An Alphabet of Better Writing # C

C is for Challenge....

...and, oh boy, is writing a challenge. It's a challenge to find the time, to find the inspiration, to stop procrastinating.  It's a challenge to dig down into the creative, tender, sensitive part of yourself that you will need to access in order to write well.  And all of this is nothing compared to the challenge involved in sharing what you have written with other people.

Another challenge, which you may not anticipate when your major focus is on getting published, is how  you make sure that your work retains its vibrancy and vitality over a long period of time.  It can be easy to go off the boil and in order to prevent this from happening you need to repeatedly challenge yourself as a writer.  This involves avoiding writing about what comes easily to you -- in this context easy does not equal good. To stay fresh, to renew yourself in a way that is interesting for both you and your readers, you need to consider your weaknesses.  Think hard about what is really difficult for you to do, and then try to do it. It's the equivalent of searching the key to a locked door...

and the greater the challenge, the greater the reward.

An Alphabet of Better Writing # B

B is for Back Story...

In many ways beginnings are easy: you think of a dramatic moment in your story and jump in (even though it can take you a little while to find your narrative feet).  The tricky part is managing your back story. This is the information your reader will need about what has happened to your characters before the current action starts.  The back story is your intimate knowledge of their lives.  It is important that you, as the author, know a good deal about your hero, heroine and their confederates, because you will need all this information to bring them to life.  However, this is not the same thing as telling your reader everything about them. You need to know about their early childhood traumas in order to show how it affects their adult behaviour, but you don't always need to spell out everything, otherwise you will end up with a curriculum vitae rather than a novel.

The principle for handling the back story is similar to the principle for handling how you drip feed information in general.  Too much is definitely not a good thing.  It is crucially important for the writer to get the reader to work with them in imagining the story - this is very much a joint venture. To achieve this, you need to give them enough facts to stimulate their curiosity, so that they start adding two and two together, then suddenly they're off and away, making four, or five, or Heavens to Betsy, even six.

As a rule of thumb, I try to find out as much about my characters as I would want to know about a friend.  I'm inquisitive about their families, where they were brought up, how educated  they are, what they enjoy , what they fear, any gossip, etc etc. This is all useful to me because it informs how I write about them.  I guess I only tell the reader about a quarter of what I know.

Collating this information is one thing, distributing it is another.  Try not to dump it in a great indigestible heap at the beginning of your story.  Work out the minimum that your reader requires in order to get started and then try sprinkling the rest judiciously as the narrative moves along.  Try an aside here, a recollection there, but avoid big clunky flashbacks because they're just that: clunky.

An Alphabet of Better Writing # A

A is for Author....

My dictionary (an old pocket Oxford belonging to my Dad, with his name written in the front) defines author as the originator of an idea or event. The word sits between authenticate (part of the writers job being to authenticate or give validity to their readers' experience of the world) and authoritarian / authoritative / authority. While I wouldn't advocate being authoritarian in your work (a light touch with writing is often the best way to go) authoritative is defined as being reliable *tick* and authority means personal influence arising especially from knowledge.

You can't go far wrong in your creative work if you write authentically, with knowledge drawn from personal experience; these seem to me to be excellent foundation stones for a novel or a short story, and I'm starting my Alphabet of  Better Writing with Author, because it all begins with you....

True Love - Too Much Flash and Not Enough Fiction

I watched the first episode of True Love, Dominic Savage's series of five short romances filmed in Margate for the BBC. It's the televisual equivalent of flash fiction - each one is a small but perfectly formed twenty-five minutes long.

The filmette was beautifully photographed and David Tennant brought considerable passion to his portrayal of the central character of Nick, whose happily married life is turned upside down by the reappearance of his first love, but the overall effect was slightly weird.  With time so short, writer and director Savage concentrated on the big dramatic set pieces and left out everything in between, so that the narrative seemed jerky, with none of the small but telling details, the warp and weft, that knits up a good story.

The high production values made it easy to enjoy, but I found myself yearning for a bit of length. I'm not much of a short story writer or reader, I like room to manoeuvre, so I guess it was inevitable that I would find True Love in some way unsatisfying. For me, the literary importance of having the space to explore nuance  and detail is crucial.  If you turn your back on that and focus on the edited highlights of an emotional crisis, you end up with a story which is two-dimensional: not drama, but melodrama.

The big picture is always less interesting, it's the small detail, the oblique close-up, the sideways glance, which is usually more revealing...

(Though what's really fascinating is what goes on behind closed doors...)

What's the Most Inspiring Character Trait of All?

I think it's resilience, and I'll tell you why.

I never really hit it off with Steinbeck; I tried reading The Grapes of Wrath and found it too bleak, too dusty, so I approached Winter's Bone by Daniel Woodrell with some anxiety, as both novels deal with the hopeless lives of downtrodden white communities in the neighbouring states of Oklahoma and Missouri.

I needn't have worried.  I was bowled over by Winter's Bone, which tells the story of Ree, a teenage girl fending for her family in the Missouri Badlands, where her rogue father has mysteriously disappeared.

This is how Ree describes her forebears,

"...kin who had so many bones that broke, broke and mended, broke and mended wrong, so they limped through life on the bad-mend bones for year upon year until falling dead in a single evening from something that sounded wet in the lungs.  The men came to mind as mostly idle between nights of running wild or time in the pen, cooking moon and gathering around the spout, with ears chewed, fingers chopped, arms shot away, and no apologies grunted ever.  The women came to mind bigger, closer, with their lonely eyes and homely yellow teeth, mouths clamped against smiles, working in the hot fields from can to can't, hands tattered rough as dry cobs, lips cracked all winter, a white dress for marrying, a black dress for burying, and Ree nodded yup.  Yup."

It is against this background that her quest to find her father and protect her family unfolds. Woodrell takes Ree (and us) to some dark places indeed, but what makes the book luminous rather than depressing is the way in which Ree's spirit burns with a bright and unquenchable light.  No matter what trials and setbacks she encounters, she remains unbowed. This, coupled with prose that is so rich you can taste it in your mouth, makes for heady reading; it makes for a good lesson in writing too. It's a fantastic example of what an attractive and aspirational quality resilience is. Reading about someone behaving indomitably at some level encourages us to do likewise, it's uplifting and inspiring - emotions all of us should be aiming to kindle in our readers.

Resilience is  a vital quality for writers too.  You need it to cope with the hard knocks and the disappointments; you need it to underpin the workings of your imagination.

Lost in Translation # 2

Ohh, the slippery delights of language!

Normally, when I'm in France and don't know how to say something, I just use the English word in my cod French accent and nine times out of  ten get by okay.  There are, however, moments when the similarities between our languages can be incredibly misleading.

We saw this sign on our last trip:

The helpful translation (by Google, perhaps?) offers free accosting - which according to my Pocket Oxford means "approach and address, esp boldly (of prostitute)".  In French it means mooring.

It sent us on our way with smiles on our faces, but I guess there's a moral here as well: words mean different things in different contexts and nuances can be vital if you don't want to be misunderstood.  If ever you're in doubt about the precise meaning of a word, look it up; it's a great way to expand your vocabulary and you're bound to stumble across something else interesting at the same time.  It might also save you some embarrassment: until I was twenty four I thought that enervated meant excited - I was in a play in Edinburgh which was described as, "the most enervating show on the Fringe," and we stuck the review up outside the theatre, thinking that such high praise would have the punters falling over each other to get in.

What You Can Learn from John Lanchester...

Well, loads of things, of course, he's a brilliant writer.  But having just read Capital, which is set in a single London street and anatomises the effects of the 2008 financial crisis on its inhabitants, what struck me most was the way in which he was able to accentuate the foibles and of fallibility is of his characters, while still making them seem sympathetic.  It can be a difficult trick to pull off, but it has the effect of giving greater depth and subtlety to characterisation.

I'm always intrigued by any tension in a narrative.  I don't mean narrative tension or suspense, but something at a more structural level:  the sense that the warp and weft of the story are pulling in slightly different directions.  It adds timbre and texture.

In John Lanchester's case, Capital's hot shot banker Roger is lazy, greedy, selfish, concupiscent and utterly lacking in self-awareness, in other words the perfect vehicle for all our prejudices about city high flyers. But at the same time, he is disarmingly human: he does enough, more or less, to get by; he tries to please his insatiably avaricious wife without much success; he lusts after the nanny but is unable to seduce her; whether or not he will get his coveted bonus is open to doubt.  There is something forlorn and disappointed about him; he has shortcomings we can recognise, in spite of ourselves we feel sympathetic.

Lanchester portrays most of the other inhabitants of Pepys Road with similar ambivalence and ambiguity. I think it is part of the alchemy that lifts them from the page and transforms them into credible, complex beings.  It's something to think about in your own work: people are never wholly admirable so, when you are writing, see if you can conjure up a character who is just about likeable, warts and all.

Self-Publishing - the Surprise Revelation?

There was an interesting article in yesterday's Guardian reflecting on the survey into self (or Indie) publishing recently conducted by the Taleist web site. Taleist's founder, journalist Steven Lewis, asked one thousand and seven correspondents sixty one questions and from their answers was able to glean a number of interesting facts:

• Genre -- writers of romance made 170% of the Indie average income, science fiction 38%, fantasy 32% and literary fiction 20%.
• Output - the highest earners produced approximately five hundred words a day more than their less successful colleagues and spent on average 24% more time on each word they wrote.
• Investment - Indie writers who paid for professional help with editing, copy editing and proof reading earned 13% more than those who didn't and money spent on professional cover design increased profits by 34%.

Apart from the light shed on the popularity of romantic fiction, it seems to me that the most salient point to emerge from the survey is a simple and yet profound truth: in literature, as in life, you get out what you put in.  Writers who self-publish successfully invest more of their time and their money in their work. 
Lesson learnt.

What's in a Name?

For the last month I've been thinking, in increasingly less vague terms, about a new novel.  I've been scratching about at the edges of an idea, teasing out a few strands of the story, mulling over different characters, but nothing has taken flight so far: the wings of my imagination have stayed tightly furled - there have been no thermals to coast,  no up draughts or down draughts or any other kind of draft. Nieda.

Until today.  I've been rather stumped about what I should call my characters, but today I made myself decide.  I've been wading through lists of girls' and boys' names, trying them out, conjuring, feeling them on my tongue and now everyone who features in my narrative has a name.

The effect has been extraordinary.  Within the space of a (cold, wet) afternoon I have the skeleton of a pitch sketched out.  It is as if making one decision, the first, critical choice about what a character should be called, has facilitated the making of dozens of others.

The lesson here? Naming your characters is the start of a long commitment.  Like the christening of a baby, promises are made and pledges given.  Giving someone a name is the first step towards them having an identity; it makes them real.  Unnamed, it's difficult to relate to them -- no wonder my story wasn't gelling.  All that remains for me now is to have a little drink to wet the baby's head -- oh, and to write the book, of course.

An Observation about Using Observation in Creative Writing

I was on the bus the other day, whiling away the time by watching two people who were sitting side-by-side in separate pools of tiredness.  You could tell that they were both worn out, but they were worn out in different ways.  The woman was relatively upright, gazing into space as if she had been travelling forever, her expression blank.  Next to her, the man seemed hollowed out by tiredness, crushed by it.  He was slumped, his tie was loose at his neck, his head was hanging, his cheeks were gaunt.  He didn't have the energy to gaze anywhere, he was staring at nothing. He seemed at the end of his tether, beside himself, bereft.

I'm sharing this with you because, as writers, you never know where you're going to find material, and you won't find it if you don't look.  In fact, it's everywhere, all around you and if you take the trouble to search with an observant eye you will find everything you need to inform your work.  Studying these people (as covertly as I could) make me think about characterisation, contrast, degree and detail; it was like taking a short refresher course in descriptive writing.  It didn't just pass the time for me, it filled it with interest and wonder.

Another shopfront from the book village of Cuisery...

In the Presence of Greatness

One of my earliest memories is of my mum scooping me out of the bath and swaddling me, dripping, in a towel; then sitting me on her knee and singing me Harry Belafonte songs: Brown Skin Girl, Come Back Liza and, of course, the Banana Boat Song. So because America has been kind enough to lend him to the United Kingdom for a few days, the two of us went along to hear him speak at St George's Hall in Bristol.

We went expecting an evening of celebrity reminiscences.  Before he appeared we watched a twenty minute film showing highlights from his career.  He was the first person in the world to sell a million records (during the evening he observed dryly that you don't know the meaning of the word power until you have heard fifty thousand Japanese singing "Dai-o...") Asked if he considered himself to be an actor or a singer, he replied "Oh, I'm an actor, a great actor, because I managed to convince the whole world that I'm a singer."

His success in show business was as nothing compared to his achievements as a human rights activist.  He was able to use his influence as a successful singer to enlist friends such as Marlon Brando and Rod Steiger, with whom he had studied drama, into the human rights movement.  He marched to Washington shoulder to shoulder with Martin Luther King, and when the (then) Senator John Kennedy broached him to ask how he could cultivate the black vote he rebuked him to the shallowness of his strategy.

His clear-sighted vision, that change should be achieved by non-violent means, was articulated during the course an uplifting evening, his conversation laid-back, laced with philosophy and interspersed with stories and anecdotes.  At eighty-five, graceful and elegant, he is still involved in humanitarian work, acting as an ambassador with UNICEF. He was completely up to speed with developments in the Arab Spring, observing that oppressors never voluntarily yield power, you have to take it from them.  He should know; he has spent the majority of his life fighting oppression, and sitting listening to him talk in Bristol, whose considerable wealth was built on the back of the slave trade, his humility and his steel lit a flame in all of us who heard him.

Pet Hates

If you want some "light" reading over the Jubilee weekend, it's worth spending half an hour digesting Jonathan Franzen's excellent article about autobiography in last Saturday's Guardian 

I 've only just caught up with it myself and, actually, it isn't light at all, it's chocablock with closely argued, trenchant observations, but it is bound to set you thinking about the whole business of writing, and in particular about drawing on your own experience as a source for your work, and that can only be a good thing.

The literary megastar author of The Corrections includes a list of all the things he dislikes in literature,

"My work represents an active campaign against the values I dislike: sentimentality, weak narrative, overly lyrical prose, solipsism, self-indulgence, misogyny and other parochialisms, sterile game-playing, overt didacticism, moral simplicity, unnecessary difficulty, informational fetishes, and so on."

This made me think about my own pet hates: writing for effect (of any kind) which I suppose means writing without truth or sincerity; sensationalism, lazy plotting, anything obvious, anything gratuitous, anything too accessible, anything too inaccessible (!). The fiction I enjoy the most is like a door, ajar, waiting for your hand upon the latch and the pressure of your arm as you push it open....

 

What are your literary dislikes?