of what you are about to describe already and that by cutting away from the immediate drama,  you risk losing narrative tension.

However, I think that often the reverse is true.  In Alice Sebold's The Lovely Bones, the story is told by the spirit of a young girl who has been murdered.  From the outset we know that she is dead; the fascination of the story lies in discovering how this came about. the excitement lies in the unfolding tale -- I think there is more to a plot than what happened: the reader wants to know how it happened and why.

I also think that if you outlaw the flashback you deny yourself an incredibly useful writing tool. I am constantly fascinated by the interplay between the past and the present, how what happened previously dictates the way that characters behave; how past mistakes come back to haunt them; how lessons not learned will continually trip them up. As a writer, to cut yourself off from these haunting echoes may make your story harder to tell and your writing less resonant.

Tools of the Trade

I went on a breathtaking walk yesterday, from Kingswear to Froward  Point, delving into green clefts, glimpsing patches of Mediterranean blue - sea?  sky? - we could hardly tell which was which along the brush stroke blur of the horizon. Walking through an overgrown gully the smell of cut nettles and grasses was everywhere.  Ahead of us on the path a man was scything the verges -- and I mean scything - his blade catching drowsy flowers unaware, filling the air with the scent of bruised leaves and severed stems.  He said he always worked by hand, when we stopped for a chat, because he liked the silence and the lack of fumes. As we walked on, behind us we could hear him sharpening his scythe, and the knifing whispers as he set to work again.

It made me long for a clean sheet of paper and a sharpened pencil. I regret the fact that I work on a computer, but it’s pragmatic: it makes revising much easier -- you can draft and then re-draft and re-draft again without what you are trying to say disappearing into a knot of scribblings out. And I think it's quicker; I think it is… But to satisfy the longing for a blank sheet of paper, off white in colour, faintly veined with turquoise lines, I make notes by hand.  Every thought I have goes into a little red book: jottings and plottings, small epiphanies, this and that.  It's the rawest of raw material, the first engagement with an idea, the freshest and the truest.  And I always write in pencil, and I love the way it starts off as sharp as a pin and becomes softened and blunted by my scrawl, so like the man in the hedgerow, I have to sharpen it before I can start again.

Expectation is All

I'm about to start reading Freedom by Jonathan Franzen and I’m really looking forward to it. I devoured The Corrections and absolutely adored it and I can't wait to lose myself in the vast landscape of his new book. I'm filled with that prickle of excitement and if anything I'm delaying the start of the novel simply because I don't want to finish it too soon.

There's a lesson here for writing fiction. Anticipation can be one of the most pleasurable experiences known to man (and woman - see my previous post) and something that a storyteller should seek to inspire in her audience.  In theory, it should be easy to achieve.  You give your characters, and by inference your readers, a taste of something potent (it could be pain or terror as well as something more enjoyable) but then you cut away to something else.  This helps to create a sense of expectation which you then take ages to fulfil.  And ages.  And ages.  And when you do fulfil it, maybe it happens in an unexpected way.  Deferred gratification is the kind of exquisite torture which keeps people up at night, turning pages…