Creative Writing: Working with Mosaics

I thought you might like some gilded Art Nouveau flowers to brighten up this interminably long shortest month. I am so through with February. I'm desperate for some mad March wind to blast the grey away and shake the gold from the daffodils.

In the meantime, here are my gaudy blooms, found above a shop front in Nancy, France. I'm intrigued by the composite nature of the image, hundreds of tiny tiles that would be decorative but meaningless on their own, fitting together to make a picture. I like the way the artist has put contrasting colours together to create an impression of depth and texture. It's interesting that the composition is framed in gold and then again in blue and white, and yet the petals break through the frame rebelliously, softening and subverting.

What my flowers teach us about writing fiction is to do with the accumulation of detail. They show how a picture full of depth and resonance can be fashioned from hundreds of tiny details, which looked at individually have little to tell us, but viewed as part of a larger whole can be extraordinarily revealing.

See how you can apply this to your own work: it can be helpful in building a character or describing a scene. Jot down as many individual observations as you can – more than you need – and start assembling them, being conscious of the effect of comparison and contrast. Move them around until you're happy with the overall effect and then stand back and take a look – you might be surprised at what you see.

Writing Fiction : The Perfect Beginning

I've just read the first two chapters of Maggie O'Farrell's new novel Instructions for a Heatwave, an opening so exquisitely orchestrated that it has left me feeling every other writer should just pack up their things and go home. I'd be full of gloom and despair for all our prospects, if I weren't enjoying her book so much.

Why is it so wonderful? It's not just because her writing is pitch perfect: never understated, yet never flashy either, with a tone as clear as a bell; it's the way she turns water into wine, using her intricate knowledge of the human heart to transform the ordinary lives of simple people into something representative and symbolic. In the opening pages we discover certain things about the Riordan family - the elderly father has gone missing, the son's marriage is on the brink – but we are learning so much more about the geology of human relationships as O'Farrell digs deep into the impermeable seams of rock, the crumbling sandstone, the pockets of air that make up the foundations of the interplay between people. She deals in misplaced aspirations and assumptions, in the shortfall of good intentions, in the abrasions between hope and reality – and I am only on page twenty-five! I've got three hundred and twelve pages still to go (not that I'm counting) and shall doubtless have plenty more to say about this amazing book once I have finished it. But in the meantime, if you want to discover how to write the opening chapters of a story, learn from an expert  – it's not just instructions for a heatwave that Maggie O'Farrell's novel contains, it's instructions for writing to the best of your ability...

Fiction Writing – Drawing on Your Own Experience

"A little talent is a good thing to have if you want to be a writer. But the only real requirement is the ability to remember every scar." So says Stephen King in his own particular take on the old adage that you should write about what you know, drawing inspiration from your own experience. I like the idea of remembering every scar, even though it might turn you into a poor, paranoid, retributive creature. The key thing is to be able to recall the feelings associated with each inflicted wound, because being able to write truthfully about emotion and therefore to share insights with your readers is what will bring them back for more.

However, being able to reproduce your own personal scars as literature is harder than it looks. If you transcribe your experience directly, without allowing your imagination to work upon it and transform it, you run the risk that a) your work will be full of self-pity and b) it will be so personal to you that it will fail to resonate with other people. You need to convert the particular into something general, without losing that unique genesis that made it individual in the first place – almost a contradiction in terms and flipping difficult to do.

Write about your scars from a safe distance, when you have enough perspective to interpret them in a way that will illuminate what you are describing for your audience. One of the best experiences for a reader is to think That's happened to me, I've felt that, I've been there. It's that moment of recognition, of identification, of profound sharing. The way you achieve that connection with them is not simply to reproduce your own trauma and unhappiness for public consumption, no matter how skilfully you re-imagine it. What you need to add is a sense of wisdom gained,  the promise that out of the darkness light has come. Suffering in stories always needs to be accompanied (and redeemed) by hope.

Creative Writing – How to Set Your Story in Time and Place

I'm just starting to work on a new writing project, so the setting of the story is very much on my mind. As a huge fan of Thomas Hardy's Wessex novels, as well as classics like Wuthering Heights, I'm conscious of the powerful role that location can play in a book. Handled well, it can carry as much weight as the central characters. It can inspire feelings of longing, revulsion, alienation; it can enhance the emotional arc of your narrative by contributing to the atmosphere, or alternatively it can provide a useful counterpoint.

You can be businesslike about it and provide just enough information to anchor the events you're describing and the people who are involved in them and in a plot driven novel, where action is all, this may be the right way to go about things. However, I'm inclined to think that any writing opportunity which presents itself should be exploited to the full and that if you don't give due attention to the location of your narrative – where it exists in time and place – you may be selling yourself short.

If you want a brilliant example of how to tackle setting, check out Dart, Deborah Harvey's new book just published by Indigo Dreams. It's a young adult's novel set in 14th century Devon, and Harvey meticulously brings to life this remote mediaeval period (without her extensive research ever intruding), but the irresistible pull of the story lies in its setting on Dartmoor, which works upon the lives of her protagonists almost as powerfully as the scourge of the Black Death - the bubonic plague which overwhelmed the county and decimated its population. Even if you don't want to learn useful lessons about location, read it anyway: Deborah writes with a poet's lyricism, combining it with authenticity and accuracy to produce an epic tale that is still haunting me, even though I finished it a while ago.

Finding a Frame for your Story

I took this picture just outside the Place Stanislas in Nancy, looking into what is said to be the most beautiful square in the whole of France. It was designed by Emmanuel Héré and lavishly embellished by Jean Lamour, whose wrought iron archway draws the eye into my photo.

I'm a crap photographer, but I like the way the dark green foliage in shadow at the front of the picture anticipates the lighter tree in the square, and then the one that we can glimpse beyond that. I like the contrast between the pale sky and the gilded filigree of the railings, between the harshness of the foreground and the softness of the distant spire. Really, I suppose, it's two separate images, ones superimposed on the other, both of them echoing and resonating together.

Just as I've attempted to frame one view with another, so one story can provide the setting for another when you are writing fiction. You can do this through flashback, using the present as a lens through which to view of the past, or you can use your subplot, making the actions of the minor characters provide a commentary on the behaviour of your protagonists. As with my picture, there should be plenty of similarities and contrasts between the two layers in your story, in order to make what can sometimes be a complicated process worthwhile. If you can pull it off, your narrative will have greater depth, more nuance, more subtlety than it would if it consisted of a single plot strand, rather than two inter-related ones that counterpoint each other.

Ghost Writing?

I went to visit my father's grave yesterday. He is buried in a churchyard at the foot of the Cotswold escarpment, in a place that is haunted by memories: of my dad, of my son's childhood which was spent in the village, of life as it used to be and is no longer, yet each time I visit it feels as if it is I who am the ghost. I seem to slip into the uncanny space that exists between the worlds of then and now. When I wander up to the graveyard, or stand at the bottom of our old driveway gazing hungrily up at the house, I feel as if I am the spectre outside the window, the exorcised, the banished.

The reason I'm sharing this with you, the creative writing reason, is because I think it touches on perspective and what you can do with it when you are writing fiction. Received wisdom is that the dead haunt the living, but when I go back to my old "haunts", that isn't my experience at all, for me the reverse is true. I think you might be able to apply this to your own work: when you are tackling point of view within the structure of your narrative, see what happens when you approach it from a different viewpoint. For example, if A is the heroine of your story, try telling it from the perspective of B, or C. To put it even more simply, when you are working creatively begin with the obvious and then do the opposite.

The Spaces Between Words

We're Borgen slaves in our house, gone into mourning now that the second series has finished. How I'll make it through the year without my weekly dip into the lives of Danish Prime Minister Birgitte Nyborg (Sidse Babett Knudsen) and her soulful, straying husband Philip Christensen (Mikael Birkkjær), I just don't know.

For the unconverted amongst you, the series is in Danish with English subtitles, so imagine my surprise when my husband asked me to turn it up because he couldn't hear! But when I thought about it for a moment, I completely got what he meant. Even though we could understand what the actors were saying because it was helpfully written on the screen for us to see, hearing their voices, with all the subtle inflections of emotion and restraint, was absolutely key in responding to their performances. In other words, how they were speaking was as important, if not more, as what they were communicating.

There's a creative writing lesson here - no way! - and it's about dialogue and context. When your characters are in conversation it isn't enough to show them exchanging lines with each other. You need to provide enough additional information for your reader to be able to interpret all the nuances of what they are expressing. They need to understand not just what they are saying, but what they are not saying, what they've regretted saying, what they really mean. You need to indicate whether their words are shot through with irony or humour or spite, whether sincerity is real or faked. There is a mass of spin that you as a writer can apply to ordinary speech, which is why dialogue alone is not enough – unless you have actors like Sidse Babett Knudsen and Mikael Birkkjær to do the extra work for you. So when your characters begin to speak, fill in the spaces between their words to make our reading richer.

In Praise of Criticism

Criticism stings; it hurts. Sometimes it makes you want to curl up into a ball, block your ears and go lah, lah, lah, lah, lah. It can feel as rejecting as someone slamming a door in your face,

even this poor, rickety, broken thing.

Yet criticism is one of the most valuable things you will ever receive as a writer; far more use to you than praise, which merely affirms, whereas criticism stretches, provokes and inspires. If somebody pays you the enormous compliment of investing time and thought into reading what you have written, don't stick your fingers in your ears and walk away if they tell you they don't like certain aspects of it. Think long and hard about what the problem might be and how you can fix it. I once had an editor say, I can't quite put my finger on what's wrong. How helpful is that? If she had come back and said the scenes are under-dramatised and the characters seem a little frozen, that would have given me plenty to work with.

Even if you want approval for your writing, it might not always be what is best for you, so if constructive and insightful criticism comes your way, seize it as a lifeline - the grit of a salty comment or two might just turn into a pearl one day.

Top Tips for Starting a Novel

I am – I think – on the threshold of starting my Next Major Work. If you detect a note of caution, it's because I'm not absolutely certain that I'm ready to begin, even though I started making notes about possible ideas last May, so I've already had a good forty weeks' gestation and should be ready to give birth.

Which brings me to my first tip: don't start writing your story or novel too soon. This is because you need to be so pent up, so desperate to write it, that you generate enough momentum to keep you going over a period which could last years. Giving yourself plenty of time to prepare will also mean that your ideas and characters are well developed and will therefore spring vividly from the page.

My second  tip is that you should have a reasonable sense of where you're going. I'm always amazed at the number of people who set off on the long creative trek to write a book without having some kind of a route map to guide them. Don't be afraid that having a plan will cramp or inhibit your inspiration – you can modify your work right up until the last minute if you want to and it's a good idea to build in enough flexibility to allow you to respond to the brilliant idea that hits you halfway through. But if you don't give your imagination material to work with – the basis and structure for a story – you may find that you're making impossible demands on it and don't be surprised if it, and your project, run out of steam. If you were building a house you'd employ an architect, who would be there to help you if you wanted to change the position of the kitchen halfway through the build. It's the same with writing fiction. Having a solid structure will support the alterations you want to make, as well as giving you the confidence to be bold and implement them.

My third tip is that you should keep mum: don't reveal what you're writing about to anybody because it will dilute the story you want to tell. The first narration should occur on the page. I wouldn't be too precious about having your idea stolen because, like fingerprints, no two stories are the same and you can't copyright ideas, only words. By keeping quiet about what you are up to, the only expectations you have to deal with are your own and you may find those difficult enough in any case.

My final tip – enjoy what you are doing. Relish every phrase you write. Fall in love with your characters as you get to know them better. Let yourself be giddy with the excitement of it all. Writing is the easy part – the big challenge of how to get your work into the public domain comes later.

Cooking Sources

I'm reading Michael Plampin's brand-new novel Illumination which is set in Paris in 1870 when the French capital was under siege by the Prussian army. It's a riveting tale, with lots of surface glitter, made all the more interesting to me because I've just finished Alistair Horne's account of the same event in his history, The Fall of Paris.

I'm enjoying Plampin's tale too much to be reading it forensically. At the moment I'm romping through it devouring the big set pieces on the French balloonists who risked their lives to escape over the enemy lines with vital dispatches, and the levels of starvation which drove the Parisians to eat the contents of their zoo, and the forlorn valour of the Great Sortie. I'll probably go back and read it again more slowly to see if I can make sense of the strange alchemical process by which writers turn fact into fiction. Already I'm making connections between imaginary characters and their real life counterparts and the odd event or observation is ringing bells with me as well.

I'm intrigued by the way in which a line in a history book can act as the seed to an idea which then flowers into something other – a fully realised independent creation.

You might find an analysis of the process helpful too, particularly if you are interested in writing historical fiction yourself. By comparing a factual and a fictional account of the same event you can examine different sources like separate ingredients in a story. That way you'll gain a greater understanding of how to cook them into something as satisfying as Illumination.