Using Your Influence

Writers work on their readers in many ways, their wonders to perform.

You can convey information directly, by telling the reader that something is so; you can allude to it symbolically and get them to work it out for themselves, but sometimes it can be quite fun, and therefore satisfying, simply to influence them.  By means of mood and atmosphere and choice of words, you can nudge them in the direction that you want them to go.  Done well, this can be a subtle tool, but a lightness of touch is important.

Here's little exercise to practise with, in between wrapping presents.  Write a quick sketch of a character in such a way that it quickly becomes apparent that the person you are describing is sympathetic and likeable.  Then see how  little you have to change -- make sure it is the absolute minimum -- to recast them as somebody for whom the reader will have no sympathy.  Explore the small margin that exists between the two, the grey area, the ambiguous area, as that is often where your most interesting work will occur.

I'll be wrapping presents in the next couple of days, so blogging might become a little sporadic (I'm giving myself plenty of latitude for a could do better  New Year's resolution...)

An Off Piste Polemic

There's a lovely line in As You like It, where Rosalind says, I am a woman -- when I think, I must speak, and I'm finding myself uncharacteristically exercised by something I read in the Observer over the weekend, so although it is straying from my Creative Writing theme, I feel the need to let off steam.

Michael Boyd, Head Honcho at the Royal Shakespeare Company, was talking about the challenges for children performing Shakespeare. He commented,

"There is no getting around the fact it is difficult, but when children perform it, they conquer it and that means they own a bit of high-status culture."

Oooh dear. I have to say my heart sank. How can somebody at the pinnacle of the artistic life of our country talk in terms of owning high status culture? Culture isn't something that you own, for a start: it's something that you enjoy, or celebrate, or share, or explore. If you are talking of ownership, then straightaway you reduce culture to a commodity.  And if you're even thinking in terms of the status of culture, your cause is lost. This is not the language of the practitioner who speaks from the heart, but of a bureaucrat, or a marketeer. Theatre (and fiction) at its dizzying best is a magical kind of communion, the fusion of collective imagination, there's nothing more exciting.  I can't help thinking how impoverished we would be if all we had to enrich ourselves was high status culture, rather than the real thing.

Duvet Day

Throwing a sickie  Streaming cold - my present to everyone for Christmas.  Normal service will resume. In the meantime, here's a wintry door to throw your literary weight against...

Writing With All Five Senses

When you are working on a story, you tend to rely on two of your five senses: sight predominately, as you seek to create visual impressions of the people and locations you are describing, but also sound -- you will have an ear out for your own narrative voice (but don't listen to hard or you will become too self-conscious) and the voices of your characters.

However, in order to fire on all literary cylinders, don't neglect the other three senses: touch, taste and smell, as each of them can be incredibly evocative in conjuring atmosphere or bringing familiar places and faces to mind. You might like to try a brief exercise to help you focus on them more strongly. 

Spend a few moments taking stock of where you are now.  Write a description of what you are looking out at -- both the  near and the middle distance - and what effect the view has upon your mood.  Next, describe what you can hear.  Are the sounds sharp or muffled, intermittent or continuous, irritating or delightful? What are your physical feelings at the moment?  What is your body in contact with (hard or soft surfaces?) Are you comfortable, or tense? What scents are wafting round your room?  Are they indoor smells or have you got a whiff of the great out doors? Are they long established smells, or fresh ones? What can you taste?  Anything?  Remnants of lunch?  The last cup of tea? Medicine, perhaps? Or strong whisky (same thing, ed)?

You get the picture; the full on, sensual, in-the-round picture.  Try and keep it in your head, and the next time you are working on a scene, recall some of these details and observations and see how they might apply to your characters, because if they are in touch with their senses, they will come more easily to life.

Creative Writing -- Working Undercover

In writing (as in life?) the most interesting things are usually what lie just beneath the surface.  It's the stuff you glimpse, that you have to work for in order to reach.  Anything that's handed to you on a plate can feel as if it's not worth having.  This is never more true than in dialogue, which provides delicious opportunities for being elliptical or evasive.

In the real world, when we talk to one another, a large part of our communication remains unspoken and the small amount that is actually said can often be an innocent-looking cover for deeper stuff: to glean meaningful information, to insult or attack, to seduce. In other words speech is a great means of touching on things we can't deal with directly.

To this end, when you are writing dialogue it is often a good idea to be as spare as possible.  Use the minimum number of word that you feel comfortable with, and when you have written them, see if you can cut them by a quarter (you can always put them back later). The trick is to leave plenty of gaps for the reader's imagination to inhabit.  It will make your work more challenging and your characters more recognisable and sympathetic.

How to Make Fictional Oaks Grow From Little Acorns

We've had sleet today and there's snow forecast, so it's definitely a good time to hunker down in the warm and do some writing.

How's this for an idea?  Describe a character; flesh out as much detail as you can -- appearance, back story, strengths and weaknesses, hopes for the future, occupation etc.  Put in as much information as you can.  Then do the same thing for a second, completely different character.  Finally dream up a situation in which they might meet one another by chance, and see what happens when they do.

You'd be surprised how much well-realised and engrossing work can spring from such a simple beginning.  After all, every story has to start at some point and an exercise like this might lead to somewhere interesting, or be a good warm up if you're working on an existing project.

Think of it as a new door opening....

(I haven't indulged in one of these for ages...)

Fairy Dust in Fiction

It's a hoary old chestnut that truth is stranger than fiction, but it seems to me that creative writing would be a dull prospect if miraculous and extraordinary things didn't happen sometimes in stories. Perhaps that's why the Magic Realism of writers such as Isabel Allende has such a hold on our imaginations.  The ancient classical writers used a device called Deus ex Machina, in which some god or other descended from the heavens and set everything to rights/meted out justice, so the supernatural is not a new idea in fiction.

I'm not a great fan of fantasy writing, because I like a narrative to be anchored in reality -- I find it difficult to suspend my disbelief otherwise.  But if you have well-rounded characters and are writing with authority, an extraordinary or even magical event to can provide an unforgettable moment of literary leger de main, as long as you are not using it to cover up a weakness in your plot.

So here is a little exercise to scatter some fairy dust on a Monday morning. See what happens if you radically break with convention in the story you are writing at the moment, or start a story in which, at some point, your characters enter a new reality.  It's up to you how you interpret this (as with all things) but try taking a deep breath, swiftly followed by a leap of faith, and for the time being don't look back to see if your reader has followed you....

Don't Shelve the Opportunity for a Good Read

Two days without blogging. Hmm. Definitely puts me in the could do better category, but I've got the cyber equivalent of a note from home because I've been spending my time unpacking my books, which is a kind of literary activity all of its own.  I've only got as far as M - I'm one of those sad muppets who arranges all their fiction alphabetically, mostly because it means everything is easy to find, but also because I like the careless  geometry of the shelves that way: ancient hardbacks crammed in next to gleaming new large format paperbacks and nicotine-coloured old style Penguins. I also like the unexpected literary alliances which find Hilary Mantel next to Maupassant and John Fowles and Jonathan Franzen keeping company.

I packed them all away in April, many, many months ago, so there's been something of a reunion going on. My house -- and my life -- has seemed unfurnished without them and now that all those stories are sleeping softly on my shelves again, I feel rehabilitated. I've been coming across books I haven't read at all and ones that inexplicably I've bought two copies of. Then there's all the treasure that slips out from long unopened pages - postcards, bookmarks, letters.  (I once found a surgical mask in a book I borrowed from Camden library.)

The reason I'm going on about it so, is that as writers we need people to value books, and what's more, to read them. so perhaps this weekend, instead of doing some kind of writing, perhaps you could rootle through your own collection and find a book you've always meant to read, but haven't, and set to work on it....

It Ain't What You Say...

...it's the way that you say it, as the song says, and in this instance, the song is right.  To prove this to yourself, write a passage of dialogue between two people.  Keep the speech as neutral as you can and then inflect it with meaning by describing how  the characters are speaking - expend your energy and word power on the context of the exchange.

When you have done this,  rewrite the scene keeping the dialogue identical, but changing the way in which your characters behave.  See how radically different you can make the two versions. I remember reading somewhere that only seven per cent of communication between two people is verbal, so have some fun exploring the other ninety three percent.

How to Show not Tell

Novice writers are always being given helpful advice about showing, not telling, which means trying to show something happening (>dynamism), rather than telling the reader that it has taken place (>dullness).  If you find this difficult to do, why not try depriving yourself of adjectives and adverbs, the usual tools of description, so that all that you are left with is pure action?  Have a go at introducing a character for the first time in this way, so that you are robbed of the possibility of telling us that she has red hair and green eyes, and instead have to think very hard about how you portray her in motion.  It can feel a little constraining first, but if it takes you to a slightly different place in your writing and helps you unknot the show/tell tangle, it might be worth a shot...

Juxtaposition

I was on the Tube this morning and sitting opposite me was a young girl wearing a hijab and reading a trashy mag called Reveal. She made a striking picture, muffled in black, with the title of the magazine blaring out from her lap. The contradiction she presented seemed kind of ironic and it struck me that juxtapositions like this can be meat and drink for the fiction writer. It was a quick cultural snapshot that begged so many questions, suggested so many different influences at play and I think as an image it could have made the start of a story, or certainly an exercise in characterisation.

It got me thinking that you can certainly use juxtaposition to highlight a point that you are trying to put across in your narrative.  Something incongruous is immediately interesting; you can use it to create tension or to shed new light. As human beings, we are a mass of contradictions, that's what makes us interesting; that's what makes writing about people so fascinating, and reading about them too...