On the Move...

We are moving house next week, so there may be a slight hiatus here while I rummage through every single cardboard box we have in order to find my laptop and then perch it on a precarious pile of books and start to blog again.

As they say, when one door closes...

...another one opens!

Keep writing.  Back soon.

Musical Colons

Some people find punctuation extremely daunting, the errant apostrophe seems to trip everybody up, and even though I had a fantastic grounding in English grammar when I was about twelve (thank you Miss Maynard), there are things I'm still a little hesitant about.

When I'm writing, I get totally absorbed in the rhythm of my work -- each phrase has its own particular beat which in turn feeds into the overall metre of the sentence and then the paragraph. In some ways it's like a musical score, and if you think of it like that then punctuation becomes a little easier. Commas, semi-colons and colons are really the measure of different lengths of pause: picture the shortest, the comma, as a quaver, the semi-colon as a crotchet and the colon as a minim.  They are there to isolate phrases so that they make sense to the reader and enable her to pace herself throughout a sustained piece of writing - in some cases they are almost a pause for breath.

So listen to the music of the voice inside your head and you will find that the breaks will come naturally as the sense settles into place.  It is not infallible, but as a rule of thumb it can be helpful.

How Not to Insult Your Readers

I'm just reading through the latest draft of my novel, making sure that the new bits I have written fit seamlessly in place, checking for typos, cutting where I can (see previous post) and I've noticed that in one or two places I have spelt things out too much for my readers.  It is as if there is a huge signpost on the page saying this is happening, this is what you need to know and although it is important that they pick up the finer points of the plot, you will end up insulting their intelligence if you do all the work for them.

For a reader, to have something obvious handed to them on a plate is an unsatisfying experience.  You want to engage their curiosity and intelligence so that they can work things out for themselves.  Perhaps this is why crime fiction is so popular, it's an overt example of that taking place, but it doesn't have to be restricted to thrillers.  With a light touch, you can sow seeds in your readers' brain, ready for them to propagate themselves.  A brief reference to an event in someone's past, or the hint of an infidelity,  is quite enough to set things in motion.  You don't need to do it in capital letters with a bold font.  Try going for understatement - it's a way of complimenting your audience.

Keeping it Brief

I'm still in Hillary Mantel mode, mulling over all the things she said in her recent BBC2 interview and discovering nuggets of excellent advice. Amongst them is her revelation that she reckoned on cutting one third of every page that she writes.  Think about that!  One third of her entire output goes in the bin. I have known  inexperienced students in classes I have taught haggling over individual sentences, justifying their importance, and I don't entirely blame them.  If your time is precious and you have had to sacrifice something else in order to be able to write, then sweated hard over what you have written, chucking any of it away can be difficult to do.  Stories and novels are the offspring of your imagination and it's a terrible thought to inflict what you perceive to be damage on your own literary child.

However, just as parents can be blind to the faults of their sons and daughters, so writers can sometimes be unaware of the weaknesses in  their work.  If somebody suggests you make a cut, don't hesitate; what's more, look for other bits to snip out too. Stephen King once said that he cuts ten percent from the final draft of any manuscript -- that seems to me to be a minimum requirement. You could put this to the test -- fish out a piece of work you wrote a while ago and reduce it by a tenth.  I don't mind betting that the new version will be crisper, more vivid and packed with greater tension.

The Bare Essentials

It can be incredibly easy, when you are writing, to fall in love with the language you are using (guilty as charged!) For me, finessing the perfect sentence so that it conveys meaning, trips the reader's imagination, sounds as elegant and and unexpected as possible, with the stresses and emphases all in the right places, is all part of the obsessive challenge of writing well.

However, I have to keep reminding myself that  language is only a means to an end, not an end in itself and the writer's primary obligation is to tell a story. With this in mind, try writing a short story, or even a paragraph, that is stripped of all its garnish.  Allow yourself enough linguistic leeway to convey character and crank up tension, but nothing else.  See if, by stripping everything down to the bare essentials, your prose becomes more concentrated and more urgent.  It may become more dull, who knows? But at least you will start to develop a sense of the range in which descriptive writing works and by doing that you will learn to find your place within it.

In Memoriam

Some breathtaking works of literature have been inspired by loss and grief -- Tennyson's In Memoriam, Grey's Elegy - and it can be a great way of turning feelings of  bereavement into something positive and creative - an exercise that blurs with the notion of writing as therapy.

If you want to write for comfort, because it is a way of conjuring up or even communing with the person you have lost, then do it straight away, while you are still raw and sore. What you produce will probably be messy and passionate, with an intensity you are unlikely to be able to reproduce again; the kind of writing that has urgency and immediacy but maybe lacks craft. If you want to write a rounder, fuller portrait of someone, or use them as the inspiration for a character in a piece of work, it might be best to wait a little bit until you are able to write more objectively.

Either way, it's an incredibly salving means of spending time with someone you have loved.  It's a way of paying tribute to them, of preserving their memory, of keeping yourself sane.  As Hilary Mantel said, "what's to be done with the lost, the dead, but write them into being?"

The door is closed, but not entirely...

Subtext and Subtlety

Still feeling rather feak and weeble, so forgive me if I'm brief today (partly because my voice is sounding so peculiar, the speech recognition software can't understand a word I'm saying). I'm going to have another Hilary Mantel moment, as the following  thought would make a very good basis for a writing exercise.  She said, "there are layers beneath the obvious of almost every interaction," an observation suggestive of all kinds of subtleties.  Try writing a scene in which you include and explore several different strata beneath the surface exchanges.  Think about motivation, (hypocrisy? deception?) as well as the tension between what people say and what they do or think.  It's a great way for developing character and perhaps adding an element of mystery or intrigue to your narrative.

I'll be back, in more robust form, tomorrow....

It Wasn't the Cough that Carried Her Off...

Another thing that the great Ms Mantel said in the Culture Show at the weekend was, "you need to lead a boring life if the contents of your head are very exciting."  As I'm in the grip of a vile cold > chest infection, I'm going to leave you with that reassuring thought, cover myself in Vicks vapour rub and go back to bed...

NB This isn't my bed, sadly.  It's in the Hospices de Beaune in Burgundy, where the poor used to go when they were sick.

Blue Sky Thinking...

I watched Hilary Mantel on the Culture Show over the weekend -- riveting and inspiring stuff.  She's been a god to me since I read A Place of Greater Safety, and as for Wolf Hall - well, respect.

She had a great deal to say that I found interesting and helpful, but one of the things which struck me most was her humility. At one point she confessed, "Every day I'm writing I feel like a beginner -- there are no guarantees because you could do it yesterday, you can do it today." If you look beyond the writerly superstition to which every author must be prone, that not-taking-anything-for-granted feeling, you find an extraordinary sense of possibility, both positive and negative.  There is the chance that you will dry up and won't be able to think of anything to write at all, but on the other hand you shouldn't lose sight of the fact that anything could happen.  That is the thrill and the source of the compulsion to keep going.  The blank computer screen (or page) is like the wide blue sky -- who knows what the weather will work upon it?

Creative Writing - the Missing Ingredient

I'm coming to the end (I hope) of some extensive rewrites to my book.  It's a bit like cooking a dinner party for some people you want to impress, without using any kind of recipe.  You bung in a bit of this, slosh in some of that, taste it yourself to see how it is coming along and then perhaps ask someone else to taste it too (an agent, a mentor or a friend).

My agent told me that one of the characters who barely appears needed a greater presence in the story.. Hmm. After a lot more bunging and sloshing and some vigorous stirring, I think I've found a way of giving him a voice without disrupting the overall balance of the narrative.  To my total astonishment, it seems to have transformed the whole book.  At the risk of extending the cookery metaphor even further, it's a little bit like adding salt: it enhances all the other flavours.

The reason I'm sharing this with you is that, when you're grinding away with rewrites it can be easy to lose faith in what you are doing.  Drafting and re-drafting is often a thankless task.  But what I have found is that sometimes a relatively small adjustment, if it is the right one, can completely transform your work.  The slightest twist of the kaleidoscope makes the pattern fall into place.

The Purpose of Fiction

In a moody, artistic moment on holiday, I took this picture...

I loved the way the sky was reflected in the canal, a bit like oil on the water.  The clouds look like clouds, but at the same time you can tell but they're not,  -- there's a slightly broken, glazed effect which tells you that they're representations of clouds.

That's what fiction is like: it is a reflection of life.  What stops it being an exact reproduction of real events and people is the creativity, the perspective of the writer.  Just as the surface of the water in my picture adds a shimmer and a glow to the reflection, so your style and life experience will add a gloss to the story you are telling.

What I'm saying is don't be too literal in your writing, go for accuracy and truthfulness, but allow the alchemy of your imagination to work as well, so that the elements of your narrative take on a life of their own.  It is a mysterious process that acts as a bridge between actuality and fiction; it's a kind of smoke and mirrors; in it's way it's a reflection on water.

Working with Resistance

I'm feeling grim today: sore throat, headache, cold coming.  It would be the easiest thing in the world to crawl back under the duvet (and I wouldn't rule that out), but I'm going to stay sitting at my desk trying to write.  Not just because I've got a deadline, in fact that hardly figures at all in my thinking, but because I know from past experience that for some weird reason I write better when I'm run down and tired.

Perhaps it's because when your resistance is low you have quicker and more direct access to that vulnerable space where your creativity lies: the unprotected part that still aches with old hurts,  where your neuroses flourish unchecked; the twilight place where emotional memory meets imagination and becomes something close to inspiration.

Because of this, I'm going to wrap up warm, and grab a box of tissues, and sit tight, typing away in the hope that something a little more raw and unprocessed might slip out from under the wire...

The Secret of Songwriting is...

I saw American country singer Sam Baker at St Bonaventure's (arguably the best music space in the world) Parish Hall last night. His songs were  like perfectly crafted short stories, each one full of the drifting heartbreak of smalltown Texas life.  He gave great patter too, wooing the audience with his laid-back drawl and amongst the throwaway lines he kept using (I don't know where this is going being one) he kept saying, the secret of good songwriting is...and proceeded to list things you should mention to create a good song: push-up bras, red boots, Texan Stud.

Which got me thinking.  I suspect the secret of good writing, of songs or stories, is to write about what excites you, because  your excitement is what communicates itself to the reader.  Write about what you are confident about (a variation on the old saw of write about what you know) because your sense of authority will make your audience sit up and listen.  Write with passion because it is there you will discover your flair.

For me, the secret of good writing is clarity -- the letting in of light. 

What's your secret?

Just Do It

When I worked as an actor, one of the first lessons I learned was about stage presence: if you walk onto the stage as if you own it and have every right to be there, then you can communicate anything you want to a captive audience.  On the other hand, if you creep on looking uncertain about how you could possibly have ended up in the limelight, you will be lucky to  project anything as far as the front row.  It has a little bit to do with conviction and a lot to do with energy.

The same applies with writing. The novel I am working on at the moment is told from one character's point of view and involves two principal protagonists.  Another crucial character is part of the story, but never makes an appearance.  My agent suggested that this off-stage figure should have a presence in the narrative and I've been agonising about whether it matters if I break the literary convention I've established and if it doesn't, how I should set about it.  I've spent ages cudgling my brains and I've finally arrived at the answer:

Just do it.

As with acting, if you do something with total conviction and a certain amount of verve and energy, your reader will accept any convention you throw at them - first person, third person, present tense, past tense - whatever.  If you have faith in what you are doing, they will too.  If you are uncertain about it, you can bet your bottom dollar your insecurities will be transmitted to them as well.  For writing, the solution is unusually simple.  Get on with it.

A Different Perspective

It's a question of perspective: you can make something  - an emotion or an event -- seem enormous depending on whether your character is closely involved, or you can allow it to appear distant and insignificant if they are only peripheral. Sometimes, to get a sense of perspective, you need context too. In my cute little picture of Snow White,

(taken a while bumping about in a French lock) it is the presence of the flowers which give away the fact that she is only inches tall.  Without them, she could almost be lifesize.

Why not experiment with this in your writing. Play with the perspective of a scene to see how you can alter its significance.  What do you need to do to make it acutely important for one of your characters and negligible for another, and what effect does that have on the feelings of each of them?  Think of it as a kind of emotional engineering.  Remember, it is also a question of how close you as the writer want or are able to be to your work, because your distance (or otherwise) will have an effect on it as well.

In the Beginning...

 

Dawn, up early and no one else about, so time to look and think, both critical occupations for a writer, though to the outside observer it might seem as if you're simply idling. But stood idling long enough to see the day  lose its first intensity as the sun diluted.

The moment was full of private magic, like the best writing.  You need time to feed your imagination, and often that means being on your own, and daring to do nothing.

Taking Wing...

We found this tiny fledgeling in the middle of a lake at the Cotswold Water Park.  The poor little thing was drowning and we managed to rescue it and put it among  some dry leaves to recover.  There it shivered for half an hour or more and occasionally we crept back,  expecting that it would have pegged out and we'd have a funeral on our hands.  However, gradually it dried out and fluffed up and the last time we went back, it was gone.

Fiction is a little bit like that.  Some ideas need rescuing and all of them need tending regularly, with patience and persistence and a great deal of goodwill all round (both from the writer and the poor long suffering people around them.) But like our little fledgeling, ideas do fluff up (and with any luck they don't dry out) and eventually they take flight.  You have to stick your neck out and fight for them a bit, but if they soar, then every bit of effort is worth it.

The Bon Mot, or Choosing the Right Word

As a writer, you need to be as sensitive as possible to the nuances of language -- natch.  You need to be alert to the various meanings a word can have, and how context can alter them.  In the editing process you need to make sure you have anticipated every possible way in which your sentence can be construed, because if the words you choose are even slightly off target, the consequences can be disastrous.

I know that things can often get skewed -- or lost -- in translation, but even so, in this age of globalisation I hope the marketing consultants who came up with this brand are kicking themselves now.

Time Passes

Time passes, slipping by rather too quickly when you are away "researching" in the backwaters of southern Burgundy with its crumbling ochre villages, where Gothic architecture looks  positively cutting age and modern, compared to the rounded, earth-bound arches of the Norman churches and fortified farms that are two a penny, still.

Sometimes, it can feel as if one era has gently fragmented and in the cracks and fissures and shards that are left, you can just glimpse another emerging beneath.  Time certainly doesn't seem linear here:: it feels more elliptical and unknowable than that, so that the landscape appears to be dotted with unsolved clues to the mystery of the past.

Try writing about the passage of time in a way that evokes this sense of enigma. Think about atmosphere and telling detail, rather than dates; try and give your writing some emotional context (an ache? a sense of loss? a release?) as that will make it more interesting and resonant.