Lost in Translation # 5

I love the weird dissonance that can happen during  translation – the way in which two languages collide and send words glancing off in unexpected directions. Here's something I saw in Venice last autumn...

On the contrary, I think historical pasta might be very, very sexy – anything from the past kindles my imagination, but what intrigues and delights me about this notice are the questions that it poses – what was the writer trying to say? All the possibilities of nuance and interpretation are suddenly opened up and my reader's (and writer's) brain is flung into overdrive.

It reminds me of the subtleties and accidents of language – and it makes me laugh....

The Coffin and the Sharpened Stake - Accepting Criticism

I've just sent the first three chapters of my new novel to my writing friend and mentor, so I'm feeling a little unsettled and unstable. I want her to like it, but I don't necessarily want her to tell me that she does, as I don't think that would be helpful or constructive. I need her to find fault with it, to pick it apart forensically with her writer's clinical analysis rather than her friend's warm heart. I hope she'll tell me all the ways in which I can make it better and then, after this savaging, I want her to tell me that if I work really hard at it, she thinks it might have some potential.

I'm not sure that praise, when you're in the early stages of writing fiction, is particularly helpful, although sometimes you need a small amount of sugar to help the medicine go down. David Mitchell put it this way...

“If you show someone something you've written, you give them a sharpened stake, lie down in your coffin, and say, ‘When you’re ready’.”

If you've had a literary pasting yourself and are in need of balm, you could do worse than reading his excellent novel Black Swan Green  (which is where this quotation comes from) – not only will it divert you, it's an exemplary lesson in how to write.

The Literary Come-On

 Ooh, I've been writing so hard I feel as if my head is spinning and I could easily have parked my bicycle high on the wall of this French restaurant and in fact perhaps I did!

 Although I hardly know whether I'm on my head on my heels, I do recall rash promises of talking about tension and suspense, so here are a few brief thoughts...

Tension, suspense, anticipation – all of them delicious emotions if you experience them in moderation, although the extreme versions take you into murky, E L James, pain-and-pleasure territory, so it's probably best to stay within the parameters of delicious and allow your reader the thrill of having their expectations built up, before they are fulfilled or thwarted.

There are a few ways of doing this.

• You can announce that something is going to happen up front and then leave your reader in an agony as to how and why.
• You can drop hints – the use of portents and omens a la Thomas Hardy can be very useful here – without being too specific, just enough to whet the appetite.
• You can take your reader right to the brink of the crisis, and leave them there.
• You can convince your reader that one thing is going to happen and then surprise them with another.

It's a form of structural flirtation, a literary come-on. In a way, plotting the novel is an extended seduction, so we're back in EL James territory once again. You want to confound your reader, but not too often. You want to leave them hungry for more.

Story Structure Made (Very, Very) Simple

In my previous post I made a few suggestions about how you might approach the plotting of your story and finished with rash promises about offering some thoughts about structure, so here goes...

I've never read how-to books on structure, other than Christopher Vogler's much trumpeted The Writer's Journey and although I found it fascinating, I found it equally difficult to apply to my own work.I couldn't forge my story to fit his framework, no matter how much I tried to hammer and bend it, so consequently I'm wary of instruction manuals that are too specific about assembling the elements of a narrative, because it's such an intuitive, organic process and you don't want your well-crafted work of fiction to read as though it's come off a production line.

There are a few basics which are unarguably necessary, among them a beginning and an end. You'll notice I've left out the middle, because in fact I think you need two middles, as I suspect the old three act structure of the well-made play does have something to recommend it. So...

• Act One: a beginning, the arrival of some complicating factor, a crisis.
• Act Two: some high-stakes attempts to resolve the crisis, denouement.
• Act Three: resolution.

...and even that feels a little too prescriptive.

The best advice I can give you is to pay attention to contrast and pace, because if you are vigilant about these you will automatically create and then dissipate tension, thus providing well-integrated climaxes in your story.

Perhaps in my next post I'll look at how you handle tension, (but on the other hand...)

How to Achieve Plotting Perfection without Really Trying

Finding the perfect plot is something which writers agonise about, but asking yourself a few simple questions will soon help you to tease out the germ of a good idea. 

Girl meets boy, girl loses boy, girl wins boy back and they live happily ever after. Think of this  corny old outline as the foundation of your narrative. The plot is the sequence of events through which you describe your story taking place. The way to derive a plot from your original idea is to keep asking yourself questions.

Girl Meets Boy. What is the girl like? What is the boy like? How do they meet? Have either of them had partners before and if so was it a positive or negative experience? What are their first impressions of each other? Is one of them more keen than the other? Where do they meet? Does the meeting go well, or is it a disaster?

Girl Loses Boy. What exactly has she lost? How far has their relationship developed? Does it have a solid foundation or has it been precarious from the start? How does she lose him? Does the loss come as a surprise or was it predictable from the outset? Is another person involved? What effect does the loss have upon her? What does she decide to do about it?

Girl Wins Boy Back. How does she achieve this? What odds are stacked against her to make it a challenge? Does winning him back occur in a single moment of realisation or does she conduct a sustained campaign? How has he changed? Why has he changed? What makes him want her back?

They Live Happily Ever After. Or do they? Are the auspices positive or negative? Is it a question of "be careful what you really want..." What is happy?

When you have answered all these fundamental questions you will have the basic elements of a plot. You then need to think about structure – how you fit all these elements together, but that's a story for another day...

Time Travelling – the Use of Tenses in Fiction

In my manuscript-appraising life, I'm prone to slashing and burning when it comes to the pluperfect tense - cuts here, red lines there – I think it should only ever be used sparingly. I know that when they teach you grammar in school, they tell you that the pluperfect is the tense to use when you are talking about the distant past – I had been, rather than I was, but I like my stories to be more immediate than that: I don't want to be reading about things which seem remote from me, what I'm after is a sense of current engagement. I prefer to use the perfect – I have been,  the simple past - I was, or even the zingy present – I am. I'm also wary of any grammatical construction that burdens a sentence with additional words – had and have can weigh your prose down unnecessarily. I'm not saying never use the pluperfect: it can be fantastic for adding dimension to your narrative of the past and for giving a sense of perspective, but once in a scene is probably enough, there's no need for reinforcement.

If you want an exercise to help you explore the effect on your writing of using various tenses, try this: I'll jot down four first lines below to get you started on four different paragraphs – they don't have to be related in any way. Just continue in the tense in which I've started and when you have finished read them through and see what effect they have on pace, tension, accessibility and immediacy.

1. It had been a cold winter and I hadn't seen our neighbour for more than a month.
2. I have been meaning to write, honestly, I have.
3. The beeping stopped, the monitor flatlined, the nurse checked for vital signs.
4. The child is inching along the wall, heel to toe, trembling;  he cannot reach her.

You might also try constructing a sentence that uses all four tenses, just to see how muscular your prose needs to be in order to accommodate that kind of movement.
I'd be interested to hear how you get on...

The Multi-Tasking Manuscript

We've become so adept at multi-tasking – bringing up children, sustaining a relationship, running a house, keeping down a job, writing a novel - and that lot's just for starters. Doing one thing at a time doesn't really cut the mustard any more, we've got to succeed on as many fronts as possible.

Hold this thought in your head next time you sit down to work on your novel or short story. It's no accident that the mighty BBC's mission is to educate, inform and entertain. Not just inform. Not just educate. All three in a one-er. I think the same applies in creative writing. If you dash off a good yarn with a cracking plot, you may do very well – there is a place for stories which simply entertain and sometimes it can be a profitable one. However, I suspect that in these hard-pressed times people have got used to looking for added value – that's what makes them commit to a purchase, or to reading a book – so it might be worth spending some time thinking of how you can add value to the story you are writing.

Here are a few ideas...

• If you set something in the past, make sure your period is well researched and seek out as many illuminating details as you can, so your reader finishes what you have written feeling she has learnt something.
• I suspect that dramas about hospitals and the police do so well on television because people want privileged access to a world that is denied them elsewhere. They want to feel as if they're on the inside of an exclusive group. Try and make this work to your advantage – set your narrative in an environment that most people wouldn't normally have access to, so that you can draw them in.
• Make sure your writing is as good as it can be. Of course, its primary function is to tell your story, but if the quality of your prose beguiles the reader at the same time, they are more likely to come back for more.
• You could even weave in recipes, or prizes, or tips for better sex – it's all been done to great effect before (Like Water for Chocolate, Kit Williams' Masquerade, the ubiqitious EL James...)

In a bid to multi-task with this blog, I'm not just jotting down a few thoughts for your delight and delectation, I'm giving you a beautiful door as well...

Steinbeck's Rule for Writing Fiction

The Grapes of Wrath...Of Mice and Men – okay, okay, John Steinbeck knew a thing or two about writing fiction, so I was interested to come across this quote from him on the Goodreads site,

"If a story is not about the hearer, he will not listen. And here I make a rule—a great and interesting story is about everyone or it will not last."

I think it goes to the heart of why we read – to understand our own experience and find some kind of affirmation of it. Most of us are looking for illumination and reassurance from the books we choose (as well as excitement, entertainment, catharsis, diversion, information - are you sure you want to be a writer?)

When you are starting work on a novel or short story, I think you should have this issue of reader identification at the forefront of your thinking. Finding your voice as a writer is one thing, making sure it speaks to your reader is something slightly different and that is where your choice of subject and theme comes into play. Be wary of taking the advice about writing about what you know too literally – if you work in a hospital, don't necessarily write about routine on the wards, but draw on your experience of what it feels like to save (or lose) the life of a child so that you can write vividly, in heartfelt tones, about striving, disappointment, elation, loss. These feelings are universal, but the events that give rise to them are specific to an individual.

Perhaps that's what Steinbeck is getting at – use your narrative to anatomise one person's particular experience of an emotion that is generally felt. When you are reading, the best moment is always one of recognition – of I know how that feels. Use your writer's guile, your literary smoke and mirrors, to reflect their own emotional truth back to your readers – it isn't their narcissism you will be speaking to, it's their desire to share....

Scrabbling for Metaphors...

I found my parents' ancient set of Scrabble in our loft the other day - the box (which boasts New Plastic Tiles!) endlessly repaired with yellowed sellotape. Inside was a record of all the scores of all the games they'd ever played. Forty two years of unarmed combat! One day my Dad, convinced of his supremacy, did the maths and totted up the figures. Result: 60,900 to him and a resounding, trouncing 63,283 to my mum.

That's an awful lot of words.

That's the portrait of a marriage, in miniature.

That's the germ of a short story, surely? Think of a metaphor for your own relationship, and set to work...