White Rabbits, Wonderland and Writer's Block

Recognise this little fellow?

Said to be carved in approximately 1330 and wearing the distinctive satchel of the pilgrim, he graces the archway of St Mary's Church in Beverley, Yorkshire, a town where Lewis Carroll stayed while he was preparing to write Alice in Wonderland. Even the most fleeting glance suggests an impression of the White Rabbit, running behind schedule, whom Alice follows into the rabbit hole, thus beginning her fantastical adventures.

It was a treat to see him, so distinctive and characterful, partly because it made me smile to think of the stonemason with a sense of humour all those years ago, but also because it's a reminder that inspiration comes in unexpected places. If you are tussling with your Work in Progress, or suffering from writer's block, go out for a walk or a wander – it's amazing what you might stumble upon and following a fresh idea may lead you to unexpected places, just as Alice discovered when she set off in pursuit of an irresistible little rabbit...

Twenty Questions about Characterisation

Do you remember playing that car game, brilliant for long journeys, where one of you assumes a character and the others have to guess who it is by asking twenty questions? When we were little we whiled away hours playing it on the autobahns and autoroutes of Europe, but it has other applications too and can be particularly useful for a fiction writer in search of a protagonist.

When you are in the process of fleshing out your hero or heroine, you might consider submitting them to the same sort of interrogation (and it's also the kind of thing you can do on long car journeys!)

1. When were you born?
2. Where were you born?
3. Do you have brothers and sisters?
4. What is your happiest memory?
5. What makes you saddest?
6. Where do you live?
7. What do you do for a living?
8. Have you had other relationships?
9. Do you consider yourself an extrovert?
10. Do you have secrets?
11. How good is your self-esteem?
12. What is your attitude to your appearance?
13. What is your proudest possession?
14. What are you most ashamed of?
15. What are your politics?
16. What makes you angry?
17. What is your best quality?
18. What do you value most in other people?
19. What do you yearn for?
20. What keeps you awake at night?

There are dozens of other interesting questions you could pose and while some are more simplistic than others, all of them will get you thinking about your character and may even send you off in an unanticipated direction which, in my experience, is where the interesting stuff is to be found...

Monet, Monet, Monet...

Because it's high summer (!) I thought I'd share with you this picture of Monet's garden at Giverney just north of Paris.

He is reputed to have regarded it as his greatest work of art and if you gaze at it through half-closed eyes you can almost see his impressionist brushstrokes at play. There's light and shade and texture and tone and colour all in this little thumbnail image. There's a sense of composition too, with the two paths running in parallel and the tulips bursting forth in between. The effect is deceptively simple, but if you look at the way the blue contrasts with the pink and the prickly rose bushes oppose the softness of the tulips, you begin to get a sense of how complex the design really is – and that's before you take account of the olfactory delights the garden – the symphony of different scents.

I'm not sure that there is a creative writing lesson here, except that Giverney is extraordinarily beautiful in a number of different ways and that it is an expression of one man's vision - much like a good book. It's a source of inspiration, and there is a kind of education to be had as well, if you start to look at the structure of different areas and how they interact as a whole. Perhaps today's little homily is about being receptive to what you see, about being attuned, about seeing the creative potential in your surroundings, no matter what they are...

An Exercise in Sensory Deprivation

The sun is shining, I can hear birds singing outside my window and it's the longest day, so the last thing you probably want is a writing exercise for the weekend, but if you think that the longest day will, by definition, give you more time to write, and allow your senses to be stimulated by the effects of the lovely weather, perhaps you might be persuaded....

Early memories, because they are vivid and elemental and form part of your make up, can be a fertile source of ideas. Try and recall an event from your infancy or early childhood and jot down as many details as you can remember so that you have plenty of information  at your fingertips. Then, just to make it a little more challenging, write a few paragraphs based on this memory, but without using any visual description at all.

This will force you to think about other ways of recalling and describing things – sounds, smells and tastes can be intensely evocative, and conjuring up a memory purely through the medium of touch might be a revelation. This is an opportunity to flex different writing muscles; going beyond the visual might take you deeper into the experience itself, thus bringing rewards to both you and your reader.

And anyway, the forecast for tomorrow is for gales and rain. Have a great weekend....

Why I Hate Fantasy Fiction

I've never been a great fan of fantasy fiction. I don't like its expedience or its lack of boundaries – the way that rules can be endlessly changed to suit the author's creative intent. It's too geeky for me, too concerned with form rather than content, too preoccupied with creating a world and establishing the conventions that go with it to get to the heart of the characters - I think it's often difficult even to find their pulse. For me, the magic is too overt – I prefer something a little more nuanced.

I think I might be with Oscar Wilde on this one. He once said, "The true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible," and I think he's right, it's the ordinary everyday mysteries of human behaviour that lend themselves so well to fiction and make the vital process of identification between the reader and the protagonist much easier to achieve. I know that all fiction is fantasy in one way or another, but some of it is too fantastical and anything overly esoteric just doesn't cut the mustard with me.

Which genres do you particularly hate - or admire?

A Light Touch – A Lesson in Characterisation from Mark Chagall

On a recent trip to France we stumbled upon a stunning window by Mark Chagall in a restored chapel in the town of Sarrebourg. Peace, his extravagant bouquet of scenes from the Old and New Testaments, takes your breath away when you first walk into the room. Although the impact is almost overwhelming, as with most things, the power of the piece lies in the detail...

This Madonna and Child is tucked away somewhere at the bottom of the composition and when you study it, you see how few strokes of colour (and yes, genius) are needed to create an image of Mary cradling the baby Jesus - a line here, the darkening of a shade there - and the job is done.
That's not to underestimate the talent and skill of the artist. Quite the contrary, it demonstrates an absolute understanding of what is needed to engage the imagination of the viewer.
The same is true when you are depicting characters in fiction. Flashes of insight - a telling observation, a revealing line of dialogue - can do more work than whole paragraphs of overwrought description. Work with a light touch, suggest rather than prescribe, and the chances are you will end up with figures as luminous as the simple yet powerful ones in Chagall's beautiful window.

How to Make Your Fiction Faultless (Read Your Work Aloud)

This may not occur to you when you are starting out as a writer, but any time spent reading your work aloud is time well spent. Usually, when you stumble over a phrase, it's a cast iron indication the phrase does not ring true.  Perhaps it's the literary equivalent of the flicker in the gaze which betrays a lie. It's certainly a useful ploy you can put to good use in your work: when you have finished a paragraph or a page or a chapter, if you read it out loud to yourself and note which sentences trip you up, you will usually find that the structure is awkward or the syntax awry, or that you have loaded on too much alliteration.  You can bet your bottom dollar that something won't be quite right.

It may feel like a self-conscious exercise to begin with, and you mustn't get carried away by the richness/polish/perfection of your own prose, but it's well worth doing.

Fracking for Fiction

"There is no rule on how to write. Sometimes it comes easily and perfectly; sometimes it's like drilling rock and then blasting it out with charges."

Ernest Hemingway's description of the creative process sounds a bit like fracking to me – occasionally you strike oil and out comes the black gold in an effortless stream, but more often than not you're drilling into rock, setting your charges and then blasting away. The British Government called a halt to some experimental fracking in the north-west of the country because it seemed to be causing minor earthquakes. The compensation of a good day's writing, even if it involves some difficult detonations, is that the effects of it can sometimes feel seismic. It's one of the few things that really does make the earth move.

In Defence of Flashback

I know that some writers – and editors – view the use of flashback with some misgivings, objecting to it because the reader is made to look back at events which have already happened and therefore knows there is a positive outcome (your heroine is still alive and compos mentis) meaning that the narrative tension is diminished.
I'm currently plotting a novel and I'm definitely going to tell some of it in flashback, for a number of different reasons.

• Looking back at something which has happened enables the writer to put a spin on events. They don't just happen sequentially, they can be viewed through the lens of the present, which gives you the potential to examine them more obliquely and add layers of subtlety. It's rather like lighting a scene for effect – do you use soft, rosie tones or go for a cool, blue hue? What you might possibly lose in tension, you certainly make up for in atmosphere.
• I don't believe that suspense is necessarily diminished. The reader knows that the protagonist has got from point A in the story to point B, but they have no idea of the route taken, the pitfalls, or the high points. In a novel written sequentially you don't know whether the heroine will make it to point B, but generally speaking they do, so it seems to me that nothing is lost.
• Writing in flashback can allow you to use an unreliable narrator, which is another way of adding tension to your work, as the reader gradually comes to see that the account given by your central character may not necessarily be accurate and unbiased.
• Using flashback enables you to exploit the full potential of dramatic irony, where the reader knows more than the characters do, thus giving a different kind of tension to the story.

It also has to be said that a number of writers have used flashback to dazzling effect. Off the top of my head, I'm thinking that Wuthering Heights opens with the ghost of Cathy outside the window and Heathcliff in terrible distress calling out to her. Emily Brontë then goes on to describe the course of their ill-starred relationship, but knowing from the outset that it ended tragically means the narrative is shot through, not just with dramatic irony, but a delicious kind of poignancy as well.
And one of the most famous opening lines in modern fiction is Last night I dreamt  I went to Manderley again...I don't suppose anybody had the effrontery to tell Daphne du Maurier to avoid writing in flashback.

Hot Off the Press...

...my picture of the statue of the renaissance man who invented it – Johannes Gutenberg - standing proudly in the square named after him in the centre of Strasbourg.

Gutenberg was a goldsmith by profession and modified existing screw printers while adding innovations of his own, thus making it possible to create movable metal type in huge quantities. His fifteenth century printing press could produce three thousand six hundred pages a day, so he was directly responsible for facilitating the mass distribution of books.

Respect!

It was a strange experience to stand gazing up at him (in the rain) reflecting on how he helped to turn the world on its axis. By printing the works of revolutionary theologians such as Erasmus and Luther he contributed to the Reformation, radically changing both religion and society.

The experience was strange because the world is tilting on its axis once again, and once again it is because of changes in the way that information is distributed. The arrival of the internet and the development of e-books will doubtless seem as significant in five hundred and fifty years time as Gutenberg's achievements appear to us now. I couldn't help wondering if some techno-geek will have an equivalent statue erected in his memory in some mall in Silicon Valley half a millennium in the future.

As someone fascinated by publication, self-publishing, blogging, Kindle editions, books as apps and books that are foxed, dog-eared, musty-smelling, much-loved and much-read, I felt a little sad that Gutenberg's invention is being superseded, but then I had to remind myself that it was he who started the process of democratising literature and that recent technological developments are merely picking up from where he left off.

Most of all I had to remind myself that it isn't the medium that matters – it's the message. What is most important is that writers write, and that readers read. The rest is detail.

Punctuation – To Be Punctilious, or Not?

I was chatting to a writer friend last night who had recently been doing some editing and she remarked how much the rules of punctuation seem to have changed since she started out. Should you use double quotation marks or single, for example? Though strict grammarians would probably take a different view, I suspect that punctuation is becoming less and less of an exact science.

I'm probably not alone in using a rather subjective approach to the matter. 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. For example, 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.Writers put punctuation in a sentence in the same way that a climber might put pitons in the side of a mountain: they are way markers to help you navigate the complicated escarpment of a paragraph.

As with all things, it is important to be consistent and work with  conviction: if you are confident in how you punctuate your work, then the reader will feel at ease. I don't think you should lose too much sleep over it in any case, as most publishers have their own house style and you can bet your bottom dollar that whatever you do will be altered to fit in with that.

NB If in doubt, get hold of a copy of Lynne Truss's definitive book on the subject – Eats Shoots and Leaves. It's an amusing and informative bible.